Friday Grab Bag

Good morning, Fackers. I hope Brain Hoch is right and the Yankees are in fact picking up their bats when they come back to New York.

Ben Kabak from River Ave. Blues made an appearance on the Bloomberg Sports podcast to talk about the site, along with the minor league system, Austin Jackson, Joba's ceiling and more. It's about 15 minutes long and quite enjoyable. LISTEN TO IT.

Mike from The Yankeeist ties a bow around his trip to Detroit.

Is an article with effusive praise for Phil Hughes enough to get you to read Mike Lupica? Nah, probably not...

But over at the WSJ, Scott Cacciola wrote a nice feature on Hughes and some of the things that have helped him be successful this year. Greg Fertel from Pending Pinstripes gets more specific, looking at Hughes' fantastic fastball.

On the same day that Matt from TYU suggested another way to look at how effective pitchers are (runs per 100 pitches), Beyond the Box Score ranked the best pitchers of all time according to Wins Above Replacement per 200 innings pitched. Can you guess the best starter and reliever? Massive hint: both were in the World Series last year.

When you combine all five teams' records, the AL East is 16 games over .500 this year, best in the league by 7 games. Sean Forman at the Bats Blog looks at how the balance of power has shifted to different divisions in recent years.

Mike Ashmore, who does an excellent job of covering the Trenton Thunder, wrote an excellent piece about Alan Horne beginning to recover from the surgery that sought to repair an 80% tear in his rotator cuff. He's receiving Platelet-Rich Plasma treatments and hopes that they will help him heal more fully. Horne is 27 and no longer a prospect, but there are plenty of guys who don't make their Major League debut until they are in their late 20's or 30's and can still have good careers.

When they weren't totally nicking our hooks, Bronx Banter had two excellent interviews this week - one with Dayn Perry and one with Josh Wilker - about their upcoming books.

What do Jonah Keri and Marlo Stanfield have in common? Their names both ring out in the streets. Except I don't think Jonah had to hand out money for it to happen.

The 193 acre farm that contains the Field of Dreams is up for sale. Here are the particulars of the property.

The Sports Hernia comes up with a worthy sequel to my favorite SH post ever.

Craig Calcaterra doesn't use too many tags, but when he does, they are downright awesome.

I'm with Bengie Molina here and I think it's excellent that athletes can use blogging to defend themselves against other, larger forms of media. This is the first post of Molina's I've read and while he's not quite Morgan Ensberg on the keyboard, he did a great job of making his point and staying on the high road, something that's not easy to do if you feel you've been offended personally.

They ah makin' it hah-dah to pahk you-ah cah around Fenway Pahk. WHAT THE FACK!?1/!

I don't listen to WFAN so I had no idea about former New York Football Giant Brad Bensen's ridiculous radio ads until this post on Deadspin highlighted them.

Can someone tell Will Leitch to cinch up his tie?

Now that his daughters are watching the show religiously, Joe Posnanski breaks out a bunch of obscure facts about Gilligan's Island. The show was obviously way before my time but I used to get up early when I was in grade school and watch the reruns before the bus picked me up. The episodes are all pretty much self-contained and the only thing you have to know going is conveyed to you by the theme song. It's right up there with Scooby Doo and House as the most formulaic television show of all time, but when you're 9 years old that only serves to make it easier to understand and enjoy.

And finally, here is a video of an octopus killing a shark. To be fair, Spiny Dogfish Sharks aren't exactly the kings of the ocean and the Giant Pacific Octopus is rather massive, but it's still pretty crazy to watch. The narrator almost ruins it so I suggest that you mute it and skip to the 1:30 mark.

The WSJ's New & Unconventional Take On Beat Writers

Via Baseball Think Factory, the Wall Street Journal is adding a fleet of so-called beat reporters to cover the major New York sports teams.

The Journal’s New York sports section will assign beat reporters to the major local sports teams, including the Mets, Yankees, Jets, Giants and the Knicks, sources said. They’ll be credentialed for home games, and they’ll travel to road games.

However, they won't be functioning like regular beat writers:

Sources familiar with the plans said that The Journal will not be covering games in the way that, say, the tabloids do. Instead of rehashing what happened the night before, the Journal sportswriters will be looking for news features and interesting stories from within the locker room.

That would, of course, fit it nicely in competition with — who else? — The Times.

Whereas the News and the Post continue to cover games as if it were 1998—and God bless them for it!—The Times has changed its focus over the past year. Tom Jolly, The Times’ sports editor, has put more of an emphasis on features and trend stories rather than demanding that beat reporters stay with a team every waking moment.

To their credit, the WSJ is providing their staff with the same level of access to the team as other papers, but not the same burdens of reporting every bit of the day-to-day minutiae.

There are a lot of guys on the Yankee beat right now. Fewer than there were, but probably more than there need to be. Not to say that any individual paper should discontinue its daily coverage, but if you read multiple beat writer's blogs, there is a tremendous amount of overlap between them*.

*For instance, the news Chad Gaudin being unconditionally released this morning first came from this tweet from Marc Carig of the Star-Ledger. Soon after, Brian Hoch reported the same thing on Twitter, as did Mark Feinsand. Within a half hour, MLB Trade Rumors was linking back to Carig, Hoch put up on an article on MLB.com, River Ave. Blues had the news, and Chad Jennings was reporting Gaudin's departure. About an hour and a half later, an AP story showed up on Carig's blog, Jennings had audio from Gaudin, and within two hours, Craig Calcaterra noted it at NBC Sports.

Essentially, the marginal gains a fan gets from following each additional beat writer are hardly worth the effort of reading them. For even a die-hard fan to read (or just skim) the same things in several different places over and over again seems grossly inefficient, especially when you consider that each individual beat writer is going to pick up the most important bits of information for you soon enough.

While it makes sense for papers that already have beat writers to keep them, it would be foolish for an outlet looking to stick its foot in the door to do so via a traditional beat writer.

Not many media companies could afford to pay someone to travel with a team without the expectation that they will provide thorough day-to-day coverage of it. In the days of fuzzy online revenue streams, it might be difficult to tell whether or not the expenditure is justified. The WSJ, however, is willing to take that chance.

Like Bloomberg Sports, this is another example of a financially-focused company allocating a relatively small amount of resources for a sports-related venture. Each appears to have somewhat limited upside when compared to the company's primary focuses, but both BBG and WSJ seem to be applying the practices that made them successful in other arenas to what they are doing in sports. Bloomberg is providing intuitive software for baseball analysis and the WSJ is offering companion-style reading for New York area teams.

By allowing its writers to stay close to the team but focus on producing news features and more substantial analytical pieces, The Journal has created a position with the daily access of a beat writer but the writing requirements of a columnist. By going for exclusive, high quality stories they are aiming for the kind of content that might be of interest to those who aren't fans of the specific team they cover. It seems like a best-of-both-worlds type of arrangement, but it will be up to each writer to deliver top notch content and validate those theories.

The Journal has been producing quality sports content for a while, but they have it stashed away two clicks removed from the homepage under the Life & Style tab. Now, it would appear, they are making a more serious foray into the New York sports media landscape. And by eschewing the traditional expectations of a beat writer, it seems they are on the right track.

Friday Morning Linkaround

Hang in there, Fackers. There sweet salvation of the weekend has almost arrived. Like yesterday, the the content is going to be fairly slow around here as the reports out of this stage of Spring Training aren't worth extrapolating upon and Matt and I are held up with the tedious obligations which actually provide us with monetary compensation. The best we can do is direct you towards some interesting reading material to hold you over:

Friend of the blog Marc Carig asked Joe Girardi a bunch of questions proposed by his Twitter followers. Carig polished up the best sub-140 character entries into actual queries and did his beat reportedly duty of following them up as well. (You can follow the Star-Ledger scribe on his personal Twitter account or with the paper. Or as I do, tag along with both.)

He doesn't go out of his way to publicize it or post on it very often, but Craig Calcaterra keeps a personal blog. Yesterday, inspired by the receipt of his Spring Training itinerary, he recalled his many unsuccessful attempts to have an enjoyable trip to Florida in the past.

Larry from Wezen-Ball used his uncanny powers of research to dig up some features from LIFE Magazine on Spring Training. The Wezenmaster also discovered, as we did last year, the bounty of Spring Training photos in the LIFE Photo Archive on Google, where we shamelessly sampled the banner of the site from. Poke around there and you'll find gems like the one at the top of the post.

Sorry Joe McCarthy, Joe Torre and Billy Martin. Rob Neyer could only find room for one former Yankee manager on Managerial Mount Rushmore. (I'm not counting John McGraw who managed the franchise for the first two seasons when they were still in Baltimore and called the Orioles before bolting to the New York Giants.)

The Bloomberg Sports Blog, headed by the esteemed Jonah Keri, is now up and running. It should be an excellent resource for fantasy geeks and statheads alike.

Jeremy Greenhouse of Baseball Analysts put the "Verducci Effect" under a scientific microscope and guess what... It doesn't pass the P-Value test.

In the Journal News, Chad Jennings notes that Yankee starters will begin their throwing schedule slightly later than normal due to the additional innings they tossed in the postseason.

Ben Shpigel profiled Andrew Brackman today in the New York Times.

The Sports Herina mined photo gold from Yankees camp.

Brew Crew Ball created a Mad Lib of sorts with which you can concoct your own passe Spring Training storylines. As Craig says, "It actually works pretty well. So well in fact that I wouldn't be surprised if the beat writer's guild has called an emergency meeting to see which of them was supposed to be on duty when the secret formula was stolen."

Alex Remington at Big League Stew compares Jonathan Papelbon's career thus far to Mariano Rivera's and concludes that they aren't as far apart as we so boldly stated on Wednesday.

Groundhog Day: Wintertime Blues

Good morning Fackers. We're coming to you a little earlier than usual this morning, with this publishing at 7:00 AM. Twenty six minutes from now, the sun will rise in western Pennsylvania, bringing daylight to the tiny town of Punxsutawney. Shortly thereafter, some quack wearing a tuxedo and top hat will hold a glorified rodent aloft, and it will magically determine whether or not winter will last for another six weeks.

If that furball sees his shadow, I'm gonna be pissed. I've had enough of winter and cannot wait for baseball to start. So I'm not putting my faith in any groundhog today. As we will remind you later on, it's just fifteen days until pitchers and catchers report. And you can't have Spring Training if it's still winter. So shadow or no shadow, winter ends in two weeks and one day. And I couldn't be happier about that.

And if Punxsutawney Phil doesn't tell us what we want to hear, perhaps Staten Island Chuck will have better news for us. At the very least, Chuck should have the decency not to bite the mayor this year; his company has developed some pretty sweet baseball analytics software. On the other hand, if Bloomberg doesn't eventually offer the general public some version of the pro software, I say chomp away Chuck.

Well, it's the same old drill,
About Punxsutawney Phil,
If he's sees his own shadow,
I'm shootin' to kill.

Come on over baby,
I stand accused,
There's a man going crazy up here,
With the wintertime blues.

Baseball Braces For Bloomberg

For about four hours yesterday, a good portion of the baseball blogoshpere gathered at the Bloomberg headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. Many went through the painful process of putting on pants, emerging from their mother's basements and commuting to New York City in exchange for an up close and personal tour of Bloomberg's new baseball software, along with lunch, beverages, some especially delicious frosted peanut butter brownies and an awesome shirt.

Even those of us who don't work in finance were familiar with Bloomberg's capabilities in data gathering, organization and visualization and were anxious to see how they had applied it to baseball. The company is offering two separate products, one aimed towards fantasy baseball players and the other designed specifically for and in partnership with the teams in the MLB. The demonstration of the fantasy version came first.

Within the fantasy product, there are two main incarnations of the program, available for purchase separately. The first is the draft kit, in which you can enter the specifications of your league regardless of where it is hosted (CBS, ESPN, Yahoo, etc).

Bloomberg's system revolves around a proprietary B-Rank based on a 5x5 league, which the presenters disclosed next to nothing about. I understand reasons for the secrecy, but I think users might find this off-putting in contrast to the availability of data throughout the rest of the software. It's tough to get a someone with a sabermetric slat to put their faith behind a metric whose methodology is purposely concealed.

Beyond the B-Rank though, you can search for and prioritize players by any statistical category (and by multiple categories at once) to ensure you have a balanced roster. Conveiently, Bloomberg has already computed player's eligibility by position to save you that headache. With your subscription, you have access to a player's average draft position in relation to their projected production, providing a simple visual representation of their value among many, many, many other intuitive features and comparisons. If you take your fantasy draft preparation seriously, the biggest limitation of the utility of the software is the amount of time you want to put into it.

Similar to the draft tracker, the in-season version of the Bloomberg software offers an impressive depth of information and is very customizable. They don't have historical or minor league stats available yet, but those are included in the professional suite and could be added in the future. The in-season version will be the most useful to this site and you will likely see some of the Bloomberg visualizations in our posts once the software debuts on February 18th.

The draft kit is being offered for $19.95, the in-season tools for $24.95 and both of them together will set you back $31.95.

The professional level software was what was most tantalizing to most of us bloggers in attendance. With a less colorful and more data-heavy layout, I could imagine spending days on end poking through the spray charts, pitch predictors and countless other tools that were offered. The teams are being given a free trial which started at the Winter Meetings and extends through the All-Star break, during which time Bloomberg has been and will be making every effort to customize the software and give the teams exactly what they want.

One of the underlying themes Bloomberg bent over backwards to convey was that what we were looking at on the 7th floor of 731 Lexington Ave. yesterday was just the beginning. They welcomed and encouraged - and might have even demanded - our input and suggestions were that socially acceptable.

To a company like Bloomberg, the market for baseball information is pretty limited. The financial firm employs over 10,000 people and has 126 offices around the world, so their entrée into the world of sports statistics and information isn't likely to significantly affect their bottom line, even if their software becomes ubiquitous among teams, fantasy baseball players and bloggers alike. But they seem committed to constant improvement of the technology nonetheless.

What was most encouraging about yesterday's presentation was that Bloomberg seemed to embrace the sabermetric ideal, even though they had arrived there from a financial background. They aren't attempting to give people the answers they are looking for, they just want to give them the information to come to their own conclusions. Through it all, there was a notion of humility and the desire to improve the product in every way possible and that bodes well for the future of the software.

Self-Promotion Alert

None of this is new or earth-shattering, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I'm in the batter's box over at LoHud this morning with a distilled version of the post I wrote about Javier Vazquez's clutch ability a while back.

Also, we were listed in Big League Stew's Yankees blogbook. Check that out, not so much for our part, but for the other excellent Yanks' blogs that are listed.

And finally, Matt and I will be attending an event for the launch of Bloomberg's baseball software at their headquarters in Manhattan. There will be some some tweets emanating from the event under the hashtag #BBGSports, and I can promise a post on what we learned at some point in the near future.