Saying Good-Bye to the fake to third pickoff - WHY?!?

from McCovey Chronicles:
http://www.mccoveychronicles.com/2013/1/28/3924554/saying-goodbye-to-the-fake-to-third-pickoff-move?ref=yahoo

What Santiago did there would be illegal in 2013. No, no, not changing his name and lying about his age. That was already illegal. The fake-to-third, throw-to-first move is what's going to be illegal in 2013. It will be a balk next year, and few pitchers are rather annoyed:

My only question is why? Why?!? Because Joe Morgan thinks it's a balk? Why not get rid of the fake / slash bunt as well? Let's just puts pretty little bow-ties and skirts on the fellas uniforms and go back to a more civil, genteel game that is totally devoid of deception? Let's outlaw the curve-ball next. That's deceptive to the batter isn't it? Something to think about, right?



Or just get rid of those crafty pitchers entirely and put the ball on a tee for the batters. That would be lovely.

What a dumb move by MLB. Who are we protecting here? The nearly extinct, clueless base-runner? I mean seriously folks, how is this move fooling ANYBODY? 

I would be more in favor of banning from MLB (for the entire year, if not life) anybody FOOLED by this move. In fact, Joe Morgan should be removed from the HOF for being foolish enough to think this move is a problem for base-runners and continue to perpetuate the charade that he was a great base-runner during his career. Talk about FRAUD.

If you notice in the video above, it looks like Casilla balks the runner with the back foot by "quick lifting" it and then proceeding with the dreaded "3B-1B fake". Go back and take another look and watch his back foot carefully (as the umpire should have been).

The initial "pump fake" with the back foot should have been a balk, IMO. Maybe we should just get rid of lazy MLB umpires and call it a day.

This move has simply been removing clueless base-runners from the base paths and speeding up games for decades.

Besides, what is HOF Joe Morgan going to whine about now?  Maybe just add a section under BASE RUNNING: titled "Don't get fooled by the third to first move, You Big Dummy!!"

President Barack Obama not sure he'd allow a son to play football - ESPNK

This is going to surprise some, but I think he's got a valid point here. It is a really, really tough call here.

Sure, this all sounded like so much crazy talk when I was saying it (OK, me and maybe Terry Bradshaw). Now when the chorus echoes around the Oval Office and the Super Bowl media sound bytes, the talk might get some of the respect that it's due. Think it through though chief, you kill youth football, HS football and college football and what kind of NFL are you going to have? Bernard Pollard thinks it's bad now...


from ESPN:
President Barack Obama not sure he'd allow a son to play football - ESPN:

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama says he's a football fan but that if he had a son, considering the impact the game has on its players, he would think long and hard before allowing his son to play.

Obama tells The New Republic that football fans are going to have to wrestle with the fact that the game will probably change over time to try to reduce the violence.

 Obama says he worries more about college players than those in the NFL because the pros have a union, are well-paid and are grown men.

 "They can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies," Obama said of NFL players. "You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That's something that I'd like to see the NCAA think about."

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from ESPN:
http://espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs/2012/story/_/id/8889447/bernard-pollard-baltimore-ravens-nfl-not-exist-30-years

The hard-hitting Baltimore Ravens safety toldCBSSports.com recently that he doesn't believe the league will be in existence in 30 years because of rules changes instituted in an effort to make the game safer, and the chance a player might die on the field as players continue to get stronger and faster.

"Thirty years from now, I don't think it will be in existence. I could be wrong. It's just my opinion, but I think with the direction things are going -- where [NFL rules makers] want to lighten up, and they're throwing flags and everything else -- there's going to come a point where fans are going to get fed up with it," he told the website.

"Guys are getting fined, and they're talking about, 'Let's take away the strike zone' and 'Take the pads off' or 'Take the helmets off.' It's going to be a thing where fans aren't going to want to watch it anymore."

You're welcome, boys.

I could go into how this is all a European, socialist plot to elevate what we call soccer and what the rest of the world erroneously calls football, but quite frankly, people are so thin-skinned and hyper-sensitive about anything that smacks of political speech, that I'm just not going to do it.

And you can't make me.

Starting to get serious now. Once the concussion lawsuits start hitting the below college levels, it's going to be 'Katy bar the door'.

The Rays of the Future Identified - DRaysBay

CAN'T WAIT!!!!

I have to admit I use a similar methodology to to begin the process of sorting / ranking my Giants prospect list.  However, instead of taking Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice's opinion, I use Baseball America, Fan Graphs, John Sickels and other scouting authorities, to come up with the initial group of names and preliminary rankings.  No knock on these guys, they likely read the same sources that most of us do. The big-guys have their reputations for a reason. This approach is very consensus, "wisdom of the crowd" oriented. I think McCovey Chronicles takes a similar approach, so it's apparently a copy-cat league in the blog-osphere as well as the NFL.


from  draysbay.com
2013 DRaysBay writers' top 30 prospect list - DRaysBay:

To combine the four lists, I used the NCAA poll point system. A vote for first place is 30 points, second is 29, all the way down to 30th being 1 point. To break the ties, I went with the player who had the smaller standard deviation between the two.

'via Blog this'

So, if I have, let's say 7 master lists to begin, the names that appear on all seven lists rise to the top, the ones who appear on 6 of  7 are next, and so on. Within those categories I sub-sort by who appears the highest (and receives the lowest score, much like golf) on the lists in aggregate as a tie-breaker. If there are seven lists, a perfect score is 7 -- the number 1 ranking on all seven lists. A consensus-stud prospect, if you will. There are not too many of those, since there seems to be a bit of a competition to out-identify the competition.

Then I look into the statistical components, age, level of play and so on to adjust players up or down. The "guru's lists" tend to over-rank the younger guys for some reason. It may be the need among that group to be recognized as the "first to identify the next big thing" so I put a little more stock in the statistical analysis than OPR or "Other Peoples Rankings".

This is where the rubber hits the road as far as identifying a "dark-horse" who makes it, when nobody else sees him or a consensus favorite "breaks it" and becomes an infamous bust. Some statistics are simply more relevant than others and either send up red-flags or the give you the old checkered flag (WINNER!!).

If I really feel up to it, I'll try to find some film, either on YouTube or a scouting service and see if the guy "looks the part" of a true prospect. Maybe as a pitcher, he's succeeding with a "funked-up" delivery. After that, it's all over but writing a thumb-nail of what you've seen, heard and read and numbers-crunched.

Presto!! Now you can make your very own Organizational Prospect List, just like the experts do.  As soon as you know which stats to look for. Stay tuned for more on that in the future.

I like the lists overall and it is clear why the Rays have the sterling reputation they do as an organization that scouts, drafts and develops well. Like the Giants, their top 7-10 guys look like they will be solid players for years to come.

The Rays have to win in this area of the game in order to survive the division they are in. They simply continue to do the most-est (developing stars) with the least-est (money to invest in payroll).

more from draysbay.com:
http://www.draysbay.com/rays-prospects/2013/1/25/3914642/top-30-prospects-week-dans-top-30

1. Wil Myers, OF
2. Chris Archer, RHP
3. Taylor Guerrieri, RHP
4. Jake Odorizzi, RHP
5. Alex Colome, RHP
6. Hak-Ju Lee, SS
7. Richie Shaffer, 3B
8. Jake Hager, SS
9. Blake Snell, LHP
10. Brandon Guyer, OF

Moneyball coming to the NBA (kicking and screaming)

David Thorpe and Henry Abbott -- on TrueHoopTV via Skype -- discuss the migration of the Moneyball, quantitative analysis concept to the NBA. Interesting discussion.

from ESPN:
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:8604090

True Hoop TV Silver Lessons:



For all of you old-school NBA fans and coaches, don't stand on the tracks when the train is coming....

SPEAKING WORDS OF WISDOM.....

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those, who in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. -- Dante Alighieri

To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice. -- Confucius

Or, as T.S. Eliot famously put it: "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves." (From the 1950 play "The cocktail party") 

H. L. Mencken warned us long ago. Some of his more colorful quotes certainly ring true in light of recent events:

As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. 

Democracy is a form of worship. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights.

Never be lukewarm.Life itself demands passion.He who is indifferent to God has already forfeited his soul.He who is indifferent to politics has already forfeited his liberty.Good citizenship, for Americans, is not a spectator sport.Do not allow our common destiny as a whole people to just happen.Welcome to my site.

http://www.thinking-catholic-strategic-center.com/2012-Ohio-Voter-Guide.html

There are many paths to success in baseball

Interesting article in that it identifies the scouting or talent identification approach, the Wall Street / SABR-Moneyball statistical approach and the Grit / Grinder approach (also scouting based) that locally, the White Sox have built an entire marketing campaign around.  Many paths to success indeed.

from Yahoo Sports:
Snakebitten? D'backs make peculiar decision to trade Justin Upton's 'superstar' talent - Yahoo! Sports:

What many in this age of baseball homogeneity don't quite understand is a simple principle: There is more than one way to win. One of the game's beauties is its improbability – how, say, Red Sox teams that relied so heavily on numerical analysis won two World Series in four years while half a decade later Giants teams built with a diametrically opposed baseball worldview won two titles in three years. The road in baseball is not a Frost poem. Its fork has unlimited tines.

No matter a team's philosophy, one commonality saturates winners: talent. Perhaps the Red Sox and Giants took different paths to find it, but both aimed more than anything to build the most talented team it could.  That is what makes the Arizona Diamondbacks' trade of Justin Upton on Thursday so fascinating –  the sort of thing that if successful could alter the sport's calculus and if failed could add another check mark to the assault against intangibles.

As much as any baseball team in recent memory, the Diamondbacks on Thursday publicly embraced the idea of grittiness and guts, of the inherent and unquantifiable. And in doing so, they finished a two-trade whammy over the last six weeks that has seen them ship out their two most talented players in an effort to better embody this belief.

'via Blog this'

Athletes and age of peak performance | Axon Sports

Betty Davis once said "Old age is no place for sissies". Judging from the results of the studies cited in the Axon Sports article, it's no place for athlete's either. But the good news is that research appears to be leading to a better understanding of how the brain ages, which leads to advancement in treatments and cures for degenerative diseases like Alzheimers, as shown in the follow-up article on Galantamine.

As the safety advances that are developed on NASCAR tracks eventually flow through to the auto industry and provide benefits for the masses, some of the research built around the "laboratory of athletics" will lead to health benefits that will effect BOTH former athletes and non-athletes.

from Axonpotential.com:
Athletes and age of peak performance | Axon Sports:

July 27, 2011

Athletes and age of peak performance

Via Joaquin Chapa

The consistency of this rise-peak-decline pattern is striking, even across very different sports. For nearly every major sport, the age of peak performance is in the range of 22-30, and some interesting trends emerge when you look at sport type in relation to an athlete’s peak age. The age at which performance tends to peak across sports seems to mirror the continuum from purely explosive, athletic sports to slower, more skill-based sports, with explosive sports peaking earlier. Further, even within sports that combine different abilities, explosive abilities (e.g. base stealing in baseball) tend to peak earlier than more cognitive, skill-based abilities (e.g. drawing walks in baseball).

* For baseball, a number of studies, using different methods, have pegged peak age between 27-29. (Link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02640410802691348#preview
* For Tennis, peak age has been pegged between the early 20′s and 25. (Link)
* For basketball, peak age has been found to be at 27 for all positions, with different positions showing different patterns of decline. (Link)
* For Track and Field, peak sprinting age has been found to be in the lower-mid twenties, with endurance events having older peak ages. (Link)
* For golf, athletes have broader peaks–between 25-35, with slower declines. (Link)
* For football, running backs and receivers peak around 27, with running backs showing sharper fall-offs than receivers. Quarterbacks have a broader peak between 25-35. (Link)

So why do athletes decline? One place where we might look for an explanation is in myelin integrity. Myelin is a fatty sheath that insulates the axon of the neuron, the long portion of the neuron that conducts the electrical signal when a neuron “fires”. This sheath acts like an electrical insulator, and allows the axon to conduct a signal much faster than an unmyelinated axon. Myelin is what gets called “white matter” when we’re talking about the brain (as opposed to “gray matter”, which is mostly composed of neuronal cell bodies). Neuroplastic changes in white matter have been observed in musicians and other categories of experts–it’s as if repetition and practice cause the laying down of additional layers of this myelinated insulation–so it isn’t too great of a leap to anticipate that highly trained athletes might exhibit differences in myelination and white matter when compared to the general population.

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Galantamine May Improve Myelin Integrity
http://www.life-enhancement.com/magazine/article/1947-galantamine-may-improve-myelin-integrity

We’ll get to that matter of broken insulation. First, however, let’s consider a provocative idea put forth recently by Dr. George Bartzokis, a neurologist at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, who stepped outside the box to have a fresh look at something important to all of us: our brain function and how it deteriorates with age.¹ The box in question encompasses our thinking about the use of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEIs) for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer’s disease, the greatest scourge of them all.

Bartzokis believes that the indisputable benefits of AChEIs may be due in large measure to something other than what we’ve thought all along. To put his view into perspective, let’s have a quick look inside the box he broke out of. It’s not that there’s anything wrong in there—there certainly isn’t, as he’s quick to point out—but rather that the box is too small to encompass the larger picture he sees.

Galantamine—Potent and Versatile

It has long been known that AChEIs, such as the plant alkaloid galantamine, are effective in alleviating the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and slowing its inevitable course, usually for a period of about 6 months to a year, before the decline resumes in earnest. (There is still no cure for AD, which is ultimately fatal.) Some AChEIs, such as donepezil and rivastigmine, are prescription drugs. Galantamine too is sold by prescription, but, unlike the others, it’s also available as a nutritional supplement, owing to its use as such for many years before the FDA approved it as a “drug” in 2001.

 The Myelin Model of the Human Brain

In his paper, Bartzokis outlines what he calls the myelin model of the human brain, which he has been developing over the last several years (in numerous published papers). It involves the fact that the myelination of axons in the human brain is not fully developed at birth, but develops gradually throughout the first four decades of life, peaking at around age 45; thereafter, the brain’s myelin content declines gradually for the rest of our lives, as the myelin sheaths degrade. From the myelin perspective, these two broad phases in the life of the brain—a development phase (myelination) and a degeneration phase (demyelination) represent a curved trajectory, as seen below

Achievement Metrics sells sound of success in NFL draft prospects

The career passer ratings of several NFL quarterbacks show how their performance has matched up against Achievement Metrics' assessment of their speech while the players were in college. The chart places the players according to their scores for "positive power,” or their belief in the ability to influence outcomes, and “in-group affiliation,” or how well they interact with a group. The firm cautions that the report "is designed for informational purposes only" and "should not be construed to guarantee a player’s future performance or behavior and is not a comprehensive statement, evaluation, or judgment of any player’s character or future performance."

Here are a couple of interesting articles and graphics presented at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference http://www.sloansportsconference.com/ by a firm by the name of Achievement Metrics.

They may have some potential to replace the Wonderlic test to help NFL teams better assess the intangibles they are looking for in QB's and other leadership positions.

If they do a decent job in sorting out the leader for a couple of drafts, the NFL will beat a quick path to their door and as always, it helps if the QB or MLB can make plays. Interesting stuff in that it seems like it attempts to quantify that which has historically been a "gut-feel" thing among scouts. The interviews at the combine are supposedly where teams either hit or miss big on some of these guys and anything that can be objectively quantified is going to give GM's and owners more of a "warm and fuzzy" feeling before they invest big dollars in a guy. It might even help finding that later round, smaller school guy who has better potential to succeed a similar prospect from a larger, more visible school.

from AchievmentMetrics.com
Achievement Metrics sells sound of success in NFL draft prospects « News « Achievement Metrics:

How an individual speaks, he said, is a gauge as to how they think, and the company thinks NFL franchises could find that valuable when they analyze how to spend millions of dollars on player contracts.

The career passer ratings of several NFL quarterbacks show how their performance has matched up against Achievement Metrics' assessment of their speech while the players were in college. The chart places the players according to their scores for "positive power,” or their belief in the ability to influence outcomes, and “in-group affiliation,” or how well they interact with a group. The firm cautions that the report "is designed for informational purposes only" and "should not be construed to guarantee a player’s future performance or behavior and is not a comprehensive statement, evaluation, or judgment of any player’s character or future performance."

Online magazine Slate.com has a more detailed breakdown of the science, but Hall said the brief pitch is this – it creates psychological profiles of player prospects based on words used in spontaneous speech.

It isn’t a grammar test. An algorithm analyzes speech to determine traits such as “conceptual complexity,” or whether a prospect views the world in shades of gray or clearly pall mall cigarettes delineates it in black and white; “positive power,” or belief in the ability to influence outcomes; and “in-group affiliation,” or how a prospect associates – well or poorly – with a group.

'via Blog this'

USE YOUR WORDS

from AchievmentMetrics.com
http://www.achievementmetrics.com/archives/319

It’s notoriously difficult to figure out which top collegiate quarterbacks will succeed in the NFL. Pro teams give prospects an SAT-type test called the Wonderlic test, which doesn’t parliament cigarettes predict all that accurately.  A company called Achievement Metrics, on the other hand, studies the words college athletes use in media interviews. Some use words that signal high degrees of confidence, conceptual complexity and team orientation. Others use words that signal self-centeredness and distrust.

The results of their work were recently written up by Machael Agger in Slate. The most arresting example concerns a choice the San Francisco 49ers faced in 2005, whether to draft Alex Smith or Aaron Rodgers as their future quarterback. Both were college stars and Smith had a phenomenal score on the Wonderlic test. But Smith didn’t use common leadership words in his interviews, while Rodgers had leadership words spewing out of his mouth.

The method assumes that the words we blurt out in a quick interview are a window into our soul. I don’t know if that’s true, but they might be as good an indicator of football performance as an IQ test.

David Brooks
Source: New York Times

from slate.com
http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2011/04/will_cam_newton_be_a_bust.single.html

As you can see, Cam Newton is in what I've termed the "quadrant of doom." He talks like other first-round draft picks—Matt Leinart, Alex Smith, Brady Quinn—who have bombed in the NFL. Does this mean Newton is destined for a disastrous career? Absolutely not. This year's No. 1 pick could defy the probabilities and become a success in the NFL, just the way that Carson Palmer has done.

More jarring, perhaps, is the presence of Tim Tebow in the quadrant of doom. Though his on-field readiness for the NFL has been debated endlessly, nobody disputes his skill as a leader and orator. The pledge he made after a 2008 loss to Ole Miss—"You will never see someone push the rest of the team as hard as I will push everybody the rest of the season"—is even inscribed on a plaque at his alma mater. Although this sounds uplifting to our ears, the algorithm heard something different. It detected a guy who had a little less love for the team and a little less belief in himself than his peers did.

The big surprise in the first round was the Minnesota Vikings' pick of Christian Ponder, a quarterback whom many had projected to go in the third round. On the NFL network, the assembled pundits couldn't stop repeating "there's something about this guy." He's in the "Julius Caesar" quadrant, along with his fellow first-round draft picks Jake Locker and Blaine Gabbert. The other highly regarded quarterbacks in the draft, Andy Dalton (taken by the Bengals as the 35^th pick) and Ryan Mallett (taken by the Patriots in the 3^rd round) also talk (at least) like winners.

Sophistry (Word of the Day)

A lot of this going around. Beware. Be prepared.

Noun

1.

sophistry - a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone

• Sophistry, Logic, and Philosophy
  "There is in sophistry a similarity to precisely what some praise as the value of symbolic logic: in knowing logic a person in principle knows everything, because there is nothing that can't be argued in it. Plato has the Visitor in the Sophist make the same observation: 'In fact, take expertise in disputation as a whole. Doesn't it seem like a capacity that's sufficient for carrying on controversies about absolutely everything?'
  "The difference between philosophy and sophistry on this point could perhaps be summed up by saying that, while sophistry represents an abstract universality, philosophy's universality is essentially concrete. Sophistry is indifferent to content, and this indifference prevents it from integrating what it knows into a well-ordered and meaningful whole. . . . Sophistry can 'know' this or that, but it cannot see how these things hang together or how they fit into the cosmos, because to do so would require genuine knowledge of the good."
  
  (D. C. Schindler, Plato's Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic. Catholic Univ. of America Press, 2008)
• • "As creeping ivy clings to wood or stone,
    And hides the ruin that it feeds upon,
    So sophistry cleaves close to and protects
    Sin's rotten trunk, concealing its defects."
    (William Cowper, "The Progress of Error")

Sophism in the modern definition is a specious argument used for deceiving someone. In ancient Greece, sophists were a category of teachers who specialized in using the tools of philosophy and rhetoric for the purpose of teaching arete—excellence, or virtue—predominantly to young statesmen and nobility. The practice of charging money for education and providing wisdom only to those who could pay led to the condemnations made by Socrates, through Plato in his dialogues, as well as Xenophon's Memorabilia. Through works such as these, Sophists were portrayed as "specious" or "deceptive", hence the modern meaning of the term.

 The term originated from Greek σόφισμα, sophisma, from σοφίζω, sophizo "I am wise"; confer σοφιστής, sophistēs, meaning "wise-ist, one who does wisdom," and σοφός, sophós means "wise man".

Musial on manager's mind at Cardinals fan festival - Yahoo! Sports

Stan 'The Man Musial' was baseball royalty. A unique -- as you can see from the shots above -- and extremely gifted hitter.  A huge loss to the Cardinals organization and the baseball community.

Musial on manager's mind at Cardinals fan festival - Yahoo! Sports:

''I think everybody around here, young and old, gets how important Mr. Musial was and still is - and will be - to this organization and this community. Just everything he stood for,'' Matheny said Monday at the end of the three-day Winter Warm-Up fan festival.

''Whether it's something we physically put on our sleeve or not, I'm sure there will be something that will memorialize Mr. Musial.''

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