Today's links were invented out of whole cloth in one of the six U.S. counties named for one of our greatest naval heroes.
• Takeaway from Josh Kalk's fantastic piece about umpires and strike zones: the umps do a great job … even Angel Hernandez.
• Is
Ryan Howard worth the $18 million
he's asking in arbitration?
Via
FanGraphs, here are Howard's salaries and his
real values since 2006:
| Ryan Howard |
|
Salary ($) |
Value ($) |
| 2006 |
400,000 |
25,700,000 |
| 2007 |
900,000 |
17,100,000 |
| 2008 |
10,000,000 |
14,100,000 |
| 2008 |
18,000,000 |
? |
We're assuming Howard gets his $18 million, which would only continue a dramatically positive trend for him. The Phillies, though? It looks like they're about to pay Howard and the piper. (That said, I don't think Howard will get his $18 million. As David Pinto notes, by filing at $14 million, the Phillies already are offering "Albert Pujols numbers for less production.")
• From the Orlando Sentinel's Andrea Adelson, another nice piece about
baseball during the Great Depression.
•
Don't buy this book.
• Boy, I sure am glad I'm not one of those
filthy seamheads.
• Joe Posnanski puts together
the perfect draft … and if you still need more proof that scouting is really, really, really hard, this should be plenty.
• In his latest blog entry, Bill James comes up with a new method -- actually, two-and-a-half new methods -- for
ranking baseball teams ($). The oh-so-Jamesian finale:
No matter what we do, we are going to reach the conclusion that the Red Sox were the best team in baseball in 2008, but I've checked my finger a number of times, and I'm really certain that there ain't no ring there. I'm not pursuing that claim; we're simply trying to understand the data a little bit better. By learning to make inferences from the data, we might eventually learn to rank restaurants, high schools, political candidates or movie stars. We're starting with baseball teams.
As James notes, perhaps the most interesting thing about this research is the ability to compare teams in one league to teams in the other. And, according to one of the methods, last season the Royals were better than 10 National League teams.
•
Sweet ride.
Rob Neyer
