The Magic of Tiefnology

I believe - no, I KNOW - I set an all-time record this morning by having the Friday night FNFT stats posted by 5:35 a.m. STATS has been back on their early schedule. I have no way of knowing what time they actually post the stats, but this morning they were there at 5:00 a.m. because that's when I downloaded them.

Here's what you're probably thinking.

Still no word from them on games by position. I'm working on an alternative source for that. I'm also working on FNFT player stats, which once I have the format finished will be much improved over last year.

Stats and Eggs

So I just got out of the schvitz. I'm sitting here on a Saturday morning on my back patio, watching some ducks swim around on Tief Lake, drinking a cup of coffee, typing this blog entry on my ultra-cool Asus Eee PC mini wireless laptop computer. Life is good, right?

Well, it could be better. For the last few days, STATS has been posting the stats around 10:00 a.m. rather than before 6:00 a.m. like they had been up until now. I've got everything ready to go on my end, but no stats from them. As I've said, I'm on farmer time now that I'm old. By 10:00 a.m. on a weekend I'm sitting in Webb's in front of a plate of bacon and eggs. As much as I love running FNFT stats, I'm not going to sit around all morning waiting to do it.

UPDATE: The stats showed up at 8:45 a.m., just as I was about to leave. I thought I'd be a nice guy and put off breakfast for another 15 minutes.

In-Between Hops

Time for some shameless self-promotion and gloating. My Brewers blog, In-Between Hops, had a record 150 unique visitors yesterday. It had been averaging about 20-25 per day. Five other blogs and Sports Bubbler, a new and growing Wisconsin Sports News website, all linked to an article I wrote about Prince Fielder's lack of home runs this year. The article was very tongue-in cheek, but everyone took it seriously. Hilarious.

From Brew Crew Ball:

I read about 190 baseball blogs and sites daily, and this is why I do it: Sometimes there's only one person saying something everyone should hear. Today, that one voice is Scott over at In-Between Hops. He notes that Prince Fielder didn't hit his second home run until his 16th game last year. So let's give him another week or two before we condemn the "vegetarian lifestyle." Also, Scott has a really nice chart to illustrate Prince's HR progress in 2007 and 2008.

Games Played by Position

I have been informed by Mark Mulder at STATS that they will soon be adding games played by position to the hitter's stats that I download every morning. This is great news as it will allow me to post eligible positions for players as I did last year. So just sit tight.

In other news, I've developed a new tool I use for posting lineups. I'm going to try to figure out a way to port it online so everyone can use it. It's a simple Excel file. The screen shot looks like this: (click on image for larger view)


You simply enter the ID numbers of your players in the first column and everything else fills in automatically. The chart on the left is your previous lineup which you can use for reference. It's not the Holy Grail I've always wanted, but if what we do now is analogous to drinking out of your cupped hands, this would at least be a paper cup. Maybe next week I'll post an Excel version for everyone (who has Excel) to try out.

Coutlangus Now A Snake

http://mlb-rumors.blogspot.com/2008/04/diamondbacks-acquire-coutlangus.html

Pitchers Duel

Saturday, April 12, 2008

2008 Statistics

Team	Pitcher	W-L	ERA	IP	K
MLW	Ben Sheets (R)	1-0	0.00	15.1	15
@NYM	Johan Santana (L)	1-1	1.93	14.0	11

Loophole

Now matter how hard I try to button up all of the loopholes in the rules, it seems like every year something comes up that's not covered.

Here's what happened - this morning I announced a pickup of Jeremy Accardo (RP-TOR) and I cut Kevin Gregg (RP-FLA). About two hours latter, John, the vulture that he is, picked up Gregg and cut Jack Wilson (SS-PIT). The problem is that Joe has now informed me that he has Jeremy Accardo on his roster. My bad. Normally I memorize everyone's roster and would not make this mistake, but it's too early in the season and I'm running two leagues.

As an aside, the timing of John's pickup of Gregg falls under the 24-hour waiver rule that we added last year. Since John picked up a player within 24 hours of him being cut, a team with a lower record could swoop in and claim Gregg if they wanted to. Since John has the worst record in the league, the point is moot.

A second aside - it was another shitty relief pitcher, B.J. Ryan, who caused the waiver rule. He was cut by Dennis and three or four other teams wanted to claim him. I guess I now have something in common with Dennis.

Shut up.

Back to the main issue - what to do. Whenever stuff like this comes up, my feeling is that the guy who f-ed up should be the one penalized. In this case that was me. It would make sense that since I cut Gregg, he should stay cut and John should be allowed to claim him. I obviously can't take Accardo, so that leaves me with an empty spot on my roster which I can still fill with my transaction for the week.

This would all be fine and good, but what if John hadn't picked up Gregg? It has happened many times in the past where teams have picked up players that were already on someone else's roster. We've always just negated the pickup. But if we used that standard here, it gives me a do-over and screws John out of the player he wanted.

So, I'm changing the rule. Once you cut a player, he is cut - even if the player you want to pick up is already on someone else's roster. If that happens, you are allowed to pick up a different player to fill the empty spot, but the original player you cut remains cut from the time you first announced it.

There - that should sew it up.

So, think before you cut.

Eligible Positions

As I've mentioned earlier, the new stats service doesn't include games played by position, so I am not able to post eligible positions for all players. They do give me a "usual" position, which I've put in the stats in the place where eligible positions used to be.

For most players this doesn't matter, but for certain ones it does and will more and more as the season wears on. Unfortunately, you will all have to police this yourselves for now. If you play a guy in his "usual" position according to the stats, I'll count it as legal. If he's out of position according to that, I'll probably check and warn you. I'll keep looking for an alternative data source for this, but I have my doubts that I will find something suitable. It will probably have to be a manual process.

I did email STATS and request that they add it, but I don't know that they would do it this year as they don't like to change the data layout once it's established.

UPDATE: There are buttons on the website to the USA Today games played by position charts that are fairly easy to read.

Daily Stats

The daily hitting and pitching stats are posted, and should be every morning from now on. I still have a few more things to set up, but I'm pretty close to being back in business

Premature Jocularity

From Joe:

Add: Xavier Nady - OF - PITT

Drop - Cameron Maylin - OF - FLA

I love watching early season pickups in fantasy leagues. People forget all of the spring training stats, all of last year's stats, all of the 3-year weighted averages, all of the projections, and everything else they know and pick guys up based on a couple of games' performances - or, in this case, one game.

This is no rip on Joe, because a lot of people do it, but if Xavier Nady is better than Cameron Maybin today, why wasn't he better last Saturday?

I'm going to make a new award - the Tuffy Rhodes Award. Joe should win this year, hands down.

Game 1 Preliminary Stats

Despite Joel's YouTube videos (which I passed off as an April Fools joke - considering the source, that would be likely), the preliminary Game 1 stats were posted to the website at 6:30 this morning. If you ever go to the site and don't find something you think should be there, hit "refresh" on your browser. Sometimes I've needed to do that to get all of the latest updates. I recall adding something to the HTML code last year so you wouldn't have to do that, but I forget if it ever worked.

There is one error in the stats that I know of. Pitchers are not given credit for fractions of an inning pitched. The old stats service used to send me 6.3 for six and one third innings. The new service sends 6.1. When I rewrote the formula for pitcher's points, I forgot to take that into account. As an example, Ben Sheets (6.1 2 0 0 2 7) should have 22 points instead of 21.

Please let me know if you find anything else wrong. As I said, I pretty much needed to rewrite or make major edits to all of my spreadsheet formulas. It would be amazing if this were the only thing I missed.

Junior Prognosticators

From Junior FNFT Owner 2 Catchers, 1 Cup:

"dale jake and bill have the best teams i think my money is on
dale"