I have to think that lowers his value.

And don’t underrate him – he sold off Haren and that pushed his way into contention somehow. Beane does not sell or buy, he just deals.

Seriously. If you think ESPN overlooks everything in the Central time zone (or just outside the Boston/NY markets) you should live out here!

Though it was cool seeing the Brewers get some headlines over the past couple of days.

However, lets wait until the deadline for this one when JJ will be back to his normal self.

Assuming the Cubs and Brewers are in a dead heat at the end of the season, how would you like to see CC Sabathia pitching against the Cubs in the (regular) season-ending series?

Hardy is an offensive mystery. Power hitter? Hits for average? Both? Neither? In tonight’s game, he’ll probably go out and swipe three bases.

has the Brewers win probability for tonight at 1000%.

They had t-shirts with that all over the place.

cool article from wang. i’ll just go ahead and break from my normal posting patterns and point out some disagreements…

1) the upgrade from the back of the bullpen (wang uses Choate(?)) to McClung can’t possibly be worth 0.6 wins, i mean it could end up being worth that, but 0.6 wins is not a median projection. I mean you’re talking about, what, maybe at the very high end 40 innnings of low, low leverage pitching… a safer wager would be 0.0 wins, i’m comfortable calling it 0.25.

2) he’s got the odds of the brewers reaching the postseason going from 23% (?!) to 51%, pecota adjusted post season odds, as dixieflatline points out, already has them at 55%, i feel much more comfortable with a 10% bump. Using the 35 million dollar figure (love that, and would love to see the BP article about this), that makes the increased playoff odds worth 3.5 million, not the 9.8 that wang has.

3) he’s got LaPorta’s value at 23.5 million, and he uses a pretty cool method to determine that value, see the linked article. the problem with the method, however, is that it averages a group of prospects together, so you’re using guys who are not very projectable (like high school pitchers) as part of your method to evaluate one of the most projectable commodities, a college slugger with a pretty good walk rate. a better method would actually create a projection for laporta. using jeff’s minor league equivalency calculator we’d get an ML equivalent line based on LaPorta’s AA season of .236/.330/.448. Well, that’s about average for a left fielder. That makes him 2 wins above replacement, which is worth about 9 million dollars a year, or 54 million dollars (unadjusted) over 6 cost controlled years. With a salary of about 16.2 million dollars, that give LaPorta a surplus value of 38.2 million dollars. (Now, the scary part is, there is a tiny chance- the allstar factor- that he hits at the majors the way he has hit in AA, and if that were the case his surplus value would be about 114 million dollars. but try not to imagine that scenario.)

So, using Wang’s surplus value method and adjusting the postseason odds, and the likelihood of success for LaPorta, you can come up with a defensible position that the indians win the deal by 20+ million dollars (a huge win). Most of this difference, i believe, comes in from Wang’s underestimation of his surplus value. He has him projected as a below average ML player.

also, and this gets pretty geeky, i’d like to say, incredible work on the wear pattern chart. the quality of your data display, and your data density have skyrocketted since you started creating these pitch f/x charts.

you’ve got for each pitch, vertical, and horizontal movement, speed, their mean, std, by game, over time. plotted together you are also showing correlation between each of these variables, not only that you can see usage in the chart, gaps for days off, concentrated points for consecutive use.

by my count that is 16+ variables in the chart. phenomenal.

Jeff Passan has a nice piece on Attanasio’s, Melvin’s, and Yost’s reactions to the deal.

It includes this picture:

Does he ever not smile?

He comes down on the side of the Brewers:

On July 31, I might argue that two months of CC Sabathia for six years of Matt LaPorta and some throw-ins is what the market priced him at. The same deal on July 7 means that not enough options were explored. This wasn’t a Godfather offer, and it’s one that absolutely would have been there three weeks from now. Mark Shapiro simply dealt Sabathia too soon, without letting the desperation of his fellow GMs drive up the price and get him a better deal.

The thing is, I’m pretty sure Melvin said that the deal was only this sweet because of the timing, and that if they had to wait until after the ASB to get CC, the price would go down, so it seems like Sheehan doesn’t really have an accurate idea of the market price of Sabathia.

the MiLB.com URL scheme uses “brrrok” as the rookie Brewers’ team abbreviation…that could serve as a pretty good descriptor of their play, too, on most days. :-/