Beaneball

I finished The Eudaemonic Pie the day before yesterday. The book is the story of a group of, semi-euphemistically, anti-establishment academics, mostly physicists, who set out to build a portable computer that will allow them to beat roulette, a game that shouldn't be predictable. What the scientists discover is that the equations describing the path the ball will take are relatively simple. Not quadratic formula simple, but simple enough that the primitive computers of the day (this was the late '70's) could be programmed to quickly calculate what number the ball would land on to a great degree of accuracy. It's an astounding idea, really, and a risky one, especially since they planned on storming Las Vegas, a place not known for its tolerance of people beating their systems, whether by hook or by crook. Unfortunately, the technology never really comes together for the group. They make a few successful trips and pull down a few thousand dollars, but the computers they build are so flaky as to be occasionally dangerous (one member has a hole burned in her chest by a misfiring computer). One can easily imagine groups today using the same principles, the same equations, but with new, stabler, smaller, easier-to-program technology to pull it off. In fact, BBC news had a story about two months ago about people trying to beat casinos that dropped this tidbit: "In [a] recent London case, a group of gamblers allegedly used a laser scanner linked to a computer to gauge numbers likely to come up on the roulette wheel." That's essentially what the Eudaemonic people were doing, but with humans timing the wheel and the ball rather than a more accurate but also more dangerous laser. The book is sprinkled with the scientific happenings at the time, too, from advancements in ideas of chaos to the miniaturization of computer components, that add a lot of flavor. This spice, and the intellectualism and scientific inquisitiveness the author (a part-time member of the group, though not a scientist himself) brings to the table takes this book far beyond the boundaries established by Bringing Down the House, the best-selling book about a group of MIT students who take down Vegas the old-school way, by counting cards in blackjack. Enough people have made the connection between these two stories that Amazon returns Bringing Down the House as a result of a search for Eudaemonic Pie, but it's a tenuous connection is many ways. The MIT students were motivated by money, sex, and fame, and the book, which reads like a trashy thriller, reflects these crass ideals. The students had no higher calling, though they pretended, at times, to be devoted to the idea of robbing the rich casinos, who made a living off of cheating others. The Eudaemonic group, while they intended to make piles of money, aimed to re-invest that money in a series of communes on the West Coast that would promote the scientific and political ideals they held dear. After the final aborted trip to Las Vegas, the Eudaemonic project was called off, but the group didn't admit total defeat, instead recognizing the physical and technological challenges they had overcome in their attempts to beat the roulette system. Drawing a weak parallel to more theoretical mathematics, if the search for a proof of the Riemann Conjecture were called off today, mathematicians could still be proud of all the byproducts of that search that had advanced human knowledge of the mathematical world.

Posted by jason in Reading at 15:17 | |

I'm currently making my way through Baseball Prospectus's archives, since I managed to completely ignore the site for about six months despite paying for the privilege to read it. Back on May 12, 2004, Dayn Perry wrote an article excoriating Jimy Williams's use of his bullpen (it's in their free section). I'm going to borrow his methods because it made me curious about how the A's bullpen was deployed last season. First, we have to consider performance. There are two ideas to consider here: the value we would expect from the player before the season started (which would help determine the role that player would play) and his actual value as seen from the end of the season (because as a manager watches his relievers throughout the season, he should be expected to adjust their roles based on who is living up to their expected performance). As Perry did, I'll use VORP/IP as my value measure. Below is the list of every player who made at least 20 relief appearances for the A's this year (to eliminate the end-of-year usage of Joe Blanton and the beginning-of-year usage of Chad Harville, for instance), along with their 2004 weighted-mean VORP/IP as predicted by PECOTA and their actual performance.

Pitcher	Predicted VORP/IP	Actual VORP/IP
Justin Duchscherer	0.169	0.314
Chad Bradford	0.275	0.156
Chris Hammond	0.232	0.307
Octavio Dotel	0.292	0.245
Jim Mecir	0.126	0.258
Ricardo Rincon	0.166	0.198
Arthur Rhodes	NA	0.103
Justin Lehr	NA	0.116

It should come as no surprise that Dotel was supposed to be the most valuable pitcher on the staff, nor that Bradford was supposed to follow closely on his heels. What is a surprise is how poorly Bradford and Rhodes actually performed, though they were balanced out by awesome contributions from Mecir, Duchscherer, and Hammond. Who was betting on the latter two to be, inning for inning, the most valuable relievers for Oakland last year? Not PECOTA, that's for sure. Moving on, Perry needed a composite measure of the types of games each reliever was entering. What he used was the average of the absolute value of the run differential the relievers faced when they entered their games. Absolute value is the key here because there are managers who use certain relievers only when the team is ahead and certain players only when they are behind, even though a one-run game is a one-run game in either direction, and you ought to be using one of your top relievers at that juncture. The following two tables contain this data and are a copy-and-paste of the above table with the new column added in. The first table is ordered by expected value and the second by actual value. Hopefully, if the managing of the bullpen is competent, we'll see some (negative) correlation between the value metric and the usage one.

Player	Predicted VORP/IP	Actual VORP/IP	Run Differential
Dotel	0.292	0.245	2.18
Bradford	0.275	0.156	2.46
Hammond	0.232	0.307	4.05
Duchscherer	0.169	0.314	2.38
Rincon	0.166	0.198	2.54
Mecir	0.126	0.258	2.95
Rhodes	NA	0.103	2.24
Lehr	NA	0.116	3.81

Here's a scatter plot for the five pitchers we have prediction data for with value on the y-axis and usage on x. With the exception of the outlier (in so many ways!) named Chris Hammond, we seem to see the predicted better relievers used in overall tighter situations.

Player	Predicted VORP/IP	Actual VORP/IP	Run Differential
Duchscherer	0.169	0.314	2.38
Hammond	0.232	0.307	4.05
Mecir	0.126	0.258	2.95
Dotel	0.292	0.245	2.18
Rincon	0.166	0.198	2.54
Bradford	0.275	0.156	2.46
Lehr	NA	0.116	3.81
Rhodes	NA	0.103	2.24

Here's the same scatter plot, but now with actual value on the y-axis. This paints a much less pretty picture. Hammond in particular seems to have been mis-used. Why was the guy who ended up being the A's second-best reliever only pitching in games in which it would take more than a grand slam to change the lead? Rincon, Bradford, and Rhodes being used in tighter situations than Mecir is also disheartening. I suppose there was doubt that the man with the bad knees, feet, and just about everything else would hold it all together for much longer, but why was Arthur Rhodes let anywhere near a close game at the end of the season? Now, that question begs another. Did usage change throughout the season? Was Rhodes, in fact, pitching in close games at the end of the season, or do his overall usage stats mask a late-season change? On would hope that usage didn't remain static, especially considering the case of a guy like Duchscherer, who only pitched in blowouts at the beginning of the season, but later on turned out to be a multi-inning ace, reminiscent of Ramiro Mendoza in his Yankees heyday. What we can do to try to answer this question in a quick way is look at a running average of the usage stat we used above. We'd hope that a graph of these numbers for Duchscherer would steadily track downward, while the same for Rhodes would shoot upward, displaying a recognition by manager Ken Macha that these relievers were no longer pitching as might have been predicted at the beginning of the year. Here's the running average graph for Duchscherer. Duchscherer's line does move downward as the year goes on, fitting with what I remember of the season. He started out pitching six-run games and finished up throwing tough innings against top opponents like the Red Sox (and succeeding). Duchscherer's changed usage patterns are a credit to the management of the team on the field. Next up is Bradford, who started the year as the guy who probably should have been Oakland's ace reliever (since Dotel hadn't joined up yet), though it's hard to say what was expected out of Rhodes. Bradford was pretty ineffective the whole year, so ideally, we'll see that he was used in fewer tight situations (rising graph) as the year went on. What we see is sort of inconclusive, though the lack of any sort of steady trend indicates that he was pretty much used in any and all situations. There does seem to be a general sort of rising up until about his 55th game, when the graph starts to fall again. We'll count this as another plus in Ken Macha and Curt Young's column, a point for not blindly sticking with a guy when there were better options at hand, regardless of what he had done for the team in the past. We already know what Chris Hammond's graph is going to look like: it's going to be far higher on the y-axis than he deserves it to be. It'll be interesting to see, though, whether there was any wising up on the part of the management toward the end of the season. And the answer is "no." That's terrible. Here's a guy who should've been the second go-to guy in the 'pen, after Duchscherer, and instead was used in looser and looser situations as the year went on, even as it became more and more apparent how well he was pitching. Strike one against Macha and Young. Dotel was used kind of weirdly when he was acquired, almost as if Macha bought into Jimy Williams's four-run ninth inning philosophy (wherein the closer ought to be used more often, but not necessarily smarter). Later on, according to my memory, he was used in more tied games as Macha and Young apparently got more liberal about his usage. Let's see if the picture backs up my recollection. Indeed it does. From about Dotel's fifteenth game on, we see a steady decline in the graph. On the other hand, I also recall Dotel being generally used as a pretty conventional closer, so, perhaps more than the other relievers, his usage pattern stats can be affected by other elements. If the A's just happened to have a bunch of 1-run 9th inning situations at the end of the year, then it will appear that he was being used smarter, even though he was still being deployed as a neo-classical closer. For Mecir, I'd hope to see something like Duchscherer's graph, with early usage leaving him essentially in a mop-up, middle-relief role and later usage pushing him into closer games as more of a setup guy. It looks like it took the A's a little longer to get the idea with Mecir than it did with Duchscherer. The graph doesn't really turn around until Mecir's already pitched about 40 games, leaving only about twenty on the tail end of the season where it seems that Macha and Young started to have some confidence in him again. I'm not sure what I should make of Rincon. He was used in both a LOOGY role and a multi-batter role this year, and, it seemed when I was collecting data, in a variety of run-difference situations. I really don't have a sense of what his graph will look like, nor what it ought to be. As it turns out, the graph climbs steadily until about the 45 game mark, then falls. This is similar enough to Mecir's graph that I wonder whether their "usage" was more a function of the team's offense and starting pitching, similar to my comment about Dotel, than anything else. If they were being used in the tighter games, who was used in the looser ones? Maybe that's where Rhodes and Justin Lehr will come in. Rhodes, I'm hoping, will display a radically upward-shooting graph. In fact, to my surprise (I don't give often give Macha credit for anything, preferring to harp on technicalities and minor blips than laud larger victories), Rhodes's graph does veer upward markedly, from a low of about 1.6 after 20 games all the way up to the 2.24 he ended up with. What we see is, I think, a plus for the management: he was perceived to be a strong reliever and was used as such (his run differentials were well below two) until the perception wore off and the A's realized that he just wasn't going to be that good. That his run differential average shot up by over 0.6 in fewer than 20 games is an illustration of exactly why I decided to use these running averages. Rhodes is the model for the player whose average in some statistic doesn't tell the story of two disparate parts of a season. Justin Lehr has a smaller sample size than any of the other pitchers to work with, so his graph probably won't have the clear trends of some of the others. In fact, that's exactly what we see. There does seem to be an uptick at the end, but it's hard to really say anything about this picture. In the end, I'm not sure how much we learned, except that the A's seem neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally bad at managing their relievers in optimal run-difference situations. This was fun enough, though, that I may try to keep and display usage stats for the 2005 season as it runs. If I can manage it, I may try to do the whole league, but if I can't, hopefully I can at least do the A's.

Posted by jason in Baseball, Oakland A's at 23:08 | |

Windows users aren't going to care too much about this post. Since I got my Xclef, I've needed to rip my CDs to Oggs so that I might actually have something to put on the player. Unfortunately, the ripping was not cooperating until, I believe, last night. What was happening is Oggs were being created that seemed to be an appropriate file size but had no apparent data in them: they sounded like a bunch of hisses and clicks. I quickly realized that the problem was not in the Ogg creation, but in the ripping of the audio CD to Wav format, because the Wav files were even emptier: they produced no sound whatsoever. A look at a Wav file in most was enlightening: it contained 0 upon 0 upon 0. Sixty megabytes of zeros! No wonder there was no meaningful sound created. (This did make me wonder, though, about the sound integrity of compressing audio files: how did a bunch of zeros get turned into hisses and clicks?) I tried restarting the computer (to get the process table into something of a virgin state), but that didn't really work. I tried a different ripper (cdd2wav instead of cdparanoia). I looked at different versions of the rippers (though I never actually tested a new version). Finally, on cdparanoia's website, I found a hint. Maybe I should try enabling ide-scsi emulation. Last night, I recompiled my kernel (again - it's like my ninth recompile of the last two days, for a variety of reasons) with ide-scsi and without ATAPI CDROM support, added the appropriate boot parameter (EDIT: That appropriate boot parameter is append="hdd=ide-scsi" in the menu.lst file for grub, at least in my case; for you, it might be hda, hdb, or hdc.), and restarted. Lo and behold, my computer is currently ripping its third consecutive CD successfully. Full Xclef, here I come! Details:

• Compiled ide-scsi as a module in a 2.6.7 kernel (Device Drivers -> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support -> SCSI emulation support)
• Compiled sr-mod as a module (Device Drivers -> SCSI device support -> SCSI CDROM support)
• Compiled sg as a module (Device Drivers -> SCSI device support -> SCSI generic support)
• Deselected ATAPI CDROM support (Device Drivers -> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support -> Include IDE/ATAPI CDROM support)
• Pointed the /dev/cdrom symlink to /dev/scd0
• In Grip (my ripper of choice), put Generic SCSI device as /dev/sg0 (Config tab -> Rip tab -> Ripper tab -> Generic SCSI device) (EDIT: Putting /dev/cdrom here, after creating the link, also seems to work. For some strange reason, I don't recall having /dev/scd0 there working, and I'm loathe to play too much - it's so delicate!)

Posted by jason in Computer at 11:17 | |

Athletics Nation claims to have info that Erubiel Durazo has been signed to a one-year deal. Obviously, we can't really say more about this until we know the terms, but the immediate good and bad are pretty clear. EDIT: Durazo appears to have actually signed for $4.7 million for this year, according to ... well, just about everyone. I'm leaving the above link in for archival purposes. This means that if he does this year what he did last, the A's will be getting about one win per million bucks for him, which isn't terrible. It's not likely to approach the value they'll get from Dan Haren or anything, but that's not a fair comparison. Look at the guys on either side of him on the VORP list from last year: Hideki Matsui and Javy Lopez, both of whom are making far more than four and a half million bucks next year. Anyway, on both a rate and overall value basis, Durazo was the best hitter on the team last year. When defense is taken into account, Mark Kotsay and Eric Chavez were both more valuable, but in terms of who the A's want at the plate in a critical situation and who the A's most want in the batting order every day, Durazo is the guy. A second point is that Durazo's mainstream stats were not that impressive: he hit just 22 homers, drove in 88 runs, scored 80, and struck out over 100 times. The only thing he'd have going for him if we were still living with the analysis of the '50's is his .321 batting average. The hidden part of his value comes from his 74 times on base that didn't require a hit and his .202 Isolated Power, a result of 35 doubles. The point of all this is that he might be making less money than he actually deserves because the demands he could make in arbitration may not be as great as comparable players with better counting numbers. On the downside, this means Dan Johnson is stuck again. Durazo and Scott Hatteberg both play most of the team's games, despite Durazo's prior injury history, so there's not a lot of room for someone else to horn in on their playing time when they need to nurse some owies. Graham Koonce has already left for greener pastures, probably because he realized that he was never going to get any significant playing time in Oakland. It also means the A's don't really have a backup first baseman. When Hatteberg does need to rest, the A's options at first appear to be Durazo and, based on his college position, Nick Swisher. He did make some appearances at first last year, so the A's aren't locked into the idea of him as an outfielder, which is nice, but, seeing as how he's supposed to be the everyday right fielder, you don't necessarily want to be jerking him around when you need to rest Hatteberg. This leaves Durazo to play first, which is a really ugly and costly site. His rate stats at first last year suggest that he'd cost the team 47 runs below the average first baseman over 100 games. Small sample size warnings apply, of course, because this was only four games. His previous four years, though, in which he played 60, 38, 56, and 33 games, yielded rates of 89, 97, 91, and 81. Those are ugly. You don't want those numbers in the field for your team, but if Hatteberg goes down and you want to do something other than shift Keith Ginter around, Durazo's going to be out there, butchering ground balls and throws from the infield alike. First-base-side fans, take heed. Of course, the A's could just count on Hatteberg playing every day and, in the case of injury, calling up Johnson to play every day, leaving Durazo safely at the DH. I guess this isn't a bad option, because Hatteberg has been durable, appearing in 152 games last year. That plus the fact that the A's are already going younger and, temporarily, worse, means they probably don't want to swap out Durazo for Johnson just yet. Wait 'til 2006.

Posted by jason in Baseball, Oakland A's at 10:48 | |

I got my DMC Xclef 500 yesterday and, after a little bit of Googling, figured out how to set it up. Since no one appears to have anything on the net relating specifically to setting this up (I inferred from other documents), I thought I'd just mention the few easy steps I took on my Debian Linux box. The options I needed in my kernel were to enable SCSI devices in general and SCSI hard drives in particular, USB mass-storage devices, and the DOS FAT filesystem. Once I had those ready to go, I simply mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /media/xclef, though obviously your mount point will differ. I'm sure I could futz for a while and figure out how to mount it so that I don't have to be root to copy files onto the player, but I don't really care that much. One note about potential buyers: it's really huge. If you're expected an iPod or something, don't get this player. I love it already, without even having heard it yet, but it's large and not particularly light, mostly, I'd guess, because of the brilliant idea to make the thing with a standard laptop hard drive, thus making the swapping out of drives an easy, do-it-yourself proposition in case you want more space or a drive fries or something.

Posted by jason in Computer, Personal at 11:12 | |

I've got a post in the works about Oakland's reliever usage this year, but b2evolution isn't cooperating. It doesn't allow me to use anchor links (i.e. name="blah" href="#blah"), presumably because they're not part of perfect XHTML. Worse, though, is that when I tried to save the post that had these "bad" tags in them and I got errors, it promptly threw out all my changes since the last time I had saved that post. Building these tables is excruciating sometimes and the last thing I need is my software losing my work for me.

Posted by jason in Baseball, Oakland A's, Personal, The Blog at 08:45 | |

According to this story, the Astros are interested in acquiring Jeromy Burnitz to play center field. Included in the article is this quote from Burnitz's agent, Howard Simon

He may not be as good in center field as some of the pure center fielders, but everybody who's seen him patrol center field in Coors is convinced he does at least, if not better than, an adequate job.

Now, there's some marketing going on here, because Simon is, after all, getting a cut of Burnitz's salary. That said, Burnitz's Rate in center field last year, covering 69 games, says that he'd have ended up eight runs below average through 100 games, so if he saw, say, 135 games in center field for the Astros, he you might expect him to cost the team ten or eleven runs below the average center fielder. Meanwhile, right there on the Astros's roster is this dude from Smithtown, NY who put up a rate of 100 in 150 games in 2003 and a rate of 97 in 66 games last year. Granted, he'll be 39 years old this year, and granted, he put up a rate of 89 in left field over 83 games, but is there any reason the Astros would prefer Burnitz over Craig Biggio in center field other than the fact that Biggio got shoved out of his position by Carlos Beltran last year and is thus considered a full-time left fielder now? Sure, Biggio's not likely to be a defensive presence like Darin Erstad or anything, but don't we have to figure that neither Biggio nor Burnitz is likely to be significantly better than the other this year? On the other hand, Burnitz put up a .283 EqA last year, compared to .270 from Biggio, and, while the erstwhile Rockie was coming off a terrible year and a half, Biggio's essentially been a mediocre hitter since 2000. That said, I still like Biggio because I'd consider Burnitz a bigger risk for total collapse than the scrappy former second baseman. As usual, though, PECOTA will have something to say on that score in a couple of months. Unfortunately, by that point the signings will be done and over with, which doesn't help me analyze the potential of this move at this point.

Posted by jason in Baseball at 16:57 | |

The signing of Carlos Beltran makes the Mets an intriguing team in my mind. Without looking at things further, I'd call the Mets something like an 83-win team with a chance for things to break right and have them win eight or ten more than that, along with the division. The question, of course, is whether this holds up under the scrutiny of some actual analysis, keeping in mind that rosters are far from set, especially since Carlos Delgado and Magglio Ordonez are still free agents and Sammy Sosa could probably still be had in a trade. Still, we can look at how the team should and could be better or worse going into next year. Since Beltran is the new guy, let's start with the outfield. The leaders in games played at each of the positions last year were Cliff Floyd in left, Mike Cameron in center, and Richard Hidalgo in right. Hidalgo is gone, and we'll assume that Cameron will move to right with Beltran replacing him in center. Floyd and his numerous injury replacements (with Victor Diaz probably being chief among them) will cobble together 162 games in left. Cameron was a disappointment in 2004, underperforming his PECOTA weighted mean projection (sub. req.) by over 20 EqA points while also watching his defense take a hit, dropping from 22 fielding runs above average (FRAA) in 2003 to just 4 last year, despite essentially equivalent playing time. I'd figure Cameron for about the same offensive numbers while adding to his defensive value, due to both a bounce-back factor as well as his skills being worth more above the average right fielder's than the average center man's. Last year's right field team, Hidalgo and Karim Garcia, who together played over 130 games in the starboard corner, were eight batting runs below average (BRAA, which is actually Batting Runs Above Average, of course, and Garcia and Hidalgo's numbers are negatives) and four fielding runs below average. Replace that with eight batting runs and eight fielding runs from Cameron and the Mets are looking at a 28-run improvement at just one position. Meanwhile, Carlos Beltran was good for 35 BRAA and 3 FRAA in center last year, split between his two teams, so if we figure him for 30 and 3 (assuming that last year was his peak season rather than a breakout to a new level of performance) in 2005, that's a 21-run improvement over Cameron's play in center. Left field by committee is hard to get a handle on, because you never know what minor acquisitions the Mets could make to back up Cliff Floyd. The easy thing to do is to just assume that in the end, new positives will cancel old negatives and vice versa, leaving left field in essentially the same value state the Mets had in '04. Already, though, with only the shifting that the acquisition of Beltran causes, the Mets could be looking at a 49-run improvement.

NEWSFLASH

Of course, now comes the news that Cameron doesn't want to play right field and wants to be traded, rendering much of the above moot, as we have to assume that the Mets will have a completely new right fielder to go with their shiny new center fielder in 2005. Whether that right fielder is Victor Diaz, Magglio Ordonez, or Sammy Sosa remains to be seen, and each of those choices impacts the above analysis differently, with a special focus on Diaz, since the Mets would no longer be able to count on him filling in for the inevitable Floyd injury. In the infield, third base should be manned by David Wright all year, after a season that was basically half-Wright, half-Ty Wigginton. The two had essentially identical VORP despite Wright ending up with about fifty fewer plate appearances than Wigginton. On the other hand, you have to wonder whether he's really ready to slug .525 in a full season. PECOTA, after all, had him pegged for just a 10% chance to post a slugging percentage even as high as .417 in 2004. It's hard to say with this kind of back-of-the-envelope math we're doing here, and PECOTA, when the new projections come out, will know a lot more than I do about Wright's expected ranged of prodcution this year, so let's just put third base down as a wash. Because I have no idea who'll play second and who'll play shortstop between Jose Reyes and Kaz Matsui, let's refer to the keystone as a unit. There's nowhere to go but up for Reyes, who has to be better than a .237 EqA hitter. Matsui was also a disappointment with the stick, though not on the level of his double play partner. Let's assume that Kaz pulls a Hideki and gets some of his lost power back while Reyes finally manages to stay a little bit healthy (and misses "only" twenty games this time around due to minor owies and some Bonds-like precautions in taking care of his legs) and the Mets pick up twenty runs, conservatively, between the two positions. At first base and catcher, at least until the Mets sign Delgado or something, there appears to be something of an unsettled mess. We'll get to see some Jason Phillips (who had an awful year), some Mike Piazza (who'll miss 40-60 games again, I'm sure), and even some Vance Wilson. Phillips almost has to bounce back, while Piazza will probably provide roughly the same performance he did in 2004: perhaps he'll hit a little more in a bit less time or maybe he'll play more and hit worse, but in any case, I'm guessing he'll give the Mets essentially the same value for their mega-bucks. Let's be conservative, though, and figure that the Mets get about 15 runs better because of Phillips's return to respectability. On the offense and defense, then, I've got the Mets down for a gain of 84 runs, so let's call that a seven game improvement. If we use 76 wins as a starting place (using Baseball Prospectus's Adjusted Standings as a better measure of how many games this team "should" have won last year than their actual win total), we're up to the aforementioned 83 wins already. I won't go into any detail with the pitching, largely because it seems much more hard to predict than the offense, but it seems like the team, in adding Pedro Martinez and retaining Victor Zambrano, Kris Benson, and Tom Glavine, at worst held steady, and more likely added some value over last year. Now, I can't say I'm going to pick the Mets for first place when March rolls around, in no small part because I don't have a lot of faith in Omar Minaya's ability to take a team that could be in contention and make them better at the trade deadline (without giving up the whole farm system for a dubiously-valued veteran, that is). When I do make my predictions, though, I can say that the team will not be in that Bud Selig-created "no hope and faith" category, either.

Posted by jason in Baseball at 22:40 | |

Visitors to the site in the last few days will have noticed that it looked a bit messed up. My sidebar had become a bottom bar. Ugh. But I finally got it fixed (missing /div tag), so it looks better now. Next up are two issues: an apparently wonky look in Firefox and a lack of distinctiveness. Also, of course, we need more baseball content. Expect something about the Mets's acquisition of Carlos Beltran and how this plus a former A's braintrust makes them perhaps the most interesting team to watch out for in the NL East. Or perhaps not. You'll find out when that comes out.

Posted by jason in Personal, The Blog at 08:57 | |

Well, we're live with the new site. I was just sick of the other one, so I finally moved it over after my nice hosting provider got me SSH access, making the process of moving all the b2evolution files to a new location so much easier than it would have been had I had to FTP the files down and then back up again.

Posted by jason in Personal, The Blog at 09:10 | |