Strategies include:

• “Suggest the hometown players early so people over pay”
• “Suggest young, intriguing players early so people over pay”
• “Bid up the last good shortstop/second baseman/catcher so that someone wastes a bunch of money on Ian Kinsler/Derek Jeter/Jason Varitek”
• “Save all your money to the end of the draft and clean up on the guys everyone forgot about”

Basically, it’s open season to be a dick. For my “keepers,” I’m keeping 5 guys from last year who I got cheaply and save me money versus what they would cost me this season (Jered Weaver and Clay Buchholz are probably 2 of the top 10 or 12 pitchers available and I’ve got them for a combined $20 auction dollars).

Giddy up. Baseball season is here (just in time for the Celtics to go into their normal end of season hibernation).

–Ryan

When Moneyball came out, it didn’t take long for the importance of on-base percentage to become part of mainstream conventional wisdom. It would be great if some of the findings in the book did the same—the debunking of the ‘hot hand,’ for instance, or ‘icing the kicker.’ However, I’d hate for ‘home field advantage is caused by biased referees’ to do the same—because that’s a huge claim, and I don’t think it’s true. Ideally, the authors would have consulted some of the practicing sabermetricians in the various sports—the Prospectus writers, Tom Tango, Brian Burke, Gabriel Desjardins, and so forth—who would undoubtedly have pointed out some issues and advised the authors to temper some of their conclusions.

It’s possible that having to qualify some of the results would make for a less popular book. In any case, Moskowitz and Wertheim are outstanding at getting their ideas across effortlessly. With a little more collaboration from others who study this stuff, this could have easily been the best popular sabermetrics book since Bill James. As it stands, it’s still recommended reading, but I wish it came with a warning to take some of its conclusions with a grain of salt.”

(Via Baseball Prospectus.)

Scorecasting is a great read. And, if you’re reading it with a somewhat open mind, you’ll learn a lot, but also pause a lot and say “wow, I feel like I’m missing a whole side of this argument.” Which is pretty much exactly how I felt reading Freakonomics.

(Note: If you buy the book from the Amazon link above, I get like 12 cents.)

“Now I had to write something on the bat. At Memorial Stadium, the bat room was not too close to the clubhouse, so I wanted to write something that I could find immediately if I looked up and it was 4:44 and I had to get out there on the field a minute later and not be late. There were five big grocery carts full of bats in there and if I wrote my number 3, it could be too confusing. So I wrote ‘F–k’ Face on it.”

So great. When my friends and I first found this card, we thought it was quite possibly the greatest thing ever. I think it was one of our most sought after baseball cards (along with the Ken Griffey Jr Upper Deck rookie card and the “Bo’s Back” Bo Jackson card).

Of course, as with anything fun, Billy Ripken tries to ruin it:

“I can’t believe the people at Fleer couldn’t catch that. I mean, they certainly have to have enough proofreaders to see it. I think not only did they see it, they enhanced it. That writing on that bat is way too clear. I don’t write that neat. I think they knew that once they saw it, they could use the card to create an awful lot of stir.”

Whatever. Take credit for one of the defining moments of the late 80s.

Here it is, in all its glory …

(Via Baseball Musings.)