Disqus - Friends of caladein

Re: Largehearted Boy: Contest - Win The National's High Violet and Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrado

jwojciechowski — Sat, 08 May 2010 17:03:43 -0000

My 2010 musical obsession so far is last year's Heartless Bastards album, "The Mountain". Book: I finally read "The Maltese Falcon".

Re: Manager of the Year

jwojciechowski — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 01:38:58 -0000

Wow, gosh, how much of a dummy am I? I've changed it to Manny Acta (silently, but let this comment be a record of such edit). This is very sad because I love Acta as a manager.

Someday I'd like to take a more rigorous shot at something like this to really get an estimate on runs cost/earned by manager decisions. Tactics and lineups are relatively easily measurable. Position player usage and bullpens are harder. And how to divide credit between the manager and the GM on roster-building is probably just impossible.

Re: Grades do not make a student - Berkshire Eagle Online

jwojciechowski — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 17:13:28 -0000

I hope that Ms. Hgenhah figures out, before she pays any deposits, that neither Wheaton nor Sarah Lawrence is a women's college.

Re: 15 Killer Google Chrome Features You Might Not Know About

jwojciechowski — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 20:51:30 -0000

You misread that post you linked to. Note how that post talks about pasting into text editors IN CHROME. (The examples given are Gmail and Docs.)

Re: 15 Killer Google Chrome Features You Might Not Know About

jwojciechowski — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 23:49:56 -0000

Right, your comment is absolutely correct, and the post now reads the way you meant as well. I thought, when reading the original post, that you had misunderstood the feature itself, but now I see that it was just unclear from the original text what you meant.

Re: Election day…whooo.

jwojciechowski — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 11:37:43 -0000

"Yeah, white people can sit on their ass and not care about voting today or not. After all they ALWAYS have had the ability to vote, it wasn’t something they every had to fight and bleed and die for."

Tell it to women. Or, hell, non-property-owners.

Re: Ideology in global warming

jwojciechowski — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 14:38:33 -0000

Interesting -- so I'm trying to kill the Christian god in the name of spreading my own religion, the religion of science.

Re: Dave Alvin Visits Harlan County, KY

jwojciechowski — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 22:29:08 -0000

Chiming in rather late here, but: Harlan (the town) and Harlan (the county) are both very real places in Kentucky. See., e.g., the famous documentary: http://www.imdb.com/title/t...

Re: The Thrill Building, "The Greatest Game In The World"

jwojciechowski — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:56:20 -0000

On the one hand, no, not really. On the other hand, it's baseball! We should have all the baseball songs in the world.

Re: Bob Geren > Adam Berry

jwojciechowski — Sun, 15 May 2011 16:05:01 -0000

I think your parenthetical is key, and revisiting the post, I realize that instead of "there is no additional pressure," I should have said "there should be no additional pressure." You're right that the media, managers, players themselves, etc. certainly might feel a desire to step their game up to make up for the lost pitcher -- I just don't think (as the clutch studies have shown) that there's any significant ability to do so, and therefore talking about "extra pressure" and "have to step up" is just setting up a narrative to explain what happens the rest of the year -- the other pitchers, even though they'll likely pitch exactly the same as they would have had Braden not gone down, will be judged as either having stepped up or not stepped up if the A's make the playoffs or don't.

I think it also comes down to a distinction I failed to draw -- players might feel more pressure, but that doesn't mean that they have, in any objective way, any additional responsibility. It's really the responsibility part of Berry's point that I object to.

Re: David Purcey for Scott Sizemore

jwojciechowski — Fri, 27 May 2011 20:45:29 -0000

Darn it, I knew there was something I was missing.

I guess it could still be done if you're willing to go two starts at a time. Given that it's no mystery who's coming up on the schedule, this could probably be worked out, but you're right, this puts a real crimp in my plans.

Re: Over the Monster podcast: it's me!

jwojciechowski — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 00:40:30 -0000

I think grammatically it's pretty clear that "incomparable" applies to both of you.

I had a lot of fun. I hope the audience did!

Re: Sam Miller on Mike Scioscia

jwojciechowski — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 12:34:42 -0000

I have a hard time getting a read on how much (justified, as your comment notes) skepticism people have about the available defensive metrics. The sentence I left out, though, was this: "He says they don’t account for the role of advanced scouting, positioning and, yes, even the catcher’s role in calling pitches that reflect the scouting and positioning," and how true that is depends on how much fielders position themselves vs. managers micromanaging their place on the field. I'm not aware of anyone knowing the answer to that.

Re: Bill Simmons on LeBron as Dr. J

jwojciechowski — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 03:07:49 -0000

The overall theme of the piece is that what LeBron chose to do in free agency was something we could read into and psychoanalyze even if we didn't know the first thing about him. That's as dead wrong today as it was a year ago.

And for all the reasons already stated, the comparison made no sense at all. LeBron is head and shoulders above Dr. J. It's really that simple.

Re: Mark Ellis traded to the Rockies

jwojciechowski — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 03:38:13 -0000

I definitely have a type which is probably best illustrated by Jack Cust being at the top of the list. Probably, what, half those guys are basically some version or another of Cust.

I actually hadn't really thought through the implications of Purcey-Sizemore on Mark Ellis, but if they're unable to acquire Sizemore, and assuming Kevin Kouzmanoff still gets the boot to Sacramento, Adam Rosales is probably the everyday third baseman, leaving Ellis a utility role. So if Sizemore's acquisition essentially forced Ellis out, then I think your two-trade idea makes a lot of sense, and the position-player part of it seems like a clear upgrade, especially when you consider organizational need.

Re: Tyson Ross's return

jwojciechowski — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 10:51:10 -0000

Thanks for pointing that out, David. This is terrifying. What are they doing?

Re: Game 87, Mariners 4, A's 2 (38-49) (cusses)

jwojciechowski — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 12:23:57 -0000

I'm of a mind that we just notice it more these days -- more people watching, better quality video, more people making gifs and putting things on YouTube when calls are blown, etc. I also think that we're fairly blessed as baseball fans -- whatever subjectivity there is in the interference calls I complained about in this post, e.g., is dwarfed by the body of unwritten law that has developed around traveling in the NBA or pass interference in the NFL.

Re: Twitter Q&A: Do Reyes & Wright get along?

jwojciechowski — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 19:15:47 -0000

"And, think of all that they’ve been through together: playing in the minors"

Nope. Go check Baseball-Reference.com please.

Re: NBA Mythbusters: Is Andrea Bargnani A Terrible Defender?

jwojciechowski — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 20:11:50 -0000

The three Google autocompletes for me for "Andrea Bargnani is", for what it's worth, are "not a bust", "a bust", and "girlfriend."

No, I have no idea how "Andrea Bargnani is girlfriend" makes sense.

Re: Game 97, A's 3, Tigers 8 (42-55) (brief)

jwojciechowski — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:28:13 -0000

It always bugs me when MLB managers have bullpenners only throw one inning in a clear "bullpen game" situation. Expecting, say, FDLS, Fuentes, and Breslow to combine for six innings (or even seven, if FDLS can go three) hardly seems unreasonable, and still leaves you about a million pitchers fresh for the next game. (Granted, no lefties, so maybe you don't have Breslow pitch after Fuentes, but use Ziegler instead.)

Re: FIP as fielding-independent stat

jwojciechowski — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:54:33 -0000

Your comment made me realize that I was thinking only of the numerator in FIP, which just has BB, K, and HR. (Your sequence, then, doesn't change the numerator, because whether that ball in play ahead of the homer is an out, an error, or a double, it's not recorded in the FIP numerator.) The denominator, though, is IP, i.e. outs recorded, which are absolutely not fielding-independent.

Re: A history of Billy Beane's intradivision trades

jwojciechowski — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 17:42:36 -0000

I'd managed to block out just how bad that trade was. It's not a good thing when the best thing you can say out of the deal is "got a pitcher who was later traded as part of the package to acquire Kevin Appier."

Re: Favorite A's pitchers of all time

jwojciechowski — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 13:26:07 -0000

I liked Zito a lot at the time he was with the A's, and even have his bobblehead, but the warm feelings haven't stayed with me. I wasn't that sad to see him go to the Giants, for instance, in the same way that I was sad to see Hudson and Mulder go (although it's possible that's due to the circumstances of their leaving -- I don't hold it against players to leave by free agency or anything, but the surprise of the Hudson/Mulder trades probably contributed to my feelings, while we were able to prepare for Zito's departure).

I'm not sure who you mean by Smoke.

Re: Favorite A's pitchers of all time

jwojciechowski — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 11:10:50 -0000

Ah, Stewart, right. Yeah, he's everyone's favorite, but his glory years are just a tad before my time. I became an A's fan around 1989, but only in the sense that I decided I was going to be happy they won the World Series -- I don't think I knew many of the players except via baseball cards, and I doubt I watched any actual games until much later. (My house was not a sports house.)

Re: Game 124, Blue Jays 7, A's 0 (55-69) [recap]

jwojciechowski — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:54:15 -0000

I would also be down with (how about this) LAU-ree. I think no matter what, it's not Lori, though.