Friday Hodgepodge

t looks like everyone made it through the All Star game unscathed (except maybe Adam Wainwright?), and with no games this week, there are no ass hDLes to talk about.  I was hoping that Bob would cancel the apocolypse by sending me the long awaited answers to the questions I sent him, but he hasnt yet (even though he swears he is half way through them...show me the answers Bob).  So that means I get to let my mind wander.
First, the Wainwright thing.  If you havent heard (and the only reasons you would not have would be because you have been living under a rock or because you couldnt afford to pay your cable or internet bills), Wainwright said that he purposely threw a couple of balls straight down the shitter for Derek Jeter in the at bat that lead off the All Star Game (Jeter doubled to rightfield) so that Jeter could have his moment in his last ASG...and he said this in an interview DURING THE GAME.  People got a bit uppity about that, but really whats the biggie?  Wainwright obviously has a lot of respect for Jeter and wanted to see him go out on a high note in his last ASG.  The ASG has a long history of random things (Ripken hitting a homer in his last ASG on a pitch that could not have been placed anymore in the kill zone than if it was placed on a tee) because the players know, at its core, the ASG is still mostly an exhibition that they play in for fun and for the fans.  Jeter has been the face of baseball for the better part of 15 years, and like him or dislike him (is there anyone that really hates him?) he is still a class act whose career achievements deserve to be celebrated (and I am one of those that think he should have moved to 3b for ARod, not the other way around, and that he hasnt been an adequate defensive SS for nearly 10 years). 
And why not celebrate them at the games gathering of stars?  So I have no problem with Wainwright throwing Jeter a cookie.  Should he have said anything about it?  Hmm...probably not so much, but it is what it is.  I will admit, I am an unabashed Wainwright homer.  That 12-6 curveball is a thing of beauty and I may or may not have contemplated writing a 3 act play called Wainwright's Duece that would star, of course, Josh Duhammel...because everything should star Josh Duhammel (I love that Las Vegas and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton) and Justin Timberlake.  But I dont think that makes my opinion any less valid. I am not going to dwell on it...it'll blow over soon enough.
A few weeks ago I threw out the LoudAA stats, but I have been thinking about them over the past week or so and decided that they didnt say what I really wanted them to say.  In that forumla, I had taken the entire season's worth of data and tried to quantify worth, but really, many of the players on that list hadnt been used in lineups very much, if at all.  I wanted a stat that told me how useful players were when they were used and how much they helped or hurt the team they were on.  So...luckily Yahoo! tracks the stats for players that have been used by each team for the games they were active.  So I took those for each team and the concept and the forumlas from the LoudAAs and came up with something useful (at least to me).  I am still working on the pitching side, though I had a mini break through today playing around with standard deviations and stats.  I ran the STD deviation idea through my LoudAA stats and came up with something that has players very nearly in order according to their OWAR on BR.com...so that makes me both happy that I was able to come up with something that was valid and sad that I spent a lot of time basically recreating the wheel.  But dammit, I am going to run with it anyways.  Remember, this is only for the time they have actually been in the lineup.  There have been 145 players used by the 10 teams this year, with the fewest being the Dust Bunnies (the same 8 all season, even if they have been on the DL...fuckin Dusty) and the most the Hitless Bastards (17).  Most teams have used between 14 and 16 players.  In the below charts, pace means the expected score if that player reached exactly 600 ABs.  "Points" are based on the relationship to the current league average (252/315/390 65R 62RBI 9 SB in 600 AB) in each of the 6 scoring categories.
The top 5:

 

Name	Team	GP	600 AB Pace	Current Score	$
Mike Trout	Dust Bun	90	246.89	141.96	89
Troy Tulowitzki	Dust Bun	89	266.25	137.56	52
Andrew McCutchen	LesMole	93	218.11	128.32	78
Paul Goldschmidt	MBHB	95	201.14	119.68	60
Giancarlo Stanton	UCCMA	94	186.86	109.94	34

Not really much surprise here.  These are the top players in fantasy regardless of what metric you are using.  They were some of the most expensive players and have been in lineups for every game this season.

The bottom 5.  You will notice here that the 600 AB pace doesnt match the current.  That is because the 600 AB pace column looks at what a player would score if he continued on that pace for 600 ABs.  Because many of the players who are on the bottom of the list had low ABs, their pace score is much higher.

Name	Team	GP	600 AB Pace	Current Score	$
Jean Segura	UCCMA	84	-37.13	-19.80	37
Xander Bogaerts	MBHB	23	-151.38	-20.69	6
Kendrys Morales	UCCMA	27	-123.79	-21.87	5
Carlos Santana	MTMTAS	24	-168.95	-23.09	21
Everth Cabrera	BySs	74	-89.39	-44.25	9

The Most Harmful Fantasy Player so far this year.

Bogaerts (159/266/232 7R 5RBI 1SB in 82 ABs), Morales (198/216/292 6R 14RBI in 106 ABs) and Santana (122/301/195 9R 3RBI in 82 PAs) are tough to stomach (I have Bogaerts and I just picked up Santana, YAY!), but at least they were only harmful for twenty-some games before their owner removed them.  Cabrera was such a throrn in Kyler's side that he has started trying to acquire every other MLB shortstop to compensate.  And while Cabrera (222/261/300 28R 14RBI 13SB in 297 ABs) was the single most harmful player used in the league this year because of how bad he was for such a large number of at bats, he at least didnt cost much to get.  The real painful one here is Segura.  Jimmy paid a premium for Segura at the auction ($37) and was repaid with the 5th worst output (234/270/319 41R 23RBI 15SB in 320 ABs)...and he rode it for 84 games.  The only player, other than Everth, who was close to as bad for as long was Allen Craig (MTMTAS) who put up a 241/290/352 34R 43RBI 1 SB line over 349 ABs for a -17.10 current score (-29.40 600 AB Pace).

A couple of things that may interest only me before moving on:
- Drafted players had much better success rate than waiver pick ups, though the return on the investment was exponentially higher on waiver players than drafted ones (likely bouyed by a couple outliers).  Basically, people know who to pay for in the draft, but waivers are a crap shoot.
- The highest scoring waiver pick up was Anthony Rendon, who at 18th overall, fell right between Jayson Werth and Nelson Cruz.

-Carlos Gomez is 9th, between Robinson Cano and Jose Bautista...for John and Kyler from the other day
-14 players have lower scores than Mike Moustakas, who put up a 000/118/000 1R 1RBI line in 15 ABs for UCCMA.  He has by far the highest per 600 AB score (-378.00) but because the damage was limited to 15 ABs, it didnt hurt Jimmy as bad.
-There are way way way way more players who are 6 category assests (or, more accurately, not a huge liability in any one category) than I ever would have imagined.  I started listing them off because I thought it would be a fairly short list and before I knew it I had 3 typed lines full of names and wasnt through the list yet.

I could seriously include nothing but Evan Gattis/Bear pictures
and I would be a happy man.

-There are only 5 players who have been well above league average in all 6 categories - Andrew McCutchen (353 AB), Carlos Gomez (349 AB), Hanley Ramirez (169 AB), Coco Crisp (in 201 ABs on Tom's team...and then he traded him for John Lackey) and Charlie Mars Blackmon (in 44 AB on John's team after the trade with Kyler).  Blackmon is a small sample size and HanRam's isnt the biggest (but its still impressive). 
-Coco was by FAR the best value - 51.72 pts for $1.  El Oso Blanco, Evan Gattis (29.36 for $1), and Jose Abreu (37.26 for $2) were next.
- Michael Brantley (1.42) and Victor Martinez (1.45) are the 3rd and 4th highest pts/game played.  And both were waiver wire pick ups.

Highest current score by position (600 AB projection):
C- Jonathan Lucroy 67.35 (118.85)
1b- Paul Goldschmidt 119.68 (201.14)
2b- Robby Cano 92.56 (157.32)
3b- Edwin Encarnacion 103.44 (189.23)
SS- Troy Tulowitzki 137.56 (266.25)
OF- Mike Trout 141.96 (246.89)
OF- Andrew McCutchen 128.32 (218.11)
OF- Giancarlo Stanton 109.94 (186.86)

I dont know why I find stats so interesting, but I always have.  When I was younger I used to buy Baseball Weekly (which has since changed to Sports Weekly...for shame) at the gas station and read it cover to cover.  But I always spent the most time pouring over the stats.  That newspaper printed all of the stats for every team (like a weekly snapshot of BaseballReference before the interweb was really popular) and I would go through and make fake lineups from players from the NL and AL and then play an All Star Game in my head (I have said before that I am a nerd...more proof).  When I was in college, I didnt use it for that anymore (I had found Whatifsports.com by then and it more than compensates for all of my fake sports needs) but I still bought it every week in the summer, read it cover to cover more than once and played the crossword puzzle which was mostly baseball trivia related.  My work truck used to have 4 or 5 weeks worth of BW at any given time.

Anyways, I promised that I would give my division predictions, so here they are:
NL East- Washington
NL Central- St. Louis
NL West- LA Dodgers
WC1- San Francisco
WC2- Milwaukee

Atlanta's string of injuries and their insistence on continuing to use BJ Upton and his .277 OBP in the leadoff spot with Andrelton Simmons and his .309 OBP in the 2 hole finally catch up with them.

AL East- Baltimore
AL Central- Detroit
AL West- LA Angels of Disneyland
WC1- Oakland A's
WC2- Kansas City (I think they make a big trade at the deadline to acquire another pitcher and their hitters start hitting like they are capable of hitting)

Toronto's pitching finally comes back to reality (Mark Buehrle - We're looking at you) and the injured hitters (Lind, Lawrie, Encarnacion and something is coming for Joey Bats...it always comes for Joey Bats) are out just long enough for the team to dig themselves a hole they cant get out of.

NL WC - SF over Mil
AL WC - Oak over KC

Both SF and Oak will be cofortably in the WC spots and will be able to set their rotation to get the best matchup possible for the single elimination WC game.  SF sends a rejuvenated Matt Cain against Willy Peralta for the Brew.  Oakland can set up Kazmir to start while KC has to counter with Shields or the pitcher they are going to get on short rest or Jeremy Guthrie.

NL Division Series - LA over SF
NL Division Series - Wash over SL

LA and Washington are simply the 2 best teams in the NL right now.  With Cain used in the WC game, the Giants are left with Bumgarner, Lincecum and Tim Hudson to start the first 3 games against the $234 billion Dodger lineup.  In the other matchup, StL's pitching woes prove too much to overcome against Strats, Zimmerman, Gio and Fister.

AL Division Series - Oak over Balt
AL Division Series - Det over LAA

This Baltimore team gets into the playoffs by not being terrible and then meets a team that is much better than them, even with Oak having to win a WC game to get into the series.  In the other matchup, Cabrera gets tired of hearing everyone talk about how much better Trout is and goes on a 1 man barrage (a la David Ortiz last year) and carries the Tigers to the series win.

NLCS - Wash over LA
ALCS - Oak over Det

The Nats pitching might be the only staff in the NL that can hold the Dodgers down over a 7 game series.  LA has a nice staff in their own right, but the 3/4 of Ryu and Beckett cant keep up with Gio and Fister.  BTW - this would be a spectacular NLCS to watch.  If this ends up being the matchup, I anticpate my wife being unpleased with the amount of baseball I want to watch that week.

Oak realizes that they can pitch around Miggy and keep him from beating them.  He hits 3 HRs on intential walk pitches anyways.  But no one else on the Tigers can solve Samardzija, Kazmir, or Sonny Gray and the the Tigers are going to be counting on Rick Porcello and Justin Verlander's ghost to throw meaningful innings.

World Series - Oak over Wash
"Moneyball" finally wins a championship...except that it isnt Moneyball because such a thing never really existed in the first place.  The theory Michael Lewis wrote about in Moneyball was about exploiting market inefficiencies and not giving away something that it a finite resource (outs) when you dont have to.  Those older A's teams exploited that teams were not paying for players who were not great at hitting but were great at not making outs.  Now everyone does that, so the market for those players is no longer efficient.  Now the A's are simply doing a better job of scouting other teams and identifying players that are undervalued.  The A's have exactly 3 players on their active roster (Sean Doolittle, Sonny Gray and YoAnus) who never spent time with another organization.  That number jumps to 4 if you include players in the DL (AJ Griffin).  And YoAnus didnt come through their system, he was signed out of Cuba and immediately hit the Big League roster.  I like Oakland to win in a great series and then Samardzija to hold up the Commissioner's Trophy on National TV and taunt the Cub front office mercilessly.

AL MVP- Mike Trout, Pretzel Pusher and Subway Dealer
NL MVP- Tulo -- I am tempted to put Carlos Gomez here because I think he and Puig will have the best numbers for a team in the playoffs...and I dont think the media like Puig much.  The Rockies are already out of it, but Tulo is having such a transcendant year, that it might not matter how the Rockies are doing.
AL CY - Felix Hernandez
NL CY-Clayton Kershaw
AL ROY- Jose Abreu
NL ROY-Billy Hamilton