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2008 MLB Predictions

Sat, 09 May 2009 9:33:25 EDT

Everyone else is doing it, so here goes my shot...

AL East

1. New York: They have the best offense in the AL and their pitching and defense will be much improved from last year.

2. Boston: They have more holes than the Yanks and less options when stuff goes wrong. Ramirez, Varitek, Lowell will be disappointments. Still good enough to win the wild card.

Fantasy Surprises and Busts

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:53:22 EDT

I'm also a big fantasy baseball fan, so now that I've had all my drafts completed, I'll share my top surprises for 2008 as well as the biggest busts. As a baseline, I'm using our own Draft Averages (www.sportsline.com/fantasy/baseball/draft/MLB/ROTO/ALL) So for each position I'll pick a player who I think will most outperform their draft slot and the one that will most underperform it.

Surprises:

C: Geovany Soto: Won the job after a great callup last year. I have him ranked at #6 after all the M's (Martinez, Martin, Mauer and McCann) and Posada. He's #11 by our users, behind over the hill guys such as Varitek, Hernandez and Rodriguez. I also like Napoli and both Molinas better than most.

1B: Todd Helton: I have him as the 7th best 1B, while our users have him at #12. He'll hit for a higher average than any 1B not named Pujols and his R and RBI totals will be very strong, considering the park and the lineup. I like LaRoche and Jackson to out do their 16th and 17th ranking as well.

Cactus League Report 3/8

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 21:24:59 EST

Yesterday (Friday) we went to Mesa to watch Seattle play the Cubs. Here are some observations:

Mesa Stadium is the largest of all the Cactus League parks, and it's always packed. Today was no exception.

Ted Lilly started for the Cubs and he promplty walked Ichiro and Yuneisky Betancourt hit a bomb to give the M's a 2-run lead. But Lilly settled down from there on and didn't allow another baserunner in his three innings of work.

I was looking forward to see Kosuke Fukudome play and fortunately Pinella put in the game. Actually, it was a pretty good lineup, with all the starters in except Soriano. The Mariners did likewise, with Adrian Beltre being the one notable absence.

Cactus League Report

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:03:58 EST

Today we went to watch the Arizona Diamondbacks take on the Kansas City Royals in Surprise. Here are some observations:

The Surprise stadium is perhaps the nicest in the entire Cactus League. Too bad its tenants are the Royals and Rangers. The good thing is always easy to get good seats.

Dan Haren (below) started for the D-Backs and pitched really well. I'm as big a fan of him but fans in Arizona are expecting Brandon Webb and him to do what Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling did in 2001. The thing is, this team has so many good young players, their two aces don't have to be that good to win a championship.

Arizona played their entire starting lineup except for Justin Upton. Too bad, I was really hoping to see that future star play.

Spring Training, Cactus League Style

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:25:48 EST

So I'm spending a few days in Arizona and catching some Cactus League action. Today I was at the San Diego vs Oakland game and here are some observations:

This early in the season, pitchers don't go very long into games and that's understandable, but there are lots of batters that are way deep in the depth chart that are getting playing time.

Randy Wolf started the game for San Diego. He warming up right in front of us and he seemed extremely wild. I said that he wouldn't get out of the first inning. He lasted 2/3 of an inning and allowed 4 runs. Not even Petco Park makes him someone you will want to have on your fantasy team.

Chase Headley (right) played left for the Padres. He didn't look particularly good out there but he seemed to have a lot of difficult plays to deal with. He did have an assist. I doubt he'll make the team out of spring training, but he should be in the majors sometime in 2008.

Blogging in big media

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:23:05 EST

It's certainly not news that blogging as communication form has exploded. Every day that goes by there's more evidence of how mainstream the concept of blogging has become.

While "professionally produced content" will never go away, it's great that those that create it are challenged by talented individuals that until recently did not have an outlet to share their views. It's one of the things that makes me appreciate my job so much.

Here are two recent examples:

Yesterday, we linked to a bigpapiandmanny's blog on MLB Power Rankings from the MLB home page. The link is not up anymore there as we rotate over different types of content. I'm glad to see us recognizing such good work. Looks like Emack has some competition. This is just a start. I don't know what our site will look like in 6 months, but there's going to be a lot more of that.

My Value is Going Down

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 8:23:56 EDT

Some users have been noticing that their "Value" (that's the third component of your reputation, along with Connections, Participations and Skills) has been going down of late, despite them getting mostly good ratings. The "Value" component is basically a reflection of how people rate your contributions. The more and higher ratings you get the higher your value.

For the purposes of this process, only the contributions and reviews submitted in the last 90 days count. So if someone gives you 5 stars today for a post that you submitted 89 days ago, this rating will only help you for two days. In two days the message would be expired and so will be all the reviews on it. The message can still be accessed on the site (we keep them for around 135 days) but the ratings won't count. The reason for this is to take into account users that change their behavior either for good or bad.

Ratings Changes Effective Tomorrow

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:05:24 EDT

In this thread we announced some upcoming changes to the way posts are rated and how those ratings impact the reputation:

www.sportsline.com/mcc/messages/chrono/5876055/

Now that the changes have been made I want to describe them here as the thread above may not have gotten all the details exactly right.

Why are we making this change?

Why we have ratings

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:10:40 EDT

I guess I'll start this thing in the most controversial possible way: discussing the reputation and rating system use by the message boards and now the blogs. Many of you wonder why we have ratings?

Having a system that rates users and their content has several benefits. The two main ones are:

1. Allows us to pick the best content and feature it on our community pages and soon in other areas of the site. When the community selects someone to be in the top 100 or 1000, we can be sure that this content is worth reading, and we can make it available to newcomers to the site. A lot of our users can't spend hours on the site finding the best content, so we use the community ratings as a way to help them do that. By introducing them to some of your best content, hopefully that will motivate them to consume more content and even join in on the discussion.