batmagadanleadoff

Edgy MD wrote: The median isn't skewed by a trillion-dollar team. That's the point of a median. It's the standard replay to the Bill Gates example. An outlier like Bill Gates moves the mean, but not the median. You're on both sides of this now. You rejected the mean, because it was skewed by the Dodgers and therefore somehow misrepresentative. Now you reject the median, because it isn't skewed by the Dodgers. Anybody want in? Of course the median remains unchanged even with a trillion dollar payroll. But all of the other data is skewed to give the false impression tbat DHs dont add costs. Just like its .misleading to say that the average person is worth billions when its Gates and 19 destitute people that comprise the sample.

How would median data help to understand that there's a trillion dollar payroll skewing the data?

Edgy MD wrote: That's the point of a median. It stays the same despite the presence of extreme outliers on the top and bottom. You're complaining that the mean is thrown off because of how much the Dodgers spend. But now you dismiss the median, because it's not thrown off by how much the Dodgers spend. That's exactly right. . What is it that you're trying to prove with .median data?

Edgy MD wrote: I'm having a discussion here, too. Please try it without the un-necessary and undeserved sarcasm. I just don't see it the way you wanna see it. I don't want to see it any way. I'm looking at what the data tells me. Your position reminds me of the old line where if you put Bill Gates and 20 average people in the same room, each person in that room would, on average, be worth over a billion dollars. Which technically, would be true. I looked beyond the mean and spoke to the median, too, so what I've presented is meaningfully different. Speaking to the median wouldn't do anything here. The .median would remain the same even if the Dodgers spent a trillion dollars on payroll.

Edgy MD wrote: That's not science. That's arbitrary. It's real money people are being paid. You don't have to tell me about math. I'm the one presenting math. I can't understand your Phillies comment at all. Just trying to have a discussion here. I'm having a discussion here, too. I just don't see it the way you wanna see it. Your position reminds me of the old line where if you put Bill Gates and 20 average people in the same room, each person in that room would, on average, be worth over a billion dollars. Which technically, would be true.

If they weren't such wusses about respecting copyrights, and made that stuff in the style of the Mets numbers and lettering, it'd definitely sell more.

Frayed Knot wrote: So to sum up: the DH rule increases payrolls except in those cases where it doesn't. That'll work for me. Edgy MD wrote: That's certainly worthwhile speculation, but it's not like the Dodgers haven't been on top for a few years now. The same perspective could say any of a number of teams (the Mets?) is skewing the data. The only answer is a linear study. The Dodgers, after loading up down the stretch with the likes of Jimmy Rollins, were actually closer to $300 million. And if the Phillies were in the AL, they woulda had a $325M payroll! The post-McCourt Dodgers are an outlier, payroll-wise. And the thing to do, statistically, with outlier data is to exclude it. That's not me talking. That's not my idea. That's science. Math and shit. The DH increases costs, especially at the top end, among the teams that spend the most. What more can I say? If you don't wanna believe it, you don't have to.

Look at what this web site's selling: [fimg=433]http://ih0.redbubble.net/image.39069784.1844/ra,unisex_tshirt,x1350,white,front-c,30,60,940,730-bg,f8f8f8.jpg[/fimg] And lots more --- http://www.redbubble.com/people/imsport/works/13481844-national-baseball-player-jesse-orosco-jersey-61?p=tote-bag

Edgy MD wrote: And I thought I was presenting data that suggested that may not be true. I certainly disagree that the McCourt-era Dodgers somehow represent a more authentic version of what the Dodgers truly are. Dodgers Shmodgers. A mean is a mean. If the players are getting the money, they are. It's not a question of the Dodgers authenticity, whatever that even means. The Dodgers are skewing the recent data. They're outspending the Yankees by about 30%. They're not a normal team payroll-wise, by any measure. They're an outlier.

Edgy MD wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: You can explain the same numbers in a multituide of ways. McLaughlin seems to be measuring them the same way. Mclaughlin is saying that the DH increases payroll costs, especially at the high end of the team payroll spectrum. It's precisely what I wrote when I first posted in this thread.

More of the obscenely rich Dodgers. You can explain the same numbers in a multituide of ways. Here's one point of view I found that's on point. It's from the Frank McCourt era, from before when the Dodgers could outspend the next closest team by almost $100M. [fimg=222]https://s0.wp.com/wp-content/themes/vip/espn-grantland/img/grantland-logo@2x.png[/fimg] Designated Hitters and the Economics of Baseball July 12, 2011 by Dan McLaughlin Baseball is a game of traditions. It comes as no surprise, then, that nearly four decades after it was adopted, the game and its fans still have not fully embraced the Designated Hitter rule. Most of us can recite in our sleep the traditionalist arguments against the DH — it creates halfway players, it reduces strategy, it’s not The Way Things Have Always Been. But those arguments are matters of taste. Other arguments against the DH — the havoc it creates with postseason and interleague play, especially in the age of the unbalanced schedule — are more a function of the rule existing in only one league. Still others, such as whether the DH rule contributes to the ever-diminishing workloads carried by frontline pitchers, remain open to debate; it’s hard to separate the evidence from other long-term trends in the game. But let’s instead focus on another aspect of the DH rule: the practical effect of the rule on the game’s economic structure, and why the economic effects of the DH rule are precisely why we can neither get rid of it nor extend it to the National League. A major league roster has 25 players, but the cost of those players is not evenly distributed, and neither is their impact on the team’s success. Most teams carry 11 or 12 pitchers, of whom five starters and perhaps three relievers will play critical roles. A National League roster has eight everyday players and a four- to six-man bench; in the American League, the DH means there’s one extra everyday player, generally at the expense of one bench job. Due in part to the expansion of bullpens, platooning is far rarer today than it was two decades ago, so there’s a wide gap in pay and playing time between true regulars and bench players. So, an NL team has about 16 crucial jobs, an AL team 17. But wait: A typical team will be able to fill about seven of those jobs with players who don’t have enough service time to demand high salaries. The reality is that adding another regular can take a team from nine to 10 jobs that truly require a major outlay of cash. The numbers bear this out. The average AL payroll was $92.8 million from 2006 to 2010, while the average NL payroll was $80.1 million. If you look only at teams with winning records — working under the theory that those are the teams actually trying to spend enough money to compete and succeed — the disparity is even larger: The average winning AL team had a payroll of $108.4 million compared to $88.7 million in the NL. That’s a $20 million-a-year difference. Is the DH rule to blame for this? It’s obviously not the only reason, but certainly it’s a contributing factor. Over the same five-year period, the 14 American League teams employed something like a full-time DH in 57 out of 70 possible seasons. (“Full time” is defined here as 300 or more plate appearances with at least half the player’s games at DH.) The average salary of those players? $6.8 million. And that doesn’t include the cost of DHs who break down due to age or injury. Travis Hafner made more than $8 million in 2008, Ken Griffey $2.3 million in 2010, and neither made it to 300 plate appearances. Frank Thomas had a $12.5 million salary when he was with the Blue Jays in 2008, Pat Burrell was making $9 million from the Rays in 2010, Shea Hillenbrand $6 million from the Angels in 2007. All three were cut early in the year and were signed for a song by other teams. The financial impact of the Designated Hitter rule also widens the gap between big- and small-market teams. Just compare the haves and have-nots: Over the same five seasons, the average AL team that finished .500 or worse had a payroll of $71.1 million, indistinguishable from the $72.0 million average in the NL but $37.3 million behind the winning teams, while the NL teams trailed the winners in their league by $17.6 million. Some of those American League teams kept their costs down by just giving up. Sure, a well-run small-market team can compete by filling roster spots with players who haven’t reached free agency yet and thus are paid below their market value. But the more roster spots there are to fill, the harder it is to use the farm system to keep up with the teams that are buying high-end veterans on the open market, especially the big sluggers who generally fill the ranks of DHs. The average age of the starting DHs in the AL over that period? 32.7 years old. Aside from Billy Butler on the 2007-08 Royals, no American League team employed a DH under the age of 25, and the only AL franchises to use a regular DH under age 29 were the Royals, Twins, Rays, and Blue Jays. And the DH gives roster flexibility to the biggest players in the free-agent market. The Yankees, for example, could move guys like Jason Giambi and Hideki Matsui there near the end of big contracts to make room for still more high-priced acquisitions. The disparity in labor costs makes the National League more attractive to owners in the free-agency era. Two teams were added to the National League when Major League Baseball expanded in 1993, matching it with the American League. Then came the 1998 expansion and realignment. Tampa Bay and Arizona were added, and Commissioner Bud Selig managed to move the Brewers from the American League to the National League. The Rays and the Diamondbacks agreed that they could be shifted to another league without their consent, but when Selig floated a plan to realign them in 2001, the Rays expressed interest in going to the NL; the D-Backs, facing transfer to the AL, fought the plan. With another realignment scheme in the air this year, Astros owner Drayton McLane is singing the same tune. Yet the same payroll considerations are why we are stuck with the DH. The MLB Players Association will fight tooth and nail to avoid losing those high-paying jobs, and, as was the case with steroid testing, owners seem to have higher priorities in the zero-sum negotiations with the union than fixing structural problems for the greater good of the game. In the case of the DH, the big-market AL teams have no financial incentive to reduce their competitive advantage, and the NL owners have no real stake in reducing the AL owners’ cost of doing business. Unless and until all the owners are willing to make financial concessions in other areas to bring an end to the DH rule in the AL, we’re stuck with it as is. http://grantland.com/the-triangle/designated-hitters-and-the-economics-of-baseball/

As I post this, TOD is leading, 9-6. Yet the comments all contain reasons why folks voted for the other choice. I'd be curious why people voted for TOD. Later I haven't voted this contest yet, and I'm somewhat torn. I think that the TOD wraparound cover is aesthetically, the best of the final four -- maybe even the best of all entries -- at least aesthetically. But I also agree, or I think I do, that the TOD cover shouldn't even be in this competition. That's the thing: I'm not sure. It's really in its own category. It's not depicting some specific news event like the other pages are. And it has the unfair advantage of using twice the canvas size as the other entries. With twice the real estate to work with, it's easier to create a visually compelling cover/back page/whatever you wanna call it. It's not a perfect cover, either. I'm not crazy about the Team of Destiny tag line. It sounds hubristic to me and I've never heard this team referred to as a team of destiny either. I'm not even sure what a team of destiny is, or why wouldn't every other playoff team think they're a team of destiny? What was their destiny? To lay a total egg in the World Series, where everyone sucked and Cespedes was probably injured six times over dating back to the Tom Koehler beaning and then during the Cubs series it was reported that he couldn't even raise his arms above his shoulder and Wright was probably so goddam injured by the time of the WS that he personally volunteered to take a game off and how secretly compromised do you think David Wright hadda be for him to even make that suggestion to Terry Collins in the first place? And if Wright can't play the whole WS because his body needs some rest from playing a few weeks what the hell does that mean for next year when he'll be a year older and he'll need even more time to recuperate and his skills should be diminishing on age alone even if he was the healthiest man in the world? So how am I supposed to know how to vote this round?

[fimg=222]http://a1.nyt.com/assets/article/20160113-172825/images/foundation/logos/nyt-logo-185x26.svg[/fimg] Strat-O-Matic Builds Out Its Digital Game Roster By STUART MILLERJAN. 17, 2016 Before the World Series between the Kansas City Royals and the New York Mets last fall, a small number of baseball experts were confident they knew what would happen. Two Royals players, Alcides Escobar and Alex Gordon, would hit home runs in Game 1. There would be a David Wright homer in Game 3, and Matt Harvey would dominate in Game 5, giving up just four hits and a walk in the first seven innings. These soothsayers had no time-traveling DeLorean. They were testing a new digital simulation game, Strat-O-Matic Baseball Daily. The game, to be unveiled on Monday, is the latest step in the brand’s evolution from an old-school cards-and-dice board game into a modern digital one. Traditionally, Strat-O-Matic — first as a board game and later in Windows and online formats — has been played using cards for each player based on statistics from the previous season. (The company, like its rival APBA, also sells cards representing bygone teams. Strat-O-Matic even created Negro League cards.) This meant gamers were always living in the past. Not anymore. Baseball Daily uses projections and proprietary algorithms to create a digital “card” for each 2016 player, which will be updated daily with actual statistics. Strat-O-Matic’s founder, Hal Richman, pointed to the Los Angeles Dodgers rookie Joc Pederson as a case study. He had 19 home runs and a .393 on-base percentage through the first 71 games, but hit just seven home runs over the final 91 games as his on-base percentage plummeted nearly 50 points. In Baseball Daily, Mr. Richman said, “You would see the change in his card as the homers and walks disappear, and you would be in the same position as his manager, trying to decide whether to keep sending him out in the hopes that he’d snap out of it.” John Dewan, a member of Strat-O-Matic’s board and a co-founder of Baseball Info Solutions, an analytics company that provides Strat-O-Matic with projections for the digital cards, praised the new approach. “They found a way into the future,” he said. Mr. Richman and his board say the new format puts the company in a position to scoop up some daily gamers who have been flocking to the fantasy sports sites FanDuel and DraftKings, although Baseball Daily does not involve cash prizes and the play is structured differently. (In Strat-O-Matic, two players’ teams compete in a simulated nine-inning game; in fantasy games, statistics are used to accumulate points.) But this stage of Strat-O-Matic’s transformation nearly did not happen. Mr. Richman, now 79, began developing the idea for the game as an 11-year-old. He started selling a basic version in 1961, when he was a college student, and gradually built Strat-O-Matic into a profitable company and a baseball institution. (The company, based on Long Island, also makes football, basketball and hockey games.) In 2008, however, he was on the verge of selling the company. Then his son, Adam, persuaded him to reject the offers and enter the modern era. “I’m a 1950s and ’60s guy,” Hal Richman said. Strat-O-Matic had already developed a computer game, and Adam Richman began providing strategic advice to further shift the emphasis. “Every year, we try to push forward digitally,” he said. “We need to rethink how we are doing everything.” At a digital retreat three years ago, he suggested daily updates, “to play games in the present, using current data.” “This is a natural evolution that will allow more engagement for our fans and expand our purview,” he added. He learned that his father and Strat-O-Matic’s director of product development, Bob Winberry, had rejected that idea years earlier as too expensive and time-consuming. But the landscape had changed, and the opportunities on computers and in mobile apps now seemed worth the investment, Hal Richman said. “It was as if they had read my mind,” said Larry Foster, 51, a financial analyst who lives in the Atlanta suburbs and has been playing Strat-O-Matic baseball since he was 10. Mr. Foster said his 7-year-old son started asking last year why the Atlanta Braves team he played in Strat-O-Matic lacked new players like Nick Markakis. In Baseball Daily, the updates will keep players rooted in the present. Mr. Foster was invited to participate in the game’s beta testing and praised it. “It worked really well,” he said. Mr. Winberry called the new digital format “extremely important to our business, because we can potentially reach another audience,” a younger generation accustomed to instant updates. (Traditionalists can still play year-round with the annual card set.) Hal Richman emphasized that this move was made from strength, not desperation. As a mail-order and then Internet company with a small staff that responds to demand, “We get money as we ship the product, so we never had a cash problem and we have been profitable for all these years,” he said. “We had our most profitable year ever in 2015.” While he believes that Baseball Daily has great potential, he says the company will remain profitable even if the new game’s success is limited. Adam Richman, who is also producing a documentary about Strat-O-Matic, said the company was spending more on marketing for the new version, while simultaneously redesigning its traditional computer and online game, which has been rebranded as Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365. “This is a year of change,” he said. The company is also investing heavily in developing mobile apps, he said. Eventually, one app will allow fans to play a simulated game featuring updated statistics between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox while riding the subway to the Bronx to see the real thing. Adam Richman said he hoped the new apps would lead to partnerships with “big companies in this space.” Preplaying an actual game would allow fans to set their own lineups and see if they could do better than real managers. Or they could simulate a game using real lineups. Of course, as much as Strat-O-Matic strives for accuracy, reality always provides surprises. For instance, in the company’s projected 2015 World Series, Matt Harvey was relieved after seven innings in Game 5 and the Mets held on to win, on the way to capturing the crown in six games. In reality, the pitcher was sent out until the disastrous ninth inning when the Royals rallied to win Game 5 and the World Series. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/technology/strat-o-matic-builds-out-its-digital-game-roster.html

In my world (and I do aim to someday have one), professional baseball rosters will be limited to about 16 players. Everybody will have to hit. Everybody will have to play multiple positions. Most everybody will eventually be called on to pitch an inning here or there, including being called in from the outfield to warm up mid-inning. And the human person will shine and God will we glorified. Hey, that's how we did it when we were adolescents! And when we were done, we'd trek on over to the candy store for Yoo-Hoos and baseball cards. Relatable! yes, but the result of that is otherwise crappy play in other situations. Yes, I tried to thoughtfully address this as well as I could. Frankly, I'm surprised that this "DH in the NL" has momentum. DH's cost money. Lots of it. The union deeply desires this. And I imagine the owners considering dangling it as a tradeoff for something the owners deeply desire. AL team payrolls are higher, on average, than NL payrolls, especially at the top end. I'd like to see if this is indeed true, year-in and year-out, or just assumed to be so. For instance, here are the projected payrolls for the start of 2015. (Try as I might, I cannot find semi-official final payrolls from last year, but this is just an experiment.) NL TeamProjected 2015 PayrollAL TeamProjected 2015 PayrollLos Angeles Dodgers$272,789,040New York Yankees$219,282,196San Francisco Giants$172,672,111Boston Red Sox$187,407,202Washington Nationals$164,920,505Detroit Tigers$173,813,750Philadelphia Phillies$135,827,500Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim$150,933,083St. Louis Cardinals$120,869,458Texas Rangers$142,140,873Chicago Cubs$119,006,885Toronto Blue Jays$122,506,600Cincinnati Reds$117,197,072Seattle Mariners$119,798,060Milwaukee Brewers$105,002,536Chicago White Sox$115,238,678Colorado Rockies$102,006,130Kansas City Royals$113,618,650New York Mets$101,409,244Baltimore Orioles$110,146,097San Diego Padres$100,675,896Minnesota Twins$108,945,000Atlanta Braves$97,578,565Cleveland Indians$86,091,175Arizona Diamondbacks$91,518,833Oakland A's$86,086,667Pittsburgh Pirates$88,278,500Tampa Bay Rays$76,061,707Miami Marlins$68,479,000Houston Astros$70,910,100Sum:$1,858,231,275 Sum:$1,882,979,838 Mean:$123,882,085 Mean:$125,531,989 There we have National League payrolls 1.31% lower per team than those of their American League counterparts. I suppose if that's the average outcome every season, it could be meaningful to management and unions fighting for ever dollar, but it strikes me as, if not inconsequential, certainly within the realm of one-year fluctuations. Obviously more (and more reliable) data is needed, but I don't think it's crazy that the one more big payday that the DH gets is (largely or completely) made up for piecemeal by the National League teams needing deeper bullpens and deeper benches. The union may still prefer the DH and the one big contract/satisfied member per team, but that strikes me as not particularly loyal to the rank-and-file members who may be doing better in the National League. Looks like the suddenly obscenely-rich Dodgers singlehandedly skewing the data.

batmagadanleadoff wrote: Ceetar wrote: the number in name meme is so played out and it's not like the '4' here is really particularly meaningful or that anything in the game swung on his 4th hit. It's not like he hit a grand slam to win it. And there is way too much text on the cover. Well here's something we could agree on this morning. I was thinking the same thing, more or less. I get the "4" thing but to me, it comes off as contrived and forced rather than clever. OE -- Or at least not clever enough to get to the final four.

Ceetar wrote: the number in name meme is so played out and it's not like the '4' here is really particularly meaningful or that anything in the game swung on his 4th hit. It's not like he hit a grand slam to win it. And there is way too much text on the cover. Well here's something we could agree on this morning. I was thinking the same thing, more or less. I get the "4" thing but to me, it comes off as contrived and forced rather than clever.

Edgy MD wrote: In my world (and I do aim to someday have one), professional baseball rosters will be limited to about 16 players. Everybody will have to hit. Everybody will have to play multiple positions. Most everybody will eventually be called on to pitch an inning here or there, including being called in from the outfield to warm up mid-inning. And the human person will shine and God will we glorified. Hey, that's how we did it when we were adolescents! And when we were done, we'd trek on over to the candy store for Yoo-Hoos and baseball cards.

Ceetar wrote: Ceetar wrote: and a lot of them would just play poor defense otherwise. This is about the weakest, lamest reason for a DH. You know who else plays poor defense? My mother. no, it's a reason for a non-DH. my point was it's not like the Yankees would cut A-Rod if the DH vanished. or the Red Sox would cut Ortiz. Maybe they'd pay them a little less, but Ortiz would just statue it up at first and not much would change. The AL has higher salaries/offense because they pay an additional hitter, but not specifically because of full-time DHs. Well, now you're shifting the discussion from whether the NL should adopt the DH to whether the AL should eliminate it. The Yankees and Red Sox wouldn't have to worry about what to do with A-Rod and Ortiz in the unlikely event that the AL drops the DH because if that were to ever happen, MLB would schedule that event years in the future so that the AL teams could plan for a smooth transition without abruptly being stuck with expensive players signed exclusively for their bats that are all of a sudden huge liabilities because they can't play defense.

Ceetar wrote: The players are underpaid right now. Players are always underpaid, on average. The way to fix that is to pay them more money. The fix isn't to expand the DH. How would that help Jacob deGrom or Matt Harvey, who are grossly underpaid?

Ceetar wrote: and a lot of them would just play poor defense otherwise. This is about the weakest, lamest reason for a DH. You know who else plays poor defense? My mother.

If you showed me all the entries at the beginning of the tournament, I would've never guessed that these two would make it to the final four. I hate that NY Citi one, especially. I hate just about all of the word play with "Citi". I can't think of anything more cliche.

RealityChuck wrote: I don't care for the DH, but since most pitchers never get a chance to bat in college and the minors (Matt Harve had 25 PAs, Degrom 34, and Syndergaard, 47), it's unfair to have their first experience in the batter's box against major league pitching. I don't see what's unfair about the DH insofar as the rules are the same for all NL pitchers. Frankly, I'm surprised that this "DH in the NL" has momentum. DH's cost money. Lots of it. Typically, DH's are not fringe players, but everyday players who often command larger salaries. They're free agents and sluggers and former position players now slowing down in the middle of huge contracts that are paying them a shitload of money for their 35+ year old seasons. AL team payrolls are higher, on average, than NL payrolls, especially at the top end. And it's totally because of the DH. I'm surprised that NL owners would go for the DH, in light of the financial consideration alone. I can't see Fred wanting this.

Centerfield wrote: Make of it what you will. This has been the strangest pursuit of a big-name free agent that I can remember.

Mex17 wrote: batmagadanleadoff wrote: See, this is yet another thing about this that makes no sense to me. If Cespedes is willing to sign a one-year deal, I would think that more, rather than less teams would be interested. But if the term of years and AAV are comparable across the board, I would think that the Mets then have the advantage over another unknown situation. If that is true, then "more teams" would be of little consequence (unless Oakland, Boston, or Detroit get involved). So you're saying that the Mets wouldn't have to be the highest bidder because he last played for them? Who knows? We'll see. The point I was mainly trying to make, though, is how little interest Cespedes appears to be generating.

bmfc1 wrote: The only aspect of this story that matters: Are the Orioles still in on Cespedes, or are they no longer in the picture?I'm positive that they are "out" which leaves very few opportunities for Yo. See, this is yet another thing about this that makes no sense to me. If Cespedes is willing to sign a one-year deal, I would think that more, rather than less teams would be interested. I'm starting to wonder if either Cespedes or his agent is being blackballed perhaps. Because that would make more sense to me than what's being reported.