As many of you already know, Baseball prospectus released their depth charts for the year, as well as the pecota based team projections.  

They listed the A's as first with 82wins, the LAAA's at 79.  I remember lots of people predicting that the A's are a 85 win team right now.  What say ye now?  

I don't know a lot about other projections, such as the bill james, CHONE and zips and zits, but I do know that BP delivers year in year out.  

IF the angles add dunn, and he is a two win increase, then the a's would be still up one game, which is well within the margin of error; it will come to how much grit the A's have and how mexican chavez is, I guess.

as a big music fan, and a huge dylan fan, I have always enjoyed "catfish" by dylan, about our good ol' pitcher which some of us know better than others (I am not so fortunate).  its worth a listen (its on the bootleg series Vol. 1-3).

So it got me thinking, does anyone know of any other examples of baseball/A's in some songs??

Inspired by Devo's #3 pick, what would your all time team look like??

C. josh gibson
1b. lou gehrig
2b. jackie robinson
ss. honus wagner
3b. george brett
lf. ted williams
cf. mickey mantle
rf. Griffey Jr.

sp1. satchel paige
sp2. sandy koufax
sp3. pedro martinez
sp4. bob gibson
sp5. babe ruth

cl1 mariano rivera
cl2. eck.

my mind completely blanked on 3b.  lets hear ya alls!!!

I just recently finished reading moneyball (earlier today while recovering from food poisoning), and i thought it was a very interesting book!!

It gave me mixed feelings about beane.  In some ways, it paints him as a trading genuis, not overly as bright as others (depo), irrational in many ways, and totally likable.

Lewis didn't seem to do a good job at explaining the 'moneyball' philosophy.  He seems to convey it as the pratice of getting useful goods (OBP, P/AB, and others) for cheap because no one really knew about the importance of these stats.  

what remained unscene is how much new stats/analysis the a's actually developed themselves.  James seems to be the main driving force behind many of the ideas that the a's office was going after.   does anyone know how successful the a's have been at creating their own devices for player evaluations?

i thought the most profound idea in the whole book is that a teams weakness can be made up by improvements in other areas. aka the way beane delt with the loss of giambi  by making it up by other players, or that individual statistics are much less important than the team statistics.

by the end of the book it seemed as if there was a big dark cloud hanging over me as i thought "the A's are screwed once every team starts doing the same thing, because then they will back to square one"  

does anyone have any thoughts on the evolution of the moneyball idea, and if these new approaches of "market inefficiencies" will be able to support the a's for much longer?