janedavile

jorge posada wife

2012-01-24T17:51:00.000-08:00

jorge posada wife

"POWDER" COLORS

2012-01-23T14:44:00.000-08:00

"POWDER" COLORS

SOURCE:lefashion

CORRELATING POWER/PLATOON SPLITS 1: SUB-HoF LEFTY FIRST SACKERS

2012-01-18T23:09:00.000-08:00

Penumbra....

It's time to mess around with some data in the subcutaneous regions. (We all need to wind down from the agitato of the Hall of Fame's bloody penumbra.)

...bloody Penumbra. (But Cristina Brondo
might be worth getting sliced up for...)

So we will fly under the Hall of Fame--literally, in this case.

The vagrant thought that motivated this was an old chestnut: the platoon advantage. Or, rather, the disadvantage as it's often manifested in lefty hitters vs. lefty pitchers. We wondered if there might be any rhyme or reason in it--meaning some other kind of correlating pattern which explained its overall behavior.

So we decided to take a subgroup of hitters who would have been good enough to have actually given a prolonged opportunity to hit against lefties.

That group, after a couple of generous swallows of a high-powered Trappist ale, was identified as the left-handed hitting first basemen from 1930 to the present who are just below Hall of Fame level play.

We gathered the 38 hitters and calculated their personal OPS+ against lefties (we call it LOPS+, and it corresponds to the sOPS figure that Forman et fil calculate on their splits pages). That data is presented in the table at the left.

When we average out some of the other salient data about these guys, we discover that, as is the case generally in baseball as it's moved into the present, power is increasing. We took our three historical categories (30s-50s, 60s-80s, 90s-now) and averaged the ISO (isolated power) and the XBA (our stat, called eXtra Base Average, the percentage of total bases that are created from extra-base hits). When you look at that, you'll see that there's a big uptick in the last 20 years.

This is also accompanied by a general improvement in the performance level of the lefty-swinging first sackers who are "bubbling under" the HoF.

The XBA values, not shown in the chart, mirror the ISO: .556 for the 30s-50s group; .573 for the 60s-80s group; .640 for the 90s-to-the-present group.

The overall LOPS+ value for all 38 lefty-swinging first basemen is 79. That is, they lose about 21% of their overall OPS+ as a result of facing left-handed pitchers.

The historical data shows that there was a slight dip in the platoon performance of the lefty first-sackers who played in the 60s-80s group.

From this, it doesn't look like there's a whole lot to this study...

But it turns out there's another way to slice the data. (There's always another way to slice the data.)

And, in this case, the slice we want to do looks at a grouping of players by their ISO/XBA.

When we lump players into six XBA categories (.499-, .500-.549, .550-.599, .600-.649, .650-.699, and .700+), we see that there's almost a linear correlation. We've run the power data "backwards" in our chart; it runs from the most powerful to the least powerful, left to right, in order to show the virtually linear improvement in platoon advantage.

So what we're seeing here is that the more XBA or ISO these players have, the worse they are at hitting left-handed pitching.

Now possibly this is simply an intuitive thing. It might just be common sense to you all that the more a left-handed hitter successfully swings for the fences (or emphasizes extra-base power), the more trouble he might have with southpaws.

But it's not something that we've ever seen broken out in any way. So, here it is.

We of course realize that this is a highly targeted small sample size. It surely isn't representative of average players--though it could be. One thing to test is the performance of other lefty-hitting players who play different positions, but who hit at an analogous level for their defensive position. (In other words, hitters from other defensive positions who are the "bubbling under the HoF" types.)

We'll probably get to that a bit later on in the remaining off-season.

Ryan Howard: disappearing into a cloud of smoke
against lefties...

OK, it's coming back to us. What spurred this little exercise was the ongoing discussion of Norm Cash, the Tigers' long-time slugger. Cash had a fine career, and he gets touted as a "skirting the HoF" type from now and then.

But he had a very pronounced platoon split (just 61 LOPS+, one of the worst such scores among the players we've broken out).

The positive point, however: he owned righties.

That makes him eerily similar to a man who, unlike him, is widely considered to be a vastly overrated player--Ryan Howard.

Cash spent a portion of his later career being sat out against lefties. That was a lot easier to do in those days because the Tigers weren't paying him an absolute king's ransom to play. The Phillies might be well-advised to have Howard sit against lefties, but given what they're paying him, it just isn't feasible.

SAKOGUCHI ON SAKOGUCHI

2012-01-12T09:04:00.000-08:00

The makers of this poignant mini-documentary about iconoclastic painter Ben Sakoguchi, whose "Unauthorized History of Baseball" is but one of many "orange crate label" series that he has produced in a startling display of focused artistic energy, didn't see fit to bring baseball into the narrative, but as Sakoguchi talks about his life and art (a most welcome first) you can see a generous array of the baseball paintings in the right corner of the frame...

The occasion for the video is Sakoguchi's inclusion in the Japanese-American National Museum's ongoing series, Drawing the Line: Japanese Art, Design, and Activism in Post-War Los Angeles, which is featured at their Little Tokyo-based facility just east of downtown L.A. For more information about the exhibit, which is part of the expertly coordinated Pacific Standard Time cluster of exhibitions that have been running throughout Los Angeles since October, please visit their web site. The Drawing the Line exhibition continues through February 19th.

Ben Sakoguchi today...

The only problem with Sakoguchi's video is that it is much, much too short. The filmmakers do a wonderful job of capturing the essence of Ben's unique personality, and the story they are able to tell in just over four minutes is affecting, but more time with his prolific, often outrageous, consistently challenging and thought-provoking work is what the viewer will want after such a tantalizing glimpse. (A half-hour or hour documentary is what's needed: let's hope that it will happen--soon.)

Ben "back in the day"...

You can take a self-guided tour of Sakoguchi's work at his web site, lovingly maintained by his wife Jan, who is also the very principled portal through which prospective buyers of Ben's work must pass. [Full disclosure: we are pleased and honored to have somehow slipped through the cracks in her radar to have become a proud owner of several "Unauthorized History of Baseball" paintings.]

Such a tour, which will remind you of Ben's fruitful association with the Baseball Reliquary, will also demonstrate to you how much more there is to his work than baseball.

JIM, JACK AND THE LASH OF THE BACK: BASEBALL's CULTURE WAR HEATS UP

2012-01-10T11:09:00.000-08:00

First and foremost: congratulations to Barry Larkin for his enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. He is an exemplary choice in every way.

•

Jack (aka "Whisky Jack")...

...and Jim (who some would rather have
dipped in something other than bronze).

While yesterday's Hall of Fame vote didn't deliver a lethal blow to our little scenario for future results (more on that below...), it did crystallize the dynamics of the culture war that continues to rage between two increasingly armed camps: the mainstream media and the blogosphere.

What's clear from the increase in the support for Jack Morris (up to 67% from the low-to-mid fifties in the two previous years) is that the mainstream media has been listening to the blogosphere. But what they've heard--much as was the case with Jim Rice--has caused them to dig their heels in.

It's plain as the nose on Pinocchio's face that the BBWAA writers have taken umbrage at the ridicule that has been relentlessly sent their way by a very vocal minority (a kind of "Green Party" of "baseball activists") that hounds them. As is the case with any stacked deck, there are essentially two choices for alleviating the effects of such a condition: evolution or revolution.

The blogosphere, following the more combative post-Abstract muckracking of Bill James, has chosen revolutionary ardor. Buoyed by the fact that baseball front offices have adopted statistical and economic concepts from the ongoing "advanced metrics industry," they operate ideologically, attempting a full-court press of cultural revolution.

But they've only been given the keys to daddy's car. They don't own the car, and they don't have enough revolutionary praxis to steal it away from either its owners or its guardians: the mainstream press.

Thus the Hall of Fame has become the bloody battleground for symbolic control of the flow of ideas and the control over the nature of discourse. As we've demonstrated elsewhere, the flaws in the Hall of Fame voting process have been exaggerated, beginning with James in The Politics of Glory, who opened the door to what has become a tidal wave of revisionism by declaring that the process was irretrievably broken and advocating radical new mechanisms for voting.

Thus the BBWAA has been under assault from the forces of revisionist revolution for the better part of two decades, with a yearly flashpoint that occurs in the second week of every new year.

Make no mistake: the BBWAA is far from perfect in what it does. But nothing in this world is. And when an organization holds an important key to how "cultural definition" is coined, it's best to proceed from a less combative position.

Rich and Bert: accentuate the postive...

Rich Lederer's campaign for Bert Blyleven was effective not so much because it encompassed all of the deep technical truths that animate the world of "advanced metrics," but because it was an example of positive advocacy. By contrast, the neo-sabe campaigns against Jim Rice (and, now, Jack Morris) have failed to gain traction. If anything, they may have helped hasten the very thing they were attempting to avoid.

Frankly, the Hall of Fame is the most pointless place to wage a cultural war. But neo-sabes can't quite let go of their Stalinist roots. They factionalize as well--and as frequently--as any cadre of folk, even those with a bitterly cynical brand of utopian fervor. (It's that combination of impulses that earmarks it as a tiny but potent signifier for the ongoing malaise in American culture.)

The sane response to a Hall of Fame that's seen as a hopeless quagmire is to simply start one's own. A somewhat more moderate subgroup in the analytical world began this in the mid-80s, well before the Internet. That group predated the Hall of Merit by fifteen years, and it began as an intellectual exercise not motivated by the cynical depredations that permeate James's bracing-but-divisive Politics of Glory. That group called itself the Baseball Maniacs, attempting to own up to the obsessiveness that such immersion in minutiae so clearly entails. They did not think that the world would change much if they conducted a thought-experiment about who the best ballplayers were. They did not think it quite so urgent that a semi-lax organization be overthrown due to the "cultural abominations" it had perpetrated upon a helpless humanity.

As noted, the result of these negative campaigns against Rice and Morris seems to be that the organization with the power to make a "bad decision" will only be motivated to go ahead and do it, if only to remind everyone that they have the power to do so. Now, in some cases, such actions can serve to undermine authority and pave the way for cultural change. That's what some would call a Trotskyite tactic for "dialectical transformation." And, clearly, creating martyrs has brought about change--some of it good.

But people become resistant to such tactics. They learn to discount and deflect them. Cycles of change occur as cultural combatants revise and reapply their words and actions.

But the other problem for the neo-sabes who want to reform/control/blow up the Hall of Fame and drive all the BBWAA "morons" into the Red Sea is this:

--Not nearly enough people are going to get up in arms if/when a controlling organization goes "rogue" and puts Jim Rice and/or Jack Morris into its Hall of Fame.

There's no traction for "cultural transformation" here. It's better found in the front offices. If it permeates the front offices (and, to some extent, it is doing so, but the jury is still out on that eventual outcome), then there will be a slower but more lasting set of changes.

"Mandarin revolution" is a double-edged sword, and one must not proceed prematurely to the next state of change without risking backlash. The road to what looks like a sudden transformation is usually preceded by a long march. That is the reality of the situation here, and it will be best to accept and absorb the so-called "setbacks" in order to find the path that will lead to success. Given what's happened, there is really no other recourse.

•

So Morris' rise in the voting reflects more than just a strategic failure on the part of the numbers mob. It demonstrates that if you push against an inchoate monolith, the inchoate monolith tends to push back.

The corollary to the famous film noir maxim "No good deed goes unpunished" that's appropriate here is: "Poke a sleeping bear once too often, and you won't have to worry about where your next meal is coming from--because you will be the meal." The BBWAA is the bear; we are the visitors to the park. You don't change that essential relationship by yelling at the bear.

We weren't convinced that the Morris matter had taken root in the way that it has, but this year's result makes it clear that we're now in that "elemental test of manhood" phase.

Organizations do (at least) as many bad things as good things when they are threatened, or feel threatened. Lederer's approach shows how small changes can be made; the campaign against Rice (and now Morris) is pitched at such a volume that it can't help but create backlash.

From the tiny standpoint of our own ongoing HoF projections, they weren't blown out of the water by yesterday's results. Jeff Bagwell came up a bit short of our projection, but his upward movement was strong; while there's considerably less certainty that he'll make the necessary jump for enshrinement in 2013, we'd still grade it at 60-65%. None of the other results were particularly divergent from what was predicted; like many of those whose individual voices remain less combative than the unfortunate "echo chamber" effect of the numbers blogosphere, we're heartened to see Tim Raines move up in the vote, but caution his advocates to be ready to weather a protracted plateau as a series of more obviously qualified candidates begin to appear on the ballot next year.

[EDIT: Some might wonder why, if the Hall of Fame is characterized here as not being worth so much worry, why we've (recently) advocated a "Hall of Fame Redux." A fair question. That idea is just that: an intellectual exercise that follows in the wake of very diligent efforts by a group of committed baseball scholars and historians to shape an alternative roster of the best players using the most rigorous methods available to them (the Hall of Merit).

The thought-question answered by a "Hall of Fame Redux" is what would that roster of inductees look like had the same bureaucratic constraints been in place for the Hall of Merit as was the case for the BBWAA. While this is admittedly an esoteric idea, the interest in seeing such a result simply won't go away, at least from yours truly. We will know more about what the exact differences are in the de facto "inner circle" of the Hall of Fame by participating in such an exercise. Perhaps this is pointless, as it will not change anything. But any new perspective has the potential to spark future actions and change, even if they seem less than promising at first glance. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.]

PERSPECTIVIZING POSADA

2012-01-09T15:27:00.000-08:00

Jorge Posada has announced his retirement...the late-blooming Yankee backstop was a mainstay during a time when the gorillas from the Bronx were exceptionally successful even by their standards.

His retirement leaves only two players from the beginning of the Yankees' late 90s dominance still active (Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera).

He's not going to be a force in the Hall of Fame voting in 2017, though one expects him to stay on the ballot for a few years. His association with the Yankees during an extremely successful timeframe should boost his vote totals, as opposed to what happened to a switch-hitting catcher with a similar profile (Ted Simmons, who dropped off the ballot with only 4% of the vote in 1994).

Here's a brief sketch of factoids concerning Posada's career that will add a little more perspective.

First, of course, is that late-bloomingness. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of players who had their career year at age 35.

That age-35 season is the best such season turned in by a catcher that age in baseball history. (WAR-mongers might argue for Elston Howard's 1964 season, but they'd be doing so on the basis of the sketchy defensive values that the system kicks out for catchers. Posada's 153 OPS+ dominates the list of 35-year old backstops.)

The lengthy post-season that was so often part of the Yankee experience during Posada's career seemed to grind him down. Forman et fils' post-season breakouts show a marked decline over the escalating course of the post season: Posada's OPS in division series was .790; in championship series it was .742; and in the World Series it fell to .667.

In terms of his career development as a hitter, Posada began as a much better right-handed hitter, as our chart of his cumulative left-right splits demonstrates. He made a rapid improvement from the left side in 2000, and continued to improve as a lefty from then on--one of the contributing factors to his ability to remain an extremely effective hitter into his mid-to-late 30s.

That sharp dip in 2011 that's shown for his right-handed hitting (the one marked "LHP") shows the specific nature of Jorge's decline. He was just 6-for-65 against lefties last year. (That might have been a contributing factor in his decision to hang it up.)

The thought of playing anywhere else probably also influenced Posada. Of all the ballparks in all the major leagues, the one he really didn't want to walk out of (to rework that Casablanca reference just a bit...) was New Yankee Stadium. The revamped "House That ~~Ruth~~ George Built" proved to be exceptionally cozy for Jorge: in the three years he played there (at the advanced age of 37-39), the park literally kept his career going. He hit .302 there, with an OPS of .938. On the road, those number were considerably more wan--as in .209 and a .665 OPS. In 2011, Posada hit .165 away from the Bronx, with a .524 OPS.

Laura Posada: perhaps the reason for the "home
field advantage" is now abundantly clear...

Of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't work in a couple of "midwestern angst" digs into this. First, Rob Neyer's knee-jerk notion that Posada was held back from enough career games in 1996-99 to cost him a slot in Cooperstown wasn't really worth the time it took to write the column. (That's the Damoclean sword of the Internet--it just coerces that empty content out of you...) [EDIT: Hi, Rob!! :-)] There's a good chance that Jorge will end up in the Hall--but it will be sometime after 2030 or so, when many more things have shaken out. Second, it turns out that Posada's very favorite place to hit is--you guessed it--Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City (.340 BA, 1.011 OPS).

Get lost, Chet!!

Finally: evidence that Posada just isn't a West Coast kind of guy. On West Coast road trips, Posada hit .246, was on-base about a third of the time (.331), slugged .386--a total OPS of .728. Everywhere else (including his two homers in Tokyo, which is so far west that it's in the Far East and thus doesn't count) he hit .276/.374/.483, for an OPS of .857. Note to Jorge's red hot wife Laura: no Chet Baker records to get him in the mood. It'll just get him fouled up and off his rhythm.

Thanks for the memories, Jorge.

RELIQUARY REVS UP FOR ETERNAL BALLOT #14

2012-01-07T18:09:00.000-08:00

The Blue Bum tells it like it is: Stephen Seemayer's
paintings revamp the Dodgers' increasingly fragile legacy.

While oh so many of you are fixating on the scarifyin' prospect of Monday's Hall of Fame vote (Barry Larkin is looking good), you might want to turn your attention to an election in which any and all are allowed to participate: the Baseball Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals, where you can buy your own vote for a small yearly fee of $25 (that's less than seven cents a day, campers).

It involves a shift in mentality that might not be possible for those who are over-invested in statistics or "official stories." Rather than expending emotion and intellect in Hall of Fame revisionism, there's an alternate path that involves an entirely new vision, a true re-visioning, in fact, of baseball history. The voters of the Baseball Reliquary get to engage in this process directly, and they've done a sensational job in producing a unique slate of Eternals. Their "outsider" stance welds together the most disparate strands of baseball's ongoing tapestry.

This year there are a dozen new candidates for the Shrine of the Eternals. Some of the better-known names include: Bert Campaneris, Jose Canseco, Charlie Finley, Hideo Nomo, Lefty O'Doul, and Joe Pepitone. (How would you like to have that sextet in a panel discussion?)

But where the Reliquary really shines is in its selection of the lesser-known figures in baseball history. These are the fleeting ones, who add the texture of individuality to the game--the characters who often are the purest embodiments of adversity, extremity and otherness: the qualities that abound in Reliquary inductees.

Bill Bergen

The half-dozen fleeting ones who are invited to take a bow in 2012:

--Gary Bell, an ordinary pitcher with an extraordinary wit, one of the three major characters in Jim Bouton's abidingly irreverent classic, Ball Four;

--Bill Bergen, whose lack of hitting prowess is the most extreme for any position player who ever amassed 2500 or more at-bats;

--Steve Bilko, legendary minor-league slugger whose long-ball exploits in the Pacific Coast League were so legendary that Hollywood appropriated his name for the classic Phil Silvers comedy, Sergeant Bilko;

--Charles "Victory" Faust, the type of "team mascot" that could never happen today, whose story would make for a quirky but compelling baseball biopic;

Toni Stone

--Annabelle Lee, aunt of Bill (Spaceman) Lee, whose left-handed pitching exploits in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League included a perfect game (Lee has said his aunt threw harder than he did);

--Toni Stone, the only woman to play in the Negro Leagues, signed by the Indianapolis Clowns in 1953 to play second base (thus replacing a future Hall of Famer: Hank Aaron).

These are not your garden-variety "Hall of Fame" candidates. They are literally the stuff that dreams are made of, people who lived out their dreams in the light of day. For thirteen years, with unerring insight, the voter population of the Baseball Reliquary has selected a troika of inductees that capture this quirky, undefinable resonance.

If the all-too-brief stories of these six unique, fleeting-but-eternal individuals capture even the briefest spark of interest in you, then you should join the Baseball Reliquary--the quintessential baseball "anti-institution" where your voice is always heard. Voting begins in April, so there's still time to join.

The fourteenth Shrine of the Eternals Induction Day will be held on Sunday, July 15th, in Pasadena, CA. As we've told you for almost as long as there has been an Induction Day, the ceremony is unlike any other you will ever attend. Don't miss it.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO FALL APART?

2012-01-06T23:07:00.000-08:00

The Big Z: according to many semi-reliable sources,
the bobblehead makers got the proportions right...

The new year, arriving on the heels of the Oakland A's tradeoff of three frontline pitchers and the Chicago Cubs (aka Theo'n'Jed's Sausage Shed) deep-throating of Carlos Zambrano's contract, is virtually guaranteed to send the post-neo saber-fatalists into paroxysms of punditry capable of outstripping the mainstreamers they love to excoriate. (Since news often travels in threes, we can only hope that the Houston Astros will bite the bullet and hire Keith Law in a dual role--deputy scouting director and team mascot.)

The consensus in the ever-Iagoseque world of numbers is that Billy Beane has at last been exposed as a corporate shill, in direct opposition to his portrayal in Moneyball (and, yes, we still owe you our rev-up on the film, the flim-flam, and the many talking dead bodies that are still molesting the many myths that were serially propagated over the past decade).

The universal contempt for his recent deals, which sent starters Trevor Cahill and Gio Gonzalez (snif!), plus reliever Andrew Bailey, off to far-flung destinations for a minivan full of farm-fresh produce, is an amusing reversal of the 1998 idolatry accorded then-Marlins' GM Dave Dombrowski for his acquisition of a rhythm section's worth of first-round draft picks.

The fine feathered folk who touted the "Swing Kids" strategy in 1998 lived through a number of years where the Marlins fell far short of the scenario predicted for them, were buoyed by the parallel success of the A's, whose longer-term run of fortuitous draft selections coalesced into a set of mythic performances in 2000-02 that ushered in a wonk-infused feeding frenzy.

His other nickname: Lew "Blow Up My Stadium" Wolff

But the A's stalled (purportedly because their "brand" of exploiting "market inefficiency" went by the wayside). As with the five-year plateau that faced them in 2002 when the Marlins remained on the wrong side of .500, the A's old constituency has finally gotten off the bus. Jonah Keri, the krown prince of profit-pundit shape-shifters, actually tossed an incendiary device into his most recent screedy-poo at (g)Rantland, dousing Beane with gasoline as the hired hand of an owner with an agenda as dire as Wayne Huizenga or Jeffrey Loria. (That A's owner is now nicknamed Lew "the Leper" Wolff.)

The massive irony, of course, is that as Wolff and Beane tear down their team, their actions are no longer brilliant. And yet as Theo'n'Jed (Epstein and Hoyer, the two goombas from Boston who've begun to share a reinforced houseboat on the shores of Lake Michigan) make a series of similar steps (while not actually resulting in any dramatic payroll reduction, mind you...), they are the beneficiaries of what is mostly a "hands-off" policy.

We might humorously ascribe this to an inverted variant of Keri's discarded (shape-shifter, remember?) "theories," which we could rechristen as the "failure cycle," but we really ought to get down to something actually worth reading about. Let's just finish this long opening aside by noting that five years is clearly the operating limit for the cultural heroes of the numbers set. Epstein, a clever shape-shifter himself, bought himself time by taking a powder: by leaving Boston (four years after his last big success, and with two years out of the post-season), he was able to re-set the clock.

"Lavrenti" Beane...

"Billy" Beria

Beane and the A's, however, are now worse off than a discredited mid-fifties Politburo member. While it's gratifying that the crossed-sword set is actually willing to acknowledge how many games the long-ago vaunted (and summarily eviscerated) Fish Fillets (aka the Marlins) lost in 1998--that's 108 big ones, for those of you who were riding the space shuttle at the time--it is by no means a done deal that the A's will suffer the same fate.

It's not a done deal, in fact, that they will actually be all that much worse than they were in 2011.

(Gasp!)

There, we've said it. And, of course, we have some of our always handy, usually idiosyncratic data with which to wrangle.

What does it take to fall apart? Nobody is really sure, of course, until after it's happened. But that won't stop many from predicting it, particularly if they've been unlucky in love. The A's are odds-on "favorites" to lose 100 games (for the sake of our data, we'll interpret this as playing less than .400 ball).

Teams in the .399- WPCT bracket, as the data from the past twenty years demonstrates, do not tend to be exemplars of the "fall apart" syndrome. They tend to be a good way toward the lower depths already, and merely slide further into a region below mediocrity. The overall average drop for these teams is 14 games, but this figure has tightened a bit in the most recent decade.

Using a formula that uses team ERA+ and OPS+ to solidly mimic Pythagorean Win Percentage, we see that in the last decade teams who've declined into sub-mediocrity have lost the most ground in their pitching staff.

But the eighteen teams in the most recent decade have clearly bifuracted into two distinct classes (as the more detailed breeakout will demonstrate). They've splintered into teams that genuinely, catastrophically collapse (we can put the 2011 Twins and Astros, the 2010 Mariners, 2008 Padres, and 2004 Royals and D-Backs into this category), as opposed to mediocre teams that were already skating closing to the thin ice separating them from pond scum status.

Only five out of these eighteen teams had better-than-league-average pitching in the year prior to their sub-.400 season. Four of them are teams that really collapsed. And these are the only four (out of nearly two hundred league seasons where teams scored a 100 or higher in ERA+) where the teams collapsed.

The A's had an ERA+ of 110 in 2011. While they've lost three front-line pitchers, one of them (Cahill) was slightly under the league average in ERA+ in 2011. The A's have quite a backlog of young starters, including several who were acquired in these most recent trades. There is no fait accompli that the A's pitchers will suffer a catastrophic reversal in 2012.

The data strongly indicates that it's the pitching that drives the decline process, however. (The steady-state bad teams show a more balanced decline.) So how far do the A's need to drop from last year's pitching performance in order to sink into the morass that so many are expecting?

Let's answer that with a bit of indirection. What's clear from the data when we separate the two classes of .399- teams (the bad-by-free-fall from the bad-by-steady-state) is that the 2011 A's have a performance profile more like the free-fall teams, but we have to remember than there is a totally unrepresented class of teams that need to be mentioned here; namely, the teams that didn't collapse at all, but remained at least mediocre (winning 75 or more games in the following year). The A's still have a backlog of pitching that can cushion their fall; if they are able to stay at or near league average, they are going to be able to win enough games at home to escape catastrophe.

The best Beane can do when asked to remove payroll is to reposition the team to have the best possible chance to tailor the talent distribution around the characteristics of his home park. He's done that.

Now back to the question. How far do the A's need to fall in order to fulfill the wish-fulfillment of those who would send Beane off to a sabermetric gulag? The answer: several ways--both of them requiring a drop-off combination of at least twenty percent (as shown in the diagram: projections for 2012 at the left; last year's data on the right). The two likeliest scenarios are: a balanced downturn that's relatively even across offense and pitching performance; or a catastrophic decline in one category (we've chosen to humor the doom-sayers and put it all in the pitching side of the ledger).

Both of these would get the A's down to a projected win total that'd drop below a .400 WPCT; the current likeliest projection, however, looks more like a more modest downturn, one that won't push the A's down into the type of oblivion that teams such as the Royals and Pirates have reached. (We've also included the current projections for the Cubs and those current sabermetric darlings, the Tampa Bay Rays, entering that fateful fifth year of being the daring Davids in the ever shape-shifting maudit Moneyball formulation still swirling in the snark-infested waters of the post-neo zeitgeist.

Consequently we're inclined to think that a mild drop-off in 2012 will be followed by a return of solid pitching in '13. Add in some incremental offensive improvement and the 2014 A's (wherever they might be playing) have a decent shot to be "the new Rays."

Be sure to forget that you read it here first.

HAPPY 2012 !!

2011-12-31T10:51:00.000-08:00

HAPPY 2012!!

THE COOPER COLLECTION: TEN MONTHS AND COUNTING

2011-12-30T14:53:00.000-08:00

Right in the middle of the 2012 post-season, a unique baseball collection will go to auction.

Baseball table game collector Dr. Mark Cooper (who always seems to have that monicker applied at the front of his name, just like Dr. Joyce Brothers) will let go of an assemblage of over 250 board games that span more than a century.

Heritage Auctions in Dallas is putting this event together, and it's currently scheduled to occur on October 25-26, 2012--an event that might just coincide with another post-season appearance by the local team (the Texas Rangers).

The graphics and visual layout of these early board games have the same antique charm and nostalgic resonance as so much of the more well-known baseball memorabilia, and often conspicuously feature star players of yesteryear (looking, no doubt, for endorsement income at a time when the possible windfall was something more than a drop in the bucket).

We'll feature more of these as we move closer to the auction date. It will be awhile before Heritage has a highly structured area up and running, so we'll keep the previews coming. Great stuff!

SOME CLARITY ON THE CONLIN CONTRETEMPS

2011-12-26T11:36:00.000-08:00

As the Christmas goose reaches its final stages of dessication, we now face an off-season of punditry, what with all sort of folk weighing in on Yet Another Despicable Display of Abjection--henceforth acronymmed (sp.?) to YADDA--swirling around the pressbox. Bill Conlin, longtime media fixture in Philadelphia, has become the Herman Cain of baseball writers--and quite possibly worse. Allegations of child molestation and sexual abuse have surfaced, and seem to be multiplying at an astonishing rate.

We rush to write about this because the rush to judgment is already proceeding at a breakneck pace. Our old pal Rob Neyer, in the final stages of a transformation from proselytizer to pundit, is out front asking readers to vote on Conlin's fate. While this is a wonderful way to indirectly moralize (let's call it meta-moralizing), it's still part of a "peer review posse" mentality that seems to be overlooking one basic fact of American law.

Bill Conlin: a handsome devil
even with the extra chin...

Which is: innocent until proven guilty.

What ought to happen in America, away from the blatherings of a fractious but oddly insular sub-world of the press, is that Conlin should be indicted and tried.

Until then, we should not have any polls about what his "fate" should be.

Complicating this scenario, however, is the fact that Conlin's alleged acts occurred so long ago that law enforcement is stymied by statute-of-limitation issues. (Neyer, to his credit, references all this. But he can't resist imposing a "court of public opinion.")

Late meta-capitalist genius at work: commodification
of the hash-slinging slang of misfortune and dross...

Further complicating the process is the unfortunate timing of a BBWAA/Hall of Fame award that Conlin received for lifetime achievement as a baseball writer. To be blunt, most of the rationale behind all of the feather-fluttering over a piece of YADDA that's come right into the BBWAA's nest has to do with the turd in the punchbowl that currently floats in disturbingly plain view.

Rob's poll is really a referendum on the nature and limits of moralizing and how far it can be extended into action where legal remedies are unavailable. In essence, what 70% of the respondents to the poll are currently saying is that we can impose sanctions and penalties even if we have no direct evidence that someone has done something wrong.

There is something innately disturbing in such a result, but it is not especially surprising. Human beings want to impose order: after all, it was humans who invented the phrase "nature abhors a vacuum."

Rob's poll would be more interesting (and more potentially useful to the BBWAA) if it addressed this aspect of the question. Absent conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, what penalties can/should be imposed on an individual who's widely believed to have done wrong on multiple occasions?

Civil law often provides remedies in cases where criminal law cannot. Wrongful death, damages for pain and suffering, palimony: the signs of an age encroached upon by shades of grey.

One way for a judgment against Conlin to gain traction would be for his alleged victims to escalate their accusations into a civil proceeding. But such a proceeding would be problematized by the length of time that has passed since the alleged acts occurred.

So--what to do? Pundits will rush to judgment; radio call-in shows will seek to boost their ratings; the public will furrow up its brow a bit more. All part of the Human Frailty Industry and the cyncial news cycle in quest of the next YADDA with which to feed itself.

We should do nothing to Bill Conlin until some kind of legal matter is undertaken against him. An oddly timed leak of an investigation is not in and of itself sufficient for a rush to judgment. The sense of deflation in Neyer's article at the realization that the only real action possible at this time is to downplay Conlin's presence in the Hall of Fame exhibit should not distract from the fact that, for now, this is the only possible action that makes sense.

It is embarrassing, to be sure. It is ill-timed and "inconvenient." But mostly it is a sad commentary on how so many of those who enter into the world of the media find themselves caught up in the need to promote readership via premature punditry.

We need a poll question that addresses how we reign in those tendencies without doing any more damage to our democracy, but it's a subject that is thornier and a good bit more murky than the pointed fingers that surround Bill Conlin.

For what it shows is that human beings, hamstrung by their own need for self-esteem, can become overly obsessed with reward and retribution. The urge to strip an honor from someone sometimes seems to be more innate than the desire to bestow one. A few deep breaths--possibly from some of that (purportedly) fine product from the shores of Humboldt County--might help more than a few of the current YADDA fulminators to chill out and wait for the rest of the Conlin story to emerge before preparing the tar and feathers.

Bom Natal !! Merry Christmas !!

2011-12-24T06:03:00.000-08:00

Desejo a todos um Natal Muito Especial, cheio de Alegria e de Paz

...UM GRANDE BEIJINHO!!

I hope you all have a Magical Christmas, full of joy and peace

Kisses !!

PLAYING WITH THE LEFTOVERS

2011-12-24T00:25:00.000-08:00

Prince Fielder: a bit too ready for his close-up...

Twenty-eighty hours to Xmas and rather than wrap presents we can't help but spike the egg nog for old times' sake. And after one too many, we are seized by yet another silly but semi-subversive idea as we stumble over Jeff Passan's free agent master list at Yahoo.com. The one-liners there are strictly sweatshop material but the list shook loose a vagrant thought...

Which is, what would it be like if baseball simply declared the free-agent period over and done with at Xmas, with all of the remaining players summarily assigned to a new team? Baseball could have fun with a variant on expansion by creating a thirty-first team via a bidding war between the various metro areas with a rooting interest in joining America's giddiest monopoly, and by making the thirty-second team a team filled with the free agent leftovers left unsigned by Xmas.

This is, admittedly, more whacked than our earlier proposal (back in the 1995 BBBA) that teams simply be moved from city to city on a yearly basis...well, come to think of it, maybe this idea actually makes more sense.

Let's have that thirty-second team land permanently in a place where everything that happens there is supposed to stay there--Las Vegas. Let's call the team the "Leftovers." And let's have the team be disbanded every year, only to be replaced by a new set of free agents.

Of course, this would be hard to implement, because once teams saw who was available, they would tend to snap up all the best players by the deadline. But we could think up ways to make it work if we really wanted to: it's not that important to cross t's and dot i's for the purposes of spiked-egg nog whimsy. Suffice it to say you could devise a method that would ensure that a sufficient number of good players would be available to a franchise specializing in a permanently-imposed makeover. (If these players were all free agents again in the following year, for example, the Players' Union would probably sign off on it.)

Let's take a look at how this would work in our current 2011-12 offseason. And let's begin with some context, using Passan's master list. We've taken his rankings and distributed them across a grid of free agents that's organized by position. The ones in orange are the ones that have already been signed.

Passan has 181 free agents on his master list; as of December 23, 71 (just under 40%) have been signed. (Perhaps some enterprising researcher can tell us if this percentage is on track with the average progression of free agent signings over any given off-season.)

The list set up this way (players are anonymous, though we've coded Yu Darvish and his posting lottery fee in pale blue so you'll see where it is on the chart) tells us several interesting things.

First, more than half of the Top 50 free agents (according to Passan, of course: YMMV) have already been signed.

Second, catchers and middle infielders tend to have high signing percentages. Teams seem to focus on getting these guys signed early. (This is subject to further verification, however.)

When we look at the actual players who are sill available and place the best of them onto an actual roster, we get:

C--Ramon Castro (137), Jorge Posada (96), Ivan Rodriguez (146), Jason Varitek (160)
1B--Prince Fielder (2), Conor Jackson (122) Carlos Pena (19)
2B--Mark DeRosa (117), Carlos Guillen (118)
SS--Ronny Cedeno (72), Edgar Renteria (119)
3B--Wilson Betemit (57), Kevin Kouzmanoff (81), Sean Burroughs (171)
UT--Aaron Miles (134), Willie Harris (135)
LF--Johnny Damon (34), Andruw Jones (56), Scott Hairston (103)
CF--Coco Crisp (29), Rick Ankiel (94)

Roy Oswalt contemplating the potential run support
from his Leftover hitters...

RF--Ryan Ludwick (47), Kosuke Fukudome (64)

Starters--Roy Oswalt (7), Hiroki Kuroda (13), Edwin Jackson (17), Hisashi Iwamura (18), Javier Vazquez (21), Rich Harden (38), Jeff Francis (61), Kevin Millwood (78).

Relievers--Ryan Madson (15), Darren Oliver (51), Chad Qualls (53), Brad Lidge (54), Joel Zumaya (79), Mike Gonzalez (80), Dan Wheeler (91), Shawn Camp (102).

It is a team blessed with surprisingly credible pitching and an offense that's barely existent once you get past Prince Fielder. You will see what we mean when you take a look at the team's projected batting order:

1. Crisp cf; 2. Damon lf; 3. Fukudome rf; 4. Fielder 1b; 5. Castro c; 6. Betemit 3b; 7. Guillen 2b; 8. Cedeno ss.

It's a team that projects to score 600-625 runs over the course of a season, which would have ranked thirteenth in both the AL and the NL last year.

When we played out the year, we got the following stats in one of those sim-seasons (as is often the case in a simulations, the game simply trashes a few players--this time it was Betemit):

What leaps out here is that Prince Fielder would be getting pitched around as often as possible. The team loses seven points of BA, five points of OBP, and nineteen points of SLG if Prince were to be replaced at first base by Carlos Pena. And estimates indicate that the team would score 35-40 fewer runs with Pena on first instead of Fielder.

The best estimate of the runs allowed for the pitching staff is right at 700 for the season. The Pythagorean Method suggests that this team would go 72-90 with such a runs scored/runs allowed differential.

What are the chances that a "leftover" team can be a playoff team? Probably about 1 in 9, which isn't awful odds. After all, some teams don't make the playoffs anywhere near that often, even with bonafide efforts to build a farm system and play within the current rules of MLB.

While definitely right on the ledge in terms of wackiness, there is something oddly irresistible about a team that has virtually 100% turnover from one season to another. The years in which such a team contends for the playoffs would contain a smidge of surrealism--a quality that wouldn't exactly hurt a game that has tilted dangerously in the direction of uniformity over the past couple of decades.

Er, Morganna--this is not what they meant by the "double switch"....

And, finally, for a team with such a built-in revolving door policy, the proper management method would be a return to the Cubs' "college of coaches" approach, with the person in charge on any given day determined by any number of occult practices--day of the week, biorhythms, seance, short straw, karaoke contest.

Or Vegas showgirls. Yeah, that's the ticket--a gaggle of showgirls are the perfect "brain trust" for the Leftovers. It would constitute sweet revenge for good ol' Morganna the Kissing Bandit, except that the ladies who managed the team might well decide within a matter of weeks that, unlike their highly protuberated precursor, they really didn't like every ballplayer that they happened to meet.

So many social problems to solve, and so little time!! Merry Xmas, and don't forget to doctor that egg nog...

THE HALL OF FAME LOGJAM: A PERFECT STORM DISPELLED...

2011-12-20T21:40:00.000-08:00

The mayhem Glenn Langan causes has nothing on what seems to be
heading in the direction of the Hall of Fame in January 2013...

The topic looms larger and larger, growing with a force as alarming as what faced poor Glenn Langan in The Amazing Colossal Man...

Before we know it, an avalanche of Hall of Fame candidates will come crashing down on the BBWAA. Doomsday scenarios of various forms and denominations are already being concocted.

We're actually going to try to go beyond the cheap symmetry in our title, and present our own speculative account of what's coming when the floodtide of qualified Hall of Fame players begins next year.

Our rationale is based on the fact that while a large majority of the BBWAA continue to exhibit a pronounced moralizing bent, they will be swayed by a series of practical considerations that will prevent them from imposing the type of across-the-board ostracism that many fear will be the case.

Forget about the Curse of the Bambino: might not the residual
malaise that continues to fester in Beantown stem from this
archetypal moment...the Great Molasses Meltdown?

But there's a greater worry: a crowded ballot will simply turn what is already a problematic enshrinement process into a molasses-like mush.

Some are envisioning a 2016 ballot with up to twenty bonafide Hall of Famers spinning their wheels in a combinatoric nightmare where no one can get the required vote percentage.

Others think the process will become a more protracted quagmire that will doom candidates to the vagaries of a Veterans' Committee that has been molasses-like in its own right over the past decade.

We think people who think this way are the luckiest...well, no, actually we think they are borrowing an entire molasses plant worth of trouble. And the psychology of the "disloyal opposition" to the BBWAA, a group that has done a better job of putting people through the front door of Cooperstown than anyone in the numbers community is willing to admit, is focused on the prospect of a "doomsday scenario" if for no other reason that it would constitute proof that the Hall of Fame's main voting body is more flawed than the cluster of seismic faults in and around the San Francisco Bay Area whose probability of catastrophic event is edging into Chicken Little territory.

Perhaps we should have called this article "Adventures in Future Schadenfreude." (And perhaps we would be in Pot. Kettle. Black. territory ourselves.)

What would be preferable would be to look at what is likely to happen in Hall of Fame voting beginning in 2013 and see if there is any reason to be constructing "sky is falling" scenarios.

Clearly, a 2016 voter stagnation'n'strangulation scenario depends on the BBWAA doing two major things wrong: 1) being unable to promptly elect deserving candidates and 2) conflating moral issues in such a way that all candidates suffer proportionally as a result.

If that happens, we would be looking at a 2016 ballot with the following 20 players still trying to get elected:

Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Tom Glavine, Ken Griffey, Jr.*, Randy Johnson, Jeff Kent, Barry Larkin, Greg Maddux, Edgar Martinez, Pedro Martinez, Mike Mussina, Mike Piazza, Tim Raines, Curt Schilling, Gary Sheffield, John Smoltz, Sammy Sosa, Frank Thomas, Larry Walker.

(*) means first year on the ballot

(numbers under the "2011" column in the chart indicate vote % in that HoF election)

Notice that for the purpose of this display, we are not even bothering to add in several folks who might still be on the ballot in 2016:

Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Lee Smith, Alan Trammell.

We are not expecting that the following players will receive (or retain) the minimum 5% support to remain on the ballot:

Juan Gonzalez, Kenny Lofton, David Wells, Bernie Williams.

Well, yes, if you look at it from this perspective, and come to the conclusion that the BBWAA, which shows a certain amount of molasses-like tendencies, will dawdle and double-dribble all over their shirts, then for goodness' sakes the sky has already fallen.

However...there are other perspectives. There are actually more than a few hopeful signs that argue against Chicken Little. We will go through them in a way that, if not convincing, will at least be confusing.

First, let's take a look at the most crowded ballot in the history of the Hall of Fame voting--1936. That ballot had nineteen hitters whose OPS+ was 130 or higher. It had eight pitchers whose ERA+ was 120 or higher (not including Babe Ruth). It had twenty-two players whose career Wins Above Replacement (WAR) was 60 or higher (not including Joe Jackson, who actually got two votes despite being ineligible).

The potential for chaos, for Chicken Little being more than just a future fryer with an advanced case of paranoia, was just as great.

What happened in that election? Five players (Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson) were enshrined.

Ah, you say. But those were five of the greatest players of all time, and the backlog of talent was much, much greater than five years. The players in the 2016 group have subtler, more elusive qualifications, and the BBWAA hasn't shown an ability to discriminate. This is the tsunami that will topple them, the perfect storm of candidates who will all founder on the rocks as the wind pushes all the boats against the current. Years of deadlock will ensue.

Sorry, we don't buy it. One way to track the level of deadlock is to look at how decisive the BBWAA is in terms of players. Is there a pervasive tendency to make players wait years after they first become eligible?

The answer is: no. The Hall of Fame had some issues with its voting rules, which took two decades to sort out. Once the BBWAA had a five-year waiting period and a yearly ballot, they began to become noticeably more decisive with respect to inductees. (This doesn't mean that they were flawless in identifying all Hall of Famers, and one of the criticisms of the BBWAA is in its inability to keep players with more subtle--and previously unmeasurable--achievements on the ballot long enough for arguments about them to ripen.)

But it's clear from the graph at right that the BBWAA has had no problem identifying first-round inductees. Their cumulative percentage has progressed upward steadily since the 50s and approached its original 30s level in the last decade.

Ah, you say. But there is a catastrophic complicating factor--AKA "the age of PEDs." The BBWAA has its own case of "roid rage" that it will be systematically imposing upon the voting process. This will lower the vote totals of all players coming onto the ballot, as demonstrated by what's happened to McGwire and Palmeiro.

We'll give you a "maybe" on that. So far the only serious vote suppression that has occurred has come at the expense of those two players. (The stats cadre wants to make a case that such is the case for Tim Raines, but the fact is that players like Raines often take time to ripen on the vine in terms of HoF voting. The insistence on the part of certain stathead factions that Raines is a first-ballot Hall of Famer is one part analysis, one part rhetoric, and one part attack-dog tactics. High OBP, low SLG players do take longer to get recognized, and Raines doesn't match up with players like Tony Gwynn, Wade Boggs, or Rod Carew, who were at the top of their leagues' offensive performance levels over a much longer period of time. WAR is not a perfect instrument.)

And what's likeliest to happen over the course of the next few years is that the BBWAA will single out the most controversial (read: arrogant) players from the age of PEDs and make examples out of them. As a voting group, they know that it would be impolitic to bar the doors of Cooperstown to all the players from the wraparound decades (1990s/2000s). They also know (when they are not pontificating) that the Mitchell Report is not...a perfect instrument.

To leave too many of these players out of the Hall of Fame based on the unreliable evidence that has been assembled would make everyone look bad.

And thus the real catastrophe would happen in Cooperstown, New York, where the ongoing financial health of the Hall of Fame--dependent on a PR stream from new inductees--would be seriously threatened.

Though many erstwhile revolutionaries would love to see the Hall crumble into dust, they should not hold out false hope for such an occurrence. The BBWAA isn't going to be party to that, no matter how devoutly one might wish it so. They will be stepping back from this brinksmanship and making an example of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.

And there is tremendous good fortune in the fact that the two greatest players of the "age of PEDs" will be systematically ostracized. It will force the BBWAA to examine players that would otherwise get less attention in the voting process. This will serve to sustain several worthy candidates through what will be a crowded ballot period (people like Raines and Edgar Martinez) and give them a chance to be enshrined within the fifteen year period.

There is already good evidence to indicate that this is going to happen. Roberto Alomar's election in his second year of eligibility signals that the BBWAA is very likely to be selective in its punishment.

Barry Larkin

Craig Biggio--how many catcher/second
basemen/center fielders are there
in the Hall of Fame? None--yet.

Alomar's selection is good news for both Larkin and Biggio. It signals that the BBWAA is cognizant of positional difference and that they'll take it into account. Larkin is positioned to sneak over the line in 2012 as a result.

Biggio has an important ace up his sleeve that no other candidate can bring to the table--3000+ hits. It's one of two things that will make him a first-ballot inductee. (The other is his ability to successfully play two other positions on the left side of the defensive spectrum--catcher and center field. It makes him a unique player.)

The Hall of Fame history of 3000+ hit players is a strong indication that Biggio will come in at around 80% of the vote.

Even though in this rare collection of players (only 28 in baseball history) Biggio is down near the bottom of the group (as measured by hits, OPS, OPS+), he gets a big boost from the fact that out of 25 players eligible for the Hall of Fame with 3000+ hits, 96% of them are in Cooperstown--and 76% of them were inducted on the first ballot.

And the only reason that three of the other members of this group weren't inducted on the first ballot was because they happened to be on the "first ballot" in 1936: Nap Lajoie, Tris Speaker, and Eddie Collins. Lajoie and Speaker went in the second year (1937), along with Cy Young; Collins was inducted in 1939.

Twelve of these players received 90+% of the vote when they went in.

Oddly enough, when we average all of these players' first-year voting percentages (even the three 1936 players, the odd anomaly of Paul Waner, who was part of the late 40s confusion that hampered the Hall of Fame for the better part of a decade, and the scapegoated Palmeiro) we get an overall average of 80% for this group. That looks about right for Biggio, who has more similarity with players like Robin Yount and Lou Brock--career longevity and several moments when he was seriously mentioned as the best player in baseball.

(Interesting fact: Forman et fil's intriguing Elo-Rater system has three second basemen piled up together in slots #64-#66: Biggio, Ryne Sandberg, and Alomar. While it's not "scientific," it's a solid little tool--and the other two guys are in the Hall. Neither of them played catcher or center field.)

It's silly of us to post a speculative scenario for how the Hall of Fame vote will proceed over the next four years, but--what the heck, we'll do it anyway. You'll be able to see where the assumptions are, and how those have more than a small chance of coming unglued. What we expect to happen in the upcoming vote is that Larkin will get inducted, Jack Morris will max out a bit lower than what other folks expect, and Bagwell will actually slip past Jack. Why will Bags get a boost? Someone has to, and there's no one else on the ballot with numbers remotely like his.

Someone will remind his pals that Bags had a helluva lot of RBI per game, and that of players with a moderate length career (2000-2200 games), he ranks fourth (behind Lou Gehrig, Harry Heilmann, and Joe DiMaggio). The ones who've cottoned up to on-base percentage will note that Bags is 21st lifetime (.408). They'll note that he had a lot of round-number seasons (nine seasons with 100+ runs scored, eight with 100+ RBI, seven seasons with 100+ walks, and six seasons where he did all three in the same year). They'll notice that in addition to winning the MVP (in 1994), he also finished 2nd and 3rd, and was in the top ten of MVP voting six times. And they'll note that while he didn't manage to lead the league in HRs, he hit 30 or more in nine seasons.

The breadth of these accomplishments will rub off on voters--in part because there is no one else to focus on in 2012--and Bags will move up. (He will be more evidence that the scurrilous folk who toss around baseless accusations of PED use are not going to poison the jury pool any more than has already been the case--we are on the downslope of all this, and pond scum such as Jeff Pearlman will suddenly discover that they no longer have working vocal cords.)

With Biggio on the ballot in 2013, the memory of the "Killer B's" will be just enough to bring them over the line. It will be a massive PR coup for Cooperstown. The "Schadenfreude crew" will be conflicted--torn between a sense of relief and a lack of satisfaction over the dimming prospects of the Fallen Sky Scenario.

The chart shows how we think it will play out...with Larkin, Biggio and Bagwell voted in, the logjam is lessened, and The Perfect Storm can remain a lugubrious, inauthentic film.

What we find out in 2013 is that the moralizing bloc will not be able to crush Bonds and Clemens to the extent that they did with McGwire and Palmeiro: these two guys were just too great for too long to be completely trashed. They'll get around 30% of the vote, and it will be more loyal and tenacious on their behalf because these guys were really and truly inner circle players.

Mike Piazza, also on the ballot in '13, will draw down a solid percentage that will be off by around 6-9% from what Yogi Berra polled in his first year on the ballot (67%). He will be in position to go in on the third ballot in 2015.

The reason he won't make it in 2014 is that an exceptionally strong crop of candidates will debut that year, with Greg Maddux, Frank Thomas, and Tom Glavine all crashing through in their first year. Jack Morris, in his last year of eligibility, will go out with a semi-quaver as two 300+-game winners will be inducted in the same year for the very first time.

In 2015, we'll have two more all-time pitchers in Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez, and Piazza will join them for the second consecutive troika on the Cooperstown dais--something that won't have happened since 1937. Bonds and Clemens will be joined in their 30s holding pattern by Gary Sheffield.

The BBWAA will steam through this purported Perfect Storm without a glitch, but it won't gain them much respect. Basement dwellers will still be miffed about Raines; some of us will still be venting about Edgar Martinez; and there will be a series of splinter groups mouth-foaming about Bobby Grich, Lou Whitaker and Rick Reuschel.

In short: life will return to normal.

It will just be another cataclysm that didn't happen that we won't talk about even though we still think we can see it coming in the rear-view mirror.

Synesthesia...Sinestesias

2011-12-16T00:00:00.000-08:00

Fascinam-me sempre as produções que cruzam o mundo da moda com a natureza, as flores, que envolvem e revolvem os sentidos, mais do que um editorial de beleza estas imagens são um verdadeiro festim visual, cruzam cor, tacto, cheiro, paladar, numa explosão sensorial...

Always fascinated me the fashion productions that cross the fashion world with nature and the senses, more than a beauty editorial these images are a true feast for the senses, it mix color, smell, taste, a truly sensory explosion ...

source: Liandra by Michelle Du Xuan for Fashion Gone Rogue

HALL OF FAME REDUX: 1936

2011-12-15T23:48:00.000-08:00

This cap (with its seven-layer burrito rendition of
"fame as in Hall of...") is not yours when you
cast your vote in BBBA's Hall of Fame Redux...

A couple of years ago we suggested to the folks at the Hall of Merit that they extend their efforts by following the strictures of actual history and select potential Hall of Fame inductees according to the original rules:

--Vote for 10 players;
--75% of the votes produces enshrinement;
--Eligibility rules as in existence for each year in question, with the exception of Gehrig (presumed inducted via special vote in 1939).

So far the Hall of Merit folks have not taken us up on this idea. That's fair enough: they have their own activities and approaches, and we can all applaud their alternative take on the best ballplayers in baseball history.

But we remain fascinated by the prospect of having a more sabermetrically-engaged membership take on a "Hall of Fame Redux" where the first ballot begins precisely when it did in 1936, using the exact parameters that the BBWAA faced (and continues to face seventy-five years later).

So here's our pitch. If the good folks at Baseball Think Factory will see fit to link to this post, thus creating a thread where anyone who is interested can vote, we will tabulate the votes after a five-day voting period, announce the results, and continue with weekly posts moving through the years toward the present.

We'll also create an ongoing comparison chart of the BBWAA inductees and the BTF-HOF inductees which will be updated with each weekly result.

For the eligible players, refer to the link provided to Baseball Reference's useful Hall of Fame voting results page for 1936. There is a great deal of useful data summarized there that will help you make your picks.

Lou Gehrig will, alas, sit out this election and all the others, but will
be inducted in 1939 just as was the case when it actually happened.

Here is our vote for the 1936 election (in alphabetical order):

1. Pete Alexander
2. Ty Cobb
3. Eddie Collins
4. Rogers Hornsby
5. Walter Johnson
6. Nap Lajoie
7. Christy Mathewson
8. Babe Ruth
9. Tris Speaker
10. Cy Young

Vote early, vote once only, and let's see how many players can receive 75% or higher in the vote count. Five players made it in the actual BBWAA election; we're thinking that it might be possible to elect seven or eight in the Redux version.

We look forward to your participation...

Take a "Bow"

2011-12-15T00:03:00.000-08:00

Bows... >< >< >< ><

source: vogue | Stella McCartney | cinemagraph

Fallen Angels

2011-12-14T10:37:00.000-08:00

Um editorial etéreo com as peças impressionantes da Givenchy, Versace, Dior e Alexander McQueen, que complementam na perfeição o cenário transcendente onde impera o branco...para espalhar a magia desta época!!

An ethereal editorial with stunning pieces from Givenchy, Versace, Dior and Alexander McQueen, which perfectly complement the transcendent and magical scenario dominated by the white ... to spread the Christmas magic!!

source: Cara Delevingne by Sølve Sundsbø for Vogue China December 2011

Have a Nice Week!!...Boa Semana para Todos!!

2011-12-12T12:36:00.000-08:00

YU. YU. YU.

2011-12-09T17:44:00.000-08:00

As we suggested awhile back, Yu Darvish will emerge as the most pivotal chip in the major league baseball post-season when the Nippon Ham Fighter ace becomes the most-talked-about Japanese baseball player to be "posted" for acquisition by American MLB clubs.

Yu Darvish: possibly a bit too ready for his close-up...

Darvish, who turned 25 in August, had his best-yet season in 2011 for the Fighters (18-6, 1.44 ERA, 276 K's, 10.7 K/9). His lifetime record is 93-38 with a 1.99 ERA--in short, the best JPPL pitcher ever eligible to make a transcontinental trek.

Bloggers (particularly those within a certain radius of the Bronx) have been trying to contain themselves in the manner of Internet porn users working hard not to go one stroke over the line, but Sweet Baby Jesus it's almost impossible not to have a mass relocation of blood flow when contemplating the figure and form of Darvish. With C.J. Wilson opting to go west, the Yankees would seem like the logical folks to be priming the pump for an infusion of stud-muffin pitching power.

Let's face it, the Yanks got by with a whole lotta smoke and mirrors in the starting rotation last season, and odds are not short that they can pull a repeat with what they're currently projecting to put out there behind C.C. Sabathia.

Where else could Yu go? The Red Sox are paying two pitchers (John Lackey and their earlier "Big in Japan" investment Daisuke Mastuzaka) some serious coin to heal in 2012, and new Boston GM Ben Cherington is downplaying his team as contenders for Darvish.

Big dollars have already flowed in Miami and Anaheim (oops, sorry: the Angels still want us to think they are actually based in Los Angeles, don't they?), so it would be even more astonishing if either of them decided to enter the fray.

Of course, we are rooting for some kind of totally counterintuitive result from all this. We're firmly convinced that baseball, now that MBAs have taken charge from top to middle to Yu's-soft-as-a-baby's bottom, is about to enter its most virulent phase of meta-collusion to date, a barely-hidden travesty that will only become more overt in the next several seasons as we transition from the reign of Budzilla to the MBA's version of David Petraeus. The anarchic environment within the industry is gaining steam; in such a context, meta-collusive transactions are becoming likelier and likelier.

In that spirit, examine these possible counterintuitive locations for Yu:

1. San Diego. Sure, Jed Hoyer is gone, but the moles that Jed and his new-old boss in Chicago, Theo Epstein, have implanted within the Padre organization could pay off with a stutter-step maneuver that brings Darvish to the West Coast as a short-term "rental" followed by a pass-through to the Cubs in 2014 or 2015 when the Cubs are ready for the final piece of their "break the curse" puzzle. (Of course, that assumes that Theo and Jed really are going to lead the Cubs out of hibernation.)

Chances are higher than usual that Darvish is going to get an opt-out clause in his contract...whether this is for everyone's mutual benefit or to establish as many pass-through options as possible will just have to remain to be seen.

2. Philadelphia. Hey, why stop with Phour Aces? They have the money.

3. Seattle. Actually, not so counterintuitive. A good ballpark fit, with similar weather.

It's just a question as to whether Jack Z. can convince his bosses that Darvish can get the M's back on track when they have so much more left to do in order to be competitive.

4. Kansas City. (Hey, you knew this was coming.) The Royals need to go for it now--and what would better symbolize the breathless abandon of a long-dormant but suddenly heel-swingin' franchise than the acquisition of an actual, bonafide whirling Darvish for a team in need of an even newer twist?

Plus it would give Joe Pos something to get extra creamy about.

Actually, only 1) and 4) really provide any likelihood of pass-through or meta-collusive scenarios, but the fact that it's a 50-50 proposition should tell you something.

• •

Wherever Yu winds up, though, the perfect American theme song awaits him...

Little girl lost Lauren Hillman, moving her way through to synth-pop resurrection via a crossbred tune mashing up The Beach Boys and Enya, gives Darvish an angelic, Kotomi-esque chorus. And why not?

Well, because Yu will almost certainly wind up in New York, and they'll probably decide to make him into a Metal Man. Big mistake, Ninja guy: power pitcher needs ethereal girl to achieve grace and balance. Wherever you go, make this your theme song, and America will be at your feet.

Among the Flowers

2011-12-09T10:44:00.000-08:00

A beleza desalinhada por entre flores e padrões ecléticos...a recriação da atmosfera bucólica dos jardins ingleses...rebeldes, naturais, onde as flores emergem livremente, tal como neste editorial onde todos os elementos se ligam e se interligam, e vivem da harmonia de uma convivência espontânea

Bom fim-de-semana!!

The beauty among the flowers and eclectic patterns.

Have a nice weekend!

source: noirfacade - Lily Cole by Sandrine Dulermo & Michael Labica for Plastic Dreams #6 Fall 2011

Red she Said

2011-12-07T01:00:00.000-08:00

Inspiração de cor vermelha...a suavidade das formas clássicas e femininas combinadas com a força da cor...

Color inspiration...

source: fashiongonerogue | noirfaçade

Girl Play

2011-12-06T01:00:00.000-08:00

Um editorial divertido e bem-humorado que joga com as incontornáveis peças pretas de Inverno...que este ano ganham contornos hiper-femininos entre rendas, vestidos e saias rodadas

A fun and saultry editorial playing with the black pieces and feline patterns of the winter... between hyper-feminine lace, dresses and skirts

source: fashiongonerogue

RON SANTO: TEARS OF JOY, TEARS OF INFINITE SADNESS

2011-12-05T20:54:00.000-08:00

One very large slight in the Hall of Fame voting results was at long last rectified today. Ron Santo, the fourth key member of the 1960s Chicago Cubs--the most star-crossed franchise of that decade, the one with absolutely nothing to show for itself--was finally admitted by what seems like the four hundredth incarnation of the serially dubious and excessively bureaucratized Veterans' Committee.

Sadly, though, this vote was (unnecessarily) too tardy to permit Santo (who passed away almost exactly one year ago) to enjoy this honor while still alive. And it sends a signal that in an age of accelerating cultural and economic factionalization, public institutions such as the Hall of Fame will be increasingly forced to take these types of mincing steps only with the convenient impetus of dead bodies.

For some reason, we are faced with the paradox that as the life of the world becomes more accessible to us, it is more and more necessary to not engage in any type of official judgmental activity unless those involved are already dead and gone.

This is a terrible and unfortunate trend, and it sends a tragic message to an entire series of aging ballplayers who are as deserving as Santo, but whose mistake (or so it would seem) is that they are still alive.

It is not fair to Santo to point out the series of reasons why his honor was so long delayed, but we must do so. His supporters, who naively believe that his enshrinement is part of a larger cultural-economic-rationalist "movement" to save baseball from a dark, protracted age of insiderist myth-mongering, have spun a narrative that Santo was merely an overly enthusiastic "yokel" whose on-field braggadocio was essentially harmless and homespun. When this is done in the mainstream media, it is known as "whitewashing."

Santo was no saint. He was not a pleasant man. He was a bully. He was also a great baseball player, an excellent third baseman, a hitter with power and strike-zone judgment--and a man who overcame a serious medical condition (diabetes). He also had the great good fortune, however, to play in a ballpark (Wrigley Field) that aided hitters the most of any during the time frame (1960-74) in which he played.

And, as the data shows, Santo took advantage of it more than anyone. The current "advanced metrics" which have become part of the long drumbeat on his behalf have conveniently cast off the constraining reality of these park effects and what they can tell us about Santo's actual level of offense.

This inconvenient truth does not mean that we are concluding that Santo is not deserving of induction. We suggested back in 2002, when we were writing a column for the Baseball Think Factory, that in a gesture of sabermetric and cultural healing, Santo and Dick Allen be inducted in the same ceremony. Such a concept was always naive and sentimental, because while Santo had been snubbed by a coterie of sportswriters who'd found him to be less than couth, Allen had come to symbolize far greater levels of hubris and social leprosy.

But with our lenses tinted to the maximum value of rose, we fearlessly suggested such a redemptive scenario. And it is to the eternal degradation of American culture, as embodied in the little world of baseball, committed both by those with the power to have made it happen, and those whose voices could have created a narrative to give it some real impetus, that this did not occur.

It is a blemish that will never go away.

We harbor no illusions that Dick Allen--clearly no saint, but a far greater hitter than anyone of his time who's not already in the Hall of Fame--will ever be enshrined while he is still breathing. After all, if the various editions of the bureaucracy could not manage to do so for Ron Santo, how can anyone in their right mind expect that for Allen?

And, likewise, we feel nothing but pity and regret for Minnie Minoso, a member of the first generation of black ballplayers to play in the major leagues. Minoso is in his mid-to-late 80s, and while his achievements are arguably more modest than those of Santo or Allen, the combination of his talents and personality are more than sufficient for such an honor.

We know that there are legions of "numbers folk" who have become comfortably numb with respect to Dick Allen. We can only shake our heads at their inconceivable certainty, and be saddened by their incalculable cultural cowardice. They were led by a series of terribly unfortunate slurs written by Bill James in a sprawling, dyspeptic, often downright nasty book originally entitled The Politics of Glory. Bill has recently recanted those words, but he did so in a backhanded way that was too little and too late. (It was the equivalent of a retraction of a libelous comment buried somewhere deep in the classified ad section.) His influence was much greater than he knew, and it remains infinitely more damaging than that.

Allen and Minoso must take solace in their enshrinement by two smaller but infinitely more cogent institutions--the Baseball Reliquary and the Hall of Merit. The former has an actual concept of American culture; the latter has an actual concept of the true on-field value of baseball players. This is better than nothing, to be sure. But we are left with the ugly residue of a series of cultural clashes that played out in the middle part of the twentieth century that, apparently, we are still centuries away from successfully resolving. (If we make it far enough.)

So, while there are tears of joy for Ron Santo (particularly for his family, who know more than any of the rest of us how much Santo recognized his own personal shortcomings and worked to ameliorate them during his post-baseball life), there are only tears of infinite sadness for the lost opportunities to rectify so much more than one great ballplayer who had unfairly been on the outside looking in.

Sunflowers

2011-12-05T09:29:00.000-08:00

Um jardim florido de girassois torna-se o complemento perfeito das silhuetas femininas e retro de Inverno

A garden of sunflowers becomes the perfect complement to the feminine and retro silhouettes of the winter

source:This Joyful Promise

Ymre Stiekema by Andreas Sjödin for Vogue Japan November 2011

THE 1-0 MIRACLES OF THE '69 METS AND OTHER ANOMALIES

2011-12-03T23:06:00.000-08:00

What a coincidence that 1-0 games are back to 1969 levels (well, not quite: there were 112 1-0 games in both 2011 and 1969, but there were more total games played this past season, so the percentage of 1-0 games was still higher in Ye Olde Year of the Moon Landing and the Miracle Whip™ Mets), but it's close enough for government work and our Curler Boy® Chart (below).

There are so many wacky things that were part of the Metsies' improbable run to glory that year (Nixon, war protests, Weathermen, the invention of heavy metal, etc., etc.) that it just makes the blood run cold while The Wind Cries Mary (sorry, axtually released in 1967), but we'll stay on point and remind you that the Mets kept the echo of 1968 alive in baseball's most expansive year ever with 14 1-0 games and a full half-season's worth of contests in which both teams combined to score six runs or less.

The starting pitching was righteous, all right--and those former hapless denizens of Flushing went 9-5 in the 1-0 games and went 53-28 in those low-scoring games, ratcheting up their record over the last two months of the season with hellacious hurling from such unlikely stalwarts as Jim McAndrew and Don Cardwell.

As our chart at left indicates, the Mets reached a crescendo of run suppression in August and September of '69, following up a 13-6 mark in August with a well-nigh unconscious 15-2 record down the home stretch.

Let's face it, winning 24 of 34 games (.706 WPCT) in which both teams score a total of 3 runs or less is a pretty astonishing feat. The only other teams to win at least two-thirds of such games with such a quantity of games during the season were deadball-era teams (the 1913 Senators were a mind-boggling 26-4 in such contests) and the 1968 St. Louis Cardinals (26-13).

Part of the incandescence of the Mets came from their 1-0 wins, in particular the legendary double 1-0 wins in Pittsburgh on September 12th behind Cardwell (game two) and Jerry Koosman (game one). Adding spice to the proceedings was the fact that in each game, the only run was driven in by the pitcher.

Three weeks earlier, the Mets had won a 1-0 game in which rookie Gary Gentry battled the Giants' Juan Marichal to a draw, leaving after 10 innings in a scoreless tie. Later in the game, the Mets employed a four-man outfield against Willie McCovey: in a bizarre and miraculous variation on his ill-fated line drive in Game Seven of the 1962 World Series, McCovey drilled a ball that no three-man outfield could have possibly caught.

With four outfielders, however, Cleon Jones was able to be in position to make a leaping catch to keep the ball in the park. The Mets would eventually win the game, 1-0, in the sixteenth inning.

Koosman was the man who was in the most of these 1-0 games, turning up in a total of five of 'em.

You may have noticed the (parentheses) for some of the games, which depict doubleheaders. More than anything else, the biggest difference between 1969 and 2011 is the number of doubleheaders played during the course of the season. The Mets played 22 doubleheaders in 1969. That total of 44 games represents more than a fourth of the season. They went 30-14 over this span of games.

What the breakout by pitcher shows is that Tom Seaver and Koosman were simply 1-2 dynamite for the Mets, combining for a 13-2 record when they pitched in doubleheaders. Right behind them, however, is McAndrew, who didn't get the run support that the two aces received and went only 3-3 in these games. And Cardwell wasn't exactly chopped liver, either.

Another serious difference has to do with how relievers were used. Tug McGraw was a combination long-man/closer, averaging nearly two innings an appearance and not so occasionally pitching much longer (and we're not counting his four early-season starts).

Jack DiLauro

As Leonard Koppett suggested forty years ago, however, the Mets' most pivotal game in 1969 may have occurred in their very first doubleheader of the year. Having lost three straight to the Cubs in their first meeting of the year--including a blown save from ex-Cub Cal Koonce in the first game of their April 27th doubleheader at Shea Stadium--the Mets found themselves in a scoreless game with two-game swing in the standings dependent on the game outcome. McAndrew, who'd been pitching terribly in the early going, inched his way through five innings. McGraw threw four innings of scoreless relief and the Mets won on Jones's three-run walkoff HR. It was the game that stemmed the tide and, according to all who were around at the time, gave the Mets the confidence that they could play with the mighty Cubs.

This was a 3-0 win, however, and is a bit off-point...the early-season 1-0 game that gets the most ink is the one on June 4th, as the Mets were in the midst of what would become an eleven-game winning streak.

Obscure lefty Jack DiLauro, obtained from the Tigers over the 1968-69 off-season, made his first big league start in this game--and proceeded to shut the Dodgers out for nine innings with stuff that wouldn't have blown over a feather. It took the Mets six more innings to finally push across a run, but DiLauro had come out of nowhere to fuel the improbable rise of a franchise still living on the fumes of these distant memories.

These may be too distant to bring Gil Hodges a slot in the Hall of Fame (the new version of the Veterans Committee will convene next week, with the fate of several notables hanging in the balance), but the Mets could use a little something to lift their spirits. No one ever did so much with so little: here's on ya, Gil.

Have a Nice Weekend!!

2011-12-03T01:00:00.000-08:00

Bom fim-de-semana!!

Have a nice Weekend!!

Couture Perfection

2011-12-02T09:07:00.000-08:00

Acho que neste caso as palavras sobram para descrever a história da Casa Dior capturada pela lente do fotógrafo Patrick Demarchelier para o livro lançado pela marca...a primeira fotografia capta a essência de toda a produção...Inspirar Sonhos!

I think in this case we almost no need words to describe the history of Dior captured through the lens of photographer Patrick Demarchelier for the new book... the first photo captures the essence of the whole production ... Inspire Dreams!

source: Dior by Patrick Demarchelier

Understated Look

2011-11-30T06:48:00.000-08:00

Um editorial que vive do equilíbrio entre tons suaves, de onde sobressaem silhuetas estruturadas completadas por um visual descontraído e subentendido, sem se esforçar...porque nem sempre as imagens vivem do contraste, naquelas à partida mais neutras os nossos olhos exploram com mais precisão e aí descobrimos os pormenores e nuances mais interessantes

...

As peças, todas elas Ellery da colecção Resort 2011 foram buscar inspiração à obra dos anos 60 "Second Marriage" do artista David Hockney

An editorial that lives from the balance between soft tones, where structured silhouettes stand out complemented by relaxed and understated looks ... because the images do not always stand out because of the contrast of the colors, those more neutral make our eyes explore more precisely and then we discovered the most interesting details

...

The pieces, all of Ellery Resort 2011 collection are inspired in the painting of the 60's "Second Marriage" by David Hockney

Kim Noorda for Ellery Resort 2011 Campaign by Darren McDonald

Bold Époque

2011-11-28T08:54:00.000-08:00

A encenação da Belle Époque, (Bold Époque) porque é forte, densa e arrojada, íngreme e atrevida nas declinações estéticas...glamorosa, retro, mas ao mesmo tempo relaxada...entre peças de joalharia marcantes, tons saturados e decoração opulenta

The Belle Epoque (Bold Époque) because it is strong and intense... glamorous and retro, but at the same time relaxed ... between striking pieces of jewelry, saturated tones and opulent ensembles

source: Julia Zimmer & Johanna Fosselius by Michelle Du Xuan for Fashion Gone Rogue

LATE-BLOOMERS, THE HOF, AND THE AGE 32/33 DIVIDE...

2011-11-27T21:23:00.000-08:00

We will now officially "cherry-pick" from BTF (Baseball Think Factory) the way they do from everyone else.

The fugitive world of baseball statistics is fast becoming meta-parasitic anyway, and the handy chart compiled by the embedded insurgent renegade group RBI, showing how the types of parasitism in baseball discourse have operated over the past few seasons (with an entirely new strain emerging in the past year), is a telling indicator of the (apparently) inevitable direction that things are taking.

So, when in a Petri dish...

Actually, we are stealing our own list out of a thread that has grown as frayed and brittle as many of them do over at the Shrink Factory, where fabric softener is no longer an optional product. The list came from a bit of business following up a slice of commentary at Bill James' web site, where registered site visitors can engage Bill in questions and comments, sometimes about baseball, sometimes not.

In this case, it was a set of related questions about the Hall of Fame likelihood for two highly regarded late-blooming infielders, the Phillies' Chase Utley (right) and the Red Sox' Kevin Youkilis (left)--who are both turning 33 prior to the start of the 2012 season, and who are showing some signs that they might not be able to sustain the career momentum necessary to power their way into Cooperstown.

Both players have a 127 OPS+ going into next season, but there's a difference in their number of career games played--Utley (1109) has about 200 more than Youkilis (911). James noted the small number of players in the Hall with less than 1,000 games at the age of 32, and pretty much consigned these two also-ran status.

That got us thinking about the players who were like these two--as good or better--who'd come up late and had somewhere between 911 and 1109 games in their careers at age 32. How many were there? How many of them have made it into the Hall? Are there other late bloomers who've been overlooked in terms of the Hall due to short careers?

We went to Forman et fil and created a list of players in what we might call the "Utley-Youkilis Gap." It turns out there are 29 of them. We've sorted them into the list below at right, and will now proceed to explain (as best possible) what all the freakin' color-coding means.

First, the players in "hard orange" are the four who beat the odds and made it into the HoF--Kiki Cuyler, Bill Terry, Earle Combs, and Earl Averill.

The rest are color-coded by the number of games they played from age 33 on. The guys with 800 or more games played from age 33 are listed in two different color schemes (we'll explain the reason for this later--three (Ken Williams, Edgar Martinez, Bob Johnson) are in light orange, while two (Brian Giles, Rico Carty) are in pink.

We did the same thing with the guys with 600-799 games played at age 33 on. Two (Jack Fournier, Dolph Camilli) are in yellow; one (Cliff Johnson) is in blue. (Can you figure out why the reason for the subcategorization?)

The players with 400-599 games (actually 598, we cheated to get Camilli on the earlier list) are coded in dark green; those with 200-399 games are shown in light green.

Everyone with 0-199 games is shown in light blue.

Edgar Martinez

The separation of the top groups into two separate color codings is to differentiate the players whose OPS+ averages actually increased in their 33-year and up seasons. Five players did that: Williams, Martinez, Bob Johnson, Fournier, Camilli. Only three of these guys saw their OPS+ averages and their WAR totals increase: Williams, Martinez, Bob Johnson.

And those are the three guys who, in our estimation, deserve to be in the Hall of Fame.

They beat the odds. Everyone lost fifteen points off their OPS and saw their WAR total drop 60% in the 33+ age window.

These guys went the other way--and actually played more games from age 33 on than they did through age 32.

"Indian" Bob Johnson

Edgar, of course, is the current case--and we're just going to have to hope that the BBWAA gives him a full ride over the ballot process. This next vote will give us a much better sense of how things are going to go--with any luck, Edgar will go up into the mid-to-high 40s due to the lull in the coming "perfect storm" of HoF candidates that will arrive beginning in 2013.

Johnson and Williams are going to require a lot of proselytizing--and it won't be a walk in the park, even compared with the arduous efforts expended on behalf of Bert Blyleven. However, it's easier to convince a VC body than the full BBWAA, so educating folks as to just how rare it is to beat your "decline phase" is something that's possible with such a small group. Or so we can hope.

We wouldn't give much for either Johnson or Williams' chances. But both did a wonderful job of defying time, and this is a very rare achievement worthy of recognition.

(BTW, the numbers for "UTLEY" and "YOUKILIS" on the big chart are not for the individuals, but for the groups broken out by the thick line between Riggs Stephenson and Earl Averill. The "Utley group" is above (more than 911, less than 1109 games at 32). The "Youkilis group" is below (less than 911 games).

Ken Williams

It's going to be harder for Utley to play more games after 33 than through 32 than it will be for Youkilis, but if he could do so, it would probably mean enshrinement (especially if he can manage to stay a second baseman well into his late 30s). Chase is farther advanced WAR-wise than anyone else on the list (Terry gives him a very close run for his money, but Bill is one of the ~30% of these guys who had a better year at 33 than at 32. Utley really needs to do the same: he's going to need to shake off the injuries that have slowed his meteoric rise.

Youk made a successful move to third base last year, but his body type is such that it doesn't seem plausible for this switch to be viable for more than a couple of more years. He needs the Red Sox to decide that he's indispensable in their lineup: he's got about a 14% home park advantage at Fenway, which is exceptionally well-suited to his doubles-centric batting style. If he tries to jack up his HR totals, it might backfire on him, causing his BA to drop too much to keep him in MVP contention.

What did the "Gang of 29" do in their age-32 and age-33 years? Their aggregate OPS+ dropped from 134 to 119. They lost about 18% in WAR, a shade under 12% in OPS. Career-wise, they plated just over half the number of games they'd managed through age 32 from age 33 on.

I expect Utley and Youkilis to beat that 50% figure, but they probably won't break 70%. Clearly, the higher this percentage, the greater chance they'll have for Cooperstown. Utley has the better shot, given his head start in games and the fact that he's been playing the tougher defensive position.

What's also clear is that this group of late-blooming players is quite interesting unto itself. They still need a shortstop and a catcher to be able to field a full team, but they'd be an awfully solid hitting unit if they could do that.

SUNDAY LADIES

2011-11-27T08:41:00.000-08:00

Adoro a elegância imperturbável de cada um dos retratos que compõem este editorial, recria na perfeição a intemporalidade das actrizes da Era de Ouro do cinema, serenas, mas poderosas. Num guarda-roupa que vive do poder da forma, estruturada e feminina, da comunhão entre a cintura marcada, a pele, a nossa e a outra, e a eterna renda...

I love the elegance of each one of this portraits, this editorial recreates perfectly the timelessness of the actresses from the Golden Age of cinema, quiet, but powerful...

photography : Willy Vanderperre

Jump...Take a Leap !!

2011-11-25T06:46:00.000-08:00

TAKE A LEAP!!

source: everything's beautiful here - photos by Philip Halsman

The Lady to Be

2011-11-24T04:05:00.000-08:00

A combinação sempre clássica entre pele, renda, eyeliner, cabelo ripado e uma atitude "over the shoulder"... imagens com um poder relaxado e descontraído, que mesmo sem o forçarem, o têm...

The classic mix between lace, leather, eyeliner, ripped hair and attitude "over the shoulder" ... images with a relaxed and laid back power, that even without force it , HAVE THE POWER...

Julia Restoin Roitfeld x Me & City Winter 2011 Collection

All the Colors

2011-11-24T03:25:00.000-08:00

O Inverno transformado num caleidoscópio cromático, desde a intensidade do vermelho ao sabor agudo das cores citricas, do azul ciano ao verde bandeira, misturados com as declinações cromáticas das tonalidades quentes dos raios de sol.

PARA MISTURAR.

A winter kaleidoscope, the intensity of the red color to the sharp citrus flavor of the greens, from cyan to green flag, mixed with the warm tones of the chromatic declinations of the sun's rays.

TO MIX.

source: noirfacade - Multicolore

Imogen Morris Clarke by Ishi for Amica November 2011

A FLUKE FOR ALL TIME, or: QMAX AND STARTING PITCHER MVPs

2011-11-22T22:18:00.000-08:00

We weren't quite expecting Justin Verlander to become a double award winner this year, but the BB-WAA has had its way with us. Rather than remain doctrinaire, we figured it might be worth using the Quality Matrix (QMAX) to examine Verlander in the context of those starting pitchers who've won the MVP award.

In our previous entry we showed how closely bunched four NL pitchers (Clayton Kershaw, Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, and Cole Hamels) were in the QMAX data. Given that QMAX is a 7 x 7 bidirectional matrix, it's probably not surprising to you that the aggregate average in any given year is somewhere around 7--which is right at the dead center of the matrix chart. As offensive levels change, that average fluctuates up and down--from a low of 6.81 in 1968 to a high of 7.59 in 2000.

So you can see that scores around 5 are excellent and usually match up well with an ERA+ between 145 and 160. The fluctuations in ERA+ generally have to do with individual factors--flukes of clutch pitching, or extremely low distributions of extra-base hits, etc.--that pull away from QMAX's large-scale probabilistic centrifugal force.

OK, enough of that, let's try to contextualize Verlander using QMAX. How does his season compare to the other starting pitchers who either won both the CYA and MVP, or won the MVP prior to the creation of the CYA, or who won the CYA and were strongly ballyhooed for the MVP?

Let's cut right to the QMAX value chart, the basic QMAX average and the Quality Winning Percentage (QWP).

Don Newcombe in his heyday...

We can see that while Verlander ranks seventh in the overall QMAX score and sixth in QWP, his "T" score of 4.92 and his .725 QWP is well within the range of performance where pitchers have been awarded MVPs as well as CYAs. (Don Newcombe, the first pitcher to win a CYA, and who also won the MVP award that year in large part due to his winning 27 games, has the lowest QWP of any of these pitchers.)

Verlander's 2011 season, from the basic QMAX data, looks like pretty much a dead ringer for Roger Clemens' 1986 season.

But this is where we can bring in QMAX's "shape" component to add context to the basic data. The QMAX range data is extremely suggestive in providing us with a series of percentages for performance criteria within the expanse of the QMAX matrix chart.

We want to look at the ranges within the QMAX chart that seem to have the greatest "range" (distance from the best score to the worst from among pitchers in this most distinguished sample). When we examine the QMAX range chart, we can see that the range categories that show the most fluctuation are the "Elite Square" (ES) and the "Hit Hard" (HH) sector.

We can see that with respect to those stats, Verlander is again down in the pack a bit. His ES score is seventh best and his HH percentage, while excellent (the average AL pitcher was hit hard in 30% of his starts during 2011), is tied for sixth in this rarefied company.

We follow with a whole series of QMAX charts for these pitchers, and we will conclude by adding the QMAX data for three pitchers not on the current list--Ron Guidry and his storybook 25-3 season with the Yankees in 1978; Pedro Martinez' best-ever season in 2000 (even though most would expect us to be looking at 1999 instead, when Pudge Rodriguez beat him out for MVP); and Zack Greinke in his much ballyhooed 2009 campaign.

What these charts mostly tell you is that great pitchers have very similar success patterns. They may flip-flop on their top hit prevention (S12) games--some have more in the "1" (most dominant) area, some have it in "2", but these games constitute at least 50% of all their starts. In the case of Bob Gibson and his legendary 1968 season, that figure breaks 75%.

Denny McLain isn't really given all that much credit for his achievements in 1968--the modern low point in run scoring has become a bit exaggerated, and the campaign against the value of wins has also caused many to put aside his 31-win season. (It's now been longer since McLain achieved this feat in 1968--forty-three years and counting--that it was between McLain and Dizzy Dean, who did in 1934. It will probably be a whole lot longer before anyone does it again.) He also suffers in comparison to Gibson's incredible achievement.

Bobby Shantz--a true "pocket ace" in 1952

Of the three pre-1960 pitchers on this list (Newcombe, Bobby Shantz, Hal Newhouser) that we chose to include, it's Shantz' season that is the most notable--if only for the fact that Bobby was one of the tiniest aces in baseball history. (Forman et fils lists him at 5'6" and 139 lbs.--now that's not just tiny, that's virtually nonexistent.)

A look at Shantz' game logs in 1952 shows that he was on his way to a sub-4 QMAX season as late as August 22nd (when his record was 22-4, 1.81), but he just didn't have the stamina to sustain such an effort over a full season and he faded badly in September. (Five of the seven games that Shantz had in the "HH" category came in his last ten starts of the season, a sign that the little lefty was simply gassed. And, of course, he never came close to duplicating his 1952 performance.)

That leads us to the three might-have-been MVPs--Guidry, Martinez, and Greinke. When we look at the basic data, we start to get a sense that something is out of order with one of these guys. Whereas nobody in the original CYA/MVP list shows up with a "T" score higher than 5.1 or a QWP lower than .680, all of a sudden we have one "legendary" season--Greinke's 2009--that looks more than a little pekid.

We'll get back to that in awhile. What's clear from the rest of the data above (and in the associated QMAX range data) is that Guidry was right in the pocket for the double trophy.

Pedro Martinez: in 2000, that upwardly-pointed finger
gave him direct access to whatever celestial deity
floats your boat...

And Pedro's 2000 season, despite being lower in wins (18-6 vs. 23-4 in 1999), is the truly killer year for him, with only Gibson's 1968 being in its gunsights. He holds the record for all of the QMAX range categories (save the "TJ" and "PP" ranges, shown in green because they are most descriptive and not a direct measure of performance).

Now you may be wondering why Pedro's basic QMAX score (3.79) is higher than Gibson's (3.68). The answer is that there's a difference in the winning percentages for each QMAX cell in 2000 than in 1968. That difference across the entire matrix means that the value of a 1,1 game is a few points of WPCT higher in 2000 than was the case in 1968. Thus QMAX is also era-adjusted (taking away another of the original objections that surfaced when this method was introduced in the mid-90s). While the basic S, C, T numbers do not change, the "win values" for the cells do fluctuate from year to year. The effect is not as striking as some of the other "sabe-centric" adjustments that have become popular, but it does correct for run-scoring levels appropriately.

But let's get back to Greinke. This is a guy whose 2009 season has been spoken of in hushed tones by an large coterie of baseball folks. An adjusted ERA (ERA+) of 205, for Crissakes. How can he be showing up so poorly in comparison to the rest of these guys? Surely that means that QMAX is full of it, nicht war?

Sorry, the answer is "nein." Remember that we've always pointed out that QMAX is a probabilistic system. While it does correct for XB/H in the "S" value, it doesn't attempt to be as precise as what all the other systems do when they simply start with runs. What QMAX does is tell you with all reasonable conditions controlled for and with baserunner strand rates assumed to fall within relatively narrow range parameters, this is what you can expect from the hit and walk prevention figures that it computes.

So why does it vary so much with respect to Greinke? Well, there are some odd aspects to Zack's 2009. It turns out that Zack had an incredibly hot start (0.94 ERA and 8-1 record in his first ten starts) and a blistering finish (5-0 and a 1.29 ERA over his last eight starts). In between those two streaks, however, he was just about a league average pitcher (3.66 ERA and a 3-7 record).

Let's look at the QMAX range data for Zack as it maps out for the 18-game "Buddha" period in 2009, and for the 15-game "Bubba" period. Remember, Greinke has a 1.29 ERA in that first group, a figure that should by all rights be producing a sub-4 QMAX "T" score a la Gibson and Pedro, but instead is coming out in the high 4's--great, but nowhere near the "godhead" level.

In the other 15 games, he's a very hittable pitcher with good control, and he's just barely more than a .500 pitcher. This evaluation is supported by the range data, which shows that Greinke had 55% of an historic season in 2009, and 45% of a season where he was--in the immortal words of Zbigniew Bzrezinski: "Meh."

The Bzrezinskian "grand chessboard" might be an excuse for the
strategic deployment of dirty bombs, but it's no match for the geopolitical
pitching intricacies as they are laid out in the QMAX matrix chart...

But so what, you say? The adjusted ERA is what matters, right? And the fact that his other measures--his BABIP, for example--doesn't point to great luck? Who cares? You don't even want to use runs in this crazy system!

Ah, but that's the point. A counter-intuitive system needs to have something that it uses as a fulcrum. FIP-based stats use BABIP as that fulcrum, pretending that it's random enough to operate that way, preferring to believe that the slice of data that it uses is somehow sufficient to leach out all the "fielding luck."

In QMAX that fulcrum is the strand rate, which can either be measured directly or can be simulated (just as BABIP acts a proxy in that system for focusing only on balls in play) by looking at the difference in batter vs. pitcher OPS in general and a key subset of that measure--batter vs. pitcher OPS with men on base.

You want to argue as to which one is more "valid"? Are any of these measures necessarily more "valid" than any others? Take a shot at it. Take your best shot. What might just be mind-opening is to take a look at the deviation in those two batter vs. pitcher OPS figures and see if they point in one particular direction, and whether Greinke might just have had one of the most aberrantly brilliant seasons in baseball history.

The chart at right shows those figures for the twelve pitchers we've looked at in this study. As you can see, while there are some differences, the major trend for these pitchers with respect to batter vs. pitcher OPS is for that figure to rise when men are on base. There are three exceptions to this: Guidry, Pedro, and--

Oh my god. Look at that outlier for Greinke. The average differential for this comparison over all of MLB in 2011 is -3.4% (.780 OPS with men on vs. .754 OPS overall).

Greinke's batter vs. pitcher OPS with men on base in 2009 was about 20% better than it was overall.

That is how his ERA ended up being so low for the year. It was a year of pitching unconsciously when men were on base. This is the textbook extreme of how one maximizes performance elements into a season of overachievement.

Sure, we can give Greinke credit for his great and sustained clutch performance over 2009. And let's face it, the fact that he was in Kansas City that year made it certain that he would get adulation from the sabe-centric world. Joe Posnanski, maybe the key fence-straddler in the mainstream media with his ties to Bill James and his folksy, aberrantly experimental writing forays--and his unique access to the socially challenged Greinke--made absolutely sure of that. Quirky anti-folk hero? Check. Struggling small market team? Double check. All "sympathetic trope systems" were "go." Pos's brilliant proselytizing for Greinke, timed to the tail end of his first hot streak, opened the door for many other sportswriters, and there was undoubtedly a domino effect when it came time for the CYA voting. Zack didn't hurt his chances by getting white hot down the last six weeks of the season, either.

Greinke in 2009: a dominance created by a fast start,
historic clutch pitching and a brilliant tout
from Joe Pos...not from his hit prevention!

But what QMAX tells us is that it was a glorious fluke season of overachieving greatness, propelled by a stat that's much more of an outlier than any of the BABIP data in the "fielding independent" cigar box.

And you will note that Greinke has never come close to doing that again, either before or since.

In fact, usually the greater the pitcher, the closer these two OPS figures cling to one another.

QMAX assumes that this will be the case. Therefore, it stubbornly--and correctly--suggests that Greinke's true value in 2009 was a good bit lower than what the ERA/ERA+ (and WAR data) suggests..

Now this isn't going to help get QMAX accepted in the little sabe-centric world. They like their myths, especially when the myth looks empirically, walks empiricially, and talks empirically like a duck. After all, that 205 ERA+ is real: it really happened. The fact that it may be part of a different type of illusion, one that has yet to recognized, is unlikely to register at this time. The underlying feeling from this piece for many will be that we're trying to "take down" Greinke--who, having moved to another midwest franchise that actually made its move into the playoffs, is still benefitting from the original halo effect. And that's not going to sit well.

But keep in mind that Greinke has never come close to that season. His next best ERA+ to that 205 in 2009 was 126 the previous year. The fact that his QWP was actually only .640 in 2009 tells us that he really hasn't fallen as far from his "peak" has is commonly thought. His .566 QWP in 2011 could well be his true level--unless he goes unconscious with men on base again.

But chances are that he'll always be thought of as someone who showed a singular glimpse of unalloyed greatness. After all, that's kinder and gentler (and more in keeping with this most emprirical of myths) than calling it a "fluke."

How about we just agree to call it the "greatest and grandest fluke in the history of baseball"? That sounds more positive, to be sure--and it also happens to be the stone cold truth.

Graphic Power

2011-11-22T10:10:00.000-08:00

A força gráfica da combinação de sempre entre Preto e Branco, mistura de todas as cores e ausência total de luz à partida não se misturam, mas quando se trata de padrões estes opostos resultam em imagens fortes, que definem looks ora inspirados no Rock and Roll, mas ao mesmo tempo ultra-femininos e até clássicos, como será sempre esta combinação de cores...

The strength of the combination between Black and White, when it comes to patterns these opposite result in strong images, inspired by the Rock and Roll but at the same time ultra-feminine and classic ...

Fall's Graphic Prints

Julia Saner by Daniel Jackson for Harper's Bazaar US October 2011

The Breath of Nature

2011-11-21T13:39:00.000-08:00

Este editorial para a Nylon Magazine transpôs elementos emblemáticos das colecções desta estação, como as peças de lantejoulas gigantes Prada para um universo hippie, soalheiro e em contacto com a natureza...respira-se o ambiente eclético de final dos anos 60 e 70, mas ao mesmo tempo em cada imagem há um elemento destabilizador e futurista que nos trás de volta...

This editorial for Nylon Magazine transposed emblematic elements of this season's collections, like the giant Prada sequins to a hippie and sunny universe in contact with nature ... the editorial is full of the eclectic environment of the late 60's and 70's but at the same time in each image there is a destabilizing and futuristic element that brings us back ...

source: Taylor Warren for Nylon Magazine Mexico September 2011

Hided in my Sweater

2011-11-20T12:11:00.000-08:00

Um guia de texturas para este Inverno, uma ode a um guarda-roupa cada vez mais sensorial e despojado, e que apela ao conforto, no qual imagens simples revelam como protagonista apenas, a camisola de sempre, simples, mas poderosa.

A guide for this Winter textures, in which the sweater, simple but powerful, is the protagonist

source: Mikaela Carlén by Andreas Öhlund for Velvet

November Rain

2011-11-18T09:02:00.000-08:00

Um editorial para fazer de conta, nem que seja por momentos, que a chuva de novembro se transformou nas águas de Março de Tom Jobim... a fechar o Verão... quem melhor para captar as cores e a temperatura do sol do que o fotógrafo Mario Testino...Bom fim de semana !!

An editorial to pretend that the November Rain turned into the "waters of March" of the Tom Jobim song ...who better to capture the colors and the temperature of the sun than the photographer Mario Testino ... Good weekend!

Vogue US December 2011

Models: Karlie Kloss & Eddie Redmayne

Photographer: Mario Testino

NL QMAX UPDATE: HAMELS AND LINCECUM

2011-11-18T08:42:00.000-08:00

Cole Hamels defenders have a right to be wondering the following:

--Why he finished fifth in the NL CYA behind Ian Kennedy;
--Why we left him out of our earlier discussion.

Our conjecture concerning the former is that voters (who are political as much as they are analytical) simply didn't want to have a monolithic vote for Philadelphia pitchers.

That's understandable, but not necessarily condonable.

We simply got so caught up in Phase I of the hand-to-hand combat over Clayton Kershaw that we simply neglected to run the numbers for Hamels. (And, sure, we were occupied sharpening our knives.)

When we run the QMAX numbers for Hamels, we discover that there is a fourth pitcher who deserves to be in the thick of the discussion. According to our numbers, he is just a razor's edge behind Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee and the difference is slight enough that it's clearly "throw a blanket over 'em" time.

Hamels' QWP is .667, just a tad under the other two Phillies aces. (Note: we do not include Hamels' relief tune-up performance on the final day of the season in these calculations.) His top hit prevention percentage (S12) is 52%, comparing favorably with Lee (50%) and just under Kershaw (58%) and Tim Lincecum (55%).

Another reason why Hamels may have been downgraded to fifth is that the lessons of last year (King Felix's AL CYA win despite a 13-12 record) have not quite percolated down into the lower levels of the ballot process. Again, understandable but not condonable. Hamels had the least number of wins out of the great Philly troika, but a strong case can be made that these guys finished in a dead heat.

Here are the expanded QMAX rankings and range data lists, which include Hamels and Lincecum, who finished sixth on the ballot. Rob Neyer is once again overreacting with a strange variant of the Stalinism that seems to infect those who wrap their lips around the Fangraphs exhaust pipe, excoriating the stray voters who picked The Freak over Hamels or Kennedy, but these votes may well have come from a different impetus.

Lincecum had the worst run support of anyone in the NL last year. The Giants scored an average of 2.81 runs in his starts. Quite possibly these were sympathy votes: possibly a bit more condonable than missing the true level of Hamels' achievement.

QMAX suggests that the voting order for the NL CYA is Kershaw, Halladay, Lee, Hamels, Kennedy. If that gets us excommunicated from the little world of sabermetrics (wait, didn't that already happen at least once??), then so be it.

QMAX SMOKES OUT THE CYA--NL & ELSEWHERE

2011-11-18T01:42:00.000-08:00

That skunky smell you may be noticing is emanating out of the virtual cubicles at SB Nation, where BMOC Rob Neyer is wasting no time in proving our point about the vagaries of sabe-centric dogmatism, as referenced in our most recent post (!!), where we alluded to:

"the strange intractability inherent in the war over WAR, the guerrilla infighting, the race to phantom regions of moral rectitude..."

Now Bill James really is to blame for all of this--it was his high moral tone in the midst of his long-term, intransigent gadfly-ism that set the bar for the knee-jerk "us vs. them" mentality that Neyer and others have absorbed through the pores. Consequently it has made a quest that should have been conducted from the cerebrum into something that continues to be ruled by the cerebellum, despite all of the metamathematical anathemas that the Whole Sick Crew has been conjuring for better and worse in the neo-sabe Iron Age.

Rob is currently tilting windmills over the selection of Clayton Kershaw as the 2011 Cy Young Award winner. He and his former ESPN colleague, Keith Law, seem to have decided that they know best with respect to which version of WAR (Wins Above Replacement, for those of you still break bread with a Visigothic splinter group...) is the one to apply to the task of ranking Cy Young candidates.

To say that this is a decision made based on factionalism and politics as opposed to any demonstrable technical knowledge on the part of these two is perhaps more bold a statement than we should make, given that these two are now BBWAA members (and, unbeknownst to themselves, have jumped the shark.) But overly bold as it might be, it is the plain and ugly truth.

The plain fact of the matter is that the war over WAR is a pointless one, and the idea that anyone could cite one or the other of the competing formulae as definitive is both insult and injury. Both versions--the one at Forman et fils and the one at Fangraphs--are flawed. Just how flawed is one of the murky embarrassments of the field, because rather than working to clarify the issues involved and possibly leapfrog past the limitations and distortions, we instead have careerist insiders using these tools for their own agendas.

It's ironic that Bill James just wrote an eloquent rejection of the notion of "expertise" as a claim for methodological superiority, only to witness the exact type of behavior he is critiquing rear its head.

It's ironic, but it's not surprising, given the track record of the two men in question. This is what happens when the quest for knowledge gets compromised by careerism.

The idea that Clayton Kershaw's selection as NL CYA is any kind of a blot on the award process, or on sabermetrics, or any similarly phrased journalistic exercise in misdirection, is beyond silly. (We'll address this question in greater detail below.)

Apparently our heroes think that because one version of WAR incorporates BABIP into its calculation and it creates distance between Kershaw and Roy Halladay, this is proof that we have all gone right back down the rabbit hole that we all just climbed out of when Felix Hernandez was awarded the AL CYA last year.

There are a few interesting conceptual problems about BABIP and how it should be adjusted for in a WAR statistic that rarely--if ever--get addressed. The one that seems to elude most of its practitioners is that its slice of pitching statistics is both incomplete and based on half-truths. (For one thing, it's highly ironic that a stat based on batting average has become so pivotal in a field that continues to insist that BA is a woefully inadequate tool.)

Another, possibly more devastating problem is that other slices of pitching performance that may more accurately depict the way in which pitchers prevent run scoring--such as situational pitching--are completely ignored and discarded in the mad rush to a so-called "fielding independent" perspective. Each of these constitutes subsets of data, but one has become inordinately privileged as a result of a series of assumptions that are nowhere near being verified.

On second thought...maybe not.

In the continuing absence of a definitive solution to the war over WAR, there is a need--now more than ever--to revisit other probabilistic modeling methods, particularly for pitching. We've been doing just that here for awhile with the Quality Matrix, which--yes--was invented here so many years ago. Rather than simply sum up and perform adjustments on run prevention, it provides a probabilistic basis for winning percentage by creating a bidirectional performance grid that is tied to actual game results.

What's different in QMAX is its willingness to throw away the runs to get at the probabilities of the combined components that result in runs. Its indirectness is upfront, as opposed to the indirectness in the application of WAR for pitchers, which makes a series of murky assumptions about what the "replacement level" of runs allowed is for each individual pitcher. You will chase your tail in trying to reconcile how those replacement level figures are calculated.

You don't have to bother with that for QMAX, because the runs are removed and probabilistic winning percentages are calculated from the thousands of individual games played in each season. BABIP-based systems really slide over the sample size issues in their calculations, figuring (conveniently) that the details of run-scoring don't really matter--their regression model is supposed to handle it all. There is increasing evidence that it doesn't.

Each of those QMAX cells has hundreds-thousands of games represented, with probabilistic winning percentages that are linear in their descent from the best games (at the top left of the matrix) to the worst (in the lower right). Let's see what QMAX has to say about the 2011 NL CYA.

First we'll look at four QMAX matrix boxes--for Kershaw, Halladay, Halladay's illustrious teammate Cliff Lee, and Ian Kennedy of the Arizona Diamondbacks. These are the four best starting pitchers in the 2011 NL according to QMAX. The other benefit with this tool is that it gives a graphic presentation of the quality pattern of the individual pitcher.

The measurements on the "S" (hit/XB prevention) and "C" (walk prevention) create a "shape" function that can't be found in other pitching statistics. We'll look at the "shape data" for these four pitchers and what it tells us as we go along.

Remembering that the charts depict the best in the upper left and the worst in the lower right, we can see that these four pitchers had very fine years in 2011.

What's clear from the matrix boxes is that Kershaw and Lee had many more games in the very best area of the QMAX chart, the yellow-shaded area that we call the "Elite Square," where 83% of the games in that region wind up as wins for the team whose starter inhabits it.

What's also clear is that Kershaw and Kennedy were both able to avoid getting "hit hard" (the region on the chart that's shown in orange) to a far greater extent than the two Phillies' aces.

These two veterans inhabit what we call the "Tommy John" region of the QMAX chart (the box at the lower left) with much greater frequency than the two younger pitchers. These are games where hits are plentiful, walks are scarce, and runs saved over probabilistic expectation can be achieved.

We can't simply read the QMAX chart to know which of these four had the best season; we need to compile the QMAX range data to see how the candidates compare. The range data creates totals for each of the regions defined on the chart--the aforementioned "Elite Square", the broader "Success Square" (which many folks have already pointed out, thank you, is not quite a square), the counterintuitive regions in the upper right and lower left (the "Tommy John" and "Power Precipice" regions--that last one may be familiar to you from our look at Jonathan Sanchez recently), and the deadly box in the lower right, the "Blown Start" region (not much in play for the four pitchers here).

The range data shows how well these guys really did. "Success Square" percentages in the 60s and 70s; "Elite Square" numbers in the 20s through 40s (Lee had a magnificent run of these games in the second half of 2011 and wound up at 44% in this category, one of the highest totals in recent memory). Kershaw excelled at avoiding "hit hard" games, with only 6%; Kennedy was very good as well (15%), while the two Phils were much closer to league average in this stat.

In terms of top hit prevention games (measured in the top two rows of the QMAX diagram, the ones referred to as "S12"), Kershaw and Lee had excellent percentages, while Halladay and Kennedy were merely above average.

We can rank these for each pitcher relative to the others, assigning points to the relative values: the bright orange worth three points, the pale orange two, and the yellow one. That adds up to what we call the "Quality Range Score" (QRS). It's just a crude indicator, but it might well be suitable for breaking a tie or moving a close contest in one particular direction. Kershaw has the advantage here.

The summary stats for QMAX are the "S" and "C" averages, which add up to a total ("T") ranking. (The lower the "T" score, the better--just like ERA.) By using the probabilistic win percentages or values assigned to each cell in the matrix (these are called QWVs), we can calculate the pitcher's overall quality value, his Quality Winning Percentage (QWP).

Remember, we are pushing back against actual wins and losses here, as represented in the linkage between each performance cell and the historical results in that cell. What is lost by ignoring questions of "fielding independence" is offset by a grounding in both probability and reality.

The result is "abstract," but so is FIP. We can adjust the "T" value to an ERA construct if it makes you feel more at home, but we haven't bothered. What you need to know is that any "T" score below six is an ace, anything below five is an historic season. (Pedro Martinez scored 2.00 "S", 1.90 "C"/3.90 "T" in 2000, which was pretty darned historic.)

What QMAX shows us is a narrow lead for Kershaw in both the "T" score and in the QWP. What it does is reinforce the largely-held impression by intelligent folks (those who are undraped in questionable "expertise" and sportswriterly posturing) that the race between Kershaw, Halladay and Lee was extremely close.

Notice that we are not discussing pitching triple crowns here, or any other stats. QMAX is agnostic concerning strikeouts. Based on the down-at-the-game level probabilities, and without recourse to any of the ideological puffery of a Law or the grandstanding bully pulpit of a Neyer (OK, we're partially guilty on that one...), we figure that it's actually OK to vote for Clayton Kershaw with a (relatively) free conscience. (The relativity has more to do with what else you've been up to.)

We sincerely wish that our two fine feathered "friends" would quit leading us on a wild goose chase. However, it is migration season and the skies are pretty crowded. No one would blame you if you hauled out the shotgun and took aim at the sky. Just don't take aim at our two friends here, who seem to think they are flying high up in the air, but are actually stuck on the ground.

Liberty Prints

2011-11-17T02:50:00.000-08:00

Em cada imagem a imaginação corre livremente por entre cores e padrões, é um verdadeiro desafio estético, que me parece extraído ora do imaginário de um quadro pontilhista, repleto de uma miríade de impressões, ora de uma aguarela, que se vislumbra de olhos semicerrados, ou então inspirado na geometria intrincada de cores puras de Mondrian, cor para absorver concentrada ou diluída em água ;)

In each image the imagination runs freely among colors and patterns, is a real aesthetic challenge, which seems to me extracted from the imagery of a pointillist painting, filled with a myriad of impressions, or from the imagery of a watercolor, that we see with half-closed eyes, or inspired from the intricate geometry of pure colors of Mondrian

source : fashiongonerogue - Charlotte T by Andrew Yee for How to Spend It

THE AWARD YOU DON'T WANT TO WIN

2011-11-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

A socio-linguist studying the sabe-centric world might well have a tough time picking out the most prevalent (read: privileged) jargon--what H. L. Mencken (channeling his inner Victor Hugo via Thorstein Veblen) would have dubbed "the argot of the analyst class."

"Sweet Jehosaphat, Ann, every week our relationship regresses
to the mean!!"

There are so many to choose from...

--But let's not dwell upon this, as such a discussion simply revisits the peculiar intractability inherent in the ongoing war over WAR, the guerrilla infighting, the race to phantom regions of moral rectitude, the shameless borrowing of social science concepts for the sake of intellectual carpet-bombing, etc.

Whatever lists of involuted supercalifragilistic expialadociousness are compiled to tourniquet the machinery of the "meme" as it has spread across the little world of baseball analysis during the past three decades, there is one phrase that's almost certain to be at the top. What is it? No, it's not that girl, it's...

Regression to the mean.

Fuggedabout that girl...this girl has got the stuff. While her affinity
for upscale malt liquor is elevated, there's no truth to the rumor that
she'll be naming her new band LoLo and the Suds...but, hey, if
Lauren Hillman keeps writing songs like "Young Love," she can
do whatever she wants....

This is the allspice of sabermetrics, even seems to not eff up the taste of ice cream when you accidentally take off the top and dump instead of sprinkle. Of course, tastes differ, but this explanation of events seems so ladled with preservatives that you can not only leave it on the bedpost overnight, but you can leave it out for decades...aeons...and it won't spoil or--worst of all--get clumpy due to prolonged exposure to the air.

And that's just what we need in a phrase that combines precision and puffery, rigor and mortis, warp and woof.

Now it turns out that there is one post-season award that exemplifies the actual principle within the phrase "regression to the mean." It's an award whose trophy should contain--or possibly simply just be--a double-edged sword.

"Managers of the Year" by Francisco Goya...

What's that award?

It's called Manager of the Year. Today, two fine fellows will get honored for their work in the dugout. Next year, they will almost certainly get buried.

Think I'm off my rocker? (It's OK, national polls favor your position.) Here are the facts: the winning percentage of managers in the years they win the MoYA (rhymes with Goya, so...) is .591. Their winning percentage in the year after is...

.511.

That's an eighty-point drop. Teams win 13.4% fewer games in the season following a year where the manager has been a MoYA.

There have been fifty-four managers who were MoYA and managed again in the next year. (We tossed out Bobby Cox, TOR, 1985, and Davey Johnson, BAL, 1997, because they didn't manage in the following season). Out of this group of fifty-four managers, only four of them (7%) had a better winning percentage in the year after they won the MoYA. Those four managers who've beaten the odds are: Jim Leyland, PIT, 1990; Bobby Cox, ATL, 1991; Gene Lamont, CHW, 1993; and Joe Torre, NYY, 1996.

Everyone else on the list (and it's reproduced for you at left) has, to some degree or another, taken it in the tukus. As is usually the case, Tony LaRussa is prominent on this list, and just might walk off with the record for the longest span of MoYA, having gotten his first in 1983 (and winning 25 fewer games the next year). We all know that Tony is singular, and so it shouldn't be surprising that he is the only manager to win the World Series in the season following a MoYA: 1989. The A's did win fewer games in '89 than in '88, but Tony is, as always, at least a partial anomaly unto himself.

This partially explains why it is so rare for anyone to be MoYA in successive seasons. Over the past twenty-nine years, this has happened only once, when Bobby Cox won in both 2004 and 2005.

Who had the greatest percentage drop from one year to the next? Until the conclusion of the present season, the cruel fact was that the MoYA who crashed hardest was--you guessed it--someone who worked for Kansas City. Tony Pena, who also holds the record for winning a MoYA with the lowest seasonal WPCT (.512, 83-79), watched in Goya-esque horror as his team tumbled into Boschian regions (Don or Hieronymous, take your pick...) the next year, going 58-104. That amounted to a 30.12% drop in WPCT.

As we said, until this year. Ron Gardenhire has taken Pena off the hook with an even more fearsomely prodigious swan dive, one that represents a drop of 32.98%.

Tony LaRussa managed to have two follow-on MoYA disaster years--1984, noted already (a 25% drop) and 1993 (a 29% drop). One suspects that Tony knows all this, and here's yet another reason for him to ride off into the sunset in case the BBWAA hands him another double-edged sword.

Looking from the insider perspective, the one where the folks involved actually put on the jockstrap, there's a phrase that resonates with the concept of "regression to the mean." That phrase, uttered on behalf of Sandy Koufax by the great sportswriter Ed Linn (the ghostwriter of Sandy's 1966 autobiography), goes as follows:

"This game can't wait to humble you."

That apparently applies to managers even more than players.

So congrats to the 2011 MoYA winners [UPDATE: Kirk Gibson and Jumpin' Joe Maddon]--and...

Condolences.

Dandy Princess

2011-11-16T09:34:00.000-08:00

A atmosfera refinada, excêntrica, mas ao mesmo tempo relaxada e boémia que marca a atmosfera vivida pelos dandies de finais do séc. XIX inícios do séc XX em Inglaterra. Aqui vivida no feminino, e personificado pela modelo Tati Cotliar entre decorações opulentas e peças elaboradas, mas com um toque irreverente de rebeldia de uma princesa dandy dos nossos tempos...

The refined atmosphere, eccentric, but at the same time relaxed and bohemian that remembers the social atmosphere of the dandies of the beginning of the nineteenth century in England. In this editorial experienced by Tati Cotliar, between opulent decorations, but with a touch of irreverent dandy rebellion a princess of our times ...

source: noirfacade - Diario de una princesa

Tati Cotliar by Gustavo di Mario for Harper's Bazaar Argentina October 2011

Through Today's eyes

2011-11-15T01:00:00.000-08:00

Um pouco de inspiração para o dia de hoje, porque é através dos nossos olhos, pequeno globo brilhante que captamos o Mundo todo de uma só vez!!

My moodboard for today, hope you enjoy!! ...because is through our eyes, small bright globe that we see all world at once!!

source: noir façade| fashiongonerogue

Paris Mise en Scène

2011-11-14T08:11:00.000-08:00

O fascínio da Alta-Costura, da verdadeira Mise en Scène da mestria dos grandes costureiros encenada no seu cenário simbólico, Paris, entre os carroseis do Sacre Couer e a Torre Eiffel

The allure of haute couture, the true Mise en Scène, the mastery of the great couturiers staged in its symbolic scenario, Paris, between carrousels and the Eiffel Tower

Title: Remake Couture

Magazine: L'Officiel October 2011

Models: Tanya Dziahileva, Emma W, Carmen, Charlotte

Photographer: Jean-Daniel Lorieux

Stylist: Marie José Jalou

PAPELGONE

2011-11-13T13:01:00.000-08:00

While he isn't a signature feature of the recently-departed EJE (you know, the Epstein-James Era, whose true icon is David Ortiz), Jonathan Papelbon was a lightning rod for the Boston Red Sox and their many mouthfoam-infested fans, a nation of harsh accents that has been (temporarily) quieted by a Month From Hell.

Apropos of September 2011:
an antithetical,
unpalatable mix of
otherwise harmonious
ingredients...

They won't have Jon anymore to kick around, to champion, to fixate upon--he and his kewpie-doll face have moved to Philadelphia, the true big leagues of bad fandom. It's a classic out-of-the-fry-pan-into-the-fire scenario, but the Big Payday™will buy several tons of aloe to soothe the burn.

Before we let him scowl off into that good night, however, we thought it would be fun to commemorate a key subset of his 6+ years with the Sox. What's that nutty, nougaty morsel of Papelbon's often anxiety-producing performance? Why, nothing other than his game-by-game record against the Red Sox' arch-rivals, the New York Yankees.

That game-by-game record can be accessed by this link at Forman et fils (which seems to be downsizing to "Forman et fil" despite--or possibly due to--a massive sticker-shock phenomenon that's gone viral on their pages). The yearly summary of that performance can be found below:

That's correct. Papelbon never won a game against the Yankees. (Reliever wins are not a big deal, of course, but there it is anyway.) Jon's BB/9 in these games (4.9) is more than double his lifetime (2.4). His home run rate is elevated; his WHIP is about 30% higher than lifetime (1.306 vs. 1.016).

You could say that is what happens when a good reliever is pitted against a franchise that is, year-in and year-out, the best (or near-best) team in the game.

We'll leave it to others to anatomize the single-game details of Papelbon's bateau ivre odyssey against the Evil Empire. As a footnote, we thought it might be instructive (or at least interesting) to examine the record of Jon's mysterious rival from the Bronx, Mariano Rivera. How did the man who's likely to be remembered as the greatest relief pitcher in baseball history do when he faced the Red Sox?

We are limiting our direct comparison to the years in which Rivera and Papelbon overlap (2005-2011), but let's note before we proceed further that Mo's lifetime ERA against the Red Sox is 2.82 and he has saved 54 games against them. His won-loss record over that time span: 12-7.

Here are Rivera's year-to-year stats vs. the Red Sox from 2005 to the present:

Mo is giving up a lot more hits per nine against the Sox (8.6 vs. 6.9 lifetime), which makes sense given Boston's consistently strong offense. His BB/9 is also up (2.8) but not all that much from his lifetime (2.0).

This is the difference between a Hall of Famer and a guy who's sidling up to "close but no cigar" status. (But don't let our picture fool you as to who fits which category!!)

So what about head-to-head competition between these two guys? Is that a contradiction in terms given the logistics of bullpen usage as it's evolved? Does the fact that the specialization inherent in the closer role has made head-to-head appearances between relief aces a mutually exclusive proposition?

Take a moment and ponder this--and then take a guess as to how many times Papelbon and Rivera have appeared in the same game...

The total number of appearances that the two of 'em have made in the Yankee-Red Sox games from 2005-2011 is 98...that's 52 for Rivera, and 46 for Papelbon.

How many of those games do they have in common, and what happened in those games?

The answer is eleven. Here's a quick synopsis:

May 10, 2006 (Yankee Stadium): Papelbon works the eighth in a "get some work" outing (the Yanks win 7-3). Rivera works the ninth in a non-save situation.

May 11, 2006 (Yankee Stadium): Rivera pitches the ninth with the Yanks down 4-3 and gives up a run. Papelbon enters in the eighth, relieving Keith Foulke with what was then the tying run at third, fans Miguel Cairo to end the threat, and retires the Yanks in the ninth for his first save against them.

May 23, 2006 (Fenway Park): Papelbon enters in the ninth with the Red Sox trailing 7-5, keeps it close by retiring the side with 2Ks. Rivera enters with one out in the eighth, leading 7-4, allows an inherited runner to score, but that's all the Sox can get: Mo gets the save.

June 3, 2007 (Fenway Park): With the score tied 5-5, Papelbon gives up a ninth-inning HR to Alex Rodriguez. Mo, who hasn't been pitching that well thus far (5.11 ERA going into the game) works the bottom of the ninth and fans two (Manny Ramirez and Mike Lowell) to nail it down for the Yanks.

September 14, 2007 (Fenway Park): The Sox are cruising to a division title, but the Yanks know how to make things interesting. Trailing 7-2 in the eighth, they rally against Hideki Okajima. Papelbon enters the game with one out, two on, and the score 7-4. Boom, boom, boom: Jeter singles, Abreu doubles, and A-Rod singles. It's suddenly 8-7 Yanks. In the ninth, Rivera gives up a single to J.D. Drew, but he gets out of it. Mo gets the save, Papelbon gets two kinds of pain: a blown save and a loss.

August 28, 2008 (Yankee Stadium): A close, well-pitched game on both sides--a rarity in this rivalry: the game is tied 2-2 in the ninth. Rivera is brought in and works around a Jeter error (!!) to retire the side. Justin Masterson begins bot-9 for the Sox, and things slowly get complicated: a single, a steal, an intentional walk, and a 3-2 walk to Ivan Rodriguez loads the bases with one out. Paps comes in, gets two quick strikes on Jason Giambi, then--boom! Single to center. Mo gets the win, Masterson winds up in Cleveland.

April 24, 2009 (Fenway Park): The Yankees take a 4-2 lead into the ninth, but Mo (who'd been brought in during the eighth to quell a Red Sox rally) gets tagged for a two-out, two-run, game-tying homer by Jason Bay (soon Mets-bound, where he'd hit half as many homers over two seasons as what he hit in '09 for the Sox). Paps comes in for top-10, has an adventurous inning, but strands two. He's replaced by Ramon Ramirez in the eleventh The Sox push over a run in the bottom of the inning to win, 5-4. Blown save for Mo.

Talk about a transgressive rivalry!!

August 7, 2009 (Yankee Stadium): Probably the best-pitched game on both sides during the 2005-11 incarnation of the rivalry. The Yanks win, 2-0, when A-Rod hits a walkoff homer in the bottom of the fifteenth. Josh Beckett and A.J. Burnett, former Florida teammates, are each unhittable for seven innings. Mo works the ninth, Papelbon the tenth.

April 7, 2010 (Fenway Park): As the yearly totals above will attest, Papelbon had a very rough year against the Yankees in 2010. It began with this game, where, after pitching a perfect ninth, he was sent out for a second inning by Terry Francona and immediately surrendered a homer to Curtis Granderson. He K'ed Nick Swisher, but got wild and had to be relieved--and it was already over: the Yanks wound up winning 3-1. Mo came in for the bottom of the tenth and picked up the save.

August 7, 2011 (Fenway Park): The Sox, still in high gear at this point in '11, were pushing their way past the Yankees for the AL East lead, and it was all working for them here--trailing 2-1 in the ninth, they pushed over a run against Mo (blown save!) to tie the game, then won it in the bottom of the eleventh against Phil Hughes. Paps pitched a scoreless ninth.

September 25, 2011 (Yankee Stadium, second game of DH): Firmly in the grip of collapse, the Sox won their second-to-last game in 2011 by rallying from a 3-0 first-inning deficit, taking a 4-3 lead with two in the seventh. The Yanks tied it up and the game went fourteen innings before Jacoby Ellsbury took it to Aaron Laffey, hitting a three-run homer to pull out a 7-4 win. Mo pitched the ninth; Papelbon saved the game in the ninth by striking out Austin Romine with the bases loaded, then threw two more scoreless innings. It was his longest (2.1 IP) and most successful appearance against the Yanks.

The head-to-head record:

Rivera: 1-0, 4 Sv, 2 BSv, 2.92 ERA
Papelbon: 0-3, 1 Sv, 1 BSv, 3.65 ERA

The Yankees won seven of the eleven games where both Mo and Paps appeared.

LAST PLAY AT SHEA

2011-11-12T10:14:00.000-08:00

Combining the life stories of Billy Joel and Shea Stadium with a minor-key glimpse at the relentless, Robert Moses-driven suburbanization of Long Island, Last Play at Shea captures a moment of bittersweet transition that valiantly attempts to valorize a world that is falling apart. (In the case of Shea Stadium, of course, this is literally true: within six months of Joel's two concerts there in July 2008, the facility would be demolished.)

Though we were steadfastly resistant to Joel's music during its heyday, the passage of time has softened the edges of his work: like Elton John (with whom he began touring after giving up songwriting in the 90s), his gift for melody ultimately forgives many sins. If one had to knock down Shea Stadium, Billy was indisputably the man to give it its sendoff.

The filmmakers knew they were creating too many narratives for their film to escape a feeling of it being neither fish nor fowl, so they found a fourth strand that gives it a semblance of narrative drive--they relate Shea Stadium's history to the iconic event of its youth, the 1965 Beatles concert.

This fourth layer provides a musical link between Joel and the Moptops, and injects suspense into the unfolding story: will Paul McCartney find a way to appear at Joel's farewell to Shea? Will things come full circle before the wrecking ball?

As one watches the contrasting visuals at Shea--we're talking daytime and nighttime imagery--it is still astonishing to contemplate how divergent one's response could be to it. In the daytime, in the non-descript "garbage dump meadow" that Robert Moses hand-picked as the location for the Dodgers (and caused them to flee to California), it was nothing other than a dump. All that "multi-purposeness" and the attenuated circular design seemed underwhelming, particularly since its best spatial representation was clearly not from the fans' vantage point, but from the players'.

But at night--especially when the camera at the Joel concert looks out into the audience from the center field stage--Shea Stadium (surely the only major league sports facility named for a lawyer...) takes on a good bit of the classicism inherent in its design. The interplay of light and shadow actually transformed it into--OK, a beautifully-lit dump, but a classy dump. With this added resonance, and bathed in a parallel glow of hard-edged nostalgia, Shea finally achieved a long-withheld dollop of grandeur as it moved inexorably toward its extinction.

Our own favorite memory of Shea was a doubleheader attended there in 1984, a point in time when the Mets were coming back into prominence under manager Davey Johnson, while Shea Stadium itself looked shockingly unkempt. The fans around us seemed to draw a peculiarly venomous level of disdain from these surroundings, already deep into the vitriolic recesses of what Billy Joel had termed the "New York state of mind."

Much of this barely-contained rage was directed at Darryl Strawberry, the march-to-his-own-drummer kid from the wrong coast (Crenshaw High, Los Angeles). At one point during the doubleheader, when Strawberry overran a hit in right field, allowing the Padres to score an extra run, one particularly terse New Yorker summed things up with a brutal flourish: "This ain't love/hate, you stiff--this is HATE/HATE!!"

Despite the fact that Strawberry hit homers in each game (including one in the second game that capped a five-run, two-out rally that gave the Mets a lead they would never relinquish), the fans still seemed more inclined to drop Darryl into a tank of water filled with piranhas. Shouts of "Stiff! Stiff!" resounded when Strawberry struck out in the first inning of the opener, and left a couple of men on base by grounding out in the third.

In the fourth, with a grouchy fan base in mid-grumble, Darryl slammed a long home run off the Padres' Andy Hawkins. As the stadium transformed itself into deafening cheers, two wise guys behind us were overheard to hear even as they applauded: "Eh, y'know...he's STILL a STIFF!!"

Which, in some way, makes us savor the closing image here--one that, in an odd way, visualizes the divided consciousness of the New Yorker. Especially those who, like Billy Joel, were exiled from the mean streets, but needed to feed on them vicariously in order to have an identity. Those who found it both easy and difficult to jettison the past while still yearning for it.

Did Paul McCartney show up? Does the documentary reveal that the concert really wasn't the "last play at Shea," given that it was held in the summer of 2008, a few months before the Mets completed a late-season collapse that was a replay of the previous season and a weird premonition of the financial meltdown that is itself strangely captured in this image?

You'll just have to watch it for yourself to find out.

Twinkle Little Star

2011-11-10T13:48:00.000-08:00

Um editorial único e divertido para entrarmos na atmosfera natalícia...as fotografias têm uma energia peculiar e um styling interessante, mais alternativo e eclético do que o que costuma normalmente ser feito neste tipo de produção, adoro a saia da terceira foto, arrojada e feminina...

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

How I wonder what you are.

Up above the world so high,

Like a diamond in the sky.

A quirky and unique editorial to get into the Christmas atmosphere...the photos have a peculiar energy and an interesting styling, more alternative and eclectic than is usually done in the editorials, I love the skirt of the third picture, edgy and girly...

source: Tank Magazine

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

2011-11-09T13:41:00.000-08:00

Este editorial cruza várias influências cinematográficas, por um lado denota-se a marca única dos Filmes Noir, com um estilo visual muito próprio, uma iluminação recheada de contrastes ricos entre luz e sombra e as decorações luxuosas que povoam histórias densas e dramáticas que rodeiam a central femme fatale.

De outra perspectiva, acho que é inegável a inspiração visual no filme "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", "Gata em Telhado de Zinco Quente" de 1958, com Elisabeth Taylor e Paul Newman, principalmente nas primeiras fotografias, a atmosfera, o cenário, as personagens que parecem contornadas e adensadas para sobressair do fundo, a pose e todo o styling reproduzem a impressão de estarmos perante uma verdadeira produção cinematográfica, que relembra a diva de olhos violeta que nasceu com duas filas de pestanas...

This editorial crosses various cinematic influences. On one hand reminds me the unique visual style of the Film Noir, rich contrasts between light and shadow and luxurious decorations.

From another perspective, I think it is undeniable the visual inspiration in the film "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" with Elizabeth Taylor, the atmosphere, the setting and all the styling reproduce the impression that we are in the real cinematographic production...

Title: Suggestions

Magazine: Vogue Italia September 2011

Model: Isabeli Fontana

Photographer: Vincent Peters

Stylist: Valentina Serra

KING OF THE POWER PRECIPICE

2011-11-08T19:29:00.000-08:00

Before we spend time and bandwidth befouling and buffaloing you with the QMAX esoterica that can be ladled onto the just-traded Jonathan Sanchez, let's just shake out heads at the sabe-world's continuing fixation with Kansas City.

The Royals really are no more inept than the Pittsburgh Pirates, but the godfather of sabermetrics didn't live and die with the Buccos during the formative years of the snark-crackle-pop of the sourest science this side of a stale SweeTart.

Rob Neyer, in a feeble attempt
at misdirection...

It's been twenty years since either team was worth a pitcher of warm spit.

Bill James moved on, but replacement-level fixationists such as Rob Neyer and Rany Jazayerli have maintained the tradition in ways that were more shrill and more dim all at once (a testament to their unique talents).

Theo as St. George...
St. George as Theo
(hmmm...might be time to
let that hair grow out).

Thanks to these chimps, there continues to be enough buzz about this frabjously forlorn franchise to drown out a good bit of the bittersweet buzz that swarms around the Chicago Cubs (until Theo Epstein, proving himself to be the ersatz Joseph Campbell of baseball executives, decided to take his horse and his suit of armor to that other hotbed of boutique nostalgia).

Thirteen years ago, the buzz was all about the Florida Marlins. They'd slain all of their high-priced dragons, and they were about to prove how creative destruction would yield a new paradigm for how to ascend the ladder of success. For five years--1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002--this was the word as handed down from the Baseball Politboro: it really did have an odd Soviet feel to it.

The Fish fizzled in the pan for five years, getting about 45% of the way to the Promised Land. The A's stole their thunder, and helped to launch a perfect-storm collision between mythology and economics. Once they were abandoned by the best and the brightest, they made a couple of (seemingly) counterintuitive trades, and had a much belated (yet shockingly swift...) Miraculous Moment.

Eighty percent of all franchises have been in the post-season since 2003, but of the six who've been on the outside looking in, it's the Royals who get the most buzz. (For the record, the descending order of attention for the other perennial doormats: Toronto, Seattle, Washington, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh).

By whatever measurement system one cares to apply, the Royals are the recipients of more attention per neuron-above-replacement than any team that hasn't been to the World Series since the Marlins made it. Though they ranked 30th in WPCT from 1995-2005, and 28th from 2006-2011, KC is about sixteenth in sabe-centric media coverage. This is all due to the lingering effect of the corps of writers who were able to gain a foothold in the national consciousness.

Consequently, the trade that sent our old pal Melky Cabrera (!!) to the Giants and sent Jonathan Sanchez to the Royals has created so much buzz in the past day that even we can't ignore it.

Of course, the two players involved are archetypes in and of themselves as these have developed in the neo-sabe age--players whose archetypal status creates and reinforces a pattern of privilege and taboo. The rat's maze of science and myth in the field as it's presently constituted is both as simple and elaborate as what Joseph Campbell et al have mapped out for us in the nether regions of hero worship.

• •

Jonathan Sanchez, contemplating Kansas City...

Ergo Jonathan Sanchez. Understand from the get-go that if J-Boy had been traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates, the amount of discussion produced by his relocation would have been roughly one-tenth of what's spread across the Internet in the past thirty hours or so.

While the Royals are clearly part of that (the sabe-centric world needs to bring this team out of its seemingly endless assignation with the underworld--it buttresses their belief system and honors their distant, curmudgeonly father), there's an added component that revs the scrutiny into overdrive.

And that's Sanchez' particular set of characteristics. He's a wild-ass lefty with enough raw stuff to make the mostly dormant codpieces of the sabe-set (vacant in large part due to the demise of the slide rule...) bulge with anticipation. During the Giants' annus mirabilis in 2010, Sanchez seemed to be on the brink of becoming. (Yes, that's a complete sentence...we are talking about sabe-centric myth, not the actual outcome whereby a wild southpaw occasionally turns into a Hall of Famer.)

Cain, Lincecum, Bumgarner: the three remaining "Steampunk amigos"
give their wayward brother a muted but wacky farewell...

In 2011, however, he regressed. He got injured. And his protean personality appeared to grate on those who'd been able to ignore it in 2010.

All of Sanchez' potential, which remains writ large in the minds of the sabe-set due to the symbolism of his 2009 no-hitter, has been transferred to a team (the Royals) in need of a psychic renewal--one that's been receiving a kind of pre-emptive, repetitive prophecy for about four years now.

Yes, it's true. Sabermetrics has gone steampunk.

Obligatory, obfuscatory babefication...

All of which means it is a perfect time to dig deep into the QMAX bag of tricks in order to anatomize Jonathan as he goes off to meet his fate in the midwestern underworld. What makes Sanchez so much fun is that he embodies the most dramatic sub-region in the QMAX continuum--the dangerous, maddening, ex-PreRaphaelite zone known as "the Power Precipice." This is where wild-ass lefties are born--and where most of them die.

That right side of the QMAX matrix box is a thrill ride in the abstract and a nightmare in the concrete, pitch-by-pitch world. Watching some of these guys going through their motions will drive a reformed smoker to light up an entire pack all at once--sort of Beyond the Valley of the Full-Pack, if you get the drift.

It is a way-station, a place that is either passed through or buried within. Some of the greatest pitchers in baseball history began their careers here--and for many of them it was touch-and-go as to whether they would survive to make the rest of the journey.

We begin with Sanchez' 2009 season, because until he threw that no-hitter against the Padres on July 10th, virtually no one was paying attention to him--he had a 5.54 ERA and was probably a start or two from being demoted to the minors.

His next ten starts, however, got folks intrigued. He was still a bit wild (3.9 BB/9), but his K/9 was through the roof (11.4) and his ERA for all eleven games (including the no-hitter) was 2.75. For the first time in his career, he strung together five solid starts. By the end of the year, he was looking like an actual project.

The Power Precipice is that box enclosed within the QMAX diagram at the upper right. It overlaps with what we call the "Success Square" (a term we've chosen not to rename despite its unfortunate rapprochement with Jonah Keri's regrettable "Success Cycle", which was actually more akin to a money laundering operation). It's not an area where a "garden-variety" pitcher resides; the ones who do are usually called "hurlers." With ten such games out of 29 starts, Sanchez clearly was doing a lot of hurling.

Things seemed to get better in 2010, especially down the stretch, as all of the Giants' starters became Zen-like (except the original King of Zen, Barry Zito, a lefty making a mis-timed trek back into the Power Precipice). Sanchez posted a 2.48 ERA over his final eleven regular-season starts, including a classically rare 1,7 QMAX game (one in which the pitcher is literally too fast and wild to be hit, giving up virtually no hits but issuing more walks than innings pitched).

As you can see, there was some leftward shift in Sanchez' 2010 QMAX chart. (A leftward shift, despite what you read in the media, is always a good thing.) He actually managed to have a couple of starts land in the "Tommy John" region--sort of the "white dwarf" alternative world to the "red giant" apocalyptico of the "Power Precipice."

There are twice as many games in the "TJ" region than there are in the "PP" region: the "backwards" pitchers with the opposite ratio, like Sanchez, are usually euphemized with the word "colorful."

In 2011, the slippage is interesting (and worrisome). It isn't so much a regression to wildness (though that is clearly there, with a large jump in BB/9) as it is a decline in hit prevention.

Basically there are a bunch of games that used to be in the Power Precipice (where the probabilities of winning remain high) that have slipped into a more problematic region. That "3" zone, as measured horizontally across the QMAX diagram, has the greatest percentage drop in expected WPCT from left to right of any row in the matrix.

When we add up the range data and break it out into percentages for the three years (below left), we can see all of this with added clarity. Sanchez' top hit prevention games (the top two rows of the QMAX diagram) and his "Success Square" games are highly correlated despite being a different sub-set of games--normally a pitcher will have more "Success Square" games than "top hit prevention" games. To have such a pattern is to exhibit several different ways of being effective. Sanchez doesn't have that pattern. He's got a narrow bandwidth in which he can pitch well.

And the data shows that he is losing ground even in the portion of his game that's been his strength. The 2010 uptick in the "Elite Square" (the very best games, inhabiting the smaller yellow box at the upper left in each QMAX diagram) should have been followed by a push upward in the overall "Success Square" in 2011. That's often what happens when a sequence such as the one Sanchez had from 2009 to 2010 occurs. But it didn't happen here. That's not a good sign.

What's also possible when integrating the QMAX data with more mainstream stats is to project a "top performance ceiling" by taking the best consecutive starts from adjacent seasons and doing what Bill James used to call "game line assembly." We use eleven consecutive starts and assemble them from three consecutive years, which approximates a full season at what was the best from each year. The "Top 33" QMAX data shown in the table above (in green) is the assemblage of these "best starts" into a projection of a "peak season."

The diagram at right provides all of Sanchez' starts in these three subgroups, and provides the ERA for each eleven-game unit, along with the QMAX "S" (hit prevention) and "C" (walk prevention) averages. We sum up the data from the three years to show what the projected stat line would look like for this "peak season." We also see the raw totals for each subgroup.

What we also toss in, to add a little more spice to it, is the projected total stats at the same projected number of IP for each yearly group of eleven starts (in the grouping labeled "EXT"). What shows up strongly here is the decay in Sanchez' peak during 2011--a slight decline in hit prevention, the marked increase in walks, and the decay in strikeouts.

Back in the range data table we had a line marked "PROF"--that stands for "Profile." It's the aggregate QMAX range data for pitchers who average 61% of their games in the "Success Square." We put this in to compare the averages for all the other regions to the projected peak season shape that is created when we do the "game assembly." What we see there is how different the shape of Sanchez' projected peak is when compared to the average pitcher with this level of success. In order to be that successful with the type of raw numbers shown in the three-year summary diagram, Sanchez is pitching in the "Power Precipice" even more often than he is in real life (36% as opposed to 28%). He's got to reach historically low "Hit Hard" percentages (just 6%, about three times lower than the average pitcher in this range). His "QR ratio" (the percentage of good games where the pitcher exhibits excellent control) is impossibly low.

Tommy Byrne, taking dead aim between
Row A and Row Z...

The type of effort involved in pitching this way is virtually untenable. There are a precious few over the history of baseball who've pitched like this for more than just a few years--most notably our old pal Tommy Byrne, the true "King of the Power Precipice."

But Byrne played at a time when many pitchers in his league (the AL of 1946-55) had profiles that at least approached his; he's less out of whack with the AL norms for most of these seasons than Sanchez is in the present day.

The monomyth that Sanchez embodies is the wild-ass lefty who emerges from the underworld with 90+% of his stuff and 200% of his control. Pitchers who fit this profile are few and far between, but they are gods--Sandy Koufax, Randy Johnson. They can probably be counted on Three-Finger Brown's pitching hand.

But the urge for the myth--tied to the sabe-set's need to untie the Gordian knot, to slay the Minotaur, to bell the cat, to sleep with a string of supermodels--is so strong that it can't be left unheeded. Especially when it's tied to the equally centrifugal force emanating from a parallel need to predict another underdog franchise resurrection--the desire to return to the amniotic fluid of sabermetrics itself, the ovarian waters in which the Royals have been dog-paddling for what seems like an eternity.

Like the umbilical cord itself, it's hard to let go of--even when you are unaware of its existence. These are deep, deep desires, and while we like to trifle with them here, to chide those who prefer to believe that they are simply men in lab coats, we do understand what's really at stake. One can only be buried alive for so long before one is simply buried.

The Seasons of a Woman's hair

2011-11-07T14:05:00.000-08:00

Title: Designer Hair

Magazine: Allure US November 2011

Model: Eniko Mihalik

Photographer: Tom Munro

Stylist: Paul Cavaco

Nomadic Routes

2011-11-06T11:24:00.000-08:00

Title: Nomade Land

Magazine: Jalouse October 2011

Model: Madisyn Ritland

Photographer: Paul Schmidt

Stylist: Anne Sophie Thomas

Mrs Mixed !

2011-11-05T14:05:00.000-07:00

Title: Hey Mrs Mix!

Magazine: Elle France October 2011

Model: Edie Campbell

Photographer: Simon Burstall

Stylist: Jeanne Le Bault

When she was just a girl she expected the WORLD...

2011-11-04T09:12:00.000-07:00

When she was just a girl

She expected the world

But it flew away from her reach

So she ran away in her sleep

Dreamed of para-para-paradise

Every time she closed her eyes

When she was just a girl

She expected the world

But it flew away from her reach

And bullets catch in her teeth

Life goes on

It gets so heavy

The wheel breaks the butterfly

Every tear, a waterfall

In the night, the stormy night

She closed her eyes

In the night

The stormy night

Away she flied

Still lying underneath the stormy skies

She said oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh

I know the sun must set to rise

This could be para-para-paradise

Paradise - Coldplay

Title: Honey Bunny

Magazine: Jalouse November 2011
Model: Masha Tyelna
Photographers: Chuando & Frey
Stylist: Anna Quérouil

Finishing Line

2011-11-03T05:03:00.000-07:00

Kasia Struss by Tom Craig for Vogue Russia October 2011

Petal earrings

2011-11-02T12:12:00.000-07:00