Northside Blues

maybe i should read the entire thread not just the last page.

Let's hope Jim Hendry reads into this as a potential cancer in the clubhouse and rids ourselves of him.

Considering that we only need a little over 1000 polled people (randomly) to be able to give us a 95% chance to gauge the votes of over 100,000,000 voters to within 3%, then yes, 11 seasons (roughly 900 games) is enough of a sample. An explanation of what's actually going on in statistics: The way he was doing this basically said this question*: Let's assume that there's no HFA. What is the probability that a team without HFA did that well at home. For instance, let's say the Cubs are a .500 level team. What's the likelihood that they played .550 ball at home. IE if you flip a coin 81 times in a season. What are your chances of getting 45 or more heads. Then do this for each season. Finally over that data you find out the probability all that would happen to chance. Next you pick an arbitrary value which you deem to be statistically significant. What that depends on depends on what type of data you're looking at. If you are looking at things in the social sciences you usually pick this value to be .05 or .01. If you are looking at things in the natural sciences you pick something much smaller, usually .001. If the probability that a team with no HFA is smaller than your value then you reject the original hypothesis, ie that there is no HFA. If your probability is larger then you don't reject the original hypothesis. For instance he used .01. That means that if the chances of a none HFA team to play that well is smaller than 1 in 100, then you reject the HFA notion. Some of those teams could conceivably have no HFA, but it happened to chance. There's just a 1% chance of that happening. For the NL teams in the study he found: 1.7% Cubs 1.0% Orioles 0.9% Braves 0.8% Red Sox 0.4% White Sox 0.4% Indians 0.4% Angels 0.3% Marlins 0.2% Royals 0.2% DBacks 0.2% Tigers 0.1% Jays 0.08% Giants 0.04% Astros 0.04% A's 0.02% Dodgers 0.01% Rangers 0.01% Rays 0.01% Mariners 0.00004% Rockies *its a little different since you include the away data but this is close enough for me to explain it. Honestly, he should have used .05 or even .1 instead of .01. Regardless it IS enough to conclude that if the Cubs have a HFA, it's much much weaker than most others. Maybe not the Braves. Also, for the hell of it. This is only 2008 data, but # games in each win direction and average windspeed. +------+-------+------+---------+-----------+----------+ | home | b_out | b_in | b_cross | b_indoors | avg_wind | +------+-------+------+---------+-----------+----------+ | ana | 75 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 7.22 | | ari | 2 | 16 | 13 | 50 | 3.53 | | atl | 8 | 2 | 73 | 0 | 8.11 | | bal | 39 | 16 | 26 | 0 | 6.88 | | bos | 45 | 19 | 20 | 0 | 10.61 | | cha | 24 | 13 | 47 | 0 | 10.99 | | chn | 24 | 37 | 20 | 0 | 9.00 | | cin | 17 | 12 | 49 | 3 | 7.72 | | cle | 21 | 31 | 31 | 0 | 9.28 | | col | 22 | 38 | 22 | 0 | 7.35 | | det | 17 | 19 | 46 | 0 | 9.94 | | flo | 11 | 54 | 16 | 1 | 11.46 | | hou | 8 | 10 | 12 | 50 | 2.26 | | kca | 1 | 12 | 68 | 1 | 8.10 | | lan | 78 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 6.44 | | mil | 9 | 17 | 54 | 1 | 6.15 | | min | 0 | 0 | 0 | 81 | NULL | | nya | 32 | 15 | 37 | 0 | 9.48 | | nyn | 22 | 29 | 33 | 0 | 11.37 | | oak | 43 | 11 | 25 | 0 | 12.37 | | phi | 26 | 4 | 52 | 0 | 9.33 | | pit | 32 | 14 | 36 | 1 | 7.93 | | sdn | 12 | 0 | 69 | 0 | 8.43 | | sea | 32 | 23 | 14 | 12 | 2.52 | | sfn | 65 | 5 | 11 | 0 | 12.98 | | sln | 33 | 20 | 29 | 0 | 8.09 | | tba | 0 | 1 | 1 | 79 | 7.33 | | tex | 21 | 40 | 20 | 1 | 12.15 | | tor | 29 | 14 | 5 | 33 | 6.25 | | was | 25 | 30 | 24 | 2 | 8.27 | +------+-------+------+---------+-----------+----------+ You can cross-reference the two lists if you want to. The Cubs are hardly the only teams with variable winds. Granted one season only.

By that criterium, would not all empirical science be conjecture? If so, I think we simply use the word "conjecture" differently. In any case, I digress. I blame the shifting winds off the lake. It is. I guess the word "conjecture" might be too strong, but now we're arguing pointless semantics. Not that we had an argument of any substance before. Blaming shifting winds off the lake is one thing, but it's hard to believe that there are no shifting winds in other ballparks. Later today, if I have a chance, I will look into this. Honestly, it's probably not one thing. It's probably a combination of wind, day/night games, and other things. One would wonder if the effect existed if they restricted the data to pre WWII when most games were not played under the lights.

gravity can never be fully proven. It will always be a conjecture. it's not based on axioms like probability theory is (now whether or not you believe in the axiom of choice is something else entirely). There's always a chance, albeit a very very small chance, that gravity doesn't exist and that what we perceive to be gravity is quite different. It won't be the first time a change like that would happen, I mean old civilizations were certain the earth was flat after all. That chance doesn't exist for probability theory.

Yes, there is validity. Things like the t-distribution aren't merely conjectures, like black holes - or even gravity, they're proven facts. Now whether or WL is normally distributed is another question, though as the number of games goes up, you can scale them to make it normal, and that's not a conjecture but a fact as well.

Livan Hernandez had a lower ERA last year than Ryan Dempster, our opening day starter.

I dunno if a guy that has a ton of trouble finding the strikezone is the guy you want out there in a high-leverage one-out situation. He's walked 1 in 10 lefties in his career. He has walked 1 in 7 righties.

And no matter how outdated ERA is as a metric, having a 0.00 will look good on the baseball card. Yeah, but -.-- or - doesn't look too appealing.

He wouldn't be a bad loogy candidate if someone doesn't offer him a more significant job to re-establish his Boras claims.

Burgess probably has the best raw power in the system, and that includes Aramis Ramirez, Tyler Colvin and Carlos Pena. It's going to be the development of his patience that decides whether or not he sticks. He was 21 last year and split between High A and Double A, so he would have been at league to a little younger than league age last year when he managed a .822 OPS. He may not be an Eric Hosmer type prospect as a 1B, but there's certainly potential there. I don't think anyone would be surprised if he developed into legitimate MLB power bat. He's still very young, a little under a year older than Vitters and certainly more production at the same levels, not to mention both guys have rather high ceilings. Edit: Accidently put younger not older.

If a book is titled "Why JFK never really existed" would you have to read it to know it was terriblle

While we're at it Ronny Cedeno hit 10 homers once. Neifi did it twice and also hit 9 with the Cubs. Henry Blanco hit 10 once. Angel Pagan hit 11 last year. Jason Bartlett hit 14 once. Jerry Hairston JR has done it twice. There is a fairly good chance that Castro hits 10 homers this season. Now if he does it with any regularity is another question entirely. I'd expect him to be around 6-8 this season, giving him maybe a 1 in 8 chance of hitting double digits (also a similar chance of not reaching 5).

Yeah he hit 3 homers in four days on May 1-4. He then hit 2 HR on May 13. His other two were on June 7th and June 29th.

I hear that Ted Williams guy aged pretty well.

No, but they'll probably continue to rise at close to 5%, because of inflation and popularity growth. If there's any considerable economic growth in regions that like baseball, such as Latin America, that figure would increase in the short term

Here you go: http://mlb.mlb.com/team/player.jsp?player_id=516770 1 K in 19 ab's is not bad. No need to worry about walks when he hits .474. my personal feeling is that great players get walked, they don't look for walks. if castro continues to hit well, he will be walked a lot. what? just no.

Why am I not surprised she gets her facts wrong?

And John Grabow has a K/BB of 139/90 (1.54 Rate) Yuck. For his career lefties have hit .264/.334/.379 against John Grabow (92 OPS+). Lefties hit .214 against Perez in 2010. Lefties hit .200 with an OPS+ of 69 against him in 2009. Finally, in 2008 they hit .158 with a whopping 50 OPS+ against him. Lefties don't hit Oliver Perez. They never have. They probably won't in the future. He'd certainly be 10 times a better LOOGY type RP with the Cubs than Grabow. And if his "command"/velocity comes back you can slide him back into the rotation and reap the benefits. He doesn't also have to be a LOOGY, if we need someone to pick up garbage innings, he's perfectly capable of doing that, Grabow isn't. Will he get a starting gig somewhere else? I have no idea. If he does, I am sure he will take it. If he doesn't he'd probably be a useful lefty in any bullpen, ours included, and he will be VERY cheap. (Granted for us he'd take someone like Maine or Russell's spot, not Grabow but you see my point).

for 414k, why not?

for 300k? why not

IP without issuing a walk 1962 Bill Fischer 84.1 2001 Greg Maddux 72.1 1913 Christy Mathewson 68.0 1976 Randy Jones 68.0 1907 Harris White 65.2 And people were mentioning Cliff Lee's streak of 38 innings pitched laster without one. Weak.

72 1/3 IP without giving up a walk in 2001. That totaled 291 consecutive batters. The streak ended on a IBB to Steve Finley, followed by a ground out and another intentional walk to future Cub great Damian Miller. He actually went 343 BF without issuing a unintentional walk, spanning nearly two months. Needless to say, his ERA over that stretch was a rather plain 3.53, by Maddux' standards. By comparison, I doubt Marmol has ever gone 20 batters in a row without a walk. Someone look this up.

Marmol will also face far fewer batters over that time (assuming he plays that long) than Maddux did. Really? I guess I should have posted that in bold blue font.

Yeah, but is it unreliable enough to make up that much of a difference? I would guess the accuracy is within 2 or 3 percent at most. While that's enough to get McNutt's lower than Miller's if you want to make that weak argument, it's certainly not enough to push Miller's LD% high enough to the point where it A) becomes a reasonable explanation for his high BABIP or B) is a legitimate concern going forward for him because, as 'scarey' puts it, "He just threw the ball over the plate when he had to."