Jim's Lab Notes: Please Excuse the Mess

It’s update time. The season is over and a slower news cycle is upon us. It’s time for me to roll up my sleeves and work on the site. First up is the transition of our Content Management System (CMS) from Expression Engine‘s 1.x series to its 2.x series. I had hoped to accomplish this upgrade last March but, unfortunately, some of the third-party scripts the site uses had not yet been updated to the new version, my personal life was much too busy and, frankly, I did not have sufficient funds to ...

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Transaction Oracle: Indians - Acquired Lowe

Cleveland Indians - Acquired P Derek Lowe from the Atlanta Braves for P Chris Jones

It's not exactly news that Lowe was surplus to requirements in Atlanta. His health record has been exceptional – rarely missing a turn since becoming a starter a decade ago.

The problem is that he's 3 years removed from being an impact player. His upside is probably league average and I'd be more than a little surprised if he's that good. 39 year old pitchers in a decline phase are not what you'd call good ...

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Transaction Oracle: 2012 ZiPS Projections - Philadelphia Phillies

Not a whole lot of surprises here. A ton of hitters that played in the organization get projected this year, mostly because the team employed a massive number of semi-familiar names this year. Brent Clevlen! Rich Thompson! Tagg Bozied! A lot of the minors looked a bit like the 2004 waiver wire in your fantasy baseball league.

The starting pitching made up for a lot of sins in the form of an overrated offense and should continue to do so, even if they can't bring Roy Oswalt back at a ...

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Transaction Oracle: 2012 ZiPS Projections - Chicago Cubs

Epstein! That's pretty much the big news in Cubs baseball the last month. It's still hard to tell what direction exactly Epstein will take the Cubs, but it's likely that the list of players employed by the Cubs in 2012 will look very different than the list of players below. Epstein wasn't brought in with giant sacks full of money in order to politely churn Jim Hendry's assemblage of awesomeness.

On the plus side, the Cubs aren't really as decrepit a team to rebuild as the Houston ...

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Transaction Oracle: 2012 ZiPS Projections - Boston Red Sox

Despite the September collapse, the Red Sox managed to still win 90 games, but the collapse is what will be remembered about this team in the year 2050. Hopefully, as we listen to baseball games in our rocket cars or watch with our virtual reality Ballparksperience contraptions. Still, what it came down didn't really have much to do with beer drinking in the clubhouse (drinking beer and playing video games seemed to work just fine for the 5/6th of a season during which the team was one of ...Read More...

Transaction Oracle: Transaction Oracle, the Future

As most of you probably ought to know by now, I've been contributing regularly to ESPN.com for about a year and a half. As such, a lot of the transaction analysis stuff that went on in this area has gone by the wayside, simply because I've done a lot of articles for ESPN that involve player signings and trades. While I don't write up every trade for ESPN, I do enough that to oraculate about the rest here would tend to leave this blog unsatisfyingly fragmented. After all, what good's a ...Read More...

Transaction Oracle: 2012 ZiPS Projections - New York Yankees

And heeeeeeeere come the pretzels!

Just a reminder, that I'm going in reverse from last year. Starting next year, I'm going to randomly draw for order.

ZiPS is rather grumpy again about the Yankee starting pitching. Banuelos and Betances still have a lot of upside, but ZiPS is suspicious about them immediately making an impact in the rotation, given that they both walked way too many batters in AA. The good news for Yankees fans, of course, is that the team has an open wallet and is likely ...

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Transaction Oracle: 2011 ZiPS Minor League Translations 0.9

Archive with files .xlsx and .csv can be found here. I'm calling this 0.9 for now as there are usually some errors to massage out, sometimes big ones I overlooked.

As a reminder, these are translations, not projections and subject to the same pitfalls as any seasonal line is.

Any errors, omissions, or other questions, feel free to ask.

For those that don't remember, I have two flavors, one with no $H regression and one with mild $H regression. I post the latter one as people have found it ...

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Transaction Oracle: 2011 Minor League Park Multipliers

As usual, the raw data for these would be a complete pain to accumulate without the scripting wizardry of Jeff Sackmann. Jeff runs College Splits, GMAT Hacks and has a weekly column on college baseball on ESPN Insider during the season. Jeff also has a tennis sabermetrics blog, Heavy Topspin. So make sure to support Jeff, or else I'll have to put the information together myseful, resulting in a gigantic headache and me retaliating on the community with random beatings and pessimistic ...Read More...

Sox Therapy: Red Sox Fans Need to Take a Deeeeeeeep Breath

One phenomena which is quite interesting to me is how most of the analysts calling for Theo's head, and talking about what a flawed team the Red Sox are, are the same people who were talking about how great this team was in the spring and July. People (and by people I include the Red Sox ownership) need to relax and stay the course with this front office. There are decisions in life, unfortunately, where you do everything right in preparation and consideration, but the outcome disappoints. ...Read More...