SB Nation User Blog: thecheeseisblue

#Pirates Joe Kerrigan returning as pitching coach in 2010

thecheeseisblue — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:29:48 -0000

#Pirates Joe Kerrigan returning as pitching coach in 2010

http://twitter.com/Dejan_Kovacevic/status/4480066047
Dejan via Twitter

An extension of the 2007 Pirates

thecheeseisblue — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:03:02 -0000

Trogluddite's recent post about the 2007 Pirates got me thinking about how many wins that team would get in terms of each players WAR today (or in the last season they pitched if they are currently retired). A replacement level team would get 48 wins. The WAR of each active player is multiplied by 1.6, since we are 101 games through the season.

Ronny Paulino = 0.8 WAR = 1.28 WAR/162

Adam LaRoche = 0.4 WAR = 0.64 WAR/162

Freddy Sanchez = 2.2 WAR = 3.52 WAR/162

Jack Wilson = 1.9 WAR = 3.04 WAR/162

Jose Bautista = 0.7 WAR = 1.12 WAR/162

Jason Bay = 1.7 WAR = 2.72 WAR/162

Nate McLouth = 2.1 WAR = 3.36 WAR/162

Xavier Nady (2008) = 4.0 WAR/162

Ian Snell = 0.6 WAR = 0.96 WAR/162

Tom Gorzelanny (2008) = -1.1 WAR/162

Paul Maholm = 2.5 WAR = 4 WAR/162

Zach Duke = 2.1 WAR = 3.36 WAR/162

Matt Morris (2008) = -0.4 WAR/160

Matt Capps = -0.6 WAR = -0.96 WAR/162

Shawn Chacon (2008) = -0.4 WAR/162

Salomon Torres (2008) = 0.4 WAR/162

John Grabow = 0 WAR

Damaso Marte = 1.2 WAR/162

So, overall, this would add 26.74, or about 27 wins to the 48 win replacement team. Meaning the Pirates would finish with 75 wins with this team, still under .500, and about to lose players to free agency.

Just for kicks I'm going to take the WAR of each player's career year with the Pirates.

Ronny Paulino = 2.6 WAR

Adam LaRoche = 2.5 WAR

Freddy Sanchez = 4.8 WAR

Jack Wilson = 4.3 WAR

Jose Bautista = 1.1 WAR

Jason Bay = 6.4 WAR

Nate McLouth = 3.6 WAR

Xavier Nady = 4 WAR

Ian Snell = 3.4 WAR

Tom Gorzelanny = 2.8 WAR

Paul Maholm = 2.7 WAR

Zach Duke = 3.3 WAR

Matt Morris = -0.4 WAR

Matt Capps = 1.6 WAR

Shawn Chacon = 0.2 WAR

Salomon Torres = 1.4 WAR

John Grabow = 0.5 WAR

Damaso Marte = 1.2 WAR

For a grand total of 46 WAR, or 94 wins, which would be enough to give them the NL wild card last year.

In conclusion, had the Pirates kept their players, based on the win values from Frangraphs, they would still be a below .500 time. And if they kept their players, and each had a career year, even though the odds are nearly impossible, they would still be a wild card team.

So in other words, yes, the Pirates have made the correct moves.

Baseball Christmas

thecheeseisblue — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 03:29:25 -0000

So I read a tweet by Whygavs that said "Can I be honest? I still feel like a kid on Christmas right now." And that got me to thinking about Christmas, and how the players exchanged today would compare to some of the toys in my memory. This is the players from todays trades and the Morgan Milledge trade just for kicks.

To begin with the players we gave up.

Jack Wilson - Jack is like getting clothes on Christmas. It's not exciting. It's not fun. It's never what you want. But it is a solid reliable gift, one that will stick around and be useful to you for a while. A little underrated.

Ian Snell - Snell is one of those talking Billy Bass things. The first time you see it, you're like "hey this is pretty funny, it could be kinda cool". A little later you change your mind to "This thing is freaking annoying. I will do anything just GET IT AWAY!" Plus a little thing you didn't know. That Billy Bass, yeah he hated you just as much as you hated him.

Freddy Sanchez - Freddy is like getting a bike. Not your first one, just a bike. It's better than your other one, it can be fun sometimes. It's reliable, it's useful. Basically it's an all around quality gift.

Nyjer Morgan - Nyjer is any generic action figure. It's exciting for a brief while, but you get bored of it really quickly. It holds sentimental value to you, but you realize there are much better toys out there. Really not a great toy once you get past the initial excitement.

Now for what we got in return.

Lastings Milledge - Milledge is like the Nintendo Gamecube. Nintendo dominated the game market for years, and everyone was waiting around to see what they would come out with next. Then you got the Gamecube. It was seriously disappointing. But if you get the right games for it, you can get it to be an extremely useful system.

Tim Alderson - Alderson is like an Ipod. It's exciting and everyone loves it. You have fun with it, it lasts for a while and is reliable. Barring some hardware malfunction, it's a great gift you're happy to have.

Ronny Cedeno - Cedeno is a Tomagotchi. At one time it was really popular. Nobody really knew why, but it was. Now everyone realizes how much it sucks. You can still keep one around and use it to pass the time if you need to, but you would really prefer something better.

Jeff Clement - A used video game. You heard it was a good game. The disc is a little scratched up so it can freeze from time to time. Being a video game, it can be great or it can be awful. It has the potential, but you're only going to find out once you play it.

Aaron Pribanic, Brett Lorin, and Nathan Adcock - Three of any sort of "stocking stuffer" type gifts. There's a whole lot of them, and you realistically don't expect much when you first get them. But every one of them does have the potential to be a pretty great gift, or be a useless pile of crap.

I had no particular reason for doing any of this. So there.

A proposal

thecheeseisblue — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 05:14:44 -0000

We all know there are plenty of people who seem to reject everything the Pirates do, often without reason. This is a post for those who write off all their moves, even the Hinske trade in which the Pirates paid a portion of his salary, as salary dumps in a big scheme for Nutting to make money. They also think of Huntington as the same person as Littlefield, comparing every move to the ever famous Aramis Ramirez trade. I could spend hours trying to prove how all of this is not true, and this front office is different and better, but I don't feel I need to on this site. I do, however, have a proposal for these so called fans.

If Huntington has not been making good moves so far, what exactly would you do to field a winning team? Not just sayign something like I would keep our good players forever! With detail, how would you take the team as it was when this front office took over, with Bay, Nady, McLouth and everyone else, and make it into a competitive, playoff team? Without any ridiculous ideas and unrealistic spending like saying we should have signed Mark Tiexiera and C.C. Sabathia. This is open to anyone with ideas, but I really want to hear from those who reject the current moves.

Tell me your plan.

Trade predictions by random people

thecheeseisblue — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:04:23 -0000

I was reading mlbtraderumors, and they were having a discussion as to which players would go where by the deadline. I would like to list the trades involving the Pirates, both realistic and unrealistic, and see what people think about them. Organized by poster.

cnnrcrrll - Yankees trade George Kontos and a player to be named later for Ian Snell

RoyalsRetro - 2B Freddy Sanchez to Minnesota for IF Steve Tolleson and P Jeff Manship

P Ian Snell and P Jesse Chavez to Cleveland for 1B Ryan Garko and 2B Josh Barfield

enchinga - 1.F. Sanchez to Giants for J. Sanchez and Noonan.

2.Snell and Grabow to Yanks for Coke, Kontos, and Betances.

3.Zack Duke to Texas for Moscoso.

4.Maholm and LaRoche to Braves for Escobar and Medelin.

Pirateswillwinin2010! - Pirates trade Ryan Doumit C and Zach Duke to Philadelphia for Kyle Drabek SP, Jason Donald SS, Andrew Carpenter SP, and Micheal Durant 1B

Matt Capps and Ian Snell to Colorado for 2B Eric Young Jr, and P Casey Weathers

Now let the blasting of people we've never met begin.

Pens sign Jay McKee

thecheeseisblue — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:09:41 -0000

As per The Insider on PIttsburgh Sports and Hockeybuzz. http://insidepittsburghsports.com/

Money is unreported as of yet, but apparently he took less to play for the Penguins, and that's why they stopped pursuing Nick Boynton. Expected to be announced Friday.

I really have nothing else to add, as you can just click the link for Depaoli's usually semi accurate info, but I need it to reach seventy five words. Now it is.

There's no comment needed, just read the card. Personally, I'm impressed.

thecheeseisblue — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 05:04:31 -0000

There's no comment needed, just read the card. Personally, I'm impressed.

Pittsburgh Tea Party for Real Fans

thecheeseisblue — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:33:02 -0000

For intelligent Pirate fans only. We know that Bob Nutting has spent money since McClatchey stepped down. And that Neal Huntington has, quite frankly, done a hell of a job with what he was given. Most of the trades since the new guard took over have been good, and the Pirates are actually trying to win. So in direct contradiction to the other post, I suggest a display of support for the organization.

1. Support the team - go to games.

2. Symbolic acts - create a petition or craft a letter showing our support to Huntington and Nutting.

3. Well an ad campaign would just be waste, Nutting isn't letting the team go, even if the yinzers think Mark Tiexera will singlehandedly win us the World Series.

4. I can't respond to this one, the other guy says to hire a new GM to try to make the team good, but they already did.

5. Do nothing, just ignore the idiots.

There's no need to take the team back from anything. They're doing well, building a minor league system so they could compete for years. I, for one, would much prefer constant contending for the playoffs and/or World Series rather than one .500 season and more awfulness.

This post is only to contradict the other one. I've stopped trying to change the minds of those people, but I know there are plenty of fans, particularly on these boards, that know the Pirates are doing well and have the patience to wait rather than trying to buy free agents in a haphazard attempt at one not awful season (Kinda like we did when PNC park opened).

So please, intelligent, maybe not articulate, but certainly real baseball fans, join my in my support of the current Pirates organization, and help us undo the evil that was Dave Littlefield.

Poll

Let's just see how this turns out. Would you rather support or boycott the Pirates after the trades from this season?

Support

85 votes

Boycott

6 votes

91 votes | Poll has closed

My new player performance formula

thecheeseisblue — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:10:38 -0000

So I was up the other night thinking there has to be a good new age way to analyze hockey players, ala Sabermetrics in baseball. All I kept thinking is that Plus/Minus could be a very useful statistic, but it doesn't truly measure the goals a player contributes to his team and directly measure the ones in the other team's favor. So I came up with a formula using a player's goals, primary and secondary assists, powerplays drawn and the effectiveness of those powerplays, giveaways and the results of those giveaways, and penalties taken and the result of those penalty kills. The resulting formula is as follows.

((Goals * .5 (assuming that the player scoring the goal is 50 percent responsible for it's actual being scored)) + (Primary Assists * .35 (assuming the primary assister is 35 percent responsible)) + (Secondary Assists * .15) + (Powerplays Drawn * (League number of powerplays drawn / league number of powerplay goals)) + (Shots on drawn powerplays * (league number of shots on drawn powerplays / league number of powerplay goals) + (goals on drawn powerplays)) - ((giveaways * (league number of giveaways / league number of giveaway goals)) + (shots off giveaways * (league number of giveaway shots / league number of giveaway goals)) + (giveaway goals) + (penalties against * (league penalties against / league penalties against goals)) + (penalties against shots * (league penalties against shots / league penalties against goals)) + (penalties against goals))

In my estimation this formula should measure the true number of goals a player contributes to his team or against is, weighted appropriately against league averages. Unfortunately the statistics I require are not available or recorded or I just could find them, so I went through play by plays by hand of the Stanley Cup Finals and recorded stats from those seven games. The results of my formula are as follows.

Justin Abdelkater 0.9605

Ville Leino 0.6605

Brett Lebda -0.7473

Ruslan Fedotenko 0.5569

Valtteri Filppula -0.1044

Marc Andre Fleury -1.3834

Brad Stuart -0.4334

Brian Rafalski 0.6717

Chris Osgood 0.1322

Evgeni Malkin 1.6803

Niklas Lidstrom -0.7536

Niklas Kronwall -3.6576

Mikael Samuelsson 0.2632

Phillipe Boucher -0.0395

Henrik Zetterberg 1.8202

Hal Gill -2.0148

Jonathan Ericsson -0.9140

Maxime Talbot 2.2195

Bill Guerin -1.7104

Jordan Staal 0.5421

Segei Gonchar -0.9666

Kris Letang 1.1525

Matt Cooke 1.1789

Craig Adams -0.0341

Marian Hossa 0.3079

Johan Franzen 3.1554

Sidney Crosby 0.6894

Brooks Orpik -1.6174

Mark Eaton 0.3765

Jiri Hudler 0.6482

Tyler Kennedy 1.1920

Tomas Holmstrom 1.3554

Dan Cleary 2.3177

Darren Helm 1.4912

Chris Kunitz -2.4622

Miroslav Satan -0.3753

Rob Scuderi -0.9018

Kirk Maltby -0.1580

Mathieu Garon 0.3807

Pascal Dupuis -0.1534

Kris Draper 0.8807

The average is somewhere around 0.2. So by my estimation the most effective player was Johan Franzen, the least effective was Niklas Kronwall, the most effective Penguin was Maxime Talbot, the least effective Penguin was Chris Kunitz.

This is only a rough formula come up with at about four in the morning last night. It seems to skew towards forwards and be innacurate towards defensemen, but seems to work well enough for me. The results are also probably pretty skewed due to the extremely small sample size, but I was too lazy to look at any more play by plays.

Let me know what you guys think.

Connor