chw42

7 strikeouts for Kyle Davies? WTF? I know it's cold, I know it's early, but god damn. Have you guys forgot how to swing a damn bat? Damn it Konerko...almost.

These guys forgot how to hit. Ozzie should go on a rant, lol.

Fields is crouching a little more and his legs must be farther apart, that's the only thing I noticed. It looks more like Quentin's, but it's not there yet. I swear, I thought I was watching Jeff Bagwell for a second when I saw Fields up there yesterday.

QUOTE (Princess Dye @ Apr 8, 2009 -> 06:31 PM) Currently listening to Chris Rongey on radio and watching Dan Roan on TV..... lock thread if i'm wrong on this, but isnt it true that they're both Cub fans? sure CPS is underfunded on the southside but c'mon ! Rongey is a Cardinals fan... He'd be the last person to like the Cubs lol. Don't know about Roan though.

Yeah, maybe next year. He'll enjoy 2009 in jail or at home.

QUOTE (rangercal @ Apr 7, 2009 -> 08:27 PM) Walt Frazier's pick for Rookie of The Year is OJ Mayo His reason is because mayo is a better shooter than Rose. Maybe so, but I will still take Rose's 47.1 fg % over Mayo's 43.4 fg% (even though I know this is due to better shot selection and drives to the hoop rather than high volume 3pt shots Mayo takes) Mayo is a slightly taller Ben Gordon. I'm calling it right now. He can't do anything but chuck up shots. He makes a lot of them, but he's a one dimensional player.

QUOTE (RibbieRubarb @ Apr 8, 2009 -> 03:16 PM) 1984 Everyone made it but the Sox I don't think it has ever happened with all five teams because last year was the first time in a long time the Sox and Cubs made it in the same year. Someone want to do more research? In 2005, the Bulls, Bears, and Sox all made it. The Blackhawks didn't even play and Cubs did not. That was the closest year that it's happened in my lifetime.

QUOTE (DABearSoX @ Apr 7, 2009 -> 03:55 PM) you went to a movie on Sox opening day??? for shame The people I went with didn't care for me or the Sox and I really wanted to see Fast & Furious. I wasn't going to get another chance this week either...so there was no other option. I was seriously hoping that the theaters would have wifi and let me see the score through my iPod touch. Didn't happen. Oh well.

Getz is the future leadoff hitter. BA should be batting 9th come the middle of the month. I have nothing against Wise, but he's just not real good.

I was at the movies, but I saw some highlights. Thome came up huge. It was off of Farnsworthless too...lol.

I'm assuming that he'll wear a Bulls jersey, and wear a Sox cap at the same time... OMG dude, this is way too late for April Fools. When I saw the Yahoo sign, I thought this was for real.

C.C. gave me -17 points for my fantasy league... I have -1 total points right now... He better pitch a no hitter his next start.

I bought the $9.99 iPhone app. I get Gameday audio and video highlights. Good deal IMO.

QUOTE (kyyle23 @ Apr 5, 2009 -> 11:03 AM) And with Wrestlemania tonite, i am totally watching for Contreras to go heel and take out HHH Heh, his heel healed fast. So confusing. xD

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Apr 4, 2009 -> 07:14 PM) How is this man not considered an enemy on the North Side yet? The average Cubs fan is screaming, "trade him!!!" What a bunch of idiots. They also wanted to trade Derek Lee last year after he agreed with what Obama said about Wrigley. They just can't face facts...

This is comical... Konerko's going to be missing a couple of home runs at the end of the year because of this.

QUOTE (4 points @ Apr 4, 2009 -> 04:25 AM) While I enjoy the Sox love, Werth at 23, and Votto at 30, make this list laughable at best. Gotta agree there. I don't think Werth is going to be anymore than what he was last year. Votto on the other hand, should provide 30-100 type numbers with a very good average.

He was nasty out there today. Cubans heel fast, it's a fact.

WTF happened to Vince Carter? He looked like he was about 90 out there today.

QUOTE (knightni @ Apr 3, 2009 -> 07:52 PM) http://ballhype.com/story/lindsay_lohan_th...n_is_super_hot/ I remember this, lol.

Charlotte loses to Miami. Bulls now with a 2 game lead again. They better come out fighting against New Jersey. These past two games have been atrocious. Please come back John Salmons. The team just sucks without you.

Let's see what he can do with actual receivers.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Apr 3, 2009 -> 11:19 AM) ASK TORII HUNTER where he ranks among the best defensive centerfielders, and he appears perplexed. "You mean, where I rank with guys now, or in history?" he says. The Angels' Hunter takes his defense as seriously as you'd expect from someone who says, "To catch a ball, I'd commit suicide." And to most of the baseball world, for that matter, it's conventional wisdom that he's one of the best fielders, period. Try to prod Hunter into naming another American League centerfielder in his class defensively, and he just shakes his head. The Indians' Grady Sizemore, perhaps? "Nah," Hunter says. "He's got some work to do. He takes bad jumps." The Tigers' Curtis Granderson? "He's up there, but he has to learn to take better routes," Hunter says. "You shouldn't dive as much as Grandy dives." Hunter's replacement in Minnesota last season, Carlos Gomez? "Dude is quick, but he also goes from points A to B to C to D when he should be going A to B," says Hunter. "And he's too aggressive with his throwing. Just look at his errors. [Gomez had eight.] I had none. Zero." He flashes a smile and shrugs. Case closed, as far as he's concerned. And few would disagree. Certainly not the managers and coaches who last fall voted him to an eighth straight Gold Glove award. (Only five outfielders in history have won more.) Certainly not the Angels, who last winter lured him off the free-agent market with a $90 million contract, as much for his defensive reputation as his bat. And certainly not the fans, players, scouts and other baseball cognoscenti who favor traditional fielding statistics—errors, fielding percentage (Hunter's was a perfect 1.000) and putouts (his 350 were fifth among AL outfielders)—and watch the familiar sight of the 33-year-old gliding gracefully over the grass and, on occasion, scaling the outfield wall to rob a batter of a home run. To the eye, there is nothing to indicate that Hunter is anything but what he thinks he is: an elite centerfielder, the best in the American League, possibly one of the best ever to play the position. But here's a flash for Hunter: Comparing players' defensive skills is no longer as scientific as sizing up Best Supporting Actress performances before the Oscars. In his first Bill James Abstract, in 1977, the oracle of statistical analysis lamented the inability to quantify defensive success with anything other than such antiquated statistics as errors and fielding percentage. It has taken three decades, but the mystery of defensive analysis, perhaps the last frontier in the statistical ether, has been cracked by sabermetricians who have devoted 15, 20 years to the cause. The clunkily named metrics that have emerged within the last five years may sound like topics at a symposium for mechanical engineers—Probablistic Model of Range, Defensive Regression Analysis, Special Aggregate Fielding Evaluation, Ultimate Zone Rating—but not only have they become accepted by analysts like James as accurate tools, they have also infiltrated the daily vernacular of front offices. But major league clubhouses? Not so much. "The Probablistic Model of who?" asks Hunter, after he's told where he stands by measure of the metrics. Not only does he rate below Sizemore, below Granderson and below Gomez, Hunter was also regarded across the board as a merely average fielder, and in many instances, below average—which is the case according to Bill James's disciple John Dewan, author of The Fielding Bible and creator of the Plus/Minus Runs Saved metric, which six years ago did rank Hunter as the league's top centerfielder. Now Dewan's numbers show that Hunter has been steadily slowing down, and that last season he made plays on five fewer balls than an average centerfielder would be expected to make, costing the Angels four runs. The best defensive centerfielder in the AL? Dewan's calculations says it's Gomez, who tracked down 14 more balls than the average centerfielder and saved Hunter's old team 16 runs. "If I've lost a step, I'm still better than the average person," Hunter huffs. "When I need a walker, I'll go to rightfield and be the best rightfielder in the game." In addition to telling us that Hunter is an average defensive outfielder, the metrics also suggest that the Yankees should relocate Derek Jeter, long rated by the metrics as the worst-fielding shortstop in baseball, to the outfield and that the Cubs' Alfonso Soriano, because of his strong arm, has saved more runs than any other leftfielder since moving from second base in 2006. In a poststeroid era, when scoring and home run totals have fallen as fast as the NASDAQ and speed and defense are becoming as important and as appreciated as they were during the Whiteyball days in St. Louis two decades ago, these metrics are becoming essential tools for winning organizations. "There are still teams stuck in the Dark Ages," says one American League general manager, "but the secret's getting out. Defensive metrics have almost caught up to the offensive side. Some people would say they didn't think they'd see this day. But the revolution's here." IN 1982 John Dewan was an actuary living in Chicago when a coworker handed him a copy of the Bill James Abstract. Dewan, a die-hard White Sox fan who grew up playing the baseball simulation board game Strat-O-Matic, was instantly hooked. Two years later he was sitting at his kitchen table reading one of James's articles about creating an organization of volunteers who would record detailed play-by-play information not found in the box scores of every major league game. "I put the book down, and I went to the phone and called directory assistance in Lawrence, Kansas," says Dewan. "I got Bill James's assistant on the line and signed up immediately." Dewan became the director of the organization, Project Scoresheet, a year later while continuing to hold down his day job. Soon after quitting his actuary job in '87 to devote himself full-time to statistical analysis, he invented a metric called Zone Rating, in which he took play-by-play data and calculated the percentage of balls fielded by a player in his defensive zone, as well as balls outside of his zone. (By these metrics, Jeter always ranks among the lowest shortstops because he doesn't get to many balls outside a shortstop's zone.) Ten years later companies such as STATS Inc. and Baseball Info Solutions (which Dewan cofounded in 2002 with Steve Moyer) began hiring armies of new college grads who collectively would watch every game and keep a detailed log of what happened to every batted ball: what kind of pitch was hit, where the ball was hit, how hard it was hit, who fielded it and how it was or wasn't turned into an out. THE DATA has given Dewan and other analysts the power to compute, with great precision, a player's ability to turn batted balls into outs. In 2003, in a forum on the website Baseball Think Factory, a professional poker player living in Las Vegas named Michtel Licthman introduced, in a 6,800-word primer, a metric that he called Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR). Lichtman was crunching numbers with data he purchased from STATS Inc.—paying nearly $10,000 for it annually—and, like Dewan, was measuring the runs saved or lost by every fielder compared to the league average at his position. His UZR model was similar to the plus/minus system that Dewan had come up with, but with more parameters for each batted ball; among them, the ballpark, whether the pitcher and batter were left- or righthanded, and the ground ball and fly ball tendencies of the pitcher. Gradually baseball people outside the sabermetrics community began to take notice. During spring training in '04, Dewan was giving a presentation to the White Sox' front office in the team cafeteria when manager Ozzie Guillen and his players wandered in to have lunch, their game that day having been rained out. Dewan noticed that Guillen would occasionally glance over at the presentation. Eventually he walked up to Dewan and started flipping through his statistical samples. "If they had this s--- when I was playing," the manager announced to the room, "I would have been the best f------ shortstop who ever lived." http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vau...911/1/index.htm (for link to complete article) I like plus/minus a lot, but Soriano saving the Cubs runs? Don't know about that. I've always seen Hunter as a great outfielder and it really surprises me that plus/minus only rates him as an average one. Thing is, plus/minus is completely based off of opinion. Not horribly bad opinions, but it's still an opinion. It's almost in the same league with errors, but a lot more unbiased. In other words, it's not perfect. BTW, the Ozzie Guillen quote was hilarious.

QUOTE (Controlled Chaos @ Apr 3, 2009 -> 01:27 PM) Has anyone heard this? I saw somebody post something that they hope the Sox make up their minds on when they're going to have it Mon or Tues? I can't find any info anywhere, so I'm guessing there isn't much to it, but wanted to check with the peeps here in the know. It's snowing on Monday and Tuesday according to weather.com. Yuck.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Apr 2, 2009 -> 07:13 PM) Not when Marshall's in jail!!! Good point