Derek Zumsteg suggests an alternative to Major League Baseball’s toothless drug policy, and a better use for Pete Rose’s services.
The Red Sox and Yankees on the aftermath of last night’s mishaps, Rob Dibble has a new appreciation for performance analysis, Scott Boras discusses Josh Beckett’s paralyzing fear of Jeff Torb…er…blisters, and Jose Contreras and Miguel Tejada announce plans to pull their pants up to their chests and move to Florida.
The cheapskate A’s finally get off their butts and spend some money, inking reigning MVP and world’s best shortstop Miguel Tejada to a five-year, $58.5 million deal. GM Billy Beane turns attention to locking up Frank Menechino for the next five years.
The best division in the National League features three solid playoff contenders, and two teams that might be no more than a year away.
Derek Jeter could be out a long time, it’s a bad 2003 so far for closers, and no UTK would be complete without the requisite pickle juice and urine reference.
Keith Woolner takes a second look at OBP, righting a big wrong in the process.
Doug Pappas takes Andrew Zimbalist to task for his latest ill-informed sputtering on baseball, and praises Commissioner Bud Selig’s efforts to save the game.
The miracles of revenue-sharing save the cash-strapped, small-market Angels, in the spring, a manager’s fancy turns to thoughts of manufacturing runs, and we had April 5 in the pool for the first misguided comparison of performance analysis to rotisserie leagues.
It’s Opening Night. It doesn’t have the same ring or even the same importance as “Opening Day,” but it’s still nice to see games that count. It’s fun to see the season open with something like a Doug Glanville full-count walk or a couple sac bunts in the first inning. Oy, baseball is a long season, but this we don’t need. At least Alex Rodriguez went deep. Even better, the game looks great on the big screen and I’m ready–beer, chips and salsa, and coffee–for the 12-hour orgy of baseball that will be my Monday.
Last year, I introduced a new measure of a team’s efficiency: marginal dollars per marginal win. An article by Michael Lewis in the March 30 New York Times Magazine excerpted from his forthcoming Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, used my analysis to illustrate how Oakland gets so much more performance than other teams out of its low payroll.
BP’s authors shoot the breeze, giving their takes on their surprising AL West unanimity, the wide-open NL Central, the viability of Vlad for MVP and Mark Prior for Cy Young, and more.
This will be a transition year in the NL Central, as the teams that
have been
at the top for years cede control to a pair of up-and-comers. Don’t
worry,
though: Those of you desiring sameness can still take comfort in the
Brewers.
For a long time, I’ve been trying to find someone who’s at or near the top of the ladder in an MLB marketing department to talk to me about some of the unique challenges, opportunities, and practices in marketing an MLB club, and to give a spin-free answer to some of the tougher questions that readers have asked about MLB’s policies over the years. On Thursday, I was fortunate enough to talk with the lead executive of an MLB club’s marketing department, and they agreed to answer any questions I threw out, so long as I didn’t give out their name.
Each and every THR came with its own set of pitfalls. Players were analyzed based on several factors, such as injury history, comparable players, style of play, biomechanics, and inside information from my sources. With no good statistics and no usable injury database, early readers screamed and yelled for “proof!” My response: There is no proof to injuries–sports medicine is like baseball before Bill James, and injury analysis is as much art as it is science.
What the THRs did do was spark some discussion, get people thinking about the effects of injury on their favorite teams and players, and bring sports medicine into the conversation more when performance analysis comes up for discussion. Sometimes, the evidence took care of itself, as in the case of Phil Nevin. That one call probably got more notice than any other, but it shows that there’s a method to the madness–add up injury history, a positional change, a player with an odd career pattern, and the advice of the UTK Medical Advisory Board and it’s not voodoo or Satanism, as one Pizza Feeder accused me of, Cotton Mather-style. I’ve said that if I do my job well, everyone will be able to make the same types of judgments with varying degrees of success. With statistics, some of us stick with OPS since there’s no long division; in injury analysis, if you only want the results, I’ll be here.
The end of March is a time of great anticipation in the baseball world. Fans are nearly as anxious as the players to see the teams head north and start getting some hard answers to the questions that surround their favorite ball clubs. Since veterans have generally established expected levels of performance, much of the buzz and uncertainty surrounds rookies who have survived the spring sifting.
The NL East is a mess, with overpaid teams, overrated teams, teams with no
ownership and teams that might be better off with no ownership. It’s possible
that no team will win 90 games, and that the spread from top to bottom won’t
be 20 games.