The World Series is over.  You're looking at another off-season of trying to figure out if your team should sign some middle-of-the-road middle infielder who won't bring the pennant next year either.  And because you can only do that for about 15 minutes before crying, you need something to do that can keep your mind on baseball, so that you don't have to resort to *gasp!* watching the NFL, NBA, NHL, EPL (go Everton!), WWE, or SCOTUS.  (Tonight on Monday Night Litigation, it's Sotomayor vs. Alito.  Justice will prevail!)

No, let's do something baseball-related.  Let's plan a baseball road-trip, the best baseball road trip ever.  And let's do it on a budget.

Your mission is simple:  In 2010, you will (in your imagination) travel to all 30 MLB parks, see 30 games, and you will figure out how you would do it at the lowest possible cost.  At least in theory.  (It's a free country, so if you actually want to do this in real life, you can... but the point is that it's a fun mental exercise.)  Using the real 2010 MLB schedule, and some other web-based resources, you will put together an itinerary that would allow you to meet your goal.  The person who can do it in the lowest amount of cash will win a cookie and bragging rights.  (Note: no actual cookie will be awarded.)

I will tell you, this "game" is horribly addictive.  Worse than Farmville.  You won't think so at first, but it is.

Intrigued?  The rules are below...

Continue reading this post »

Suppose that a batter is 5-for-7 over the course of his last seven plate appearances.  Pretty good two-game stretch, eh?  Now, suppose that another player has a career 5-for-7 mark against the day's starter, going back a few years.  (You could substitute "the reliever who was just brought in" if you like.)  Which is the more meaningful, the last seven PA's chronologically, or those seven PA's against the pitcher?

The proper answer to this is "Who cares?  Seven plate appearances isn't enough of a sample to tell us much of anything."  Let's leave that aside for a moment.  Let's enter the magical world inhabited by magical gnomes, Joe Morgan, and more MLB managers than I care to mention.  Let's pretend that you can actually draw serious inferences about future performance from seven plate app... I almost got through that with a straight face.

The bigger question is which is the better source of information: performance in the recent past against a different set of pitchers or performance against this specific pitcher over an array of years, given an equal number of plate apperances in each case.  I suppose it's an empirical question and one that I haven't really seen a study of directly.  I've seen a few things that lead me to believe that neither is a particularly good predictor, and so the "winner" between those two would be the winner of the "tallest grasshopper" award.

Continue reading this post »

A small thought experiment:

Imagine for a moment the perfect starting pitcher.  And when I say perfect, I mean he's practically perfect in every way.  He is guaranteed to go out every fifth game and to throw nine perfect innings, striking out all 27 batters on 81 pitches.  Guaranteed.  If your team has a minimally competent offense (must... resist... Royals joke) and can squeeze out one run over nine innings, you have a win.  We'll call him Pedro Halladay "Three Finger" Gibson-Young.  Figure that over a 162 game season, he'll start 35 times (plus his inevitable All-Star Game start) and garner you 35 wins.  If your team makes the playoffs, he'll do the same thing there in two games of each series.  Need someone to pitch Game Seven?  He'd make a rather nice option.

Now it so happens that this winter, Pedro Halladay "Three Finger" Gibson-Young will be a free agent this winter.  Imagine that you have a $100M payroll to work with.  How much would you offer him on a per annum basis?  Remember that you do have 24 other roster spots to fill and every million that you offer to Mr. Gibson-Young is another million that you can't spend on the rest of the team.

Got a number in your head?  (Really?  That much?  Since we're suspending disbelief, I gave myself the ability to read your mind.  And yes, I heard that too.  That's disgusting.  I would never do that with a lobster.)

Two questions:

1. Are you paying a little extra for the Game Seven thing?  Should you?
2. Consider the number that you just generated.  Consider numbers that are thrown around for mere mortals who do not throw perfect games every time out and are not guaranteed to even be good.  Are your numbers close?

Discuss.