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Stats are very good sources of information on a player. Focusing on a single stat to the exclusion of others or even a bias toward one over another is usually a bad idea. Certainly nobody has a single stat that is that significant. Even WAR which is something of an effort as a compilation is roundly criticized. OBP as an example. I would only emphasis OBP if I was looking for a particular type of ballplayer....maybe a lead off hitter for example. Once you get past your lead off hitter, a bias toward OBP won't likely do very much for you, not in lieu of everything else. If somebody put a gun to my head and told me I could only use one stat across a whole batting order, it would likely be OPS or one of its sisters....OPS+ whatever. Then relying on stats alone is another problem as bad as not relying on stats at all. Relying on stats alone won't allow a GM to build an effective offense. All too often stats alone are just that, stats and without understanding the underpinnings often you end up with a compilation of players that simply don't roll up into an effective offense. Then everybody expresses shock that the "team" did not do as well as expected and even individual players under performed.....what a shock! Maybe the biggest problem for fans is thinking Fantasy Baseball Leagues are meaningful as a relationship to real baseball games being played by the baseball players themselves and they just aren't. Worse yet when real GM's overemphasis this stuff. This in part was likely a reaction by baseball itself that for at least a short time tried to convince itself in some quarters that it could simply let go of traditional scouting and just rely on some geek with a computer program. Some of that still exists today. But more balanced approaches seem now to prevail.

To be honest Spud what somebody does with their own issues is his own business. What somebody knows or does not know is more often an issue of time and/or interest in particular subjects and does not suggest some sort of inner wisdom or kismet or whatever. It is when people just won't accept as even plausible what their very eyes should be telling them regardless of what can or can't be proven in a court of law, which an opinion driven discussion forum is not....that is when I push the panic button and actually start to question whether posting or reading makes any sense at all. As for yo-yo dieting, it is not a matter of dick length....just happens to be something I know something about...thats it....nothing earth shattering or even important.

Google yo-yo dieting for a lesson in physiology. Here is a quick study: One of the greatest frustrations people with weight problems can go through is the so-called weight cycling or yo-yo dieting – losing weight successfully, only to gain it all back. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is quite common. Over 80 percent of dieters regain some or all of their former weight back within two years and two-thirds of once successful dieters end up heavier than they were before their initial weight loss, according to a study by the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Yo-Yo dieting is not only emotionally frustrating, it can also have serious consequences for a person’s physical well-being. “The more diets you’ve been on, the harder it becomes to lose weight,” said Dr. Kelly Brownwell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. Even on a sensible diet, your body is reluctant to let go of some of its mass. When you are dieting, it may perceive it as impending starvation and a threat to its survival. In cases of rapid weight loss (e.g. crash diets), a metabolic overcompensation can kick in, resulting in a slower metabolism and greater difficulty to lose additional weight. Weight cycling can actually change your physiology, according to Dr. Brownwell. One of the reasons for this is that through dieting a hunger hormone called ghrelin increases, and a fullness hormone called leptin decreases, so you feel hungrier and less satiated every time around. Also, frequent yo-yo dieting lets you lose muscle mass and replaces it with fat as you regain weight. Because muscle burns many more calories than fat does, your metabolism slows down even further. “Losing and regaining weight regularly takes a huge toll on your body,” said Dr. Keith Ayoob, professor at Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York, not just aesthetically by loss of skin elasticity but, more importantly, by the damage being done to the inner organs, the arteries and the skeletal system, and by a host of potentially life-threatening illnesses resulting from unhealthy weight gain like diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and cancer. - See more at: http://www.timigustafson.com/2012/why-is-gaining-weight-so-much-easier-than-losing-weight/#sthash.c2NVMIl0.dpuf If you really read up on it, you will I am sure find that so called yo-yo dieting (even has a term) does eventually make it easier to gain after you lose. This is particularly true if you yo-yo on a one year cycle. Yo-Yoing on such short cycles can be an absolute death sentence. In all honesty, if the guy keels over from a heart attack this year, I will not be surprised.

OBP is only OBP, not the end all of run production IMO. I do agree that your best OBP batter should bat 1st but if he can't hardly run at all then all you have done is clog the base paths, something the Sox specialized in last year and that I expect to some extent again this year. The number of times they simply ran out of outs before they could get many or any runs across belied their position in league scoring particularly since they were for the most part outscored by teams in their own division. At 4 in the order, your hitter comes up in the first inning unless you were unable to get anybody on out of your first 3 hitters. He also comes up with at least one runner on and much more of a chance to drive somebody in. Of course here again the Sox ran into something of a problem last year as they often had Panda too high in the order where he could only for the most part hit singles and then .....clog the base paths. Protecting a hitter with another hitter has become less effective but mainly because pitchers basically go after most hitters now regardless of their prominence. However it is pretty obvious when a pitcher pitches around a hitter and it still happens. The biggest problem the Sox face offensively is that they are a tweener. They neither have enough speed to be effective as a station to station scoring machine nor enough power to be a power based scoring machine. They were a tweener last year and this will for all intents exactly the same lineup now with Ortiz a year older and a year slower. They are a great example for why IMO OBP is not the end all of run production. If your team is dead slow AND hits too high a percentage of singles while being unable to get out of its own way on the base paths, they just run out of outs (3) in an inning before they can get much done. Once again stats or a bias toward a particular stat will frustrate you if you don't take into account other elements of the game that exist around that stat. They were for example a much better and more effective team with either Panda or Hanley sitting last year and were much more effective when both were out of the lineup...a chilling thought since they will both likely see a great deal of time this year. The problem is that they end up stuck in the middle of the order with Ortiz if Farrell repeats last year (see paragraph above ....clogging base paths and running out of outs in an inning). Ortiz is slow, Hanley is a stupid base runner who has lost a step off his best running days and Panda is not just slow but is downright cardiac material. But I think Farrell will simply hope that Hanley shows some the promise that BC hired him to show and will make that bet first. But last year should have thoroughly dispelled the idea that this is some scoring juggernaut....its not. Thought there is nothing more stubborn than a stats geek as anything that does not align with his thinking is.......a OUTLIER! I suspect that thoughts of championships for this bunch are again a byproduct of the statistician's insistence that "this is a juggernaut damn it, now give me more jugger and less naught so I can prove how right I am".

There is your best all around hitter vs your best power hitter. IMO your best all around hitter bats 3rd. Your best power hit that also has something of an all around hitter profile bats 4th and your best HR hitter that really does not do much else bats 5th. 4 is the guy you really want to protect in the lineup if you can. The only kind of hitter that protects anybody is a guy that is a real threat to change the score with one swing of the bat. Farrell is probably going to try to squeeze Hanley into the 3 or 4 at first and Ortiz the 4 or 5. Then flip Hanley to 5 to shake things up if the first few configurations don't work out. XB is the interesting guy to watch this year. Once he adopted that inside out swing and abandoned that Chris Davis rocking chair swing his numbers really took off. But he won't hit for HR power with last year's swing. My preference would be for him to stick with last year's swing as I think a return to the "rocking chair" is likely to also bring on a return to something like 2014's inconsistency.

This circular discussions are one of the reasons people leave this forum. Talent does matter. You judge that player by player just as the statistics are gathered. This is a bad tool to use the way you suggest and I very much suspect Fangraphs knows that. Only fans might decide for themselves that it is meaningful in that context. Good luck with that. It is bad tool and there is nothing you can say to make it a good tool.

You need to have more base running capability and not be so vulnerable to the shift to bat 3rd. I doubt Fareell is stupid enough to put him there. Hanley might come through and against certain pitchers he might be a better 4 than Ortiz or Hanley could be the 3. I would guess that as the season gets going Hanley will move between 3 and 4 and Ortiz will move between 4 and 5. If that falls apart I would expect some combination of Pedey and XB, 2 and 3, Ortiz at 4, Hanley pushed down to a position behind Ortiz in an effort to see if he can protect Ortiz (that did not do much last year...a testament to Ortiz and his power and smarts at the plate) and then Panda hampered by being a LH hitter only.

Fine then folks using them to suggest that the Sox will finish atop their division should stop. There are likely plenty of good reasons to suggest they might do that. This is not one of them.

Panda has regularly lost 20-25 lbs each off season. This is common knowledge although the best way to go backwards now would be to try to find the older stuff out of SF on him. But he has done at least this much every off season and packs it right back on again once the season starts. We all know he lost at least 30 lbs the last off season and packed it all back on again and then some once the season started. His 255 listed playing weight is now about where he starts each season although, this cyclical process he has been going through regularly usually results in both the lower number and the higher number going up and the middle of the bell curve rising. This is true for all of us. Once you get on that cycle your body recognizes it and it very hard to break. The weight comes back on you for a guy that size in lb increments. He will likely consider 260 a job well done for this off season. At the end of last season, when Hanley was truthful about his weight, Hanley said he was 254. If you went to Fenway before both players were sidelined late last season and got to see Hanley standing next to Panda, those two players were not in the same zip code as to weight. At that point Panda was likely somewhere between 275 and 290 headed for 300! I have to take Hanley at his word for 254 although that is also what was reported at the time. Farrell says Hanley lost 20 lbs which takes you right to 234. Hanley says he is 234 right now but also NOW says he lost 3 lbs from 237 to 234. Right Hanley. But if I take Hanley at his word from last year, Panda was at least IMO 25-30 lbs over that. Also remember through this period Panda had to be removed from a game after going from 1st to home, getting there nearly at the point of collapse. As for Porcello, I think he will end up the pitcher that gets the most benefit out of Price being here. Not only was extending him when we did idiotic from the team perspective but it hurt him as well IMO. We certainly could not expect Porcello not to take the money. But he was clearly ill prepared to suddenly be the highest paid pitcher on the staff right in the middle of all this discussion about who was the Ace. What....we don't think that had an impact on him? Remember this was not just a media discussion...this was a team discussion. Buch had the 5 Aces t-shirts produced, a pretty good indication that they were talking about the vacuum at the top as well. However, I simply do not think he has the talent to be more than a 3 in anything we would consider a solid Boston staff, more likely a 4 but a solid 4, not an up and down, feast or famine 5. I am also concerned that his effort to turn himself into Joe Kelly last year might be a result of his bread and butter pitch being tough on the arm. He has thrown a good deal early in his career. FB's are not hard on the arm comparatively speaking. It might be that the politics of justifying your existence in MLB drove him to this FB mania from last year. There are so many hot young arms in baseball now. I think that as likely as his trying to save his arm a bit. Something drove it though...something other than "gee this is best way for me to pitch". It was not until he went back to a more recognizable Porcello that he started to get some results last year. Anyway, he is being paid like a 2016 rotation 2. He is nowhere near that and IMO won't ever be. So at best it will take two to three years for salaries to catch up to his salary. So tell me again....it made sense to without competition from the FA market advance him to a point where at best the league might catch up by 2017 or 2018???? How much time will he have left on his current contract that he might consider a reasonable salary for him at that point? I will OVER overpay for the real deal before I overpay for a middle of the packer and I will do that every time. Made no sense. Even if they wanted this middle of the packer, had they waited for the off season, I seriously doubt there would be any likelihood of the competition for his services being anything like $20m+ per

And there are so many reasons that he has to get there. But I would also suggest that what he sees as his obligation to the fans, his obligation to the league, to the players, the other teams is one of the biggest of those reasons. i have been critical of Ortiz at times. Was most critical when he splashed the dugout phone all over the thing with no reason to expect where those shards might have ended up....including some fellow player's eye! But all in he has been a better baseball citizen than many of baseball's stars and I hope I would be saying that even if he had been an opponent all these years. He is IMO going to take very seriously his obligation to get to the finish line and will likely consider his obligation to all those other constituents as even more important than his obligation to himself. I think that is worth considering when trying to place this team in the AL East as well. How many games will he play? My guess would be about 100. How hard will he run? My guess would be not very hard as the Achilles almost failed him at the end of last season. He looked very unsteady standing on 2nd base that day....more unsteady between his ears than he was on his ankles. What kind of hitter will he be? My guess....even more of a power hitter than he has been as that actually serves three purposes at least: - He is still far and away the most legit power source we have at 40!!!!! - He will want to add to his power numbers on his way out as a means of legitimizing the best shot he will have at the Hall (I think he gets there eventually) - Rounding the bases in a HR jog spares the Achilles and spares Ortiz the continuing ordeal of the dreaded shift. Each year opponents have pushed their shifts on him deeper into the OF because there are now so many places from which a throw will beat David to 1st So I have no expectation of David being the David of old but even more the David of 2015. Frankly while that is not ideal, we have so many more issues than whether David is more like the David of 2015 or 2007. I will take the power numbers and be happy to have them. What will be more interesting is where Farrell places him in yet another very eclectic lineup. Any lineup with Panda, Hanley, JBJ and Castillo will be for 2016 an eclectic bag of offerings. Farrell can't possibly put David at 3 again....can he????? Even 4 might be a stretch in this line up with David likely gunning for the fences a good deal of the time. But it has to be 4 or 5 and if Farrell is smart, more likely both through the season.

I would agree with that in principle. They are probably using more than WAR though as they have so many data points at their disposal. That said, even if more data points were added, that would not result in a meaningful comment on standings because rolling up data this way simply does not offer a result with any statistical relevance. I understand what Fangraphs is doing. It is even doing it in a way that tries to caution its audience about what this stuff is...but some in the audience apparently don't understand what Fangraphs is, don't understand how to read into results of this sort or achieved this way and probably have difficulty parsing Fangraphs very detailed and relevant statistical data from this sort of exercise thinking that one equals the other. It doesn't. You can build a fantasy team using Fangraphs...very helpful...you could even try to build a real team this way...though I would not recommend it. Rolling up those data points into a comment on eventual standings simply does not result in a relevant comment on standings. It is a house of cards that crumbles very quickly and it seems Fangraphs even knows it. Again, I have no issues with Fangraphs.

Sure it can....most of it can....but the data is the data and data is what Fangraghs is good at. The data they provide is likely essential to those indulging in Fantasy Leagues for example though I am not one....Rolling that data up into a projection on standing is not data.....nor is it useful to anybody IMO other than Fangraphs itself. Frankly I don't have an issue with that either. Fangraphs is a for profit organization and just like any other for profit organization it finds ways to keep itself relevant. So I have no issues with Fangraphs efforts to provoke thought and discussion by taking data and rolling it up any way they choose. It is when WE then take that and make more of it that it is that I start to respond. The only reason I even think what Elk found was meaningful is because IMO that is Fangraphs saying to its audience, that the way we rolled up THIS DATA into a projection on standings is fun with numbers and nothing more. It becomes a little difficult to run a profitable web based service when your audience has taken your information, bet the mortgage on it and LOST when they themselves did not intend it to be taken seriously even as a comment on the actual outcome of the season about to be played. People want to argue that this is the caliber that can compete for a championship. That is fine as far as it goes. Using this sort of information as part of that argument is simply wrong headed. If the Sox were at the bottom of a list like this and some nitwit Yankee troll came into the site claiming that to be some sort of relevant comment on the season about to be played and the eventual standings I would react the same way.

That is not much of an argument for the way we handled either situation. Sure we needed a 3rd baseman. We did not need one so desperately that we ended up saddling ourselves with a known problem without taking any measures to protect ourselves. The man was an embarrassment last year and there is every chance he will continue to be an embarrassment as he has done NOTHING this off season differently. In fact last off season he lost even more weight than his norm as a means of setting the hook on some Baseball Ops organization ( I just can't remember who) and then proceeded to pack it all back on again as is his practice. in fact this man appears to listen to nothing anybody tells him and does nothing relevant to his problem. Instead he batters the people trying to help him on his way out of town. One of the things he has likely been told and ignored is that if you constantly put your body through an annual process of weight reduction followed by letting the flood gates open your body gets used to that cycle and you will progressively just pack the weight back on again even faster year by year. I would bet that Panda can now pack on as much as a pound in a weekend! His listed playing weight is now 255! I suspect that also means that by year end last year he was approaching 290. Almost immediately after signing some of us said that our best hope for Panda was to get a couple of good years out of him before the weight just owned him. In fact we got no years out of him before that happened. As for Porcello your argument suggests that leading the market, competing with yourself for contracts makes sense and it in fact it does not. Just because the price is going up does not suggest you should lead the market by so much that it takes two to three years for the rest of baseball to catch up. What about Porcello made THAT brilliant?

You can always tell when we are getting close. These threads peter out and nobody has the strength to replace them with anything worth the effort to key them in.

In fact this is why I hae contended that Ortiz will not risk injury to the Achillies in this his victory lap season. He has to make it all the way to the finish line which almost didn't happen last year.He certainly will want to make it all the way there.

Fine....it is simply not relevant as a projection on standings which is how the data is presented. And You don't have to present the data in that format if that is what you are after. In fact, you don't have to prsent the data in that format at all if that is what you are after.

There surely was a rational behind signing Panda....they needed a 3rd baseman. But whatever rational there was for signing him got blown out of the water because they signed him for too much money with no weight stipulations in his contract. Sort of like the same one step forward two steps back approach they ended up with on Porcello. Signing him was fine. But then extending him for all the possible money and then some he ever would have gotten in FA was ridiculous.

Not that it really matters but I don't think JH ever had much confidence in BC. He had and then lost confidence in Larry and when Larry went down, he dragged BC down with him. Although they offered to keep BC on, staying would have IMO been a bad career move for BC and he was at least smart enough to know it. Really thinking about it, Theo probably just ran out of patience with JH. Theo probably wanted more power and authority than JH was willing to give to him. He finally gave up and went elsewhere.

Fangraphs cares about the accuracy of its statistical data on players which is what Fangraphs is all about. This is in technical terms what some would call a finite group analysis where each change to one member of the group effects all the other participants and the group size is finite. It is not growing nor can it grow. There are other names for it as well but that one will do for our purposes. A political poll for example is an entirely different kind of statistical analysis where the level of confidence goes up as the number of participants polled increases. There is no practical use for a finite group analysis with a margin for error of +/- 11% or more or a total of 22+%. Elk apparently found the margin for error somewhere on their site. So I am taking his word for that piece. I care to spend zero time looking at fum with numbers. It is statistically invalidated by a number of things not the least of which is the margin for error on the number. It is at the least statistically irrelevant. But you are simply not understanding what Fangraphs does nor the basis for finite group analysis. This is nothing more than an excellent PR tool for Fangraphs for the exact reason that it gets some mileage here. It is simply another way to group numbers in a way that is to some extent provocative ....that is it! Another way to think about this sort of "data" and it barely deserves to be called that is to reduce it to some sort of a betting line. This "projection" would support something like a $1.00 throw away bet. "I bet $1.00 and if I hit, I am a millionaire." It would be the equivalent of a lottery ticket....at best. i would be inclined to think that the actual data being compiled as relevant as far as it goes but the result when used this way is irrelevant.

Nobody will agree because Porcello was not a good deal....one could only call it that in the context of the horror of Hanley/Panda and toss Castillo in there for good measure. Porcello is about somewhere between $12-$15m worth of pitcher but the Sox are paying $20m per. Most ML players especially once they hit FA are overpaid at that point but you can only extend that logic so far. Extending it to the Porcello's of the world is a farce. Go pay $20k for even $15k worth of a plain Jane, kind of the mundane car and see if you end up happy with that.

2% is actually a big number. I am sure he is hoping that does not hold.

Neither is accurate to within anything worth talking about. its fun with numbers or just fun. Call it what you want. If you took them to Vegas and bet them you would be broke in a nanosecond. Plus Fangraphs has a vested interest in promoting outcomes based on purely stats based analysis. That and the Fantasy Leagues it bolsters are its bread and butter. It has no real interest in the accuracy of a standings projections other than that it gives it another talking point...another means to accumulate stats in a way that produces some result and draws attention (PR). Do you really think they care how accurate they are? If they did they would consider last year and every year they have done them colossal failures. Why sports fans refuse to follow the simplest rule of all...follow the money......The majority of the time, you will come closer to accurate if you follow that simple rule. Whether its Fangraphs or your local supermarket.....follow the money.

I would rate you a baseball fan though or for one thing you would not be looking at and posting in a baseball forum. I consider casual fans people that are spending entertainment $ on baseball as opposed to spending baseball $ on baseball. Those spending entertainment $ on baseball just find something more entertaining if the team is playing embarrassing ball. There are a a bunch of things you can do with your family for $500.

I actually think those casual fans are the most likely to pass if in fact the dynamic I suggested is at play. However it won't effect that fans that stream in from out of town who consider Fenway now a baseball destination. But again, I am not any longer conversant on the state of season ticket sales and or package deal sales and I am sure there are others here that are much more on top of that. Actually hoping that one of the folks in the discussion can tell us if in fact advanced ticket sales are not at the pace one would expect for this period or if it is in fact a bit too early. If we are not in a high advance ticket sales period yet, it can't be that far off. I would have bought my season seats by now just as an example...but believe me that is info from the long ago 70's. Since then I hae either sat in company owned seats or bought tickets a month or two in advance of going. For one thing, while the Sox held the line on ticket prices for 2015, I would have given strong consideration to doing it again in 2016. A price increase might turn out to be a tough pill to swallow under the circumstances.

Interesting that it is down so much that the packages are not moving. Maybe it is a little early though. Last time I was a season ticket holder, you just walked up, somebody took you out to take a look at the seats you wanted and if you liked them, just got your tickets. Could have had just about anything you wanted really, maybe with the exception of the loge seats right around the dugout over to just right of the plate. I always thought the seats in the first couple rows under the roof were prime. Shade from the sun and protection from the rain. When I was a season ticket holder that is exactly where the team wives sat. Gotta' figure that was a prime location. Tickets are so much now and if there is some delay in ticket sales that you guys with more recent season ticket experience are sensing, it might be because there is winning and losing and then there is flat embarrassing. They were bad in 2014 and flat embarrassing in 2015. Yet some of the most troubling aspects of the 2015 squad are still here. So I think fans might be taking a wait and see attitude. Nobody wants to blow $500.00 on a day at the park (family tics plus parking plus food and assorted memorabilia) only to watch an embarrassing 2016 rendition of the 2015 nonsense. Red Sox marketing has the park itself which is a baseball destination and an asset in that regard. But the home fans of the team won't sit there and watch embarrassing...not much anyway.