Jake

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Jan 19, 2014 -> 12:34 PM) All this said, I said the same think about Boston this past year. Boston always had a really good-looking rotation. IMO, the Yankees are so porous in the pitching staff that the whole thing can blow up in their face. Boston's questions were in their lineup. They were a more 2005 White Sox-like team that had a pitching staff that was predictably good but a lineup that needed some surprise performances.

I'm not convinced the Yankees are in a position to compete this year. I suppose. I wouldn't be placing my bets for them to be in the playoffs,though it isn't outside the realm of possibility

I like how the Sox are the only team not leaking anything

I'm not even sure what I'd think about this. Not so much the money, but holy hell you would have a team who has a fathomable W anywhere from 60 to 100. Who knows what they'd be capable of. A buttload of talent and almost no certainty

I think our scouts had agreed with the early scouting consensus that Teague was a Top 15 guy and we just didn't do a lot of work on him. When he was still there at 30, we knew we weren't getting a guy we had scouted much, but we assumed was an absolute steal

Stephen Krol didn't earn the degrees. Dr. V didn't earn the degrees. The legal record shows when Stephen Krol changed her name to Essay Vanderbilt. His research places Stephen Krol in various unremarkable places at times when Dr. V claims she was in D.C., among other places. In the end, Hannan concedes that there is unfortunately a great deal he doesn't know. While there are good reasons to doubt the Oracle product and much of anything with which Dr. V promoted herself, he can't be sure. He says that some third parties seem to think the physics argument is a good one. If non-physicists could have made all the clubs to date, it isn't insane to say a non-physicist made another good one. One of the most interesting thing the story does, in my opinion, is show that trans people are out there. You may not realize they are right in front of you. However, their insecurity due to society's inability to expect or understand them makes them want to recede into the shadows. It's not insane to interpret this article to be more of that transphobia, but I'm not incredibly convinced by those arguments right now.

I feel like if she had earned the degrees and such when she was living as a man, none of those details would have ever emerged. None of the story would have made sense if the reporter didn't "reveal" the name/gender change and sharing this information early on would have completely altered the story, as it was being told -- a largely chronological account of his research on Yar Golf. Had he know she was transgendered from the beginning, it is quite likely IMO that he would not have done the digging on her credentials in the first place. He would have simply assumed she had earned those credentials under a different name. While we will never really know, it seems her gender identity was a significant explanatory part of her mental/emotional demise. Living most of her early life as a lie, which is how she would have felt as a man, could easily have led to a lifelong struggle with a fluid identity. She probably felt like Dr. V is the kind of person she could have been if only she had been able to have been born into the right body. Having yet another disappointment, the reaffirmation that she was not Dr. V, could have been too much. Maybe it was mostly unrelated. Who knows. FWIW, I was not surprised at all that Dr. V was "revealed" to be a biological man as I was reading the article. We have a super-secretive person who claims to have been deeply embedded into the military, also be a Vanderbilt, was writing unintelligible gobbledygook in email correspondence, is 6'3" with a deep voice ... let's not act like it was completely outside the realm of possibility until the reporter said so outright.

QUOTE (SouthsideDon48 @ Jan 18, 2014 -> 12:25 AM) I think people writing with a different hand than they throw with may be more common than you think. I write left-handed, but I throw balls with my right hand. I toss trash in the trash can with whichever. My parents tell me that when I was little, I didn't seem to throw better with one arm than another. Since my older brothers were right-handed throwers, they knew they had gloves for me so I became a righty. I write left-handed and would generally call myself a lefty. But noooo, I couldn't be a left-handed pitcher!

For another dystopian choice, I have always preferred Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, who was English but lived much of his life in the USA and was repeatedly denied citizenship for refusing to fight on philosophical, rather than religious, grounds. He also taught biology to a young George Orwell, which is cool. I've always thought Huxley's warnings were more prescient -- that freedom would be surrendered, not taken

From Yar Golf's poorly designed, confusing website's "about" section:

For some reason, my first reactions were Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City as they cover very interesting parts of recent American history that aren't really immortalized in the grand narrative. Neither are super difficult reads; the former was written by a then-college student. Might be a little out there though, in terms of content. I bet both of those books have been burned. Now that I think about it, the whole child rape thing in Less Than Zero is probably too much. Kerouac's On the Road might be of some thought, but it has been a long time since I've read it so I cannot remember what kind of reading level we're dealing with. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is deeply rooted in American history and I recall reading it at that age. Has a lot to offer in a variety of ways and is generally considered a "classic." If it is possible to go with a collection of short stories, I'm sure there are some from John Cheever which might be interesting --his stuff is rather cerebral, but quite American and since they come in small doses, I wonder if it would be easier to get kids interested in reading small, self-contained stories. Part novel and part short story collection, I might also suggest Shoeless Joe comes to Iowa by WP Kinsella. While it is quite a bit more than this, it is indeed the inspiration for Field of Dreams. The best and worst of America. Ironically all from a Canadian author who loved baseball, Iowa, and Shoeless Joe. For some reason, I can't come up with a good suggestion from Hemingway, who is an obvious choice given his writing style. All of his best stuff is set in Paris and Cuba, at least the things coming to mind. The Nick Adams Stories were dreadful to read as a 10th grader by my recollection, though they are at least set in Michigan IIRC

Jesse Stones

Hey Anaheim.. SUCK ITTTTTT

Sometimes you sign a guy not for it to be a good deal, but because you want him on your team. Imagine if Mike Trout became a free agent -- you wouldn't give him $40M a year because he'll necessarily be "worth" it, but because you're better off with him for $40 than nothing for $0. Some guys in some situations are just priceless

It is times like these when Rock and bucket are always absent.... I need a hotline I can call

The whole "Ricketts family in $700M of debt, haven't even started investing in Wrigley renovations" bit makes me skeptical of it all. Nothing will surprise me, of course

I still feel like Cubs don't actually have anything close to the money to sign Tanaka and are just making a bunch of noise to get their fans interested and think they're trying.

QUOTE (Downtown518 @ Jan 17, 2014 -> 11:08 AM) Jesse Sanchez ‏@JesseSanchezMLB Source tells me clubs have not heard back from Tanaka & nobody knows where they stand. Most had about 60 mins to make a case. No visits. https://twitter.com/JesseSanchezMLB/status/...225081196171265 This sounds more credible than anything else I've heard.

Sacramento currently has the 8th worst record in the league and has been playing better since the Gay trade. We have a shot at getting that pick this year

I would say that the difference between fWAR and bWAR is that bWAR tries to measure on-field results while fWAR tries to measure onfield talent. As usual, pitchers are the best way to look at this. fWAR rewards a pitcher for doing "pitching things" well -- striking people out, not walking people -- while bWAR rewards a pitcher for earned run prevention, which can be strongly influenced by luck, defensive talent, ballpark, etc. Throughout each measure, you can see how fWAR is about trying to find what a player added in a vacuum; that is, what would have happened if you took that player's efforts and put them in a different context. There's good conversation to this effect in the UZR primer. Does a player's batting average really tell you what happened? Is it a very useful representation of what he contributed to his team? Or is there a better way to do it, with less doubt about luck and the value of one event versus another? IMO, bWAR is not quite like batting average in its archaic-ness but it certainly is not worried about influences on production that are outside of the player's efforts, like luck.

for comparison, DRS: http://www.fangraphs.com/library/defense/drs/ For those wondering, fWAR uses DRS for catchers. A few other notes: DRS does not do adjustments for handedness of batter (and thus fielder position), ballpark (affects outfielders)

Another important difference between bWAR and fWAR - defense. bWAR uses Total Zone while FanGraphs uses UZR EDIT: Baseball-Reference switched to DRS from TZ, look to next post for information on DRS http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-fangraphs-uzr-primer/

Just unlocked, rooted, and flashed a ROM on my One earlier this week. I feel all grown up now. I agree that there are not a lot of beginner's resources and you'll have to get a minimum of adequacy with command prompt unless a kind developer has created a tool for your device

I'll add this resource to kick things off: The FanGraphs Glossary -- the real gems here are the full explanations of how each component of WAR is calculated for hitters and pitchers, which is also where you'll learn the most about things like wOBA and wRC+

This is why people want it to be called climate change. It won't always be warmer where you are, but it will always be more extreme