Tony's life is changing everyday
Every possible way
Though our dreams, it’s never quite as it seems
Never quite as it seems
Then I open up and see
The person fumbling here is me
A different way to be
I want more, impossible to ignore
Impossible to ignore
They’ll come true, impossible not to do
Impossible not to do
Talk to me amazing mind
So understanding and so blind
You’re everything to me
Jack's life is changing everyday
Every possible way
Though my dreams, it’s never quite as it seems
’cause it's a dream to me
Dream to me
Keep dreamin' along with BaseballHQ. Their Forecaster is available here.
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=== 25 Years In 25 Words, Dept. ===
If you're one of the silent majority who is far too well-adjusted to sit and gather the nuts and bolts of saber...
Bill James invented "speed score" so that he could tell how fast players were in 1925. Like Doc Brown building a time machine out of vacuum tubes, thirty years ago Bill took a stack of old Sporting News magazines and found a way to --- > decipher whether Honus Wagner, a huge guy playing shortstop, was really fast enough to play shortstop. (He was.)
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=== Nuts and Bolts, circa 1980 ===
James used these four statistics to derive a player's on-field, "effective baseball speed":
- How often a player TRIES to steal a base
- How often a player succeeds in stealing a base, given his attempts (SB%)
- Triples, per time he hit the ball into fair play
- Runs scored, per time on base (without HR's, of course)
He put together a formula, and indexed it to the league average. (Why does FanGraphs list Wagner's speed as 8.1? What does that mean? Why not write that as 137? But already we skid the car onto the shoulder of the road...)
What we were going to say was: those four stats allowed for an awfully blinkin' useful number. Not only could you tell the Ty Cobbs from the Babe Ruths ... but you could also tell that 1B Lou Gehrig was faster than 2B Rogers Hornsby.
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=== Baseball Cards ===
1927 was the year that Babe Ruth hit 60 homers, Lou Gehrig hit 47 more, and guess how many the #3 guy in the league had? Their teammate, Tony Lazzeri, would have led the league with 18 homers except for Ruth and Gehrig.
Proportionally, they had the strength of spiders ... it would be like Smoak and Cust hitting 171 and 149 homers next year, and Franklin Gutierrez finishing third at 47.
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Interesting thing about the 1927 Yankees? They had one of baseball's fastest ballclubs.
Earle Combs was effectively as fast as Ichiro ... Bob Meusel was one of the league's 10 or so fastest players ... Mark Koenig was real fast; he and Meusel stole over 20 bases each... the ballclub finished first in triples.
As Bill James said about the 1975 Reds, no team ever leads the league in everything... twice last century...
Once Felix, Bedar', and Pineda get rollin' we'll do that on the mound, eh.
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Peter Bourjos, by the way, has baseball's highest projected SPD score for 2011.
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