Laika

What program do you prefer? I've used R a little bit for graphing but I don't really remember most of the language. I should probably refamiliarize myself with R.

Transaction Analysis geeks might like this http://www.breakingblue.ca/2013/12/01/a-primer-and-review-on-value-calculations-part-1/

How many teams, what are the stats, and what are their salary situations? Two seasons in a row in the PL, I've drafted Ike Davis and rostered him through several horrendous months before dropping him and watching him put up numbers for someone else in the second half. Luckily last season he got hurt so it wasn't a wholly regrettable drop. Ike Davis is a cancer! Avoid him. He's also a pretty replaceable fantasy 1B, although he does have some big power upside.

If you mean Dickey today, then sure. Maybe that's fair. If you mean Dickey from pre-2013, then you're insane. Even right now, I'd probably prefer the next 2 years from Dickey over the next 2 from Smurf_DJ_zinga. Dickey quietly came back huge in the second half, his velocity came back and so did his run prevention skills. He might be 39 but he's not on the same trajectory as most pitchers. RA can probably pitch into his mid 40's if he feels like it.

In context, Dickey was >>>>> Samardzija

We're still feeling it out but yeah, I'm thinking that might be the formula.

If you post breaking news (or whatever), it would probably be beneficial to shoot a quick tweet out. Just your article title and the link would be fine. @BreakingBlueMLB password = heisenbird And a few notes about the article just published: - Title shouldn't be a question, especially since it has been confirmed. - Rumours needs a u! - Probably shouldn't say according to reports from MLBTR, since MLBTR themselves don't really ever report anything. Just say who MLBTR says broke the news. In this case, Nolasco has signed with the Twins, as first reported by @ChrisCotillo - Link portion of @AlexHalsted missed the D (I can't just make these edits because you have the article open / "currently editing")

I can't get my head off of this subject. I'm just not really seeing the 9M or 10M figure anywhere. For anyone else who cares, this comment thread has an abundance of information. Tango, MGL, Swartz, and others commenting on a pretty good study. http://tangotiger.com/index.php/site/comments/how-much-do-wins-cost I also found this 1-2 year old Swartz study that looks like it found about ~6M in 2011 with a trend of roughly ~6% inflation. So say 7.25M this offseason. This corroborates the more recent study from the first post. http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/a-retrospective-look-at-the-price-of-a-win-part-two/ More than anything though, I've found the question to be extremely complicated. It's obvious that the cost/win in free agency isn't the cost/win in all of baseball. The most efficient way to add wins is through league min and low arb players. The Rays pay like 2 million bucks per win, or something like that. The Blue Jays probably paid a near free agency rate for all of their wins above replacement last season. A win near the 90 win mark is worth a lot more than a win anywhere else, so value is very relative. $/WAR value calculations might be more dubious than informative in some circumstances. I'm wary of the entire exercise.

Chris, please don't leave too soon. We plan on riding your nerdy coat tails somewhere.

It's definitely something that I want/need some more information on

Chris and Nox have both said that 9M is more corrector, but I haven't read their source material or anything. I have no idea what numbers to actually use. Fangraphs still uses things closer to 5, I think. I've used 5, 7.5, and 9 so far. I've actually written an entire post about value calculation questions in order to kind of crowdsource an ideal method, but I'm not sure if it would get enough attention to be worth posting yet.

Yeah, there's a chasm there. Hard to really like a guy with that run rate in those types of parks. I'd probably take Vargas for 32 before I'd take Nolasco at the same amount, and Nolasco wants like 80M or something goofy.

Crunched some Jeff Smardzjzjzj numbers in our first Bird Seed news recap re: how much him, Sanchez, and Stroman are roughly worth. http://www.breakingblue.ca/2013/11/24/bird-seed-mccann-peralta-samardzija-nolasco-anthopoulos/

I've been hesitant to because I want to standardize our value calculations first. I'm going to need help from the community at large to do so, so I'm currently working on a post to that end. Hopefully after I get that sorted, I/we can go back and examine McCann and Peralta, and anyone else.

We could pick our consensus top 20 and then Ace could write them all up, if he wants. And then put them out 2 at a time or whatever. I think Ace should write the meat of all of it since that's his forte, but Chris and I could give some input on their profiles and what that means in terms of their chances of working out, etc. Maybe it would be a pretty good list since we have two angles going on. Ace is like our resident youtube scout, and Chris and I are the stat-filter BR couch analysts or whatever

I think you accidentally a word

OP is a wimp

but what about THIS http://sabr.org/research/does-pitcher-s-height-matter A short pitcher could theoretically cancel out the theoretical optical negatives of being short be theoretically being inherently better at other things, like such as controlling his shorter limbs a bit better and repeating his delivery more effectively, in theory.

Fielding Exempt True Chucking Heuristic FETCH!

Pretty sure he has like, a Master's degree in modern poetry or something crazy like that. Published poet, sabermetrician.

It's extremely difficult to predict what specific players will do in the future. In general, these projection systems are excellent. When it comes to certain specific individual players, however, they can be super wrong. With Bourjos, I'm guessing that Steamer just doesn't give him as much credit for fielding as he's earned while playing in his 350 some odd games so far. So if he's played like a +20 run centre fielder, Steamer probably takes a more cautious view of him and pretends that he's a +8 or something like that.

I like a couple of their dudes. Cistullli. Matt Carruth used to write for them too and I liked him, but I think he quit the game entirely. But yeah. Jess Sullivan is one of their best writers and I think he's just some M's blogger that Cameron scooped up one day.

Bourjos' Steamer projection seems kind of bunk though. He's been worth 9 wins in basically 2 seasons worth of playing time. He's still pre-prime. 2.6 wins seems pretty light.

I think it will end up mostly being a lose-lose trade.

Sure, they are on the MLC leaderboards. Just be careful about how you frame the data. For example, David Robertson is one of the higher looking K% guys in MLB according to MLC, and he has a phenomenal curveball.