I put off posting this longer than I should have, as I think on Fridays only 9 of my 23 regular readers come around, but I have a transaction to report, that might be even more thrilling than the Mark Teahen-for-Chris Getz-and-Josh Fields-Royals-White Sox-Utility-Man Blockbuster (did that even go through yet?). I don't want to make too big a deal out of this, but...

The brains behind FanGraphs.

As of Monday, I will be a regular contributor to Cornell FanGraphs (maybe you've heard of it?) on their analysis blog (under a different name, but it'll be easy enough to figure out). It's a great opportunity for me, and I appreciate the Daves (Appleman and Cameron, pictured left) bringing me on board. I mean, I'm assuming they haven't figured out exactly what kind of stuff I do yet. But, you know, I'm sure the Royals might have had misgivings the day after they signed Jose Guillen, but by then it was too late.

Neither FanGraphs nor Driveline are "exclusive," meaning that if I wanted to, I could keep writing the same amount for both. However, I'm already probably spending more about as much time as I should on this hobby, and real life recently got more complicated (and fun) with the arrival of B.L.F. I thought about it for a while, but finally decided that FanGraphs would be the best move for me. So I won't be a regular poster here any more.

Kyle Boddy lures a young blogger-wannabe into a life of nerdy dissipation.

It was a tough decision. Kyle basically found me hanging out on the corner, handing out trivial sabermetric analyses and bitching about trades to anyone who was bored enough to listen. He let me basically do whatever I wanted. My first "real" post here in January was something I'd been kicking around for a while (remember the days before UZR was freely available?), and I obviously couldn't say enough about it... I hope I've learned to keep things a bit more "efficient" since then. Since then, there have been some good and some not-as-good posts, but I've learned a great deal not just about baseball, but about blogging from this experience. I won't go through the highlights now -- this has gone on long enough as it is.

 

While I won't be posting here on a regular basis anymore, I will still be around here and other SBNation sites, and will sometimes have posts that I'll do here and elsewhere on "bigger" issues. I don't want to be the guy who's already graduated but keeps hanging around campus (alright alright alright), but I'll be around.

Final thank-yous:

Thanks to everyone who read my stuff here, especially those of you who linked to it. I appreciate the time it took. I hope that if any of you aren't FanGraphs regulars yet, you'll come by and check out my stuff there (you can also continue to follow me on Twitter).  I know I'll be watching to see new developments here at Driveline as Kyle enters a new era in his business.

Big thanks to Kyle for giving me a shot basically out of nowhere and giving me pretty much complete freedom to write about anything I wanted. You the man.

Thanks to Royals Review, both various users there and especially Will, for putting up with my nonsense in FanPosts and comments there. No, I never "worked" there, I'm just some annoying guy who posted a lot. Without that forum, Kyle probably would never have been tricked into thinking I had something to say.

Thanks to Sky Kalkman for help and encouragement by email and Google Talk.

And thank you Dayton, just for being Dayton.

You know, I kept my mouth shut when analyzing the Freddy Sanchez contract. But with reported trade of the Rays' Akinori Iwamura to the Pirates for Jesse Chavez,  I can't keep it in any longer.

Think back a couple of years ago when the game of baseball was the victim of possibly one of the worst breaches of its sacred code since some guy didn't run out a ground ball. You all know what I'm talking about: when Incarnation of Evil Scott Boras and his Willing Servant Alex Rodriguez announced that A-Rod would be opting out of his contract. A-Rod is "finally" hitting in the playoffs, but his horrible legacy lives on. Have teams and players no respect for this, the pure, untainted-by-greed World Series, the holiest part of the baseball calender? Instead of talking about the important stuff like whether or not Cole Hamels has quit on his team, Jose Molina's game-calling skills, Nick Swisher's "slump," trying to figure out if this "Chase Utley" character who just came out of nowhere is any good, and psychological speculation about the Yankees reliving 2004, we're going to have non-stop discussion and dissection of these moves, which is exactly the lesson that A-Rod and Boras wanted to teach to narcissistic, irreverent, selfish jerks like Sanchez, Sabean, Friedman, and especially Iwamura and his agent Alan Nero, who obviously negotiated his contract conditions with the idea of ruining from the World Series.

I guess we'll just have to push through and try to enjoy what's left, in between the constant Aki Updates. I'm so mad, I'm not even going to try and analyze Jesse Chavez. You hear that, Iwamura, you attention-craving jerk? Your strategy worked. Even a bigwig like me is going to give ALL the attention to you.

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I know there's a World Series going on and everything, but isn't anyone going to talk about the bigger news? That's right: Freddy Sanchez re-signed with the Giants for 2 years, $12 million, replacing his 2010 club option for $8M (with a $0.6M buyout) from his previous contract with the Pirates. Isn't this more interesting than reading about going on three days rest, Chase Utley, terrible managing, and OMG Derek Yeter is teh overated!!1111ONE?//?

Yes. Yes it is. (Okay, maybe not Utley)

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Game One of the 2009 World Series ended with the Phillies (mainly Cliff Le) dominating the Yankees in a complete game. The batting order for the Yankees didn't quite match what I recommended for them yesterday, but we hardly expected that, did we? The Phillies have some very good hitters, although not quite as good overall as the Yankees. There is a definiitely dividing line between the really good hitters (Utley, Howard, Werth) and the others. (But it's worth keeping in mind, well-known-on-line-"sabermetric"-analyst-who-shall-go-nameless, that most of the less skilled Philadelphia hitters justify their playing because of their excellent defense. Also, stop using VORP.) The heavily-left-leaning nature of the core of the Phillies offense also poses a challenge. But hey, there's the easy way, and then there's the cowboy way... And it's nice not to have a lousy lineup to optimize. So here we go, it's late and I want to get this done before the World Series ends.

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So there's a big game tonight. CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee are facing off in a matchup destined to stab Cleveland fans in the fork with an eye for ages to come. And it's also a chance for me to write about something that, while I it doesn' t matter all that much -- 5 to 15 runs over a full season, so almost irrelevant in a 7 game series -- I obsess over constantly: batting order.

During the season, I had an occasional series called the Lousy Lineup Optimizer. Obviously, the two teams in the World Series have not-so-lousy lineups, and it was a fun chance to mess around with some batting orders full of great hitters. I'd meant to start yesterday, but these things take a while to put together to account for platoon splits, etc. I'll hopefully post on the Phillies tomorrow. Indeed, I'd wanted to do this for all the playoff teams, but 1) it was going to take too much time -- series would be over before I got all the teams posted; and 2) if there's anything we've learned from reading MGL's posts on the Book Blog, it's that you can't just use current season stats to judge a player's ability -- you need something like a projection. Earlier, I was using the ZiPS Rest of Season stats, but the season is over. My pseudo-Marcels spreadsheet was frustrating me. But then Acta Sports made the 2010 BIll James projections to be published in the 2010 Bill James Handbook (now available for pre-order!) available to SB Nation writers. I figure next season isn't that far off. I'm no posting these as "my" projections, but just using them to get an idea of the relative abiltiies of the players of each team for putting together a batting order.

Again, batting order doesn't matter all that much, but you'd think that teams in the World Series would want to maximize their chances any way they can. It's also interesting because they'll need for put together batting orders both with and without a DH. Let's see what the Yankees should do.

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Yes, it's that time of year... projections are already coming out. Dan Szymborski from Baseball Think Factory has already published his ZiPS projections for a few teams, and I may (or may not) do some very basic projections once Baseball Databank's database is posted.

The first public player projections usually publicized in full in the offseason are the Bill James (maybe you've heard of him?) projections that are also included in the Bill James handbook. That's right, the 2010 Bill James Handbook is already available for pre-order from Acta Sports, so check it out. The projections are fun to look at, but there's much more the Handbook than that -- it usually includes cool extras like possible "career path" projections (e.g., how likely certain players are to hit certain milestones), Bill James' baserunning numbers, player win shares, the annual Fielding Bible Awards, and more. This season the  Handbook is featuring new stuff on instant replay and pinch hitting analysis.

In the meantime, they've distributed their player projections to some SBNation staff for a preview. I imagine your team site may or may not be posting about that, but for my purposes, this couldn't come at a better time, as I was planning on doing a post on the two of the biggest free agents on the 09-10 market: Matt Holliday and Jason Bay. Here are the James hitting projections for the players -- I've calculated the wOBA myself, of course, using the Tango's original weights

Name	AB	H	2B	3B	HR	BB	SB	CS	BA	OBP	SLG	wOBA
Jason Bay	560	150	32	2	32	88	11	4	.268	.378	.504	.377
Matt Holliday	605	155	43	3	27	66	14	6	.316	.395	.531	.394

 

Assuming something like this season's run environment (.329 league wOBA), over 700 PAs, that would make Bay about a +29 runs above average, and Holliday about +38. The James projections often seem optimistic, and, if the internet has taught us anything the last couple of seasons, it's that it isn't all about offense. And if it's taught us anything else, it's that there's a lot of different ways of projecting players... so let's see how "my" crude projections (based solely-on unadjusted wOBA) stack up against the Big Bad Bill James projections when combined with estimates of each players' other skills to get their individual True Talent Wins Above Replacement (WAR), and, even better, see how much they might get in contracts in the offseason.

It's not just Bay vs. Holliday, it's James vs. fingers. Bring it.

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