Baseball 2016

[MadBurgerMaker]

Yes. Amazing story from Coastal and frankly a wonderful championship series. Reminds me why I love College Baseball. Shame our Big 12 brethren shit the bed there in the semis.

Great hire. Pierce was exactly the kind of guy I hoped UT would hire. Youngish, hungry, with his best days in front of him and ready to be the next great Texas Baseball Coach. I expect him to last at least 15 years.

Coastal Carolina won it this afternoon.  I wasn't able to watch very closely, but I had it on here at work.  Most of the runs came in the 6th inning (4 for CCU, 2 for Arizona) and I actually did see those.   It was two errors on one play that killed Arizona:  Directly allowed 2x runs in when they should have ended the inning, then two batters later there was a homer.

E:  Fun fact:  Coastal Carolina is changing conferences tomorrow.  They're going to the Sun Belt.  That might have been interesting if they had had to delay the game for another day due to weather.   

[Sophie Scholl]

19 to get 14.  Wow.  That was a tough win for the Tribe today.

[jimmy olsen]

Interesting.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/would-baseballs-all-time-all-star-team-go-162-0/

Would Baseball's All-Time All-Star Team Go 162-0?

By Rob Arthur

How many games would a team of All-Stars — including all these Red Sox players — win if they played a 162-game schedule? Winslow Townson / AP

Every year, MLB's All-Star game brings together the best players from each league to form two superteams. For one game, we get to see Jose Fernandez as a reliever against lineups in which Mike Trout and Miguel Cabrera hit back to back. But unlike the NBA's fantasy rosters made real, we never get to glimpse how dominant such a talent-laden squad would be against normal MLB competition. So with a little statistical analysis and some conjecture, I took a guess at how well an MLB All-Star team would fare in a regular season — and even how often they'd go a perfect 162-0.1

To get an idea of how good each All-Star team would be, I added up the wins above replacement2 for every All-Star team's best player at each position since 1933 (the first year of the All-Star Game). To further make things comparable to regular-season teams, I summed the top five pitchers' WAR totals to get a rotation's worth of pitching WAR.3 I also did not consider any WAR contributed by the designated hitter for each All-Star and regular season team, since the DH did not exist before 1973. The result of all this was a predicted WAR total for each All-Star team, which I could use as a comparison against real regular-season teams.

Not surprisingly, All-Star teams tend to carry far more talent in their ranks than most normal teams. The average All-Star squad put 60 full-season WAR on the field, which is about the same as the 1976 Reds — widely regarded as one of the best teams in MLB history. No regular-season team in history exceeded the 1927 Yankees' 66.3 WAR, but about 30 percent of All-Star teams would have if given the chance to play together in the regular season.

But 66.3 WAR is kind of an abstract idea; what most fans care about is Ws and Ls. To establish how well these All-Star rosters might have fared in the standings, I used regular-season teams as a guide. I regressed their winning percentages against the total WAR on their rosters to get a sense for how much each additional WAR was worth.4 As expected, each win above replacement contributed to a team increases winning percentage by roughly 0.7 points, or the equivalent of about one win in a 162-game schedule.

By this method, practically every All-Star team would be predicted to have a winning record, and the average All-Star squad would be predicted to win 73.4 percent of its games.5 In a 162-game schedule a .734 winning percentage would lead to 120 wins, a feat no real-life team has ever achieved. And that's just the average; the very best All-Star teams — the top 10 percent — would be predicted to win more than 81 percent of their games, or 132 contests in a regular season.

Standing atop that group as the best All-Star team ever was the 1997 National League squad. (Which, by the way, lost to the AL 3-1, a reminder that in any one game a superteam can lose to a merely great team, especially if there isn't much at stake.) Seven players from that roster have already made the Hall of Fame, with two more (third baseman Chipper Jones and pitcher Curt Schilling) likely to reach induction in the near future, and a few others (such as outfielder Barry Bonds and first baseman Jeff Bagwell) mainly excluded over performance-enhancing drug concerns. (By comparison, only five players from the AL team that opposed them have made the hall so far.) Combined, the top players on the '97 NL team produced 86.2 WAR; six of them reached the MVP level threshold of 6 WAR; their worst position player, Jones, ended up producing 3.7 WAR — still 23rd best in the NL.

We can't say for sure how such a team might have fared over a 162-game schedule; the assumptions of any model can break down at the extremes, particularly since we're trying to extrapolate from a sample of regular-season teams that have never been anywhere near as powerful. But by the model outlined above, the 1997 NL All-Stars would have been predicted to win 87 percent of their games, or 140 times in a season. Even given the amount of luck in baseball records,6 the '97 NL would hypothetically go undefeated only once every six billion seasons. (So the best team in baseball history — by a huge margin — would still be the longest of long shots for a perfect record.)

I can, of course, take things a step further and assemble the all-time greatest All-Star team. By assembling the greatest single-season performances at each position throughout history, I can build a team with almost 137 WAR, more than 50 percent better than the greatest single All-Star team ever. This team — with Lou Gehrig from 1934 manning first base, Barry Bonds from 2002 in the outfield, and '99 Pedro Martinez sharing a rotation with '72 Steve Carlton — would be predicted to win 96.8 percent of its games, becoming the first 157-game winner. With a lot of luck, it could eke out an undefeated regular season, but even for them it would be far from a certainty. (According to the binomial distribution, it would happen once every 200 or so seasons.)

Obviously, no such team will ever play the regular season, and this simplified approach ignores many factors that limit teams from such otherworldly performance, such as injuries and the grind of the long schedule. Even so, it's intriguing to consider how overwhelming an All-Star team likely would be in the face of regular-season competition. For a game in which the default is to fail seven times out of 10, most All-Star teams would suddenly make baseball look quite easy.

[sbr]

Of all the dumb shit I have seen here this may be top 10.

Or higher.

[derspiess]

Stanton crushed it in the Home Run Derby last night.  Glad to see the NL win something a couple years in a row.  Kind of jealous seeing the All Star festivities in another city.  It was such a high to have it in Cincy last year

[Valmy]

Damn I thought I was going to see crowing by BB after his team dominated the All Star game last night. I am disappointed.

[derspiess]

I stopped watching in the 7th inning.  AL won, shock.

[Valmy]

AL won, shock.

[Barrister]

Damn I thought I was going to see crowing by BB after his team dominated the All Star game last night. I am disappointed.

You had to wait till the morning for that.

Nice showing by Hosmer and Perez (and Ned Yost for that matter).

Now lets see if the Royals can turn it up in the second half so they have a chance of taking advantage of that home field advantage in the fall.

[The Minsky Moment]

Pete Rose is correct that as of today Big Papi is a borderline hall of famer.  At best.
However - despite my redsox hate part of me wants see him make it.  If anyone has the likability factor to shatter the hall of fame roid barrier it would be him. 

[sbr]

How the hell can Ortiz be a borderline HoF  candidate? He should be a shoo-in.

[derspiess]

I saw Pete get inducted into the Reds Hall of Fame a few weeks ago.  Everyone pretended it was the real Hall of Fame.

[dps]

Yeah, not seeing him as merely borderline.  His entry might be delayed because there is likely to still be a backlog of qualified candidates when he becomes eligible.

[The Minsky Moment]

How the hell can Ortiz be a borderline HoF  candidate? He should be a shoo-in.

For example: how is he a stronger candidate then say Fred McGriff, who crapped out at 20%.
The careers are the same length, batting stats are similar except Ortiz has 40 pts of slugging %, but McGriff played a decent first base for a number of years, while Ortiz was so brutal in the field he kept Manny out of the DH spot.  Ortiz also awful on the bases. WAR is similar for both, fangraphs actually has Crime Dog materially higher.  Both had impressive post-season exploits.

[The Minsky Moment]

Interesting fact:  Ortiz only led the league in HRs once.  McGriff did it twice.
Ortiz is the better power hitter of course.  But interesting nonetheless.  The comparison is really closer than one might think because McGriff's prime years were in the 1988-1993 time period when power numbers were a lot lower.