However, the M’s only owe him $3M for ‘08. They’re not commited to him for 4 years or something outrageous. It really could be worse.

Here’s his firstinning.com page. And his fangraphs.com page.

On the other hand, I don’t brood, nor do I carry grudges. Maybe we can find some common ground.

Why don’t you like the Wilkerson signing?

If you think the Wilkerson signing was lame, welcome to the club (well, making him a starter is lame). Look at the differences in BABIP last year between home and away. Again, really small sample size. But .216? Ouch. Call it s***** luck for the most part.

That being said though, Graham could have been a lot nastier (and I could have been, as well) considering that you:

-showed up, made a proclamation that home/away splits mattered but that you really didn’t care about providing evidence to support your assertion;

-stated that any counter-argument was “non-sensical”;

-complained that you were being insulted, when people mildly jibed about a couple of pretty egregous spelling mistakes;

-also complained that you were being insulted when I tried to link you to a place where you could be informed about the expectations for comment threads when you’re trying to make a point, particularly a more outlandish one.

I’m not sure why you would expect, given all of that, that people would want to be polite to you; and yet, people WERE polite, and even endeavored to help you “raise your game”. You treated them shabbily for it.

In any case, this a thread about Wilkerson, not a thread for complaining about people being mean to you; there’s a link to email the authors if you really feel you’re being treated inappropriately.

Stats without meaningful analysis are well, meaningless. If you want to prove that that split is statistically significant, run the numbers rather than providing random anecdotes. Furthermore, Wilkerson’s performance in 2008 is almost entirely irrelevent here as well. This is a matter of small sample size and you trying to draw meaning out of random data.

I’m hardly going to let you get away with saying ‘let’s agree to disagree’ when your suppositions are based around the incorrect notion that this sample size is big enough to draw real conclusions from. It isn’t, and you’re deluding yourself if you think otherwise. Worry about Wilkerson’s contact ability, worry about age-related decline, but worrying about the equivalent of 2 home runs over 200 at-bats is pointless. Just because your opinion is that it’s a significant result does not make it true, and you expecting me to accept that it’s ok to disagree on this point because everyone’s opinions are apparently equally meritorious is silly.

This is mathematics.

I was in a foul mood yesterday, so I apologize for being over the top with the freedom of speech thing. I note, however, that the retorts were sophomoric. Moreover, when I tried to “walk away”, Graham was hardly gracious in retorting ( “If you want to be wrong, that’s your call.”).

In 2000, Cirillo hit .403 at home, while hitting just .239 away. In 2001, Cirillo hit .363 at home, while hitting just .266 away. Those numbers gave some of us pause because Cirillo had been a .300 hitter on the road for Milwaukee.

It is true that Wilkerson’s 2006 splits in Texas were balanced. That only serves to underscore the dramatic drop-off in 2007, when he also turned 30. It is obvious that I am not going to convince you no matter how many stats I provide.

Finally, I haven’t made a secret of the fact that I think Bavasi is incompetent, and that signing Wilkerson was yet another costly mistake in a long line of such mistakes.

Small sample size. Done.

Oh, and scraps has a point, consistent splits over the course of several years are something to watch out for, but single season ones? In something like 200 plate appearances? The regression to the mean is so stupidly high that the splits don’t mean anything. If Yuni got traded to, say, Houston, you think they’d be worried about his .354 slugging away from Safeco last year?

For starters, its a free country, so yes, I do get to come on here and make such a statement. You get to respond.

I think it was Joanna Russ who noted that children who discover “everyone’s entitled to their own opinion” at ten graduate to “it’s a free country at thirteen”.

This is not, whatever you may think, a public square; it is a private space run by a few guys, who host a conversation. You don’t “get to come here” and do whatever you want as though we’re all mouthing off in the street.

That said, I don’t think home/road splits are ass irrelevant as others here do, and I’ve thought Texeira overrated for that reason. But one season isn’t much to go on. Does Wilkerson have a history of poor hitting on the road? Enough to think Reed, awful as he has always been at the major league level, could be a comparable hitter?