Wedge

QUOTE(YASNY @ May 4, 2005 -> 10:20 AM) I think it was Johnny Damon. They are actually equivalent

"Who would steal 47,000 promotional Yankee caps?" "I'll tell you who! It was that damn Sasquatch!"

"At six, six... from the University of NORTH Carolina... MIIIIIIICHAEL JOOOORDAN!" damn, that still gives me goosebumps

QUOTE(nitetrain8601 @ May 3, 2005 -> 10:16 PM) Billy Wagner. That's interesting. I wonder what it would take to get Wagner from the Phils...

As long as Crede is doing OK and Dye comes around to at least a shadow of his form numbers, our offense should be fine.

I think one of my favorite recent moments was the Garland vs. Detroit game when DJ referenced the song "Leanback"

It'd be really great if Shingo gets his act back together and can close like he did for most of last season. Otherwise, I have no problem with the committee approach that has been taken for about the last week or two.

The Yankees are in a world of hurt, right now. The problem that they face is that they have very little minor league talent to trade away. The only thing they can attempt to do is pick up salary from small market teams, but that probably will not improve their team enough. A team with a good, but expensive player will get talent from another contender. There isn't a big enough pool, I feel. They have holes up and down that roster, but particularly in their bullpen. They might look awful now, but imagine how bad they'd look without Randy Johnson.

The best thing about Garland is that as far as I can remember he has never had an injury and certainly does not have the nagging injuries that a guy like El Duque has had a history of. If Garland comes "back to earth" as predicted by just about everybody, it will most likely result from him losing some of his command/location or his seeming newfound ability to pitch out of jams. He has had a very healthy career (knock on wood) and health should not be an issue with him. There was a comparison the other day of Garland to Loiaza in terms of being two pitchers that started out a season like gang-busters. I think the two scenarios are fairly different in Garland's favor. If you recall, that season Loiaza added a new pitch (the cutter) which he could locate incredibly. Once the league caught on to this, his numbers began resemebling those he had established over his career. It seems that Garland is benefitting from two good game calling catchers and from some lessons he's learned by watching Buehrle pitch in terms of throwing strikes and working out of jams. My prediction is that he ends up winning 20 with an ERA around 2.50.

QUOTE(SoxFanForever @ May 2, 2005 -> 02:55 PM) I liked Jeter's comments on the last page at the end. "It's not the same team". Funny how a team with that much of a payroll can't get a little chemistry and develop trust in eachother. It's like they said, though, these guys didn't grow up together and go through the minors together.

QUOTE(jackie hayes @ May 2, 2005 -> 03:40 PM) It's not a good measure here -- runs are nonnegative, and the distribution is nonsymmetric. Take the same distribution, do nothing except scale it down a little, and you'll get a lower standard deviation. That's not really true, standard deviation is good for nonnegative ranges. It definitely holds true for things like the distribution of height. You're right though, for the nonsymmetric distribution, it might not be the ideal statistic, but it does paint a decent picture, I think.

QUOTE(jackie hayes @ May 2, 2005 -> 03:05 PM) No, not really. All the stuff about 'inconsistency' last year is anecdotal. Some people here have looked at that and asked if the Sox scored fewer than X runs (3, say) more often than other teams -- and found that there were no big differences. And this year we'll score 8, 9, 11 runs one day, and 1 or 2 on others. Not to turn into Juggs here, but I did a rough a dirty calculation of our runs/game standard deviation. My data was a bit suspect, I was only going off of the info in Jake's post (i.e. I weighted games in the 9-10 category as 9.5 runs scored and 10+ became 12 runs). Despite this, the numbers should illustrate a good trend. Standard deviation (also known as variance) is a measure of how spread out a distribution is (thus a lower number means more consistent data). In 2004, this figure was roughly 3.5. This year so far, our figure is 2.5, ergo statistically we are much more consistent in terms of run scoring.

QUOTE(jackie hayes @ May 2, 2005 -> 02:45 PM) Nice method, cherry pick a couple days. Are you claiming that we will not once, this whole season, score a bunch to win in one game, then lose close ones around that day? I think that he was showing a case of how inconsistent our offense was last season and used what appeared to be a pretty good example.where in a 5 game stretch we outscored our opponent 29-8 and yet went 2-3 despite 5 good pitching efforts. I think he was trying to make more of a case that our offense is more consistent this year than last season. Our pitching is definitely improved and nobody can really argue with that, but given the same 5 pitching efforts he cited, don't you like our chances of winning those games more with the 2005 offense than the 2004?

QUOTE(CWSGuy406 @ Apr 30, 2005 -> 10:51 PM) Link Pretty interesting read. I'm hoping that we can be a Boston-lite, with a better bottom three, but a worse top two. We should be in the upper tier of starting rotations, though. Hopefully El Duque can stay reasonably healthy. It's also good to see (knock on wood) that we've been in just about every game we've played. Other than the game in which Vizcaino had to take one for the team, we've been in every game. In that case, I'd say our model is more suggestive of the Cardinals method. Basically this article indicates that the best way for a lower budget team to consistently build a staff through free agency is to consistently try to sign high value bottom of the rotation pitchers and hope that guys in your farm can become those top of the rotation guys that you can sign and keep at a reduced free agency rate (see Johan Santana). In reality, this is what we did last season and offseason to prepare for this one. On paper alone, we upgraded our bottom 3 from Garland, Schoenweis, and ____ to Garland++ (although nobody could have counted on this), Contreras, and Duque. I think when you look at this study, it shows just how important the Duque signing was to the "mathematics" of making this a very sound pitching team. You should also be able to get get significant bang-for-buck by adding significant bullpen arms; however, I think that the Tigers this season show that you do need sufficient starters. A good article that should give GMs food for thought.

QUOTE(Jake @ May 2, 2005 -> 01:57 PM) Here are some interesting numbers from 2004(give or take a couple on each): Games with: 0 runs : 8 1-2 runs : 41 3-4 runs : 35 5-6 runs : 26 7-8 runs : 19 9-10 runs : 17 More than 10 runs : 16 See what was wrong? We were at extremes way too much. Games with 7+ runs = 52. Games with 5+ runs = 78. Games with 2 or less runs = 49. We were only at our average (5.34 runs per game) 26 times. We were within 2-3 runs of it 80 times. Less than half. That's how the numbers lie. This year: 0 runs : 0 1-2 : 6 3-4 : 7 5-6 : 7 7-8 : 4 9-10 : 1 More than 10 : 0 Our average runs per game this year is 4.56. We are within 2 runs of this 14 games, over half the time (56% to be exact). We are within 3 runs 20 games. (80%) This is our consistency and staying away from extremes. These numbers don't lie. That's very good information. If I could track down a list of the number of runs we scored last year, I could calculate the standard deviation, which is a measurement of the consistency of a statistic. Our runs/game for last season might be higher, but there was a high level of variance (the bimodal syndrome: score 16 one day, then score 0, 2, 0, 1 ,6, 4 for the rest of the week) that I think most people sense instinctively. Something more telling might be this: in 2004 and 2005 we scored 5+ runs in a game at roughly the same rate (just a tad under 50% in both cases). I'm pretty sure there's a pretty high relation of scoring 5 runs and winning games (I'd guess offhand if you score 5+ runs, you are 60% likely to win a game) .

Link This is a really great read... it gets into good detail about the psychosis of Steinbrenner...

My bad, I thought Gustavo was this guy:

QUOTE(NUKE_CLEVELAND @ May 2, 2005 -> 01:19 PM) We'll get a lot more punch out of that 50 million dollar rotation than the Spankees are getting with their 100 million dollar rotation. I agree. That'd be about the smartest $50 million we could spend. I'd rather have B-Mac and Gio eventually replacing Contreras and Duque than Garland. That way, we have guys that came up in the Sox system that should have more signability, due to club loyalty. Whether you have loved or hated Garland in the past, we've all sat back and taken our lumps waiting for him to mature. Trading your best Starting Pitcher when you're in a potential pennant race is just dumb.

who is Gustavo Chacin? Some of the pitching match-ups on paper seem so laughable in our favor...

We should have a shot of signing him long term in the $6-8 million range/4 years, I'd guess.

If we can get a dependable long reliever/set-up man in a trade that involves Borchard, I'd have tears of joy.

The biggest improvement is that Garland can work out of jams now. Yesterday was a pretty good example where he had men on first and second with no outs. I thought we'd be lucky to only have 1 run score. Instead he gets a fly out, a line-out, and a strike out to get out of the jam. That was really good!

I was pleasantly surprised with that episode. I thought the new episodes weren't going to be very good, but they seem like the picked up where they left off! The GI Joe reference was pretty sweet, too!

That's cool and all... but I don't really care. If I want to know how the team did, I look up the AP story and box score or watch the game. If I want intelligent commentary, I come here and dig around Does BBTN really serve any purpose?