StrangeSox

Cheerleading doesn't necessarily require making obviously ridiculous claims. That's just meatball homerism.

QUOTE (Jose Paniagua @ May 8, 2014 -> 04:06 PM) You can enjoy and be very embarrassed simultaneously. that he's your announcer those arent mutually exclusive this is where I'm at with him.

Bernstein likes Theo's approach. That doesn't make him a Cubs fan or mean that he isn't or can't be a White Sox fan.

It's not like the "human element" and how pressure affects people wouldn't show up in the stats, anyway. If someone pretty much always sucked in close-and-late situations, it could be measured. You can break down all of this stuff with all sorts of splits. It's just that at the MLB level, you really don't see too much variance in how a guy performs in 20-0 blowouts versus close-and-late, given enough sample size. If your performance always starts to decline when it matters most, you're probably not going to get called up anyway.

He was. Now what does the line predicting future performance look like from a data set of 1?

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ May 8, 2014 -> 10:13 AM) Soxtalk's opinion on John Danks "stuff"= whatever the radar gun says. If it says 88, he obviously has nothing even though he isn't being hit hard. what were you just told about sample size in that other thread

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ May 8, 2014 -> 09:48 AM) Can't you just take the Metra to downtown then walk a few blocks to the Red or Green Line? That's what I do coming from near O'Hare and it's pretty simple. Or just switch to the Rock Island Metra? Well yeah you can do that, but it's not exactly quick and convenient. Using google maps, if I wanted to leave from Downers some time after five for a weeknight game, the earliest I can get to the park is a little after 7 and that's with a couple of bus transfers. edit: this is a Chicago infrastructure problem and there's not really anything the Sox could do about it. They do have the Pace shuttles, but those all leave Bolingbrook at 4:15 or Burr Ridge at 4:45.

QUOTE (IlliniKrush @ May 8, 2014 -> 09:46 AM) Agreed. Plus, a lot of that south side area, you're not exactly pulling fans from it. The Cell is tough to get to, has a bad stigma around it, hardly anything to do near the park (comparatively) and the biggest thing that goes against it is that it's not on the north side. You have people on here that live in Downers that talk about how it's tough to get to the game with public transportation, and the alternative, driving, is awful. That applies for the vast majority of suburbs. For a sport with 81 games vs 41, and much more reliant on families, I think the suburbs would make a big difference. There's a Metra stop at 35th on the Rock Island line now, but that's only really good for the Joliet-New Lenox-Tinley area.

QUOTE (SnB @ May 8, 2014 -> 09:39 AM) I've been saying this for awhile. It's about time for the sox to concede the city/tourists to the Cubs and focus hard on families in the suburbs. They'd kill out there. It'd be an easier sell if you could take public transportation all the way from the suburbs to the 35th street red line stop.

My dad had it done 12-15 years ago. He does need reading glasses now that he's in his mid-late 50's, but so do my in-laws who had 20-20 vision their entire lives.

Stats teachers everywhere weep at that last post

QUOTE (ChrisLikesBaseball @ May 6, 2014 -> 10:07 AM) I had to leave my season ticket package, not because I couldn't afford the tickets, but because I couldn't afford the parking. At $18/game my parking was about 1/3 the cost of going to the games in seats I truly enjoyed (Upper Deck, Row 7, section 531 behind home plate). I considered finding a reasonable public-transportation method, but from Westmont/Downers Grove there isn't anything as convenient as driving. Food/bev is a little easier to manage once you figure out a plan to grill outside the stadium, but it's always tempting to grab something to eat on the inside. If parking were $10 every day.. Maybe $15, the amount of games I'd go to would increase significantly. Paying $10 a few Sundays ago hardly put a dent into what that game cost me.. That, added to not drinking and grilling Brats and eating chips outside the game made for a grand-total of $61 (girlfriend just HAD to have some ice cream, and I just HAD to have some peanuts inside) for two of us to go with seats in the lower bowl. $30 per person for a day/night out is a manageable expense in my book. Once you break $50, it becomes a luxury. The lack of convenient public transportation to the park from downers kills my motivation. I don't want to sit on 55 in traffic there and back, and then have to pay for parking.

QUOTE (ptatc @ May 7, 2014 -> 02:23 PM) Correct. But we knew that by watching each of the players, so the numbers really didn't help either way. Right, you don't exactly need a bunch of stats to see that Trout is better. It was brought up because it is so obvious that Trout is better and more valuable, but the crude RBI/runs stats don't indicate that at all. They're a very poor measure of talent/ability and a poor predictor of future individual performance. Advanced analysis isn't very important when comparing across big gaps in talent, but it is very important when comparing otherwise similar players or finding players who are undervalued by traditional/crude stats.

QUOTE (ptatc @ May 7, 2014 -> 02:19 PM) 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. 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.

Bringing up Monica Lewinski is definitely not old news in 2014.

Who knows, they may have published a correction or update on Page 17 or somewhere else buried in the paper a week or two later.

QUOTE (ptatc @ May 7, 2014 -> 01:54 PM) It doesn't need to be that complex. How many did the player account for. Why use other stats to predict it. Of course things like being on base will influence it but it's not as important as actually doing it. Instead of looking at how factors over 5 years predict it, look at 5 years of actually doing it. 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.

"Producing runs" is a hugely complex thing which a lot of these stats try to tease out, and crude metrics like RBI or runs don't really tell that accurate of a story. Being on base (put another way, not making an out) is a huge component of effectively producing runs. You're right that more advanced metrics were originally crafted by fans, but they were picked up by agents and then used by GMs because they give better and/or additional information. GMs wouldn't care a bit about some fancy nerd math numbers that Boras is using unless the GM (and his staff) felt that they were actually valuable. It'd be more accurate to say that they gained wider acceptance in baseball management because they allow teams to better understand the players and the game.

QUOTE (ptatc @ May 7, 2014 -> 12:48 PM) Correct. However, that is the game of baseball. You cannot control everything to win the game. So why make up a stat that doesn't use it. It came about so agents can get more money for their client because "he did what he could control" nothing else really matters. Because evaluating a team as a whole and a player as an individual are two very different things? Just like in any other field of research, you want to limit your variables as much as possible. It came about so smart GMs could better evaluate talent.

Why did abreu get taken out

Lol I'll take it

Why do these replays take so damn long

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ May 5, 2014 -> 02:02 PM) In short, Jose Abreu is awesome and everyone knows it

can we all chip in $5 to get it sponsored by soxtalk?