metsmarathon

if its illegal, why do they have to ban it?

how do you feel about lasik? actually, how do you feel about the colored contact lenses that nike unveiled two years ago to some media fanfare? if the mlb were now to ban those colored contact lenses, were the players who used to wear them cheating? cheaters? if the mlb were to ban maple bats, would the many players now using them be cheating? cheaters?

if keith was taking coke because he felt it gives him an edge, does it then make it cheating? if ankiel/glaus were taking hgh for legit doctor-prescribed reasons, would it still be cheating? because in the olympics, it still would be. if its banned, then no matter how you get it, its cheating if you do it. legal, doctor-prescribed, or produced in a meth lab, if its on the list and you take it, then you are cheating. is laser eye surgery cheating? is it cheating if you do it illegally, or without real need, just to improve performance? (like, i guess, if your eyes are already 20-20, and a doctor isn't willing to give you 20-15 cos your eyes are good enough, but you pay him a ton of money and he does it anyways...) if i'm a ballplayer, and i'm feeling a bit under the weather, and i illegally obtain prescription strength sudafed, and it makes me better, am i a cheater? to cheat, you have to break the rules of the activity in which you are engaged. if there is no rule to cover what you are doing, is it really cheating? or are you innovative? and that of course is not to say that i endorse finding the gaps in the established rules, or putting weird and wacky substances into your body because you think they might help you even though they might also hurt you, and hey, they're not on the banned list. and that doesn't make it good, right, healthy, or sportsmanlike. it just doesn't earn him the label of "cheater" to get that, you have to break the rules.

oh, how i love the argument that illegal = cheating. most of football, hockey, boxing, and much of basketball is illegal. in fact, throwing a baseball at a grown man is assault. hitting him is battery. running into a crowd to participate in a shoving match can get you arrested as well. and i've never heard of anybody getting arrested for putting cork into a piece of maple, or scuffing up a toy. if hgh wasn't banned by baseball, then taking it didn't make you a cheater. steroids, otoh, were banned by baseball - i'm pretty sure - and have been for a while. they just hadn't been tested for. that doesn't mean that just because something isn't banned that it's not bad for your, or terrible for you even, or something you'd hate to see your high school kids taking to get an edge on the competition. it just means that taking it isn't cheating. if they decided tomorrow that drinking gatorade is to be banned in baseball, would those players who took it before it became banned be called cheaters? nope. only if and when baseball and other sports adopt a policy like the olympics, where if they test you, and find something that isn't currently banned, but int he future it is banned, they can strip your accomplishments, can you state that taking hgh when it wasn't banned is cheating. if a guy's getting percosets on the side, is he cheating too? i mean, was keith hernandez cheating when he was snorting coke? or was he just breaking the law?

m.e.t.b.o.t. needs a little help with his html.

well, you are equally likely. thing is, you don't know what your chances of scoring those runs is until you score them. much like getting a hit on a given occasion. you probability of getting that hit is, towards the end of the season, and all things considered, roughly the same as your batting average entering that at bat. only after the at bat do you know if your probability of getting a hit was higher, or lower, than your batting average entering the at bat. look at it this way. at the end of the season, if you had a 0.333 batting average, you could say that at any point in the season, you had a 1 in 3 chance of getting a hit. but if you entered an at bat with a 0.300 batting average during the season, you would think that your chances of getting a hit were only 3 in 10. only after the at bat do you know what your probability of getting a hit there really was. likewise in a game. you don't really know what your probability of scoring any runs after the 6th inning is until after you get to the end of the game. its too small a sample size. so if you have that one-run lead in, say, the 7th, you may think you have another two chances to score runs and that since you already have a lead that you are more likely to score than your opponent, but you may be wrong. and you may enter the ninth with still only that one run lead, and your best reliever has already been used up. and then, was the 7th inning really all that important in retrospect? this decade, entering the top of the 7th inning with a one run lead, the home team has a 71% chance of winning. if they come to bat in the bottom of that inning suddenly down by one run, they now have a 38% chance of winning - a swing of 34% this decade, entering the top of the 8th inning with a one run lead, the home team has a 77% chance of winning. if they come to bat in the bottom of that inning suddenly down by one run, they now have a 30% chance of winning - a swing of 46% this decade, entering the top of the 9th inning with a one run lead, the home team has a 86% chance of winning. if they come to bat in the bottom of that inning suddenly down by one run, they now have only a 19% chance of winning - a swing of 68% which inning would you say is most important to prevent those two runs in? ... david wright had an awful april this year. would you rather he have an awful september instead?

the events in the ninth inning are more pivotal as to the eventual outcome of the game. if you're up by one run in the 6th or 7th, with the heart of their lineup due, do you want your closer in then as well, or would you rather keep him until the ninth, when you might face the same heart due back up, and the margin hasn't yet increased in your favor? because it is true that you do have time to recover from the events of the first inning through the eighth inning much moreso than you can recover from the events of the ninth inning. sure, those early outs count as part of the same 1/27th of the ballgame as the last out does. what isnt the same is your chances of still managing a win if you allow run in early innings versus late innings.

win shares has him tied for 8th place with perez & green at 9 win shares apeice. damian easley sits right behind the trio with 8 win shares. he's the 5th best met pitcher and 9th overall met with a VORP of 20, and his WARP3 is the 6th best overall. somewhere between 8th & 10th best met sounds the most appropriate to me for billy. i mean, are loduca, green, sosa, alou really better than him this year? i'm not so sure... sounds like a fun discussion for the end of the year!

i've actually gone in and reevaluated how i award schaeffer points, particularly to relievers. i've significantly upped the proprietary marathon points for saves, and given a little nudge to inherited runners stranded, among other more subtle differences... as i looked at my voting for the year i began to realize that marathon points in a save get suppressed by the higher total points seen in a win. more positive contributors mean each individual contribution is lessened when the whole is normalized to a maximum of 10 points. so a contribution such as a save should be inflated, almost artificially, to correct for this. using my old system, billy was the 12th best met, just ahead of moises alou. using my new system, he's up to 9th best, just ahead of shawn green. see: Player old rank new rank difference old points new points difference Wright 1 1 - 123.1 124.7 1.6 Reyes 2 2 - 96.3 90.7 (5.6) Beltran 3 3 - 93.0 89.9 (3.1) Glavine 4 4 - 83.6 83.9 0.3 Delgado 5 6 (1) 80.0 74.9 (5.1) OHernandez 6 5 1 76.4 76 (0.4) Maine 7 7 - 67.7 71.8 4.1 Perez 8 8 - 60.4 62.2 1.8 LoDuca 9 11 (2) 48 47.7 (0.3) Green 10 10 - 46.7 49.6 2.9 Sosa 11 13 (2) 46 43.8 (2.2) Wagner 12 9 3 43.1 57.5 14.4 Alou 13 15 (2) 40.7 37.7 (3.0) Heilman 14 14 - 37.3 38.3 1.0 Feliciano 15 12 3 36.7 46.8 10.1 Schoeneweis 16 16 - 34.3 37 2.7 Easley 17 19 (2) 29.2 26.5 (2.7) Mota 18 18 - 27.5 27.2 (0.3) Smith 19 17 2 27.1 28.1 1.0 Sele 20 21 (1) 23.5 24.5 1.0 Gotay 21 20 1 23.5 25.4 1.9 Castro 22 22 (1) 22.8 21.7 (1.1) Milledge 23 23 - 20.6 18.9 (1.7) Chavez 24 25 (1) 20.4 18.2 (2.2) Valentin 25 24 1 19.4 18.4 (1.0) Castillo 26 27 (1) 16.5 14.6 (1.9) Anderson 27 28 (1) 13.5 12.4 (1.1) Gomez 28 29 (1) 13.4 12.4 (1.0) Burgos 29 26 3 12.6 14.8 2.2 Newhan 30 30 - 9.8 10.4 0.6 Pelfrey 31 31 - 8.8 10.3 1.5 Ledee 32 32 - 5.8 5.9 0.1 Lawrence 33 33 - 5.6 5.9 0.3 Franco 34 34 - 5.2 5.7 0.5 Conine 35 35 - 2.1 2.2 0.1 Ambres 36 37 (1) 1.6 1.7 0.1 DiFelice 36 36 - 1.6 2 0.4 Martinez 38 38 - 1.4 1.2 (0.2) Vargas 38 40 (2) 1.4 0.8 (0.6) Adkins 40 39 1 1 1 - Alomar 41 41 - 0.8 0.7 (0.1) Johnson 42 42 - 0.3 0 (0.3) Ahernandez 43 42 1 0 0 - Padilla 43 42 1 0 0 - Park 43 42 1 0 0 - Sanchez 43 42 1 0 0 - Urdaneta 43 42 1 0 0 - Williams 43 42 1 0 0 - (thru 4 sept 07)

atlanta wins, 9-8.

LoDuca 4.7 Green 2.1 Beltran 1.2 Heilman 0.7 Mota 0.7 Gotay 0.6

Wright 3.0 Alou 2.4 Castillo 1.9 Martinez 1.2 Delgado 1.0 Schoeneweis 0.5

Glavine 3.6 Wright 2.3 Sosa 1.6 Alou 0.9 Heilman 0.9 Wagner 0.7

Maine 4.2 Delgado 2.4 Reyes 1.5 Anderson 0.9 Heilman 0.6 Schoeneweis 0.4

Pelfrey 3.6 Beltran 2.1 Feliciano 1.8 Delgado 1.0 Milledge 0.9 Mota 0.6

... hee! i've already voted here!

Beltran 4.5 Reyes 2.2 Lawrence 1.9 Green 0.7 Alou 0.6 Feliciano 0.1

Glavine 5.0 Easley 1.7 DiFelice 1.5 Feliciano 1.1 Green 0.4 Beltran 0.3

Beltran 3.6 OHernandez 2.8 Green 1.2 Anderson 1.2 Wright 0.7 Feliciano 0.5

Castillo 3.0 Wright 2.1 Sosa 1.5 Mota 1.4 Heilman 1.0 Wagner 1.0

Beltran 4.3 Castillo 2.0 Maine 1.3 Schoeneweis 1.1 Anderson 0.7 Reyes 0.6

Wright 2.8 Conine 1.7 Anderson 1.4 Reyes 1.1 Schoeneweis 0.9 Sele 0.8

Anderson 3.5 Feliciano 1.6 Wright 1.6 Beltran 1.4 Castillo 1.0 Reyes 0.9

Perez 4.4 Wright 1.9 Gotay 1.6 Feliciano 1.1 Milledge 0.5 DiFelice 0.5

OHernandez 5.3 Wright 1.9 Heilman 1.3 Reyes 0.6 Conine 0.5 Feliciano 0.4