Everyone knows that Josh Vitters was terrible at baseball in his limited time at the big league level in 2012. Just how bad was he? In RE24 (min. 75 PA), Josh Vitters was the 17th worst offensive player in all of baseball last year, just above…Mark Buerhle. If he had 200 PA instead of just 109, he would have ran …
That revamped Cubs rotation
Much has been written here in the last few days about the Cubs rotation injuries and what it means for the overall strength of the rotation. Most, or actually all of that has been negative. Sure, losing Garza can't be spun as a positive so I'm not going to do that. As the resident optimist, I am here to assure …
Are ground balls overrated by Sabermetrics?
I can't see the original Bill James piece (behind a paywall), but Rob Neyer posted a big excerpt from it at his site. My instant reaction to the title was that it's a preposterous hypothesis, as I'm someone who thinks that groundballs are underrated by the standard tools of internet sabermetrics, especially FIP. Saber types have tried to factor batted ball percentages in …
Better Know a Statistic: (K-BB)/PA
I have a confession to make. When I first fell headlong into baseball analysis, I kind of took K/BB as my pet statistic. I loved how it was essentially "luckless": the only things the pitcher couldn't control was the discipline of the batter and the strike zone of the umpire, the two things he can only understand (but never master). …
Cubs being Cubs (injury report)
Scott Baker has retired 1 batter in spring training. Unfortunately, he faced 6 of them. After his Spring Training performance, he decided that something wasn't right. Baker is going to meet with a doctor this weekend, and until then he'll do nothing. We already knew that Baker wasn't really going to pitch until mid-April at the earliest, but having elbow …
This Year OV Has TWO Discredited Non-Classy Tournament Picking Options
I've always loved and hated doing brackets for the NCAA Tournament. On one hand, I'm not a huge college hoops follower, so having a bracket or two gives me rooting interests and makes the games between teams I generally couldn't care less about, a heck of a lot more fun. But on the other hand, I suck at picking brackets. …
How much is Jeff Samardzija worth?
With news that the Cubs have tried to extend Jeff Samardzija beyond his arbitration eligible seasons not once, but twice, I thought it might be a good idea to look into how much he's worth. Steamer projects 2.4 WAR and ZiPS projects 3.3. You can see these yourself on Fangraphs. Let's just split the difference and go with 2.9. Samardzija …
The Cubs Have Tried to Extend Jeff Samardzija Twice
John Heyman passes along a few nuggets today with respect to the Cubs' efforts to extend Jeff Samardzija. JefF7 is three years from free agency, and the Cubs have apparently made two distinct efforts to extend him, to no avail. The two are apparently far enough apart that talks are on hold. We have had some word about this previously, …
Cubs Showcasing the Best of their System to Japanese Media Instead of Their Own Fans
The Cubs will be playing two games today. One against the White Sox that will be televised on WGN and one against the Japanese national team that will not be televised. Here is the Cubs lineup for the televised game: Valbuena 3B Barney 2B Castro SS Schierholtz RF Hairston DH Navarro C Bogusevic LF McDonald CF Nelson 1B Hooray. I'm interested …
Rant Sports writes stupid stuff on the internet again
The Chicago Cubs must trade Alfonso Soriano before other teams realize just how far he has fallen since he became a Cub. – stupid stuff found on internet I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that if random stupid guy on internet knows that Soriano isn't as good as he once was that other MLB teams know …