This Day in LSB History
by Adam J. Morris on Sep 16, 2010 3:00 PM CDT
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PrintOn this day three years ago, we discussed the epic letdown that occurred that was Nick Swisher rushing the mound against Vicente Padilla.
It looked like it was going to be an epic, true fist-swinging battle, with Padilla ready to throw, and instead, Swisher dived at his legs, and it turned into boring old baseball fight.
Hard to believe it was three years ago today that the Swisher/Padilla fight took place.
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In this day in LSB history
Josey Wales said something stupid.
Fuck Arias
by hornedfrogs45 on Sep 16, 2010 3:04 PM CDT reply actions 4 recs
Dirkatron pulled a DShep
I also flagged the troll lol.
by TheHuntforRedOctober on Sep 16, 2010 3:24 PM CDT up reply actions
should we take a poll?
- In Bangkok trying to relive the Carradine
- In jail on “pare” charges
- In his shanty in the backwoods just sitting there
- Dead
"Look at our current situation with that camel f$%ker over in Iraq. Pacifism is not something to hide behind."
by Walter Sobchak on Sep 16, 2010 5:28 PM CDT up reply actions
Is there any doubt that Padilla carries an 8 inch shiv in his stocking?
"Sometimes you just want to sit back and watch somebody throw 100." - Jeff Passan on Neftali Feliz
"Baseball's all that's real" - JB
gotta keep y'all on your toes!
"Sometimes you just want to sit back and watch somebody throw 100." - Jeff Passan on Neftali Feliz
"Baseball's all that's real" - JB
That or a beretta.
If we're really serious about getting Tom Hicks outta here, I know some folks from Liverpool who'll be glad to help.
by Cruztovictory on Sep 16, 2010 8:37 PM CDT up reply actions
Who wins in an ugly match -
Padilla or Cantu?
"Back in Irish's day you had to kill a man before you were taken seriously in polite society." - Aquaman56 06/25/10
by Samuel_L_Bronkowitz on Sep 16, 2010 4:50 PM CDT reply actions
Ezekiel Astacio
"The Angels are like the villain in the movie that isn't dead until he's been stabbed 150 times in the bath tub, yet he still might come back up one more time." - Eric Nadel
by TXHC on Sep 16, 2010 5:38 PM CDT up reply actions 1 recs
Antonio Alfonseca's hand
"Jurick Profar is tired of practice!! I wanna play I wanna play….waiting for march 12 to go to spring training! to kill some pichers:D:D I am Jurickson Profar son of judeska and chesmond.. And I was born ready! ready to play baseball!!" - Jurickson Profar
Kinda miss drunk 'ol Padilla
not his pitching so much… just the amusement factor
"Drinks are on me if Lewis posts >168IP and an era lower than 3.86." by RangerMad on Jan 20, 2010 12:36 PM PST
I'm still sad that I was in Oakland that day and didn't get a chance to go to the game.
Also, maybe I missed something, but what happened to Ed Coffin? I see in his comments in that thread, but his name grayed out instead of a link to his profile.
He retired from LSB posting
Said he had too much more important stuff to get done at his age.
"I support you, Wash; I’ve always supported you," Young said
"Back on the scene, with a gangsta lean" RW
Be nice if he came back, we need the elder statemen enforcing order at times.
Genesis 1: 3-4 (Rangers Edition): And JD said "Let there be Lee," and there was Lee. And JD saw the Lee, that it was good: and JD divided the Rangers from the Angels. by Aquaman56
"Josey drives to games??? I always assumed he rides in on his high horse" jam0152
he's definitely a guy I'd love to roll around town with
and not just because of the Lambo
"Look at our current situation with that camel f$%ker over in Iraq. Pacifism is not something to hide behind."
by Walter Sobchak on Sep 16, 2010 5:36 PM CDT up reply actions
I never hated him
but I guess I understand why some people wanted to get rid of him. In addition to his HBP antics, he was just frustrating – he could have been a great pitcher but seemed to be too distracted by petty stuff
Go Rice Owls!
at the point in time that he was here
I was so desperate to see a pitcher with some swing and miss stuff that those occasional gems that Padilla would throw up tantalized me, especially since it didn’t seem like we had another arm on the whole team that could realistically get the ball past hitters consistently.
It's fun to do bad things.
Awesome from the start.
not as the end-all, be-all*, but as a pretty good place to start when trying to figure out a player’s value.
I've heard the "how can an MVP only be 6-8 wins!" argument before, and it weirds me out.
6-8 wins is a lot. That’s going from .500 to 89 wins, which will often have you in the playoffs; at least in contention, usually. That’s one single player. And the idea is that players barely good enough to belong in MLB will still win games, they’re just going to lose 100+ times. But, on the reverse, rarely are teams talented to win many more than 100 times.
It’s that ~46 or so win margin between the absolute worst defensible MLB squad and the best you’ll almost always seen that teams tend to live in. And a mediocre player accounts for 4-5% of that over a scrub. That’s a pretty meaningful contribution. Two wins isn’t something to just be chucked aside as a tiny contribution.
I think there is a problem with the term "replacement" that causes the confusion
As Pos says, you need a baseline.
But when “replacement level” is your baseline, you now have a 2nd measurement that you have to have in order to ascertain a player’s value. That 2nd measure cancels out when you are comparing Konerko to Cabrera, but it doesn’t if you are comparing Cabrea to Hamilton. Because if all of a sudden you are underrating or overrating the replacement level firstbaseman or left fielder, you may have an overall error that biases the overall comparison.
It isn’t that I have a better solution, but all estimates have errors, and WAR has double the error that a non-relative metric has. For that reason, I think there is some value in just comparing hitters based on wOBA and using some common sense when accounting for defense and position.
Go Rice Owls!
I see what you're saying,
but I trust empirical evidence over my eyes (for defense) and my common sense (for positional adjustment). I don’t follow that evidence blindly, but I definitely weigh it more than my gut reactions.
The thing about defensive stats, especially as far as their use in WAR goes,
is that they aren’t even consistent.
Look at Murphy: Fangraphs has him at 2.3WAR, with both positive offense and defense. B-R doesn’t like his defense at all, though, and lops 1.3 WAR off to leave him with only 0.6 WAR according to them. And yeah, that’s an older, less sophisticated stat, but even UZR is known to vary widely year-to-year for the same player. I don’t really think player’s true defensive ability changes that much year over year, so I think the fluctuation is a big limitation of the current stats. Maybe it’s just not that good after all, or maybe there’s a BABIP-like, highly-variable, out-of-the-player’s control component that makes UZR go up and down like that. But either way I think it’s a big problem with WAR for anything more than quick-and-dirty comparisons.
The thing is, most comparisons in internet conversations are quick and dirty.
And I think the WAR concept is the best way to do it. Which one is the best is worth debate, and certainly I believe there will be vast improvement down the road, but when we’re just pulling out 30 seconds of analysis to make a quick point (that hopefully we’d be ready to surrender with better evidence), that’s the route I think you go.
Like he says, though, it’s a start. It’s not a finish. If you’ve got the time and the reason to do something more thorough, pure WAR shouldn’t be more than how you begin your sorting process, and the problems with everything you cite should be considered. And if you’re actually in charge of building a team, the concepts of how much a player adds to your team when you get him is important, but you’d better not be stopping your scouting with a quick visit to FanGraphs.
I don't think
defensive ABILITY changes that much. I am willing to consider that the high variability of defensive chances make it where defensive metrics are unlikely to stabilize over sample sizes even as large as a season. The majority of plays are routine for every fielder, so the amount of meaningful defensive chances (meaning ones that separate good fielders and bad fielders) is even smaller, which I would guess is where a lot of the variability comes from.
That said, I take it with a grain of salt and kind of wish FG’s WAR didn’t rely solely on one defensive metric.
The thing that feels wrong to me about multi-year UZR,
is that give its league-average basis, it varies not just with how an individual player does but with how the rest of the league at that position does. So ideally you wouldn’t want to just average or sum up three years worth of individual season UZR data, but recompute it for the whole period for the whole league, but I don’t think I’ve seen a site that lets you do that. And it’s just not going to ever be suited for comparisons like “who had a better defensive season: Elvis 2009 or A-Rod 1996?”
But this is turning into more a complaint about the general trend of normalized stats…
Personally,
I think defensive stats, and a lot of the Defense Independant Pitching stats are still in their infancy and not particularly reliable yet. I imagine they will evolve and be worthwhile in a week or so.
"Look, we're basically on earth to shit and fuck. So unless your job's to help people shit or fuck, it's not that important, so relax."-https://twitter.com/shitmydadsays
for some reason I remember a really old post of yours that talked about...
quantitative defensive metrics as being the holy grail for the sabers. At that point there weren’t any ball in play metrics at all, at least available publicly. The progress that has been made in quantifying defense in baseball has come a really long way in not that many years.
It's fun to do bad things.
I know Tango use to rail against using replacement level at the Baseball Fever forum.
This was my introduction to Tom (and a lot of baseball concepts), btw.
Anyway, part of his issue was just that the only form of WAR used back then was Prospectus, and everyone felt their replacement level was too low. Also, what you said, he felt average was better.
I think it would just depend on what you’re looking for. I think if you’re looking for “how much better does he make the team over what’s likely to be their for a team without good depth which isn’t really under the players’ control,” then it needs to be replacement level. Now you get in to an argument about how accurately replacement level is assessed, but that’s where it needs to be.
If you’re just trying to create a metric to compare players to eachother, then average is more reliable.
as a poker player
I didn’t like the poker analogy at all.
But the rest of the article was great, as always.
Go Rice Owls!
As a casual poker player it made sense to me.
So I’m guessing the more you know about poker the less sense it makes.
Sort of like when some football fan who barely knows a thing about baseball tries to make a baseball analogy to explain something from football?
Didn't know where to post this.
But walking around in the Majestic Grand Slam Shop today and I found this shot glass to be quite hilarious.
hahaha!
FANTASTIC!!! (in a Russell Edgington voice)
Question: if that fight were to take place again, with Padilla still on our team and Swisher still an A, how many would be pulling for Nick in that fight?
"Look at our current situation with that camel f$%ker over in Iraq. Pacifism is not something to hide behind."
by Walter Sobchak on Sep 16, 2010 5:37 PM CDT up reply actions
Nice reference
I have no idea why anyone would ever root for Swisher in a Padilla-Swisher fight.
Go Rice Owls!
I pull for anyone against Swisher.....
Padilla included……question is, who do you pull for in a Papelbon/Swisher fight? Or do you hope for the simultaneous knockout punch?
Ball....toss.....antlers....
by GhostofSteveFoucault on Sep 16, 2010 6:53 PM CDT up reply actions
ooh.... I'm rooting for Swisher
someone needs to knock that stupid expression off Papelbon’s face
Go Rice Owls!
I don't care
I’m just glad they’re fighting.
I think I might root for Swisher just so he has the confidence to fight someone else in the future and get the crap beat out of him.
I don't remember that at all.
Weird. I’m pretty certain I had MLB TV by then, it wasn’t in the dark ages when the only thing I knew about the Rangers was looking at their box scores one week at a time.
say what you want about pads
but he was an interesting oily sweaty character
"Please don't hand Jim Knox your children."
- Josh Lewin
Oily Bohunk
"Sometimes you just want to sit back and watch somebody throw 100." - Jeff Passan on Neftali Feliz
"Baseball's all that's real" - JB
Things I liked about Padilla:
The fact that his fastball seemed to tail so much (mainly because the normal camera angle does that to righties) and that his curveball apparently breaks velocity related charts:
If anybody cares,
I finally managed to use pitchF/X data in R to make plots.
If you don’t care, I still managed to do that.
Now to try out heat maps.
I wonder who "inactive lsb user" is
Hmmm….Over 9900 comments
"Hell's frozen over, Pigs are flying! The Saints have won the Super Bowl"
Shreveport Captains in LSB H2H Fantasy League
I recognize the avy too, but can't place it.
I don’t always have sex with men…but when I do, I prefer Josh Hamilton. - AJM
Four Mariners currently in the every-day lineup have lower wOBAs than Borbon.
A fifth is barely higher.
That is how you manage to have a historically-bad ofense.
Why?
I don’t always have sex with men…but when I do, I prefer Josh Hamilton. - AJM
by LSJ on Sep 17, 2010 1:34 AM CDT up reply actions 1 recs
because he was
the only grandfather figure I ever knew
by blueballlefty on Sep 17, 2010 1:41 AM CDT up reply actions
when Nelly Cruz was floundering around his first couple runs thru the Show
Ed was the only guy I know that was confident the guy was going to be a ML star. He was right, but at the time there sure weren’t many voices agreeing with him.
It's fun to do bad things.
That was Ed - passionately defending the middle ground
He never was quick to praise or to roast, and that would always drive others nuts when they were dying to do so.
The Texas Rangers have been synonymous with explosive firepower ever since they emptied 130 rounds into Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in 1934. - Alyssa Milano
So... yay?
He also had a thing for Oliver Perez, IIRC.
I don’t always have sex with men…but when I do, I prefer Josh Hamilton. - AJM
by LSJ on Sep 17, 2010 10:02 AM CDT up reply actions 1 recs
So...
He had an original take on an issue, and over time he was proved to be correct.
If you could point me to an instance that you had an original take on an issue, and were proved to be correct, I’d like you point me there because I must have missed it. As far as I can tell, your one big call since joining this community was that Salty was the next big thing and that Joba Chamberlain wouldn’t be nearly equivalent value for him.
Since then, you pretty much just hate on how all of our players suck, and don’t venture outside the consensus of the pack. Ed was better than that.
It's fun to do bad things.
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