benzona79

Brett Kolman is the best football voice on youtube IMO. He teaches me so much about football...and about myself. He makes me want to be a better person. Here is his mock draft I've been waiting two weeks for: Definitely worth checking out all his individual breakdowns as well.

Check out this tweet from jizzo [tweet] [/tweet]

On a slightly different topic, here is a very interesting article on the "science of hot streaks" http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/25/the-science-of-an-insane-hitting-streak.html Basically it argues that contrary to the stat-enthusiast viewpoint, hot streaks are not simply the coincidental stringing together of excellent at bats or whatever, but a hot streak can have predictive value as to how a player will perform in subsequent at bats. I would imagine that the opposite is true as well, that cold streaks have predictive value as to subsequent performance as well. This is nice, because it sort of confirms what watchers would swear up and down - that of course Daniel-Freaking-Murphy was going to hit bullets, just like Rizzo was definitely destined to weakly dribble one to the second baseman this post season.

Hey all! I'm looking to buy vials of Cardinal Fan tears. Will pay premium price, but proof of authenticity MUST be provided. PM for details. Thanks!

According to Manuel, only 2014 draft guy rated ahead of Schwarber is Rodon. Well done boys!

I like to live with the illusion that players are still like Rogers Hornsby, just waiting for spring and the season to begin. Norman Rockwell baseball, America at it's finest. Not only does he suck, I can't stand him because he preferred to sit out half the season in 2014 rather than take a 14m QO or 2yr 20 mil from the mets. Would hate to have him on the Cubs.

Well, there were 707 runs scored against the cubs last year. Miguel Montero had 24 runs above average, while castillo was at -24.4 - so 48.4/707=6.85%. Yeah, seems a bit crazy, but you know, I remember reading a Maddon quote in which he claimed Molina saved 50 runs by his pitch framing abilities in 2012, so it's in the ballpark. And thanks for the welcome everyone! Welcome. You don't think very much of your mother, do you? Haha, no she's good. I don't mean it literally :D

oh, and by the way - just found the baseball prospectus article talking about the Molina 50. Apparently 50 runs saved correlates to 5 wins.

Well, there were 707 runs scored against the cubs last year. Miguel Montero had 24 runs above average, while castillo was at -24.4 - so 48.4/707=6.85%. Yeah, seems a bit crazy, but you know, I remember reading a Maddon quote in which he claimed Molina saved 50 runs by his pitch framing abilities in 2012, so it's in the ballpark. And thanks for the welcome everyone!

I would be surprised if Ross is Lester's personal catcher regardless of splits. Would imagine Montero is catching for Lester opening day. Think it would send a very bad message if Lester insists on Ross despite the fact that Montero is excellent defensively and was targeted as our number one catcher. Obviously the front office places great emphasis on pitch framing, and it's easy to see why, based on all the studies that have been popping up - Maddon has been talking about it at least for the last 3-4 years, so this isn't some new passing fad. According to the stats in the article posted by davell, if we had Montero catching instead of Castillo last year, teams would have scored 7% less runs against us on the season. Don't know how to quantify heightened pitch counts, etc, but would imagine there is very significant value there as well. No way Castillo's offensive upside comes close to covering that gap, and would imagine that this run differential more than justifies the salary differential between the two players. Once we got Montero, Castillo's value as trade bait to a team less smitten with pitch framing stuff is most likely worth more than his value catching every 5th day for the cubs. And we've got a great defensive tandem with good splits to for the next few years as we wait to see whether Schwarber is for real.