213 Miles From Shea

Not to be confused with the other thing I always refer to, this was last weeks Sporting News Issue.

The cover this year: Barry Zito

Power Rankings:

1. Twins

2. Tigers

3. Yankees

4. Red Sox

5. Mets

6. Phillies

I think that the year the Twins will def. win the World Series, or get there will be 2008. They will have Johan, a healthy Liriano and Mauer and Monroe with more experience….Plus a Perkins and Boonser with more experience…they can be dangerous

They give the best offseason move to the Tigers getting Gary Sheffield

Worst offeseason move to the Red Sox and JD Drew

Listed as teh #3 rookie to get starting jobs is Mike Pelfry

In Ranking the offseasons by division, they gave the Mets 3rd, because of all the reasons we have all heard over a million times.

For the detailed look at the Mets, they say that Pelfry and Perez are likly to get the 4th and 5th rotation spot jobs. They say Sanchez will be ready to pitch, but just in case, Heilman is still there to help out.

As you could imagine from previous articles in this issue, Pelfry, is one of the prospects to watch.

On the bottom of all the pages, they run a fantasy ticker that ranks the draft picks. Here are teh Mets listed and their number (there are 96 total listed)

5. Jose Reyes

20. Carlos Beltran

22. David Wright

38. Billy Wagner

47. Carlos Delgado

I think only 9 more days till Spring Training Games start. Then we can look at, examine, disect, extrapolate stats that mean nothing at all but warm up for the regular season.

Oh, I also registered for an ESPN fantasy team yesterday and a MLB fantasy team…Im still gonna register at Yahoo

Jorge Posada, and Nike have been developing new catcher gear together. Today, Posada got one of his catching innovations that he worked on with Nike. Its a titatium catchers mask that is much lighter than the standard one, much stronger, and is easier to see out of. From mlb.com

So everyone has already heard by now that Griffy, broke his hand wrestling with his kids, If you didnt know, now you do. Between that and the Kerry Wood incident earlier this week, i wanted to take a look back on some other embarrassing injuries to athletes:

These are from a collection of sources:

John Smoltz once burned his chest while ironing a shirt…yes he was wearing a shirt and ironing it…wow

Clarence  Blethen injured himself by taking out his false teeth. He wanted to look mean by not wearing his false teeth. He placed them in his pocket. When he slid into second base, well he “bit” himself.

Jason Isringhausen stabbed himself in the chest opening up a CD, he also punched out a trashcan.

Steve Sparks dislocated his shoulder ripping a phone book in half.

Glenallen Hill had a nightmare about spiders, paniced, rolled off his bed and into a glass table.

Denny McLain went to bed and he was fine and healthy. Woke up with four dislocated toes.

Bret Barberie made some amazing nachos with spicy sauce. Put his contacts in. He didnt wash his hands so the sauce got in his eyes and he missed his next game.

Adam Eaton stabbed himself opening a DVD… those security tapes are dangerous

Human Interest and Baseball usually create those types of responses…I do believe that the Griffy Injury, cause of its severity (broken hand) will land a spot on this list.

Hall of Fame also anounced its Veteran Committee Ballot, the nominated can be found here:

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20070111&content_id=1777217&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb

In the Nationals attempt to have the laregest amount of people ever try to get onto a mediocre team, they are now interested in Ronnie Belliard, as reported by mlbtraderumors.com. He would be back up to Felipe Lopez and Zimmerman, who already has Batista as a back up as well

I really dont like Belliard, he gets on my nerves

Clemens says hes 80% sure of retiring (ESPN)

That statement has no effect on me anymore after all the times he has “retired”

You know statement Glavine made yesterday, as reported on every other blog, is big news when it is reported in the Baltimore Sun as well.

So on the ESPNEWS, the fantasy 3:50 focus was on hidden gems, really more on people who would be great other places but because of the talent on their teams, they might not get their chance. They are good hitters and have other talents as well, some I'll go into detail about, others I'll just list.

Aybar (Angels SS)

Hariston (Dbacks 2B and OF)

Brooks Conrad

Shin Soo Choo

Ryan Theriot

Hinske (Red Sox)

Marcas Thames

Chris Shelton – The analyst on ESPN believes that a change of senary will be the best move to see the amazing Shelton from April Last year.

Now to the Dbacks, they have two players for 3B. Their amazing BJ Upton, might be out of luck with Iwamura coming to America. BJ's only hope is Iwamura goes to second base, or he can find another place to be at offensivly. This is gonna play out in an interesting way.

In other news:

Bonds signed his one year deal…big whup

Kerry Wood, has done it again folks. ESPN this morning reports that he injured his toe getting out of a hot tub.

You cant depend on anything, but you can depend on Kerry Wood gettting injured some how.

Keith Folke, was working out earlier with the Indians, felt some pain in his shoulder (or arm) and after 10 years, he has retired. Also reported on ESPN

Interesting Barry Zito news, he came to camp yesterday with a new “old school” pitching style. His new pitching coach thinks its not as effective and that its more dangerous to his health, should be easier to get injured now. Also from ESPN.

Finally, also reported on ESPN, Willy Mo Pena and the Red Sox just barely avoided their arbritation meeting today by agreeing to a one year deal.

Are a big risk, according to Will Carol

He was interviewed at 3:50 today talking about risky players. He said that all the starters in the Angel outfield, including Vlad, are big injury risks. They all are wearing down. He says Vlad's power is going down. Gary Matthey Jr, we all know, had a career year last year, and is an unlikly repeat.

Another risky player is the now Royal, Gil Meche. Besides the fact that he got paid way more than what he is worth, he probably wont make it the full season. He used Mike Hampton as an anolgy to describe how much of a risk he is.

Felix Hernandez, he says is a risk cause of the way he finishes pitches, its dangerous.

I like that kid, and i really hope he has a good year.

He also thinks that Paplepon will become less of a risk with moving to the rotation because he was in the rotation for his whole life and the schedueled rest that he will now get will do him good.

In other news, Bill Hall, Brewers shortstop (or second baseman i forget) is not anymore. He will now play center field for the brew crew/

Well this is going to be a very National themed entry. First off, they now have Dmitri Young and Tony Batista. When asked about these signings, their reaction was basically this, “It gives us depth at the position of first base and third base”

I guess I follow that statement, until it was followed with this:

It also gives us trade bait for prospects

… I'm pretty confident that the nationals will get very little in terms of prospects for these two…no offense to them

Our boy on the Nationals, Manny Acta, was interviewed about starting his dream job. His main concern in the spring is keeping everyone moving. They have 4 rotations spots with 12 serious people starting out. More surprising is on top of the 40 man roster, they have a total 71 people so far, now up 73 with the additional signings above, of people trying to get on that 40 man roster

The last four games of spring training, the Nats play the O's, four days straight…I have a good feeling that for the Orioles it will be like playing a different team everyday just about.

Keeping with this National Team, its time for fantasy comparison. Please note that there probably have already been changes to this starting list, and there will be more coming later…so dont take this one too seriously.

Felipe Lopez: 7.1 (Valtine 7.7)

Nick Johnson: 8.5 (Delgado 9.0)

Ryan Zimmeran: 9.2 (Wright 9.2)

Austin Kearns: 7.0 (Green 7.0)

Brian Schneider: 7.5 (LoDuca 8.3)

Kory Casto: 6.4 (Alou 7.7)

Cristian Guzman: 5.8 (Reyes 9.6)

Nook Logan: 6.6 (Beltran 9.2)

Nationals: 58.1

Mets: 67.7

So first time in one of these, we see a big difference, which shouldnt be a surprise…not that these things mean anything. Not to mention, the Nationals also expect church to be a factor this time around, but was not listed in the Sporting News Preview, which is where these numbers were pulled, still Florida, Baltimore and the other New York to go…and I'll do some more stat analysis.

The O's reported yesterday. One more days to till the Mets…Welcome Back Baseball…although, thru this offseason like always… u never really left

So I know I said that the next stats would be DWright hits vs HR's, but i did some pitching analysis, so ill do that today. Also, I will get to that other stuff I promised soon. First some roundup.

Mariano is not happy with the way the Yanks are handleing his contract extension. He wants more respect.

ESPN reports that Papelbon has a new trick up his sleeve, a new pitch. When i find out, ill update.

Now to keep with this theme of pitching, I wanted to find the probability of a pitcher having 3 strikeouts in an inning.

Now most of you already know what K/9 is, (Strikeouts per nine innings), for this exercises, I chose Wagner cause he has the highest on the Mets, 11.70.

Now if you take the K/9 and divide by 27 and you get the KAVG, for Wagner this would be .433

So first, the probability in one inning that Wagner gets at least one K

1-Binomcdf(3,.433,0) = .818

Now these are the exact probilities of 0,1,2,3 K's per inning

Binompdf(3,.433,0) = .182

Binompdf(3,.433,1) = .418

Binompdf(3,.433,2) = .319

Binompdf(3,.433,3) = .081

Another interesting take on this…so close to pitchers and catchers

First off, ESPN.com, is really bad in terms of load times…its frustrating anyway

Time Warner does not own the Braves anymore, in fact now Liberty Media Corp does. Within the deal, a lot of money goes to Liberty from Time Warner, and then there are the stock exchange involved as well which is estimated around 1.27 billion

Not approved yet by the MLB

also Im still working on those new DWright Stat analysis

So as you all have probably heard, Benson out for the year. Now, being an Oriole fan (second to the Mets, the Mets are still #1 in my heart) i am very depressed about this news, Benson was crucial for the team this year for even having a longshot at 3rd place. So here is the sorry conclusion, the orioles for one, have to realy more on jaret wright to perform well and at the same time have to find someone. That someone might just be Trax, which in that case, Im not looking foward to go to those games…they'll take forever.

Now about M Cabera, as reported on mlbtraderumors.com, the Marlins are mad at Caberera for not being at their fanfest. Miguel is mad about the arbritation case going on between them…There is more to this story basically saying that the Marlins have no respect to or for their players.

Now on for some stats analysis. So in previous posts I walked over the probability for DWright to get a certain number of hits in a ball game and the probability of his first hig coming in a certain number of AB's. So now I'm going to apply those same processes for finding out the probability for DWright and Beltran and hitting HR's in a game.

So lets Look at Beltran. Last year was a record year for him. In 510 AB, he hit 41 HR

That means his HRAVG would be .080 (Homerun Average)

Now the probability of Beltran hitting exactly one HR in a game (with 5 AB) is:

Binompdf(5,.080,5) = .287 or 28.7% chance

Here is the probability of Beltran breaking the single game HR record, which would be launching 5 HR

Binompdf(5,.080,5) = .00000328 or a .000328% chance

Now, to show how successful Beltran was last year, lets look at his career stats

In 4559 AB, he has hit 203 HR making his HRAVG .045

Now using these numbers, we can determine the probability for Beltran based on lifetime stats, to hit 1 OR more Homeruns per game based on a 5 AB game.

1 – Binomcdf(5,.045,0) = .207 or 20.7%

So out of 162 games, in 20.7%, or about 34 games, Beltran will hit 1 or more homeruns per game, this stat would be a lot higher using his current latest, last season numbers.

Later I will do a similar analysis for DWright, but in that analysis, I will compare hit probabilities to HR probabilities, to put the numbers in perspective and easier to understand…and yeah im gonna do those other things I said i would