Mattingly, get rid of those sideburns! 2011 Dodgers thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHv3aDa8n_A

This will be the thread in which I post to myself nonsense about the Dodgers.

Such as this nugget of truth from Jamie's lawyer

“The thing that would be best for Frank and Jamie and their children, in my opinion, isn’t necessarily the best for Los Angeles and for the Dodgers,” Boies said.

kinda like this tshirt even tho the timing is a little on the late side

http://oi51.tinypic.com/210ngh2.jpg

Kershaw officially announced as opening day starter. March 31: Kershaw v.Lincecum. My god.

Bud Selig rejected proposal for Fox to loan $200 million to Dodgers' owner - The deal called for Frank McCourt to use the Dodgers' cable TV rights as collateral, extending the team's current TV contract with Fox.

fuck both of these assholes. selig for foisting frank on la and frank for existing.

http://a323.yahoofs.com/ymg/ept_sports_mlb_experts__75/ept_sports_mlb_experts-309809482-1299449531.jpg?ym7qZqEDKonpNAfA

Shitking, get rid of that

Class title. <relurks>

Kim Ng joining MLB executive operations

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20110308&content_id=16860564&vkey=news_la&c_id=la

Would have preferred it if she was our GM instead of Colletti.

heres an interesting look at whats going on in Joe Torre's new fiefdom

With Joe Torre now in place as executive VP of operations, Major League Baseball has undertaken a major restructuring of the department. Three senior officials were fired, while former Arizona Diamondbacks GM Joe Garagiola Jr. maintains his title of senior VP but accepts a demotion from a supervisory role to the "dean of discipline" position.

In what one MLB employee described as a "bloodbath," VP of umpiring Mike Port and longtime VP of administration Ed Burns were fired on Thursday, along with ex-Met outfielder Darryl Hamilton, the senior specialist of on-field operations. ...

Replacing Port, Garagiola and Burns as the senior officials working directly under Torre are Kim Ng, the former assistant GM of the Yankees who has been serving in the same position for the Los Angeles Dodgers since 2002, and Peter Woodfork, former assistant GM of the Diamondbacks. Woodfork, who also worked in MLB's labor relations department under executive VP Rob Manfred, is slated to be Torre's "point man" with the umpires, while Ng's primary responsibilities will be in the players' area. ...

Although much was made of Torre's hiring by commissioner Bud Selig on Feb. 26 at a reported salary of $2 million, all the changes within operations were said to be in the works before he came aboard. Of the new people, only Ng had ever worked with Torre before and, like him, she was eager to flee what has become a Dodger cuckoo's nest under battling owners Frank and Jamie McCourt, who are in the midst of increasingly messy divorce proceedings.

Proof you can never have too much pitching: Dodgers were going to start the season with 6 potential starters - Kershaw, Billingsley, Kuroda, Lilly, Garland and Padilla. 2 Weeks into spring training theyve lost Padilla to some weird nerve impingement surgery and Garland went down yesterday for 4-6 weeks with an oblique strain.

at least it's their #5 and #6 guys that went down

Yeah and its good to get these things out of the way early. John Ely should do the trick. Ill be super pissed if they burn a 40 man roster space on Tim Goddamn Redding.

Too early to worry but this line from Broxton is epic

0.1 IP, 3 H, 1 BB, 4 runs (all earned), 1 HR, 3 SB against

Heard this..

Per @dodgerscribe: Dodgers close to 3-year-deal with Chad Billingsley. Deal would go from 2012-2014 at more than $30MM. Possible 2015 option

a steal for the best pitcher in the NL ( / plaschke )

lol -- $10m a year for him is a pretty good deal tho

Chad is a great #2 and will reliably give you 190 innings and 170 ks. Dude is also built like dump truck and can only put so much strain on his arm when his big ass is bearing the brunt of his delivery.

I cant believe Aaron motherfucking Miles is going to be on our opening day roster.

In case anyone forgot, according to baseball-reference.com, Miles is the 1,712th best hitter in MLB out of a total of 1,726.

HA ha ha!

how much does a pitcher's weight matter anyways?

i'm not saying it isn't something to think about when evaluating a pitcher - but it obviously doesn't matter as much as it would for, say, an outfielder (or princefielder).

I feel with Billingsey the odds of him getting an elbow injury are slightly (and I mean slightly because we're talking about pitchers arms here) less susceptible to getting blown out because he doesnt rely on as much whipsaw action with his arms because hes getting alot of drive and torque with his sizable thighs.

Then again I am no scout so perhaps I am full of shit.

Kuo is their only leftie reliever? WTF!

The Padres only have one lefty reliever.

Pads get a smdh too, then.

Fuck t padres

Ha

Mattingly said he wasn't going to carry a lefty just because he's left-handed and sucks. If he wanted to do that we'd have Ron Mahay on our roster right now. Cormier has decent splits against lefties in spite of being a rhp.

In other news

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/04/giants-fan-critically-beaten-after-dodgers-home-opener-team-rivalry-may-be-factor.html

Dodger fans still ghetto. Sun still rises in the east. Feel like once the raiders left town the element that likes to kick the shit out of people in parking lots became dodger fans.

"I do that very well," Vin says when asked if he spent a relaxing off-season. "I broke my toe, and that was fun — slipping on a wood floor in my stocking feet. I had a root canal, and that was fun. Oh, yeah, I had something that's one less than having a colonoscopy. So yes, I'm looking forward to coming to the ballpark."

SSS but kemp is looking really good so far. Key at bats the last two nights..

agreed

this will become a cliche but hiring davey lopes is going to be massive for him... If anyone needed to be keyed into smart baserunning it's kemp, but I look forward to lazy commentators like bobby valentine to keep talking shit..

itt we toss beach balls, do the wave

Kemp's first-to-third on the grounder the other night was dope.

dodgers are 3-2 so far this season. both losses have been shutouts. playing games against the giants defense made me forget that my team sucks.

was watching the live show that mlb network does at night & whoever the host is was talking about how the versatile jamey carroll was arguably the dodgers mvp last year

lol. tbf Carroll had a good year for a backup/spot starter for the perennially injured Furcal. he had a solid .350 obp.

now Aaron Miles on the other hand is fucking worthless. and the post Kemp spots in the order of Loney-Uribe-Barajas-Thames or whoever is pretty much garbage..

Chad Billingsley pooped his pants in Colorado to the line of 3IP, 6H, 5ER, 3BB, 3Ks =(

Dodgers are now 3-3 and I anticipate them playing mediocre .500 ball the rest of the year.

hey, they finally started this game in SD, and EI has the Vin Scully feed.

lol, it's raining again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pyC7WnvLT4

why the hell did they keep restarting this game

the umpires should've taken into consideration the fact that none of these teams can hit for shit & there's at least a 65% chance that this is going into extra innings

hahahahahahahaha they're calling the game off now

wait, nevermind

will vin be able to survive this

still up, it's 1:15, tie game in the ninth, raining like cats and dogs and just right now in another rain delay.

can anyone explain to me why the umpires doing the first game of a three game series in april between two division opponents are about to go through their fourth hour of rain delay as if this is some cross country interleague match up

Will Venable to survive this

still it was fun to hear Vin say "The latest I've ever been at a ballpark was at old Forbes Field, when a transformer blew and the crowd sat in the dark for a few hours..."

shitty way to start a stretch of 20 games in a row..

nl west had some crazy long games yesterday..

Matt Kemp is hitting a cool .409/.519/.727 so far this season

There's a fundamental misunderstanding here. When I put out a music fanzine in the '90s, I wrote a detailed six-page thing on how overrated Joe Carter was, going through all the old Elias books to show how empty his RBI counts were. I get all that; I get it today, I got it then, I got it in the early '80s, when I first started reading James. I was never on any crusade for RBIs. I think my basic point was that they weren't meaningless, and that as long as you had a basic understanding of how they were compiled--in what park, hitting behind who, etc.--then they had some value in arriving at a complete picture of a player, along with 30 or 40 other metrics. It just seems to me that some of you guys get stuck on "counting stat, counting stat," and that your belief system or whatever is as inflexible as people in the '70s who were forever saying Tony Perez was a great clutch hitter just because everybody said he was.

Just so I don't contradict myself, it was clear that Carter's RBI counts reflected three things, one a positive (his ability to stay in the lineup), one a negative (his generally terrible walk totals), and one circumstantial (hitting behind the likes of Brett Butler, Gwynn, Henderson, Alomar, etc.). So not completely empty, but neither, as the Elias data clearly showed, did he have any special ability to hit with men on base. He's an extreme example, though. Another point I was making on that thread last year was that with somebody like Pujols, or Kemp this year, their RBI counts are probably just one more meaningful indicator that they're great hitters. Unless you think Kemp's leading the league in RBI because he's been exceptionally lucky, or he's hitting clean-up in the midst of Murderer's Row.

Yes, and my answer then as is now is that an RBI is completely situational, the condition is whether there is a runner or runners on base or in scoring position when a batter gets a hit (or grounds out/flies out). It is also conditional on a player's position in the batting order.

I'm much more interested in RBI-rate (RBIs/chances) than straight RBIs as there is far too much noise in the data: e.g., Vinny Castilla was a marginal batter who was slotted behind guys who had massive OBPs playing half their games with superballs in thin air. Yet he was the 2004 NL RBI champion and in your eyes, just as "close" (perhaps closer!) as Bonds was to the Triple Crown in 2004.

This will be good news for Obama--he can ignore the prosaic reality of 9% unemployment, remind people that if he'd presided over ideal conditions things would be much better, and he'll surely be reelected in a landslide. (He probably will end up campaigning on the first two, but never mind.)

As expected: Kemp is .331/.446/.636 with runners in scoring position, and .343/.422/.619 with runners on. So: is it not fair to say that his 123 RBI serve as fairly reliable shorthand for how well he's hit with guys on base this year? That far from being meaningless, they're one more indicator of what a great season he's had?

You left out one conditional: whether or not the guy at bat gets a hit.

You need to make an appointment with your optometrist.

I guess that'll stand in for actually answering the question.

clem, I am going oldschool and rooting for Reyes to win the batting title.

...because it will jack his price up and the Mets can spend their money on more cost-effective players.

I doubt if I've seen Reyes play five times in my life, and I haven't a clue anymore what counts as cost-effective (beyond Barry Zito-types), but following him from a distance, he sure looks like someone I'd want to keep. He's on track for HOF consideration, no?

He's deceptively brittle

Nice bullpen implosion with 2 outs in the 10th. You're welcome Arizona.

clemenza, sure the RBI statistic can tell you something, esp if you know the "context" (tho a lot of ppl don't) but i think the general point is that other stats can tell you those same things but more accurately?

and anyway, i would probably even disagree w/ the idea that you can know the context of someone's rbi stat unless you watched every single one of their games and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the situations in which they hit

merely knowing that ryan howard had victorino, rollins and utley hitting in front of him doesn't give you the actual "context" of his ABs

Kenley Jansen: 93 Ks in 52 IP this season. 41 in 27 last season.

96 in 53, that is.

Sorry for hijacking the Dodgers thread; it all started as a simple two-line post on Matt Kemp. For what it's worth, pretty much the only time I ever notice RBI counts anymore is when the possibility of a Triple Crown arises. And yes, I'll admit that that's something the little-kid fan in me wants to see before I shuffle off, maybe because the last one was Yaz just before I became a fan; the Triple Crown has acquired an irrational mystique for me. Otherwise, RBI are just a quick and easy stat that (I believe) serve as a generally reliable--and I do stress "generally"--shorthand for a whole bunch of things that, as you say Jordan, you won't necessarily have access to: what the player did with runners on, with runners in scoring position, etc. I fully realize there are cases like Joe Carter, Dante Bichette, so on and so forth (or, at the other end of the spectrum, Brook Jacoby's bizarre 1987 season), and I'd never take RBI at face value without stopping for a second to ask if they jibe with everything else I know about the player. That's all...um, go Dodgers!

I doubt if I've seen Reyes play five times in my life, and I haven't a clue anymore what counts as cost-effective (beyond Barry Zito-types), but following him from a distance, he sure looks like someone I'd want to keep.

The question, as always, is at what price? To sit there when he's missing 60-100 games with leg issues at age 32, at $22 mil a year, and think, "Wow, we only have 4 more seasons of this?"

As expected: Kemp is .331/.446/.636 with runners in scoring position, and .343/.422/.619 with runners on. So: is it not fair to say that his 123 RBI serve as fairly reliable shorthand for how well he's hit with guys on base this year? That far from being meaningless, they're one more indicator of what a great season he's had?

Those lines are identical! IMO it makes about as much sense as judging a QB by how many yards he's throwing for, it's usually an indicator of good performance, but it depends so much on teammates that it doesn't say anything conrete (I can't think of anyone who had a BAD season w/ 100 RBIs, but I think that's because 100 RBI guys typically hit 3rd or 4th and therefore are usually the best hitters anyway, even Posada could have 100 RBIs if he hit 4th in the NYY lineup)

Can definitely name one horrible year with 100 RBI: Joe Carter's 1990. .232/.290/.391, 115 RBI.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.cgi?id=cartejo01&year=1990&t=b

He was better with men on and RISP, but nothing special at all. I'm guessing he had Gwynn (subpar year), Alomar (still developing), and Jack Clark (lot of walks, as always) ahead of him, but truthfully, I'm mystified as to how he did it.

Matt Kemp has had way more opportunities to hit with men on base than Braun. Ethier's power kinda disappeared this year but he was an obp machine.

What impresses me is how Kemp has scored so many runs with the pile of shit hitting behind him most of the year - Aaron Miles, James Loney, etc. Juan Rivera got kinda hot at the end of the year and leads the league in RBIs since August (I think this is correct..) but still hes no great shakes either.

I can't think of anyone who had a BAD season w/ 100 RBIs,

There are plenty of examples of this, Joe Carter had a number of them, so did Garret Anderson. You're right that 100 RBI seasons are generally good seasons, but with counting stats there are always exceptions and they're not all that rare. Guys who get 180+ hits in a season are generally good players, but Ichiro this year and Juan Pierre's career show that it's not always true.

Kemp did seem to be "closer" to the Triple Crown than anyone has in a long time. When he was three points back in BA before the weekend I really thought he had a chance. And yeah, winning the TC is cool and interesting, even though it doesn't mean that someone had a better year than Bonds in '04. Ted Williams would have won ten TC if he hadn't been walked all the time and/or Boston's offense wasn't crap with the exception of him in the 50's. Everyone agrees with that, so I don't know what the argument is about.

yeah I think in general I would have to think of some really bad 3-or-4 hitters, but couldn't think of anyone offhand

I mean it's kind of in the same realm as pitcher wins, whereas a pitcher who wins 15+ games a season is generally going to be good, I can definitely name some bad 15 win seasons

baseball reference has a blog entry discussing the worst 100 RBI seasons ever. joe carter has 3 of the top 7 but the #1 worst is dante bichette's impressive-seeming 1999: 34 HR, 133 RBI, .298/.354/.541, 104 runs, -2.8 WAR. ruben sierra's terrible 1993 is a close second.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/blog/archives/7948

wow, I've never seen anyone with a -34 RField

you've never watched brad hawpe play the outfield?

even taking into account his shitty, shitty defense, bichette only had an offensive WAR of 0.5 that year.

huh? .298/.354/.541 is similar to Mike Stanton's .263/.357/.540 line and he's worth 4.5 WAR, and he's not a great fielder either

bbr has stanton as #2 in the NL in defensive WAR and superior in lots of the stats they mention. but also i think bichette playing half his games at coors field was taken into account somehow, maybe.

so I don't know what the argument is about

Swear to god, I don't know what half the arguments I get into on the baseball board are about.

Ted Williams would have won ten TC if he hadn't been walked all the time and/or Boston's offense wasn't crap with the exception of him in the 50's.

I'm guessing you're right about most of the '50s, but in the back of my mind I remembered that there was one team that was awesome. It was the 1950 Red Sox team--they scored over 1,000 runs, with Williams around for only 89 games.

https://msti.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/gordon_barajas_baby.gif

WAS JUST ABOUT TO POST THIS

huh? .298/.354/.541 is similar to Mike Stanton's .263/.357/.540 line and he's worth 4.5 WAR, and he's not a great fielder either

― frogbs, Wednesday, September 28, 2011 5:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that was pre-humidor coors, league average there was something nuts like .860 OPS

THE MAN WHO CRADLED DEE GORDON

looooooooooove that gif

http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2011/09/29/kenley-jansen-broke-the-all-time-strikeout-rate-record

The Dodgers' bankruptcy trial has been postponed for one month so Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and Major League Baseball can explore a possible settlement under which McCourt would agree to sell the team, multiple people familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-1027-dodgers-bankruptcy-20111027,0,2390406.story

http://blog.sfgate.com/giants/2011/10/27/dodgers-say-stow-responsible-for-beating/

The civil complaint also insinuates that (Brian) Stow owns some of the blame because, according to McCourt’s attorney Jerome Jackson, "I've been doing these cases for 23 years and I have never seen one yet in which it didn't take at least two people to tango."

Haha. jeez, dudes.

Its totally insensitive and tone deaf on the lawyers behalf but I find it hard to believe that the dude did absolutely nothing whatsoever to get those hoodlums attention.

Kershaw, Kemp and Ethier win gold gloves. Who needs to go to the post season when you receive such prestigious awards?

HOLY FUCK

McCourt agrees to sell Dodgers. Team to be auctioned in bankruptcy court. More soon at latimes.com/sports.

Dumb question -- if the Dodgers sell for $1B, how much of that ends up in Frank McCourt's pocket?

you thinking of buying?

He bought the team for 420 mil, owes his wife 130, and the team allegedly has like 300-400 in debt. Thats a thumbnail sketch obv.. If it sells for 1.2 bil then he'll be in the black for sure.

Would what's left of the Dodgers actually be worth $1? I thought he'd basically dismantled the organization...

the media rights are getting pried from fox after next season and should be worth a shitload of money. fox will probably have to pony up to compete with time warner who threw a jillion dollars at the lakers to start their own network.

But I thought he spun off parking, concessions, etc, into different companies as well?

All that stuff is included in the sale. The real estate too.

Reading more it looks like McCourt basically has to sell the team for $1B just to come close to breaking even and that's without getting into possible back taxes he owes.

Definitely. Alot of theories around the time of the announcement was that MLB would guarantee a price floor, but since then we've learned thats not true.. You'd have to assume they'd get more than the 850m the cubs sold for..