Mid-week news bonanza, feed reminder
First, a straight repeat reminder:
Come on out to sunny Peoria and meet two major league GMs March 3rd. Seattle Mariners GM Bill Bavasi and San Diego Padres GM Kevin Towers will talk and take questions from fans for a good 45 minutes, before seeing the two interleague rivals face off in a fierce spring training game at the Peoria Sports Complex. Afterwards, you can buy a signed copy of the newly updated, paperback version of Baseball Prospectus’ Baseball Between the Numbers
and chat with editor/co-author Jonah Keri or receive some kind of The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball promotional item from USSM author Derek Zumsteg. Game time is 1:05 p.m., and guests should plan to arrive NO LATER than 11:30 a.m. for pre-game festivities, to be held in the section where we’ll be sitting.
Cost is $21, which includes your ticket to the game and the money we have to pay TicketMaster to mail them to us so we can distribute them early.
RSVP by emailing to seattlefeed@yahoo.com. Please specify your full name and how many tickets you need. To ensure that we can secure/order a group of tickets all together, deadline to RSVP and pay for tickets will be Friday, Feb. 9. Once we’ve confirmed your RSVP by email, you can PayPal the funds, by no later than Friday, Feb. 9, to: derek@ussmariner.com
What else?
Lew Burdette passed away at 80. In The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, I wrote
Lew Burdette was the greatest spitballer of the 1950s. He debuted in 1950 but didn’t start pitching regularly until 1952 at the age of 23. Everyone accused Burdette of throwing the spitball because of the dramatic downward break he could get on a pitch, but he always denied it. When he hung up the spikes in 1967, he had won 203 games, gone to two All-Star games in 1957 and 1959, and in 1958 finished third in Cy Young voting.
Burdette would get good hitters to come up to the plate and stare at him, waiting for the spitball, watching strike after strike go past them, right over the plate, and then they’d go sit down, angry they hadn’t seen a spitter.
Burdette, like other great cheaters, helped force a rule change that prohibited pitchers from going to their mouth while on the mound. Burdette, like some of the other great trick pitchers, eventually did admit he’d been putting something on the ball, but not what he was accused of: “I wet my fingers by bringing them to my mouth once in a while like a lot of other pitchers do. It’s a nervous habit. But I go to my eyebrows a lot more, and that’s when my fingers get real wet. I’m a pretty good perspirer, one of the best, and the sweat runs down my forehead and soaks my eyebrows.â€
Aaron Harang signed a four-year, $36.5m deal with the Reds, avoiding arbitration.
Eric Byrnes got a one-year deal.
John D in comments pointed out that “What about some love for ex-M FELIX FERMIN? He just managed the DR to his 3rd Caribbean title.” Nice.
Community Projection: Kenji Johjima
The results of the first community projection are in, as we had 142 people contribute their estimates for Johjima’s performance. Here are the results, and those of you on the email list can expect to receive the spreadsheet for Richie Sexson tomorrow.
Overall Projection: .291/.344/.468, 492 AB, 26 2B, 1 3B, 20 HR, 31 BB, 9 HBP, 51 K
High Projection: Mark S: .347/.429/.565
Low Projection: Natebracy: .268/.306/.403
Dave Projection: .276/.320/.434
PECOTA: .294/.351/.453
Besides Mark S, the projections were all fairly neutral, with no one projecting an OBP over .400 or an OBP under .300. The overall projection is extremely close to the PECOTA projection and maybe a tad bit optimistic on the power end of the spectrum.
Overall, though, I think it’s a good representation of what we can expect from Kenji this year. This kind of performance should again make him one of the best catchers in the American League.
Monday’s news in short
Guardado takes the Reds up on their offer, Sanchez and the Pirates avoid arbitration, Myers and the Phillies agree to a $26m deal.
On the fresh and (for now) extremely ugly Cheater’s Guide to Baseball blog, my first entry’s on the possibility of a valid HGH test.
Community Projection #1 Released
If you signed up to be part of the community projections, you should be receiving the invitation to edit the Google Spreadsheet for Kenji Johjima in the next few minutes. When adding people to the contacts list, I missed a few, so a couple of you guys aren’t going to get this initial email – drop us a line and we’ll get it out to you.
If you missed the announcement on Friday, you can read this post and send us an email to join the fun.
Imagine Sisyphus a Mariner
“Sisyphus is a professional rock-roller, who provides strength going up both sides of the mountain. He’s a big, strong kid who rolls the boulder real hard.” — press release
This off-season, I’d get up in the morning and check through the news sites quickly to see that there was no new disaster. No Mariner-related headline was the best news I could reasonably hope for. I am as much hostage as fan, the powerful able to inflict pain great and small on me at their whim, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I have no say in their decisions, but their decisions make a great difference in how my life’s going to go.
Every day. Did they trade Adam Jones for Jon Switzer? Manage to lose Jose Lopez on waivers somehow? No fear or rumor was too irrational to dismiss entirely. Would the Mariners really be crazy enough to give Jeff Weaver a five year, $50m deal? I’d think “there’s no way, that’s insane”. But that’s what I’ve thought year after year, move after move, and I’d feel my pulse quicken. It could happen: Jeff Weaver, $10m a year for five years. Run away, run away now.
I’m too much a fan to stop following baseball, I can’t move from Seattle. I don’t know how well-imprinted I am at this point but I know I won’t ever be a Yankees fan, and you’d have to hold me down to get me to put on a Dodgers cap. I don’t have any choice. I can’t escape this.
What’s worse, the good, small moves didn’t help. Arthur Rhodes on a minor league invite? That’s a nice little contract. That’s the kind of smart deal the team should be making. Clearly there’s a pulse controlling the organization. But if they’re smart at all, if there’s even the dimmest bulb lit, then there’s no explanation for other moves.
Every day for months, I worry I’m going to wake up and see that the Mariners signed Tomo Ohka to a three-year, $54m deal to provide stability in the rotation, and I’ll glance up at the byline and see that oh, of course, it’s 2009 and he’s just come off a 12-10 season with the surprising Devil Rays.
Why not? Why wouldn’t that happen?
What evidence is there, at all, that the Mariners are any smarter than they were the year before? Or the year before that? Rats running mazes don’t keep charging in to find the same blank dead end because it’s comfortable. Eventually they find a food pellet, and the next time in, they’re a little faster through the maze.
Not the Mariners. This is an abjectly stupid franchise, from top on down. No lesson is written too large for them to ignore, no problem too obvious not to fix. Drop them into the box and they run for the electric shock panel, because they’re convinced that once, they shocked themselves and it worked out great. Read more
All about elbows
An article from the North County (CA) Times. I’m sure some of you would have found this interesting regardless, but for those who might not have otherwise, there’s a Mark Lowe reference at the very end.
Yes, this probably counts as being even more news-starved than the Parque signing.
Jim Parque signs
Man, you dudes are staaarved for news. Jim Parque’s this year’s “injured former player now hopefully healed and dreams of making it back” story. Injuries destroyed his career: after a nice 2000 with the White Sox, he never started more than five games in a season and hasn’t put on a major league uniform since 2003. There’s really no projections or analysis to be done here – the health of his arm determines entirely how well he can pitch, and at this point only the teams that have talked to him and Parque have any idea what his condition is.
Someone wins an advance reader’s copy of The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball
207 unique non-authors commented, some of who, ignoring instructions, registered today and made their first comment in that thread. They got thrown out. No one (surprisingly, given the subject matter) attempted to bribe me or otherwise cheat. So lacking a good n-sided die, I used Excel’s RANDBETWEEN, and we have a winner, which I’ll announce when I hear back from them. Unless they want to remain anonymous.
If I may make a pitch, though — it’s clear that at least 200 of you are interested in reading it. For only $11 more than free, you can pre-order the final version that features pictures with captions, corrected illustrations, and I promise that either at the USSM signing event (to be announced) or in some other fashion, I’ll make every effort to sign it for you.
Pre-orders will be hugely important in the book’s success, so if you’re thinking about it, please do go for it — it’s $11 and you’ve got months to cancel if all the readers and reviews this far turn out to be wrong.
Thanks to everyone who entered, it was good to see.
Free advance copy of The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball
I hold in my hands one rare advance uncorrected reader’s copy of The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball. I’m going to give it away to a USSM reader today.
If you’d like it, autographed or not, leave a comment below and I’ll randomly select someone and send it to them. The one caveat: to prevent mass registrations, your account must have been registered before today. Long-time lurkers, apologies, but your day will come.
Also, a reminder – March 3rd, Peoria. Meet two major league GMs, Jonah Keri, me, and get a Cheater’s Guide bookmark or something similarly exciting. Check it out.
Read more
Community Projections
In 2004, James Surowiecki published a book entitled “The Wisdom of Crowds”, in which he discussed how a well rounded group of laymen were better at evaluating almost anything than any individual expert in that field. Essentially, he posited that a large group of people would almost always do better in any test of knowledge than an individual person, even if that person was clearly more informed than any other individual in the crowd.
This applies to almost every facet of life, including baseball. As notable analyst and friend of USSM Tom Tango has shown, an amalgamation of projections from fans often perform as well or better than advanced projection systems or baseball experts. By combing the various bits of knowledge from a large sample of people, the inherent bias’ that each of us hold can generally be overcome in most cases, presenting an accurate assessment of reality.
In that spirit, we’re happy to join forces with Jeff Sullivan and the gang over at Lookout Landing to present the 2007 Community Projection series. Last year, Jeff spearheaded this project on his blog, and this year, we’re joining forces to give the Mariner blogosphere readership a real chance to show your stuff. Is the group widsom of the average USSM/LL reader more knowledgable about the potential of this team than advanced systems like PECOTA? I say yes, and this is a chance to find out.
The community projections officially kick off on Monday. In order to make the collection and calculations easy and accurate, we’re going to be utilizing Google Spreadsheets. This will allow us to share an Excel style workbook over the web for collaboration and publishing. To use Google Spreadsheets, you need to have a (free) Google account and join the community projection mailing list so that we can add you to the list of collaborators.
We will not send any spam, sell your address, or do any other annoying things – we just need to be able to invite you to edit the spreadsheet. To participate, send an email to communityprojections@gmail.com. On Monday, we’ll send a notice inviting everyone on the list to enter your projection for Kenji Johjima, and we’ll proceed around the diamond with the rest of the team over the next several months.
You don’t need to be an expert to feel like you have something to offer. If you’re reading the blog, you’re probably a pretty well informed fan, and we’d love to have you participate in the community projection series. So, sign up today and help us make this a true test of the wisdom of the Mariner blogosphere crowd.