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QUOTE (CaliSoxFanViaSWside @ May 10, 2014 -> 12:27 AM) Excuse my ignorance but by its very name isn't a microdisectomy for the reason stated pretty much the same as like a herniated disc that is done by microsurgery instead of a scalpel ? Yes it is. The reason i think this is because the injury was originally diagnosed as hip pain. The most likely reason it would then be re-diagnosed as hip pain coming from the back is a disc herniation. If he may return in 4 weeks it wasn't an open procedure with a fair amount of muscles and fascia incised. So he probably had a partial microdisectomy for a small herniation.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 9, 2014 -> 04:27 PM) Doug Padilla ‏@ESPNChiSox 14m Nate Jones confident he will pitch this year after his back procedure. Hopes to take part in baseball activity in 4 weeks. Must have been a partial microdisectomy. this is only back procedure I can see rehabbing that quickly.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ May 9, 2014 -> 11:54 AM) http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article/mlb/anthon...p;vkey=news_mlb The costs of throwing at high velocity at an early age...and the rash of TJ surgeries popping up all over MLB. People are finally listening. It's amazing how your research gets denied for publication yet more higher profile researchers say the same thing and it gets published! I hate academia.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ May 9, 2014 -> 02:11 AM) Right now, they're saying two rehab starts because Ventura doesn't want him to go out at the MLB level and be limited to 4-5 innings the first time out....says it wouldn't be fair to him. Makes sense. When they said conservative theywere not kidding.

QUOTE (flavum @ May 8, 2014 -> 06:34 PM) http://www.csnchicago.com/white-sox/white-...ale-comes-focus Probably be 3 weeks before he can go 7 innings. I think it will be earlier than that. Saturday will be his 3rd bullpen and I'm sure they have been slowly increasing the number and intensity. He should then be ready for a rehab start. He shouldn't be limited to much. So 4 days later would be the next rehab or MLB depending on the how he feels.

QUOTE (The Ginger Kid @ May 8, 2014 -> 01:47 PM) No s***? That's a pretty big one to have witnessed it. I remember falling asleep. I think we came close to falling asleep in the park before they called it.

QUOTE (chitownsportsfan @ May 8, 2014 -> 12:55 PM) Are you a doctor? I just ask because I'm generally curious. My understanding is that the imaging (MRI and X-Ray) are good but not perfect for looking at the structural integrity of the elbow joint. They can say "it looks clean" but if symtomps perisist past the time of a mere "muscle strain" and they can't see anything in the imaging then they go into the elbow. A google search of "exploratory elbow surgery" yields quite a few results, including Joel Zumaya to have exploratory elbow surgery I'm a physical therapist and athletic trainer with about 30 years of sports medicine research and experience. You're right about the imaging techniques. I refer to MRI as standing for "More Radiographic Income." One reason i say that there really isn't an exploratory surgery for this case is the way they are treating it. While the imaging techniques aren't always accurate, manual ligament tests are. They know if the ligament is loose or not. They would have him throwing if there was any doubt. The other reason is that Zumaya is a different case as he is having post surgical difficulties. Once you have surgery and the anatomy changes all bets are off. The normal manual tests don't always look the same. Plus he has been having problems for months post surgery. You really can't equate the two since one has already had a surgery.

QUOTE (chitownsportsfan @ May 8, 2014 -> 12:45 PM) Poorly worded tweet, is he saying it's important he stay free or that he threw and it was pain free? Robin's words today scare me: So, what does that mean? Anyways, all we know for a fact is he's thrown two bullpens in the span of a week. If things are actually better in his elbow then he'll throw a rehab start next week and be back a week after that. If that doesn't happen you'll probably see the dreaded "exploratory surgery" option thrown out there. There is no exploratory surgery for something like this. The joint is currently not lax so there is no plans for surgery, otherwise he wouldn't be throwing. If the joint is lax but not enough for surgery, he is shut down and in a brace for 3-6 weeks. Currently it is a question of building the arm strength back with no adverse effect to the muscles. If the muscles aren't working properly the ligament can tear. So they need to strengthen it a the symptoms allow.

QUOTE (The Ginger Kid @ May 8, 2014 -> 12:33 PM) 30 years ago today the Sox and Brewers played the longest game in history and Tom Seaver won 2 games in 1 day. Fun read about it... 1984 game I was there for the whole game. Skipped school the second day to go back and watch it. It was alot of fun to watch. Didn't stay for the second game. I had to get some sleep.

QUOTE (Jose Paniagua @ May 8, 2014 -> 10:22 AM) By your metric then, the only way a pitcher can be bad is if the most recent outcome was poor? I'd advise you to look at Danks overall since injury and then tell me you're pleased with what he is now. I am not. I would be pleased with his progress since the injury. I would not expect him to be fully recovered until after a full season, as it takes usually ine season of pitching to get feeling right. I think he has done pretty well this year so far. Great, no but pretty good.

QUOTE (pittshoganerkoff @ May 8, 2014 -> 12:04 PM) I think we'll see as pitchers adjust to him, he will adjust and be more patient. If he does that, he'll walk more, too. But yes, his numbers could be ridiculous. Even if his adjustment period is slow, he could still hit 40+ HRs this year with a lower than ideal BA. He is more aggressive than Thomas was. This is not a bad thing. It drove me crazy when Thomas would take a pitch slightly high for a walk with a man on second. Those are the best pitches to drive and he could've produced a run. This was the type of thing that drove team mates nuts as well and why he got termed a "selfish" player. He was more worried about his stats than winning. Now his way wasn't necessarily wrong but it drove me crazy.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ May 8, 2014 -> 10:33 AM) I'm sure that's great if you live on that train line, but I live on the other side of town and the Millenium Station on the north end is a mile away from Ogilivie. The stadiums aren't necessarily difficult to get to, they are just very time consuming because they require multiple modes of transportation. True. I do drive 20 min. to get to the metra, but just makes everything easier.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ May 8, 2014 -> 10:29 AM) Except if you live on the north side of the city. I live on the near north. Wrigley is closer, but the train to USCF and Wrigley is about a draw. Soldier Field is a pain. Well....that's what you get for being on the dark side come over to the light and everything is easier.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ May 8, 2014 -> 10:17 AM) That's true. I don't go to that many games and it's usually on the weekend, so it doesn't bother me as much. I imagine that would get old trying to go to multiple weekday games. You are right about the Chicago infrastructure problem, because the same can be said for the other stadiums in the city. If you want to drive to Wrigley, you have to drive through at least two miles in s***ty city traffic. The only way to get there via public transportation is downtown to the Red Line like for the Sox or the Metra from the NW Burbs, then the hellish packed #80 bus. United Center is at least pretty close to 290 and 90, but it's several blocks from train stations or from downtown you have to take a nearly two mile bus ride. And Soldier Field doesn't even deserve a comment. Soldier Field is easy to get to. The metra drops you off at 18th street on the south end and 12th street on the north end. The Bears special train leaves 1/2 after the game ends.

QUOTE (Hawkfan @ May 8, 2014 -> 09:26 AM) This is a good thread, can't wait to read it all during lunch. After reading the article, I particularly liked the part where he dismissed the failure of Theo & Jed's campaign, solely based on the fact that anthony rizzo is good. Of course because like him, Theo and Jed are smarter than everyone else and how to properly use the stats.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ May 8, 2014 -> 09:21 AM) Again, I disagree. Your argument when some data is pointed out not to show your position is correct is sample size. Your argument to me is given enough of a sample a good hitter will be a good clutch player. (I still disagree with that, but OK) The argument I have is that sample isn't going to be available. In order to be a good clutch player, you are going to have to do it with a small sample size. If you do not, you aren't a clutch player. Your clutch opportunities are limited. This is true but I also think it is for a different reason. All SABR stats are based on the averages over time. For hitters this means your stats are based on facing all pitchers during a season, good and bad. Guess what the good hitter feast on bad pitchers and are only average against really good pitchers. This is part of the problem with basing a hitter's performance on averages. Same thing the post season. Hitters are no longer facing alot of bad pitchers. The teams that made it to the post season have better than most players. This was the problem with teams like the A's and Beane. They looked like geniuses in the regular season but the OBP based players couldn't get the same OBP in the playoffs and they never really did anything on the low budget hitters.

QUOTE (Jake @ May 7, 2014 -> 05:13 PM) First of all, I think it's good that you approach it this way and do it without the "this newfangled stuff is terrible, you nerds are ruining everything." It allows the SABR folks to answer the primary criticism of what they advocate, which is that sometimes sabermetrics seem to be at odds with what is observed (I should say that sometimes sabermetrics do a better job at explaining what it is we see). Obviously, if Abreu finishes with a 110 wRC+ and knocks in 150 RBI, I'm probably going to want to say he was a better run producer than just 10% above average. If he were to do that, though, it would suggest something that these kinds of statistics don't really take into consideration (and for good reason) - it would mean that the hits, walks, and outs that led to 150 RBI happened in a way that was biased towards runs being scored. Generally speaking, the assumption that underlies these statistics is that most of your at-bats are no different than any other at-bats; not on the micro level, but on the macro level. Over time, few people seem especially clutch or especially not clutch. When a guy looks awesome in some aspects of the classic, counting stats and not so great with SABR stats, there might be some reason to believe that this particular player is better or worse in the most pivotal situations than what is statistically typical. For instance, let's take two pitchers. Tom Glavine was criticized by many as a first-ballot HOFer, including myself, for his not-amazing FIP over his career (3.95). It would suggest that his accomplishments were more about longevity than ever being truly dominant. His xFIP (same stat, but assuming league average HR per fly ball) was worse at 4.59. First of all, it's obvious that Glavine didn't luck into not giving up homers to that large of an extent for 19 years. He was just better than we assume at suppressing homers. There's more than that, though. I'll let FanGraphs explain some more: Basically, peripheral stats tend to be better at predicting future performance than counting stats. Furthermore, these "peripherals" are better at saying how well a pitcher truly pitched in a smaller sample. David Purcey threw something like 10-15 innings last year and had a low ERA but he walked a batter per inning and hardly struck anyone out. We know he was just a lucky SOB, especially since his walks weren't clustered in one outlier appearance. Rarely, you get a guy like Glavine who is an exception. Then we have Javier Vasquez, who is the opposite sort of exception. His career FIP was 3.91, better than that POS Glavine! His xFIP was even better, 3.75. His ERA? 4.22 (Glavine's was 3.54). An FIP-based WAR suggests that Javy was a good season or two away from matching Glavine for career WAR. His RA9-WAR for his career was 43.3, though, compared to Glavine's 88. That looks a little better, Glavine being twice the pitcher. It turns out that sabermetricians tend to agree that RA9 (which is based simply on the amount of runs surrendered) is much better for long-term evaluation of pitchers than FIP, which is better for evaluating small samples. We know what was wrong with Javy - his bad outcomes weren't randomly distributed. He liked to cluster all his walks, hits, and homers in the 5th-6th inning. This means he'll give up more runs than the accumulation of walks, hits, homers, strikeouts, etc. would suggest. FWIW, we see this kind of variability much more often with pitchers, who are more difficult to evaluate in ways beyond measuring runs allowed. Batters are easier to measure. We have a clearer idea of what every batting outcome is worth, run-wise. There is just a bunch of research that repeatedly demonstrates that players performing better in clutch or run-producing scenarios than other players do is a fiction - that is, they do it, but it is not because they are better in those situations. It's just random variation. I do think they are more important for pitchers because an individual pitcher can control the outcome of a game more than an individual hitter thus individual stats are more important.

QUOTE (TaylorStSox @ May 7, 2014 -> 03:21 PM) You have to be kidding me. You're really finding a correlation between recreational drugs and athletic performance? That's pretty absurd. I'm sure Lebron is smoking blunts at half time. Do you actually think the entire league was blowing rails on the bench 82 nights a year? Maybe it's improved defense and rule changes. Read the first line. It is an old NBA JOKE. It was meant to be humerus. Which an old anatomy JOKE.

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ May 7, 2014 -> 02:54 PM) Maybe YOU did, but the RBI total lied to you about it, and many mainstream media pundits and fans were calling for a huge contract extension for Brandon Phillips now that he had "evolved his game to become a run producer." Further, Phillips himself famously lambasted fan pressure to improve his game citing that his RBI totals spoke for themselves, as if better productivity wouldn't lead to more RBIs as a by-product. I guess what I'm saying is that if you have to ignore a stat in certain situations because you "just know better," what use does that stat have? If it's right except when it's wrong, and you already know when it's right or wrong, you really don't need the stat. It's not telling you anything in terms of player evaluation. This is true. I don't think that any one stat should be used in all situations. I think each case is individual and no one thing can tell me everything about a player or that player's performance. This is why I advocate for the use of all of them and not not placing too much focus on any one of them. You need to use the eye ball test, advanced metrics and traditional stats together to get a true evaluation of any player. Maybe this is just from my doing research for admission to physical therapy graduate school. I think if I look at a variety of grades, tests, interviews, I get a better idea of the potential for this applicant to get through school, pass the license exam and become a quality physical therapist.

QUOTE (TaylorStSox @ May 7, 2014 -> 03:11 PM) I really don't care. My point is that smoking pot didn't cause his, or any other athlete's, decline in performance. The old joke in the NBA is that in the80s and 90s the players choice was coke and it was a dynamic, high flying league. Now that they test for coke the league turned to pot literally as there is much less scoring and the league is less dynamic.

QUOTE (chw42 @ May 7, 2014 -> 02:27 PM) Except the advanced metrics also showed that Trout was a lot better than Philips... But again, we knew that already. It should be used more for comparing apples to apples such as Trout to Miggy. Then again, GMs will offer each a boatload of money.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 7, 2014 -> 02:26 PM) A baseball team must rely on the entire team to win. When evaluating talent at the individual level, it's counter-productive to rely on data with a whole bunch of dependent variables. Yes, my example is an extreme case, but I'm using it to highlight just how useless of a stat RBI and Runs can be in evaluating talent and predicting future performance. I understand, I just disagree that they are so much more accurate as it's the true number of runs scored and given up that creates a win or loss. Again, I'm not saying it isn't useful. It's just that I think they are abused and used to try to make poor comparisons like Bernstein did.

QUOTE (CyAcosta41 @ May 7, 2014 -> 02:16 PM) For my money, Dan Bernstein (AND Terry Boers) are Exhibits A and B proving that human beings can have such different tastes. When I'm in my car and I accidentally switch to the Score during their show, I trash what's left of my rotator cuff attempting to change the station (to ANY station) before another word assaults my ears. Count me in with those who think they're horrible. The premise of their show (as best as I can tell) is that it offers a unique combination of sports acumen, entertainment, and humor. I don't see any of those things. Not a one; not at all. Then, go one step more and witness the smarmy and often offensive way they abuse their loyal minions and the occasional jamoke who calls in without being in on the joke ... and wwww. I need a shower. It's like walking into a circus freak show. Clearly they've survived because somehow (albeit inexplicably to me) they bring-in the numbers. As I said, we all have different tastes. My dislike for this gruesome twosome is pretty intense. I've gone so far as to boycott their advertisers just because I feel better knowing I'm not feeding the beast. The worst part is, Dan used to be fun. When he was starting out at the score (small s) he had a Saturday morning slot. He had a skit where he tried to build sports teams from the old Saturday morning cartoons. The kangaroo from the Sylvester and tweety show was the kicker. The grown up Bam-Bam was the tight end etc. He actually has a good sense of humor but now he just wants to put everyone down and proclaim his superiority and it got old quick.

QUOTE (chw42 @ May 7, 2014 -> 02:03 PM) The only problem is that Trout was better by a lot and it's not even close. Correct. But we knew that by watching each of the players, so the numbers really didn't help either way.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 7, 2014 -> 02:09 PM) How much run production an individual player is accountable for isn't that straight forward--that's why you need more complex understanding. Relying on RBIs or Runs is going to lead to all sorts of silly conclusions about how two different players compare with each other. An individual batter can't force the guys ahead of him or the guys behind him to get on base or get a hit, so it makes no sense to use metrics that heavily rely on things outside of the individual player's control. If I hit a triple every single time I'm at bat but there's never anybody on ahead of me and everyone strikes out behind me, I'm going to have 0 RBIs and 0 runs. If you're a GM looking to evaluate signing me to a contract extension for the next year, you'd be making a horrible decision by relying on either of those two stats. True as I stated earlier. However, this is the way the game is played. You MUST rely on other players in the lineup. Even the stats can't isolate everything. Your example is an extreme case that will not happen in a game. The more likely is that some of the players will strikeout and sometimes there will be people on base ahead of you. You cannot predict this or isolate it with any of the stats. So both of them have some predictive factor. So the advanced stats really didn't tell me much different. In the example someone used earlier where Phillips looked better than Trout, a GM would be stupid to offer Phillips more than Trout. However we knew that before the numbers anyway.