Jayhawk Bill

Any one who thinks Cashman is an exellent GM is an idiot and knows nothing about baseball. Hmmm...rather than merely disagreeing with the point, Gom goes for the full-bore personal insult. OK... I consider Cashman an excellent GM. I consider Theo to be better. I consider anybody who spells the word "excellent" without using the letter "c" to be an idiot who knows nothing about information communicated through the English language, including information regarding the business of Major League Baseball. Boy, this is really constructive. I laid low, Gom, you ********. You cast the first insult. Flame war back on.

Theo Epstein has never had the highest-paid team in his division, and he's not yet failed to reach the postseason in any year where he was the GM through the preceding winter. Brian Cashman has had an extraordinary advantage in payroll and has taken best advantage of it. He also seems to have been exceptionally lucky in deadline trades since 2005, unless there's an external factor working beyond simply payroll. Neither is a bad GM, but Theo has been getting way more wins per payroll dollar year-for-year than Cashman, and, again, Theo has made the ALDS each year except when they screwed up his team while he was on hiatus.

You must mean, "The Yankees could have him for free if they eat his contract." For Boston, the price would, of course, be higher.

Meh, I've apologized to you elsewhere.

Pardon, yankees228, but you entered a thread where Gom and I were flaming and you quoted me in my response to Gom and took issue with the words. You get what you deserve when you do that. That is why I insulted you. You deserved it: you took exception to my response to Gom, a poster who is currently moving to homophobic insults in his latest attempt to overcome the shortcomings of his logic.

Gom, you're so drunk that you can't even spell "JHB" right. There is no loss: there is only research demonstrating that it's over 99% unlikely that the 2005-2007 trades would've happened without an external factor.

First, the entire post you reference regarding Yankees fans living with the disgrace: I waited a day, and I waited until I was sure you'd been online at Talksox. You're not planning to support your insult with explicit fact, Gom. See, Gom, the issue is that you cannot dispute what I'm writing. You're used to countering others' opinions with your bluster and bias, and on most sports forums it works. It may be rude to act that way when you're a guest at another team's site, but it's usually adequate to the level of discourse. This is different. I cite facts. You're failing to answer those facts. Yes, the insinuation is extraordinary--but extraordinary does not begin to mean "impossible" in an era where NBA referees are sentenced to prison for selling their impartiality. Furthermore, trades are business decisions, not directly part of the game, and even the MLBPA has accused MLB of collusion in its business decisions. Once upon a time, in the days of Babe Ruth, it was perfectly acceptable to sell away star players if it fattened the owners' pockets. The St Louis Browns stayed profitable by doing just that. Now there are alleged protections against such sales, but there are no public audits of the books of the privately-held teams or their owners that would reveal a pattern of monetary transfers...bribes...that parallelled these repeated absurdities labeled as trades. You cannot prove your point. I can quote journalists' and GMs' astonishment at many of the trades, and I can point out a pattern of unusually favorable results for the Yankees. The jury of the readership looks at these facts brought together, and it realizes that this last trade is not a single mistake but rather part of a pattern, and they come to understand that we cannot be getting the full story on why these trades happen. You respond with unsupported allegations of illogical posting. Here's the truth: your posts are illogical. Your posts are unresearched. Your posts are unnecessarily rude. And here the truth behind it all: your team, their owners, and their fans are spoiled by your resources and your past successes earned on a playing field far from level. Hank Steinbrenner, this month: Quote: Originally Posted by Bob Nightengale "There's a lot of excitement around here from the Rays fans, but almost to a point of arrogance," he says. "They better be careful. They'll learn this (expletive) can change real quick." The Yankees have been subsidizing the Rays and other teams with their revenue-sharing and luxury-tax payments, Steinbrenner says, so they should be thanking the Yankees. "People in baseball know it, whether they want to admit it or not," Steinbrenner says. "It helps everyone when the Yankees are good. The Red Sox, whether they're good or not, doesn't necessarily matter, nationally. … Let's face it: The Yankees are baseball history. You're talking about 26 championships." Hank Steinbrenner alleging arrogance on the part of Rays fans...is there a better example of irony? But consider the moral implications of this quoted sentence: "It helps everyone when the Yankees are good." If Steinbrenner truly believes that--and one is challenged to conceive of why he would utter such arrogant words on record were he not to believe them in his soul--then he can be at this very moment excusing himself for whatever else it took besides prospects to acquire Marte and Nady. Were there any transfer of wealth unreported to MLB and the public, it was only for the good of MLB...not just the good of his franchise, the good of all of MLB. At least in his own mind. *** The Marte-Nady trade stinks, Gom. Any objective party, knowing all of the facts, comes to that conclusion despite the absence of the Pirates' owners explaining for ESPN and SI, on the record, why they sold two of their best players in a sale thinly disguised as a trade. Live with the disgrace, Yankees fan. The disgrace is that Gom confronted fact with opinion. I do research; he does insults. That's the disgrace. He's called my sample size too small, and he still doesn't know what it is--although I've been kind enough to state that the last two days of the month that I sampled exceeded what he cited--twice--as the complete sample size. Regarding "What's with the masturbation comment?" you should realize that you've entered a zone of Talksox not for the thin-skinned. For the record, I was abused for about two weeks for being too thin-skinned to deal with crap like what thrown around in here. I regard that as inappropriate: I was trying to follow the posted rules. The posted rules seem not to apply. Live with it. If you can't, I advise you to avoid areas where Gom and I are going at it. Frankly, if you get away from here, I've got nothing against you. If you support Gom in this flame war, I'll post as I choose.

Quote me, and cite the relevance to this thread. Or just go masturbate...it's what you seem to be doing now.

It's actually a recitation of facts. If Yankees fans hate you for the truth...well, I've gathered that sometimes that's the case. :dunno:

Thanks! Seriously, I don't subscribe to YES (thank Gawd) and I haven't seen the video, thus my request. AFAIK, it wasn't a valid call...but I'd be eager to hear an impartial observer (um, not YES) point that out.

The rule in question is posted below. The point you make, italicized by me, was added not in 2007-2008, but rather in 2005-2006: Pardon, but do you have video showing the batter to have left the dirt circle? And as an added aside, you post, "Bill, get some help." I've not yet troubled you in my postings with Gom, but you engage in flaming--is it a Yankees thing, or is it a mental illness?

Why don't you do the research on all those other games? Barring that, why don't you stop suggesting that I'm only doing this stuff when it benefits my team? See, you're making a huge assumption and posting it as fact as an insult, even while you say, "I kept this post very clean, with no hidden agendas or meanings. THIS WAS VERY FREAKING HARD FOR ME TO DO!!!!" It's not clean, Gom. It's insulting. Do your research or shut your f***ing mouth.

It's ridiculous to point out that the pattern is aggravating but not significant? Furthermore, you say that I do this "every time the Yankees win." Find where I posted this--or anything like this--on any of their last five wins. You can't--I didn't. I only raise these points in a minority of games. What is a better way of determining a potential pattern of wrong calls than checking right and wrong calls? Odd that you'd bring this up...yes, we've won twice since 2004...so, why are you raising a "sour grapes" issue?

It looks as if the net dropped to +7 Yankees by game end. Statistically significant at the 95% level? Nah. Disturbing if it's part of a pattern, such as calling out a runner who should be safe? Yeah.

Yankees pitchers vs. Orioles pitchers tonight, Pitch f/x normalized chart: Yankees bonus strikes tonight: 7 Orioles bonus strikes tonight: 2 Net: Yankees +5 Yankees cheated strikes tonight: 0 Orioles cheated strikes tonight: 3 Net: Yankees +3 Total: Yankees +8 In a two-run game, the calls thus far are possibly the difference in the game.

Dice-K has allowed a batting line of .170/.264/.255 thus far in his career pitching in Toronto. Yes, Boston struggles against the Jays, but Matsuzaka has a reasonable chance to prevail.

One might criticize the small sample size, though. Through yesterday, Karstens and Nady had each earned 1.7 wins since the trade--that's superstar performance for both players. Marte has been a tiny bit (0.2 wins) below replacement level, so thus far, at the MLB level, Pittsburgh is ahead. One of the things that happens with small samples for pitchers, though, is that pitchers allow many more or fewer runs because of how hits are clumped and how balls in play are fielded. Let's look at selected stats for Karstens and Marte: [table] Stat | Karstens | Marte ERA | 2.25 | 10.13 DER | .784 | .619 LD% | 22.5% | 22.7% K/G | 3.8 | 10.6 xFIP | 5.09 | 4.93 [/table] Excepting ERA and the Defensive Efficiency of fielders behind him--and there's nothing in the line drive rate to suggest that a whopping DER difference is reasonable--it looks as if Karstens has pitched roughly as well in the NL Central as Marte has done in the AL East. Given the league differences, I'm not sure that Karstens is really doing much better... ...but the key, of course, is whether Tabata can ever be a MLB star. We'll see.

Beckett didn't get a single Cy Young vote for that season. His ERA+ was only 118; he wasn't top 10 in his league in either ERA or strikeouts. He was 21st in the NL by VORP that year--yes, that's clearly an above-average season, so I see your point, but Lester is third in the AL this year and Matsuzaka is eighth, so I was thinking of a higher standard. :dunno:

In part--but Lester has been lucky over his entire career, and Beckett isn't nearly as good. Nobody avoids the core of the strike zone like Matsuzaka. He's not afraid to walk home a crucial run, but he will not give a batter something to hit. A shot at the Red Sox pen, yes...but underbelly? Tonight's debacle aside, and Tito's irrational use of his relief pitchers through the first half also aside, Boston was still, remarkably, the tenth-best MLB bullpen rated by WXRL this morning. Perhaps the bullpen is less of a strength for Boston than some other areas, but it's tough to call it an "underbelly." OK, but Matsuzaka has the reputation of being, perhaps, the best clutch pitcher in the history of Japanese baseball, and Boston was 3-1 in his four postseason starts last year despite Tito's having almost blown out his throwing arm in the first half through pitcher abuse. This season Matsuzaka is, thus far, still healthy. I'll take Dice-K.

Meh. It answered the question at hand. :dunno: Seriously, Daisuke Matsuzaka is 15-2, he's got the best ERA, he's not a kid, and he's thrived in the spotlight in Japan several times. Beckett is an MLB-average pitcher in 2008 (in fact, his only year he received a single Cy Young Award vote was 2007) and Lester is still young. I'll take Matsuzaka. YMMV.

Alfonso Marquez is behind home plate tonight. Marquez appears to be fair with respect to both Boston and Baltimore, although Baltimore won 6-3 the last time he called a game between the two (June 2, 2008). You know, Clay Buchholz has been the unluckiest pitcher on any contending AL team this season. (Source BP; stat "LUCK.") Yeah, he's struggled, but he's not been as bad as the W-L record would suggest: with Boston, he should be nearly a .500 pitcher as well as he's thrown. Buchholz OPS allowed by catcher: Varitek: .866 Cash: .618 Should be an exciting game.

Matsuzaka.