Archive for March 5th, 2010

So, I’m not really sure where I fit into the whole scheme of things around here.  Chris has his douchebaggery, A-Team has his statistics to make sweet sweet animal love to, and Ruckus has the common sense.  I’m part Kenny Mayne, part George Carlin, and part Screamin’ A (only the cheese doodle part).  Whatever seems to be on my mind, I’ll be posting it in Reader’s Digest fashion.  Short enough to not bore you all to death, but long enough to match the size of my… never mind.  (insert penis size joke here)

I figured before I hit the uncertain “real world” that lies ahead of me post-graduation (a lot of good these two Sport Management and Communication degrees will do me), I’d have a few yuks with a couple of e-friends from the Phillies forum world.  We’ve never met in real life (outside of Ruckus and I attending our first Phillies game on the SAME DAY – July 5th, 1995, Phillies v. Padres), so thankfully I don’t have to send these clowns Christmas cards.

So here it is… one more thing that my girlfriend will officially hate me for.  Add it to the growing list of things including my unmanly 2004 Honda Civic that has LED lights under the seats, quoting movies, baseball sim leagues, farting, and man-boobs.  I’m working on that last part.  Don’t want to look like Todd Coffey and his DD’s.

Tits

And finally:  Mets suck.  That is all.

Shortly after our glorious World Series victory, Pat Gillick stepped down as general manager and was replaced by Ruben Amaro. There was, understandably, some trepidation among discerning Phillies fans. Not only did this lead to long-time assistant GM and respected scouting guru Mike Arbuckle leaving the organization, but Amaro was initially under the tutelage of Ed Wade, who was by all accounts a big, stupid doo-doo head. With a season and two winters under his belt, there’s enough activity to fairly evaluate his work up to this point, and draw some conclusions about the kind of GM he is.

Today, I’ll be looking at how Amaro has handled arbitration, contract extensions, and re-signings. Going forward, my intention is to objectively evaluate Amaro’s decisions without relying on the gift of hindsight; that is to say, I’m attempting to judge the merits of transactions based on what was known at the time. It would hardly be fair to expect Amaro to know the future, after all. Analysis after the jump…

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Some of you may have already read my introduction the last time Long Drive briefly opened its doors to the public.  For those of you that didn’t, rejoice! for this version is about 53% more readable.  I’m The A Team, check out my theme song and trailer.

I’ve been brought aboard mostly for my familiarity with advanced statistics and scathing indictments of the Mets.  Being a first hand witness of Omar Minaya’s bungling of a second in-division foe has been a truly rewarding experience made all the richer by the play-by-play of The Contest.  But in all seriousness, my job isn’t to be resident Mets basher.  I think Chris can handle that just fine.

I’m here to talk stats, analyze trades, ruminate on the virtues of our various prospects, second guess management, and keep up with the latest hype.  I’m really mostly here to do that first thing.  When doing analysis at Long Drive, we’re going to be using a suite of stats that the casual fan will be unfamiliar with.  I will be trying my damnedest to explain why context adjusted statistics are more useful than the standard crap on the back of a baseball card without putting you to sleep.  Along this line of thought, I will be starting a roughly weekly “primer” series on helpful stats.  I put primer in quotes because these articles will be intentionally light on math and therefore not very primer-ish.  I do this for three reasons.  First, being a liberal arts grad, my own math chops aren’t really up to snuff when it comes to doing my own analysis.  I can import an excel document into Stata and run an ordinary least squares regression on it, and that’s about the extent of my ability.  I’m not even sure why someone would do that for baseball…  Second, I’m aware of my audience.  Chris’ claim to fame is calling people douchebags.  I can’t compete with that by discussing the various subtleties of different compilations of Wins Above Replacement.  Third and perhaps most important, all this shit has been done already by people with major sabermetric chops.  Why do a poor job re-writing someone else’s work when I can link to it, pop in a quote or two, and relate it back to something relevant to us Phillies fans.

(you should click that read more button!)
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For the first Douche of the Day in quite a long time I had to go with the ultimate set of douches that are the New York Yankees. This bunch of rag tag douche bags deserve to be smacked around and banned from baseball. Please all of you go away you incredible douche bags.

That felt good.

OK so we have put up what we have so far of the blog design so that we can post while it’s still being worked on. So what you see here will probably be changing around a lot over the next week before it is finally finished. Anyway, we will post as normal from here on out. All the simple things like comments and everything else should be working. The Facebook and Twitter buttons both go to Twitter right now but if you want to be come a fan on Facebook click here.