Balta1701

QUOTE (fathom @ Aug 24, 2011 -> 12:40 PM) That's the thing...for everyone that has said if the Sox make the postseason, they have the pitching staff to scare teams makes no sense then because if Scherzer is as good as our #2 (Danks), then sure seems like Tigers have a pitching advantage in postseason with a true ace going for them. And I would definitely say Vogelsong has been better than pretty good this year, so I guess I really don't get how WAR is calculate sometimes. Danks also missed a month. And hopefully if you somehow got to the playoffs, you get the 2nd half John Danks rather than the 0-7 first half John Danks. big difference.

QUOTE (fathom @ Aug 24, 2011 -> 12:36 PM) Isn't that pretty good? I guess, "pretty good" isn't a real compliment, so maybe. I wouldn't say John Danks has been "Pretty good" this year, I'd say he's been an average pitcher at best and a big disappointment for him.

QUOTE (fathom @ Aug 24, 2011 -> 12:28 PM) Same people who probably think Peavy is going to regain form and put up better numbers next year than Fister. Heck, people think Scherzer is this terrible pitcher when he's been pretty good this year also. Scherzer has put up 2.2 WAR this year. That puts him solidly in the class with guys like John Danks, Paul Maholm, Ryan Vogelsong, Jeff Francis, Bartolo Colon, etc.

QUOTE (fathom @ Aug 24, 2011 -> 12:23 PM) I know there's better relievers (I do love me some Kimbrel), but hard to argue with perfection No, it's not. If a guy is getting out of trouble all the time it's only a matter of time until he's snakebitten. You're smarter than this.

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Aug 24, 2011 -> 12:08 PM) There is no chance they move Vizquel. Exactly. Which means that they're either moving De Aza or Lillibridge. Lillibridge is playing 1b half the time now, if he goes down, then that means Adam Dunn is your full time 1b until Konerko can play the field every day. If you send down De Aza, then Lillibridge is your only backup OF. Edit: Maybe they'd DFA Kinney? But that makes our bullpen thinner and Humber isn't eligible to come back for another week.

Serious question...what roster spot does Thome get? It's been made abundantly clear that Dunn can't go on the DL if he's not hurt, and he can't go there right now anyway since we need someone to play 1b while Konerko is hobbled. Flowers and Lucy aren't going, that leaves Lillibridge, De Aza, and Vizquel. I guess I'd move Vizquel, but man, I'm not sure dumping any of those for a part time DH actually makes this a stronger roster.

QUOTE (Marty34 @ Aug 24, 2011 -> 09:25 AM) Thornton's a left-handed setup guy who will give you 60 IP. I'll take my chances with those 60 innings being pitched by Reed/Santiago. In exchange for saving a whopping $5 million, less than 4% of this team's total payroll?

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 23, 2011 -> 10:18 PM) I was moderately critical of Lexi recently and got fried on here. I wasn't impressed with his hitting and the sabes guys went nuts on me. And you defend Pierre too.

QUOTE (fathom @ Aug 23, 2011 -> 10:19 PM) And that's what I'm saying, any metric that shows he's an above-average defensive SS to me seems flawed. Now I'll wait until you praise captain Jetes and then head to bed. Dude gets to everything.

QUOTE (fathom @ Aug 23, 2011 -> 10:17 PM) Alexei's defense has been so overrated this year. Math disagrees.

poll of Iowa voters. huntsman is the only republican candidate unfavorable outside the margin or error. And they really dislike him.

QUOTE (High Mileage @ Aug 23, 2011 -> 09:31 PM) Bruce Chen dominating Toronto. 7 IP, 4 hits, 3 runs, 9 K, 0 walks. 82 pitches. Just wait, in 10 minutes their GM will grab a bat.

QUOTE (fathom @ Aug 23, 2011 -> 07:54 PM) Red Sox would give him more money than that. Teams also probably will overvalue him cause they think getting him in a hitter's park will benefit him. Yeah, when I think of teams that totally ignore advanced stats when evaluating a player, I think of...the Red Sox?

QUOTE (Soxy @ Aug 23, 2011 -> 06:31 PM) Single person. So, if they used a small enough sample size, this range of means wouldn't be totally unheard of simply by chance. If there's a small sample size though I'd have to figure that anything one could reasonably call "Error bars" would be smaller than the ones they present. But if the standard error on the test itself is 15, then it seems like it would require an overwhelmingly large sample to get the error bars that they've reported.

To make it a bit clearer what you're saying...when you say "the test itself has a 15 point standard deviation" does that mean that if a single person took the test n number of times, the final distribution of IQ numbers would be normally distributed with a 1σ value of 15?

QUOTE (Soxy @ Aug 23, 2011 -> 06:01 PM) Dude, those differences are like 2/3 of a standard deviation. In those measly 10 points you probably have around 50% of the population. What do those error bars represent? Your article fails the Soxy Peer Review. Rejected outright, please do not resubmit. The standard deviations presented in Figure 1 are on the order of ~1.0 points in IQ or less, while showing 10 points of spread, and the very liberal and very conservative groups are at least 5 error bars apart. Are you bringing outside info here or is there something in the article I'm missing suggesting that the actual error bars in that figure should be 5x larger than presented?

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Aug 23, 2011 -> 05:47 PM) If we can't produce a random lefty who can produce better than a 1.333 WHIP for a minimum salary, we're in trouble. I don't have the energy to go through every single appearance...it just seems that we're spending way too much as an aggregate on these guys like Ohman, Vizquel, Teahen, Pena and Castro. Heck, we paid Linebrink $3.5 million NOT to pitch for us. In the end, that's the difference between paying Paul Konerko or being able to go after someone like Adrian Gonzalez or Miguel Cabrera long-term. If we had a better minor league system, those overpay contracts for veterans wouldn't be necessary. I mean....I'm sure you could take one of DJ Carrasco's seasons with us and point to similar numbers of inherited runners scored and say he wasn't THAT bad, either. Ohman: $1.5 mil Castro: $1.2 mil Vizquel: $1.75 mil Pena: $1.6 mil Less than $6 million for those 4. Teahen and Linebrink...yeah, that's bad. These guys aren't making the difference here. Carrasco allowed 38% of inherited runners to score in 2008 and 45% in 2009.

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Jose Contreras to have exploratory elbow surgery, ending his season.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Aug 23, 2011 -> 05:30 PM) Someone earlier said it well. We're forcing ourselves to trade away "good" assets like Thornton or Ramirez because of the array of bad/terrible decisions all over the roster. Because we didn't have what is essentially a "3rd lefty/LOOGY" in our minor league system, KW reached for Ohman. All those $1.5 and $2.5 milllion contracts add up at this point. We'd be much better off as a team if we had kept Thornton and never signed Ohman in the first place. He has added about zero, because if you had nameless rookie down there (Santiago), Ozzie would have been tempted to use him with the Sox leading or tied in a game...or even 1-2 runs down. He's failed more often than not in those "close or tied or leading" appearances if you were go through every single appearance. Will Ohman is not part of the problem. This is silly. He'd have been easily tradeable at the deadline if we wanted to move him. His ERA is literally 1.2 runs higher because he gave up 3 runs each in his first 2 outings of the season. He's had 41 runners on base when he entered and allowed under 25% of them to score, which is actually a fairly good number. Opponents hit .188 against him "Close and Late" like you ask, .693 OPS.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Aug 23, 2011 -> 05:27 PM) What a mystery Johnson is. I actually love this move for the Blue Jays. Seriously, what happened to Aaron Hill too?

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QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Aug 23, 2011 -> 05:19 PM) You just can't trust Peavy or Humber at all, and Stewart's a wild card from appearance to appearance. You can say the exact same thing about 4 of the Tigers starting rotation though.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Aug 17, 2011 -> 10:19 AM) Cole Hamels will miss a start with shoulder inflammation. Supposedly MRI shows no structural damage but you never like hearing about shoulder issues with pitchers. And now Cole Hamels to the 15 day DL with this shoulder problem.

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