My latest post at TechGraphs details all of your numerous options for seeing and hearing (at the same time!) tonight’s college football national championship game, which kicks off at 8:30 pm Eastern. Long live the Megacast!
The full post is available here.
After a disappointing 2015 season, which included some odd maneuvering at the trade deadline, the Detroit Tigers entered the offseason with a significant to-do list. They’ve already made acquisitions designed to address needs in the bullpen and starting pitching rotation, but, with three months until opening day, the team still has one major hole to fill. Continue reading
My latest post for TechGraphs outlines your options for watching and listening to the “New Year’s Six” bowls– the Peach, Orange, Cotton, Fiesta, Rose, and Sugar Bowls– taking place today and tomorrow. The Peach Bowl kicks off momentarily, with the two playoff semifinal games following this evening.
Go Green!
The full post is available here.
“The logic of the opt-out clauses for the club escapes me.” —Commissioner Rob Manfred
Nothing gets the baseball internet writer hot like a newly popularized contract structure. Rob Neyer has weighed in on the potential benefit to team of a player opt-out, and Dave Cameron has weighed in on how these cannot be seen as anything but additional costs. Neyer’s point is that giving a player an opt-out is often preferable to giving a player more money. Cameron’s point is that giving a player an opt-out is less preferable than not giving a player an opt-out. Both points are correct. Like most things, if we change the perspective, then we can look at anything as a positive or a negative. More simply, everything is better than a worse scenario and everything is worse than a better scenario.
So why the need for another article? Because unaddressed remains the most curious question about the player option: Why has it become so popular? Put differently, what benefit does the structure provide for each side as an alternative (in most mega-deals) to just agreeing on more money? … Read More
(via Baseball Prospectus)
In early November, after the Detroit Lions dumped their offensive coordinator, general manager, and team president, I wrote that people using those events as an opportunity to suggest that the team would be better off without Matt Stafford were wrong.
Those moves seemed to spark new life into the scuffling Lions, and while they remain out of the playoff picture for 2015, there are some signs that this won’t be an entirely wasted season.
According to data recently posted at FiveThirtyEight,* Stafford is among the most improved quarterbacks in the season’s second half:
* QBR and ANY/A data compiled through December 22.
Stafford accomplished this without a corresponding increase in throws to top receiver Calvin Johnson, which is evidence that OC Jim Bob Cooter’s new offensive scheme is about more than looking out for no. (8)1. Stafford’s improved numbers also could reflect a positive regression to his true talent level, as well as signal indirect improvement in the team’s offensive line. (On that front, the numbers are a bit mixed, showing minor decreases in sack rate and yards lost due to sacks, while fumbles lost held steady, and fumbles increased in the second half of the season.)
2015 obviously has not been the best season for Stafford or the Lions, but the team would be foolish to part ways with their starting quarterback. A better second half from the former top overall draft pick should help to ensure that he stays in Detroit.
To a very casual observer, a mid-December post on the 6-7 Atlanta Falcons would cry out for a Dickensian introduction, but it simply has not been a tale of two halves for these dirtier-than-anticipated birds.
Some, like MMQB’s Andy Benoit, really wanted to believe in that Victorian-era trope, though. Three weeks ago, Atlanta, which started the season 5-0, had lost four of five games, slipping to a 6-4 record. Falcons fans were beginning to lose hope, but Benoit told them not to panic, because “a closer look reveals a different story.” Benoit’s message was compelling in its simplicity:
On film, the 1-4, Stage 2 Falcons haven’t looked significantly different from the Stage 1 Falcons who started 5-0. And, OK, maybe the Stage 1 Falcons were not quite as good as their record indicated, but those five wins are a more accurate portrayal of the 2015 Falcons than the club’s four losses. The biggest difference between Stage 1 and 2 has been the dreaded turnover.
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[T]he Falcons have beaten themselves with random fumbles and a few interceptions, of which only one was a truly bad offensive play. Ryan, cerebral as he is, has always had a slight tendency to take the bait and make a foolish throw or two into disguised or tight coverages. But interceptions have never been a major bugaboo. So unless you believe this will change in the final six games of Ryan’s eighth NFL season, there’s little reason to believe turnovers will continue to plague Atlanta.
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Most likely, Atlanta’s fate hinges on how well its offense functions.
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Combine the Stage 1 Falcons with the Stage 2 Falcons and what you’ll likely get is a Stage 3 Falcons club that finishes 10-6 and is a dangerous Wild-Card foe.
The seductive simplicity of Benoit’s thesis really is too good to be true. It seems easy to pick on him three weeks later, when Atlanta dropped all three games in that period and has an active six-game losing streak, but his reasoning would’ve been flawed regardless. Even if it’s true that turnovers– both fumbles and interceptions– fall within the realm of luck, and even if it also is true that the Falcons’ then-recent losses were due to turnovers, Benoit ignores the possibility that the team’s early successes also were due to luck. Instead, he simply assumes, without offering any evidence to that effect, that the team was playing closest to its true-talent level when it opened up 5-0, rather than when it went 1-4 (now 1-7, the same record with which the Detroit Lions opened the season). Couldn’t good luck have played just as much a part of Atlanta’s 5-0 opening as bad luck did in their subsequent losses? Of course, but in his overly rosy evaluation of the early season Falcons, Benoit apparently didn’t consider that.
At 6-7, Atlanta isn’t mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, but, with another game against the Panthers remaining and the Seahawks surging, they’re very likely done for the year.
In erasing their 5-0 start, the Falcons’ poor play in the last few weeks likely is a closer approximation of their true talent level than their results in the first five weeks. Indeed, as these charts illustrate, they’ve been historically bad from Week Six onward.
For postseason purposes, Atlanta no longer controls its own destiny (scenarios), but, at a minimum, it will need to beat its three remaining opponents– Jacksonville, Carolina, and New Orleans– to have a shot. According to FiveThirtyEight, the Falcons have a two-percent chance of making the playoffs, and their projected win probability this week against the Jaguars is fifty percent. Not great, Bob.
My latest post at TechGraphs asks a simple question: why does ESPN still exist? (To find out, wait a little while and then read the comment section, wherein all the smarties will give the real answer in sure-to-be-friendly tones.)
The full post is available here.
The overhead view is of me in a maze,
and you see what I’m hunting a few steps away.
And I take a wrong turn and I’m on the wrong path,
and the people all watching enjoy a good laugh.
Embarrassed with failure, I try to reverse
the course that my tread had already traversed.
So doing the trauma engulfing my dream
invaded through what was an unguarded seam.
The torrent of helplessness swept me away
to the cavern of shame and the hall of dismay.
Inside me a voice was repeating this phrase:
“You’ve lost it, you’ll never get out of this maze.”
You’ll never get out of this maze
Happy Thanksgiving, ALDLAND readers. Without presuming that you need any help entertaining yourselves today, here are a few suggestions to enhance your holiday festivities:
We are thankful for everyone– over six thousand of you in 2015 alone– who stumbled by this virtual space in the past year. Have a wonderful day, and get off the dang computer!
It’s no mystery that I’m not crazy about the business decisions made by the Atlanta Braves’ leadership in the last few years. When I arrived in Atlanta, the Braves were a playoff team. Three years later, they’re a fourth-place team in their own division, nearly unrecognizable both in terms of record and roster. So many familiar faces are gone (only five players on Atlanta’s 2013 40-man roster remain, and the best of that bunch, Freddie Freeman, is the subject of daily trade rumors, while three of them might not belong on any major-league roster), and the team’s new, suburban stadium project, which was wrong-headed from day one, isn’t looking any better at last check.
I’m willing to concede that reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of the Braves’ recent management decisions, though. The problem for proponents of the Braves’ plan to put a winner on the new field in 2017, all other attendant circumstances be damned, however, is that they aren’t even doing that right:
The Braves are set to move into a new, publicly funded stadium in Cobb County in 2017, and even if the rebuild goes smoothly, they seem unlikely to be in a position to win by then. There’s an unwritten rule to the art of stadium-building that says if you’re going to use the public’s money to fund shiny new digs (and you bet the Braves are), you at least have to make a good-faith effort to put a solid product on the field. The Braves are trending in the opposite direction, cutting payroll and trading off cornerstone players while construction crews are turning the $672 million SunTrust Park from blueprint to reality.
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On average, a team’s payroll increased 21 percent the year it moved into a new stadium, and it jumped a staggering 57 percent during the four-year span prior to Opening Day in the new park—there’s some plain ol’ inflation mixed in there, but much of the increase is due to owners willing to shell out big contracts in exchange for the discount on a franchise-altering stadium deal.
It typically costs money to build winning baseball teams, and spend money is what teams usually do when they want to have a winning team playing its home games in their new stadium. Atlanta, by contrast, has been reducing payroll in all of its recent transactions. In other words, they aren’t doing the thing other teams do when they’re doing the thing the Braves say they’re doing.
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Previously
New Braves stadium project continues to falter
Georgia Supreme Court Upholds Cobb’s Braves Stadium Bond Deal
Braves Break Ground on Baseball Boondoggle
The yard sale at Upton Abbey continues
From Barves to Burbs: What’s happening to baseball in Atlanta?
ALDLAND 