Dojji

So kinda like Team USA then, mostly no one really cares that much unless we think they might be good.

Me too, it's really interesting to hear from this complete other culture that's suddenly over here talking about things that you sort of half understand. It's almost like learning.

Actually the moneyball A's are not all that great. Beane's farm system really isn't that productive, so the moves he makes to acquire useful veterans and outperforming schlub rookies really isn't nearly enough to make me consider him a good GM. Beane makes shrewd moves, but he's fallen in love with himself and seems a lot of the time to make moves just to make a move. A lot of very talented former Athletics, such as Dan Haren, now do their damage for someone else, and the players Beane gets in return for them, while talented, tend to also find their way to other teams in yet ANOTHER trade (Carlos Gonzalez anyone?). I feel like he's trying to be a bigger factor in the game than the players on the field, like he feels that's expected of him. It's a common failing of a GM or other executive who gets unprecedented praise while he's still young, so he rides what got him the praise instead of keeping on innovating, which was was the real cause of it. You have to have a foot in both camps in order to be a really great team. Numbers are fine things, but you can't calculate heart or team chemistry. You can, however, calculate consistency and see if a player is doing what you seem to see that he's capable of doing, frequently enough to be meaningful. It's too easy to fall in love with one side or the other of the stats v scouting spectrum. You can wear your eyes out staring at spreadsheets only to wind up signing a major attitude problem, or you can get a the hustlingest, grittiest batch of losers in history because the players, while they're talented and look good, have consistency problems and fundamental weaknesses in their approach that the numbers could tell you about. Both sides in this discussion are better off for listening attentively to the other one. A good general manager would not throw out the list a veteran manager presented of players he'd like to see replace his injured man. He would ask for the list first, and incorporate it with his own in order to see if there's any overlap and if there is, move those guys to the top of the list as agreeable to both parties independently.

Meh, I think it was time to get back to Patriots football anyway. Not that this won't hurt the team, because it will, but the high-octane halcyon days of offense and Brady-to-Moss were clearly on the way out anyway with the only question being when and how the Patriots made the adjustment. They chose to do so proactively and give themselves time to piece together what the post-Moss Patriots will look like while there's still a postseason to play for. If their reasoning is that Moss was likely to be a problem more than a solution to the rest of their season and was gone at the end anyway, it's a reasonable call to make. For most of the best years of the Patriots' run, they were a team that was D first, O second, playing the short game, running the football, possessing the football and moving the chains. That's not a Moss team, if you have Moss, you're trying to make explosive offensive plays leading to quick possessions and more O than D. Sooner or later that conflict would have blown up, now at least we have time to figure out what we're going to do for the rest of the season and make our bid for the playoffs and position for next year based on a realistic assessment of what we're likely to have. The one way in which Paladios is most right is that sometimes it does pay to play to your strengths rather than trying to be good at everything. If the Law Firm can hold up his end of the bargain in the running game, we might be surprised to find ourselves looking at a team that very closely resembles the heyday 2002-2003 Patriots. Meaning that our antacid intake picks up a tick but at the end of the day the Patriots don't wind up playing in the playoffs without knowing what they are. We'll miss Moss, but Moss was not a Patriot in the fundamental sense, he just didn't mesh very well with what BB made his bread and butter by getting players to do and I honestly think that starting with the Superbowl upset we've been paying for being caught with one foot on ship and one foot on shore.

You don't ask much? Baseball is easy to analyze statistically because each play is discrete. Things happen for awhile then play stops and resets before they can happen again, and this happend all the time, not just on the odd corner. That means that each play can be analyzed and assigned value. Metrics are just things that analyze that value. One such is WAR, which attempts to analyze how many wins a player earned for his team. There are others, such as VORP, which analyzes a player's worth compared to a generic replacement, and a lot of derivative data such as BABIP, which analyzes how often, after you hit the ball, it is fielded by a player vs. when you reach base safely, which can be used either to evaluate whether a player might be hitting into bad luck, or analyze whether a guy's making the right kind of contact to result in hits. The two numbers I use most are OBP and OPS for hitters. OBP is on base percentage or in other words the number of times the hitter did something other than becoming out. Walks and hits, mostly, but other than bases reached on error everything that sees a hitter not become out goes into OBP, so I consider it a consistency-o-meter. A good OBP is .340 or higher., or a little over 1 time on base for every 3 trips to the plate. OPS combines OBP with slugging percentage (bases advanced per plate appearance, used to evaluate a hitter's ability to take extra bases with speed or deep hits) to give an overall effectiveness number so that even if a guy doesn't get on base, if he does more damage when he does, that's measured. What's good for OPS is dependent on position, since some positions are harder to play defensively so it's tricky to get a good hitter, and others are relatively easy meaning you should find a great hitter to play that position. Catcher and shortstop are the lhardest to find good hitters there, OPS can be .700 or so and a catcher can still be considered OK, but for a first baseman or a left fielder, the standard is much higher because it's a relatively easier position to play and you really want at least an .800 OPS from any "corner" position if you can get it and if you can't, you may need to make the offense up at another position. For pitchers, I mostly use ERA and WHIP. ERA is total runs allowed that are allowed per nine innings, that are not the result of a fielder's error (personally I think E1's should be ignored when calculating ERA, since they are an error on the pitcher, but the statisticians disagree with me). Anything under 4 is considered a good ERA, but the lower, obviously, the better. WHIP is basically the opposite of OBP -- the number of times a pitcher gives up something that is not an out, such as a walk or a hit. The anagram is for Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched. You want to see that number below about 1.33, meaning a player's allowing about 4 baserunners for every 3 innings pitched. Much higher than that and the guy will wear out his arm by the 6th inning and you'll need to go to the bullpen a lot. So that's my quick cliff's notes on numbers, those 4 are probably the most fundamentally important ones to know, there's a lot of other ones but if you keep OBP, OPS, ERA, and WHIP clear in your head you should be able to contribute meaningfully to most forum conversations unless someone's got an advanced degree in nerdology and likes to show off.

Then the Patriots clearly felt he'd be a net negative presence from now to the end of the season. I'm hard pressed to disagree with them

So the Prawn Sandwich Brigade would be kind of like our "Pink Hats," people who support the team because it's stylish rather than because they understand and love the sport, the team, or the traditions of the team. Named after the girlfriends of fans basically, ladies who show up in girlified versions of team paraphanelia in a way that screams "I'm a little too good to wear the real team colors but I want to be seen to support the team because it's the thing to do, I guess." (imagine a pink LFC jersey and you might have some idea of how the die-hards regard that).

The short game, a good O-line, a bit of run to keep the defense off Brady, and excellent special teams play combined with a defense that limits the opponents to the same kind of game (which they're generally less suited for) is fundamental Patriots football. Moss is a luxury to that style of play, and if he starts bringing in negatives, he becomes a luxury the Patriots can do without. Brady isn't a great deep ball thrower anyway, he's a much, much better short passer. His arm is a touch below average in terms of length and strength, but he's pinpoint accurate within 15 yards or so, really quick with his feet, and even faster with his head, only Peyton Manning makes the right decision consistently on the first look nearly as well as Tom Brady does. That's not a guy that's going to be content to sit in the pocket waiting for a guy to run a long route and get open very often, especially not with Welker and Faulk open underneath for a first down to move the chains. Sometimes it's less important to be competitive at everything than it is to make sure you're playng your game, and a guy can be a stupendous player, if he doesn't play Patriots football he needs to not be a Patriot. If the decision is that Moss isn't a Patriots' style player and that what he brings isn't worth sacrificing that style for anymore, then you move him.

BTW, how do you pronounce "Scouser?" Is it an assonance of Scooter (Skoozer) or Scouter (Skowzer)? Or something else?

This got skipped earlier, so I'll answer the question. We're one of the few who do, actually. A lot of Boston's baseball tradition hails from older days, modern teams which made up more of their traditional canon later just use the Jumbotron to tell their fans to "MAKE SOME NOISE!" The songs themselves aren't that old but the fact that there are songs. songs that the fans sing I mean, not just songs that are played on the loudspeaker and everyone shuts up and listens, kinda sets Boston apart a bit. We have Sweet Caroline at the 7th inning stretch, and when the game ends in a win for Boston, we all raise our voices in praise of . Some of us tend to say "Dirty Water!" in the gamethreads after the last out or post images of dirty water for the reference and celebration. Point is, all of us know what Dirty Water is and what it means, it means a Red Sox win at home. When we bring in the closer, our best short-innings pitcher whose job is to get out of the last inning with the lead intact, we also have . That tradition is very new and started at the end of the World Series run in 2007, although Papelbon our current closer, who started that tradition, is in a bit of disgrace at the moment after a poor year and I am not sure that it will stick around when he moves on. And for the very rare special occasion, there's , this rendition by the Murphys. You guys might like the Dropkick Murphys as a band, feel free to check 'em out. They have a lot of the same kind of blue collar Irish inspiration that seems to be part of our New England bloodlines as well as your Scouser heritage.

Pretty much what I had in mind, yeah.

I think he's trying to mock someone's accent. Instead he just sounds like he was written by Brian Jaques.

The only reason he's stuck with Fenway is that the fans would have shot him for bulldozing their beloved 99 year old ballpark. That and there's few places to build a stadium in downtown Boston and they're reluctant to move to the 'burbs.

Even if this might be "about money" that doesn't mean a team with a financial lasso around its neck. The most profitable teams are the ones that are well-run and successful, that both do more with less and have a lot to work with.

Ruiari: It's cool, I don't have a problem with pointing out the weaknesses of the Liverpool side, the issue I had was with people digging up all the old skeletons and throwing them in the faces of all the Liverpool folks who were coming here anxious to know a little more about the team, or talking smack with Liverpool fans in other ways, since that drowns out information people are trying to get here in acrimony and background noise. I hope some of you guys stick around and chat baseball.

We get access to the public books, but it's an open question of whether we have access to the real ones. Enron taught us the distinction, and the recent financial crisis based on an overreliance on bizarre credit services and "toxic assets" served as a reminder. These guys know how to make money look better than it really is. As for why he's buying Liverpool FC, I guess you'd have to ask him, but bear in mind that a money-making sports franchise is generally one that is successful and vice versa. If Henrry wants a "football" team it's because he wants a team that wins at "football," not just a money spigot.

If Rizzo comes out and smokes the ball in AAA for the first half of the season, it'll be an open question whether we should just wait for him.

Moss hasn't been a huge factor in games for the most part. the Pats win on D, special teams and the short game when they're at their best, Moss is more of a luxury than a necessity. They play the Patriots attack best with Welker leading the charge and Moss's primary job is to draw coverage, as long as they have *a* deep threat to complement Wes they don't need one as high-end as Moss, it's like hauling your groceries around with a Lambourghini to have him on the staff the last couple years..

He's an investment manager of some fund or another, he's a billionaire at it at any rate, and he makes a good living independent of his sports franchise. As for how much the Sox make and how much he comes home with? Hard to say really, reporting on that kind of thing is sketchy and can be really difficult to take at face value. There's a lot of lawyers whose sole job is to make that number look either better or worse depending on which one suits their boss better. Henry spends a lot on the Sox, but between the media deal, the gate, various endorsements and the interest he's whipped up in the team, I can't imagine his investment in the Red Sox is losing him money.