FanHouse BaseballProspectus

NEW YORK -- Over the past few years, I have been to a lot of Yankees games. They keep it interesting, but there are a few things you come to count on. The YMCA. "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch. And horrendous defense by the home team. This last has become as much a constant as the first two. The Yankees, for the past several years, have been a terrible defensive team.

So imagine my own personal surprise Monday night when I learned that the Yankees, those same bumbling pinstripers who've spent the early part of the 21st century scraping the bottom of the statistical defensive rankings, had set a major-league record by going 18 games in a row without an error.

The Yankees? Setting a record for defense? That's like LeBron James setting some kind of handshake record. Or Lindsay Lohan setting a record for consecutive days sober. There are certain things the Yankees do well. Defense is not one of them. Something must be amiss. I went to Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night to investigate.

Anyone with even a passing interest (not you, Rick) in the work of Baseball Prospectus' authors is probably aware how high they regard the current Devil Rays, all the way from the top down, or the bottom up, depending on your perspective. The praise is warranted: With a tiny payroll and a mall for a ballpark, the Rays have built the best scouting and development system in Major League Baseball. And wouldn't you believe it, they're going to contend with the monoliths in the East:

Baseball Prospectus is not prepared to call the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays the best team in the AL, but its PECOTA projection system, which precisely predicted the White Sox' stunning 18-win falloff last season, forecasts an 88-74 finish for baseball's perennial bottom-feeders, a 22-win jump from 2007. [...] It's audacious to project an increase of 22 wins for any club, but when this much young talent coalesces so quickly, it's time to believe.

What's even better about the Rays is that they're likely to be even better in 2009. Which should give your favorite team* hope. If the Rays can do it, why can't you?

* Disclaimer: Offer of hope excludes Pittsburgh Pirates.

Wouldn't it be fun if, for once and for all, we could put a few lingering false dichotomies in the past? If we could agree that, as it stands right now, "blog" doesn't mean "anti-mainstream," but is simply a way of organizing a website in tidy and sequential fashion, and that what one chooses to do with that organization doesn't have all that much to do with the format itself? That's reasonable, is it not?

The same goes for baseball. It'd be fantastic if people could get past the idea that the only argument worth having in baseball is numbers vs. intangibles. This isn't even an argument anymore; the two work together. FRAA and VORP and PECOTA aren't here to destroy everything fun about the national pastime. They simply measure, in much more revealing and incisive ways, what has been measured throughout baseball history. So many of us have arrived at this comfort zone of reason, and yet columns like this still get written. Go on. Read it. I'm not copying and pasting, so just come right back.

Back? Good.

The Tampa Bay Devil Rays, excuse me, the Tampa Bay Rays have been a Major League franchise for ten years now, and in that time they've never won more than 70 games in one season. Instead year after year they've been a team with a lot of young talent, but never enough to make a serious run in the AL East.

I'm not sure much has changed in Tampa this season, save for losing their satanic roots, but don't tell that to Rays pitcher Scott Kazmir. He's looking to make a playoff run in 2008.

"What's possible? Play in October, that's possible," ace Scott Kazmir said. "That is possible. That's what I got out of Joe Maddon talking to us, and talking to all of my teammates, it's not something that's impossible. We have what it takes to win here."

Now when first hearing Kazmir's statement, it's pretty easy to laugh off. I mean, come on, these are the Rays we're talking about. All they are is a farm system for the rest of Major League Baseball, right?

But maybe it's not that crazy, after all, how many of us thought that the Colorado Rockies were going to get to the World Series last season? While I don't think the Rays can realistically compete with the Red Sox and Yankees in the AL East this season, Baseball Prospectus just released their PECOTA projections for 2008 (subscription required), and guess what?

The Rays project to have their first winning season in 2008, going 82-80.

A few breaks here and there, and a breakout season from a youngster or two, and maybe Scott Kazmir won't look so crazy after all come October.

If you've ventured around these parts before, you know some of us are having quite a bit of fun with this whole George Mitchell steroid investigation. Namely because Mr. Mitchell seems to be getting nowhere. But at least he's trying, man.

In any event, over at Sports Illustrated today, Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus fame does not go lightly on the Mitchell investigation. He does not make contrived blogger jokes. He just simply gets down to business:

I said at the time, and I believe now, that the Mitchell Commission is a cynical exercise in public relations, designed to turn up no surprises. What I didn't see coming was how the Commission would be used to focus blame for the era exclusively on uniformed personnel. Every time the Commission makes the news, it's in some way reflecting badly on the players: They won't talk, they won't give up medical records, they won't cooperate. If the Commission isn't going to make any new findings along the way, it will certainly make sure to establish in the public eye who the villains are.

To which I say, "enough." The Mitchell Commission isn't going to -- and isn't designed to -- make any discoveries about the nominal Steroid Era. It has neither the authority nor the gravitas to do any real work. It exists merely in the hopes that it will provide a veneer of credibility to official disdain and/or condemnation of the media-approved bad guys of the timeframe.

Wow, whoa OK then. I usually defer to the BP fellas on all things baseball and I take no exception in this case. Except for this: Sheehan asserts baseball should drop the investigation instead of letting it flounder along -- it's ruining the game more than it's helping it.

I, on the other hand, don't necessarily agree. I'm having too much fun with it to let it go just yet.

Previously at FanHouse:
Guess What: Union Won't Give Up Medical Records
George Mitchell Is on The Steroids Prowl Again

When your average win total the last two seasons has been 95, you're still going to have some detractors, even if they don't have firing synapses, brown eyes or long, flowing locks. Like say, if it was a computer. Such is the case of the Chicago White Sox this season:

Baseball Prospectus, considered the new-age statistical bible, projects the White Sox to finish with a 72-90 record this season.

"Well, we're screwed now," team captain Paul Konerko said with a sarcastic laugh. "I guess we'll just have to battle through."

What the White Sox will be battling, however, are their own statistics, their ages, historical comparisons and myriad other data fed into the PECOTA system at Baseball Prospectus.

How the computer arrives at its final projections is way above the average baseball mind, a sort of "objective" analysis of what the computer predicts is going to happen.

Good news for the South Siders: In 2005, the year they claimed the World Series title, the PECOTA system at Baseball Prospectus had them finishing 71-91 and finishing in fourth place.

Take that, Mr. Computer!

We're all learning more and more about HGH every day - and today Will Carroll at Baseball Prospectus delivers some of the insights from recent scientific studies regarding the drug. Here's the gist: it doesn't actually make you stronger. It just makes you, you know, grow.

AA: Conventional wisdom says that everyone is on HGH now because there's no test to detect it, but what they don't realize is that there's a night and day difference between HGH and anabolic-androgenic steroids. Studies have shown that HGH supplementation will increase muscle mass; but there is little, if any, evidence of strength gains in these studies. In other words, when HGH supplementation has been studied in normal males, there are reports of small gains in muscle mass, but there seems to be no evidence from a randomized, double-blind study that you gain strength from HGH alone. If there is any effect of HGH, it is likely to be a small effect, especially compared to how anabolic steroids improve strength and baseball performance.

In other words, the furor over HGH might not be as warranted as that over steroids, because baseball players might not receive a major, quantifiable competitive advantage by taking HGH even in amounts that exceed the standard dosage. Instead, HGH would merely aid in physical recovery, which is an advantage given the long baseball season but doesn't specifically increase a player's speed or reaction time or anything else.

In any case, if we're going to get all worked up about HGH the way we get all worked up about steroids, distinguishing and understanding the differences between the two is probably important.