chw42

QUOTE (Felix @ Jan 10, 2011 -> 07:41 PM) I haven't posted in here in awhile, so I'll give it an update: 21.2 15.7 43.7% Absolutely absurd numbers. The 43.7% kind of sucks for a big man like him, although he does shoot some 3s.

It blows my mind how the Bulls can play down to the level of a team like the Pistons.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Jan 10, 2011 -> 06:09 PM) Then boot him to the 'pen as soon as Peavy comes back? I don't like that notion all that much. And I know this would be a nice problem to have, but what if he does fairly well as a starter initially? Doesn't really send a good message to send the kid to the 'pen, IMO. 6 man rotation. I don't think it'll hurt, especially since Peavy's a question mark at this point and Gavin usually ends up hurting himself come September. I think you have him start as the 5th guy in the rotation and then assess the situation when Peavy comes back. If the bullpen is doing well and the rotation is doing well, then do whatever you want with Sale. But if one of the areas needs help, you're gonna have to use him somewhere on the team. Because I think almost everybody in the organization is looking at this year, they probably have the future of Sale in the back of their minds, but it's not a first priority. The team winning this year is the first priority. If Sale was the team's first priority, he wouldn't have been brought up to pitch in the bullpen last season.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Jan 10, 2011 -> 06:03 PM) I want him to start in AAA. As a fan I'm not looking at just 2011. I want a cheap/productive Sale for the next 6 years. Those saying that the only thing that matters is 2011 are probably the same people that said they would never complain about a thing ever again in baseball life after we won the WS. And I think we all know by now that was a damn lie. If you're gonna start him off in the 'pen, keep him there. At least for this year. I do not want to see him dicked around all year. And they'll probably end up playing the Brandon McCarthy card anyway even if we did need an emergency starter. What's wrong with Sale starting the season as the 5th starter? I don't really care what Sale does this year, as long as he's on the team. The team needs him in 2011, they don't have the luxury to have him dominate AAA for a month or two.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Jan 10, 2011 -> 05:55 PM) Yeah, and Kinsler. He's turning into Nick Johnson. They have the depth to make up for possible injuries. Young could slot in for Kinsler. David Murphy can play a corner OF spot.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Jan 10, 2011 -> 05:49 PM) The Rangers are going to score them some runs. The possibility of a Young/Thome DH platoon looks real good to me.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 10, 2011 -> 05:24 PM) Are you sure? The Rangers already declined an option on him that would have been a small raise. Probably because they wanted to sign Beltre. I'm also confident Thome won't make more than what Vlad made last year.

QUOTE (JoeCoolMan24 @ Jan 10, 2011 -> 05:16 PM) 2 extremely good seasons? 2009, I would say was easily his best season as a reliever. Extremely good? Ehh, I'll accept that. His 2007 would be his 2nd best season, and I really don't think it was all that memorable. I would say it was a good year, but nothing I would consider "extremely good". 4.35 BB/9, 1.91 K/BB. His opponent AVG was really good, his WHIP was pretty good, and his k/9 was pretty good, but overall I would say it was nothing more than just a good year. His 2006 was pretty much average, and his 2008 was certainly below average. He put up a 2.8 WAR over 4 seasons in the bullpen. That's essentially 0.7 WAR per season. Bobby Jenks put up a WAR of double that last season, and a lot of people couldn't stand him. Again, I think CJ was a pretty decent reliever over his career, but him moving to the rotation did not create a big hole in their pen, even though he was coming off his best season in relief. Wilson was a 2 WAR reliever the year before the Rangers put him into the rotation. They did that because they could. They had the arms in the pen and their rotation was lacking a left handed starter.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 10, 2011 -> 03:45 PM) You know...Vlad is a fit for the Twinkies too. I don't think they have the money after the Pavano signing. Vlad isn't getting less than what he got last year.

Reds picked up Fred Lewis today for 900K. I would have liked to see him as a 4th OFer on the Sox.

QUOTE (Jenksy Cat @ Jan 10, 2011 -> 12:44 PM) So could you say he took his talents to south beach? As did Brent Morel, Dayan Viciedo, and all of camp Cora. God save us all.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Jan 10, 2011 -> 11:11 AM) My goodness. Reading Oney Guillen on twitter is like reading something from an idiotic 13 year old. His dad doesn't act that much older.

QUOTE (Quinarvy @ Jan 10, 2011 -> 03:27 AM) I love the move. Sports Champions is mad fun. NBA 2k11 is...confusing. Have yet to figure out how to play that with the move. Resident Evil 5 is fun with it if you have a gun controller. Have yet to try Tiger Woods with it. I really wish the Show had move controls for all hitting, not just HRD. HRD is also in 3D. 3D plus Move seems kinda cool.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 10, 2011 -> 10:13 AM) I figured it was a number of things, but I also figured that somewhere in there it was projecting worse years from a number of our starters, which I wouldn't buy, and you've confirmed that. When you consider that Danks and Floyd were 4+ WAR pitchers last year, I'm not sure I buy the projections either. But they're more or less base line projections, something that's safe. The three systems I used aren't the best. When ZiPS and Marcel come out, I think it'll be a little clearer.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Jan 10, 2011 -> 10:02 AM) I think we all kinda owe LeBron at least a semi-apology. The Cavs are 1-18 since December 2nd. They are f***ing awful. My goodness. I don't owe LeBron jack.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 10, 2011 -> 10:04 AM) Can you be more specific as to which spots we've downgraded @? The projection systems don't like any of the Sox starters. I think they're probably the most pessimistic projections I looked at. They thought all the starters were going to sport FIPs around 4. Which I find kind of unrealistic since Floyd has been around the 3.5 range the past two years. I can see it for Danks and Jackson, but those are probably the base projections. Danks had one bad year FIP-wise and that was 09. Jackson's probably going to end up in the high 3s. I can definitely agree with Buehrle's projection though. They also lose 1.5 WAR in Putz and replace him with Crain, who is at .7 WAR. Thornton's not projected to be a 2 WAR pitcher like he was last year. Jenks also had an uncharacteristically high WAR despite being bad. This is where bWAR and fWAR differ since one looks at FIP and the other looks at ERA. Also, you can add in a possible regression for Sergio Santos. It's not huge losses across the board, but these things add up.

bWAR is very different than FIP-based WAR. They don't use FIP, they use a method of taking ERA and adjusting it to the team's defense. That said, the White Sox rotation last season was 1st in fWAR, which uses FIP. The fact that the Sox pitch in a park with a 105 park factor for pitchers raises their value considerably. I've ran the entire projected Sox staff's CAIRO, Bill James, and Fan projections through this program I made. This is what came out. The program is not 100% accurate since there are so many dynamic variables in calculating WAR. But I find the error to be around .3 WAR at most. 20 WAR isn't bad, but it's a 5 WAR downgrade from last season.

This thread:

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 9, 2011 -> 10:48 PM) Hey, I'm not trying to rain on your parade. I hope we kick their ass too. But it seems to me you're trying to say we can just run the ball against them and we'll win. It's just not anywhere near that simple. If they run the ball well, of course they'll have a good chance to win. Then you'll have to lock it down in other areas too obviously. But offensively, if they can get enough pressure off of Cutler and make the Seahawks guess on defense, I think this offense will do their part. We've all seen what Jay Cutler can do when he is given time and that's what a good running game can give Cutler. I'm not saying I'm not even going to watch the game and just call it a win or anything. I'm just saying the Bears should have a really good chance to win against the Seahawks.

QUOTE (JPN366 @ Jan 9, 2011 -> 10:44 PM) Yeah, that's what got the Saints. They didn't run enough, Seattle was only rushing 3 and dropping everybody else into coverage. They really didn't have the weapons to run either. Ivory and Thomas going on IR really hurt them. Julius Jones and Reggie Bush aren't the best running backs around.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 9, 2011 -> 10:16 PM) I couldn't disagree more. What scheme change are you talking about? The realization that it helps your offensive line if you run the ball more? What I have seen is a pattern. When teams are able to slow down the Bears running game, the Bears get forced into 3rd and longs, and then the blitzes come, and Cutler panics. When the Bears are able to run the ball effectively, they keep 2nd and 3rd down manageable, the downs are not so clearly passing downs or passing plays that take a long time to develop, and our offense is able to function and sometimes even flourish, because they do have some talent. But I haven't seen a whole lot that shows that some major shift has been made in terms of a game plan or a philosophy, other than trying to commit to the running game more. We have seen the collapses as late as in the New England game and the game last week against the Packers. What happened to our scheme then? They ran the ball a lot less last week against Green Bay. I think the ratio was like 40 to 20 or something along those lines. Forte ran the ball very well too. I don't know what Martz was really trying to do. The key to the Bears' success on offense is definitely the running game. If you look at Forte's numbers since the bye, they look a lot better: Before bye: 90 attempts, 352 yards, 3.9 yards/attempt, 12.9 attempts/game. If you were to take away Forte's 22 rush 166 yard game against Carolina, he'd be averaging 2.7 yards per carry and 11 carries per game. That's absolutely atrocious. After bye: 147 attempts, 717 yards, 4.9 yards/attempt, 16.3 attempts/game. Forte only had one really bad game since the bye and that was against New England. The increase in Forte's effectiveness could be affected by a couple of things, but most notably, it could mean better run blocking and a healthier Forte (I haven't seen him run this well since his rookie year). Of course, it also doesn't hurt that he is getting the ball more every game. So if Seattle was actually good at stopping the run, which they are not, I'd be concerned. Right now, I'm feeling pretty good about next Sunday.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 9, 2011 -> 08:56 PM) But they were already shut down by this defense. How is it so easy to ignore that? And what about the Redskins? What was their defense ranked in EPA (Damn you for bringing advanced metrics to football now, you bastard! The Bears ran the ball 14 times that game. Having no rushing attack absolutely screwed that o-line because it made the offense so predictable. It's probably not going to be the same thing this time around. As for that Redskins the game, the Bears moved the ball decently. They just choked when they got into the red zone and Cutler got turnover-happy. Both of the games are before the scheme changes and I think it's pretty easy to see that the Bears from after that point are much different performance-wise.

QUOTE (Rowand44 @ Jan 9, 2011 -> 08:55 PM) Fangraphs does football too? I wish football was as easy to measure as baseball.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 9, 2011 -> 08:19 PM) I don't have an issue with any of that. But where have you been all season? Have you not seen the games where we can't protect the quarterback enough to barely keep him alive, yet alone execute an offense? I'm just not sure how anyone could be confident when it is evident in certain games after about 6 plays that the Bears are going to be absolutely incapable of scoring or running a decent offense. I've seen them all. If they were going up against a better defense, I would be concerned. But this is a Seahawks team that was 26th in defensive EPA (expected points added). They're 27th in defensive passing EPA and 20th in defensive running EPA. If you look at the traditional yards/game stats, you'll get similar results. I'm not all that concerned that they might overwhelm our crappy o-line. Because they haven't really overwhelmed anyone all season.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 9, 2011 -> 08:08 PM) I agree. I'm sort of surprised by the arrogance shown in general by Bears fans over this matchup. First of all, the Seahawks already came in to Soldier Field once and beat the Bears. The Bears scored a td on their opening drive, and returned a punt for a td at the end of the game, but the other 52 minutes of the game was dominated by the Seahawks, 23-6. Secondly, the Bears, because of their offensive line woes, are capable of being rendered just about the worst team in the NFL at any given time. We've seen this happen against the Giants, the Redskins, the Patriots and the Packers. You never really can be sure which team is going to show up on any given day. Any team can lose to any other team in the NFL on any given day, but I don't know if I have ever seen a team with such a huge range of potential performance as this Bears team. They can look absolutely putrid one game and fairly incredible the next. I don't know about you guys, but I am always afraid that the putrid Bears are going to show up. Finally, I've seen some people argue that this is "a different Bears team" now than the one that the Seahawks beat back on October 17. Well, maybe it is. But maybe this is a different Seahawks team than the one that struggled late in the regular season? Maybe this is more like the team that started off the year 4-2 with quality wins over the Bears and the Chargers... I'm not saying the Bears shouldn't be favored, because they will be, my guess is by 6 points or so, but this is no easy game. This is no just show up and win. Depending on which Bears team comes to play Sunday, I wouldn't even be shocked if the Seahawks beat the Bears handily. I don't want it to happen, and the Bears might expose the Seahawks and make it a bit of a laugher, but that's exactly it, the range of possibilities is huge any time this Bears team steps on the field. That doesn't exactly make me brimming with confidence. Bears played that game in Week 6 without Briggs. You can say the Bears have changed and you can also say how the Seahawks have changed since winning that last game of the season. The Bears are different now due to scheme changes. The talent is more or less the same. The Seahawks are more or less playing out of their minds and have had the luxury of home field advantage. And let's just say it's some of the best home field advantage in all of football. At some point, talent will trump momentum or motivation and I'd say it's pretty safe to say the Bears are the more talented team. But it's the NFL, so who knows?