It has been several weeks since I attempted to post something on this site but here it goes again. I, as you may know, am an avid, but young Indians fan. Like every young fan, I have made mistakes and upset people who don't need to be upset. I formally apologize to all those whom I may have flustered in my last 2 years of savage posting on this site. With my 16th birthday rapidly approaching, I have decided to turn over a new leaf and begin to accept what the intelligent minds of LGT have to offer and view it as strictly constructive criticism.
With that being said, I have been following the Indians since the day pitchers and catchers reported. I have to say that I have been excited about what I have seen so far:
Asdrubal Cabrera- .750 BA proves in my mind at least that last year wasn't just a fluke and he could be a thrill to have on this team as a cornerstone of a rebuilding process.
As a team, the Indians have an ERA, correct me if I am wrong, of 1.33. This is a reason for excitement simply due to the fact that the Indians haven't been praised about the Pitching Staff in months past as well as the good pitching is coming in the warm Arizona desert in which the baseball has a tendency to fly.
My final reason for excitement is based of the insight that Bruce Drennan provided today. He, like many other Cleveland fans is elated to see that the Indians have started well, one of the main things they could never accomplish under Wedge. He also believes that the lineup that the Indians are able to put out could prove to be one that could propel the Indians into contention as early as this year.
As I stated previously, I am sorry for the childish way that I acted before but I would like to start over and provide the insight that I can and get the CONSTRUCTIVE criticism that every young fan needs.
6 months ago
ClevelandCrazy29
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I’m excited as well, but keep in mind, this is all extreme SSS, with lineups full of guys at varying degrees of preparedness. We’ll see if the fast start sticks in the regular season.
Welcome back, Sandy! ATALECG...
I agree, it is entirely to early to get excited but I do like that Acta has already accomplish his first major goal, a fast start.
by ClevelandCrazy29 on Mar 9, 2010 9:53 PM EST up reply actions
Dude koobs is a legend. Where did that guy go?
If you don't respect Aaron Laffey, I will fight you.
by Cap'n Snegiryov on Mar 9, 2010 7:37 PM EST via mobile up reply actions
Koobs doesn’t go on this site anymore. After his posting of a Video Game he gave up. I can tell him to go back on if you guys really want but somehow I doubt you want that.
by ClevelandCrazy29 on Mar 9, 2010 9:55 PM EST up reply actions
I really just want to know what that was. A video game you say. That was my guess. Still don’t really understand. But that’s more than what we got originally.
Who needs affection when you can have blind hatred?
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Evan Lysacek: 2010 Olympic Gold Medalist ♥
And that wasn’t meant to be mean. I was just confused.
Who needs affection when you can have blind hatred?
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Evan Lysacek: 2010 Olympic Gold Medalist ♥
Yeah, thats what it was. I was going to say something but I decided against it figuring you guys would assume I was Koobs. It was a picture of a MLB The Show 09 game that he played.
by ClevelandCrazy29 on Mar 9, 2010 10:30 PM EST up reply actions
This one worked. If it’s the same picture.
Who needs affection when you can have blind hatred?
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Evan Lysacek: 2010 Olympic Gold Medalist ♥
That picture isn’t working for me.
Who needs affection when you can have blind hatred?
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Evan Lysacek: 2010 Olympic Gold Medalist ♥
Do you use a mac?
Who needs affection when you can have blind hatred?
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Evan Lysacek: 2010 Olympic Gold Medalist ♥
We can end the mystery and just say it’s the game Paperboy. On NES I assume.
Welcome back, Sandy! ATALECG...
I’ll suggest you check out this post, and the article it links. It’s nice that Asdrubal has a few hits in his first couple of ABs, but I’d hold off a few months in throwing a party. Or look at his combined ~3000 plate appearances as a professional rather than his first dozen or so of spring training to draw any conclusions.
May I ask what exactly makes this commical? I am just curious.
by ClevelandCrazy29 on Mar 9, 2010 9:54 PM EST up reply actions
1. We are less than a week into Spring Training. Not even Manny Acta thinks that Manny Acta has the Indians off to a fast start yet. The information provided here isn’t even substantial enough to be SSS.
2. Batting average and ERA aren’t tremendous stats to stand on even after we’ve played games that mean something. Avg especially is almost completely useless in any sort of meaningful analysis. You’d do just as well to say that Asdrubal is going to have a good year because he ties his shoes well. It’s nigh unto completely irrelevant.
3. Asdrubal Cabrera is going into his age 24 season. He isn’t disproving any flukes, he’s improving. Anyone who glanced at his minor league stats as compared to age and level knew that he could hit. The fact that he is 3-4 (or whatever) has no bearing on that.
4. I’m tired and unsure why I took the time to compose this. I cannot emphasize #1 enough. This week has proven literally nothing beyond the fact that our team still knows where the ballpark is.
5. If you really want to learn go to The Hardball Times or Baseball Prospectus and read everything you can. Never un-mute a Fox announcer and never, ever, listen to Bruce Drennan.
Amendment: if you plan to write a novel in which a main character is in television or radio, a la Stanley Elkins’ The Dick Gibson Show or Kingsley Amis’ I Want It Now, listen to Bruce Drennan. A lot. Then put aside your feeling that you will never create a character as richly and tragically comical as your muse, and write, write, write.
by YoDaddyWags on Mar 10, 2010 7:54 AM EST up reply actions 1 recs
I’ll go one step further:
If you must only use one single statistic to evaluate a player’s offense, use OPS. In general, an 800 OPS is considered “good.” This is available EVERYWHERE baseball stats are sold.
If you must only use one single statistic to evaluate a pitcher’s performance, use xFIP, available here: http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=3273&position=P
If you must only use one single statistic to evaluate a player’s overall, contribution, use wRC here: http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=y&type=1&season=2009&month=0
Do not ever use: batting average, RBI or Wins. That is instant Joe-Morgan-Level-Ridicule territory.
I think FIP is still more reliable than xFIP. FIP has a little problem with HR/F rates but a bigger problem with groundball rates. It’s not really a big deal when evaluating the other 29 pitching staffs, but for the 2007-2010 Indians, it’s kind of screwy. I don’t have a really good answer, but I’ll take FIP for now.
OPS+ is probably better than OPS.
I alluded to this below, but I think for a newbie, we shouldn’t necessarily worry about which stat is best or even which is better. Give them something basic to learn, and hope they understand why that stat makes sense, and let them fine-tune it from there. Here a commenter puts it into a finer point:
In recent years, OPS (and OPS+) has made significant inroads in the public consciousness. More people understand it. More people use it. For some, understanding and using it after years of using the traditional metrics probably took some effort. But if suddenly, just as they’ve become versed in this fancy new metric, a bunch of stathead types are quick to point out that EQA or wOBA do a slightly better job at measuring performance than OPS+, and that this new acronymed beauty is the language of choice among knowledgable fans (and from my vantage point, there is a little too much of that attitude in our community) I fully understand (and, in some ways, subscribe to) the idea of throwing up your hands and saying “#### it, I give up.”
I like and appreciate the big-picture concepts that have arisen out of sabermetrics, particularly those those that apply to how the game is played (rather than how the individual players are measured). But the latest advances in player evaluation that represent fine-grain improvements over the previous latest advances in player evaluation do little to enhance my enjoyment or understanding of the game.
I don’t think this is a condemnation of FIP, wOBA, whatever. We should be getting better and better at evaluating on-field performance, and it’s a good thing every time one of these stats articulates it better than the last. For ClevelandCrazy and others though, let’s just get them in the door first and then push the “better” stuff on them, or we risk frustrating anyone trying to learn more.
Steel Nick
I understand that we are only a week into spring training. But, you have to start somewhere. Maybe the BA for Droobs was stupid because you can reverse it and say Hafner sucks for batting .000 right now so maybe I am jumping on nothing but I am glad to see that the guys are at least playing well so far.
by ClevelandCrazy29 on Mar 10, 2010 3:16 PM EST up reply actions
Can satire be satire if it is unintentional?
by jakesinger777 on Mar 9, 2010 11:38 PM EST up reply actions
No .. but I’m really not sure it is unintentional. He consciously makes all the same ‘mistakes’ he made before!
STBNL
May I ask exactly how I made mistakes? Maybe I did use irrelavent statistics but,
1. I didn’t get angry and rant a rave
2. I didn’t aggressively defend myself.
3. I took the criticism that everyone has given me like a young man should.
So, no this was not a piece of satiracal work.
by ClevelandCrazy29 on Mar 10, 2010 3:13 PM EST up reply actions
I vouch for this. I was there.
by kennesawmountainwahoo on Mar 10, 2010 8:21 PM EST up reply actions
The problem I always had, CC29, and what I see you doing now, was justifying irrational optimism in the numbers I chose. You’re pointing to a player’s batting average and a team’s ERA total after 3 games played during spring training and finding reason to get excited and declaring the old “slow start era” over.
But if I told you that Carlos Santana is a bust and that trade was a horrible call because he’s only hitting .200 I’m sure you would point out that we’re only 3 games into spring training. As you rightfully should. But you can’t really have it both ways.
For starters I wouldn’t even gauge how fast or slow our start is until the end of April. And just for the sake of less rolled eyes here, at the very least you should set aside some time and learn OPS. From there you can go here or here and over time learn why the stats you use garner such resistance on this site. Don’t worry if it gets harder to grasp as you go along: The stat community gets a little bit lost in itself sometimes, and at some point we’re just fine-tuning stats to be percentage points more accurate than the last stat we liked. Learn the basics and you’ll at least find the conversations much easier here, both in understanding and your own contribution.
Also, you need to seriously filter your consumption of opinions from the mainstream media. I’d recommend ridding yourself entirely of Bruce Drennan. If you read the paper—I understand you’re 16, so this is probably moot—try to only read Pluto. Get your daily Indians news from Anthony Castrovince. Unfortunately there’s not much on TV worth watching that isn’t going to misinform you, but really, Bruce Drennan has to be near the bottom of the pile. It’s a call-in radio show on television. And the only people dumber than the mainstream media members are the people who call or write to them.
I appreciate the effort. I didn’t get baseball literate in a savvy sense until I was about 18, so you’re miles ahead of me just being here I suppose.
Steel Nick
by nickjs21 on Mar 10, 2010 7:58 AM EST reply actions 4 recs
I forgot to point out that similar to my Carlos Santana point, Cabrera’s batting average has dropped something like .250 points since yesterday’s 4th game. This is as much a cause for concern as his .750 average was a cause for celebration.
Steel Nick
Maybe, I over stated the batting average but to see a team that hasn’t started 4-0 in spring training in several years do so, I get excited. Maybe it’s just because I am a kid. The only reason I didn’t include the OPS or any other statistics is because I was in a rush to get out the door to my baseball tryouts for our high school team and I had to finish quickly. Thank you for at least being a little more understanding of where I am coming from but please know that I don’t get my knowledge from Bruce, in fact, the amount of time he stutters annoys me to the point of a boiling rage but to say I strictly based my excitement off of his remarks or even my baseball knowledge off of him would be a lie. Please do not take this as a swift and agressive defense, rather it was just a way of clarifying were I was coming from as far as the fanshot.
by ClevelandCrazy29 on Mar 10, 2010 3:10 PM EST up reply actions
It isn’t really about “overstating” batting average or anything else.
It’s just about never sensible to rely on:
- batting average
- any stat from just a handful of games
- anything from spring training at all.
Let me tell you have completely I accept these as basic truths. I did not even know we were 4-0. I cannot cite for you a single spring training stat for the Indians. I have no idea.
And how does this lack of knowledge of the spring training stats affect my knowledge about the Cleveland Indians? Not one bit. Zippo.
One thing I forgot to add.
It’s perfectly okay to make note of stat that doesn’t really mean anything — because it’s a small sample, or batting average, or spring training, or all three. It’s okay to make note of it, and it’s okay to be excited about it. Of course we all get excited by stuff like this.
Where the line is crossed is in using it as the basis of a serious conclusion, like predicting a bounce-back year. We all get excited, but we also have working brains and should use them.
I don’t know if maybe I made it sound like I thought they would have a great year or not. But, I didn’t mean that at all. I just simply meant I think they will be better than what some people were expecting.
by ClevelandCrazy29 on Mar 10, 2010 5:27 PM EST up reply actions
For CC29, Happy Birthday. May you get all the Tribe gear you wish for.
For the rest of you, if you weren’t similarly optimistic about the Tribe after something like a 4-0 Spring Training start when you were around CC29’s age, I feel sorry for you.
No, not you. Your helmet!
by PatBordersHelmet on Mar 10, 2010 8:04 AM EST reply actions 2 recs
Pat, I don’t know about that. When I was 16 in 1989, the Indians had the third best Spring Training record in all of Major League Baseball at 19-11-1. This might have given me the optimism that the Tribe was a 99 win team in the making (I can’t remember if it did). They went on to finish 73-89, good for 6th in the division. If anyone is similarly optimistic about the Tribe after a strong ST showing, then you should feel sorry for them, because they are set up for disappointment.
Spring Training is for drinking in the sun after a long winter, nothing more. Even if you’re 16.
Lead singer and driver of the Winnebago.
Fact is, though, it’s a vastly different perspective for the 16-year-old born in 1994 — 1994! — rather than in the early 70s.
Hang around for another 12 years GFP and your user account can become older than some other posters.
I’m already having a hard time that at my age, I’m nearing non-prospect status.
by Gradyforpresident on Mar 11, 2010 9:20 PM EST up reply actions
I was making a comment more about the youthful optimism of being 15 give or take a few years. I was 16 in 1991—which was a pretty disappointing year. I don’t remember exactly how I felt during that Spring Training, but I’m sure I anticipated October baseball. We all learn at some point that the is no Easter Bunny and Spring Training games are meaningless. Everybody has to grow up eventually, my advice would be not to rush it. Part of me always anticipates October baseball for the Indians—I just don’t say it out loud these days. I try my best to fight my cynical or even pragmatic knowledge and keep that optimism as foolish as it may seem. I envy those who can do it without showing signs of being delusional. I envy their youth.
No, not you. Your helmet!
by PatBordersHelmet on Mar 10, 2010 7:56 PM EST up reply actions 1 recs
I think we should all cut him some slack. I didn’t know half of what this kid knows about baseball at his age, and I don’t suspect most of us here have… at least not the folks in my generation. That said, CC29, just do your thing and try not to get so deeply offended when people correct you or criticize your arguments. It doesn’t mean we don’t like you.
"You are an LGT success story" -- Jay
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