It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life.
71 thoughts on “February 2, 2018: A Winter Prediction”
There will be no "Off-Season's Greetings" today for the simple reason that there were no games yesterday. The Caribbean league playoffs are over, the Australian League regular season is over, and the Caribbean Series and the Australian League playoffs both start today.
Holy smacks - this is the quote I was going to use this year.
Yesterday’s episode of Effectively Wild featured an excellent discussion with Baseball Prospectus’ Director of Technology Harry Pavlidis about the present feasibility of robot umps. Pavlidis has apparently been charting all pitches thrown for a very, very long time. I won’t spoil the conversation, so go listen to it.
Forgot to bring my damn wiener headphones to the coffee shop. Will do later.
Here you go
Amazing that they were able to fit a woofer into earbuds.
rimshot.jpg
This audiophile loves that joak
I'm still team robot ump, but the one thing that has made me walk back some is how it would eliminate framing. It's not that I think framing is great but rather how framers look. A good framer just looks better than someone like Doumit.
The discussion about implications for transitioning to a robot ump system provides a lot to chew on. There’s the obvious stuff, like what happens to catchers as position players, the strategic stuff related to how human umps award calls in certain situations, and then a ton of non-obvious stuff that doesn’t exactly jump to mind when one thinks about the accuracy of calling balls & strikes.
Yes. Harry said that most games only have a few calls that go the wrong way. I'm pretty sure there's a twitter bot that posts when umpires get it wrong and that's what we remember so strongly. We need the opposite: post every time the umpire gets it right.
Breaking balls being affected was something I knew about. The strikezone isn't a plane but a three-dimension object. But has anyone actually done research on balls that break into the zone? Balls falling out of the zone still count as strikes, so this would strictly be an increase in the number of called strikes.
I'm not sure how many equals "a few", but it doesn't take very many bad calls at the right (or wrong) times to have a major effect on the outcome of a ball game.
I wasn't listening 100% to the entire conversation, but the number Harry quoted was "four" being a common number. The worst was 50, but it sounded like it was rare. He wouldn't name any game(s).
And obviously, one pitch can do it. I meant to reference the Brandon Inge's non-HBP that probably would have won them the game in 2009. But that's also uncommon.
It doesn't even have to be something that obvious. In an at-bat with men in scoring position, if the 2-1 pitch is wrongly called a ball, now the count's 3-1 and the pitcher has to come in with a hittable pitch. On the other hand, if that pitch is wrongly called a strike, now it's 2-2 and the batter has to expand his zone a little bit. That one call can change the entire game.
Also, it's much less satisfying directing your anger at poor calibrations than humans.
I've seen arguments that if it can't (or won't) be easily put in place in all levels of play, from MLB to low-A, then that should be a deal breaker right there.
I'm on the fence, if we're being perfectly honest. I was pretty pro-replay, but the way they've implemented it has me longing for the days where they where umps would just occasionally get stuff wrong, and people got crabby about it, rather than these constant "did his foot come off the base for a half a millisecond???" replays taking five minutes and proving nothing. You can say that this would be a lot easier to implement, but once you get twenty cooks in the kitchen, nothing is easy.
MLB could do a better job with the implementation & execution of replay stuff, but I am still glad they’re making the effort to get the call right. Every time I feel like a challenge-necessitating-replay is taking too long, I just think of
I think the silly football style "coaches get a limited number of challenges and determine when to use them by themselves" thing is what's killing it. I can't blame a manager for challenging the minutiae plays, but it's not helping replay's case at all.
There needs to be a person in a booth determining this. They take a quick look at any close play, and if it's egregiously wrong, they send a signal down to the umps that "you guys might want to have another look at this". No more fraction of a second plays, no more "man, I really hope that he was safe by 1/100th of a second on a bang bang play" that has to be looked at for five minutes. The play you brought up is horrible - it also could have been fixed within ten seconds with replay. Anything that needs more than thirty seconds should just be left alone.
Despite my generally being good with replay, I will totally echo this.
Yes. While I'm against it in whole, I'll admit there's a case for appropriate use of replay in baseball that I could accept. But as executed it's all wrong.
I'm in support of an electric notification system for home-plate umpires that tells them secretly whether a robot ump thought a pitch was a ball or strike (I imagine a sensory notification like a buzzer in opposite shoes) that we would never see and never hear about, but which rather quickly and seamlessly helps umps get better at their job without ruining the game.
I don't know about the thirty second thing, but I fully agree that it should be a person in a booth determining when replay is to be used, not the managers.
I agree with this as my preferred method of implementation.
Yeah. I'm becoming sick of replay on all but the most egregious of missed calls and home runs.
See, I don't mind the replay, but I'm getting sick of players sliding poorly and losing contact with the base.
I don't think sliding skills have declined. I think we can now measure how bad actual sliding is.
(This is the "hermeneutics and alethiology" thing.)
Probably fair enough.
Could not agree more. I find myself generally liking the "human element" of umpiring more and more and replay is totally to blame for that. It should be used for things that have a physical element that makes it extraordinarily difficult for the human eye, like fair or foul home runs.
The only argument for robot umps I can get behind is what I'm going to call the "Cowboy Joe West" argument. Robot umps would eliminate the Joe West ego's of the world.
The solution is finding a better way to remove/correct umpires for repeated call/conduct issues.
With robot umpires, we would never have a Ron Gardenhire telling the men in blue, "I'm not arguing balls and strikes, I'm arguing you suck!" I'd rather have the latter.
Showtime!
[replay] has me longing for the days where they where umps would just occasionally get stuff wrong
I was anti-replay from the start. Did watching it in football teach you nothing? It changes watching a sport into hermeneutics and alethiology*.
It also biases calls in a way that they can be reversed, but then that "call on the field" is the presumption in evaluating the correct call.
I don't know if this is happening yet in baseball, but I know it had in football before I gave it up.
*I had to look this up... I thought there was a word I was familiar with having this meaning, but I guess not. Maybe I was thinking of "epistemology", but that's different. Study of "Truth" vs "Knowledge". Wikipedia notes that they could be considered synonymous, but I think this is a place where the distinction is important. Mea culpa if I'm using this in a completely incorrect sense.
But even if they don’t deal another player, the Marlins will have made history. In the months since Sherman officially succeeded reviled outgoing owner Jeffrey Loria, the Marlins—already a franchise known for fire sales—have one-upped both themselves and almost a century and a half of history, trading more WAR from the preceding season than any other team ever has in one winter.
The only time a team was divested of more WAR from the preceding season was a situation that led to contraction.
My coworker has convinced me to venture over to Nicollet Mall for lunch from one of the food trucks in a little while. If I'm trampled to death by NFL fans or run over by one of the tanks guarding the perimeter, know that I love you all.
Please send photos of tanks. Birds, I suppose, are also acceptable. Kindly kick in the shins someone from Philly. Try not to die.
The MLBPA told them that any player with a contract that would do this would be conducting an unlawful strike. It ain't going to happen.
What's kind of fascinating about this year is that there are lots and lots of guys who are in the "almost elite, but" category. Much as I usually side with the players, I don't know that I'd want my team spending $147M for six or seven years of Eric Hosmer, and that's a deal he's supposedly turned down. Ditto to just about everyone else. These are not players that I'd want my team tied to for their age 36 and 37 years.
Are teams finally using Sabrmetrics to realize that paying peak-level dollars for post-peak years is not economically sound?
If so, the economics of the sport may need to shift to pay young players more.
the economics of the sport may need to shift to pay young players more
It's this. 100%.
Too many years of team control. Teams delaying playing clocks. Caps on international pools, slotting and caps for draft picks, etc.
To Nibs' point... You can disagree with wanting Hosmer for his age 36 and 37 years, while still hating on the teams. That's part of the trade-off they get for signing the guy. I said it before... I think it's better to have the right players during and a little past their window than to not have them at all.
Also, another reminder, players in MLB get less of the pie than other major sports.
A reminder: football players get big contracts that aren't guaranteed.
A reminder: football players get head injuries. We shouldn't take the things they prioritize as instructive.
justin mauer would like a word regarding head injuries.
I would suggest that testing the will of 1,200 alpha males at the pinnacle of their profession is not a good strategy for 30 men (owners) who are bound by a much smaller fraternity.
While agreeing that something about this offseason doesn’t pass the smell test, and being politically disposed to side with labor over management/owners, this dude sounds like a total choad.
Bottom line, the players are upset. No, they are outraged.
This is my least favorite kind of bloviating. You didn't just think of a more striking word in the middle of your thought, but were so stream of thought that you just couldn't go back and edit... BRODIE.
Oh come on, that was totally edited. It's for impact. It's just a weak way of doing it. No, it's a terrible way of doing it.
Heh.
The Barry Bonds blackballing convinced me that owners do indeed collude, though I have no idea if that's the case with this off-season. Also, I find it a little harder to sympathize with labor over management when both are comfortably ensconced in the top income quintile. At some point, the bickering over dividing the massive spoils turns sour for the fans paying inflated ticket prices.
In this specific case, you can make a pretty good argument that without labor, management has no product. The disproportionate amount of the game’s money should be going to players, and that’s definitely not the case. MLB has a Congressionally-sanctioned monopoly, so this highly-skilled labor pool doesn’t have anywhere else to go that might force management’s hand. (We can quibble about when players should be getting paid for their production, but the fact is that they’re not paid what they’re worth when they’re worth the most.)
Don’t forget that the year after Bonds was shut out that Ray Durham also mysteriously couldn’t find a gig despite posting a 113 OPS+ (.380 OBP!). DRS & UZR/150 are split on his defensive work that year, but he wasn’t Ryan Braun out there. Best he could get was a minor-league deal from the Nationals. I’m not saying he should’ve gotten a 6 year deal for beaucoup dinero, but it seemed pretty odd that a guy who put up a 1.5-3 WAR season was totally frozen out.
Without labor, very few enterprises have a product. I might be suggesting that the money up for grabs would be substantially less if fans and sponsors were not subsidizing so much of ownership's costs, e.g. publicly financed stadiums, inflated 'premium' ticket prices, exorbitant television contracts, etc. Owners and labor are both pushing the limits of what the markets will bear, and it's always the fans that get squeezed. I don't care so much about advertisers, they're making a business calculation and generally get a fair return on their investment if they do their homework. I can't argue the ratio of revenue distribution isn't skewed, but I think I can make a case that we socialize too much of the owners' costs while privatizing all of the profits.
It will be interesting to see what the new limits to deductibility will do to suite and season ticket sales.
In this particular monopolistic enterprise, labor is also the product. I think fans' sympathies are actually better aligned with the goals of labor in this case; the fans want to see the best product — a collection of laborers — possible for their dollar. This is, however, complicated significantly by laundry.
As you rightly point out, fans have gone so far to subsidize the construction of venues used by the product, and owners are simply pocketing the windfall instead of investing it in the (again, captive) labor market to improve their product and attract more customers. If labor was capturing an percentage of revenue that was causing distress to their employers, that might provide grounds for raising prices for customers, but there is no evidence that MLB owners are hemorrhaging money.
I think the problem for Bonds was that he was toxic on a fan-relations standpoint for almost all teams. Giants fans already accepted his "faults", Yankees fans would have quickly gotten over it, and Marlins fans are imaginary. He would have been booed by his home fans for just. About every other team. I would have liked Bonds on the Twins, but would not have liked having to defend him from everyone who knew I was a fan of the team.
I obviously don't know if there's collusion, but it strikes me that it's a charge that's easy to make and hard to prove.
This season is just a set of dominoes ready to drop; once Darvish is gone the rest of the pride tackle the carcass
I wonder, when looking at it this way, if football apologists still see what they think they see in the game.
I joined the MOU the night before so I could post the photo once it became seasonally rare on Dec. 1.
Related sad news... I've learned that David Brislane, who took so may of those Cook County/Lutsen photos, passed away on Wednesday.
At work, heard that Philly-types are getting the snub from Minny restaurants. I thot we were more passive agressive than that. "What? You think you had a reservation?..."
I don't buy it. Unless by Philly-types you mean drunk a-holes. Then I could see it.
You can tell them by their voices - shrieking like finger nails being scratched on a chalk-board. Not just my opinion BTW.
There will be no "Off-Season's Greetings" today for the simple reason that there were no games yesterday. The Caribbean league playoffs are over, the Australian League regular season is over, and the Caribbean Series and the Australian League playoffs both start today.
Holy smacks - this is the quote I was going to use this year.
Yesterday’s episode of Effectively Wild featured an excellent discussion with Baseball Prospectus’ Director of Technology Harry Pavlidis about the present feasibility of robot umps. Pavlidis has apparently been charting all pitches thrown for a very, very long time. I won’t spoil the conversation, so go listen to it.
Forgot to bring my damn wiener headphones to the coffee shop. Will do later.
Here you go
Amazing that they were able to fit a woofer into earbuds.
rimshot.jpg
This audiophile loves that joak
I'm still team robot ump, but the one thing that has made me walk back some is how it would eliminate framing. It's not that I think framing is great but rather how framers look. A good framer just looks better than someone like Doumit.
The discussion about implications for transitioning to a robot ump system provides a lot to chew on. There’s the obvious stuff, like what happens to catchers as position players, the strategic stuff related to how human umps award calls in certain situations, and then a ton of non-obvious stuff that doesn’t exactly jump to mind when one thinks about the accuracy of calling balls & strikes.
Yes. Harry said that most games only have a few calls that go the wrong way. I'm pretty sure there's a twitter bot that posts when umpires get it wrong and that's what we remember so strongly. We need the opposite: post every time the umpire gets it right.
Breaking balls being affected was something I knew about. The strikezone isn't a plane but a three-dimension object. But has anyone actually done research on balls that break into the zone? Balls falling out of the zone still count as strikes, so this would strictly be an increase in the number of called strikes.
I'm not sure how many equals "a few", but it doesn't take very many bad calls at the right (or wrong) times to have a major effect on the outcome of a ball game.
I wasn't listening 100% to the entire conversation, but the number Harry quoted was "four" being a common number. The worst was 50, but it sounded like it was rare. He wouldn't name any game(s).
And obviously, one pitch can do it. I meant to reference the Brandon Inge's non-HBP that probably would have won them the game in 2009. But that's also uncommon.
It doesn't even have to be something that obvious. In an at-bat with men in scoring position, if the 2-1 pitch is wrongly called a ball, now the count's 3-1 and the pitcher has to come in with a hittable pitch. On the other hand, if that pitch is wrongly called a strike, now it's 2-2 and the batter has to expand his zone a little bit. That one call can change the entire game.
Also, it's much less satisfying directing your anger at poor calibrations than humans.
I've seen arguments that if it can't (or won't) be easily put in place in all levels of play, from MLB to low-A, then that should be a deal breaker right there.
I'm on the fence, if we're being perfectly honest. I was pretty pro-replay, but the way they've implemented it has me longing for the days where they where umps would just occasionally get stuff wrong, and people got crabby about it, rather than these constant "did his foot come off the base for a half a millisecond???" replays taking five minutes and proving nothing. You can say that this would be a lot easier to implement, but once you get twenty cooks in the kitchen, nothing is easy.
MLB could do a better job with the implementation & execution of replay stuff, but I am still glad they’re making the effort to get the call right. Every time I feel like a challenge-necessitating-replay is taking too long, I just think of
I think the silly football style "coaches get a limited number of challenges and determine when to use them by themselves" thing is what's killing it. I can't blame a manager for challenging the minutiae plays, but it's not helping replay's case at all.
There needs to be a person in a booth determining this. They take a quick look at any close play, and if it's egregiously wrong, they send a signal down to the umps that "you guys might want to have another look at this". No more fraction of a second plays, no more "man, I really hope that he was safe by 1/100th of a second on a bang bang play" that has to be looked at for five minutes. The play you brought up is horrible - it also could have been fixed within ten seconds with replay. Anything that needs more than thirty seconds should just be left alone.
Despite my generally being good with replay, I will totally echo this.
Yes. While I'm against it in whole, I'll admit there's a case for appropriate use of replay in baseball that I could accept. But as executed it's all wrong.
I'm in support of an electric notification system for home-plate umpires that tells them secretly whether a robot ump thought a pitch was a ball or strike (I imagine a sensory notification like a buzzer in opposite shoes) that we would never see and never hear about, but which rather quickly and seamlessly helps umps get better at their job without ruining the game.
I don't know about the thirty second thing, but I fully agree that it should be a person in a booth determining when replay is to be used, not the managers.
I agree with this as my preferred method of implementation.
Yeah. I'm becoming sick of replay on all but the most egregious of missed calls and home runs.
See, I don't mind the replay, but I'm getting sick of players sliding poorly and losing contact with the base.
I don't think sliding skills have declined. I think we can now measure how bad actual sliding is.
(This is the "hermeneutics and alethiology" thing.)
Probably fair enough.
Could not agree more. I find myself generally liking the "human element" of umpiring more and more and replay is totally to blame for that. It should be used for things that have a physical element that makes it extraordinarily difficult for the human eye, like fair or foul home runs.
The only argument for robot umps I can get behind is what I'm going to call the "Cowboy Joe West" argument. Robot umps would eliminate the Joe West ego's of the world.
The solution is finding a better way to remove/correct umpires for repeated call/conduct issues.
With robot umpires, we would never have a Ron Gardenhire telling the men in blue, "I'm not arguing balls and strikes, I'm arguing you suck!" I'd rather have the latter.
Showtime!
[replay] has me longing for the days where they where umps would just occasionally get stuff wrong
I was anti-replay from the start. Did watching it in football teach you nothing? It changes watching a sport into hermeneutics and alethiology*.
It also biases calls in a way that they can be reversed, but then that "call on the field" is the presumption in evaluating the correct call.
I don't know if this is happening yet in baseball, but I know it had in football before I gave it up.
*I had to look this up... I thought there was a word I was familiar with having this meaning, but I guess not. Maybe I was thinking of "epistemology", but that's different. Study of "Truth" vs "Knowledge". Wikipedia notes that they could be considered synonymous, but I think this is a place where the distinction is important. Mea culpa if I'm using this in a completely incorrect sense.
Ben Lindbergh has a great piece on the Marlins’ fire sale at The Ringer today.
The only time a team was divested of more WAR from the preceding season was a situation that led to contraction.
My coworker has convinced me to venture over to Nicollet Mall for lunch from one of the food trucks in a little while. If I'm trampled to death by NFL fans or run over by one of the tanks guarding the perimeter, know that I love you all.
Please send photos of tanks. Birds, I suppose, are also acceptable. Kindly kick in the shins someone from Philly. Try not to die.
Here's some birds.
I successfully accomplished 1 of the 4 items on your request list.
Keep your head on a swivel. Disrupt, divert and flank. Advance from cover to cover. You'll be fine once the shootin' starts, kid.
Serpentine Shel, serpentine!
Sometimes I'm so smart I scare myself.
Photographer from Boston: Where are you from?
Us: 4 blocks from here.
Food truck prices were majorly jacked up, btw, so I ended up grabbing something from Whole Foods instead.
I met some out-of-town friends at the landing for the zipline, and we went to Hopcat for beer. Prices weren't too bad for fancy beer.
Well, this is not something I considered as a cause for the lukewarm stove this year.
The MLBPA told them that any player with a contract that would do this would be conducting an unlawful strike. It ain't going to happen.
What's kind of fascinating about this year is that there are lots and lots of guys who are in the "almost elite, but" category. Much as I usually side with the players, I don't know that I'd want my team spending $147M for six or seven years of Eric Hosmer, and that's a deal he's supposedly turned down. Ditto to just about everyone else. These are not players that I'd want my team tied to for their age 36 and 37 years.
Are teams finally using Sabrmetrics to realize that paying peak-level dollars for post-peak years is not economically sound?
If so, the economics of the sport may need to shift to pay young players more.
the economics of the sport may need to shift to pay young players more
It's this. 100%.
Too many years of team control. Teams delaying playing clocks. Caps on international pools, slotting and caps for draft picks, etc.
To Nibs' point... You can disagree with wanting Hosmer for his age 36 and 37 years, while still hating on the teams. That's part of the trade-off they get for signing the guy. I said it before... I think it's better to have the right players during and a little past their window than to not have them at all.
Also, another reminder, players in MLB get less of the pie than other major sports.
A reminder: football players get big contracts that aren't guaranteed.
A reminder: football players get head injuries. We shouldn't take the things they prioritize as instructive.
justin mauer would like a word regarding head injuries.
While agreeing that something about this offseason doesn’t pass the smell test, and being politically disposed to side with labor over management/owners, this dude sounds like a total choad.
This is my least favorite kind of bloviating. You didn't just think of a more striking word in the middle of your thought, but were so stream of thought that you just couldn't go back and edit... BRODIE.
Oh come on, that was totally edited. It's for impact. It's just a weak way of doing it. No, it's a terrible way of doing it.
Heh.
The Barry Bonds blackballing convinced me that owners do indeed collude, though I have no idea if that's the case with this off-season. Also, I find it a little harder to sympathize with labor over management when both are comfortably ensconced in the top income quintile. At some point, the bickering over dividing the massive spoils turns sour for the fans paying inflated ticket prices.
In this specific case, you can make a pretty good argument that without labor, management has no product. The disproportionate amount of the game’s money should be going to players, and that’s definitely not the case. MLB has a Congressionally-sanctioned monopoly, so this highly-skilled labor pool doesn’t have anywhere else to go that might force management’s hand. (We can quibble about when players should be getting paid for their production, but the fact is that they’re not paid what they’re worth when they’re worth the most.)
Don’t forget that the year after Bonds was shut out that Ray Durham also mysteriously couldn’t find a gig despite posting a 113 OPS+ (.380 OBP!). DRS & UZR/150 are split on his defensive work that year, but he wasn’t Ryan Braun out there. Best he could get was a minor-league deal from the Nationals. I’m not saying he should’ve gotten a 6 year deal for beaucoup dinero, but it seemed pretty odd that a guy who put up a 1.5-3 WAR season was totally frozen out.
Without labor, very few enterprises have a product. I might be suggesting that the money up for grabs would be substantially less if fans and sponsors were not subsidizing so much of ownership's costs, e.g. publicly financed stadiums, inflated 'premium' ticket prices, exorbitant television contracts, etc. Owners and labor are both pushing the limits of what the markets will bear, and it's always the fans that get squeezed. I don't care so much about advertisers, they're making a business calculation and generally get a fair return on their investment if they do their homework. I can't argue the ratio of revenue distribution isn't skewed, but I think I can make a case that we socialize too much of the owners' costs while privatizing all of the profits.
It will be interesting to see what the new limits to deductibility will do to suite and season ticket sales.
In this particular monopolistic enterprise, labor is also the product. I think fans' sympathies are actually better aligned with the goals of labor in this case; the fans want to see the best product — a collection of laborers — possible for their dollar. This is, however, complicated significantly by laundry.
As you rightly point out, fans have gone so far to subsidize the construction of venues used by the product, and owners are simply pocketing the windfall instead of investing it in the (again, captive) labor market to improve their product and attract more customers. If labor was capturing an percentage of revenue that was causing distress to their employers, that might provide grounds for raising prices for customers, but there is no evidence that MLB owners are hemorrhaging money.
I think the problem for Bonds was that he was toxic on a fan-relations standpoint for almost all teams. Giants fans already accepted his "faults", Yankees fans would have quickly gotten over it, and Marlins fans are imaginary. He would have been booed by his home fans for just. About every other team. I would have liked Bonds on the Twins, but would not have liked having to defend him from everyone who knew I was a fan of the team.
I obviously don't know if there's collusion, but it strikes me that it's a charge that's easy to make and hard to prove.
This season is just a set of dominoes ready to drop; once Darvish is gone the rest of the pride tackle the carcass
I wonder, when looking at it this way, if football apologists still see what they think they see in the game.
Hey it's the AMR at the MOU
I joined the MOU the night before so I could post the photo once it became seasonally rare on Dec. 1.
Related sad news... I've learned that David Brislane, who took so may of those Cook County/Lutsen photos, passed away on Wednesday.
At work, heard that Philly-types are getting the snub from Minny restaurants. I thot we were more passive agressive than that. "What? You think you had a reservation?..."
I don't buy it. Unless by Philly-types you mean drunk a-holes. Then I could see it.
You can tell them by their voices - shrieking like finger nails being scratched on a chalk-board. Not just my opinion BTW.
No Chief Wahoo for Thome in HOF.
http://mlb.nbcsports.com/2018/02/02/jim-thome-does-not-want-chief-wahoo-on-the-cap-of-his-hall-of-fame-plaque/
#mensch
For real. Cool.
Class act, all the way.