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Waking up this morning and knowing we had won, I must admit I could not wait to see what would be said about the tied division. This could be a fun day for me at work today!!
Thanks!!
Keith Foulke
Tony Clark.
Tony Clark.
Travis Lee.
Sharing first place in the East wasn't exactly what I wanted, but it ain't so bad. By the end of May or so, my expectations were so incredibly low that i'm just happy they made the playoffs. Everything past this is gravy.
Did anyone notice Tony Clark posted a 1.002 OPS this year? 30 HR in 349 AB's...if only he had shared the B12 with Millar.
MCoA, don't you think that with the amount of churn on both rosters that looking at the full-season Pythagorean records is somewhat meaningless? The playerss that put up a lot of those runs scored/runs allowed numbers are gone.
Not to deny that the Red Sox are mediocre mind you. I agree with your assessment.
:):):)
Darrell May and Tim Redding.
Co-division champs my left buttock. Much like the 2001 Cardinals - you employ Mike Timlin and you finished second in the division and claimed the wild card entry into the playoffs.
Kudos nonetheless.
Combined 8 innings. Try again.
This may have been beaten to death elsewhere, but this weekend exposed some flaws in the Wild Card System. E.g., if the NYY-BOS-CLE dead heat had happened, the playoff schedule would've given the Tribe a huge advantage: Watch the Sox/Yanks burn themselves out and torch their 'pens on Monday, then take on the loser on Tuesday? C'mon!
Seems to me if you're gonna rely on team-vs.-team record to decide the division champion when a playoff is unnecesary, you gotta do the same thing when it's necessary in order to avoid the above scenario. But maybe that's just me.
My favorite Pythagorean comparison for teams finishing in a flat-footed tie is the sixth-place 1967 Orioles and Senators. The Orioles ended the season +62 in run differential, the Senators –87. They each had a record of 76-85, yet the difference in their Pythagorean winning percentages was .112.
Darrell May and Tim Redding. Or, as we in San Diego now refer to them, "the Wooden Nickels."
A prominent Red Sox chatterer and I made a bet. I won the bet, and now he is refusing to pay on some ludicrous grounds.
That made me more angry than I should have been. And for that, I apologize to all of sox nation.
The ludicrous grounds that "tied" does not equal "lost"?
btw, did anyone see "Dig"'s cover for this week? disgusting.
how a sox fan could find love with a yanks fan is totally unnatural.
But whoever isn't paying is a little puss-n'-Red Sox and boots.
Thank you sir, may I have another?
SJ, quit whining. Biff, quit whining. One of you two kids grow up and be the bigger man and let it go. This is pathetic.
SG=- all teams have crap players that cost them wins. Tim Redding and Darrell May? Dude: Curt Schilling and Keith Foulke. The Yankees are relying on old dudes and bad pitchers in their rotation, and their defense stinks. Just because the defense and the bad pitchers and one old pitcher had a hot month, doesn't suddenly make the Yankees a very good team.
The Red Sox defense and pitching and bullpen are all weak, too. I don't think I need to go into that.
Luckily, the White Sox can't hit. This should be an interesting series. Great strength vs. great strength, and sad, atrophied weakness vs. sad, atrophied weakness.
Pitchers
Position players
I imagine they will go with 10 pitchers and 15 position players in the first round. That means we need one more pitcher out of:
I’ve left Harville off that list, but probably should leave Delcarmen off too -- I can’t imagine him making it. And, that means that both Machado and Hydzu make it, too.
Other than picking from Dinardo, Hansen and Gonzalez, and I think both Dinardo and Gonzalez make it if there is a next round, there aren’t many choices. I don’t think we will see Hansen again this year and I’m hoping Dinardo gets the call before Jeremi.
So what's our pitching rotation?
Clement on Tuesday
Wells on Wed ?
Wake/Schill on Fri?
Wake/Schill on Sat?
Bronson out of the pen?
I think the Sox will go with 11 pitchers and 14 position players. Their bullpen is crap, and Bradford/Myers really should be considered one pitcher taking up two spots.
I'd rather have Hansen in there over Machado, I think.
BA has a cool new player finder that spits out G/F ratios for pitchers. Here are some of the key Sox:
Dinardo - 3.27
Meredith - 2.61
Rozier - 1.26
Lester - 1.19
Buchholz - 1.17
Papelbon - 1.03
Sanchez - 0.99
Dobies - 0.98
Hottovy - 0.92
Alvarez - 0.69
Blackley - 0.66
Of the Big 3, Lester gets a good chuink of groundballs. The other two are more flyball oriented. The one game I saw Sanchez he induced a ton of infield popups though so maybe he's not quote that flyball oriented.
I included a bunch of the finesse lefty types (Alvaez, Dobies, Hottovy, Blackley) to show how different Dinardo's ratio is from pitchers who you might think were similar.
No clue how ml G/F ratios translate up the latter because the info has never been available before, but hopefully some folks will poke around into the data now.
And what's the deal with no active ml thread while BA is throwing up their league lists? What are you slaves to WC fever?
Excellent work, Philly--except you omitted the obligatory link. Always, always assume that I am too lazy to find my own information.
If necessary.
yes? no? maybe?
Not too be ungrateful for new data to obsess about, but you'd think L/R splits would be there too, no?
Delcarmen - 1.23
1) A high GB rate is well correlated to a low HR rate. That's a really good thing.
2) In many cases, a high FB rate can be correlated to a high IF pop-up rate, which is often considered a marker of a DIPS-beater. (I think here of Sid Fernandez, Barry Zito, Keith Foulke, a lot of knuckleballers... Mariano Rivera, too?) Michael Humphries suggested this link a little while ago, and it makes sense - IF popups are technically BIP, but they are always, always outs.
Guys like Li'l Papi and Anibal are likely to allow their share of homers. Lester, too. 1.19 is basically neutral, and over 150 IP, I doubt there's much of any significant meaning in 0.2 of GB/Fb ratio. Hopefully, though, they can develop some ability on BIP. And, of course, there are a lot of real good pitchers out there with significant HR rates - your Robin Roberts types.
(By the way, where's Fabian? His whole "Hughes is teh best because he has an amazing GB rate" thing appears to have vanished in a puff of data. Hughes' GB/FB rate in A-ball was also 1.19.)
WRT Dinardo, 3.27 is a heckuva rate, and it suggests that his excellent HR ratio this year was no fluke.
First of all, the Yankees did finish first in the division and have been awarded the playoff seed of the division champ as if they were sole division champ. So you win the bet.
The only question is whether Biff *also* wins the bet, for the Sox *also* finishing first in the division. If Biff also wins the bet, it's a push; if Biff loses, he owes you the half-dollar.
I think there's some uncertainty over whether the tiebreaker determines the division champion or whether it merely determines which team will be treated as the division champion for purposes of seeding. I haven't seen anything, yet, that is convincing either way. Even the Katy Feeney quote that I posted in Chatter is ambiguous. Maybe Bud will clear this up soon; maybe not.
I would urge you and Biff to split the difference, meaning Biff gives you a George Washington quarter, preferably one of the Massachusetts ones from the State Quarters series. The alternative is to wait a few days to see if there is an official ruling, but assuming there isn't one, the one who gets the moral high ground in my book is the one who is first to propose this settlement.
None of Li'l Papi or Anibal Lester show a significant trend either way in GB/FB rate. They look pretty neutral, maybe on average tending toward FB types, but not so extreme. So they don't look like Robin Roberts types.
BTW, I'm shocked--shocked!--to learn that gambling is going on here.
Finally, I say again (repeating #18 above) that it's perfectly OK by me to say that two teams' head-to-head record is a tie-breaker, and that therefore the MFY finished 1st in the A.L. East. It ain't perfect, but it's defensible.
What is not okay, IMHO, is failing to say that exact same thing if the MFY, Sox, and Tribe had finished with identical records. That 3-team, 2-day playoff setup would have been a fuster cluck of monumental proportions, and if it had happened there would have been mass hysteria in either Nueva York or Beantown as one of those teams faced Cleveland with a severe case of burnout.
I think i disagree on the last point, for two reasons. The second reason comes in two parts.
1) It's great drama, great tv, thus great for baseball.
2) The Yanks and Sox would both get two shots at the playoffs. There would be a game Monday and a game Tuesday. Further, they'd all have failed to win it on their own in the regular season, so it'd be hard to complain after that.
Blogpen.
<table><tr align="left"><td width=60%>Name</td><td align="right" width=40%>Age</td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td red;">villageidiom</td><td align="right" blue;">35</td></tr>
<tr align="left"><td purple;">mrsidiom</td><td align="right" green;">37</td></tr>
</table>
I found that out a few posts above :-(
personally, I have long advocated a mandatory sudden death wild card play-in game, featuring the two best second-place teams.
Under that system, today we'd have the Phillies at the Astros and the Indians at ... well, either at Boston or at the Boston/NY loser, depending on how the tie were resolved.
By the way, if head-to-head is used to determine who is seeded as division winner, and to determine home field for the playoffs, why is it not also used to determine which team hosts a Game 163 playoff? Stupid coin flips.
II) The foregoing also supports Toby's comment that coin flips are stupid.
III) So Mikael is now Josh? I guess I gotta pay closer attention. Or maybe less attention. Definitely one of those two.
I think it would both feel like more of a tie and more that the Yankees won the division. Or better, what if Cleveland had won on Saturday and then went on to lose on Sunday?
That's what I was alluding to when I mentioned Sanchez gave up a lot of infield pop ups the one game I saw. When we did the whole Hughes vs the big 3 thing I flipped through some game logs for Sanchez and noticed that it did seem like there were a lot of pop ups (the milb.com game recaps separate out pop ups from flyballs). I didn't completly quantify it, but it was much higher than the rate that THT has for MLB pitchers.
And I suppose it makes sense that in the minor leagues where a pitcher can completely overwhelm hitters the way Sanchez did you may find some extreme pop up numbers or something like that.
I tried to email you after your kind comment in the self-immolation thread, but your BTF-listed email account was dead.
I'm wicked anonymous now.
These sorts of playoffs, I think. are the best answer to a bad situation. If Cleveland tied, I think it would be much more unfair to the Sox if they weren't guaranteed a playoff spot while the Yankees were, simply due to head-to-head record. If we take as given that we can't postpone the playoffs for more than a day, I don't see what else to do.
Here's what I dug up:
Excerpts from Major League Rule 33 and Major League Rule 34
Scenario #1: If there is a tie for a Division Championship and the winning percentage of the two Clubs tied for first place is higher than the winning percentage of each of the second-place Clubs in the same League, the Division Champion shall be:
The Club with the higher winning percentage in head-to-head competition between the two tied Clubs during the championship season; or ... [further tiebreakers]
LINK
Of course, this doesn't change the conclusion that SJ has been a poor sport.
Congrats, SJ & other Yankees fans, on the division championship. Biff, pay the man.
Anyway, so you're saying the superior head-to-head record is not a sufficient criterion to guarantee one team the playoffs, but it is sufficient to guarantee that team a home-field advantage if it ultimately faces the WC team? Effectively, that the inconsistent treatment of head-to-head record is justified on cost-benefit grounds?
I can probably agree with that. But I'd argue that the fact that the fuster cluck would leave all involved at a major competitive disadvantage going forward is a huge part of the cost side of the equation. I don't like that; you appear to like giving the head-to-head winner the division crown even less. Maybe we'd have to actually play these games sometime to see whether people feel the benefits > costs. It'd be dramatic as hell, I'll give ya that.
Sometimes, I forget that the history of the first centuries of Christianity is not one of the mental databases that normal people go to first to decipher odd references.
Clement of Alexandria was a second-century church leader and writer. I was looking for some stupid baseball/antiquity pun. I obviously chunked it, but I'm not switching again out of stubbornness, and out of the fact that being addressed as MCA is relatively cool.
And, yes, your summary of my position as regards cost-benefit analysis is accurate. I tend to think baseball managers would agree. In regular season games played where the division title but not a playoff berth was at stake, teams have not used their best players. The managers thus most likely would not use their best players in an equivalent one-game playoff. I assume they'd play to win in a scenario where two losses means you're out (though I don't know that for sure, I'm pretty confident).
New topic: another reason to root against the ChiSox!!! A genuinely evil man is very much rooting for them. Or at least for Ozzie.
It would be quiet a coup for the Harvard divinity student who types flawlessly to switch with the Jewish lawyer who can't type a lick!
I think Jesus ChrisTruby is still available.
I regret a couple of my posts, such as post #2 in this thread. However, I rightly believed that I won something that was being denied to me. I was taking out that frustration in any thread on the topic.
I will now withdraw my request for payment from Biff, and publically forgive his debt.
I am moving on, I hope he can do the same and we can all live happily together again. Money just gets in the way of the passive aggressive snark, the give and take that makes these Sox/Yankee whinefests wonderful.
That settles it. He's another Castro.
Do you really need a pitcher whose sole purpose is to get out AJ Pierzynski?
I'd take DelCarmen and Hansen in the last 2 spots.
My apologies to all and sundry for making a political reference that invites snark.
My apologies to Chris P for failing to provide an explanation. (My experience is that, for those who demand an explanation of why Marxist-Leninist despots are evil, none will ever suffice. So why bother?)
Two reasons I think that you actually do.
(Well, also, it's not just AJ Pierzynski, but also Scott Podsednik.)
First, the Red Sox pitchers aren't that good just yet. Both Manny D and Hansen have been quite shaky, and the Sox know way better than we do how these guys are adjusting to MLB pressure. Even if his innings are radically limited, Myers is likely to do his job.
Second, the Red Sox middle relief is not just heavily RH, but heaving RH with significant splits. Bronson Arroyo and Chad Bradford are both much better with the platoon advantage. Mike Myers serves a purpose as a bridge between RH relievers whom the Sox were going to switch between anyway. Another righty would just be depth.
I am moving on, I hope he can do the same and we can all live happily together again. Money just gets in the way of the passive aggressive snark, the give and take that makes these Sox/Yankee whinefests wonderful.
I still maintain it was a tie, and both teams "won" or both teams "lost" depdning on how you look at ties. Why are we depending on Cleveland to determine this?
How about this? In the event of another Yankees-Red Sox ALCS, double or nothing.
the Yankees are the division champions, and all of baseball except a few moronic Sox fans on this website realize it.
you realize Jaret Wright started yesterday's game, right?
I still maintain it was a tie, and both teams "won" or both teams "lost" depdning on how you look at ties. Why are we depending on Cleveland to determine this?
Except that, according to the rules of Major League Baseball, there is no tie. The Yankees are winners by dint of a superior record in head to head competition against Boston. Cleveland doesn't factor into it.
I find it amusing that people here are ripping on SJ for being a poor sport when Biff is the one squelching on a bet.
What the hell is this crap? Go home, mommy.
I find it amusing that you have a distorted perception of things.
I agree (but I'd say irritating, not amusing), and I like the improper use of squelching to replace the prejudiced use of welching/welshing (seen earlier today on the site).
Cleveland does factor into it. If they won 2 more games, it would've been settled on the field, like it should've been.
How about this? In the event of another Yankees-Red Sox ALCS, double or nothing.
No, thank you. I will make more bets with you.
Cleveland does factor into it. If they won 2 more games, it would've been settled on the field, like it should've been.
Irregardless of what "should" have happened, what "did" happen was that the Yankees won the division because they won the regular-season series against Boston.
that is a crucial word to leave out there.
Welching is prejudiced? I had no idea.
OK, lets set up a hypothetical situation. Cleveland wins 2 games that weekend, so the Yanks & Sox have to settle the division in New York. Bottom of the ninth, down by 1, Yankees get runners on 2nd and 3rd. A long drive is hit to the outfield, and Damon traps the ball. 2 runs score.
But the umpire blows the call and rules that Damon caught the ball cleanly. God, country, and every replay shows that the Yankees SHOULD have won, but major league baseball declares the Red Sox the winners. SJ refuses to pay you. How would you respond?
The Yankees, it appears by all rights, won the division on a technicality.
If I were Biff, I'd pay SJ.
If I were a Yankee fan, I wouldn't be walking around gloating about a "title" that exists in name only.
How about this? In the event of another Yankees-Red Sox ALCS, double or nothing.
Biff, the rules of MLB clearly state that in the event of a tied record where a playoff spot is <u>not</u> on the line, then the head-to-head record will decide the order of finish (i.e. who is the division champ and who is the wild card winner). By that definition, confirmed by MLB and the way the ALDS pairings have been set, the Yanks are the division champs and the Sox are the wild card.
A similar situation arose between St. Louis and Houston in 2001 - where Houston was the rightful division champs, but the Cards declared themselvs co-champions. I believe they were instructed to stop doing that.
How about this? In the event of another Yankees-Red Sox ALCS, double or nothing.
Today I proposed to SJ similar relief. If the Yanks advance farther in the tournament, you provide SJ with a Susan B. Anthony dollar and a Sacajewea dollar. If the Sox advance farther, he provides you with the JFK half dollar from the original bet.
This provides SJ a measure of relief in that he actually won this bet, and would provide you with something to hang your Wild Card Champions hat on.
Before leaning too heavily on BP's analysis, keep in mind that they had the White Sox pegged for fourth place in their division, with 71 wins.
Silver was a little more generous - he did have them ahead of the Tigers by a bit.
On the other topic, don't forget 'gypped', a Dutch date, an Indian giver, and getting one's Irish up.
yankee fans don't gloat about division titles. nor do they particularly care about 50 cents. as far as i know, they do honor their bets.
MGL certainly never understood how they could make such a projection. any accurate projection would peg them for 80 wins, like his.
The Yankees, it appears by all rights, won the division on a technicality.
What defines "a technicality" is in the eyes of the beholder.
How about this? In the event of another Yankees-Red Sox ALCS, double or nothing.
You strike me as the sort of person who cheats at "Go Fish."
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/statistics/standings.php
This is true, mainly due to the fact that Aaron Rowand and Juan Uribe killed lefties this season. But the guys who will be counted on to produce (Dye, Everett, Konerko) don't have significant platoon splits.
Somehow, despite all this, the White Sox pulled this off -
Record vs. -
Left-handed starters - 23-20
Right-handed starters - 76-43
Yeah, I don't get it, either.
For some reason, BP didn't factor in yesterday's games.
Who (or where) is kevin?
Congrats to Larry Bowa: you must be happy with Phillies performance (and he called CLE sweep, BTW).
FWIW, any Yankee fans complaining about Texas (this goes for that ##### A-Rod too) should STFU. No one owes you anything. If you don't like it, win more games next time.
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