chw42

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 03:48 PM) Many times on the waiver list the best players in baseball pass through unclaimed because teams know there is no point in claiming them. They will be pulled back and the team will have wasted a claim. Instead they claim players they might be interested in acquiring or they claim players to try to block other teams from them. There is literally no point in making a waiver claim on Mike Trout, for example. Now before someone throws a hissy fit, I am not saying this is the case for Adam Dunn, but it goes to the example of not being claimed meaning that no one wants you. From an actually honest perspective, I don't think any team in their right mind would want to claim Dunn for $15 million a year for the next two years. The guy's starting to get to the age where big sluggers decline (just go look at Prince Fielder. If Greg and company think Dunn is an overpaid bum, wait a year or two for Fielder to turn into a even worse hitter) and he hasn't exactly been consistent the past three years. Plus, he's a 1B/DH (a bad 1B at that), so he pretty much holds little to no value in the NL. Add on the fact that there's a good amount of productive bats at 1B and DH already and he's not much of a commodity in the AL either. Would teams take Dunn's bat for $10 million and one year? Probably. Two years and $30 million? Probably not. But that's just the price you pay when you go out and sign a big free agent (which Dunn was in 2011). You have to expect decline towards the end of the deal if you're signing a guy who's over 30. Just imagine the Gregs and jerksticks who are Angels fans or Tigers fans. They'll be saying the same things about Fielder and Pujols in the near future (if they haven't already).

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 03:46 PM) That is interesting however. What if he stayed healthy and did reach 3,000? You should take a look at his statline this year, it'll tell you everything you need to know.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 03:42 PM) One of those 2 is very unlikely to go to the hall of fame. Yeah, but he also has > 600 home runs. Remember when Bonds was near the end of his career and nobody was willing to offer him a contract despite the fact that he would have been one of the best offensive producers in baseball for like $10 million a year?

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 03:42 PM) only 800 away, lol Juan is ageless, he will easily get 200 hits per season for the next 4 years.

QUOTE (Jerksticks @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 03:29 PM) Dude. Greg's point is that it's unprecedented how a guy who might reach 600 home runs can't even be given away. 15 million dollars for 40 hrs and 100 RBIs. Bad ass "production" as many claim yet 29 other teams say hell no. How is that not unprecedented? Examples please. All bashing aside. Um... Alex Rodriguez and Albert Pujols will go unclaimed, easily.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 03:27 PM) Pierre doesnt have the distinction of being one of the elite in any category. This is all contingent on Dunn hitting 600 homeruns of course, which means he will have to play pretty well for the rest of his career. But he almost has 3000 hits!

QUOTE (farmteam @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 03:16 PM) 1st bolded: Everyone tries to throw a shutout. Some are better at holding onto leads than others, whether that means giving up 4 ER in 6 IP or 2 ER in 7IP. 2nd bolded: That's why I said over the course of a few years, not one year, and definitely not one game as you indicated. Would I rather have the guy who consistently 2ER in 7IP instead of the guy with 4ER in 6IP? Well duh. But if the latter guy, over the course of a few seasons, consistently gets wins throwing like that, I'm going to give him a bit of credit for at the end of the day getting the W. That still doesn't make any sense. I mean if he was winning those games where he drove in 5 runs during every start, then sure. But that would mean he's a better hitter than pitcher. But the point remains. Run support should not decide a pitcher's value. The entire point of advanced metrics is to take away dependent variables like run support and focus on the independent variables, i.e., things the pitcher can control. If you were to switch the teams your two example players pitched on, giving them opposite run support (where the guy who throws 7 IP and gives up 2 ER gets good run support and the guy who gives up 4 ER in 6 IP gets crappy run support), would you give the latter guy the benefit of the doubt when he loses 15 games? I have an idea of what you are trying to say. That being able to hold a lead and pitch to the situation is valuable. But it's certainly not valuable enough to determine a pitcher's value when something like that is also not totally up to the pitcher.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 03:20 PM) BECAUSE ONLY 8 PEOPLE IN THE HISTORY OF THE GAME HAVE HIT THAT MANY HOMERUNS WHY IS THAT SO HARD FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND?!?!?! You know who should be in the HOF? Juan Pierre.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 02:20 PM) Our fans have been very forgiving. Have you looked at the Sox record? These guys are sleepwalking through a miserable season. There's not been a lot of booing at the Cell. Comments on here have given so many players the benefit of the doubt. Yeah Greg, let's boo everyone. BOOOOOOOOOOOO. That'll surely help. Nobody's happy the team sucks this year. But when a season is lost, it's lost.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 02:11 PM) Dempster suspended for 5 games He had a personal vendetta against A-Rod. If you're gonna hit somebody, hit him on the first pitch. Don't go throw 3 pitches behind him and then hit him on 3-0.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 12:38 PM) Gabe Kapler on his career and the steroid era. This is an excellent read. http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article....articleid=21574 I seriously thought Kapler was on roids. But this article definitely tells me otherwise.

QUOTE (pettie4sox @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 12:49 PM) Loads of hindsight geniuses posting on this particular thread... ahem greg ahem jerksticks Had Dunn changed approach and sucked..."STUPID DUNN, WHY DID HE CHANGE? NOW HE'S NOT HITTING 40 HOME RUNS ANYMORE!" The funny thing is, despite hitting about 35 points better, Dunn's wRC+ is only 6% better than it was last year. SO MUCH CHANGE! He might be more consistent on a daily basis, but the overall production you get from him isn't all that different. Whatever pleases the meatballs, I guess.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 01:41 PM) So if a roster of 25 "replacement players" would be expected to win about 40 games, can one assume that each "replacement player" is worth about 1.6 wins to their team every full season? Pretty much.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 12:16 PM) None of that actually translates to some sort of actual win total that can be compared to what a pitcher actually has. FIP is used to calculate WAR, which is a win total. The calculation of pitching WAR is actually quite complicated and involves scaling the pitcher's FIP to his run environment.

QUOTE (Harry Chappas @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 12:50 PM) Wouldn't a team of all 0 WAR players hypothetically go 81-81. Everyone is completely average? A WAR of 0 means you are average not that you suck. The Median for this stat, not the average is 0. Thus if every player had a WAR of 0, they would be average in every aspect of the game. Throw a player of 10 WAR on this team and now they are at 86 wins. This was the early 2000's Red Sox with Pedro Martinez. A replacement player is not an average player.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 10:56 AM) It would be interesting to see if someone could come up with a way to isolate factors such as defense and run support while factoring in their own ERA and other pitcher numbers, to get some sort of an expected win total to see which pitchers "out-perform" their expected win totals. I think WAR pretty much tries to do just that.

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/players-vie...luate-pitchers/ This is a great article about the player's perspective on this issue. Notice how no one says that the most important metric to evaluate a pitcher is W-L. A few bring it up, but none of them say it is the most important. I think Glen Perkins' explanation is pretty good here.

I can also calculate batting average completely differently too if I wanted to.

QUOTE (TaylorStSox @ Aug 19, 2013 -> 04:35 PM) Starting pitcher WAR doesn't make sense to me. A true ace is going to guarantee anywhere from 10-15 wins even on a bad team. As a pitcher, you alone can't guarantee a win, especially in the AL. If your team doesn't score for you, you can't win.

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Aug 19, 2013 -> 02:20 PM) Yeah, Braun accused the drug test sample collector of being a Cubs fan. That's clearly crossing the line. He also accused the collector of being anti-Semitic.

After watching what happened last night, I actually felt kind of bad for A-Rod.

Fine, I'll join your stupid league.

QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Aug 18, 2013 -> 02:17 AM) Finished 76 videos before I headed off to school today. 5 more to go whenever I get back. That's $405 my dad owes me for this. At least I made SOMETHING this summer. $400 to rip DVDs? Where do I sign up?

QUOTE (TaylorStSox @ Aug 17, 2013 -> 05:16 PM) I save every 15 minutes if I'm doing anything productive. If you fall asleep and your computer updates while its in sleep mode, that's not the OS's fault. It's not like it just updated without warning and starting a countdown. It's more like blaming a car for running into a wall after you fell asleep at the wheel. The computer doesn't do anything you don't want it to do. Technically, it is. But it could also be that whatever program he was using screwed up during auto-recovery. Windows doesn't do auto-recovery the same way Mac does ATM, and I can't imagine how many resources that would use as you literally have to copy all the currently running program data in an efficient way, keep that on the HDD at all times, do an update every so many minutes (you can't predict when the computer will all of a sudden turn off and when the power cuts, you can't react fast enough to copy). Either way, Jake definitely should have saved at least once if the work was THAT important. I subconsciously press Ctrl + S every 10-15 minutes when I code or use MS Office. Or you could just use a cloud-based service like Google Docs or SkyDrive, those save periodically by default.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Aug 16, 2013 -> 02:22 PM) Danks has been quite bad and has made a lot of money, regardless of injury. You can't account for De Aza's mistakes because that introduces a sample bias because you are simply recollecting what he has done based off you memory. Alejandro De Aza has actually been one of the Sox best players. Danks has made at least 22 stupid mistakes this season.