Laika

King's post is allowable despite the flavour (and his opinions showing through) because it was directly related to baseball. It's a baseball + Covid story. L54's replies were not fine. They were basically name calling with a little bit of fair opinion hidden underneath the flaming. Stupid posts! The floor is open for someone to respond rationally to King's post, if they are capable. Any response should stick to Turner and MLB's actions though. This isn't the place to just argue about Covid death rates etc.

You might like the post but it is a summary of what the poster heard on the radio. How can that be the post of the year? The standards for our BJMB Awards are really slipping.

Wednesday, October 28, 2020 Maybe taking out Snell was a bit too early? By Tangotiger 07:23 PM I’ve posted on Twitter some data. I wrote a chapter in The Book on the topic. Plenty of others have chimed in, all concluding the same thing. Times Thru Order effect is real, and it does not take a backseat to a pitcher that is mowing down his opponents. I’m here to offer a possibility that under a specific situation, maybe there is an overriding concern. We’ll get there in a sec. Here’s a data chart, and I’ll explain what it is. (Click to embiggen) http://tangotiger.com/images/uploads/snell_thruOrder.png All the data is from 2010-2019, courtesy of Retrosheet. Chart on the left is regular season and chart on the right is the post-season. The columns from -1 to 9 refers to the strikeout - walk differential for the first 18 batters faced. -1 means more walks than strikeouts. 9 means 9 or more strikeouts than walks. All the others are exact counts. Walk is really walks + hit batters, with IBB removed. Snell was a “9”, meaning the best. The columns “1” and “2” means 1st time and 2nd time through the order. The data is wOBA. Now, don’t pay too much (or any) attention to those two columns. Those are selection biases and we’ll learn nothing from them. The column we care about is “3” meaning the performance 3rd time through the order. Since we selected our strikeout-walk differential based on the first 18 batters faced (in-sample), we are interested in what happens after that (out-of-sample). And that is the third time thru the order. Now, let’s start with the regular season. We notice that the wOBA gets progressively lower, the more the strikeout-walk differential. That’s really an issue of bias, because the better pitchers will be part of the higher differential groups disproportionately. So, we expect that value to behave as it does based strictly on the quality of the pitchers in each of those groups. Now, the right thing for me to do is to look at the actual quality of pitchers in there. I will leave that to the Aspiring Saberist. What we can do instead is use this as a baseline of sorts as we now turn our attention to the post-season chart. First, we’ll notice that in the post-season, third time through, with the strikeout-walk differential at 5 or less, the performance is roughly the same. Since the post-season is made up of good pitchers to begin with, we don’t expect the progressive drop we saw from the regular season. That said, then the fun happens. We see a big drop at a strikeout-walk differential of 6. Then a huge drop at 7. And all by its lonesome is a .214 wOBA with a strikeout-walk differential of 9+. Now, we are only talking about 9 pitchers (all huge names, as you’d expect: Cole and Kershaw twice each, Kluber, CC, Max, Stras, Verlander). And they totalled just 49 plate appearances. One standard deviation is 71 wOBA points. If we assume a .300 level talent, that’s only 1.2 standard deviations. But, 49 sounds like a lot, and if the non-data folks want to hang their hats on something, it’s that one. That in the post-season, when a superstar pitcher is mowing down batters, they went out to pitch at a better-than-Mariano level. And to give them more ammunition, we can combine the strikeout-walk differential at 7+ (so those last three lines). That’s 341 batters faced at a wOBA of .259 (meaning Mariano level). And one standard deviation is now down to 27 points. Which is actually 1.5 standard deviations. Therefore, I will give them that as a reasonable possibility. Just like we DID find evidence that a pitcher’s talent level does improve in the 9th inning when he’s going for a perfect game, maybe there is a brief change in talent level for a pitcher, who is at the highest level, pitching at an even higher level, and on the greatest stage, the post-season. That said, these star pitchers did not pitch at the level that their first 18 batters suggested, that they were “unhittable”. The best you can see is that they pitched like an average Mariano Rivera. Which is of course great. And naturally, you don’t pull Mariano Rivera from a game. But everything I’ve said comes with a degree of uncertainty. You can make the argument that Blake Snell third time through drop in performance gets cancelled out by what we saw, and so we had an average Blake Snell. And you don’t pull an average Blake Snell. Or, all of this is really grasping at straws, that the regular season provides so much data that we can conclude that Snell was losing effectiveness all the while our eyes were lying to us. Anyway, the floor is open to the Aspiring Saberists.

There really are a lot of options for Toronto if they will consider any 2B or 3B or SS. Stars like Turner and DJLM and Semien. Solid second tier players like Simmons and Gregorius. Some harder to evaluate second tier players like Wong and La Stella. Younger guys with upside like Lamb, Profar, Schoop. Veteran bounce-back candidates like Marwin or Asdrubal. Other semi-interesting vets like Kipnis, Brad Miller. Cesar Hernandez is very interesting to me.

If we need one more owner I have someone who I could probably ask

How about this guy for 3B?

This is a lazy and stupid criticism. Toronto is just a normal, holistic organization. They make rational decisions informed by data and all relevant information. They actually do not care about PR, at least not before other factors, in a lot of ways... see some of the constant criticism of the team for lineup decisions, pitching decisions etc. The team really does not give a s*** what a huge section of their fanbase thinks. I think it's also irrelevant. Most people are going to see what happened with JT as a failure of MLB and the organization. The player was put into an impossible situation. This isn't even close to Clevinger/Plesac hitting the town, not telling their team, and lying about it.

Prize reminder. I am amending the prize with a stipulation that you can only ban someone who is part of our fantasy league culture Too bad Boxy quit the board and banning him would be pointless

Is there a cutdown or anything or is this just a dynasty league now that it's on Fantrax with no cutdown? What even is the waiver draft in this league? Can prospects be demoted at will now? Are the entry picks for the NHL draft that just occurred? Are goalies good in this league?

MLBTR presents some skepticism: Talk of revenue losses throughout the sport has been prominent since the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, but commissioner Rob Manfred put some more concrete numbers on the concept this week. In an interview with Barry M. Bloom for Sportico, Manfred claimed that the league’s 30 teams have amassed a collective $8.3 billion in debt and will post anywhere from $2.8 to $3.0 billion in combined operational losses. Manfred’s comments come at a time when many clubs throughout the league have made sweeping layoffs to both business-side and baseball operations employees. The Athletic’s Alex Coffey reported last week that the A’s, for instance, are preparing to lay off upwards of 150 employees who were furloughed throughout much of the 2020 season. They’re far from the only club making such broad-ranging cuts, although Oakland certainly figures to be on the more extreme end of the spectrum. Evan Drellich of The Athletic wrote yesterday that a league official claimed Major League Baseball’s EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — showed a loss of $2.7 billion but also noted that with the league’s books closed, such numbers can’t be independently verified. A league official claimed to Drellich, perhaps more dubiously, that even under normal conditions the league would have expected $10 billion in revenue against $10.2 billion of expenses — a rather eye-opening and frankly questionable assertion when considering last year’s widely reported $10.7 billion of revenue for MLB. In that sense, the claims put forth by Manfred and the unnamed league official(s) who spoke to Drellich on the condition of anonymity call back to the ugly standoff between MLB and the MLBPA during return-to-play negotiations, wherein the players repeatedly called for ownership to open its books and provide quantitative evidence of the extent of the damage they were facing. Detractors will surely question the veracity of the league’s figures, which Drellich notes do not account for “ancillary” revenue streams like stakes in regional sports networks. Regardless, there’s no doubting that revenue losses felt by clubs in the absence of fans is enormous. The job cuts throughout the sport are but one way for ownership to soften the blow, but the most direct means of correcting course for owners is expected to be via club payroll. For months we’ve heard expectations of a bloated group of non-tendered players and a tepid market for free agents. To that end, Bloom notes that some club executives have already signaled that they won’t be able to commit salary to players this winter. Some clubs will surely still spend money. The purported $2.8 to $3 billion in operating losses isn’t necessarily divided evenly among the league’s 30 clubs, and tolerance for loss varies from owner to owner (or ownership group to ownership group). Still, on a macro level it’s wise to anticipate large-scale reductions in team payrolls. Most concerning for players, remaining club employees and the health of the sport is the potential for additional revenue losses in 2021. While the obvious hope is that fans will be back in the park for a full 162-game slate next season, that’s wholly dependent on the status of the coronavirus and the associated public health guidelines in place. To this point there’s no clear timeline on when a vaccine will be produced, approved, scaled and distributed such that clubs could expect business as usual. And while Manfred has previously taken an optimistic tone on that front, he struck a different chord in speaking with Bloom this week. “t’s going to be difficult for the industry to weather another year where we don’t have fans in the ballpark and have other limitations on how much we can’t play and how we can play,” Manfred told Bloom. “…It’s absolutely certain, I know, that we’re going to have to have conversations with the MLBPA about what 2021 is going to look like. It’s difficult to foresee a situation right now where everything’s just normal.”

I guess he's not going to be a CF... probably not even a good OF with that body. Tank!

It’s a cutter and I think it might suck? Hasn’t looked great this playoffs at least

Alright, I'm in. I have not watched much hockey in the last few years but I'll probably still be awesome at this so look out.

I think this was a good idea but when we do it next year I will give owners a limited number of transactions to replace players. Say, 12 add/drops for the entire playoffs, or something like that.

This is actually a very tight finish between Pendleton and TheHurl. Both have: Smith Lowe Bellinger Betts Seager Arozarena Kershaw Glasnow Anderson Just Pendleton: Jansen Just Hurl: Buehler McGee It's going to come down to ERA and K/BB. Hurl trails in both categories by a hair. Or are the stats just completely out of date? Not sure how that Fantrax drama has played out.

I was messaged about this. What's the deal? You need one more owner and there will be a dispersal draft?

Really not enjoying this older, wiser version of Spanky who shows up tuned every night and then makes no fantasy baseball trades.

Highlight plays, I guess. His arm was on display this year and he made a bunch of diving catches.

not really!

Only if you have moved

Yes, you probably did quite well. You may rub your nipples if you want. Basically turned May into a few good assets of arguably slightly lower value. I think everybody would still take May over any one of those players.

Similar packages but I think Sixto has more in the bag. Better secondaries IMO. May seems too dependent on his horizontal moving FB.

Big gap between Sixto and Jhoan Duran, lol

Phew. I was worried I’d accidentally end up owning him

I don’t think that is exactly what happened! You must be misremembering both trades there. You got Corbin and Davis for May. Then I traded you Marsh and Duran for Corbin. Then I traded Corbin for Marco Luciano (in a bigger deal). Corbin got traded three times last offseason