UBlink

I hope the Daytona internet broadcast works better tonight than it was last night so I can listen to the first few innings. Agree, whatever they're paying for internet streaming is too much if that's the performance they're getting. It was painful!

Anybody trying to listen to Daytona? It's cutting out horribly for me. DCubs are behind 6-3 - I can't even tell what inning they're in.

Won't make it to Jackson for this one, but I've got an excused absence - my daughter :angel: is getting married on the 29th [looking for the empty pockets smiley]

The local paper had an article that says the plan is to play first while working on learning catcher.

Nic Jackson sighting!!!!!!!!!! hitting cleanup, flies out to left, SF scores Fuld.

Harvey goes full, fouls off 4, then bloops a single.

I think you have to download their server. I guess I'll have to wait til I get home to hear Ron's dulcet tones.

The Daytona broadcast is really coming in poorly, and I can't get the DJaxx because I can't put any plugins on the work computer. If anyone has a workaround for that let me know.

Crap. I know that. For some reason I thought Justin was in the D-rays also. I'm dumb. That's OK - at least you're not the manager or GM.

Daytona welcomes back Matt Craig, Nic Jackson and Jemel Spearman: Dayton News-Journal article

Yeah! Why should the Cubs honor a former NFL coach? Well, he also coached at the only NCAA football program to receive the "death penalty" for recruiting violations.

No, that only happens in a perfect market, where both buyers and sellers are perfectly aware of what everyone is paying and bidding. This is obviously not the case in baseball, which is not a perfect market. If baseball was a perfect market, teams' performances would vary strictly by payroll. They do not. Can you explain what imperfections in the market cause my statements to be invalid? I'm very interested to hear them. However, I have very strong problems with your last statement there. Even if every FA offer sheet were completely public, there would still be significant variations in team performance. Injuries, quality of farm system, trades, performance variation, philosophical differences in approach to team building and much more all have an impact beyond the FA market. The FA market could be a "perfect market" and there could still be teams that vastly over/underperform their payroll. Further points about markets. One of the main simplifying assumptions about perfect markets is the free availability of complete information. Because the product being traded is services provided by a human in the future, that assumption clearly doesn't fit this market. Another assumption is product homogeneity. Because each player is a combination of many different skill sets and the needs of different teams for each of the skill sets will be different, there can be no uniform ranking of the value of different players, even with free availability of perfect information. The successful participants in this market will be those who are efficient at collecting the relevant, costly information, and proficient in analyzing it within their own context.

OK, I think I have it figured out now. Sometimes rain is caused by rainbows. The problem is that you can't see the rainbow through the clouds and rain while it's raining, but afterwards you see that the rainbow is there and then you know that that rain was caused by a rainbow.

Is it just me, or is that the youngest lineup we've seen at AAA in a long time (maybe forever)?

Not to mention his arm.

But thanks for trying.

You don't have to have the same talent. The inspiration for starting this thread was the publication of PECOTA projections for the 2006 season. The idea was to use the objective, quantifiable statistical projections as a control, and then see if layering observations about team chemistry would improve the precision of the predictions. So for the NL Central the PECOTA projections looked like this: NL Central W L Cardinals 86 76 Cubs 85 77 Brewers 84 78 Astros 81 81 Pirates 79 83 Reds 78 84 My hope was that somebody would be able to say that, independent of talent, my ranking of the teams chemistry would be (made up ranking) Brewers Cardinals Cubs Reds Pirates Astros Then at the end of the year we could look at the actual results and see if the chemistry observation, layered onto the PECOTA projection, improved the precision of the predicted results. Obviously if the pre-season chemistry rankings match the PECOTA rankings there's no additional information and no test. The only response I've been given, from ABuck, I think is somewhat sarcastic in that he projected the teams with the best chemistry are the ones projected to be the worst in each division. However if, at the end of the season, none of those teams actually came in last place I'd be tempted to say ABuck is on to something. Like I think I've said before, I understand the arguments on both sides. I'm just trying to shine a little empirical light on the subject

I don't know. What kind of observations would be required to find out? Do some squadrons have better chemistry than others?

Jealousy.

No, but a lot of the criticism of the chemistry concept has centered on it only being observed after the fact - as in, wow, that team really over-achieved. Oh yeah, and everybody seemed to be friendly in the clubhouse, it must have been the chemistry. And some of the criticism from the pro-chemistry side was that just because there's no good objective measure for it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, and that one would know it if you see it. Neither of those arguments will be settled theoretically. So I proposed this experiment to try to get a handle on it empirically. But so far I have no volunteers [edit] I take that back, thanks ABuck :wink:

I thought I would give this a bump one more time to solicit any predictions based on real or perceived differences in team chemistry. You've now got the advantage of one regular season game. Which teams are going to over- or under-achieve their predictions based on cold, heartless statistics due to the presence or lack of genuine, human team chemistry? Again, this isn't a thread for a discussion of the theories about team chemistry, this is the thread attempting to test for the predictive value of observations about team chemistry.

I give it about the same credibility as CBS News.

My problem is that because we are looking at "leaked" testimony, we don't really know what was said. No one is willing to go on the record and say I heard Barry say that. You don't know if the leaks are complete, taken out of context or anything. My point is, anybody who leaks secret grand jury testimony is not the type of person I would trust. It's not just a matter of trusting the reporters, it's trusting their anonymous sources. And their sources are either lying (because what they are leaking isn't really in the grand jury testimony) or criminals (for leaking sealed testimony). Barry's had over a year to refute that he admitted to using the "cream and the clear" during testimony, and has failed to do so. Couple that with him displaying virtually every known symptom of Roid abuse, there's little doubt in my mind. His lawyers tried to sue the writers of the "shadows" book because of illegally obtained grand jury testimony. Not for slander, not for printing lies, but for using illegally obtained testimony. Can he do any more to prove that the leaked testimony was in fact what he said other than coming forward and directly saying so in the press? It's a matter of principle to me. To attach any credibility to illegally obtained leaks of secret grand jury testimony is to encourage more leaks. And the higher the risk of leaks, the lower the probability that people testifying in a grand jury will speak openly and freely, not just about baseball and steroids (who cares), but about organized crime or political corruption, etc. I figure what little I can do to discredit leaks is supporting the grand jury process.

My problem is that because we are looking at "leaked" testimony, we don't really know what was said. No one is willing to go on the record and say I heard Barry say that. You don't know if the leaks are complete, taken out of context or anything. My point is, anybody who leaks secret grand jury testimony is not the type of person I would trust. It's not just a matter of trusting the reporters, it's trusting their anonymous sources. And their sources are either lying (because what they are leaking isn't really in the grand jury testimony) or criminals (for leaking sealed testimony).

Power and speed might score more than just power, or it might not. Speed doesn't guarantee more scoring. OBP guarantees more scoring. That is where the Cubs have been lacking. And you don't have to have great speed to get great OBP, but it's still nice to have. I'm saying that even if the power lineup scores more runs, and I concede that they probably will, the team with speed will still win more games. I think there are a couple of testable hypotheses here. Going back, I think the first hypothesis is that a speed team will score runs more consistently than a power team. We can compare the standard deviation of runs scored / game to test this hypothesis. The second hypothesis is independent of the speed issue, asserting that the a team with more consistent run production will win more games than a team with more variance in the distribution of runs scored. The second hypothesis is easy to test, the first requires a proxy for team speed. You'd have to somehow hold OBP constant, or at least the non speed related aspect of OBP, which is the majority of OBP. Oh, of course, the test in the first case is to see if the speed proxy adds any additional explanatory value over and above a "traditional" analysis using OBP, SLG, etc.