Fantasyland
A very short review of Fantasyland, a new book by Sam Walker.
Walker enters Tout Wars, which is one of two super-high-profile roto contests, as one of the “rookie” entries, against a set of expert roto players, and descends into madness in his pursuit of the title.
The good stuff: he goes crazy trying to win. He hires two advisors (one a NASA dude for the stats, one more on the scouting-and-intuition side), gets advice from a baseball astrologer, and gets an attractive actress to act as his “videographer” for the auction so she can flirt and distract the other male, geek-o-matic guys.
One by one, Christine slowly drains my opponents of their excess testosterone: complimenting Steve Moyer on his tan, asking Lawr Michaels if he’d like to play some air guitar, and panning in tightly on a visibly irritated Ron Shandler. “I like to think I know what I’m doing a little bit,” says a suddenly modest Matt Berry. “I certainly know I’m not one of the sharks today,” Joe Sheehan confesses. “I’m a little guppy swinning through the water, and I’m going to get eaten before the day’s out.”
“No, no,” Christine purrs. “Repeat after me: ‘I’m going to be a shark!'” Sheehan blushes, waits a few beats. “I’m going to be a shark!” he says.
“There you go!”
The draft (p151-153) is the funniest fantasy baseball anecdote I’ve ever read.
His attempts to talk to players about being on his team are awkward to the point of hilarity sometimes, and sometimes happily insightful. His writing’s easy and relaxed, and Walker’s self-critical and funny about his descent into madness.
The bad stuff: gets a little tedious in going over the mechanics of what’s happening when in the league, which today is really dry. Sure, whether or not Josh Phelps got benched was important then, but now? He tries to condense it down as much as possible, but it’s just sawdust in the Twinkie. And if you’re a serious baseball fan, you’ll probably notice that there are errors that slipped in on some niggling stuff (the Wade Boggs thing, for instance, p.28).
Also, there’s a baseball astrologer. Reallllly annoying, but I’m not going to get into that again.
He’s clearly got a huge crush on Ron Shandler, which is fine on its own. I’ve bought Baseball Forecaster before (I’ll spare you that review, too). And it makes for a weird/funny moment when Ron Shandler, who can be as insufferably arrogant as anyone, says of Baseball Prospectus “They’re so friggin’ arrogant. Joe Sheehan is one of the only guys over there that I have any respect for.”
That’s funny on maybe four, five levels.
If you’re a fantasy baseball fanatic, this is going to be a really good read. If, like me, you’re not that into roto, it’s fairly quick and entertaining as long as you start to skim when you feel your eyes glossing over when he talks about his horrible dilemma about what to do with his free agent budget.
Anyway– Fantasyland, Sam Walker. Check it out.
Felix Worship, circa 2006, Part 1 of Many
From John Hickey:
Felix Hernandez, the 19-year-old right-hander on whom the Mariners have rested many of their hopes, dazzled San Diego Thursday.
Throwing just the first inning of the annual Mariner-Padre charity game in Peoria Stadium, Hernandez struck out the side on just 13 pitches.
Dave Roberts, Mike Cameron and Brian Giles all went down on strikes against Hernandez, who was replaced by Kevin Appier to start the second inning.
Long Live The King.
Head Shaking
Okay, I know that a lot of people consider Pat Gillick to be baseball royalty, but man, this is incomprehendable.
From today’s times.
Imagine if Gillick hadn’t acceded to Ken Griffey Jr.’s trade request after the 1999 season and made the epic deal that sent the franchise icon to Cincinnati. Imagine, instead, if Gillick had dealt the Mariners’ other superstar, Alex Rodriguez, who later walked away from Seattle after the 2000 season to sign a $252 million contract with Texas.
Gillick dropped that provocative bombshell earlier this week on Dave Mahler’s KJR radio show, and he elaborated on Wednesday.
“I possibly traded the wrong guy,” he said. “If I had to do it over again, I should maybe have traded Alex.”
…
“Even though he was only one year away from free agency, I probably could have gotten more for Alex than we could for Griffey,” Gillick said.
…
“So I think if I had to do it over, I probably would have told Kenny, ‘Yeah, we’ll respect the fact you want to be traded, but we’re going to keep you.’ We probably should have moved the other guy.”
Looking back in retrospect, Gillick wishes he would have traded Rodriguez and kept Griffey. Despite the fact that trading Griffey was the single best move he made as the GM of the Mariners. Do you have any idea how bad we’d have been with Junior limping around center field in Safeco the past few seasons, pulling in $15+ million per season?
I mean, holy crap. I have no idea how you retroactively look at the Griffey deal from the M’s perspective and say “yea, I wish we could undo that one.”
Red hot Mariner news for Thursday
The Raul Ibanez signing is official. (Brock, TNT, Hickey , PI)
“There is really a very limited supply of left-handed hitters of Raul’s caliber,” Seattle general manager Bill Bavasi said. “He hits with men on base, hits both left-handers and right-handers and has a stroke that is a great fit for our ballpark. That’s before you even consider his leadership and character.”
(TNT)
The PI quotes the price at $5.5m each year for those two years, which is what was originally reported when Finnigan broke the story in the Times.
Meche is happy with his location. (Brock, TNT)
Jeff Harris wants to pitch. (also Brock, TNT)
Boone retires
As noted in comments for the day’s news thread, Boone has hung up his cleats. Picture here.
Boone’s career was quite the roller coaster ride, wasn’t it?
Future Forty, Update #1 for 2006
With spring training finally here, we’re back to monthly updates for the Future Forty, our version of a prospect “list”, so to speak. It’s quite a bit different in presentation from what you’ll get from Baseball America, and that’s on purpose. Here’s the nuts and bolts.
In my opinion, ranking prospects by numerical order, while entertaining in a friendly-argument kind of way, is essentially overanalyzing things. Trying to weed out the difference between the 13th and 24th best prospect in a given organization is going to be splitting hairs, for the most part, but their numerical differences appear quite large. In a lot of cases, there will be almost no appreciable difference between players who are slotted 15-20 spots apart, but the list creates the illusion of separation.
So, after several years of ranking the M’s prospects 1-40, I abandoned the list method and moved into a grouping analysis, which I personally find much more informative and less tedious. Players are separated into categories, based on their risk/reward levels as well as their proximity to the major leagues. Each player is a assigned a score from 1-10 in both Risk and Reward, and those are broken out to give you an idea of what type of player a prospect is, rather than simply where he ranks relative to other players in the system.
The other common complaint about prospect lists is eligibility; Felix Hernandez is no longer technically a prospect, by those who use rookie of the year status for their definition, but Kenji Johjima is. Does that make sense? The 19-year-old isn’t eligible for a list of players who may contribute to the team’s future, but the 30-year-old catcher is? So, rather than adhering to the standard rules for prospect status, I threw them out the window and created my own eligibility requirements; you can be on the Future Forty if you are either 25 years of age or less or have less than one full year of major league experience. And I reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, so while Johjima technically fits the bill, he’s obviously not part of the team’s long term future, so he doesn’t make the list.
So, on the Future Forty, you’ll find Felix, Reed, Betancourt, Lopez, Sherrill, Morse, and Jake Woods among the guys who have exhausted their prospect eligibility. They’re part of the organization’s future, and after all, that’s the whole point of this kind of exercise, right?
So, how do I evaluate prospects? Well, there’s no doubt this site is steeped in statistical analysis, and we’re never going to escape the label of statheads. That’s fine, but the connotation doesn’t necessarily fit here. On the subjective vs objective debate, I’d argue that I fall further to the subjective side of the tree. In other words, I agree with Baseball America more often than I agree with Baseball Prospectus.
Personally, I believe that statistical analysis at the minor league level is not best used as a predictor of future performance, but as an evaluator of individual skills. I’m not a fan of attempting to find out if a guy is a .260 hitter or a .290 hitter by adjusting for park, league, and age, simply because there are so many variables we don’t do a good job of accounting for, and the margin of error is just too high. However, that doesn’t mean we should ignore a player’s performance. They can be a great tool in evaluating what type of skills a player has, and once we know that, we can relatively easily figure out how well that particular skillset projects at the major league level.
Let’s take two players as an example; Asdrubal Cabrera and Matt Tuiasasopo. They’re both technically shortstops (but as I’ve stated many times, I think the odds that Tui plays short in the majors are about 1 in 100), they’re only 6 months apart in age, and they’re both 7/7 risk/reward players. Cabrera ran circles around Tui when they were teammates in Wisconsin, then held his own following a promotion to Inland Empire. He’s also the vastly superior defensive player.
From a purely statistical standpoint, Cabrera’s the clear winner. He can play shortstop in the majors and he outperformed Tui all year long. If you’re running statistical translations, you’re going to take Cabrera, and you don’t even think its particularly close.
However, that ignores the fact that Cabrera and Tui have wildly different skillsets, and are, in fact, vastly different players. An in depth analysis of their skillsets will reveal a lot more about the player’s abilities and future projection than simple minor league translations. Using the statistics to see the picture of Cabrera as a high average, aggressive, gap hitter and Tui as a power hitter who sacrifices some average for more walks and extra base hits gives a more accurate picture of their futures.
Cabrera’s certainly ahead of Tui at the moment, but his skillset type is unlikely to grow at anything close to the same rate that Tui will. In other words, Cabrera’s skillset matures faster and plateaus earlier, while Tuiasasopo may develop later and have more value further on in his career. Cabrera’s the better teenager, certainly, but Tui’s got a great chance to be the better 25-year-old.
Applying the same growth curve to each type of prospect is folly, but that’s essentially what minor league translations do. Breaking a player down by skillset is far more effective, and paints a more clear picture of what to expect in the future.
So thats the longwinded explanation of the Future Forty. As always, this thread is available for any minor league related questions, and I’ll try to answer as many as humanly possible.
Wednesday wonders
From the News Tribune: Gil Meche donated some baseballs to help a New Orleans college team, and Matt Thornton didn’t allow a run — and has a new pitch!
“I’m working on a new sinker, and I didn’t get my arm up to one hitter and walked him,†Thornton said. “Other than that, I threw pretty well.†…
Also in the TNT – “Vina wants to get quick hands on job”
Over in the PI, Meche is now throwing a two-seam fastball, instead of his four-seamer. And there’s a profile on Luis Gonzalez, a Rule 5 draftee who came here via trade and might make the bullpen.
The Seattle Times has Pineiro “getting ribbed” over his WBC participation. Also, Richie Sexson would like to remain healthy and productive.
New USSM Limited Edition T-shirts up
“Top Ten Reasons I’m Looking Forward to the 2006 Season”
(go buy it now)
1. Increased ticket prices mean I no longer must choose between charities vying for extra cash
2. Medically speaking, I have to wake up from this nightmare eventually
3. Placed huge pre-season bet on Oakland
4. After achieving Nirvana, both winning and losing are equally satisfying to me
5. WFB a no-hitter threat every game
6. They thought I was left handed, now I’m signed to a guaranteed 3-year, $22m deal
7. Recently suffered blunt force trauma to head, believe it’s 1996
8. Can pretend baseball is like golf, where low score wins
9. Low attendance means less competition for airgun-fired t-shirts
The tenth one varies depending on which version you want to fit your marital status:
Spouse version:
10. Spouse stops complaining about me, starts complaining about team
Singles version:
10. I’m sure to do better with fans of the opposite sex with this cool USSM-themed T-shirt
Now, we also came up with a whole bunch of top ten items that didn’t make it. If there’s massive public acclaim, we might be able to work something out for a second set or something that’ll accomodate you. They were:
11. 132 losses in two years left some hope uncrushed
12. Ballgirls no longer at risk of being hit on, if you know what I mean and unfortunately I think you do
13. Hang on, give me a second, I’m sure I can come up with ten reasons
14. Masochism
15. Three words: high draft pick
16. More empty seats means fewer complaints about my body odor
17. Heard captain goes down with ship, not a big fan of Tannille either
18. Was big fan of Extreme, heard their guitar player now M’s shortstop
19. Missed the joy of nurturing intestinal parasites contracted from stadium food
20. Can’t wait to see new cutting-edge goatee and soul patch fashions
21. Bandwagon fans should finally be weeded out
22. I bought counterfeit season tickets to see this counterfeit team… with counterfeit money!
23. I’m a member of the ownership group — suckers!
24. Want my enthusiasm for football rekindled
Anyway, be the coolest kid on your block.
Speculation on 2006 season’s win lines
A really long toss-off post in which I abruptly reveal that I know too much about sports betting
Out of curiosity, I looked up what the lines on teams are for this season and I’d like to reward you, dear readers, with some easy money tips. All lines were quoted at -115 either way unless otherwise noted. Please, no wagering.
Read more
Randy Winn, $24 million man
Randy Winn signed a 3 year contract extension with the Giants today, covering the 2007-2009 seasons, worth $23.5 million. He’s under contract for $5 million this season.
So, for the next four seasons, the Giants are committed to paying Randy Winn $28.5 million. $7 million per season. Randy Winn, folks. Somewhere, Jon Wells is gasping for breath.
I’m sorry, but those who still believe that a player is worth whatever a team will pay him simply don’t understand the economic realities of baseball.
What a brutal contract.