TwistedLogic

If the Blue Jays won the World Series in 2014, I think Halladay would get a ring

Holland was a guy I was begging for all the way back Soria was the closer in Kansas, too lazy to check when that was (2-3 years)? Kenley's another guy I always loved. Though I'll admit I was one out of the many (everyone?) that got blind-sided by Uehara. If you look at his numbers, anyone could have seen it coming, the guy's been and elite reliever since he stepped into the majors.

You're making excellent progress on your work if you've already significantly evolved a metric that got you national attention. When you're talking about advanced statistics that give me more information on what has already happened, I'm all ears.

Jack-Z isn't the only one working in his office, as much as we all wish that were true lol. And numbers don't have to lie when they can just as easily deceive I guess the projections debate is one thing that we'll have to agree to disagree on. I think projections are a useful tool among others when you're looking at players in a vacuum, I just think they become insignificant when you want to ball an entire organization up into one number. The amount of wiggle room and ability to go up or down on each individual player's projection, when added all together, makes the final number too much of a variable. That is my personal belief, and I think it's a legitimate, sensible one. Beyond that, everyone else has a right to their own opinion and some things make more sense or work better for others. At the end of the day, it's to each their own.

Yes, I understand that, because I know that with the emergence of advanced statistics, the new and cool thing to do is to treat players as robots.

You and me might frown or laugh at intangibles, and choose whether or not to believe it them, but teams do not. Teams take them heavily into account. That right there begins a massive separation between where a team thinks they are and where your Steamer list says they are. DeRosa didn't just get a job because he was a platoon bat, he got a job because he moonlights as a mascot. If a team believes that a good clubhouse chemistry is worth x-amount of wins, and actually has its own research and data to give credibility to that claim, that gives them a significantly different valuation of their ball club than what we are looking at. JFaS thinks the Mariners aren't ready to compete, so Jack-Z should call it off. It doesn't work that way. The Mariners have their own numbers, their own information, they think they're ready to compete. Now we can sit here and start another fruitless debate about why the Mariners are really competing, pretending that we know what's going on in their front office, or we can accept that there may be a projection system out there, or there may be a cumulative host of information, that tells us that the Mariners can compete in 2014. A few seasons ago if the Athletics or the Oriole's GMs had suddenly decided to become buyers after the kind of seasons they'd been posting, people like us might have been saying that they aren't ready to compete. Well, it turned out that they were. People laughed at the Royals a season ago, saying that they were not ready to compete and would need to improve before making an all-in trade. We were correct, they didn't compete in 2013, but just a season later they've Steamer'd their way up to the #5 spot going into the next season. Who are we to say that it's smart or dumb for the Mariners to go all-in right now? Even if it doesn't pay off in 2014, it doesn't mean it's an idiotic plan. It could easily pay off in 2014 once Cano is settled in and the Mariners have more knowledge of their core of young talent. The end goal is to get a ring. Two teams decided to go all-in last offseason: the Royals and the Blue Jays. People supported the Jays moves, saying they were a team that was on the cusp and needed that push over the edge, while people ridiculed the Royals, partly because they made a moronic trade, and partly because that moronic trade came at a time where they were allegedly not near contention. Twelve months later, as a result of those moves, the Royals are above the Jays in your beloved Steamer's projections, even if it is by just one spot.

"Barring injury, Brandon Morrow can be an x-win pitcher in 2014. It is x as likely to happen because he has had x amount of injuries in the past. x amount of these injuries are real concerns because they are mechanics-related injuries in x-amount of ways, so while he might be an x-win pitcher, he can also possibly end up needing x surgery and be out for the rest of the season, providing no value at all." http://www.imwsa.com/img/correct.gif "Barring injury, Brandon Morrow, Melky Cabrera, Brett Lawrie, Jose Bautista, JA Happ, Colby Rasmus, Jose Reyes and Sergio Santos will be worth x amount of total wins". http://jewellerysearch.com/images/button_cancel.gif The first tells you something, the second is useless garbage. So you would use a system that has an astronomically high fail rate, and missed each team's record by an average of 7.4 wins in 2013, to determine whether the most crucial point for your ball club is now here, and you're ready to spend or not? I wonder if I'm the only one here that believes this, but I don't think ball clubs are out there deciding whether to be sellers or buyers based on Steamer, my friend. These teams have an infinite amount of data, they are using every available tool at their disposal, have lengthy injury histories, in-depth scouting reports, medical records, these teams know when to go for a win and when to stand pat. Us fans use Steamer.

Do you not understand realistic actuality? Injuries DO exist, and players don't always play their projected amount of time, and so the projections do NOT give you any useful information. Learning that "in utopia, this is what would happen" is fun and all, but it gives us nothing. Bottom line: If you want to say how many wins this team should win, you should not; you have no way of knowing. You can use as many projections and data as you want, you will not get an accurate gauge on it because you can't quantify intangibles. It's the cold hard truth that sabers don't want to accept. You. Can. Not. Quantify. Intangibles. You can't put a number on a coach fixing Bautista's swing. You can't put a number on Rasmus' comfort level in a certain place affecting his performance. You can't calculate how injury prone a player is, and how much more injury prone he is than anybody else. You can't definitively say that the guy standing in the on-deck circle does not come into the mind of the guy on the mound, and ultimately affects the kind of pitch that the guy in the batter's box sees next. Maybe some day we will be able to calculate all of this, right now we can't. I don't need to keep referring to the Astros, I've already mentioned the Dodgers, the Indians-Twins and the numbers for the rest of the league. You are ignoring reality to throw out this number of 85 wins; maybe it would be an accurate estimate in a simulation-based environment. That isn't major league baseball. Estimating how many wins a single player will accumulate in one season has merit, has use. Estimating how much WAR a collective baseball organization will accumulate is useless.

No, the margins of error are so vast that it essentially makes the information worthless. It gives you the vaguest estimate from which you could add or subtract 10 wins to get the area in which your team is likely to land (and funnily enough, even then you have a good chance at being wrong; fangraphs projections were off by 10 wins or more on 9 of the 30 teams last year. 13 more of the remaining 21 teams were off by at least 5 wins. 5 wins can be the difference in being the top seed in your division versus sitting at home in October). The volatility of the information makes it so that it barely tells you anything, let alone acting as "gospel". If you average out the amount of wins that FanGraphs was off by last season, you get 7.4. Knowing that I have the number "85-87" and my team is likely to end up anywhere between 7 wins below that mark (78) to 7 wins above that mark (94) tells me nothing. When all is said and done next year, the projected standings based on Steamer or whoever else will have been about as accurate or useful as any ESPN writer's predictions. So when a moron like MohYou comes along and says "this is a last place team" without providing any basis for that statement, the correct rebuttal isn't "no, it's an 85-87 win team", because that is just as absurd of a statement.

Attaching a WAR value to that specific player is not the problem. If someone says "based on all of this information, Adam Lind looks to be a 1.2 WAR player in 2014". I'm completely on board with that. That is an educated guess. It's not accurate, because it doesn't count for injuries, breakouts or regression, but we can conclude that we can all see him at or around that mark, while nobody will be surprised if he goes back to being below replacement level, or even posts twice as much WAR. The problem is when you then take that very fragile number you just gave to Lind and put it into a calculator and hit the + sign and then enter equally fragile numbers that you assigned to Rasmus and Morrow. Now you're trying to put a predicted value to a guy who's been a different, but similar player in every year he's been in the majors (Lind), a guy who's sandwiching two horrible seasons with two excellent ones (Rasmus) and a reliever-turned starter that oozes with potential if he can only manage to stay on the field. You're already treading into the "virtually impossible to predict the outcome" waters with just these three players. Now you throw in the other 22 on the active roster, including the entire category of volatile relievers, the other 15 on the 40-man, the entire farm system, developmental staff, coaches, in-season trades, unforeseen circumstances (tu ere maricon), all of the other intangibles and pure dumb luck. You're telling me you can give me a number of wins a team is expected to accumulate in 2014, with a straight face? Single-player projections make sense to evaluate that player in a vacuum. When you put Player A + Player B + Players C-Y = team wins, you've just given me an absolutely USELESS number. With all of the up-and-downs on each of those players (Lind posting half or double of what he's expected to), you can easily end up missing your mark by 15 wins (Dodgers, Astros), making it a flawed and again, USELESS number. Nope.Who are we better than85-87 win team right now.No we're not? I don't even know what our rotation looks likeSteamer thinks we are: http://www.breakingblue.ca/2013/12/04/offseason-power-rankings-dec-4/ This exchange is a prime example of what I mean. Disregarding the fact that MohYou is a retard, this conversation proves exactly how poorly projections are used on here. Even if the people in question might not completely believe it, it is being heavily implied that the Blue Jays really are an 85-87 win team. You are assigning a value taken from the mythical world of "all things being equal" and pasting it on one of the most volatile, injury prone teams in sports right now. That is not accurate, and in JFaS' own words, is not the actual. Yet then you guys portray it as the actual yourselves.

Bud, the Astros were projected at 74 wins last year, going into the season, after those wins had been distributed. No my problem isn't with trying to make an educated prediction of the future by using informed estimates. Saying "Adam Lind is going to continue to be poor against left-handed pitching, we should account for at least one disabled list trip for Morrow, and we should have a serviceable backup for right field because it's getting to be a habit for Jose to miss time". That's a legitimate "projection". My problem is then sabers throwing their usual OCD-twist on it by trying to assign number values to every player based on this information, and then ridiculously combining it into a total win projection for a team. It becomes useless at that point. Coming on this board and using that information to tell someone "we shouldn't worry as much because based on this, the Jays look to be an 87-win team", you yourself might know that what you just told this person is useless rubbish, because it is based on the fallacy of "all things being equal" (which is true 0% of the time in the real world) but the other person will likely take it to mean something else. It's grossly misleading and it is used in the wrong context almost 100% of the time on these boards. "Steamer projects this vs this, so we should go after this guy".

Yup I just underperformed and got unlucky. But don't worry because Steamer says I will bring in two A's next semester to compensate.

That's why I think it's stupid, but not as bad to change my opinion on him, whether in the positive or negative. Yeah I don't give him huge credit for this. @ the previous post , Reagins acquired on Wells because, from what I've read, Moreno gave him 24 hours to bring in Wells or he was fired. AA gets credit for being in the right place at the right time, but as a whole, I think it's a negative on AA for losing Napoli. Not because he should have kept him (again, TDA and JP) but because of similar to the Fister trade, he could have got more than Fatty Francisco.

This f***ing picture never gets old LOL. Oh and screw you.

If I can invent a load of ******** like "truGrit" and come up with, what everyone here will agree with is a more accurate result for the Astros 2014 season, how does that prove the projection system's legitimacy any more? Looking at this chart, true talent tells us that the Astros should win 70 games, the Reds are expected to lose 84 games and that the Royals and Blue Jays are the 5th and 6th best team in the major leagues respectively. I'm sorry if you don't agree with my opinion here, and I really respect and appreciate the work and research you've accomplished, because most of it is incredibly good. But this particular concept is complete ********. It's a waste of time. It'll never be ditched, because as I said, sabermetricians are desperate to be able to predict the future, but it holds absolutely no merit. Just another thing to do in the off-season, no different in significance than rosterbation or trade ideas.

This is what I find so crazy that someone as knowledgeable as you can stand to defend this argument. So as it stands, if the Astros lose more than 100 games in 2014, it's not because that's their true talent, but it's because they got wildly unlucky for the fourth consecutive year, missing their win total by 70 wins? My point is exactly that "true talent" means nothing! There is no such thing. It's a complete and utter fabrication; a myth. How the hell can we laugh at lineup protection or team chemistry so hard and then support something ridiculous as true talent? How can you say what Rasmus' or Morrow's "true talent" is? Sabermetricians are obsessed with being able to predict the future, so they've invented this completely redundant area of research where they go to waste their time. You're chasing a ghost. No team in any single given year is going to match it's "true talent" because it doesn't exist. Injuries exist, regression exists, intangibles exist, things that can't be quantified, I'm sorry to burst the saber bubble here, exist. You ask why do we bother doing it? That's exactly my question. Why? Why are we trying to follow a system that depends absolutely on the clause "barring any injuries"? This is a far far more absurd concept than "the will to win". I'm not defending that rubbish but at least that has some sort of a basis where you can start (player psychology). Projections systems have no accuracy and no track record for accuracy. So you essentially agree that it's myth vs reality? If it doesn't PROVIDE you with the "actual", why do you do it? To gauge the "true talent" of each team? What does that achieve? Let's call it false talent, or perfect-world talent or hypothetical talent. How can you call it "true" if it's never "actual"?

Steamer, using large amounts of data, specific formulas and algorithms and an expertise of likely several years in the field, is predicting the Astros to win 70 games next year. I, using my own unique combination of tChemistry, truGrit, and twtw+ have determined that the Astros will win exactly 54 games next year. Let's revisit this next year and see who was closer.

No, my point is that projection systems are just absurd in the first place. It doesn't matter how much more accurate it is than some forum poster's opinion, it's still s*** in the end, making it an utterly redundant system. Bush was far more qualified than me to run America (...meh, debatable) but that doesn't make him a good president. FanGraphs projections missed the Astros loss record by 23 wins. They thought the Dodgers would win 14 fewer games than they did. They projected the Twins and Indians to have the same record (84-78) and missed each team by 8 wins. The Twins lost 8 more than projected, while the Indians won 8 more. They projected one single team to have 90 wins in the majors, with the worst record being 71 wins. Just because a wildly inaccurate system is used to judge every team, thus somehow levelling the playing field somehow, does not make it any more accurate. It is seriously so bad that you could assign a random number of wins to each team based on nothing but your own judgement, or hell, even the previous years standings, and you could end up with a far more accurate result than these projection systems. Just because it might get a few numbers close, or even on the dot sometime, it speaks nothing to it's legitimacy. It's just true that if you guessed a result for every player or team in the majors, you are bound to get some correct just by absolute fluke. It boggles my mind that a community that so openly smirks at traditional intangible concepts like "vetrin presents", "team chemistry" and "lineup protection" puts so much stock into a ridiculous system that attempts to predict the future. Looking at the 2013 projections, it's seriously no better or worse than to look at the stupid predictions game that ESPN writers play every season. The Jays are not an 85 win team or an 87 win team or and 89 team. They're as good as they're going to be. It's asinine to attempt to guess what that is going to be without any knowledge of future injuries, under-performances or surprise breakouts.

It was dumn but I didn't include it because it's not something that can make or break a team. Nobody really major traded hands there (the biggest quarrel I had with that was losing Musgrove and Comer after using high draft picks on them the year prior). The Dickey and Napoli ones had immediate repercussions and immediate implications. If you're going to talk about trades that are just generally dumn, then yes the Happ one was retarded, and I've always thought the Lincoln one was real stupid as well. But trades like that won't affect my opinion about a GM.

This is also sort of an over-exaggeration. They've made some very questionable calls, but so has everybody. Dombrowski is thought by a lot of people to be one of the best GMs in baseball. The Fister trade, I would argue, is as bad as the Dickey trade. Either can be worse or better than the other, but at the time they were made, they were just as bad. The players the Mets got for Dickey should have went to the Tigers for Fister, and the players the Tigers got for Fister should have went to the Mets for Dickey. Both of those trades would have made a million times more sense. Anthopoulos has built a very strong farm system, played the f*** out of everyone in the old draft compensation policy, acquired Lawrie, Rasmus, Escobar, Morrow, etc in very favourable trades, and people might disagree with me here, but I think he's got the absolute best track record for extensions since he became a general manager. It's f***ing ridiculous how favourable his extensions are. Where has he really f***ed up? The Napoli trade, the Dickey trade and the way he managed JP Arencibia. Those are only the real big marks against him (I could have left something out?) It's easy to s*** on someone in retrospect but these guys don't have crystal balls. None of us know how many of the 30 GMs wouldn't have traded Gomes for Rogers in the same situation. How does anyone know that his success this season could have been seen coming? He isn't a guy who went straight from the minors, he was someone who actually received playing time. How many GMs would have picked to keep Napoli when he had both JP and TDA in the system, guys that were both highly regarded as prospects? AA pisses the f*** out of me sometimes, but he gets far too much s*** than he deserves.

I feel like this has to be a myth, at least to some extent. I get not going after someone like Fielder or Ellsbury (at least I think they were Boras guys) but writing off the biggest sports agent in the world and his entire client-base just because you don't like how effective he is, is the most stupid f***ing way to run a front office.

Sign Baker to 5-8M over 2 years with an option for another 1 or 2 years. Have it so that his contract gives us control parallel to Lind's, and is still expendable in the case that you no longer need him, or he's no longer good at his job.

Doesn't matter because he's fed on lefties everytime he's seem them. The fact that he's only had 300 PA one time is exactly why you pick him up. He's an under-the-radar, buy-low guy that people won't immediately think to look at. And it is this point in the offseason you pick him up. As I've said several times before though, if you can't get Baker (which hinges on if AA is truly dumn) or you don't like him because of age (again, AA being dumn, since we brought in DeRosa last year) or Boras (just always a stupid reason) then you have two other good alternatives: - Trade the Marlins for Justin Ruggiano (hits lefties well, lots of team control, 3.5 WAR over the past two seasons in 219 games) - Convince Rajai Davis to come back. He wants a starting job, tell him we can make a compromise. Everytime we face a lefty pitcher he'll start in left, Melky will DH and Lind will sit. vs Righties, Lind will DH, Melky in LF, Rajai still comes into the game in the event of a pinch running situation. These, of course, are just three possibilities. There's always another guy out there when it comes to looking for platoon players. DeRosa was a good example of that, he was one of the best lefty-hitters in the majors last year.

Fixed.

Who cares? The guy is 33. It's not going to matter who his agent is based on the salary he's expected to make.