skyking162

It’s been a while since I summarized the weekly posts, mostly because of the two week “vacation” leading up to the new site being launched. So here you go, my favorite articles from the past seven, er, twenty-eight days:

• The Gold Glove winners were announced on Tuesday. Want to know how well major league managers understand their own sport? Here you go.
• Before moving on to the 2008 hot stove season, you can check out the top players at each position ranked by a combination of offense and defense. This week I presented: 1B, 2B, LF, CF, and RF.
• I’m a big fan of Mike Lowell, as are most people, but it may be a mistake to sign him without a home town discount.
• There’s still time to vote in the poll for best big name free agent signing.
• Since Saturday’s the end of the week by most calendars, feel free to make one last contribution to the Being A Fan post — a summary of important dates, events, and news stories of the second week after the World Series.
• Do you like strange trivia questions?
• Are you sick of the Yankees? Be glad they aren’t smart enough to use their huge payroll wisely. They really should be at least a 110-win team.
• Does your AL MVP ballot include Jorge Posada’s name in the top five? It should.

Popularity: 8% [?]

My PORBr (posting over replacement blogger as a rate stat) was at an all-star level this week. The scouting report says it’s not just a small sample size fluke, but only time will tell. Here’s are my favorite topics:

• Yankee fielders — Damon’s good, Jeter’s bad, and there’s a nice chart to summarize it all.
• American League polls — AL Cy Young, AL Rookie of the Year, and AL MVP.
• Expert team predictions — I presented VegasWatch’s review of the experts and then ran the same study using Pythagorean wins. For the record, my average error was 5.4 for actual wins and 5.2 for Pythagorean wins. Can I get a job at ESPN?
• My new man-crush team (Tampa Bay) — I outlined a plan for improving the fielding, finding a bullpen, and winning 88 games in 2008. Oh, and there’s something about Barry Bonds in there, too.
• Fielding — Fielding is important; more important than most people realize. There are good ways to measure fielding and we need to throw away the bad ways. As an example, I showed that the difference between a great fielder an awful fielder is the difference between hitting like ARod and hitting like Aubrey Huff.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Popularity: 7% [?]

Another week in the books. You can find the full weekly archives, if you like. My favorite posts of the week were about:

• Calling out the idiots who use the words “consistent” and “clutch” when they simply mean “good”.
• Showing why consistency actually is a good thing for above-average teams, but bad for poor teams.
• Graphing the 2005 talent distributions of each position. Firstbasemen are better than catchers, believe it or not.

I also started writing for FanGraphs.com. Here are the articles I’ve written for them so far:

• Daily Graphing - Adam Dunn
• Daily Graphing - Mike Lowell; this one’s my favorite so far.
• Speed Plots - May 10

Popularity: 7% [?]

Another full week (with a bonus out-of-town-week) with a hint of lime. You can view all of the posts from the two weeks by clicking here (and here). My favorite posts from this past week were about:

• Discovering that worse hitters “steal” Runs and RBI from the better hitters. Also, I put together lists of the most- and least-fortunate players in terms of their Runs and RBIs last year.
• Applauding Nate Silver for not falling victim to many of the dangers involved in creating a “best players of the next six years” list.
• Explaining an intuitive, yet analytical approach to picking keepers in a keeper league.
• Devising an overly-anal statistic for MVP-voting. The comments in this post include some quality discussion about the use and abuse of WPA.

Popularity: 7% [?]