102 thoughts on “January 26, 2012: Insomnia”

      1. That's the thing about humor, of course. You either think something's funny or you don't. Either way, there's no way anyone can make a logical argument that can convince you you're wrong.

        1. there's no way anyone can make a logical argument that can convince you you're wrong.

          are you kidding? i thought that's what the internet was based upon. well, you know, without the "logical" part at least. 😉

        2. I was five and had no context, and the jokes made no sense to me. I'd probably enjoy them more today.
          The "out of order" was a joke on the "and next time..." which was never delivered upon. Or were they actually delivered upon, and I actually did see them out of order?

          1. seasons one and two really are in serial form (for the R & B parts; the other bits are stand-alone), so they should make much more sense in proper sequence.

  2. I know it has been mentioned each of the past two days but i can't stop laughing about Miggy Cabrera playing third base.

    1. I wish I had heard that before I had lunch with CH yesterday. We could have had a good hearty chuckle about it, but at the time I was under the impression that he was going to DH.

      What they should really do is put both of them in the middle infield spots. Power hitting middle infielders are rare, no?

    2. The other really awesome thing is that Jhonny Peralta is their starting SS. I really think Dave Cameron nailed it when he said that if the Tigs were going to spend that much money, they should have gone for Reyes and C.J. Wilson.

      I for one won't complain, though, since this move will really limit their future and it should definitely make this year interesting.

      1. I like the idea of two fence posts and a _elmon being the entire left side of the defense for Detroit. _elmon's going to get plenty of exercise rollerskating up to clean up all those ground balls that make it through the infield.

        1. It's not like the right side is a whole lot better. Boesch is better than _elmon but still bad, and he'll be playing behind Prince. Basically the goal should be hit it anywhere but CF.

          2. I still want all the Twins to attempt bunts in their first at-bats against Verlander. With this Tigers defense, that approach might score a run or two and probably Verlander will get ejected after throwing at somebody.

            2. Also, in this scenario, there's the possibility he'd get ejected for throwing at Fielder or Cabrera, which would be pretty great.

            1. Is that their second baseman? Good lord, the games against Detroit should be an error-filled joy to watch.

            2. SSS, but his UZR/150 combined at 2B and 3B is -29 R/150G. Yikes. Even if we add 150 games of average performance to his record, to regress him to the mean, he'd be -12 R/150G. That's still pretty nasty.

  3. I think it was a big mistake for Kevin Love to extend his contact with the Timberwolves. His teammates are losers and his GM is a buffoon of Bill Smith-like proportions! Then again, with Love only concerned with gobbling up as many rebounds as possible (boxing out his own teammates often) and working on his three point shot the Wolves aren't going to be getting any better any time soon anyway.

    The Wolves should trade Love and give his minutes to Arizona alum, Derek Williams. The kid is a stud who is a natural power forward. Then the Wolves would have two legit scorers who can create their own shot in Beasley and Williams. Who says no in a Howard for Love swap? No one. The Wolves then have the best front court in basketball and can keep that goofball Pekovic on the bench--where he belongs. Until the Wolves get rid of Love their seasons will over before the games even start.

      1. I should add some logic to randomize the statfreak102 name to some other regular on the sidebar.

  4. For this weekend's taping of WGOM Radio (Pepper! episode) we have me as host, and

    Spooky
    Rhu_ru
    Nibbs (maaaaaayyyybe)

    as panelists. We're looking for 1 or 2 more people to sign up if you are free Saturday afternoon.

    1. i would highly doubt that i'll be able to join, but maybe everything will fall through on saturday. if it does, i'll let you know.

    4. I need to check if my headphones with a mic will work; if so, I'm up for being a panelist. Also, this would be over Skype, right?

    2. I wonder what kind of contract Prince Fielder would have gotten if he was in good shape. It couldn't hurt his fielding, but it wouldn't necessarily help, either. Still, being four years younger than Albert Pujols, I have to imagine he'd have gotten something like $300M/10yr if he was in good shape and GMs didn't expect him to go all Mo Vaughn.

      1. Brad Lidge signed with the Nationals for $1 million. I'd sure like the Twins to sign one of these guys on the cheap. They could've probably got 2-3 solid 'pen arms for what they're going to pay Capps.

  7. So, consider a Fielder/Raburn/Peralta/Cabrera 1B/2B/SS/3B infield. What's our best guess at their UZR for each position?

    Fielder's played nothing but 1B and his career UZR is -6.4 R/150G. Not good, obviously, but not terrible.

    Raburn, as I mentioned above is optimistically a -10 R/150G fielder at 2B. We're going on a small sample size, but considering he's an outfielder playing infield, this doesn't seem crazy.

    Last year, Peralta's UZR was +10.7 R/150G, awfully good, actually. But for his career, he's -3 R/150G, which is probably a better estimate of what he might do next year.

    Cabrera's definitely been a passable 1B: -2.7 R/150G, but the standard positional adjustment between 1B and 3B is 15 runs. So at 3B, Cabrera figures to be something like a -18 R/150G fielder.

    Altogether, that's something like a -37 R/150G infield, with the potential for worse. On the flip side, I wouldn't really want to pitch to them.

      1. Basically. I think having a high-offense, low-defense strategy is filled with peril, at least in modern baseball. If Detroit's defense really is this bad, then the entire pitching staff is going to have to throw a lot more pitches and Leyland's probably going to have to blow out the bullpen every third day.

        In the playoffs, I think that kind of strategy could work. With all the off days, you can rest your pitchers and you can even use your 5th starter as a long reliever since you only need 4 starters. I don't have any evidence for it, but I suspect that elite hitters don't see their performance drop against the best pitchers in the league as compared to the performance hit that mediocre or bad hitters see against the best pitchers in the league.

        But over the course of the regular season, it seems like a recipe for wearing down your pitchers and having trouble making the playoffs. Going by UZR, last year the Rays had the best fielding in baseball and the Mets had the worst. The Rays' pitchers faced the 2nd-fewest batters in baseball and the Mets' pitchers faced the 3rd-most batters in baseball (and they played in the 9th-hitter-is-an-automatic-out league.)

        1. It will be interesting to how how the updated Depth Chart reflects the actual positions played. If they really play Inge at 3rd and Santiago at 2B, with Cabrera as the DH, the infield looks a lot less terrible.

        2. The problem with having a high-offense, low-defense team in the playoffs is that to win games, you basically have to bludgeon your opponents into submission. You can do that in the regular season, sometimes, because you play a lot of games against teams with weak pitching staffs and weak defenses that your batters can take advantage of. In the playoffs, though, you tend to play teams with good pitching and good defense, so it's harder to score large numbers of runs. In addition, of course, you tend to play teams who also have good offenses and who can take advantage of your weak defense.

          1. Even playoff teams have weaknesses--you're not generally running into teams that have great pitching, defense, and hitting. I disagree that a high-offense, low-defense team would always have to bludgeon your opponents into submission. One of the reasons the Tigers as currently constituted, look better in the playoffs than the regular season is that they can pitch Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer--both high strikeout pitchers--in a higher percentage of games in the playoffs than the regular season. And you can ride your good pitchers a little harder because there are only so many games left. It's the days where you're throwing guys like Doug Fister that you have to worry a little more about the defense, but even then, you can go to the bullpen early and often in the playoffs, and relief pitchers tend to miss more bats than starters.

            Also, I'm not sure that St. Louis really had problems with their defense last year, but their playoff successes sure weren't built on pitching and defense.

            1. True, playoff teams don't always have great pitching, defense, and hitting, and I never said they did. I said playoff teams tend to be good at those things, and they do. That's why their playoff teams, and the other teams aren't.

              Giving the other team extra outs is obviously never a good idea, but it's easier to overcome it when you play a bad team than it is to play a good team. Yes, it's possible that your pitchers will strike out enough guys that it won't matter, but it's not that easy to rack up high-strikeout games against playoff teams. It can be done, and it has been, but I'd hate to go into the playoffs having to count on it.

            1. I updated my email address recently, which goofed up my avatar, and I did not quickly find the picture I'd been using. Spooky found it for me, but I'm having my third funeral in three weeks tomorrow and haven't gotten around to changing it back yet.

        3. I suspect that elite hitters don't see their performance drop against the best pitchers in the league as compared to the performance hit that mediocre or bad hitters see against the best pitchers in the league

          there's got to be some work done on this already. This article comes close -- weighting pitching stats by the quality of batters faced. But the key is that it is based on pitcher-batter matchup data from the Statcorner guys. The data clearly exists to do the analysis from both directions.

          1. Yeah, the data is there, but I think it's a tricky study to do. I don't think that weighting pitching stats by quality of batters faced sheds much light on this, mainly in that over the course of a full season, the quality of hitters faced by a full-time pitcher doesn't tend to vary much. (Certainly not on the level of Drew Butera vs. Albert Pujols.)

            My first thought is to group hitters and pitchers into good, average, and poor groups and look at a series of 3x3 matrices showing different statistics in the encounters between those groups (K%, BB%, HR%, FB%, wOBA, etc.) Where I think it's harder than that is that there are effectively different hitter and pitcher phenotypes out there, which could be very important. Flyball pitcher vs. flyball hitter, strikeout pitcher vs. contact hitter, etc. So then you're looking at "Good Flyball pitcher" vs. "Poor Flyball hitter", "Average Flyball pitcher" vs. "Poor Flyball hitter", etc. One guy I always think of for this is Delmon. His numbers against power pitchers (as defined by bb-ref) are remarkably poor. For his career (which is nearly 3000 PA at this point), he's .223/.270/.297 against "power" pitchers (high K+BB) and he's .317/.343/.493 against "finesse" pitchers (low K+BB.) It's also really not apparent that he's just at the tail end of a normal distribution, since he's had a negative power vs. finesse split every year in the league, and the best it's ever been is -.109 OPS in 2008. It also more or less makes sense that a guy who never met a pitch he didn't like would do worse against pitchers who work more outside the zone. This is just one glaring example, but I think it's the tip of the iceberg rather than a random chunk of ice in the ocean.

            Anyway, because of the matchups, I think the quantity of data is a blessing and a curse.

            1. There is some research in The Book that suggests that groundball hitters do better against groundball pitchers and the same for hitters and pitchers of the flyball persuasion. I don't recall the magnitude at this point. I'm thinking it might have been similar to the platoon split.

              1. I meant to add: since there is a documented difference in terms for BIP tendencies, then it seems reasonable there could also be differences in terms of pitch selection/type. That's long been "known", but it's not until now that we could actually study it. Unfortunately, teams seem to quickly hire PitchF/X people, limiting how much knowledge makes it to the public.

      2. It's hard for me to be that afraid of a lineup with Delmon hitting 5th. Maybe he's turned some kind of corner, but I'm not buying it at the moment. I won't be too bothered with the Tigers having an average hitter and poor fielder in LF.

    1. Has anyone seen that cover of Somebody I Used To Know by Walk Off The Earth? I'm a sucker for playing instruments creatively.

      1. Yeah, it's awesome:

        I've been looping the album on Rdio the last couple days. Initially I felt Somebody outclassed the rest of the album by far. But 4 or 5 loops in I started enjoying some of the other tracks. Somebody is still just so good that it kills the rest, but the album holds up pretty well I think.

  9. Leave it to the Scandanavians - soccer + dog collars = comedy gold.

    httpv://youtu.be/HuKva8GUwBk

    Start about 1:20 mark. Hit the "cc" button for English subtitles.

      1. Same here. At first I didn't get it, but then I realize what they were wearing and couldn't stop laughing.

    2. My favorite part is they also put a dog collar on the referee. The whole thing is pretty funny.

    3. Moss is a huge sucker for electroshock humor. That episode of Cheers where Cliff gets shocked is classic. And then there's the episode of the Simpsons where they do family therapy...great stuff. Moss is brought to tears by good electroshock schtick!

    1. That's actually a really interesting article, mainly because my mother-in-law has one of the genetic conditions mentioned (Rendu-Osler-Weber disease) and pretty regularly suffers from nosebleeds. I'll have to suggest that she stuff some bacon up her nose next time I see her.

  12. Russian protesters are a lot more creative than US ones.

    The article also contained this gem:

    Voina, the rebellious art collective, won worldwide fame after painting a 65-metre-long phallus on a drawbridge in St Petersburg that, when erected, faced the city's Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters. Its members have been repeatedly detained.

    1. They signed like 400 arms to audition in spring training. Why would they need to sign the Dan Wheelers of the world?

    2. I kind of dig those Tams jerseys. They look like the sweet Oakland A's-Reggie Jackson era uni's

      1. I read on Twitter that the Memphis Tams were owned by Charlie Finley, which explains the Oakland A's color scheme. I don't know if that is true, but would anyone on Twitter lie?!?

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