Dear ESPN:

I know that it’s totally cliché to write open letters to you on Weblogs. I mean, I was probably doing it back when I ran TOTK. You know, before I had to shave. [Or before I grew the beard and quit shaving.] Anyway: my beloved Cincinnati Reds have won six straight and eight of ten. They’ve somehow dug out of last place and now are sniffing the division “chase”, which in the NL Central is best defined as “the team least averse to finishing over .500″. Sure, the Reds are 60-70 and maybe only have a 1% chance of winning the division title at this point, but … do you think that you could have found a minute or two to air highlights of their sweep of the Marlins in the one-hour Sunday night Baseball Tonight?

No? Okay. Screw you.

Love,
GFM

Why are we tempted to believe in conspiracy theories? New Scientist has a theory:

So what kind of thought processes contribute to belief in conspiracy theories? A study I carried out in 2002 explored a way of thinking sometimes called “major event - major cause” reasoning. Essentially, people often assume that an event with substantial, significant or wide-ranging consequences is likely to have been caused by something substantial, significant or wide-ranging.

I gave volunteers variations of a newspaper story describing an assassination attempt on a fictitious president. Those who were given the version where the president died were significantly more likely to attribute the event to a conspiracy than those who read the one where the president survived, even though all other aspects of the story were equivalent.

To appreciate why this form of reasoning is seductive, consider the alternative: major events having minor or mundane causes — for example, the assassination of a president by a single, possibly mentally unstable, gunman, or the death of a princess because of a drunk driver. This presents us with a rather chaotic and unpredictable relationship between cause and effect. Instability makes most of us uncomfortable; we prefer to imagine we live in a predictable, safe world, so in a strange way, some conspiracy theories offer us accounts of events that allow us to retain a sense of safety and predictability.

[Emphasis mine.]

Typically, I scoff at conspiracy theories. [For example, I usually want to go all Buzz Aldrin on moon landing fakers. Crap, I shouldn't have said that, because now I'm going to draw wacko comments.] But in preparing this post, I had to consider something: I’m one of the people that has bought into the argument made about baseball’s performance-enhancing drugs problem that there had to be an active ignorance on the part of the caretakers of the game to allow all that stuff to happen. I’m now second-guessing this stance.

[HT: Schneier on Security]

Today, I was watching the Reds when I had this idle thought:

Thinking that Josh Hamilton : 2007 Reds :: Brandon Phillips : 2006 Reds, in terms of forcing himself into the lineup. Move EdE to 1B!!!

In terms of what I’m thinking here, it’s:

1. Install Josh Hamilton as the everyday CF.
2. Move Ryan Freel from CF to 3B.
3. Move Edwin Encarnacion from 3B to 1B.
4. Bench the Jeff Conine / Scott Hatteberg platoon.

Now, I’ve been mulling on that more as the afternoon has worn into the evening [and I finished watching the Reds shut out the Cubbies 1-0], and I think that would work, but:

1. It still has Ryan Freel being an everyday player, and I don’t really think that’s the way for him to be best utilized. I still think he’s best as a super-sub who gets four starts a week while the Reds regularly rest Junior, Dunn, Encarnacion, and Hamilton.
2. It puts Freel, whose game is hustling and being a pest, at what is a prime power position in MLB. Granted, individual lineup construction on a per-team basis can overlook things like this, especially when you have an outfield of mashers like Dunn, Hamilton, and Griffey. [They're everything that D-G-Kearns was supposed to be, without all of Austin's injuries.] But it’s still sub-optimal, even when there’s prior art in terms of Tony Phillips and [more recently] Chone Figgins.
3. It takes an infield liability at 3B [Encarnacion] and shifts him to 1B, where he’s not really guaranteed to be much better.

So then I had this thought:

1. Install Hamilton as the everyday LF.
2. Move Dunn to 1B.

I love the Big Donkey. I’ve had an Adam Dunn batting practice jersey since his first full season in the bigs. I gave him a break when he sulked after Kearnsie was traded last year. [Hey, I was sulking, too, because ... who trades two lineup regulars for two relievers and a couple of spare parts, even when those regulars are Kearns and Lopez, guys unlikely to make you really regret the trade in the future?] But as much as I’ve lamented his OF defense in the past, I think he’s improving now, and I wonder how badly he would react to an in-season move to 1B. I think it’s his eventual position—allowing him and Brook Jacoby to focus on his hitting—but I think that he’s the kind of player that can really use an offseason of learning how to move around the bag. I think that Dunn could be the kind of 1B that Derrek Lee is if he put the time and energy into it—he is certainly athletic enough, and working on footwork should be a natural for a former QB—but I think that he needs an offseason to do that.

Yes, yes, there’s Joey Votto to be concerned about down in AAA. Votto may be a stud, but … crap. Hamilton has essentially missed four years of baseball while dealing with his demons, never had played above AA until this season, and is mashing like he’s … well, the #1 pick he was coming out of HS. There’s small sample size to be concerned with—I’m judging his performance on spring training and two weeks in the bigs—but I have this nagging feeling that Hamilton is here to stay. I also think that he deserves the full-season trial to prove that, too. To really get a fair shake—as Phillips got last year—he needs to be in the lineup all the time. That’s going to mean rearranging the deck chairs, and that puts someone over at 1B to displace the platoon and relieve the crowding in the outfield.

Hey, who wants Hatteberg and Conine for a fourth OF who’s a fly-catcher? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

With the Reds’ loss to San Diego today, I’m officially giving up on the team’s chances. As such, I have performed my ritual deletion of my Baseball Tonight season pass. Rotowire will be enough for me to keep an eye on the little bit of interest I have in baseball [read: my roto team], but even there, my team has faded just like the real guys on the field. I must say, though; this is the latest I’ve ever canned a BBTN Season Pass.

The good news? The Bengals are 1-0 and look pretty good. I’ll have something to tide me over until UAH’s home hockey season starts. [36 days. Yes, I'm twitching in anticipation.]

This story about what major league baseball players pack in their suitcase has to be one of the stranger things I’ve read in a major media outlet.

Shawn Green brings his own soap on every road trip. Mike Cameron never forgets his lavender linen spray and orange-scented spray for the room. Ichiro Suzuki depends on an electric massager that takes up nearly half his suitcase.

And then there’s Detroit closer Todd Jones, who wears only one pair of underwear when the Tigers leave town.

“I don’t pack any underwear,” he said. “I wear it into the park, it gets washed every day and I wear it out of the park. I guess that’s weird. I’m not proud of it, but I’m cutting down on space.”

If Jones was proud of it, I bet he’s not now!

Bowden heists two everyday Reds for pair of relievers, bag of balls, and the rotting corpse of Royce Clayton.

Wayne Krivsky gets a contract extension, and then he pulls this shit?! [And yes, Alex, you know that I'm far more pissed off about Lopez than I am Kearns. We've talked about their relative merits, and you know that I think Lopez is the next Barry Larkin.]

Dear Dan O’Brien:

Yes, you deserved to be fired for the sheer stupidity of the Eric Milton signing alone. Good luck finding a new job, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Love,
Geof

Dear Dan O’Brien:

Yes, you deserved to be fired for the sheer stupidity of the Eric Milton signing alone. Good luck finding a new job, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Love,
Geof

Hallelujah! My beloved Cincinnati Reds have traded Sean Casey to his hometown team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, for a quality left-handed starter in Dave Williams.

As much as I like Sean, he was barely an average 1B on both sides of the ball, and certainly not worth what the Reds were paying him to be “The Mayor”. Sean’s a great guy and a clubhouse leader, but the Reds had four MLB-caliber outfielders and only three positions to fill. Moving Casey allows the Reds to install Adam Dunn at 1B, which should be a good move—he’s good around the bag, is 6′6″, and mashes like nobody’s business.

Good move by the Reds.

On the Rumor Forum this morning, someone asked: “[John Smoltz] currently has 167 career wins and 154 saves. Does the split roles affect him one way or the other? Does he need a magical number like 200 wins?”

I replied that I hated team-dependent counting stats; the discussion went forth from there, so I broke out some statistics:

(more…)

It’s been seventy years since the Cincinnati Reds brought night games to Major League Baseball.

Suck it, Cubbies.

Bye bye, Danny. You’ve been … DFA’d.

Funny thing is, when the Reds cut bait with D’Angelo Jimenez last week, the guy most featured in an interview with the Enquirer? Danny Graves.

I love that Carl Lindner has gotten the concept of sunk costs. At this point, there’s really only two Reds that could credibly never see this axe: Junior Griffey and Sean Casey, the former because he’s a Hall of Fame talent and the latter because he’s such a fan favorite. Thankfully, Adam Dunn won’t see this treatment because he’s wailing away at every at-bat, as his homer and strikeout totals show.

Kudos to you, Carl. Next year, though, don’t let your GM sign fly-ball pitchers in a ballpark that pads homer stats but depresses run scoring on balls that don’t leave the ballpark, eh?

I’ve spent the last couple of days ripping through Will Carroll’s two most influential books to date: Saving the Pitcher and The Juice.

StP was a good overview of how pitching injuries could be minimized—he argues eliminated—by implementing proper techniques. It’s a great starter book if you’ve got a kid who pitches or wants to pitch, if you’re a coach on the youth or high school levels, or if you’re a young pitcher yourself. If you’re a fan as I am, it can be a bit slow to slog through, because we’re not worried so much about the ideas to be applied as we are the things to look for in pitchers that we watch. Carroll notes that it’s difficult to undertake the task of writing about this topic, because it’s something that clearly lends itself to video. I would have strongly pushed for a CD-ROM to accompany this book; future work by Carroll on this subject fairly well demands it.

The Juice was interesting because it takes a relatively dispassionate view of performance-enhanced drugs (PEDs): their effects, side-effects, composition, production, use, and abuse. Before I say this, let me be clear that this is not Carroll’s position—but I came away with the feeling that it’s fruitless to attempt to ban performance enhancing drugs, and that it makes far more sense to legalize and stringently monitor them. That’s bound to be a damn unpopular conclusion to draw, but I’d ask that you read the book from cover to cover before you fly off the handle with a comment.

Back in March, I predicted that the Yankees would miss the playoffs. This surprised many on the Rumor Forum. I didn’t expect what’s happened, though.

Is history against the Yankees? Absolutely. They’re 11-18: from 1930-1999 [excepting 1981 and 1994, the strike years], teams starting 12-18 made the playoffs 1.8% of the time; teams starting 11-19 made it 1.5% of the time.

I don’t bet on sports, but if I did …

Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus has devised a thought experiment to try and see if there’s a discernible effect from a population of baseball players taking steroids. His result: nothing that’s notable, really.

If you’ve never taken a statistics course in your life, you’ll want to know this: the standard deviation is the measure of how far away from the average, on average, the data lies. Like, we know that the average U.S. male is five-foot-nine; a standard deviation of this value [probably three inches] would tell you, on average, how far a random person is likely to vary from that value. You can think of it as the fudge factor, the same kind of stuff you see in polling [52% ± 3%], if you want. [It's not really the same thing, but it's close enough for my concerns.]

And people wonder why I really don’t get all that excited about the whole performance-enhancing-drugs-in-baseball thing; honestly, it’s not much different than scuffing a ball or corking a bat. Of course, it’s a lot more expensive and potentially a lot riskier to your health, but the net effect just isn’t that big.