Dojji

Guzman would be a much better upgrade in the last year of his contract than in the next to last.

fantastic

looks like we're in danger of falling into one of those fatal offensive funks again. Joy.

No bounceback game today.

I disagree about the price tag. How much can Milwaukee really ask for the guy? Unless he turns it around he's essentially little more than an above average gloveman.

If we don't go for Hanley the other shortstop that makes sense is JJ Hardy. If the coaching staff thinks they can correct whatever's wrong with his approach to the plate he could be the steal of the century.

No Ortiz, but to make up for it we have Tek in the lineup instead. Rather have Lowell at 3B, Youk at 1B, Martinez at C, Baldelli in the lineup and Drew at DH.

http://funleagues.com/images/dodgeball.png

I think he has as good a chance as any to show the form he's shown in prior years and that'll be an upgrade on what we have right now as a #4 starter in the playoffs.

I think the bigger point is that we're hearing this at all. Most franchises know how to keep this stuff under wraps and can keep disgruntled players out of the media. Personally I think Uggla needs to take some heat here. War by media on your own teammate who will probably be your teammate next year is better than not playing through the odd injury?

At some point it has to come down to the manager and GM need to put a cap on this crap if they want to keep Hanley happy. If they can't control the clubhouse that's one more strike against a very bad franchise.

When o when do we get Daisuke back? If we could go into the playoffs with Beckett, Lester, Daisuke, and Buchholz all in working order we might just get #3 this decade.

Well there isn't honestly that much else to say. "So yeah, apparently Hanley's unpopular with the Marlins players. Not exactly surprising, his attitude has come under scrutiny before and he's being asked to be a leader on a pretty rudderless team, not a good combination. I'm pretty sure he's getting a bad rap this time, but players have shot their way out of town over less than stuff like this becoming public. Maybe this gives us a chance to trade for him. I hope so." Beyond the obligatory insults I think those 3 lines cover about everything that will be said in the entire thread.

So yeah, looks like they might be up for trading Ramirez after all.

KILO!!!!!!

I think you just slightly missed my point. Style of construction can run constant for one team for an extended period of time, decades occasionally. But even if it isn't a few things will hold true stylisticalyl. Boston is actually a prime example -- be they good or be they bad, most Sox teams were slow, AVG/OBP and power driven teams that lived or died on the merits of their starters. But even where there were speedy eras in Boston (and there are, more than a few) those teams were built at least somewhat to take advantage of the patterns of the grounds. and in one big example, the grounds were built to take advantage of the patterns of a hitter. Most of you know why the bullpen is in right field in Fenway. And most of you know why we were pioneers of the structural bullpen for that matter. The point is that these stylistic variations are a confounding issue. And when the difference is small, little variations can be big confounders.

We would have hated Guzman.

Guys, you are just digging yourselves deeper. An illiterate child could have picked the sarcasm out of a statement like that. It's long since been obvious to everyone my sarcasm meter has been dead for years. If I can pick out sarcasm, you guys have no excuse.

When you're talking about factors that are themselves incremental, a small margin of error makes a big difference. It seems to me you'd have to chew through a whole lot of data before you could make a reasonable conclusion about park factor, and that there's a third confounder that remains in play for as long as you use stats to make the determination -- the whim of the GM and owner in the kind of team they like to construct and the quality of talent available to the team and the league. It seems pretty intuitive to me at least that if you build a team for your stadium (such as a speedy team in a cavern or a power team in a bandbox, Fenway hitters or lefties who can pull it into the gulf stream at NYS), then no matter how you neutralize team composition as a factor, teams that traditionally present themselves a certain way still present a variable as long as you're dealing with player stats to determine park factors. Namely that teams built for a certain park will perform less well in other parks, presenting a positive that had better be controlled for. And that's a hard thing to evaluate in a database of sufficient size to make an adequate sample.

That sounds suspiciously like "watch the game," Dipre. Who would have thought that actual physics might affect a game that we usually try to leave to the statistics?

Oh and if you are tempted to simply assume that the road parks balance out to neutral, or even "neutral enough to be going on with" bear in mind two things. 1: Unbalanced schedules and interleague play means that everyone's road park effects are going to fall together a little differently. 2: There is one park that will never appear on your team's road stats. Its own park. Skewing the conglomerate park effects of your league by the value of whatever your own park's effects actually are (most notable in extreme effect parks) Which would seem to be the point, since in principle that might give you an isolated variable -- except for the unbalanced schedules and interpeague play, combined with plain old ordinary sample size variation, confound that variable making it dang hard to make a meaningful number out of the data available.

I don't think so. Even in the worst case scenario, he still has a few situations where you can use him for a platoon advantage. Also, the evidence suggests that he still has the talent to perform as a catcher, but wears down over the workload of a full season. It would explain his sprinting start and fading finish these last few years. He should be tried as a backup before outright discarded. Maybe with the aditional rest you might get more flashes of vintage Tek. You'd like to home for some evidence of that by the end of this year but I somehow doubt we'll be allowed that level of comfort. But regardless, Jason Varitek is here for the duration of this year and very likely next year. Beyond is also a distinct possibility.

I think he means that at home, you're always playing in the same park, but "the road" represents a conglomeration of many different park effects. That makes road results, especially for individual starting pitchers within the same team for example, a bit more ambiguous than they appear to be.

It's worth remembering though that the standard for Penny is lowered not just by the park but by the quality of competition, and it's a real difference. Especially because the Phillies, good enough for third place in the AL East, are among the toughest teams he'll face.