Hairyducked Idiot

That went well

Good call, Lou, whether it works out or not. BTW, I still got your back on Game 1 last season.

Would definitely prefer to see Harden pulled here. Three weeks in October are all that really matter for him this season. No reason to take unnecessary risks.

Oh, and let me add, leadoff isn't a position.

Correlation does not equal causation. You can't just eyeball a stat and say "not a small sample size."

It's human nature (and well-researched and documented, at that) to find bias in neutral reporting on issues you feel passionately about. You are passionate about the Cubs, so neutral reporting seems biased.

He'd be more of a liability than what we are likely to get from Fukudome from here on out, not even including defense.

The whole pitching wins thing comes from the fact that it's a stupid stat misnamed. Wins are the most important thing in baseball. It's something a team earns. The stat that so many people call "wins" is actually: Number of Times A Pitcher Started A Game, Pitched At Least Five Innings and Left With His Team Winning and They Never Relinquished the Lead, Plus Number of Times the Pitcher Relieved and Was the Last Person to Pitch When His Team Took the Lead for the Final Time in a Win, Plus The Number of Times the Pitcher Relieved in a Game in Which the Starter Did Not Go Five and Was Judged To Be The Most Effective By The Official Scorer When His Team Won. NTPSGPALFILWHTWTNRLPNTPRWLPPWHTTLFTWPTNTPRGWSDNGFWJTBTMEBTOSWHTW is a stupid stat and if it didn't have a name that made people confuse it with the most important stat in the game, nobody would care about it.

I disagree with you completely on this one because I don't believe it's truly an individual award; it does depend on how good your team is because, well, you can't really be that valuable to a team that sucks. If your team isn't anywhere near playoff contention with you, they're going still not going to be in playoff contention without you so you obviously didn't make that much of a difference. Therefore, you're not valuable to the team you're on. Obviously you'd be more valuable to a team in playoff contention, but that's not the case. You're on a team that stinks. I know it's not your fault but you're still not that valuable to the team you play for. I will say, however, that I think there should be two separate awards. One for the most valuable and one for the best player in the league to distinguish between the two. ARod on a last place Texas team wasn't valuable to his team but he was still one hell of a player. And on a side note, people who compare the MVP to the Cy Young award in this respect. The Cy Young award is given to the best pitcher in each league, not the most valuable. The fact that this logic is never taken to it's logical conclusion. If you can't be valuable to a team that is bad, you can't be valuable to any team that misses the playoffs at all. And you really can't be valuable to a team that makes the playoffs comfortably and could have done so without you, either. "Most Valuable" means "Good player on a team that just barely made the playoffs," apparently.

Fans who think they can tell balls and strikes to an accuracy of a few inches from watching on TV, when the camera is hundreds of yards away, at a skewed angle, and flattening a 3-D image into 2D, all of which affect spatial perception. The fact that the greatest Cubs team of my and possibly several generations is playing, but I can't fully enjoy it because everything will be judged by a few coinflips in October.

Chance of a bad throw almost always > chance of next batter avoiding out. Reverse wendelled :(

It's a weighted crapshoot. I give the Cubs a 65% chance of beating most first-round opponents, 55% chance of beating a team like the Brewers, and 50/50 against the Red Sox or Rays.

The ball in play can also result in something worse than the strikeout. You know this, why intentionally omit it?

He didn't grab his knee, he grabbed his side/back

If only he didn't hustle so much.

Again, I keep seeing people in this thread slightly exaggerating. All the regression models and other statistical analysis I've seen place a small negative value on K's vs. contact outs. Linear weights had it a -.05 runs worse. So if Dunn K's 100 more times than the average slugger, that's about half a win a season, enough that it should be at least noted.

People who rant about how horrible Marquis is, then are forced to acknowledge that he's not horrible (just overpaid and possibly worse than Marshall), then the next day go back to how horrible he is.

Fans who weigh down a simple, enjoyable sport with poetry and philosophy. Fans who think they own players lives to the degree they'll tell them they need to retire or move to a certain part of the country.

The entire classification of "errors" vs. "hits" The wonky continuum of contact: Swing and a miss = bad Swing and a near-miss (foul-off) = neutral Swing and a near-miss with two-strikes (foul-off) = good battling by the hitter Swing and almost a good hit (putting the ball in play in fair territory, but not strongly) = second-worst thing a batter can do Swing and a good hit = good. "I see where you're going on this, but aren't you punishing a batter for the incidental contact of a foul tip so minute that it's essentially the same thing as a swing and miss?" Works great in cricket :)

Lost in all this discussion is that, even from a sabermetric standpoint, strikeouts are a little worse than contact outs. Last I recall, the going number was roughly 1/20th of a run per out. When you are striking out at the rate Dunn does, that adds up to something not earth-shattering, but not trivial either.

If you want to go to a clinching game at Wrigley, buy your tickets ahead of time and hope for the best. Don't wait till it's 3-0 or 3-1. I was in St. Louis during their WS, and I hung out around the ballpark each night before the games. Games 3 and 4, there were roughly equal numbers of people buying and selling and tickets were changing hands at not much more than face value. Once it got to 3-1, everything changed. Three hours before the game, there were large groups of people on every corner offering obscene amounts of money for a ticket, and I didn't see a single person selling.

I would take 8 innings of Sosa doing his "I suddenly picked up a heavy accent" schtick in a heartbeat over Santo. Just sub in Santo whenever it looks like something really exciting might happen.

I've seen standard bad-contract hate plenty of times, and the hatred for Marquis goes way beyond that.

The difference between Marquis and Marshall is being vastly overstated. I agree Marshall is probably a better option, but it's close enough that I don't think he or the Cubs deserve being ripped for disagreeing. It's not nearly as clear-cut statistically as the articles of faith on this board would suggest. And I defy anyone to show me a major-league baseball team with 25 players on its roster who are all above-average for their position with no adjustments for roles. Accepting a contract that Hendry offered and being given a job that some would prefer go to a mediocre, slightly young alternative is in no way close to enough reason for the hatred Marquis inspires.

I love the anti-Marquis arguments. They seemingly say that every single player on a 25-man roster has to be above-average or ripped mercilessly, and every guy on the right side of 28 with a modicum of projectability is entitled to a job.