MjwW

Per the AFL roster pages, they are now listed on it. Surprised at McGuire, I thought he'd be at his innings limit. Same with Stilson, especially since they supposedly sent him to the pen to limit his innings. Dyson was a pretty obvious pick

It has been noted frequently around here that Brett Lawrie had a record breaking DRS rating, which indicated that he had already saved 30 runs, though we knew it was somewhat due to how the unique shifts the Jays employed were measured and it was not all real. Well, the folks at Baseball Info Solutions took notice: "But it was a flaw in our system that didn't recognize the defense the Blue Jays have employed on a regular basis for the first time in the history of baseball." As a result, they made changes to how DRS is measured. Now, shift plays are removed (similar to UZR) from individual players ratings, and the shift plays are used to calculate a team value that considers the net value at a team level. Which seems quite appropriate to me. Interestingly,Lawire is still the best 3rd baseman, at +16 runs, which is much closer to his UZR rating. The Jays also have saved the most runs due to shifting in baseball, so credit to Butter on that one. On a related note, Lawrie lost about 1.5 WAR over at Baseball Reference (which uses DRS as opposed to fWAR which uses UZR) as a result of this change. I am personally quite happy about this as I need update my contract value Excel file to account for the changes B-R made to their WAR calculations, and I was worried about this type of stuff in DRS contaminating my data. But that's fixed now.

Over at Baseball Prospectus, Russell Carleton (aka Pizza Cutter), who authored some of the initial and still commonly referenced research into the reliability of sample sizes for various statistics makes some updates to his methodology and publishes the results. In general, it's the same story as before. The stuff that stabilizes first are the Three True Outcomes, and ground ball and fly ball rates.

Vegas - Tacoma series, June 27-29. Lot of swing and miss in his game still.

Sorry, couldn't figure out how to embed the specific tweet, link to his overall feed

John Lott talks with Brandon Morrow about the differences in how he's approaching batters in 2012 vs. 2011. Money quote: "I know my mix probably wasn’t ideal before," he said. "The way I see it is that batters were looking hard and away a lot of the time. The right-handers would look to take that slider, and if it was a little bit up, shoot it out [to right field] or hit the fastball into that right-centre gap. I gave up a lot of line-drive hits that way to right-handers." I think this is pretty bang-on, based on looking at the pitchf/x data. Mixing in a third pitch if can command it consistently should really help him, especially against lefties to whom the slider is less effective

* Roughly, depending on the rate of commenting

So based on the last couple days, it seems like there's a fair number of people following minor league games. Last night updates ended up in about 4 or 5 different threads, so in the interests of not hijacking other threads and making it easier to follow in one thread, I thought I'd create one thread to be used. To avoid cluttering up the FanShots every day, I think the same FanShot can and should be used for multiple days, until it gets too big. The best way to do it is probably to have people rec until it gets pinned, and then when a new thread is created unrec it so it falls off (or one of the admins can nuke it). In the interests of making this work, here are some suggestions I have to make this work better, at least in the interim before there's a better feel for how things develop: 1. Keep comments threaded for each game, under a main comment with the date, time, league, opponent and pitching matchup. Also, a general tab for more general observations, though generally Blue Jays related (there's a daily thread at minorleagueball.com that's pretty good if that's more your thing). 2. Let's avoid a lot of OT chatter. Nothing particularly wrong with it, but it'll make each thread go further, again, in the interests of not crowding out all the other FanShots. There's plenty of other threads in which to do that anyway. 3. In game updates are great, but let's focus on value added rather than "Syndergaard just struck out a batter!" or "Player X just singled". If you're listening/watching/following and something interesting/worth mentioning happens, by all means share - let's just avoid inane comments for the most part, again to maximize each thread. Also, feel free to share any thoughts you have about this and any ideas to improve. Go 51s/Fisher Cats/Dunedin Jays/Lugnuts!