My actual predictions for each team’s W/L record, with some brief thoughts on why for most clubs, are now on my main ESPN blog.
By the way, I love this headline. This might be the first time ever that a front office person has said with a straight face that a pitcher was better suited for the pen because he was tall.
I look forward to the day when the Nationals pass on Strasburg, then the M’s take him and make him their closer.
Maybe I’m reading too deep, but that article read to me like switching Aumont to relief is as much about avoiding injury as actually wanting him in the pen, and they’re just trying to spin it in a positive way. The other possibility is that they’re trying to fast track him to the big leagues because they anticipate dropping ticket numbers and are looking for another potential draw to the ballpark.
I’ve got my own (far less interesting, I’m sure) preseason predictions up at my own blog – well, except for the AL East, which I’m procrastinating on because I can’t decide on the order for the Red Sox, Rays, and Yanks.
On the pretentious side, I dropped you as a friend and made myself a fan of your group, so you’ve got more spots for friends you actually know, and I follow pretty much everything here.
“The other possibility is that they’re trying to fast track him to the big leagues because they anticipate dropping ticket numbers and are looking for another potential draw to the ballpark.”
What?! You mean the Johjima extension isn’t drawing flocks of tourists from Japan?
Seriously though, this reads like an April Fool’s joke. I thought Dave Cameron was a little bit aggressive in assigning a high grade to the Mariners’ front office so soon. I thought at the time that the grade should be “Incomplete”, and it still looks that way to me.
They took a college closer with their first pick last year, they just committed Morrow to the pen full-time, and now they’re converting a 20 year old with front-end potential so they can rush him to the big leagues? It’s absurd. There has to be more to this.
I’ll take the general lack of comments on the Cubs in that column as a good thing.
Keith, you predict only four 90 game winners, and three are in the A.L. East. Plus you have Toronto winning 80 games, which I presume would be 5-6 games higher if they didn’t have to play so many games against the Red Sox, Yankees and Rays. Even Baltimore is steadily improving, and would probably be closer to .500 in any other division (particularly since they would be more likely to have Weiters begin the season in the majors if they had any realistic shot at the postseason). Is this the best division in recent memory?
Why should I listen to you? What are you some kind of scout/sabermetrician that we should listen to? 🙂
Good point Joe. Plus, he’s just so darn snarky anyway.
What “method” do you use for factoring in injury risk/potential? For a team like the Phillies, for instance, do you say, “X wins if they’re healthy, Y wins if Hamels/Utley miss A% of games, B% chance of that happening, so the prediction is somewhere in the middle.” I realize that this is grossly oversimplified, but I’m just curious how the thinking behind it goes. Not disagreeing by any means; just a general inquiry.
I weep for our mathematics:
You predicted an aggregate record of 2432-2428. I don’t mean to nitpick, but I’m going to nitpick. Come’on, KLaw, you know better than that. The numbers just seemed off as I read them, and a quick calculation confirmed it. Angry Dan and all the haters have found the chink in your armor! Assuming they can add.
There must be a bug in the spreadsheet. I have used the same Excel spreadsheet the last two years to tally up the wins/losses and make sure they’re equal while also showing me how much of a lead I’m giving the AL in interleague play. I’ll take a look.
I don’t believe for a second that you eyeballed those totals and noticed that they were 4 off, by the way.
Actually, I just checked the spreadsheet and the columns still add up to 2430 apiece.
Maybe I have to re-run the calculations, not that it REALLY matters. I didn’t have the exact total, but I did take note of individual divisions record above/below .500 and it seemed off. I just now quickly added up the 1’s column in W’s and got a 2. Did ESPN screw with the numbers?
Keith,
Apparently Morrow went to the M’s staff and requested to be placed in the bullpen saying he could manage his blood sugar better.
“I had troubles with low blood sugars a lot last year,” Morrow told reporters at spring training. “Especially warming up. And this year as well — the only game I started I was a little low to begin with.
“It’s just easier to have five or six innings (in the bullpen) to level out before you get in there.”
http://www.seattlepi.com/thiel/404575_thiel03.html
Unless he’s just saying that to cover for the team. Either way it’s a waste of talent.
The decision-making that’s going on in Seattle’s player development department is absurd. Maybe they think they’ll be at the leading edge of a new trend – bullpens full of first round arms.
Someone up there needs to schedule some PD that defines and explains market inefficiencies.
Just imagine how good of a closer Felix Hernandez could be. Morrow to the 8th???
Thanks for the Jake Spoon tweet; I loved Lonesome Dove (though I did *not* enjoy any of the ponderous sequels). That book, by the way, is one of the few works of fiction I’ve ever read that worked excellently on TV. Certain scenes — I’ll save which ones for your review, I suppose — even worked better on TV than in the book. It did not hurt that Duvall and Jones inhabited McCrae and Call.
I thought Ichiro was supposed to close? Wasn’t he supposed to pitch for Team Japan? Now THAT would be something. Slide King back to the 8th and Morrow to the 7th.
Duvall especially really knocked Gus out of the park. He’s said in the past that it’s his favorite role that he ever played. Gus is probably in my top five favorite literary characters of all time.
Klaw – speaking of espn blogs, any idea why Rob Neyer’s is no longer on the main ESPN MLB page? Is he on vacation?
Rob’s is now in it’s own section right under the feature story on the MLB page. It’s called the SweetSpot or something now. It’s not with Keith’s and the others on the MLB page
JR-
That confused me, too. I thought he got fired. I guess he got promoted? How would you qualify that?
Also, KLaw, when they talk about WARP, how many games would a team of all replacement players win?
Lazy math …
– Total runs last year divided by 30 was 753.5
– Replacement level is usually set around .80
– Runs scored times .80 is ~602
– Runs allowed times 1.20 is ~904
– Pythag of a team with 603 RS and 904 RA is .308 for a record of 50-112
– See also: Padres, 2009 San Diego
Interesting. My dad used to always say everyone wins 50 and loses 50 and it’s what you do with the middle 50 that matters (little bit of rounding, obviously). Interesting to see that a team of replacement players wouldn’t do much with the middle 50, if this math is close to accurate.
However, I have to question the logic. If you have an average player at every spot, you are likely an above average team. If you have a below-average player at every spot, you are likely a VERY below-average team. I would think that the sum total of a team of replacement players would make them far worse than .80 of average. But that’s just based on top-of-my-head logic.