metsmarathon

i assume you like the trade, wolfy? i do have to admit, that from a bullpen-building standpoint, i like the trade. it does resolve the uncertainty we had in our bullpen going into the season, what with all those starters floating around. with seo out of the way, and a setup man in hand, it frees up heilman for the rotation, as we no longer need him to deepen and strengthen our pen. which gives us a rotation, going in, of pedro, glavine, benson, heilman, and likely trachsel, with zambrano first one out of the pen. and we've still, presumably, got the elderly insurance in soler waiting in the wings, likely down in AAA. i think that seo is the best blend of our willingness to trade him and our ability to get something good back that we have in the rotation, so from that standpoint alone, he becomes the most sensible and most likely to be traded. the question then becomes wether or not sanchez is enough of a return for jae. and that's a tough one to answer, because we weren't going to get baez for jae, i don't think. i believe we should have been able to get more from trading jae than this, but i'm not really sure how much better we should have expected.

i have to keep telling myself that maybe jae seo was just a flash in the pan last year, and that maybe he's really just a back of the rotation guy... sanchez' scouting report from ESPN.com basically calls him a solid middle reliever, with ability to move up. he throws a two-seamer, curve, and split. all have average movement, and hte two seamer has plus velocity. his control, they claim, will improve with experience, and he's a plus fielder and competitor, with above average intelligence. nothing in there has me loving the trade. i mean, there's enough room for the trade not to suck. but right now, like mcdonalds, i'm not lovin' it.

it also assumes we ever actually converted him to second base...

i'm not sure how that really improves the team in any way imagineable...

dang. ya got me. its my blog. shouldn't there be more capitalized words mixed in for emphasis?

you seem to forget that one of the reasons we cheer is to convey the message "gosh, i hope you do well!" in the case of a timo double switch, you could still be cheering to root on the mets as a team, to indicate your desire for the move to work out for the better, despite whatever misgivings we may as fans have. the opposite of this message, to boo, is "gosh i hope you fail miserably" surely, you would expect the stands at a home game to be more filled with those who would wish well for their team, than those who would not.

the sleeping in your own bed angle could easily be tested. there are plenty of teams in the major sports that share cities, and therefore would be playing road games from their own beds. we could look at the home/road differential betwen the knicks & nets when facing each other. ditto for the old brooklyn dodgers and ny giants; the devils, rangers, and islanders; lots of baseball teams in modern times with interleague play; ny teams vs philly teams if the benefit of sleeping in one's own bed is a major contributor, then there should not be much of a difference in the home and road records of these teams. it would be very easy to investigate the impact of the umpires/referees in other sports. we could look at the number of calls made against home and away teams. in baseball, we could look at, i suppose, the balls & strikes calls of pitchers at home and on the road. we could also look at the error rate at home and on the road, i suppose, but that doesn't really have an impact, wether a missed ball was a hit or an error. the first game after a road trip, too, would be a good thing to check into.

true. and i've oversimplified. a supportive crowd is but one of many factors that would tend to bring about better performance and/or results in a home stadium. regardless, it is my belief that a supportive crowd brings out better performance and/or results in players than does a hostile crowd, thereby rendering booing as potentially detrimental to player performance and championship aspirations.

i think i've booed in the past, tho i cannot recall the exact circumstances. i actually was at the mike glavine game. i'm pretty sure i didn't boo, but i've no idea if his continued participation in metly games would have ultimately driven me to do so. certainly, my booing would not have caused him to perform better. it may, however, have served the purpose, if indeed i had chosen to boo, of conveying to management my displeasure in such a shitty player/personnel decision. so, i think that booing to express displeasure in gross player or management incompetence is perfectly fine. booing to express displeasure in a particularly bad effort or mistake, also perfectly fine. booing because a player takes the field despite his not living up to our collective (and often lofty) expectations, as some means of conveying a desire for the player to perform better... well, i'm not so sure that's all too effective, and therefore i'm typically disagree with it. why is it most players perform better at home as compared to on the road? because they feel the home crowd supports them. someone cheering for you often leads you to relax, play looser, think less about what your doing and just do it, and ultimately, those are all things that lead to better, more mistake-free play (in general). put a player in a hostile environment, and he's no longer playing loose. he's playing tight. trying too hard in many cases. it leads to poor decisions, slow reactions, and less reliance on instinct. its very similar to what happens to a player in a slump. they start examining everything they do, and try hard to do those things better. now, if you're booing a guy who's just not trying hard, then sure, i've no problem. but if you're booing a guy who's already trying to perform well, but just isnt getting results, then you're dooming him to, often, even worse performance.

i've got a problem when players are booed based primarily on poor/past results, high salary, and/or sweatiness. if a guy's trying, he shouldn't get booed, usually.

the answer is.. there's really no way to tell.

there'd be two ways of doing OPA+, to my thinking. one is more like OPS+, the other more like ERA+ OPA+ = 100 x [ 3 - ( SLA / lgSLA + OBA / lgOBA )] or OPA+ = 100 x [ lgSLA / SLA + lgOBA / lgOBA -1] i like the first one better. it gives pedro a 147 OPA+ for 2005 (as opposed to 162 using the other method) so, if i then apply my same methodology for playing time corrections for pitchers, and mix the list with hitters, i get my final ranking for the 2005 mets. edit: bah, stupid traffic limiter on geocities. thats what i get for not paying attention to file sizes... (not like there's anybody sitting at their computers thinking, darnit, that guy had some good ideas, and now i cannot see them!) smaller pics should reappear in an hour, i think anyways, below is the newest ranking! 30 Wright 29 Martinez 28 Floyd 27 Glavine 26 Benson 25 Beltran 24 Reyes 23 Heilman 22 Zambrano 21 Hernandez 20 Piazza 19 Cameron 18 Looper 17 Seo 16 Diaz 15 Mientkiewicz 14 Ishii 13 Padilla 12 Bell 11 Castro 10 Anderson 9 Matsui 8 Jacobs 7 Koo 6 Woodward 5 Cairo 4 Trachsel 3 Ring 2 Aybar 1 Graves 0 Offerman -1 Takatsu -2 Heredia -3 Valent -4 Daubach -5 DeJean -6 Williams -7 Hernandez -8 Matthews -9 Santiago -10 DiFelice -11 Hamulack

complicated? that's prolly the least complicated, and most sensible way of doing things out there! it really would make sense if pitchers were rated based on OPSa instead of ERA... maybe i'll toss that into my next figuring. edit: oh, i've been thinnking up a new way of doing OPS+ and ERA+ that should yield more linear, potentially more sensible (tho slightly more squashed) results. basically, for OPS+, its always bugged me that the formula is: OPS+ = 100 * (OPB/lgOBP + SLG/lgSLG - 1) why not actually compare OPS to the league OPS? wouldnt that make more sense? (also, two players on the same team with the same OPS can end up with different OPS+) and so, my OPS* is then, quite simply: OPS* = 100 * (OBP + SLG) / (lgOBP + lgSLG) for ERA+, i've made it more linear, by doing the following... ERA* = 100 * [1 - (lgERA - ERA) / lgERA] ERA* no longer approaches infinity for the extremely good pitcher, tho it now would approach infinity for the extremely bad pitcher. but linearly with ERA. how do these look? look at the following to find out: which, i think, undervalues poor pitching significantly. a 6.00 ERA is the same, here, as a .500 OPS! tweaking is needed, of course. and i'm thinking too hard, too. anyways, using (these two) formulation(s), i get the following ranking(s). i'm more inclined to go with the score+ than score* rankings, as it utilizes fewer of my own machinations. also, score* gives pedro top billing, and i just can't abide by that. maybe if i fiddle with my OPS* and ERA* some more...

sure, before i can try to tackle the problem of mixing the lists, edgy points out the biggest inherent problem. darn you!

so how do i apply this to the pitchers? here's where it gets more difficult, complicated, and wrongheaded! if i look at just innings pitched, i overvalue the starters at the expense of the relievers. if i look at games pitched, then i do the opposite. and of course, how do i account for a guy like heilmann, who both started and relieved? well, i did this. i created three new provisional stats with which to label my columns: %IP, % GS, and %GR %IP is (IP / 250); %GS is (GS / 34); %GR is (Games Relieved / 82) where did the numbers come from? my head, mostly. a full season for a starter would be 250 innings, and/or 34 games started. a full season by a reliever would be 82 games relieved. by averaging %IP with %GS for a starter, i get a better valuation of his overall playing time than by looking at just one or the other. ditto for a reliever. for heilmann, i add %GS with % GR, and then average that with %IP. i hope that all makes sense. mathematically, it looks like: ERA+ x [iP% + (GS% + GR%)] / 2 for pedro, roberto, and heilmann, respectively, we see the following: 148 x [217/250 + (33/34 + 0/82)] / 2 = 148 x [0.87 + (0.97 + 0)] / 2 = 131.7 162 x [69.7/250 + (0/34 + 67/82)] / 2 = 162 x [0.28 + (0 + 0.82)] / 2 = 88.8 132 x [108/250 + (7/34 + 46/82)] / 2 = 132 x [0.43 + (0.21 + 0.56)] / 2 = 79.1 and, to account for their small part of batting, i add in their offensive contribution, calculated the same way as david wright. and so, this gives me the following mess:

ok, so , it wouldn't be a ranking project without me trying to come up with a novel, overly complicated (and likely misguided) way of doing things. and so, i present to you, the metsmarathon player ranking system. here's what i've done... basically, for offensive players, i take the players OPS+ and multiply it by time played. to get this number, i take the players' plate appearances and divide by 700. it looks like this: OPS+ x (PA / 700) for david wright, we get the following: 138 x (657 / 700) = 129.5 is this a problem? well, see for yourself. douggie mientkiewicz gets himself up to the 8th best position player, which clearly seems to disagree with his win shares. as soon as i figure out how i can convey my ridiculous pitcher rankings, i'll throw that up, and then try to meld the two. comments for now?

this totally doesnt belong here, but it came up as a result of KC posting his beautiful table. brian giles racked up the 4th most win shares in the majors this year. BRIAN GILES? damn. whodathunkit!? also, houston had three of the top 4 pitchers in the NL. gawrsh! mostly i'm stalling as i try to figure out how i wanna rank ppl. it'll probably be somewhat similar to KC's, with a bit of FK methodology thrown in for good measure...

goodness...

while i agree with bret, i also think that what chuck means by "doesnt show up in a box score" is perhaps better stated as "difficult to quantify"

wade miller, according to ESPN's rumor central, may be getting a non-tender from the red sox. would we be interested in him for any part of our pitching staff?

i keep forgetting that we're projecting jose to have a .311 obp in '06...

Elster88 wrote: I could be wrong on this...I thought black wasn't, technically, a color? depends on wether you're talking color of light or color pf pigment... black is the absence of light, or, conversely, the totality of color absorption, meaning the totality of pigment. the black jackets absorb all light that strikes them, or most of it, and as such reflect none back to the eye, thus resulting in a black color.

i say the mets license my "Pinball Alley" from the build-a-stadium thread, provided i fix its flaws, of course! the open spaces thing, of course, makes entirely too much sense for a smart team not to do it.

i dunno... where can i find good data on the contractual obligations for the remainder of the major league shortstops out there? i mean, a cursory glance at this years' crop of qualified ML SS's tells me that $3M looks to be about mean, with a reasonable ceiling, excepting furcal, tejada and jeter, of $6M, but i have no idea how that all changes with time- it was, afterall a cursory glance. so, given those assumptions, and a 2006 full of offensive progress - ie raising his OBP to at least 350ish with promise of more discipline in the future, no injuries, and, dare i say, a modest increase in power at no expense of speed, i'd be cool with something on the order of 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, (7 opt) to secure our shortstop for the next 5-6 years. i hope this adequately convys neither the impression that i think him to be deserving of a superstar salary, nor the impression that i consider him a fluke-waiting-to-happen. provided he remains healthy, reyes offers FAR MORE to an offense than REY-0 ever has, and therefore is deserving of a max salary remarkably similar to what 000rdonez got. sure, its a risk, betting that he continues to develop at a meager pace, but i think it is a safer bet that he develop into a somewhate above average OPSman with well-above average speed figures, than it is to think that he will regress into rey-0 incompetence. and therefore, the financial stability proposed in my above contractual offer strikes me both fair to the player and smart to the team.

i'd have no problem with buying out some of jose's early FA years with a salary commensurate with his past performance and a well-reasoned expectation of his future performance for the duration of the contract.