Archive for the 'Bloops' Category

After poring over details from the film and our team schedules, Wezen-Ball's Larry Granillo has the answer:

Baseball Prospectus | Wezen-Ball: Ferris Bueller's Day Off at Wrigley Field

(Hat tip to David Brown & Big-League Stew.)

Tango came out with his 2011 projections yesterday:

Marcel 2011 - Tango on Baseball

I'll probably whip up some team projections based on these at some point, like I did last year.

B-R reader Mark writes in with this estimate of which specific game Derek Jeter will notch hit #3,000 in:

"When will Jeter get his 74th hit in 2011? For any Yankees season subscriber, this is a very important question to figure out before selling unwanted 2011 games.

• Based on career H/G average (1.27) , game #58 on 6/3 (assumes he plays every game in 2011)

• Based on historical record of his 74th hit every season: game 60 or 65 (6/5 or 6/11) depending on whether you consider historical Team G#s or Player G#s of each year's H# 74.

The first was simple math based on career stats.

The second was culled from b-r's Game Logs, copied as CSV into Excel, and derived from there by adding a cumulative H column for each season to the game records."

Nice to see someone using the site tools for their own mini-research projects. Of course, I would add that it's probably unrealistic to expect Jeter to hit at his career norms next season, so if we use last year's rates we get:

• Game #65 of the season based on hits per game
• Game #56 or 57 of the season based on last season's game logs

Based on this extremely simple analysis, you should probably expect Jeter's 3000th hit sometime in the first 2 weeks of June.

In his first SB Nation column, former ESPN analyst Rob Neyer introduces himself to a new audience and talks about the rapidly-shrinking gap between big-time sportswriters and bloggers:

Rob Neyer Joins SB Nation, Becomes Part Of 'Us' Not 'Them' - SBNation.com

Here's an outstanding piece from Yahoo's Jeff Passan on Voros McCracken, the progenitor of DIPS Theory. Why is one of the most influential baseball thinkers of the past decade not actually working in baseball, spending his days and nights analyzing European soccer instead?

(Hat tip to Brian Burke for the link.)

Interesting story here from Tyler Kepner of the NY Times, on Gil Meche's abrupt retirement:

Royals Pitcher Gil Meche Retires, Tossing Away $12 Million Guaranteed - NYTimes.com

In a sport dominated by guaranteed contracts, Meche felt so bad about what he believed were ill-gotten earnings that he walked away from the game.

Dave Gershman of Beyond the Box Score has posted a chart showing which reporters have broken the most correct stories regarding major-league deals this off-season. Ken Rosenthal and Jon Heyman come out particularly well.

The Angels have traded Juan Rivera and Mike Napoli to the Blue Jays for Vernon Wells. So, what do you think of this trade?

Good read here from The Browser:

Interview: Andrew Gelman on Statistics

Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. He mentions Bill James' Abstracts early on as one of his influences when he was growing up, and then goes on to talk about four other books that also deal with uncertainty, variance, and finding patterns in data.

When discussing these matters, most people point to Mark Twain's famous "lies, damned lies and statistics" quote (which, incidentally, may have actually been coined by Benjamin Disraeli or Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke), but Gelman has another great Twain quote in mind: "It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know." Statistics happen to be a great way learn about "what you don’t know you don’t know."

(Special hat tip to Chase Stuart of the PFR Blog for the link.)

Congrats to Bert Blyleven and Roberto Alomar!

I'll have more here shortly. In the interim, please feel free to use this entry to discuss today's ballot results.

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