Northside Blues

Altuve's minor league numbers are impressive. He's small, but he's got a little pop and he's very young.

Or we could trade them a catcher...

I would jump all over Burnett for Soriano.Both guys make about the same, but I would think that Burnett would have a better chance to reestabish value and we could trade him for a prospect worth getting down the road.

What does the syllabus cover?

What topics have you covered in your mathematical modeling and probability course? Interpolation, numerical solutions to systems of equations, estimating eigenvalues, etc? If so, I have a pretty easy topic. For the statistics course what did you cover? If you're going to do the topic you want to do you're going to need to use play by play data, not sure how much programming and scripting you know in order to compile the data. For that course you probably haven't covered anything robust enough to reinvent the sabermetric wheel. Just do something that's been done before like comparing career averages to playoffs. Nothing fancy.

Eh, I was making the point that for a star like Pujols a 5.0 WAR season or less is fairly improbable, as long as he stays healthy. And I did say Yes, but if Pujols' distribution is something like, not that it's that. It's certainly not going to be a normal distribution.

I'm going to guess without knowledge that high-WAR players have a much larger standard deviation in WAR than more average players Yes, but if Pujols' distribution is something like 0.0-1.0 .000 1.0-2.0 .000 2.0-3.0 .000 3.0-4.0 .002 4.0-5.0 .015 5.0-6.0 .062 6.0-7.0 .161 7.0-8.0 .260 8.0-9.0 .260 9.0-10.0 .161 10.0-11.0 .062 11.0-12.0 .015 12.0+ .002 There's just a small likelihood of him being a sub 6.0 WAR player (1.7%). For comparison, a 6.0 WAR would have been 24th in MLB last year. None of these numbers were created out of thin air. I found the stdev for Pujols' career WARs and built the distribution on that. All WAR comes from Fan Graphs. And FWIW, Albert Pujols' standard deviation for his career WAR is 1.41 and his average WAR is 8.0.

Holliday for Car Go, Bradley for Ethier, Garcia for Floyd, Mulder for are a few I can think of off the top of my head. Carlos Guillen and Freddy Garcia for two months of Randy Johnson wasn't all that bad considering the M's traded quite possibly the greatest lefty of all time.

Ivan Rodriguez has been traded in the middle of the season twice. Mike Piazza was traded in the middle of the season twice, in the same season. We acquired Jason Kendall in the middle of a pennant race. Those are just off the top of my head.

Are the refs in the game really named Matthew, Luke, John and Mark?

Am I the only one who associates Rizzo with Rizzuto?

If he continues to walk and get pegged he probably will be alright, much like Brian Giles, but not as good.

Billy Beane's Christmas came early. He finally got his Kevin Youkilis.

Epstein may have also learned something from the Matsuzaka contract. Maybe he has since become less bullish on Japanese players and decided not to incur the risk again.

Its going to be a press conference to announce that tomorrow night ESPN will be airing a show called "The Decision" in which the Ham Fighters struggle with deciding whether or not to let their star go. It will end with their decision and the team who gets his rights.