Ceetar

Centerfield wrote: themetfairy wrote: I chose neutral. We haven't even hit the Baseball Equinox yet (as calculated by G-Fafif, that will occur on January 17th this year). I'm reserving judgment for the moment. You know, I would have sworn we were past the halfway point. I think metfairy is saying I'm guilty of premature evaluation. I hate when that happens.* *In my defense, this type of thing happens to 50% of men over 40. So the woman in the football jersey says. That's because we typically are by this point, but the offseason is roughly 30 days shorter this year.

d'Kong76 wrote: How do you know Poland isn't about to invade Spain? C'mon!! German government just banned Milk Stout so there are troubles closer to home.

Zvon wrote: Dislike but leaning heavily to neutral. Because I believe Sandy is trying his hardest within his limits and the team could surprise me. Unfortunately, I'm not feeling it. Maybe when I see em play in spring I'll start feeling positive about what we have. Maybe these guys will jell. Personally I think this offseason (so far) leaves us a bit short as to what we really needed. How many games did we win because of Cespedes contributions in the short time he was here? What's the actual number? You might be surprised. And that's not some hokey pokey projection. Them's the facts. Do you know that Uribe or Johnson or Lagares wouldn't have gotten a big hit on those spots if Cespedes didn't bat? We won the division by 7 games, we would've gotten there without him.

d'Kong76 wrote: Ceetar wrote: I'm not sure I want to pay $20+ million for that in Cespedes who's not really a center fielder Well apparently no one does so far... and that might be a good thing. That's true, but some team could get crazy/desperate still. We've got 45 days or so left. Be interesting to see where he ends up, money wise.

d'Kong76 wrote: I was reacting to something up there where you said Cespedes improves the the team, but then go on say but not by how many. There is a bit of voodoo to it all in addition to probability and three jacks at a sit down card game. . Well, it's complicated for all those reasons. For one, I think Cespedes comes down closer to a 4 win player next year. And who would he be replacing? Are we just handing him Center Field and rolling with it? Lagares was worth only 1 win last year, though it wasn't a full season for him. 435 PA, which is like..75%? so maybe he gets up to 1.5 wins and suddenly we're talking like 2.5 wins different. That's fine and all, but I'm not sure I want to pay $20+ million for that in Cespedes who's not really a center fielder, particularly long term, and that's betting on no improvement from Lagares or other replacement. It's difficult to predict and plan. The Mets may not have as many jacks in the deck, but at least they pulled out most of the jokers.

d'Kong76 wrote: I appreciate everyone's knowledge and interest in all things stats wise but I really have problems with people thinking that using such measurements they can within a game or two predict what adding one player or subtracting another will produce win's wise. It's still a game, balls go through legs and stuff. If it wasn't, they can just run the season on a super-computer and why waste three hours every night watching the game? it's all probabilities and likely outcomes. I can run numbers and tell you that the odds of pulling three straight Jacks from a random draw from a deck is .02% but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen or that the time it actually happens isn't any less fun to watch. WAR (fWAR being Fangraphs specific implementation of the idea) is generally an estimate of how much value a player added more than a predictive tool. If you played out 2015 10,000 times Cespedes' contributions would be worth 6.7 wins. The variation comes from all the stuff he can't control. Who gets on in front of him, what pitchers he gets to face, etc. To go a little more granule with it, think about a Home Run. Great feat. great value. lots of fun. It can be worth 1-4 runs to the team due to factors pretty much entirely out of the actual batters control. If you add up every run scored ever and divide by every home run, you get something like 1.9 runs. So that's how much you get credit for in the WAR formula. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less. But that all depends on something outside the hitters control. You don't really know who's going to be on base when a hitter comes up, so you estimate the value of a home run and figure it all balances in the end. Some will be 1 runs, some 4, and over all it'll be roughly the 1.9.

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: Also today the Mets said Kevin Morgan will replace Dick Scott as director of Player Development. Morgan got 1 at bat as a Met in 1997 and has worked in various organiational roles ever since under Phillips, Omar and Sandy regimes, i.e.: Wilpon. Former Met statistician Ben Baumer on twitter raised the question of whether DePo's departure would leave any $$ to invest back in analytics saying current stat guy TJ Barra needed more staff. Said they were relatively understaffed in that department. kinda sad. Not that I'm necessarily doubting him or disagree that the Mets should add analytics guys, but grain of salt coming from a former employee.

Centerfield wrote: But I tell you, come September, we are going to want those 5 wins. Cespedes, in by far his best year, produced 6.7 fWAR. he's projected for half that. Even if you split the difference to get your 5 wins, that's above replacement level, something that probably won't be what the Mets produce in the outfield. Hell De Aza's probably good for about 2 if you just gave him the whole season. Adding Cespedes to the current mix of outfielders definitely improves them, but it's nowhere near 5 wins.

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: Thing is, I'm not sure how great an improvement there really was to the D. Let's be charitable and say it went from "Sucky" to "Less Sucky." I was hoping for "weakness" to "strength." That applies to SS but Walker is better than Murphy and probably at least "okay" at second. Two marginal increases combine to be fairly significant, and couple that with the talented pitching staff that already minimizes balls in play and it becomes significant.

like. I think fans are under-selling the improvement inherent in the middle infield defense. they're minor upgrades offensively, though still upgrades, which is where the bigger holes were, but defense was iffy too and this is a valuable upgrade.

Centerfield wrote: Frayed Knot wrote: Well, DePodesta did play college football (he isn't really built like Jonah Hill) and I suppose sports management is sports management. The fact that the Browns are such a dysfunctional outfit means there's probably nowhere to go but up. It would be funny if Jonah Hill just showed up and assumed the job. How long do you think it would take for the Browns to notice? This news is so strange I don't know what to do with it. I feel like the Browns should give us like a draft pick or something. Manziel was drafted by the Padres so no go there.

I'm not questioning what he preferred, I'm pointing at evidence that what he preferred was detrimental.

Frayed Knot wrote: btw, on the question of Piazza's defense, have just been reading Pedro's recent autobio -- and while he doesn't quite trash Mike and his catching abilities (maybe being honest, maybe being polite) it's clear he didn't think much of them. The lack of throwing skills was obviously part of it but he also thought MP's long & bulky body gave away far too many pitch locations ahead of time as he was clanking around back there. He much preferred Ramon Castro while w/the NYM. that's interesting. Of course, he's full of it. Another classic Moneyball example of a player not really understanding the game. K/BB with Castro in 2005, 2.97. With Piazza 7! There was a higher SB success rate, 3/6 with Castro instead of 7/8 with Piazza and just a tad over 100 IP with each. The ERA is a tick lower with Castro but the OPS against is .052 points higher In 2006 his numbers were better with Lo Duca than with Castro as well, though not as starkly but he wasn't as good a pitcher in '06 either. The Mets finished 7 games out in '05 so it doesn't really matter, but it would've been at least a little bit closer had Pedro not insisted on pitching to Castro.

Centerfield wrote: One way to settle this could be to just email Rubin and ask him right? He's pretty responsive to emails. Man. If only we knew someone who writes articles on the internet for a living. Isn't that like asking Ruben Tejada about wRC+?

I did, in fact, look up fair use. And like most laws, there's a lot of conflict out there about how it's used, or should be used, or has been used. etc. I found more than 2 places that specifically states full-excerpts are okay in certain instances. I'd argue that this is one. Technically wouldn't Rubin holds the copyright but the ad revenue goes to ESPN? Also I might attempt to argue that frequent discussion of Adam Rubin's work leads to more interest in his work as a whole, and more likely we'd visit the site to read other things he's written or will write. I think it'd be hard to argue we're costing the cite money. I'd ask to see the pageviews on articles we re-posted and ones we didn't and see no demonstrable difference. So the numbers don't support a loss of revenue there. So the only one of the four fair use limitations that might be violated is 3, but what I'm reading seems to suggest that's only used as a modifier of the other ones and doesn't really stand on it's own.

it's not a copyright violation. I'm not stealing anything. I'm reading it in a forum. What if you printed it out and handed it to me? nope, not a violation. What if was broadcast on my TV and I recorded it and showed it to all of you in my home? nope, not a violation. My thoughts here are primarily about the news/beat type articles which are more amenable to fair use anyway. I have a hard time calling an Adam Rubin post about the '86 celebrations on Memorial Day with a few mentions about what they did in '06 as 'content' except in the strictest sense. There's not a lot of artistic work going on in a news report. I understand that it gets murkier as it's further editorialized, but as all we're doing is furthering the discussion of a news item, with credit!, I find it hard to really worry about whether or not I clicked through to the original source or not. Technically this is a public site, and that's where the violation would come in, but it's really more of a small isolated group. It's not even crawled that well. Have there been any salient court cases differentiating a message board/forum from a more standard website/blog? I view this as much of a private discussion among like-minded individuals, like an email newsgroup or a Slack group or chat room. Any re-post is at least three clicks from a homepage. And it's like like we're setting up an RSS feed of a writer's work. It's not the writer we're interested in, it's the content itself. we're discussing it. we're _transforming_ it into a discussion of the news item at hand. When I repost Rubin's 30th anniversary post and comment about how I really like the replica ring giveaway and it's much better than the lame video programming they did in 2006 that's fair use. This is news propagating and commenting and criticism and all those things governed by fair use. And there's nothing inherently special about using Rubin instead of say Maria Guardado's post on the same topic. Another example of fair use because the work itself isn't particularly creative. I'd also like to point out that I'm pretty sure I've never copy and pasted an entire article here, I usually link and comment. I just happen to be interested in the evolving nature of media and content and how it's governed.

yes, post the relevant pieces you want to discuss. but if you want to discuss the entire thing, post the entire thing. This is a discussion forum, it's not a content producer. That's a big difference (and in the legal/fair use way too) and it's not like we posting the stuff un-credited. When we discuss a Joel Sherman article he gets credit for everything he said in there. we're not passing it off as original thought. we're not profiting from it. It's very much a branding thing, in that this still advances the Sherman brand. These discussions, even outside whatever platform Joel writes for, have currency. Perhaps ultimately MORE currency than a couple extra clicks on a corporate website that maybe down the line show up favorably in a "click per author" spreadsheet that his boss sees during performance review.

d'Kong76 wrote: Ceetar wrote: Other than that, I have no problem with the way we do things now. Alert the media, Ceetar takes the contrary side on an issue. Feel free to repost my thoughts in their entirety. I fall heavily on the free information side of things and would much rather, as a writer, have millions of people reading my work in "non-authorized" places than try to police and control it all. This is very different than reposting it in it's entirety on another blog or without credit in a way that obfuscates who wrote it. But that's not what we're doing here. We're posting a topic of baseball minutia for discussion. Adam Rubin gets far more credit and reputation for a discussion of his article than from 5 extra clicks on ESPN's website. And contrary in the sense that there are usually multiple sides to any issues, yes, but it's hardly contrary in the sense that it's an unpopular opinion.

Frayed Knot wrote: Vic Sage wrote: Totally agree -- the reposting of other's work en toto is not cool. It's also boring. The idea here is not just to plaster the board with the writings of others but to post your ideas on a topic backed-up, if you choose, by the facts or opinions of outsiders. boring is different. Yes it's boring, but you can post a whole article and then have discussion on it, just lead that discussion, especially if it's a new thread. If you want to talk about the whole article, about the whole topic, then post the whole thing. Don't give me homework. Other than that, I have no problem with the way we do things now.

Vic Sage wrote: fair use has criteria. Reprinting the whole article doesn't fall within it. that's not true actually. From a strictly legal standpoint I think anyone would have a hard time proving there has been a copyright violation here. Not that anyone would take the time or effort to sue. Even taking the time an effort to send a notice seems unlikely.

eh, I'm no expert but I'm pretty sure 'provocative discussion' is fair use, particularly in a non-commercial use.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: Centerfield wrote: Is there a rationale behind the years listed in the thread title? Was the last year cut off? I was trying to look up what kind of season the Mets had in 198 A.D., but I came up empty. Federico Wilponi invested in the wrong Roman empire of the 5 and spend decades in debt as a result.

For random mets pictures, jibber-jabber, oddities and other stuff that doesn't really merit it's own thread random Google created gif from some cellphone pictures.

Nymr83 wrote: We really need to have a discussion at some point on this board about fair use, and really just etiquette when it comes to posting articles in their entirety. The writer deserves his click, can't you excerpt and link? or even comment on what you are posting? as long as we full post stuff (like Chass, or Heyman's HoF column) that we're posting for hate-read reasons. I'm not going to give those guys extra clicks anyway. Also news stuff. Don't make me click away to read Rubin reposting a press release even if it does include his trolling comments. Of course, the headline/link is usually all you need on those anyway.

HahnSolo wrote: I know many calendars are available in retail in September. Not sure if that's the case here but might explain some things yes, all are available 9/1. We go through this every year. This year's particularly bad with the Jason bit, but you're lucky if you get more than 6 players still on the team. September 1st probably means they put it together well before that, and I assume they just go with some press release of rosters or something. My guess is that they basically roll through them team by team and whichever team went before the Mets had a Jason and they forgot to change out the First Name text field when they did the Last Name. It'd be almost no work at all to throw up a (unlicensed) calendar in December through Snapfish. I bet I could get enough people to buy one to cover New Years champagne or something.