The State of the Prospectus is here! (puts lengthy State of the Gabrielle Union Undress on hold)
While you have seen his name for a few months here, I would also like to talk about the work that Eric Seidman is doing that will be revealed in the coming months. In 2010, you will see new searchable, sortable player cards with career statistics, all of the BP family of stats, PECOTA projections, and more on a single easy-to-use, easy-to-read page. This is the one encyclopedic tool that many of you have been waiting for, and I think our readers will be thrilled with the results. Eric is also taking on a role as our statistical evangelist. We have a lot of great metrics out there, many which are unfortunately buried within our current public offering. That is going to change, and Eric will be spending a lot of time talking about our numbers, as well as many of the new metrics currently in development, and explaining the nuts and bolts around them, and why they are the best out there at accurately measuring team and player performance.
Some specific projects our entire stats team is working on (but are hardly limited to) include:
1. SIERA (Skill Interactive ERA): A run estimator that corrects QERA’s flaws and dethrones it as the most accurate of its kind. There’s a long explanation of SIERA in the upcoming Baseball Prospectus 2010, and look for it here soon.
2. New, “from the ground up” defensive measurements, including a separate project that will result in a state-of-the-art metric for measuring the value of catcher defense.
3. A revamped and much improved MORP.
As always PECOTA will be an important part of our product offering. Once a series of complicated Excel spreadsheets and thousands of lines of Stata code residing on Nate Silver’s laptop, we’ve moved PECOTA to a more stable and sharable development environment with the assistance of Nate, which will allow PECOTA to continue its growth as the most detailed projection system available. With our fearless statistical leader Clay Davenport at the helm, we expect to share with you many new and exciting developments concerning PECOTA in 2010 and beyond.
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1. Tricky Dick Posted: January 04, 2010 at 03:01 PM (#3426993)Most Hype Over Replacement Evar?
Does "from the ground up" mean PBP defensive stats? A someone who's bought every BP book since 2000 and subscribed since it went for pay, it really bothers me that they haven't yet purchased the BIS or Stats data packages.
Sounds as though Silver is mostly out, even with regard to PECOTA. That's unfortunate, but maybe making it more "sharable" will allow for more interactive use for subscribers (lineup toys, real in-season projections, updated projected standings).
That's all I care about.
Matt Wieters broke it, so even the unashamed shills can't call the most accurate anymore.
It just turns me off to even bother clicking on the whole article to see this kind of hype. I have no idea how Qera compares to all the other era normalizers out there, or is so great about this new metric Siera. But I'm pretty sure Goldstein doesn't either, it's just what he's trying to sell. Someone without a dog in the race is needed to determine which, if any, or these metrics are worth paying attention to.
I would add "shareable" as a real important thing too. Jeff is a real nice guy and in the past I've asked him for data and he's just sent it to me, which was super helpful. I hope that doesn't end.
This is the part that gets me about the whole thing. Goldstein is the self-proclaimed "non-stat guy" at BP. Why he is running the show and trying to sell the new stats just sounds off to me.
That suggests Jeff will be less forthcoming with data than he has been.
Most of this article is about recruiting people who have been readable for free. Now they are going behind a pay wall. So those of us who object to paying for stuff on the Internet will go on to reading other people.
Great, but Belgium didn't exist in the 16th century, so they'll be a lot of obscure references to nothing.
Stupid Flanders.
A net loss IMO, and Perotto to my knowledge has been a beat reporter, not a columnist providing opinion/analysis.
A writer like Chass ignores aspects of the discourse that would lead him, if he read and understood them, to abandon some of his opinions, and as such doesn't take part in what can legitimately be called an academic discourse. This gets us to the problem of research as "product." An organization like Prospectus, that by selling its research separates itself from the discourse rather than embracing and taking full part in it, is a commercial organization rather than an academic one. Its "product" is not produced from a truly academic point of view, and its legitimacy as academic work must thus be questioned, even if--and this must always also be in question--it is not consciously informed by a desire to grab eyeballs, and thus profits, that supersedes the desire to learn and understand.
My opinion, incidentally, is that this differs from proprietary work done within organizations and not made public for competitive reasons.
That's what I'll miss about Colin moving there. Not to imply anything about his integrity, but now he has a dog in the fight (or at least will always have the appearance/possibility thereof).
I don't know if BPro stopped being part of the conversation across the web or if I started reading different bloggers, but it doesn't seem like people have been discussing/evaluating their stats nearly as much in the last few years.
Tango mentions discussions with Clay (or was it Nate) about adjusting the replacement level for their WARP calcs. In other cases, it seems like the group as a whole was reluctant to address the wider audience's concerns about their metrics (e.g., FRAA, writing columns as if defense stats besides FRAA didn't exist, and was there ever a public response to Colin's questions about Wieters' projection?).
I hope with Colin and Carleton there, things improve in this regard. Though to be fair, I could be reading the situation wrong.
He's done both, moving more into the latter as he's moved away from the newspaper. He's also a very good writer; I prefer his stuff to Sheehan's any day.
In large part, that's because they don't give anyone outside the family any insight into what they have, so it makes it hard to discuss and evaluate their stats objectively.
-- MWE
Yeah, even for someone that's just a rudimentary consumer of advanced metrics rather than someone particularly interested in the peer review/academic aspects of stats -- that's always been a big problem with BPro since they went pay.
I pretty much tune out posts here that refer to their metrics.
EqA and VORP and PECOTA are used frequently, and WARP still somewhat. People still discuss/evaluate WARP.
I have canceled and re-upted my Prospectus subscription many times since they have gone behind the wall, and I have to say I always go back to it because largely I'm happy with the quality of the work and the consistency of the work. Though, I confess I never use there stats beyond EQA.
I have Hardball Times, Fan graphs, and The Book Blog all setup on my news reader but the only two sites I go to regularly are BR, BBTF and Prospectus. I have even let my subscription to BA lapse, which I may revisit later in the year.
Should anything else be added to my newsreader?
Maybe you need a remedial course in counting?
-- MWE
LOL.
Pretty much, yeah. And even in his newspaper days with the BCT, he was often the most honest source of commentary on the Pirates - much better than the actual opinion writers.
To me it depends on the metrics. I'll use VORP, EQA and SNWL without any issues. I know the underlying methodology and the fact that it's hosted at BP doesn't change my feelings about them. But then none are really BP metrics -- they're just hosted there.
Their projections? Well I don't particularly care that their methods are a black box. And as for Clay taking them over, I think it's likely to be a good thing. When he took over from Gary Huckabay he was far more conservative (Gary's interest in projections lay in trying to find the hidden gems. Not surprisingly Vlad -- Gary's system -- was systemically optimistic)
If you like football, I recommend Smart Football and Advanced NFL Stats. There's also Residual Prolixity, but Tom over there updates relatively infrequently. As the title implies, it's leftover stuff from when he isn't writing elsewhere. He's the guy who turned me on to the other two sites. I'm kind of meh on Football Outsiders at the moment, though. SF and ANS are more about game theory, IMO, than evaluating players, while I think FO focuses on stuff like DPAR and DVOA. I like Free Darko for basketball, but it's an acquired taste.
What, no Football Outsiders?
Nate Silver always described QERA as "a toy," so making it into a more flexible statistic is interesting and possibly useful, but the test of SIERA will be to prove itself in comparison to established alternative DIPS-based metrics -- not in comparison the QERA toy. As for PECOTA, I bet Nate's happy to be relieved of the burden of all those spreadsheet manipulations, and it's good to see that some of the metrics that Nate created, such as MORP, will undergo continued improvements and that PECOTA will be more fully integrated with other statistical reporting and projection tools. Goldstein did not address whether Nate remains a member of the BPro team, other than as an advisor in the adaptation of PECOTA. My impression is that he effectively took himself off the team last year; maybe he will continue to have an advisory role.
I see Sheehan as the "odd man out" (and not because he took himself out), especially since he was, after all, one of the relative wordsmiths at BPro and had been a co-editor of some of the earlier annuals. Perrotto is a good and prolific writer. By moving to full-time, I would speculate that he's taking over Sheehan's salary as well. I wonder whether he will continue to write for Basketball Prospectus.
While I welcome the addition of the several new analyst-writers to the BPro staff, I think the addition of the comments sections last year has been a great success (and addresses a long-standing criticism of BPro) and had led to much-needed substantive discussions as well (at least some of the time). Creating a set of blogs could take this interactive element a good bit further.
I complained on more than one occasion that the setup of their comments sections is not user friendly. It's really tedious to carry on and follow discussions there. I also don't understand why some comments have to be "rated" below a certain threshold and thus disappear from view unless you click on the comment to see what it is.
Because BPro's net development has now caught up to slashdot.
But is it deadly accurate?
I find the stuff that Chris at Smart Football and Brian at Advanced NFL Stats do to be more interesting. I've hoped that their Extra Points section would become something like this newsblog, but it never happened. Also, one of their writers sort of rubs me the wrong way. That shouldn't matter and I should be able to overcome petty crap like that, but that doesn't help matters.
Also, in BP there's no way to highlight the text you're trying to respond to. You have to put that text in quotation marks, which IMO is less than ideal.
It just seems like usenet years and years ago was a better interface than the one BP has.
I hate hate hate hate hate threaded comments.
If Primer ever goes that direction, it will be a sad day.
Yes. Play-by-play, with hit location data. That's all I can really say definitavely right now - I have a pretty good idea of how I want to implement everything right now, but no plan survives first contact with the enemy and so I'd rather not get into specifics until I know what they are.
I haven't. What I can tell you about SIERA is that it's a DIPSish component ERA that uses some batted ball data, along the lines of an xFIP or a QERA (as opposed to a DIPSish component ERA that uses some batted ball data, along the lines of tRA). Eric Seidman and Matt Swartz designed it, and say that its RMSE to ERA in Y+1 is favorable compared to FIP, xFIP and QERA. I've seen the formula but haven't done any accuracy testing on it yet myself (spent most of the weekend going over the PECOTA projections for the book instead - now that that's wrapped up I have a little more time on my hands for other things).
This is just me speaking for me here, but here's my take.
As other people note, BPro metrics aren't as popular around the Internet as they were, say, 5-6 years ago. A lot of that is because of newer metrics that have supplanted BPro metrics. We want to change that.
The way I see it, there's two things we have to do in order to get to that point:
1) Simply have the best metrics possible.
2) Make it possible for others to independently verify the validity of our metrics.
Maybe I'm hubristic, but I really think we have the ability to do #1. Obviously this requires building on the work of people both in and outside of BP - if something like BaseRuns exists and it's the best tool for the job, there's no reason for me not to use it and to give credit for it. At the same time, the idea is for us to continue to innovate and to actually add something to the conversation.
But that would be a waste of effort if we then can't convince people to use the metrics we produce. And my goal is to get to the point where people like Tom Tango and AROM and Chris Dial feel like the stats we have at Baseball Prospectus are as good or better as what they could calculate themselves.
But we're only going to get to that point if people are able to validate both our results and our methods. And that means being open and honest about what we are doing with the numbers and why.
I think it's an ambitious goal but I don't see the point of having goals that aren't ambitious. And we're up against a lot of competition - and these are good people who I like, admire and respect. They do fantastic work. But I think we can do better, and that's the standard I want to be held to.
And I still plan to be part of the larger conversation, and to be available to be accountable. I still post on Primer. I still post on Tango's blog. If anyone wants to talk to be about baseball metrics - not just BPro's metrics, anyone's metrics - you can still always reach me at:
pontifexexmachina at hotmail dot com
And that's my sales pitch, I guess.
I couldn't agree more. Threaded comments suck. It's not that hard to just read through a thread.
BPro kinda jumped the shark a couple years back, so now they're... re-jumping the shark? Jumping the blue whale? I dunno. I come more for the writing than for the stats, and BPro's writing overall has been declining in quality IMO. I just can't see what's there that's worth paying for.
I continue to fear that BPro is in front of the curve in that the internet as a whole is slowly moving toward an a-la-carte system where you pay individually for pretty much every site you go to except extremely minor ones, on top of what you pay for your net connectivity itself.
This is what I'm used to and like. The format in the forums is cool, too (altohough folks tend to build nested ziggurats of quoted comments there. Convenient for rereading old threads, but a PITA in real time.) The worst I've run across, by far, is on those free Boardhost boards. You have to click-thru to read every damn comment.
The only downside to this site's format, IMO, is that you can't control the number of posts per page. When I'm using a computer with low resolution or a mobile device, it's a ton of scrolling to read a thread... in fact, my phone can't load a whole page of a busy thread.
Other thoughts:
- People were complaining just recently about having "a beat writer like John Perrotto" on-board as one of the errors of their ways, but I think installing a newspaper guy (and imo, a pretty good writer) like him as Editor-In-Chief and pushing Kahrl back to full time analyst makes worlds of sense. The other additions, like Wyers, seem like moves in the right directions.
- Assuming that everything currently free remains, I think Euston actually getting paid for his work will mostly be a good thing. Cot's with outside support (and not too much meddling) seems like it would be beneficial
- I don't remember Joe Sheehan from years past, but his articles in recent years seemed to fall into the category of "screed" more often than not. I think his departure is a plus. I only wish a similar fate had befallen Carroll.
I'd add a third - be publicly self-critical. I suppose you might think that that's part of #1, but I would disagree.
And perhaps a 4th - don't make old data disappear. I've long wanted to go back and check multiyear PECOTA forcasts and some of Davenport's ml peak translations, but all of that stuff simply disappears once the new year versions go live.
I really hope maintaining access to seemingly "old" and "useless" data that can be used to track long term accuracy is going to be a part of this new statistical overhaul that Eric and others are working on.
And if that happens outside the pay wall, so much the better. I hope that is what the commitment means.
-- MWE
I'm very encouraged by your post and look forward t your work at BP. Overall, I read Kevin's post as a move toward reestablishing BP as a sabermetric leader and making their methodology more accessible to public scrutiny. The proof is in the pudding, of course, but there's an awful lot of talent there.
Don, I don't know if you know me. The folks at Primer know me as GGC. I always thought that neo-sabe meant a few things. Examples:
1. Rationalism to the exclusion of empiricism.
2. Looking at the numbers without regard to in-game context.
3. An almost Hollywood level worship of youth over experience.
4. A haughty disdain of front office types.
5. Lots of Simpsons references.
IOW, analyzing baseball from the viewpoint of Baseball Prospectus circa 2000. I've been misusung the term for years. My apologies. But I think that I was just finding the scene when you were cutting back on your participation. I wish that you had included a definition of the term in your glossary. Heck, there's an entry for "wafering the pitcher" and I don't think that anyone uses that expression.
Part of his reply:
... #4 is something that was altered early on when the real sea-change took place--at that came when some major league teams got more interested in number crunching than had been the case in the 80s and early 90s...
The one that should be added to supplant #4, I think, is "careerism." Now there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to have a career, but the problem for the field of sabermetrics is sucb an attitude, when taken to its logical outcome, takes us back to a point where vital facts and findings can't help but remain on the other side of the looking glass.
And if you read a blog like the one associated with Tango Tiger, you will see how this has come into play. It's clear that Will Carroll endorses the idea of a "privileged class" of "uber-analysts," while Tango and NGL have one foot in each camp. (Sometimes it's the left foot, and sometines the right...)
Should a lot of money be thrown at sabermetrics? Very probably. There's no reason why we shouldn't be able to try out as many ideas as possible, even if some of 'em are poppycock.
Should it be done under the rules of free-market capitalism? Almost certainly not.
The last paragraph is pretty straightforward, but I'm not sure if he's alluding to Elias or not earlier or what exactly he means by a priveliged class. Does he think that Caroll thinks there should be a priesthood of baseball or something like that?
I would say the things Backlasher used to think about this site (and may still, for all I know) are actually true of FO. The one thing that works well is the way the comment sections are threaded, bu if you're logged in it highlights comments you haven't read everytime you go back, so it's easy to scroll through and pick out the new comments.
I'm, so to speak, the guy that gets to carry the pink backpack out to the bullpen, so I'm really not in a position to make a commitment here either way. Obviously some things are always going to be behind the pay wall. Whether or not the stuff behind the pay wall is worth the money is a personal decision.
I think (and someone can correct me if I'm wrong on this) that in the past BPro has actually been pretty good about keeping the important stuff on the open side of the wall. The full formula for EqA, for instance, is free to read. I know Prospectus has taken heat in the past about "closed" metrics but all of the key ones - VORP (and MLV behind it), EqR/EqA, WARP, etc. - have publicly-available methodologies. Even before I worked for BPro I was able to reproduce VORP and EqA using information they made publically available.
(And PECOTA, for instance, is no more or less "black boxy" than any projection system outside of Marcels that I'm aware of. It's certainly well more open than several other projection systems; the '03 Annual and Baseball Between The Numbers both have pretty detailed writeups of the methodology.)
Pitch f/x has been available for free for those with the tech skill to get the data. But it may not stay that way, and things like hit f/x or field f/x may never be available on the outside. I hope MLB doesn't go in that direction, but I can't blame them if they do. MLB is spending a lot of money to produce this data.
They all say that...:")
I also hate threaded comments, and this is why. You can do things like that to help someone tell which are new and which are old, but it's still a lot easier to just know you left off reading #133 and start reading from there. Threaded comments encourage subconversations. The way BTF works means we're all in the same big conversation. I don't think, in a threaded environment, that a post about Lenny Dykstra turns into a health care reform debate. And I want to live in a world where that can happen.
As long as the people who are currently running MLBAM are there, I think they will make everything readily available. Yes, they realize that their prime constituency is the 30 major league teams, but I think they also realize that the researchers who grab and publicize Pitch F/x, Hit F/x and Field F/x are the best ambassadors for what they have to offer.
-- MWE
It's a football site. They're all steroid apologists.
I don't know if the FO writer who bugs GGC is Mike Kurtz, but I'd like to repeatedly hit him in the soles of his feet with a bamboo cane. Does he like anything? He could get a blowjob and then complain his dick was too wet.
Happy Base Ball.
Say it ain't so Rally :(
***
I'm sure there are tons of Primates pulling for you.
***
There are two objections that I have:
1 - Not a single person has ever shown any evidence for the PECOTA percentile ranges being accurate. For example, a rookie and a veteran in his late 20s both have similar kind of range expectation, even though the range expectation should be tighter for the guy you have more PA or IP for. Reliever ERAs fluctuate far more than starter ERAs, but you wouldn't think that looking at PECOTAs.
PizzaCutter, Matt, Colin? That's a challenge.
2 - The "deadly accurate" claim on their (soon to be your) book every year is baseless. The way I describe it, standard systems are 81-81, Marcel is like being 82-80, better systems are like an 83-win team, maybe 84. That's as far as it goes. There's no 90-win or 95-win team out there.
Other than these two points, there's no issue with PECOTA. If you hold PECOTA up to be more than that, then that's where the takedowns are coming from. If I'm given MGL, Chone, ZiPS, and PECOTA, I'm pretty much weighting them 25% each. I might go as high as 30% for one of them, but no more.
Fangraphs uses both the threaded (default) and non-threaded.
I think it's right out of the Wordpress box.
In my case, I much prefer the non-threaded for the blogs I follow all the time (I can pick up where I left off), and threaded for those I follow occasionally.
I'm not sure BPro would be too happy with that ;)
Gotcha, AROM. Thanks. I guess Pitch F/X is publically available, but I have no clue how to manipulate data like some of the more computer-oriented folks can. Rememeber, I would break Primer from time to time in the past. I suppose I could learn to, but I'm more competent at using a microfilm reader. And those still occasionally come in handy.
It's a Steelers fan thing. Steelers fans somehow manage to consistently combine incessant ########-and-moaning AND vehement blind loyalty. Everything is the fault of something other than the Steelers' players and/or coaches not being very good.
It's a Steelers fan thing. Steelers fans somehow manage to consistently combine incessant ########-and-moaning AND vehement blind loyalty. Everything is the fault of something other than the Steelers' players and/or coaches not being very good.
Once again, Justin's perception of Pittsburgh-related events and mine don't really line up anywhere.
In my experience, Steelers fans in recent years have complained near-incessantly about the O-line, which would seem to be pretty well-deserved.
I've heard a lot of complaining about the o-line, too, but hell, it's one of the worst o-lines ever put on the field.
What I've heard more than ever this year is whining about the referees are out to get the Steelers. The referees HAVE been rougher on the Steelers this year than in the past... but IMO it's because for years past they've been very kind to them. For whatever reason, they stopped being kind to them now. The Steelers' o-line holds a lot because no one on it can block anybody.
Anyway, this was originally about Mike Kurtz, whose constant complaining seems in line with most of the Steelers fans I know. The Steelers haven't lost 11 games in a season for almost 40 years; 9-7 feels like a failure, I guess. There's a lot of whining about referees and injuries and just general unluckiness, and yeah, the Steelers HAVE been unlucky this year... but they were lucky as hell last year (especially with injuries), as almost all NFL champions are.
Possibly so. Most of the ones I know are talking right now about who to target in the draft, or issuing rueful remarks about what might have been this season if they hadn't blown so many winnable games in the 4th, or had done better against a slate of mostly bad teams.
Put it this way: The Steelers MIGHT be able to survive trading Ben Roethlisberger for draft picks, if they turned the defense around quickly. But if word even leaked out they were thinking about trading Polamalu, half of Pittsburgh would burn to the ground, if the people I know are any indication.
Me, you know what kind of guy I am. The main thing I complain about is that they didn't tank their last three games. Beating three good teams to close the season looks good on Mike Tomlin's resume, but it just means they're going to pick 20th instead of 10th, which won't make the radical reconstruction of the o-line and defense any easier. At least we can hope they'll stop wasting high picks on RBs and WRs.
Rally, you should check out a post I made on BtB.
http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2009/8/19/994666/saberizing-a-mac-4-pitch-f-x
Mike provided update Perl Scripts and the spider codes in the comments, as well as helping us trouble shoot errors we got. Or, if you want to take the shortcut, there is an SQL dump that you could import with all the data from 07-09.
http://www.wantlinux.net/2009/10/pitch-fx-data-with-pitch-type/
You are correct about Hampton and Farrior, of course.
I think that playing to win was the right call, insofar as they were still mathematically alive (and didn't actually fall all that short of the postseason). As the '05/'06 team shows, anything can happen once you earn a spot in that bracket.
The Steelers really need to find that disruptive strong-side end, but it's probably going to be put on hold while they find a nose tackle. It's unlikely Ziggy Hood is that guy.
For my money the 2005 d-line (von Oelhoffen/Hampton/Smith) was the best d-line the Steelers have put out since the Steel Curtain days. That's exactly the template to model: Extreme-motor guy that disrupts the strong side (Smith), Death Star in the middle (Hampton), excellent run stuffer/space clogger on the weak side to give blitzers a chance to attack (von Oelhoffen).
Oh, and we also need to pray to the god/gods of our choosing that some rich team doesn't realize Heath Miller is the best tight end in the NFL and offer him a ridiculous contract the Steelers can't/won't match.
Not according to this. They have him 30th best this year and 34th in 2008. However, they did have him at #1 in 2007, their first year of data. According to the 3 year sample, Miller is a good receiver and an OK pass blocker but his run blocking has declined from great to poor.
Miller is an excellent receiver and an OK blocker. I don't know how one projection system or another weights those various things, but in the modern NFL, (IMO anyway) that is exactly the kind of tight end you want to have.
Anyway, when I go through rewatching all their games this year, I'll keep an eye on Miller's run blocking. Food for thought.
30th best is preposterous, though. I'm willing to allow for maybe I'm overrating him, but a system that says Heath Miller is a bad/near replacement level tight end (which a 30th rating suggests, as there are 32 teams) is a system that fails at evaluating tight ends. 10th or 12th or so would be about as low as I could see a person or system reasonably going.
But anyway, as a Steelers fan I sincerely hope the rest of the NFL agrees with PFR's analysis of him.
Did they ever write anything on Shane Lechler, or what a good punter is worth? If a guy can average 50 yards a punt but could alter his angle to average 40 yards but with so much hangtime there'd never be a return, is that a fair tradeoff? That sort of thing...
- Winning the Super Bowl just last year in miraculous fashion and claiming the SB titles lead, AND
- losing so many games against NFL bottom feeders this year...
... makes it amazing to me that any of their fans could complain about wild-card tiebreakers or how long Peyton Manning played against the Jets or whatever.
Last year's Brady-less Patriots going 11-5 and missing the playoffs - that's brutal.
2009's 9-7 Steelers, not so much.
Do fans in Pittsburgh complain about Yankees' fans sense of entitlement?
lol
Shane Lechler probably won two games for the Raiders by himself. That was the greatest season in the history of punting, by far.
I believe Burke did today or yesterday at Advanced NFL Stats.
It's not like I'm going to suddenly cancel my subscription, but when something big happens in baseball, I find myself going to ESPN for Neyer and Law's recations before BP. BP would have been the first place I visited a couple of years ago.
The first place I go is here.
Lose to the three worst teams in the league (KC, Oak & Cle), on the verge of elimination, then ironically have to route for all three of those same teams to win on the final Sunday to put them into the playoffs - and only Oakland failed to achieve.
Football Outsiders lists Heath Miller 12th in total contribution as a receiver, 8th per ball thrown his way in 2009, 12th & 8th in in 2008, 4th & 1st! in 2007. However, FC at steelerfury.com regularly criticizes his run blocking. Apparently inconsistent, but not as bad as Spaeth.
An honest assesment
http://www.steelerfury.com/content/final-report-card
Not quite. They went 5-11 in 1988, though that was the only year since 1969 they lost that many.
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