Winter Meetings Open Thread - Day 2

Particularly since Ross Perot and Ralph Nader turned it into a running joke.

(I actually wrote my master’s thesis on this). Winning a presidential election requires a massive organization, including jumping through the hoops of 50 states (with different rules in each) just to get on the ballot. And then there’s the expense, and I don’t know if Paul could actually compete with the Dems and Reps on that, especially with current electoral funding law.

I’m not libertarian, but I think if those political theories got more of a public voice, it would win more converts. It has a certain philosophical appeal.

1 or 12% running for governor of Alaska on the Libertarian ticket twice, I believe. He relented, ran for the Republican nomination and got 12% of the votes in the primary.

But it wasn’t just the scream, he had some other gaffes along the way. He was the early frontrunner, and the early frontrunner has to withstand a lot of scrutiny.

One president’s policy can radically change the course of the country for years (especially FDR, LBJ, or Reagan).

but it fucking matters. I remember when Clinton got elected, we ended up with AmeriCorps, extended work leave for Mom’s with new babies, etc…..Obama has enacted some Health Care reform, payroll taxes for everybody, this recent AIDs initiative….obviously, a lot of whether or not you like that shit or not depends on what side of the aisle you are on….but when GW was in the house, the main things were wars and tax cuts for the rich. Just sayin. It makes a diff. Not nearly as big a diff as I’d like, but the issues that get addressed are impacted by who is at the helm.

But from public perspective of character traits there’s more there than not.

Read: Matsuzaka, Daisuke and Lewis, Colby.

But you’re right. There is tremendous potential for major upside. I’d love it if turned out to be Nomo Hideo good with perhaps a higher peak.

I was considering Darrius Heyward-Bey and Daniel Thomas (and still am) before their seasons began to derail.

I wasn’t sure about that Scott. I just know for sure I’ll keep Newton going forward and the rest is up in the air.

I think Myers is on the level of the Hos possibly.

I’m not sure if that’s a “huge flaw” in the projections themselves, as something that would be nice to have in the presentation. They can all do something like that in principle, of course, it’s not just PECOTA. CHONE had “percentiles” on its individual player pages for 2009, I think it was too much work for him to do since he hosted and ran it all himself for free. Dan S. has given percentiles for individual players in the past for ZiPS. Tango even talked about doing basic ones for Marcel (~!).

There’s an on-and-off discussion about whether PECOTA’s percentiles in particular “work.” I haven’t followed it that closely. I think that when Colin Wyers took over PECOTA, he changed something about them in acknowledgement of the problems. Don’t have a strong opinion about this because I"m not informed enough.

Of course, for accuracy PECOTA does not have an edge over the other public systems in general, despite their former use of “deadly accurate” as as marketing tool (often accompanied by a picture of Matt Wieters!), something which also was dumped when Colin took charge of that part, I think. That isn’t to say that PECOTA is a bad system, it is good, and by having a guy like Colin in charge, they are going to keep making it better. But there just isn’t that much of a difference between the different public systems — PECOTA, ZiPS, Oliver and others. Indeed, by some measures they barely “beat” Marcel and the FanGraphs community projections on a regular basis. That isn’t to say there isn’t value added for fantasy purposes and stuff like that in the way they are organized and presented.

Are the team’s projections better? Probably, yeah. Part of that is because there is more and more objective scouting data that is unavailable ot the public (e.g., hit f/x). Are they tons better? I’m not sure about that. If they were, they wouldn’t be hiring Sean “CHONE” Smith as a consultant (he can’t say what he’s doing, of course, but it is reasonable to infer that projection has something to do with it). In recent years before it’s “mysterious” disappearance, CHONE regularly did the best, year-to-year, of the systems available for testing. But even then, it didn’t “win” every year, and it wasn’t as if it blew everything away. So if a team is hiring a guy who did free, public projections, and those projections aren’t far-and-away superior to other public projections (including Marcel), then I think it’s reasonable to think that public projections are decent relative to what the teams have.

Now, this may also mean, of course, that projections in general, from whatever system, public or private, have to be taken with a shaker of salt. That’s true — whether in the form of “percentiles,” Marcel’s “reliability” score, or just common sense based on past playing time the major leagues, etc.

i’ll give them that. they get points for brussels too.

(as long as we’re talking about position players, with the prospect being a top 20 MLB prospect). And I think that’s Myers by a mile.