Some Links To Occupy Your Time On This Off-Day

I haven't been posting many (or any) link dumps over the offseason, mainly because I didn't feel the need. But with the season starting up again there's a lot more news to go around.

Two interesting articles on UZR that I saw over on TYU. The first, and more reasonable, comes from Peter Abraham. and the second, comes from Dan Shaughnessy. Shaughnessy's is titled "Trust what you see, not the numbers", so you probably can tell by that's it's probably not even worth your time. If that wasn't enough, check out some of these quotes from the article:

We’ve got too many stats in this game today.

...

While baseball is played on green grass in fresh-air stadiums, an army of geeks will be holed up in their basements, under a naked light bulb, crunching numbers and finding new equations to measure something that simply can’t be quantified.

...

I don’t trust the defensive numbers.

Good job you simpleton, then maybe you should stop writing about them all together. As for Pete's article, one of the things that stuck out was this regarding a quote from J.D. Drew:

“UZR? That stuff seems like a lot of mumbo-jumbo to me,’’ Drew said. “Do those guys even watch the games?’’

Every play of every game, several times over, in fact. The data used to compile UZR and other advanced statistics comes from Baseball Info Solutions, a company in Coplay, Pa. Owner John Dewan hires only former college or professional players and trains them to chart games via video and record the specific characteristics of every batted ball.

“By gosh, there is nobody in the country who watches more games than our people,’’ Dewan said. “I can’t stress that enough. We can get down to the pixel to make a determination.’’

It's good when players have no clue about what they're talking about, especially when it's a stat compiled by former players. Unlike Shaughnessy's pile of trash, Pete's is certainly worth the read and also comes with this nice video that sums up exactly what UZR is:


- New York Magazine broke down John Sterling's call of Curtis Granderson's home run last night. If you didn't hear it, it was ""Oh Curtis, you're something sort of Grandish."

- Speaking of Granderson, Andrew Marchand has this article on ESPN New York, about Curtis and his ability to speak with the media.

No. 1, he showed power -- especially to right field -- which should serve him well in the Bronx. No. 2, he handled the media beautifully, which is important in New York because there are so many of us.

Granderson being able to handle the NY media will be very big for him, just as it would be for any new player in this town.

- Nick Swisher relaunched his website, NickSwisher.com. It looks pretty good.

- The guys over at Bronx Baseball Daily are running a ticket giveaway contest. Head on over, maybe you could land those tickets.

- Tomorrow night at 10:30 p.m. MSG network will be airing the next part in their series "The Lineup" rating New York's best baseball players, position by position. Tomorrow they will be focusing on New York's best second baseman. Go make your picks or just get info on the show here.

- Over on Baseball & The Boogie Down they're donating money for each home run Swish hits to Nick Swisher's "Swish Wishes" charity. If you're in a generous mood head on over and see what you can do.

That should keep you busy for the night.