With the weekened coming on, here we go with a look at a handful of recent FanShots over the last few days.
Apparently Bill James is going to be an important part of Moneyball: the Movie. And he's going to be a cartoon character. I'm not sure I understand. First off, I don't really understand why he needs to be in it at all. And, yeah, if he's in it, why is he a cartoon? Am I the only one who thinks that sounds ridiculously bizarre?
I put up a highlight of the PECOTA-adjusted odds for the playoffs in both the AL and the NL through the first sixth of the season. In brief, the Dodgers are close to 90% likely, and the Red Sox and Yankees join them as the only other teams more likely to make it than miss. Meanwhile, the Mets, Phillies, Tigers and Mariners join them as the remaining front runners, in decending order of liklihood.
If you hadn't heard, Manny Ramirez has been suspended for trying to get pregnant, and will be out for 50 games. Over at True Blue LA, Brendan Scolari took a rational look at how the loss of Manny will affect the Dodgers. He certainly hurts them, and he's started out great, but as Brendan says, he was likely to regress, and Juan Pierre (much fun as he is to mock) is better than a replacement-level player. Brendan's own statistical analysis has the Manny-less Dodgers losing close to two extra games over his time out, which is right around the mid-point of other analysis put up on this space. That doesn't close to de-throne them from favorites in the division, though it does obviously make it just a bit tougher. Of course, as with all things, we'll just have to wait and see.
The entire history of Baseball Digest is now available at Google Books. I'll wait until you come back.
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Alright, I'm assuming it's been a couple days for you, but you should have a look at the great break down of NL West payroll efficiency put together by Purple Row (one of my personal favorite SBN blogs, by the way). The Rockies spent $809,000 per win the last three years, best in the division as opposed to the $1.41 million per win Dodgers. Of course, as Sky points out, it's easy to be efficient when you're not winning, and the most respectable teams are those that manage to win a lot while spending little. The Rockies and Padres come close to winning at an above-average rate while spending below-average, though.
Over at Driveline Mechanics, Devil_Fingers takes a retrospective look at how bright the Travis Hafner contract looks. It has certainly come out pretty poorly for the Indians, but he, instead, looks at what they should have expected for him going forward and if the deal made sense at the time. The Indians payed him to be about a 3.5 WAR player over four years, but DF runs the numbers and says they probably should have expected more of a 3-3.3 win player at best. That still makes the deal look a little over-the-top, but makes it a tad more understandable than it seems in pure hindsight.
I'm not at all a Murray Chass fan, but I am a fan of his take down of Selena Roberts's Alex Rodriguez book. He picks apart the entire thing, essentially taking it to task for being spotty journalism with poor support. Seems to me like she essentially found a way to stretch a tabloid in to a full book.
And Aaron Heilman now has a splitter.
Slow couple days for the FanShot section, which is definitely on me, so I'm sorry, readers. There is still plenty of good stuff to head over there and discuss, though. And you can always help by bringing over your own great ideas and the terrific writing you find on the Series of Tubes. Have a good weekend!