CFBPS 2012

The Crazy Fanboy Projection System had a tough offseason.  The first time I tried to run the engine back in January, it just broke down crying.  While the Bayesian engines that power PECOTA and ZiPS are incapable of true feeling or thought, the CFBPS engine is the world’s only Freudian projection engine, and it was still in mourning.  The lost beloved of the 2011 season had entirely overwhelmed the engine’s ego, and its reality principle was unmoored.  The second run of the CFBPS produced ...

Revenge of Pythagoras

This team has really looked very bad for a while. After all my drooling over Beckett being Clemens-esque, maybe I was jumping the gun. He has very few Ks and a ton of HR this year. That’s not boding well. Schilling also worries me quite a bit because he just doesn’t look all that dominant to me. That’s more subjective. Clement is a better pitcher than he’s shown and I’m just not worried about him… the way I am about Wake/Bard. Yuck.

In the pen, we should keep an eye on Papelbon’s workload. ...

Manny’ Defense

This started out as a study in which I questioned the wisdom of regressing Manny’s defense toward the mean, but after exchanging emails with MGL, I discovered that I had misunderstood his regression methods. I had thought that in projecting Manny’s future performance (or assessing his true talent level, as MGL calls it), he would include an element of league average OF. But that is not the case…