Balta1701

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 21, 2015 -> 03:18 PM) Rodon might be the one guy who could bring a higher return than Sale simply because of control and contract situation. Even if not, his price is nearly impossible to meet unless you are starting with a Kris Bryant or Carlos Correratype of player. Rodon would not bring a higher return than Sale until he establishes he's a dominant starter right now. If he puts up an ERA of 2.75 next year, then we can talk. Until then he's still a work in progress with dominant stuff.

QUOTE (OmarComing25 @ Aug 21, 2015 -> 12:22 PM) I think they should be given roughly equal weight, with maybe a slight advantage to ERA. I've seen way too many "earned unearned runs" given up by Sox pitching this year that I just can't give ERA significantly more weight. Although the White Sox defense is particularly bad, if we're comparing Sale's numbers to Sonny Gray or Keuchel, the A's aren't exactly knwon for having a good defense and Houston isn't all that spectacular either. Fangraphs has the White Sox defense 30th, the A's 29th, and Houston 19th.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Aug 21, 2015 -> 11:52 AM) I will say one thing...Jose Abreu is a really bad defensive 1B. He has zero mobility and is just not good with the glove. I hope LaRoche has a nice off-season and comes back much closer to the guy he was for the past few years vs. the guy he was this year. What are his splits playing the field vs. dhing? .740 OPS as a 1b, .585 as a DH, but I think that reflects much more the fact that his games at 1b are heavily weighted towards games that have RH starters on the mound & where they're comfortable giving Jose the day off.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 21, 2015 -> 11:43 AM) It will be interesting. This winter has a lot of potential routes it could go. Do the White Sox believe in Erik Johnson enough to open up a spot for him? Would they go after another starting pitcher? If Samardjiza doesn't resign, then you have two holes to fill with a Quintana trade... then what? I still would be surprised if Fulmer did not make an appearance for at least part of the season next year given how this team moves their pitchers. That could fill a role partially...however I also am looking slightly longer term and although John Danks is an adequate #4/5 starter right now, Fulmer remains to me an ideal player to replace Danks even in the middle of the season next year. So if you're looking at trading Q, I think you also look farther down line and think of having 3 slots you need to fill. Montas could help with that by mid-season next year or 2017 as well, but a lesson from Rodon this year should be that even if guys are ready for the big leagues we need to expect them to struggle somewhat. So if we're going to work in these guys and trade someone like Q who is more established, we're setting ourselves up to struggle for a time while they adapt to the league.

QUOTE (OmarComing25 @ Aug 21, 2015 -> 11:07 AM) So just take the average of the two WAR numbers? I think that's probably the best way to give credit to what "should" have happened (FG) and what "actually" happened (BR). If that were the case I'd think that the data I looked at yesterday would look different. Instead there are some teams where this is a big deal and some teams where it's not a big deal at all.

I couldn't get past Carlos Quintana.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 09:58 PM) https://www.yahoo.com/parenting/i-hurt-my-d...7173047597.html Balta +1 NRA 0 Point 1. Please do not count a 2 year old shooting their parent as a "win" for me. Point 2. This kind of s*** happens all the time. Please don't try to link to every one of them. If you'd like to see a compilation of ones that appear in press reports there's a guy who has been posting them since the CT murders.

If you apply the "Stand your ground" standard, where a "reasonable person could feel threatened", I think you come to the opposite conclusion. They've already demonstrated a willingness to commit a crime, even if they're running away you could judge them to be a threat and it is not required that you retreat from that confrontation.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 04:39 PM) Of course I do. But I realize it's not going to ever happen. Then you never have the right to say "Your value of yourself is inflated." to anyone and mean it in a negative context as you just did with Kenny Williams.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 01:46 PM) Sorry, that was supposed to say 7:05 PDT. Done

QUOTE (bmags @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 12:55 PM) They have a sweet counterfeit trade with China. And they keep their little deals with China going because China knows the U.S. will continue focusing on the North Korean issue as long as the U.S. and the North have their issues. They can then use the U.S. interest in the North Korean issue to extract concessions from the U.S. in other ways - allowing China to keep their currency undervalued for example. Everyone knows that, so "crippling trade sanctions" again means you're basically willing to start a trade war with China over the issue. Ditto any obvious "assassination" campaign.

Jose Quintana was pictured rising over the Mexican volcano Popocatepetel earlier this week.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 12:43 PM) Not talking isn't exactly a hard line. I totally agree though, Bush didn't do enough. I would have enacted crippling sanctions and ok'd some assassination attempts. Because North Korea's economy is strong and heavily involved in international trade? GMAB. They trade a bit of money with China for electricity and then receive food aid to keep their people from starving.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 11:40 AM) There doesn't appear to be any editor's notes indicating that the story has been changed, either. Quality work. Here's before/after screengrabs. Note how the part I keep calling "vague" is the part that is actually now missing and was one of the parts I highlighted a few posts ago.

QUOTE (bmags @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 11:35 AM) It's vague because they scrubbed the older paragraphs, they said Iran did not have to provide photos and that IAEA would not be present during the sampling, except the final agreement will have the IAEA there on the ground while Iran gets the samples. Luckily, to assume more space, they have added four introductory paragraphs of politicians denouncing the revelations they have since removed. LOL, so they got challenged strongly on the accuracy of claims that would actually have been problematic if they were true. At least that explains why the version in my paper this morning was unreadable.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 11:05 AM) But you're still relying on Iran to provide the IAEA with samples, right? The IAEA can't collect them themselves, which is sort of the point when you have an independent agency. This is all still based on trust of Iran to tell the world the truth, which is the whole moronic thing about this deal. It's slightly better than having no idea what they're doing, except now we've lifted economic sanctions, which could potentially ramp up their efforts rather than stop it. yes, you're relying on Iran to collect them, but that's why the video and photography equipment come in. It's not independent collection, it would be collection with verification of appropriate collection, with no "trust" involved. If you don't personally collect the samples but you can verify the locations and conditions the samples are collected under and verify the chain of custody by observing that the appropriate sites are sampled after initial measurements, the seals on the samples are closed on video, and then the sampels are returned to the IAEA in a short time period with no damage to the seal, then you've got what you need to conduct an appropriate investigation of the site for nuclear material. That doesn't involve trusting Iran as I've outlined it here. Again, since the AP article was so vague I can't say with 100% certainty there is no loophole in there, but this seems like an entirely logical setup that an international organization would arrange in order to get access to secured military facilities for nuclear inspection. No country would want foreign observers on military sites so some procedure would need to be prepared to allow the necessary monitoring and sampling of those sites in order to make any agreement possible.

QUOTE (GoSox05 @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 11:17 AM) Jimmy Carter says cancer has spread to his brain (Dislike).

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 11:10 AM) You used entire team pitching stats. I was looking at starters stats since the OP was specifically talking about starting rotations. Ah, thanks.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 10:36 AM) Yes he would, assuming the White SOx are willing to offer the QO. To add a detail - the official MLB Bargaining Agreement document mentions nothing whatsoever about rules for a QO applied in multiple seasons, I checked this a couple days ago. Since it isn't explicitly prohibited the White Sox would therefore be able to offer the QO - it would be the equivalent of offering a QO to a player on a 1 year contract.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 10:47 AM) Great, so again this deal has less teeth than we were told. Iran gets a loophole on inspections. If the whole point here was to lift sanctions in exchange for full disclosure and an end to their nuclear ambitions, we didn't really get that if they're able to set up these exceptions. What's to stop Iran from basically telling the IAEA "no, uh, that building over there is for, uh, other military equipment. You can't go in there. Our inspectors have checked it though and they say it's totally fine! Nothing to see here, move along." Because if they want to initiate this procedure the inspectors still seemingly have the right to demand samples from the site. Nothing in the AP's article implies that isn't the case and it certainly doesn't say so in clear text. The AP article suggests that there is a process required for those type of inspections where site personnel would receive instructions and the IAEA would still be able to get what it needs with fairly small delays. Again, since the AP text is so vague I can't say for 100% certain that there is not some other detail buried in there, but limited access to military sites is something that every country is going to demand if they want to keep their conventional arms capabilities from being inspected and the IAEA has to develop procedures that work in those cases. The IAEA's job is not to inspect conventional arms except to the degree they are built as triggers for nuclear development. The IAEA needs to have procedures that make these type of inspections of military facilities workable and that seems to me to be the likeliest explanation for this set of clauses.

I took a swipe at these numbers this morning just to see if there was some additional insight that could be gained. I compiled the WAR stats for pitchers from Baseball-Reference to compare to fangraphs. B-R seems to me to underweight things like strikeouts in favor of overweighting what actually happens on the field whereas I've always felt that Fangraphs underestimates some things happening on the field in favor of value for pitching a lot of innings and piling up strikeouts - Fangraphs to me might underestimate the skill of creating weak contact or keeping the ball where your fielders are playing while B-R may overestimate it. It's a little hard to make a direct comparison because I had to use "wins above average" for B-R since that's what's in the table. However, there are some consistencies - the 2 datasets are strongly correlated with an R^2 of 0.69 (statistics, ignore if you don't care). the same teams are on top and on the bottom in both. However, there is a group of teams - the Padres, Tigers, Reds, Marlins, and White Sox - all of whom are significantly worse on the B-R numbers than they are on the FG numbers, enough to constitute a notable trend. The White Sox have the largest separation in baseball between their B-R numbers and their FG numbers - Fangraphs thinks they're very good, B-R thinks they're mediocre. These teams have in common that they're generally not that good, but I have a tough time making a case that this separation is all due to the teams having a crappy defense. In fact, fangraphs's defense stats find 3 of those 5 teams to be in the upper half of the league, only the White Sox and Padres are thought to have generally poor defenses. There also is basically no correlation between being in this group of teams and having a high babip - the White Sox have one of the worst babip's in the game as noted above and the Tigers are weak on that also, but the Padres are about the middle of the league and the other 2 teams are above average. I basically can't find any single metric where these teams notably stand out or group together in the rankings for their pitching staffs except for the fact that they're all pretty lousy ballclubs. The White Sox, for example, don't have a notably bad ground ball rate per the team stats, they're 11th out of 30 teams. They don't have particularly bad HR/FB rates, they don't generally cluster with low rates of leaving people on base. Also to note - HH, I'm not sure where you're seeing those numbers, but under Fangraphs - team stats - pitching - I see the Sox ranking very different from what you just posted. I don't think this is a case of it being clear-cut the White Sox poor defense, I think there's something systematic in the way these 2 different metrics calculate wins that is separating these teams out. Finding out what that is might actually be an interesting exercise because of the fact that the teams standing out are all out of the pennant races in their respective leagues - if you want to be competitive you don't want to be in this group. If anyone has any ideas for other things I could look at to try to see where this group might separate itself out, I'd love suggestions, I'm out of ideas.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 10:09 AM) What's the point of being able to select your own inspectors if the IAEA is still going to perform inspections? To keep the IAEA inspectors physically out of rooms used for military weapons development/production. Their job is to verify the absence of enriched nuclear material that violates the limits usable for nuclear weapons production - that's it. Iran has the right to develop conventional weapons and even to mount those things to missiles - if they don't want IAEA inspectors seeing parts of things like their air defense systems, that's an entirely reasonable thing for them in that region. What the IAEA needs most is samples collected appropriately to send through detection equipment. If they get that from these sites, they've got a very important verification tool. The trick is to make sure that there's some monitoring capability that verifies that the samples are appropriately collected from the sites of interest - hence the video and photograph requirements. Measurements taken in the facility to indicate the presence or absence of radioactive material combined with monitoring of those measurements and sampling of sites to verify that the monitoring happened appropriately should be able to do the job. Now of course it's possible there is some additional cover-up in this section, but from the AP's description there's no obvious reason to think that the IAEA would be unable to do their job.

So, the AP article on this issue is actually surprisingly vague and weak on details. Let me give a few direct example quotes: None of these details appear all that different from procedures the IAEA has previously used during inspection of military facilities in the past. Note for example that the AP version does not state that the IAEA will be barred from the sites, it sets up a procedure for military situations where the IAEA is present and conducts a sampling and monitoring using cleared Iranian personnel. The AP article gives basically no details about the actual details of the inspection other than "photos and videos are required" but they don't say what those photos and videos are needed to document. Based on a bit of reading, my guess is the most likely thing they'd want to document is the sampling process. According to the non-profit Arms Control Association the IAEA has established procedures for obtaining appropriate samples from such sites. Given appropriately documented samples collected using standardized procedures, the ability of Iran to cover up enrichment work would remain effectively zero.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 09:09 AM) They already fill the place. If anything, your theory should work better for the White Sox since they have more available seats. The White Sox are in the same boat with TV renewals. Why is spending money to try to win wrong for them if making a WC is worth $155 million? Everything you claimed how the Cubs would benefit applies to the other side of town, yet doom and gloom, doom and gloom, don't spend any money ever. ? Their attendance last year was 32,000/game, this year it's ~35,000, their playoff years it was >40,000. For the White Sox, spending money to get into the playoffs would be a fine and successful plan and one I'd support. There is one small problem with the spending of money the White Sox did this year in execution of that plan.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Aug 20, 2015 -> 08:56 AM) The Cubs may have money, but that doesnt mean that they can afford to throw around 150 million dollar contracts willy nilly and shrug and walk away if it didnt work out. The last contract that they had like that ended horribly for them(Soriano), even with the immediate playoff return. And it ushered in a new front office because of how badly the money was handled throughout that regime. I generally disagree with the statement that the soriano contract did not work out for them despite the way it ended. The Soriano contract worked out perfectly for the management regime, as did their other big deals. Those big deals were signed by the Tribune Company at a time when they wanted to sell the team. Those big deals got them into the playoffs and maximized the revenue coming in by selling out the ballpark. Those high revenue numbers helped produce buyers who bought into that ongoing revenue stream and made the Tribune Company a lot of money. The previous management regime was under instructions to get them into the playoffs at all cost so that the team could be easily sold. It damaged the franchise in the near-term after the sale was complete, no quesiton about it, but they've been able to pull off a fairly rapid reconstruction all things considered.