Easley/Valentin, Loaiza, B. Upton / Baldelli, 1919 Cincinnati Reds
If you were reserving your stretch drive infield position for the return of Damion Easley, he won't be coming back at all this year. He's reportedly headed home and the New York Daily News was today reporting that he won't even come back for the playoffs if the Mets are in them. The news isn't any better for another Mets infielder in that Jose Valentin also appears unlikely to return this season. We should have official word on this within the next several days.
We just saw a report from the San Francisco Chronicle that the LA Dodgers have picked up Esteban Loaiza off waivers from Oakland. This is the kind of example I was talking about weeks ago when I mentioned the old San Diego claim of Randy Myers years back. The Dodgers apparently have claimed Loaiza and Oakland didn't pull him back off waivers, meaning the Dodgers will now assume Loaiza's contract and the $7 million plus he would have been paid in 2008. With the recent addition of David Wells and now Loaiza, the Dodgers are clearly scrambling for starting pitching options for the final month of the season.
It appears B.J. Upton's permanent future will be as a center fielder, though he'll maintain infielder eligibility into next season because of how often he's played there this year. Long-time readers of our BNRA E-books will probably not be surprised by this. I had been lucky enough to guess or speculate back in the end of 2005 edition that I thought Upton's future would be as a center fielder or left fielder and it now appears this move has taken place. I like center field for Upton. It takes advantage of his range and speed but at a position where he's going to make far fewer errors.
Upton's future is somewhat tied to the ongoing uncertainty surrounding Rocco Baldelli, who continues to be out with an injured hamstring. Be warned that even in what now seems to be an unlikely return to the lineup, Baldelli would likely be on the bench when/if he's activated. One scary report I saw floating across Rotowire's news reports in the past twenty-four hours (quoting a report by Baseball Prospectus) was that Baldelli had even been considering retirement. I'll be very surprised now if he makes it back to the majors this year - and there are reports on the Internet that it's already official that he'll be shut down - I'm prepared to remove what little was left of his forecast.
As the year winds down, I'm getting to more obscure questions that have floated into my inbox at some point, things that didn't require immediate response but I had flagged as interesting and worth revisiting. At some point this season, a reader who had just watched the excellent movie "Eight Men Out" had wondered about the 1919 Chicago White Sox and how they would have done against the Cincinnati Reds if the 1919 World Series had been on the level. I actually ran high speed simulations of this match-up back in the early 1990s and while I don't still have the details, I recall telling readers that surprisingly, when you use the actual 1919 stats as the basis for the simulations, the 1919 Cincinnati Reds kept coming out as series winners, at least more than half the time.
I don't pretend to make any sort of conclusion about what those simulations meant. First, we did the simulations when the software was relatively new and while I'd be tempted to run new rounds, the current software isn't designed to play out 1919 style baseball games. Second, we're using only 1919 stats and I believe that just as when you're projecting current ability in baseball, you can't just use one season's worth of stats to estimate what a player's true hidden skill is. This is without even getting into consideration of the fact that those stats were accumulated against different competition, which is the key flaw in the simulation. The Reds actually had a better record that year than the White Sox but many experts at the time felt that the NL competition was much weaker that season than the AL competition. If I recall correctly, I believe we had done 100 simulations of the World Series and ended up with the Reds winning 56 or 57 of them, using only regular season stats as the basis and thus ignoring the errors and other deliberate misplays made by the White Sox in the World Series.
Everything I have read on this issue says that the White Sox started out as heavy favorites but that the odds eventually shifted to favor the Reds before the series started, raising suspicion. The best information I can find says that the White Sox had been favored at 5-1 odds but by the time the series started, the Reds were favored 8-5.
My suspicion here is that the White Sox, no matter how good they really were, were overrated when they were at 5-1. If the best team in baseball currently plays the worst team in baseball, you will rarely get 5-1 odds and I don't believe the NL Champion Cincinnati Reds were the worst team in baseball. Granted, the era was different but I have trouble imagining that fair odds would have believed that any team should be so heavily favored even when you had a longer best of nine series that year.
It's fun to look back at that 1919 Reds roster, which tends to get ignored when historians open their books to the year 1919 because of the more understandably obvious interest in the White Sox roster. The Reds had outfielder Edd Roush as the only future Hall of Famer to come off that roster but they scored 577 runs and allowed just 401, winning the NL by 9 games with the third place Cubs finishing an amazing 21 games back.
Anyway, as I said, I won't make a single conclusion about the 1919 White Sox based on a very crude simulation but I will float the possibility that maybe - and I mean just maybe - the 1919 Cincinnati Reds haven't gotten their due in history because of the scandal.
We just saw a report from the San Francisco Chronicle that the LA Dodgers have picked up Esteban Loaiza off waivers from Oakland. This is the kind of example I was talking about weeks ago when I mentioned the old San Diego claim of Randy Myers years back. The Dodgers apparently have claimed Loaiza and Oakland didn't pull him back off waivers, meaning the Dodgers will now assume Loaiza's contract and the $7 million plus he would have been paid in 2008. With the recent addition of David Wells and now Loaiza, the Dodgers are clearly scrambling for starting pitching options for the final month of the season.
It appears B.J. Upton's permanent future will be as a center fielder, though he'll maintain infielder eligibility into next season because of how often he's played there this year. Long-time readers of our BNRA E-books will probably not be surprised by this. I had been lucky enough to guess or speculate back in the end of 2005 edition that I thought Upton's future would be as a center fielder or left fielder and it now appears this move has taken place. I like center field for Upton. It takes advantage of his range and speed but at a position where he's going to make far fewer errors.
Upton's future is somewhat tied to the ongoing uncertainty surrounding Rocco Baldelli, who continues to be out with an injured hamstring. Be warned that even in what now seems to be an unlikely return to the lineup, Baldelli would likely be on the bench when/if he's activated. One scary report I saw floating across Rotowire's news reports in the past twenty-four hours (quoting a report by Baseball Prospectus) was that Baldelli had even been considering retirement. I'll be very surprised now if he makes it back to the majors this year - and there are reports on the Internet that it's already official that he'll be shut down - I'm prepared to remove what little was left of his forecast.
As the year winds down, I'm getting to more obscure questions that have floated into my inbox at some point, things that didn't require immediate response but I had flagged as interesting and worth revisiting. At some point this season, a reader who had just watched the excellent movie "Eight Men Out" had wondered about the 1919 Chicago White Sox and how they would have done against the Cincinnati Reds if the 1919 World Series had been on the level. I actually ran high speed simulations of this match-up back in the early 1990s and while I don't still have the details, I recall telling readers that surprisingly, when you use the actual 1919 stats as the basis for the simulations, the 1919 Cincinnati Reds kept coming out as series winners, at least more than half the time.
I don't pretend to make any sort of conclusion about what those simulations meant. First, we did the simulations when the software was relatively new and while I'd be tempted to run new rounds, the current software isn't designed to play out 1919 style baseball games. Second, we're using only 1919 stats and I believe that just as when you're projecting current ability in baseball, you can't just use one season's worth of stats to estimate what a player's true hidden skill is. This is without even getting into consideration of the fact that those stats were accumulated against different competition, which is the key flaw in the simulation. The Reds actually had a better record that year than the White Sox but many experts at the time felt that the NL competition was much weaker that season than the AL competition. If I recall correctly, I believe we had done 100 simulations of the World Series and ended up with the Reds winning 56 or 57 of them, using only regular season stats as the basis and thus ignoring the errors and other deliberate misplays made by the White Sox in the World Series.
Everything I have read on this issue says that the White Sox started out as heavy favorites but that the odds eventually shifted to favor the Reds before the series started, raising suspicion. The best information I can find says that the White Sox had been favored at 5-1 odds but by the time the series started, the Reds were favored 8-5.
My suspicion here is that the White Sox, no matter how good they really were, were overrated when they were at 5-1. If the best team in baseball currently plays the worst team in baseball, you will rarely get 5-1 odds and I don't believe the NL Champion Cincinnati Reds were the worst team in baseball. Granted, the era was different but I have trouble imagining that fair odds would have believed that any team should be so heavily favored even when you had a longer best of nine series that year.
It's fun to look back at that 1919 Reds roster, which tends to get ignored when historians open their books to the year 1919 because of the more understandably obvious interest in the White Sox roster. The Reds had outfielder Edd Roush as the only future Hall of Famer to come off that roster but they scored 577 runs and allowed just 401, winning the NL by 9 games with the third place Cubs finishing an amazing 21 games back.
Anyway, as I said, I won't make a single conclusion about the 1919 White Sox based on a very crude simulation but I will float the possibility that maybe - and I mean just maybe - the 1919 Cincinnati Reds haven't gotten their due in history because of the scandal.
posted by David Luciani at
3:35 PM
