At the time of the Peavy trade my mind wandered to John Lackey. I perceived Lackey to be a slightly less valuable/talented pitcher than Peavy and thought he would be a good test case of what it would cost to acquire a pitcher of similar value on the open market. Now that Lackey has signed for exactly what another potentially comparable player signed for last year a 3 way comparison should be insightful.

There are those out there who believe that Peavy's contract was an "ace" contract and yet he wasn't an ace. Of course at least one of those people believes that John Danks should be traded for Jose Lopez. A comparison of Peavy, Burnett and Lackey after the jump.

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Well probably not "the" unluckiest, but he does have the 3rd lowest BABIP in baseball (for players with >350 PA, data from fangraphs).  His BABIP is .226, just ahead of General Soreness and Jay Bruce.

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 , but I was motivated to try to start the discussion correctly after the last fanpost attempt at finding our left-handed power source for next year. I was also motivated by another horrific offensive "performance".

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AJ Pierzynski is having his best season since he's played for the White Sox and one of the best of his career. His wOBA and OPS are the best of his White Sox career. Much of this value is secondary to his (tied for) career high batting average. Why?

 Well yes part of it is luck. His BABIP is .321, his xBABIP is .306 using the THT xBABIP calculator and his career BABIP is .307. But the more interesting component of his season is that in addition to having a higher % of his batted balls fall for hits he is also putting a higher % of balls into play.

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Come on. We've got a southsider and White sox fan running for president. We've got to have an election day thread. I know we're apolitical here on SSS but this is a once in history event (southsider and White sox fan running for president). Even rarer than the cubs winning the world series!

I'll give my election day story. I early voted 10 days ago. Working until about 4 today. I've got my ticket to the Grant Park celebration, goin' with the wife and another couple. Probably hit a pre-grant park event first then grant park.

Yes We Can!

And WU I can't believe you're voting for a ticket with palin on it. McCain I can at least understand, but Palin??!!

[Note by The Cheat, 11/04/08 12:45 PM CST]: I was going to start one of these. We need an outlet for the inevitable political discussion that is bound to come up over the day-into-night-into-week. So consider this a suspension of the already broken soft rule about no politics. But let's keeep it to this thread, and leave it in this thread. Mkay thnx

We are a horrific 4 games under .500 against the other AL playoff contenders at a pathetic 17-21. If we make it to the playoffs, we will get eliminated in the first round. We should just pack it in. Maybe we can get a better draft pick.

We are getting crushed by a clearly better team. A juggernaut that will cruise through the playoffs and obviously is much better than us against contenders.

thought ballon: (hmm.... maybe I should check that out because somebody's gonna check that on a site devoted to thoughtful analysis).  

Red  Sox: 15-19 against AL contenders....................

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/standings/grid

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/article/how_well_can_we_project_team_defense_and_other_uzr_data/

MGL's early UZR postings show Cabrera at the top of the heap. Also of note, Q isn't quite perfect (although small sample size of course and as I recall his UZR has been fine in the past). Juan was quite good at 2B (it would be interesting to see  Alexei's UZR). These are all per 150 games so Cabrera projects to +36, but of course is not likely to be that valuable defensively at the end of the year. And since defensive stats are best evaluated over a couple of years instead of a couple of months we must bear in mind these are very small sampke sizes.

The White Sox rank 4th in AL in defense according to UZR at +15. And that feels about right to me.

One of my recent favorite websites has become http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

It's byline is "electoral projections done right". Really great analysis and application of a regression model to polls. He developed a demographic regression model that actually predicted NC and IN dem primary better than the polls. I've been visiting the site daily for a couple of months now. The blogger was previously anonymous going under the name Poblano. Today he revealed himself as Nate Silver. Pretty interesting.  

I can't take credit for this one. This is one of of the very few times that I have actually Laughed out Loud online. And since there is at least one on base percentage/ batting average baseball line in here I figured I would share. I think you'll enjoy it.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3/13/124649/291/112/475838