What They're Saying

I think one other factor taken into account it age of the two lineups and how that relates to health. The Twins have only Hudson and Cuddyer that are over 30. The Yankees have Jeter, Arod, Texiera, Posada, and Johnson in that lineup. Jeter will be 36 and Hudson actually turns 39 towards the end of the season.

I guess once age is taken into account I assume the Twins lineup will stay healthier I have to go with the Twins again, I’m trying to not be a homer here. However, if it were the two above lineups, both completely healthy for one series, you’re right the Yanks probably win by a nose.

I think the Twins will have a better bullpen especially since the Yanks are likely graduating one of Joba or Hughes to the rotations thus weakening their bullpen. They probably have us in outfield defense but I’ll take our infield defense over there’s any day. Hardy’s better than Jetah, Hudson and Cano are probably on par, Punto is better than A-rod, and Tex is likely a bit better than Morneau.

As far as rotation, yah the only way the Twins are as good as that rotation is if Liriano returns to 06 form or Sabathia breaks down.

How I would love to see that!

The truth is though, if, and it’s a very big if Liriano could somehow return to 06 form or even late 08 form (If you check out his stats after he came up from AAA he was a top 10 pitcher in baseball for two months) then yes, the Twins rotation is very capable of being among the best in baseball. The key word being among.

The point several people made is that the Twins’ rotation has a small but realistic chance of being that good. Many other teams have no realistic chance no matter how many things go right for them.

For the Twins though, if everything went right:

Liriano would be close to his ‘06 form and be a true ace.
Baker would at least repeat his career year of 2008 and be a poor man’s ace or an elite #2.
Slowey would improve from his 2008 performance and have a mid 3 ERA.
Pavano would pitch like his FIP last year would indicate and have a low 4 ERA.
Blackburn wouldn’t get any worse, maintaining another low 4 ERA.
Duensing wouldn’t regress much, with a mid 4 ERA and being a superb backup starter.

That would be a killer rotation. All of those things happening at once would be unlikely but each on their own are not.

Most other teams don’t even have that potential upside in their rotation. To be among the best rotations in baseball, they would need someone to suddenly get more talent than they have ever shown.

Here’s to hoping they break that cycle this season.

The White Sox will be above .500 this year. Then in 2011 they’ll win 75 games

Don’t see why two years in which Blackburn’s results were better than the underlying performance should convince us that we can expect that disparity. I have only vague recollection of this from looking at it during last season, but my memory is that the reason he was doing better results wise was because he had better than expected results with runners on base (in scoring position).

I can’t see that as being a repeatable skill.

FIP is a very simple statistic. It only considers HR, walks and Ks. Blackburn doesn’t give up a ton of walks or HR, but he doesn’t strike people out, either.
I don’t know how the stat was calibrated, but I imagine it was done using some kind of least squared error, or minimum average error, or something like that, and then rounded to whole numbers.

Here’s the question: are there other considerations that should be given? If you have two pitchers who have identical BB, K, HR stats, what else would you consider? If you had a predictive model, is GO/AO statistically significant? Is previous RISP performance predictive? What about how hard the ball is hit on balls in the park, etc? I imagine that there are plenty of scounts who say – this pitcher doesn’t strike a lot of people out, but he does get a lot of weak outs – he’s a good pitcher.

All I’m saying is that FIP is a good tool, but there may be other factors as well. That is the point of sabermetrics – to keep refining your knowledge using verifiable, quantifiable data. Still, that doesn’t mean you should put complete faith in your best quantitative method. Look how well that worked for the finance industry and their copula based risk management programs.

no one would pay attention to them. They wouldn’t bother keeping track of batting average if it didn’t mean anything.

It’s interesting to look at differences among teams. As long as you don’t take that paragraph as a statement that one team is better than another, then it’s fine. I, personally, didn’t realize the gap in walks was as high as it is.

Stats like Runs, while not a good statistic at all when looking at value, is obviously very meaningful at the team level.

What I’m not sure about, is what numbers are being used here. Are these projections? Are these last year’s stats but with next years projected lineups?