Archive for February, 2010

I’m TheRuckus. *shing…sparkle sparkle*

At least in the early going, you may not see as many posts from me as the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or Musketeers, or Amigos, or whatever the hell we’re going to end up calling ourselves. One reason is that I’m getting ready to move several hundred miles. The other is that I already maintain a delightful little non-baseball blog by the name of Bullsnark! If you like to see stupid people get ripped a new asshole, or you find yourself especially fond of my impeccable way with words, go ahead and check it out.

Among the stuff I’ve got planned is a comprehensive review of Ruben Amaro, Jr. ‘s tenure as general manager to this point. That’s probably going to end up a series, both because it figures to be long and detailed, and to make it look like I’m contributing more to LD than I actually am. Spoiler alert: I am a harsher critic than most regarding Amaro.

I’m not going to throw the dizzying array of statistical analysis at you that The A Team will – because he is way, way more of a nerd than I will ever be – but I am very much sabermetrically-inclined, and it’s rare that he and I aren’t on the same page. I just prefer to leaven the numbers a bit with acerbic wit. Think Fire Joe Morgan, with less talent. (Cut me some slack, those dudes are actually getting paid to write in Hollywood.) Don’t be surprised to see me emulate that basic style a few times, when one of our many God-awful beat writers lays a traditionalist turd in the sports pages. I’m placing the over/under on time into the season before Bill Conlin says something dumb at an inning and a third, and taking the under.

To me, using sabermetrics is less about crunching numbers or running computer simulations in my mother’s basement than simple common sense. Of course a hitter has no control over how many guys are on base when he comes to the plate. Of course you should use your best reliever when you’re clinging to a one-run lead and the bases are juiced, rather than with a three-run lead to start the ninth. Of course batting average is a terrible way to evaluate offensive production because it pretends a single is equal to a home run, and that walks don’t exist. So, while I’ll throw stuff like wOBA and FIP out there with regularity, I’m not going to be busting out leverage charts or regression lines.

I will, however, contribute to the hallowed LONG DRIVE tradition of remarkably shitty MS Paint work. And, in the end, is that not what man has dreamt of since first he looked up at the stars? (A million e-points to whoever gets that reference.)

We’ve almost made it though the horror that is the off-season. As Phillies fans, we’ve been blessed with a productive winter: We’ve swapped Cy Young winners, resigned some of our biggest names while some of our dear friends moved away. Our boys got got hitched, dropped some pounds, and we have some new faces wearing red pinstripes for the first time. One thing that’s for sure that if you’re anything like me is that the whole ordeal was absolute torture. I spent the entire time mashing F5 on my keyboard refreshing my browser on all of my favorite blogs trying to devour any scrap of news related to Our Heroes as fast as possible.

One of many, many, many books I've never read.

But, unlike you, I’ve been keeping track of all that’s being said. I’ve spent countless hours this offseason combing through every Phillies blog seeing who’s being talked about and what’s being said. My electric bill has been sky high as the rack of specialized servers in my apartment combed through the internet picking out data pertaining to the each individual player on the team. I’ve hired a team of interns from my alma mater Shippensburg University to compile this data into complex databases that software engineers put together for me at a cost that is absolutely staggering. (Chris, thanks in advance for approving this expense report. Also, I didn’t graduate from Ship so much as I was kicked out but I don’t know a fancy Latin term for that so… GO RED RAIDERS!)

The result of all of this work is that I can empirically prove which member of the Philadelphia Phillies won the offseason, and the result may surprise you.

Before I post the results let me tell you about the process I (actually) used to gather the data. Google has refined their search engine to a point where it allows for some really specific results. I searched each member of the team by their name (in quotes) and Phillies to cut down on irregularities like results for Ryan Howard from The Office and an author by the name of Carlos Ruiz Zafón. That result was then narrowed down to results created between November 4^th and February 4^nd. Finally, those results were limited to only blog posts. Google then displayed the total number of results rounded to the nearest ten (Unless there were less than a hundred, when the exact total was reported.)

However, simply saying who got the most mentions wasn’t enough for me. They had to be weighted somehow. I needed to put a value to each mention, because not each mention is equal. Of course Roy Halladay is going to be talked about almost constantly… isn’t that part of the reason he got so much money? So I took the number of mentions for each player this off-season and their 2010 salary (big ups to Cot’s Baseball Contracts) and made myself some statistics: Read the rest of this entry »

Long ago when I set out to move LONG DRIVE to self hosting so I could do more with it I had no idea it would take this long to get started. Now that it is good to go, mostly, you can expect new content on a daily basis.

There will be some fresh faces around these parts now that the site is back up. So please welcome The A Team, who will throw so much advanced statistical analysis your way you may void your bowels, TheRuckus, and Ryan Edmund who you may know on Twitter as @petzrawr.

You can still expect the same LONG DRIVE had to offer before, which consisted mostly of me calling people douche bags, game recaps, really bad mspaint work, and hating of the Mets. So check back regularly and enjoy bitches.