Official Godiva toy boy and forever fiance Archibald is despondent about his beloved Toronto Blue Jays firing General Manager (GM) Alex Anthopoulos (AA) by offering him a new contract without giving him the upper hand over new President Mark Shapiro on player moves. In a Godfather ju-jitsu move, the Jays made AA an offer he could refuse.
Get a grip, Archibald. Genius AA compiled a record of 489 wins and 483 losses over the 6 years that he was in charge of the Jays from 2010 through 2015. The Jays made the play-offs once and won 1 series only to lose in the semi-finals.
Over the same period while Shapiro was running the show in Cleveland the Indians' record was worse at 475-496 with one play-off appearance as wild card match loser.
But, let's take a closer look. Over that period, Shapiro in small-market Cleveland spent $72.5 million/year on average on player salaries vs. $95.6 million/year that AA spent on Blue Jay players.
In other words, AA spent $23 million more each year than Shapiro to get an additional 2.3 wins/year on average in the regular season and almost one more win/year in the play-offs. (Of course, you could argue that the real difference between the Jays and Indians was greater than 2.3 wins/year because the Jays play in the tougher American League East. But, I doubt that a schedule adjustment would be that significant. It would still look like AA spending $23 million/year for not many more wins.)
Let's see what Shapiro and his team can do with the Blue Jay budget that team owners Rogers Communications will give him. Of course, with the Canadian dollar now back to normal levels, the Blue Jay budget may get tight and Shapiro will have to be at his analytical best to squeeze wins out of the ageing roster that he has inherited from AA. Shapiro's in a no-win situation for the 2016 season. If the Jays do well, the fans will credit AA. And, if the Jays do poorly, the fans will blame Shapiro.
AA will get another GM job. I will track the AA vs. Shapiro contest by looking at both total wins and losses as well as total spending over the rest of their careers. I am willing to wager that Shapiro's future career will be better than AA's.
David Price
Blue Jay diehards and AA loyalists believe that AA would have signed David Price. Just for fun, let's keep track of Price's Red Sox career over his 2016-22 contract vs. what Shapiro does each year with the $30 million/year that he redeployed rather than pay Price's price.
Shapiro signed JA Happ at $10 million in 2016 to effectively replace Price in the starting rotation. He ended up paying an extra $2 million by trading Liam Hendriks to get Jesse Chavez and another $2 million for Franklin Morales as well as $4.5 million when he traded for Nelson Liriano at mid-season plus $0.6 million to Jason Grilli and $0.5 million picking up Joe Biaginni plus $2 million by trading Ben Revere for what turned out to be a combined year from Drew Storen and Joaquin Benoit plus $1 million for Gavin Floyd. In other words, Shapiro spent $24 million on Happ and a grab bag of spare arms hoping to strike gold.
Contrary to popular belief and a misplaced focus on his 3.99 earned run average (ERA), David Price remained one of the top pitchers in baseball in 2016 with 6.42 wins against replacement (WAR; source = baseballprospectus.com)
Happ was lucky to go 20-4, but certainly outperformed expectations with a 2.14 WAR. Biaginni chipped in with 0.82, Grilli contributed 0.64, Liriano 0.9 in 1/3 of a season, Benoit/Storen 0.7 and Chavez added 0.3 WAR. Unfortunately, Morales went -0.04 and Chavez was -1.1 below Hendriks. All told, Shapiro's loot bag of pitchers accounted for 4.4 WAR.
As I expected Price's 2016 WAR exceeded Shapiro's Happ + spare parts WARs. However, in 2022, the last year of Price's Red Sox contract, I certainly expect Shapiro to be spending that $30 million better than the Red Sox. And, the tipping point year when Price is worth less than how Shapiro spends $30 million on pitching should come well before 2022.
Luck
Interesting article from the Nate Silver operation in which the author suggests that Ryan Goins over the first 1/3 of 2016 was a victim of bad luck who will bounce back to his 2015 level and that Russell Martin will bounce part of the way back while Michael Saunders will come back a bit to earth from hitting way above his career-based expectation.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/whos-hitting-the-ball-harder-this-year-and-whos-just-getting-lucky/
In the meantime, misManager John Gibbons has benched Goins to ride the hot bat of Darwin Barney who has been hitting well above his career norms -- usually a sign of random good luck although the Jays do have a good track record of improving hitters who come to Toronto mid-career.
Postscript: Barney did indeed fall back to his career norm and finished 2016 with a 0.2 WAR. Goins remained ineffective on the few occasions when he had a chance to play and recorded a team-worst -0.9 WAR.
Friday, October 30, 2015
NBA 2015-6 Recap ATS
I play in ex-Godiva toy boy Reginald's non-profit National Basketball Association (NBA) pool picking winners against the point spread (ATS). Heavy underdogs finished 62-50-1 or over 55% ATS for the regular season.
Ride the heavy underdogs is my only advice to current Godiva toy boy and official Godiva fiance Archibald, who gets on so well with Reginald that he plays in all Reginald's pools. My advice follows academic studies showing that "heavy" NBA underdogs with more than 12 points have a statistically significant winning record over a long run of years.
While this is true of regular season matches, I am less certain that the same result can be found in play-off matches. In Reginald's play-off ATS pool, I lost taking GS -5.5 over cleveland in game 7 and finished the play-offs 48-38: 44-34 "light" overdogs and 4-4 "heavy" underdogs.
Archibald was wrong sticking to his prediction after King James fired puppet Coach Blatt: "As a general manager, Lebron is a great player. Is he still glad that he traded Andrew Wiggins for KLove and then compounded the error by resigning KLove? Minnesota will win the NBA title before Cleveland does." I should say that Arch watches sports with his eyes and never consults analytics showing that KLove is the 3rd or 4th best power forward in the NBA. For me, a healthy Chris Bosh would be 3rd and KLove 4th behind Draymond Green 1st and Millsap 2nd. (Draymond was not looking like the best in the 1st 4 matches against OKC. Also, he's a dirty player. I was glad to see him suspended for game 5 of the finals.) Archibald maintains that his prediction was sound and that he could not have predicted that NBA MVP Stephen Curry and his mates would play so poorly and only score 13 points in the 4th quarter of game 7 and no points in the final 4 minutes.
Ride the heavy underdogs is my only advice to current Godiva toy boy and official Godiva fiance Archibald, who gets on so well with Reginald that he plays in all Reginald's pools. My advice follows academic studies showing that "heavy" NBA underdogs with more than 12 points have a statistically significant winning record over a long run of years.
While this is true of regular season matches, I am less certain that the same result can be found in play-off matches. In Reginald's play-off ATS pool, I lost taking GS -5.5 over cleveland in game 7 and finished the play-offs 48-38: 44-34 "light" overdogs and 4-4 "heavy" underdogs.
Archibald was wrong sticking to his prediction after King James fired puppet Coach Blatt: "As a general manager, Lebron is a great player. Is he still glad that he traded Andrew Wiggins for KLove and then compounded the error by resigning KLove? Minnesota will win the NBA title before Cleveland does." I should say that Arch watches sports with his eyes and never consults analytics showing that KLove is the 3rd or 4th best power forward in the NBA. For me, a healthy Chris Bosh would be 3rd and KLove 4th behind Draymond Green 1st and Millsap 2nd. (Draymond was not looking like the best in the 1st 4 matches against OKC. Also, he's a dirty player. I was glad to see him suspended for game 5 of the finals.) Archibald maintains that his prediction was sound and that he could not have predicted that NBA MVP Stephen Curry and his mates would play so poorly and only score 13 points in the 4th quarter of game 7 and no points in the final 4 minutes.
Thursday, September 10, 2015
NFL Deflategate: Patriot Fumble Watch
(Updated december 2019)
The New England Cheatriots fumbled 14 times in 16 regular season matches in 2015 followed by 27 total fumbles in 2016, 13 fumbles in 2017 and 11 fumbles in 2018. 65 fumbles in 64 regular season matches over 4 years = in line with their 1/match fumble average over the previous 8 regular seasons from 2007 through 2014.
So far in 2019, only 9 fumbles in 14 matches.
However, the Cheatriots fumbled 12 times or 3/match in their first 4 Brady-less matches of 2016 while he was serving his suspension for lying about instructing the Cheatriot equipment managers to deflate his footballs from 2007-8 to 2014-15. In 74 Brady regular season games from 2015 through 2019, only 62 fumbles. Will there never be any end to the Brady Cheatriot's low-fumble magic?
I predicted that we would see the Brady Cheatriots averaging around the NFL average of 1.5 fumbles/match. But, so far Friend-of-Trump Tom he is maintaining his uncanny knack of leading a low-fumble offense.
Before the 2007 season, the National Football League (NFL) changed the rules to allow quarterbacks to prepare their own footballs for use when their teams had the ball. Over 8 regular seasons from 2007 through 2014, the New England Cheatriots averaged 15.125 fumbles/year or just under 1/game. Over the 8 prior regular seasons from 1999 through 2006, the Patriots averaged 24.75 fumbles/year or just over 1.5/game. 1999-2006 was not an unusual period of high fumbling for the Patriots. Over 14 years from 1993 through 2006, the Patriots averaged 25 fumbles/year.
There is no statistically significant evidence confirming that the Cheatriots were fumbling less from 2007 through 2014 because under-inflated footballs are easier to grip and harder for defensive opponents to knock loose. The Atlanta Falcons experienced a very similar decline in fumbles over 2007-14 vs. 1999-2006. And the Detroit Lions experienced a rise in fumbles/year of almost +6. It is difficult to imagine that even the Lions were deliberately over-inflating their footballs.
Now that there has been so much controversy, the NFL has likely been watching football pressure carefully starting with the 2015 Super Bowl. Just for fun, I have been keeping track of the number of New England Cheatriot fumbles. There is so much year-to-year variation in team fumbles that it is not possible to predict any team's fumbles for a given year. But, I expected Patriot fumbles over the 8 years from 2015 through 2022 to come closer to the NFL average of about 22/year than the 2007-14 Patriot average of 15/year.
I have to admit my deep disappointment that there is not yet any circumstantial evidence from the fumble record for the 2015 through 2019 seasons to indicate that Trump friend and supporter Tom Brady was cheating with his prepared footballs from 2007 through 2014.
The 2016 regular season results were more promising until Brady returned from his suspension for cheating and lying. Hard to believe that Brady is the key to the unusually low team fumble total from 2007 through 2015, his 12 matches in 2016, all of 2017 and 2018 as well as 2019 so far, but there is at least circumstantial evidence pointing that way.
At this point, I am not planning to track Cheatriot playoff fumbles 2008-2015 vs. 2016-2022. I don't have the time to go back to look up Cheatriot playoff fumbles 2008 to 2015. But, there is no evidence so far that deflated balls from 2007-8 to the 2015 playoffs were partly responsible for New England's unprecedented run of success, particularly regular season success, from 2007 to their 2015 Super Bowl triumph.
The New England Cheatriots fumbled 14 times in 16 regular season matches in 2015 followed by 27 total fumbles in 2016, 13 fumbles in 2017 and 11 fumbles in 2018. 65 fumbles in 64 regular season matches over 4 years = in line with their 1/match fumble average over the previous 8 regular seasons from 2007 through 2014.
So far in 2019, only 9 fumbles in 14 matches.
However, the Cheatriots fumbled 12 times or 3/match in their first 4 Brady-less matches of 2016 while he was serving his suspension for lying about instructing the Cheatriot equipment managers to deflate his footballs from 2007-8 to 2014-15. In 74 Brady regular season games from 2015 through 2019, only 62 fumbles. Will there never be any end to the Brady Cheatriot's low-fumble magic?
I predicted that we would see the Brady Cheatriots averaging around the NFL average of 1.5 fumbles/match. But, so far Friend-of-Trump Tom he is maintaining his uncanny knack of leading a low-fumble offense.
Before the 2007 season, the National Football League (NFL) changed the rules to allow quarterbacks to prepare their own footballs for use when their teams had the ball. Over 8 regular seasons from 2007 through 2014, the New England Cheatriots averaged 15.125 fumbles/year or just under 1/game. Over the 8 prior regular seasons from 1999 through 2006, the Patriots averaged 24.75 fumbles/year or just over 1.5/game. 1999-2006 was not an unusual period of high fumbling for the Patriots. Over 14 years from 1993 through 2006, the Patriots averaged 25 fumbles/year.
There is no statistically significant evidence confirming that the Cheatriots were fumbling less from 2007 through 2014 because under-inflated footballs are easier to grip and harder for defensive opponents to knock loose. The Atlanta Falcons experienced a very similar decline in fumbles over 2007-14 vs. 1999-2006. And the Detroit Lions experienced a rise in fumbles/year of almost +6. It is difficult to imagine that even the Lions were deliberately over-inflating their footballs.
Now that there has been so much controversy, the NFL has likely been watching football pressure carefully starting with the 2015 Super Bowl. Just for fun, I have been keeping track of the number of New England Cheatriot fumbles. There is so much year-to-year variation in team fumbles that it is not possible to predict any team's fumbles for a given year. But, I expected Patriot fumbles over the 8 years from 2015 through 2022 to come closer to the NFL average of about 22/year than the 2007-14 Patriot average of 15/year.
I have to admit my deep disappointment that there is not yet any circumstantial evidence from the fumble record for the 2015 through 2019 seasons to indicate that Trump friend and supporter Tom Brady was cheating with his prepared footballs from 2007 through 2014.
The 2016 regular season results were more promising until Brady returned from his suspension for cheating and lying. Hard to believe that Brady is the key to the unusually low team fumble total from 2007 through 2015, his 12 matches in 2016, all of 2017 and 2018 as well as 2019 so far, but there is at least circumstantial evidence pointing that way.
At this point, I am not planning to track Cheatriot playoff fumbles 2008-2015 vs. 2016-2022. I don't have the time to go back to look up Cheatriot playoff fumbles 2008 to 2015. But, there is no evidence so far that deflated balls from 2007-8 to the 2015 playoffs were partly responsible for New England's unprecedented run of success, particularly regular season success, from 2007 to their 2015 Super Bowl triumph.
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
NFL 2015-16 ATS Recap
In official Godiva toy boy and fiance Archibald's non-profit, season-long, just-for-fun pool picking winners against the spread (ATS), I was gratified to win my Super Bowl L pick with underdog Denver +4 over Carolina
The all-underdogs approach remains the long-run champion having defeated all-overdogs 19 of the past 24 regular seasons since 1992 averaging almost 52% over that span.
Accordingly, all-underdogs is my default pick with the occasional "value" overdog sprinkled in. I did go with all-overdogs in the 1/4 final 8 playoff round because home teams have won almost 75% of matches straight-up in this round thanks to their superior talent levels and the extra week of rest. Over 1,000 matches in these circumstances, I doubt that there would be enough point reversals to bring underdogs up to 50% ATS.
I was 131-118-7 ATS for the regular season -- 40-39-1 home underdogs, 83-69-5 road underdogs and 8-10-1 home overdogs -- good for a tie for 26th out of 99 in Arch's pool and a tie for 10th out of 68 in another pool where I swim with sharks. The non-Arch pool uses generous point spreads and that explains the difference in my results.
Earlier this year I was proving what my long gone London toy boy used to say about me: "When Lady G is good, she's very good. But, when she's bad, she's very very very bad." Indeed I was very bad earlier this year and again in week 13 at 5-11 offset by racking up 12-2 in week 10 and 11-5 in week 17. All in all, I am satisfied with my performance over the full year.
But, I was 5-6 ATS in the playoffs -- 2-3 with home overdogs, 2-2 with home underdogs, 0-1 road underdogs and 1-0 in the Bowl. (Archibald's mate Jarhead points out that home underdogs are riding a 20-12 ATS streak in the playoffs.)
This is the 6th consecutive playoff year that I have finished below 50% ATS. But, I was confident going with the Super Bowl underdog. According to Professor Steven Leavitt of Freakonomics fame, the Super Bowl underdog is the best ATS pick of the year. So far, Super underdogs are 25-23-2 ATS. Over 1000 Super Bowls we might expect to see underdogs closer to 55% than 50%.
The NFC is up XXVI to XXIV over the AFC after L Super Bowls.
I can't tell you how much it pleasured me to pick successfully against NEW ENGLAND in the conference championship round and be firmly against Coach Bill Belicheat and Donald Trump supporter Tom Brady.
Trump's views about football are as dangerous and wrong-headed as his politics.
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/donald-trump---football-has-become-soft--like-our-country-000938592.html
The all-underdogs approach remains the long-run champion having defeated all-overdogs 19 of the past 24 regular seasons since 1992 averaging almost 52% over that span.
Accordingly, all-underdogs is my default pick with the occasional "value" overdog sprinkled in. I did go with all-overdogs in the 1/4 final 8 playoff round because home teams have won almost 75% of matches straight-up in this round thanks to their superior talent levels and the extra week of rest. Over 1,000 matches in these circumstances, I doubt that there would be enough point reversals to bring underdogs up to 50% ATS.
I was 131-118-7 ATS for the regular season -- 40-39-1 home underdogs, 83-69-5 road underdogs and 8-10-1 home overdogs -- good for a tie for 26th out of 99 in Arch's pool and a tie for 10th out of 68 in another pool where I swim with sharks. The non-Arch pool uses generous point spreads and that explains the difference in my results.
Earlier this year I was proving what my long gone London toy boy used to say about me: "When Lady G is good, she's very good. But, when she's bad, she's very very very bad." Indeed I was very bad earlier this year and again in week 13 at 5-11 offset by racking up 12-2 in week 10 and 11-5 in week 17. All in all, I am satisfied with my performance over the full year.
But, I was 5-6 ATS in the playoffs -- 2-3 with home overdogs, 2-2 with home underdogs, 0-1 road underdogs and 1-0 in the Bowl. (Archibald's mate Jarhead points out that home underdogs are riding a 20-12 ATS streak in the playoffs.)
This is the 6th consecutive playoff year that I have finished below 50% ATS. But, I was confident going with the Super Bowl underdog. According to Professor Steven Leavitt of Freakonomics fame, the Super Bowl underdog is the best ATS pick of the year. So far, Super underdogs are 25-23-2 ATS. Over 1000 Super Bowls we might expect to see underdogs closer to 55% than 50%.
The NFC is up XXVI to XXIV over the AFC after L Super Bowls.
I can't tell you how much it pleasured me to pick successfully against NEW ENGLAND in the conference championship round and be firmly against Coach Bill Belicheat and Donald Trump supporter Tom Brady.
Trump's views about football are as dangerous and wrong-headed as his politics.
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/donald-trump---football-has-become-soft--like-our-country-000938592.html
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