The year is running out and we need an new music thread.  In retrospect, it was a pretty remarkable decade of music.  Brian Eno recently summarized it best:

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

What were your favorites?  Let's see some top 5, 10, etc. lists (pointing and laughing is encouraged).  Everyone join in:  The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, waistoids, dweebies, dickheads...and the old-timers, of course.  Here's mine:

1.  Radiohead - Kid A

2.  Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

2.  Arcade Fire - Funeral

4.  LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver

5.  The Streets - Original Pirate Material

6.  Microphones - The Glow, Pt. 2

7.  Panda Bear - Person Pitch

8.  Liars - Drum's Not Dead

9.  Burial - Untrue

10.  Fennesz - Endless Summer

via www.rawkblog.net

I'm sure many of you are aware that Mancow described South Siders as the "less-educated", "salt-of the earth" Sox fans; a perfect foil to the "educated" Cubs fans on the North side.  See the clip from 'No Reservations' here:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5ro_wG7EyI (minute 3:08)

While it's clearly not worth a whole lot of time specifically addressing such cliche-laden drivel, I do wonder if the exact opposite is true:  Are Sox fans in 2009, on average, more educated than Cubs fans?  It certainly seems that the perception is slowly changing with highly wonky, high-profile fans like President Obama and Nate Silver (I can already feel the love).  Or are they?  Does anyone give a s*it about any of this?  And more importantly, where can I that sandwch?

I've been trying to think of a way to correalte how good at team is based on the three major facets of the game: pitching, offense, and defense.  I chose to look at ERA, Runs Scored, and Fielding %...I realize these stats have their flaws, but they're readily available and, overall, the results seem to validate common sense.  My sample teams are the 16 teams that have made it into the World Series.  Clearly, several of those teams made the World Series despite underperforming during the regular season, but again, as you'll see, the results average out those anomalies.  For each team I found their regular season rank for each of the three statistical categories previously mentioned.  So for example, the 2005 White Sox were 4th in MLB in ERA, 13th in runs scored, and 9th in Fielding %.  I looked up the rankings for all 16 of the World Series teams and found an average ranking for each of the stats.  Here are the results:

AVG. ERA Rank: 6.63

AVG. Runs Scored  Rank: 9.00

AVG. Fielding % Rank: 9.57

Normalizing the results (dividing each average by 6.63), you get

ERA= 1.00, Runs= 0.74, Fielding= 0.69

Basically, this means pitching is 26% more important than runs scored and 31% more important than fiedling %.  These results seem to validate what we already knew: pitching is the most important component of a winning team.  But also, you need to balance this with offense and defense. 

So  we can say that the Team Strengh Number is calculated by:

1.00(ERA Rank) + 0.74(Runs Scored Rank) + 0.69(Fielding % Rank)

Looking at 2008 rankings for each of the three stats (per espn.com),

the Sox's Team Strength No. is:

1.00(1) + 0.74(8) + 0.69(14) = 16.58

then Tampa Bay at 20.27, Philly at 20.64, Atlanta at 21.47, and the Cubs round ou the top 5 at 22.04.  Note that the lower the number, the higher the Team Strength

Obviously these #'s will fluctuate throughout the year, but I contend that by the time all 162 games are played, this calculation will give you a pretty good indicator of how a team stacks up against the others as well as how likely they are to succeed in the playoffs.  In addition, it allows you to compare teams from past years.  For example, the 2005 White Sox had a Team Strength Number of 19.83.  The Red Sox of 2007 were at an astounding 7.72.  We'll see how the numbers look in a couple of months. 

How worried should we be about Bobby Jenks' in 2008?  Although much has been discussed about his decrease in velocity, I'm more alarmed by the following numbers:

2005: K/IP = 1.27, BB/IP = 0.38

2006: K/IP = 1.15, BB/IP = 0.44

2007: K/IP = 0.86, BB/IP = 0.20

2008: K/IP = 0.51, BB/IP = 0.43

While his walks are on par with his carrer numbers (2007 seems like an outlier), the strikeout rate is plunging dramatically.

With 2 blown saves already this season, at what point might Ozzie actually have to consider a closer-by-commitee as in 2005??