Sabersphere 2/15: Kyle Lohse, All Stars Aren't All-Stars, Retrosheet

It's Friday, and that means we are another day closer to the start of the regular season. Pitchers and catchers have been reporting the last few days, and other than that nothing much exciting has been going on. While you wait for the season, check out these sabermetric articles from around the web.

Previously on Beyond the Box Score

James continues to teach us all how to saberize our computers, and in this edition he helps us import and run a few basic queries using the Retrosheet files.

Saberizing a Mac #9: Retrosheet (part 1) - Beyond the Box Score

With the Retrosheet event files in your arsenal, just about any split you can imagine becomes possible. In fact, just about any statistical baseball inquiry at all becomes possible.

Around the Sabersphere

Dave Cameron and Jeff Sullivan of FanGraphs debate about Kyle Lohse, with a focus on the risk that he could bring. Over at Beyond the Box Score we are strongly against signing Lohse, Glenn DuPaul discusses this in greater detail. You can read more of why Glenn is saying #DontSignLohse here.

A Kyle Lohse Back-and-Forth | FanGraphs Baseball

A big problem is that people don’t seem to trust Kyle Lohse. Another big problem, and maybe a bigger problem, is that Lohse was extended a qualifying offer, meaning he’d cost a signing team a draft pick.

Right now Giancarlo Stanton, Jason Heyward, Mike Trout, and Bryce Harper are some of the biggest stars in baseball. Marc Normandin of Baseball Nation looks to see if they will get better, if at all.

Will Stanton, Trout, Harper, and Heyward get even better? - Baseball Nation

There's a ceiling to just how good 99 percent of players are going to be, though, with the other small percentage filling out the ranks of baseball's all-time greats, and the promise of youth isn't enough to separate them: Sometimes players are as good as they'll ever be.

In baseball there are tons of players that go under the radar, even if they've post some exceptional career numbers. Jason Wojciechowski of Baseball Prospectus looks at a few of those players.

Baseball Prospectus | In A Pickle: Not All Stars Are All-Stars

The most underappreciated players ever, by one worthwhile measure. - Keywords: Bert Blyleven, Darrell Evans, Bobby Abreu, Bert Blyleven, Jose Cruz.