Meche signs
One year, $3.7m. Could be almost $4m if he hits targets for innings pitched.
Frank Thomas signs with the A’s
1y, $500k.
So here’s why this is totally awesome:
– Frank Thomas is a great bet to pound the ball when he’s in the lineup. He may not hit .250, but he’ll draw a ton of walks and hit for good power
Here’s why this kinda sucks:
– He’s not going to be in the lineup that often. He’s old, he seems to be increasingly fragile. He’s barely played in 100 games over two seasons
– So you have to be prepared to have someone else play instead, and expect they’re going to get at least 40 games and maybe all season
– Pasting the ball if you can’t manage to hobble to second turns him into a single/walk/home run/out machine
For $500k? That’s not a bad deal at all, especially for a team like the A’s that stock their AAA team with interesting players who can step in to help the roster flex around injuries. I mean heck, if he tears up his knee in spring training and spends all year on the DL, they’re not out that much money at all.
It’s a nice little gamble.
NY Times: Partisan thought is unconscious
From the Paper of Record (and other things):
Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain’s pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.
There’s a lot more here, and it’s really good.
This seems applicable to baseball thought, and particularly the “camps” debate.
From personal experience, I immediately thought of the stadium debate, when I didn’t know enough about it and was too emotionally tied up in it. You can go back and look through the Usenet archives and see me running around acting like a goat, and while the other side wasn’t conducting itself particularly politely, I look back on some of it now and think “that one guy made a perfectly logical series of arguments, and I just really angry about it.”
The realization that untoward belief in one side or another can lead to an weird state of dedicated ignorance unsettled me, and I think it’s played a big part in my long and rocky development as a writer.
Anyway, it’s interesting to ponder.
Nightengale: M’s get new attitude
When was the last time this was the off-season storyline? I think it wassss… 2004? That went really well.
Anyway, quality quote fodder in this column. There are some pretty smart Bavasi comments, and there are also some put-down-the-beverage-first gems:
“I loved our moves,” says closer Eddie Guardado, a clubhouse leader. “We needed some attitude in that clubhouse, and we got it. Those guys are good players, but to me, that attitude they bring will be huge for us.”
I thought you were supposed to provide that attitude. What happened? You were supposed to be the joker who kept things loose, and Sexson was the guy who’d keep them focused. What went wrong?
On Everett:
“(Manager) Mike Hargrove really wanted this guy,” Bavasi says, “because of his approach to the game. We gave him his choice of a couple of guys (Jeromy Burnitz and Jacque Jones), but he pushed for Carl the whole time.”
May the universal wheel of karma deal out appropriate justice. May Everett fight with you all year long while hitting .000 and otherwise making your life miserable until you’re fired and replaced with Dan Rohn mid-season.
Evaluating Defense
If you’ve been hanging around the blog for any length of time, you’ve probably come to realize that we like numbers. They give us a better way to evaluate what we think we saw, and they compensate for our internal bias’. Since a lot of baseball is essentially a set of isolated individual plays, it’s fairly easy to evaluate a player’s value to the team through their statistics, if you know which ones to use.
However, defensive evaluations have always been elusive to the statistical community. The numbers that were recorded, such as fielding percentage, were basically useless information, more misleading than anything else. For years, the players who have made the most memorable plays have been regarded as the elite defensive players simply because we’ve had no real objective standard of how to evaluate defense.
In the past 3-4 years, however, we’ve seen significant steps forward in the realm of defensive statistics. People interested in understanding the game better have begun purchasing play-by-play data that gives them far more information than we’ve had available previously, and have used that specific information to create systems that do a much better job of figuring out just how much value a player’s defense adds to his team. However, the age of defensive statistical analysis is still in its infancy, and as such, there is not a consensus system that is correct, or established as the industry standard. There are several systems built on solid theories that evaluate different parts of defensive prowess, and sometimes, these systems give widely contradictory results. So, what do we do then, if two systems, both well designed, can’t agree?
At this point, my preference is to take a prism perspective. All of the systems have strengths, and all have flaws. So I’d rather not take any of them at face value, but instead develop a general idea of a player’s abilities based upon as much good input as I can get. So, since it’s been requested and there’s nothing going on in Mariner-land, here’s an overview, with links for those interested, for the defensive statistics that I lend some credence to, and how I attempt to put them together to get an overall idea of a player’s contributions with the glove.
USSM Mailbag: Meche heads to arbitration
First in a series of slow-news-day posts.
Meche is going to make what in arbitration? Really?
Yeah, I know. Meche made $2.5m. He asked for $4.2m, and the team offered $3.35m. They may well yet agree, as they did last year, on a split-the-difference one-year contract.
But you might well be asking “What the hell? Why would Meche get even $3.35m?”
That’s a good question. Read more
Shiggy retires
Former Mariner Shigetoshi Hasegawa has announced his retirement.
To call Hasegawa something of a pioneer would be an overstatement, but he was a reasonably important figure in the exchange of baseball talent between Japan and the U.S. Hasegawa wrote a book, “Adjustment,” about adapting to life and baseball in America. This feature by Jim Caple from a while back discusses that.
We were critical of the contract that Shiggy was given after his impressive 2003, but he was always an easy guy to root for. Happy retirement, Shiggy.
[You’d think he would have finished his website before the announcement. But when it’s completed, you’ll be able to read it in Japanese, English or Korean!]
Red Sox deal almost certainly means that Reed stays
I made a pretty flippant “Dealing Marte for Crisp is crazy” comment in another thread, and on further thought this warrants a bit of a post. My initial reaction came mostly from my belief that Marte’s an absolute blue-chip stud prospect, and Coco Crisp is a good player. But this makes a lot of sense. Read more
USSM Off-season Feed early announcement
Hey, all. I feel bad we haven’t done this much earlier this year, but we’ve had some huge scheduling conflicts and then Jeff caught mono (I think he may be just really bored).
In any event, this is likely to be more of a hang-out-and-chat feed than a secret guest and long Q&A feed. Right now the dates depend on where we can find a good location, and how many people are interested (we’re probably going to keep this to 30-50).
Potential dates:
Sat, Feb 18
Sun, Feb 19
Sat, Feb 25
Sun, Feb 26
aaand maybe Sat, March 4
Please don’t comment on whether you can or can’t make it on any of those dates. If it’s important enough that you’re willing to engage in the cool practice of bribery, email us.
Possible locations:
We don’t know, and we’re open to suggestions. Ideally for purposes of us not being stuck with the bill, no room charge and everyone pays your own tab would be great.
Everyone showing up somewhere and taking over is not out of the question.
The Elysian, which wasn’t so good for a stand-and-speak QnA, might be ideal for this. Especially if Friend of USSM Pete Livengood comes to the table with something.
Price:
We don’t know, and that’ll depend on what the place charges for room rental, etc, etc, availability, and so forth.
What happens next:
We’re going to research dates and location this week while soliciting bribes, and next week we should have a date and a place to announce.
Quick 2006 projection
Spent some time tinkering with the projected rosters today and thought I’d throw this out for your amusement: I came out at about ~775 runs scored,~750 runs allowed, which would get them over the .500 mark, though not by a lot. If anything, I think the pitching number’s the one likely to be too optimistic. As always, YMMV, DTTAH, and other standard disclaimers apply.