NEW YORK — Even when he caught a ball behind his back, Cliff Lee merely shrugged.

Cliff Lee was down-right filthy Wednesday night during his Philadelphia Phillies’ 6-1 victory in Game 1 of the World Series. The placid southpaw, donning a nasty spike curveball, lasted all night long. He calmly allowed six hits and just one run, which didn’t even appear in the box score until a Jimmy Rollins throwing error allowed Derek Jeter to cross the plate with one out in the ninth inning.

Continue reading this story at Sports Untapped.

Fan Graphs has a nifty little tool that shows what the player’s approximate value if he was a free agent based on 2009 stats. We can compare that to what the player’s 2009 salaries were to see which players played up or down to their contract this past year. Today we take a look at [...]



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The World Series starts tonight. The games will be telecast on FOX. While I have nothing personal against the announcing team of Tim McCarver and Joe Buck, it was Harry Carry who observed that some announcers are more interesting than others. Here’s a shout out to Harry.
Harry Caray’s…



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This video was shared with us today by NBC Philadelphia. We chuckled.

Enjoy Game 1 tonight, we’ll be cruising 310 to Joba’s liveblog actionfest.

Historically, you couldn’t come up with two more different franchises than the Yankees and Phillies.

The Yankees have been, by far, the winningest team in American League history — their .568 winning percentage puts them almost 2300 games over .500, and 855.5 games ahead of the second-place Boston Red Sox, if you were keeping an all-time major league standing. Put it another way: say the Red Sox started winning 100 games a year, every year, and the Yankees suddenly got bad and started losing 100 games a year, every year (that would make a 38-game difference between the two teams). It would take 23 consecutive seasons of doing that before the Red Sox could catch them. The Yankees’ pennant is their 40th; to date they have won exactly two-thirds of the World Series in which they have appeared, and they have appeared in at least one in each decade since the 1920′s.

Meanwhile, the Phillies have, up to very recently, been the sad sack team of the National League. Much was made of the Pirates recently breaking the Phillies’ record of 16 consecutive losing seasons from 1933-48. But had the Phillies not won the last game of the 1932 season to finish 78-76, they would have had thirty-one consecutive non-winning seasons from 1918-48; in 12 of those 31 years, they lost 100 or more games. The franchise won two pennants (1915 and 1950) in its first 97 years of existence, and won only one World Series (1980) until last year. The Phillies are the only major league franchise to have lost over 10,000 games (10,167), despite the fact that the Cubs and Braves were around for seven years before the Phillies were created in 1883. The Phillies stand 1129 games under .500 — put that another way, too: if they started winning 100 games a year, every year, it would take 30 consecutive seasons to put the franchise over .500.

(That ought to also give you a little perspective on Cubs history. Doesn’t look quite so bad now, does it?)

History lesson over, I’m picking the Phillies to win in seven. The Phillies can match the Yankees’ CC Sabathia with their own Cliff Lee (and Indians fans must be sighing big-time, watching their former pitchers face off tonight), and if Philly wins one of the two games in New York, stealing home field back, that will make for a tight and competitive Series.

Late in the year as it is (the “November Classic”?), it’s still the World Series. Even the weather will cooperate, with rain ending before game time and temperatures cool, but not cold, in the lower 50′s at game time. Enjoy, because after it’s over… no baseball for three months.

Phillies at Yankees, 6:57 pm CDT. TV: Fox. Announcers: Joe Buck and Tim McCarver.

MLB.com Gameday

Baseball-reference.com game preview

SB Nation game preview

Please visit our SB Nation Phillies site The Good Phight and Yankees site Pinstripe Alley.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

We tried this the other day with the world series, but it’s a topic that we’re probably not as passionate about this year after the debacle that was 2009. Since this is the first major transaction of the year, what better place to begin getting everyone’s opinions than here?
In…



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First, I want to say that I should be and plan to be around here more often than I have been since my original post. I had an insane couple of weeks of work and some epic struggles with a code I’m developing for my research projects, including an episode where my computer was essentially telling me that 11 > 202. My goal is to post articles once a week, on Mondays. I’ll try to do some catching up going forward, but can’t make any promises. (I’m working on some really cool stuff at work right now, and haven’t felt stressed despite putting in lots of hours. That’s a situation that leads to me not having much time to spend on baseball.) Anyways, onto “this week’s” topic… My intention here is to give you some insight into how scientists analyze things as varied as baseball, supernovae, and fossilized bug bites. My hope is that by giving everyone a brief introduction to how scientists ask and answer questions, it will provide a better understanding of the source of the confidence sabrmatricians (and scientists) have in their projections.

The scientific method is often summarized this way: research a topic, form a hypothesis, predict something based on that hypothesis, and then test that prediction. If the test results do not conform to the hypothesis, accordingly discard or refine the hypothesis. Either way, devise new tests for the (perhaps new) hypothesis and continue to improve upon it with repeated tests and refinements of hypotheses. Things that cannot be stated in the form of a testable hypothesis are not considered science, and do not factor into the scientific method. Examples of things that do not fall under the purview of science are statements such as: “there is a God,” or “the Cubs are cursed.” However, one can test the veracity of statements (hypotheses) such as “carbon dioxide can absorb infrared radiation emitted by the Earth,” and “there is a better correlation between a pitcher’s FIP (fielding independent pitching) one year and his ERA (earned run average) the following year than there is between his ERA in one year and his ERA in the following year.” Such questions and statements fall under the purview of the scientific method, and they’re very useful things to consider because we can make – or in the case of fans, recommend – decisions based on extrapolations from these hypotheses.

However, the power of the method is not that it can help make decisions, but that it should always improve the foundations upon which those decisions are made. Adam Dunn, a player at the center of much debate here over the years, is a great example of this. A few years ago many sabrmetric Cubs fans – including yours truly – wanted the Cubs to pursue Adam Dunn. We saw the eye-popping OBA (on-base average) and SLG (slugging average) numbers he posted year after year, and thought he would be a great fit for the Cubs’ lineup. Today, most statistically inclined Cubs fans no longer want Dunn in Chicago. Why? Our understanding of baseball has improved. It was once thought that defense contributes relatively little to the value of a player. Furthermore, the ability to determine how value defense had for individual players was poor, and thus relatively inaccessible to the scientific method. A tool was eventually developed (UZR, or ultimate zone rating) that allowed quantitative defensive analysis of players and opened the analysis of defense up to the scientific method. The tool invalidated the hypothesis that defense did not contribute much to a player’s value, particularly for extreme cases such as Dunn’s. Now that we have a reliable method of measuring defense, and can ascribe value to players based on that method, we can include it in our evaluation of the player. In short: we’re better at this evaluation thing than we were a few years ago, thanks to those that developed UZR and other defensive metrics.

The degree to which Dunn was overvalued also serves as an example of something else: scientists and sabrmatricians are going to be wrong, but yet seem to be persistent in their claims that “they know best.” This isn’t necessarily ego (but it admittedly can be). We have a high degree of confidence in recommendations and projections because they are the result of a mountain of past work, very little of which is our own. That’s not to say we expect these recommendations and projections to always be right. On the contrary, we expect them to be inaccurate and treasure our mistakes as opportunities to refine hypotheses and devise new tests for them. Additionally, the best science will present uncertainties alongside measurements and projections, thereby admitting the likelyhood that they will be “wrong.” Those uncertainties give us an idea of just how wrong we are likely to be, and that gives us some semblance of confidence. (In fact, we call the degree of uncertainty a “confidence level.”) What’s more, because those uncertainties are known (more or less), there’s a limit to how wrong they are likely to be. That’s not true when it comes to predictions, opinions, and judgements based on one person’s subjective analysis of a situation.

Ultimately, our confidence and arrogance isn’t about being right about everything… but instead comes from the knowledge that when averaged over time, projections and recommendations that follow from application of the scientific method will be better than those based primarily on one person’s conjecture. That’s where I (and others, I think) are coming from, and why I hope you understand we can come off as “know it all’s” from time to time. It’s not that we know it all or think we do… It’s that the products and tools that arise from a community that applies the scientific method is something to trust over any one person’s opinion, including our own.

For those of you who assumed Mark McGwire was gone from baseball for good, think again.

Though he hasn’t been even the smallest percentage as irritating as former Bash Brother Jose Canseco, McGwire has been accused of being a big, fat, dirty cheater and also, a liar liar pants on fire.

Of course, that has nothing to do with knowing how to crush baseballs. Therefore, he will return to the field as the St. Louis Cardinals‘ new hitting coach. Tony La Russa, who agreed Monday to return for a one more season as the club’s manager, is hanging onto all of his coaching staff, except for one guy: hitting specialist Hal McRae.

McGwire, who has worked with the likes of Matt Holliday in recent offseasons from his California home, has received just under 25% support from voters in his years on the Hall of Fame ballot. Maybe this stint with the Cards will help polish his tarnished image? La Russa hopes so.

“I’m a big fan of his,” the skipper said. “He’s back in uniform and, hopefully, people will see his greatness. But the #1 reason he’s here is to coach our hitters.”

Of course we forgive McGwire, it’s not our style to hold a grudge. Pretty hard to forget the obstinate denial during the 2005 congressional hearing on steroids in baseball, though.

It’s also tough to forget how amazing he was to watch when we were kids, how he saved the game of baseball by smashing every ball he saw over the fence, and how my brother and I would get into fist fights over who was better: him or Canseco.

Welcome back, Big Mac.

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