GO JAYS GO

Mike Wilner said on the pregame that Scott Cassidy was dealt to the Red Sox for a PTBNL.

for any fellow bauxites the game is on cjcs 1240 (COMN). I realize I have only posted 5-6 times, but I've been reading this site since last fall, so can I call myself a bauxite or are there restrictions involved. I'm from PEI by the way, but I'm moving to London, Ont. this fall so maybe I'll get a game in later this year.

While I realize that Dubose's left-handed, Delgado's increasingly starting to worry me. Apparently, judging from the boos I can hear over the radio, I'm not the only one.

JKCL - So is the season only 151 games long this year? What's the reasoning again?

Go Jays Go.

I think anyone who's been here once can call themselves a bauxite...but if the discussion gets too shallow we may have to start standardized testing :-)

King Rat, Delgado is facing a lefty but according to Mike Wilner, Dubose actually has the opposite effect -- lefthanded batters hit better than .300 off him last year while he was stingy with the righties (.182). So this is a bit of a concern. But as we all know, Delgado does things in bunches so when he gets his swing back we could see 5HR in a week.

Aw *that* is a poor defensive inning (so far)

The Jays are simply finding ways to lose right now. In this 6th inning, Cash throws a beebee to Hudson to nail Roberts on a pitchout and stolen base attempt...oh wait, Hudson never tagged him. The Mora walked behind him. Hentgen threw away a pickoff attempt into CF, moving the runners up. Now a Tejada basehit plates a run that never should have been on base.

Guess what BBFL wizard decided to sit Dubose today? Ridiculous. It was stupid of me to sit him against a team that made Nate Robertson look like a Cy Young candidate.

painful to watch... or in this case view over gameday b.c rogers put on some stupid autoracing event thats already on fox anyways.... blegh..... blahh and spa-tooie

Actually the Jays didn't look totally awful for the first 5 innings. In the sixth, defensively and then offensively, they were grim.

I think pay-per-view is a great way to alienate your fans. It's working on me...

before my slow computer could load up the bottom of the sixth, reed,eric and vw were instantaneously out... what an atrocious first tenth of the season....

This is the kind of thing where we could see Tosca getting canned soon...

This Pay-per-view thing is horrible. I have MLB extra innings and have 5 or 6 games on right now. Why would I pay for another one? The Argos tried this. Worked out great for them.

Argh! Johnson drops a line drive... another run to the Os which shouldn't have happened.

Was it deep enough for a sac fly?

Umm... actually it probably was deep enough for a sac fly. Okay, probably no harm done.

Still, Sparky looked like a gimp when the ball flopped out of his glove.

Eddy. Simply an alternative reality choice. The one so far has been too depressing. Recommended by a large portion of the psychiatrically disturbed.

Believe me - I'm playing along. I just wondered how you'd make up for the lost 11 games. Or was the season always 151 games long and I just didn't realize it?

Gameday still has the score as 2-0... It says that on the matos ball, he hits a ball into right, it finds the turf, but RJ gets it to second in time for a force out and the score still remains 2-0 in the bottom of the 7th...

Is that false? Sounds kinda screwy since it did say that it was a run-scoring play....

Johnson dropped the ball. He was able to force Matos at second, but the run scored.

Sparky got the force but a runner also scored. 3-0.

Lopez comes in for the 8th (well, for at least a third of it so far anyway). Hentgen looked pretty good to me - not overpoweringly great but there would only have been one run if the defense hadn't sucked.

I can't remember - did Kershner pitch last night? I seem to remember someone giving stats showing that he doesn't pitch well without rest, and he doesn't look much good now.

As one of the 'Hentgen is done' brigade prior to today, I thought he was good, and deserved better than he got from his defense. I don't think I can recall hearing about a non-tag on a steal before; it's the kind of mental lapse that drives you nuts.

As the score goes to 5-0, can I just say I hope they start hitting soon? It's fair to say they're better than what they've shown, based on previous experience, but they've played like a 3-9 team so far.

And now, another showing of Carlos Tosca's Bullpen Follies...

No matter... he's out of there as Tosca does a Tosca special and gets to the third pitcher of the inning.

a Tosca wouldn't be a Tosca if Tosca didn't do it ;-)

I can hear the fans booing now. They must have Ligtenberg on their fantasy teams too. Poor bastards.

Five Blue Jays are still hitting below .200. When do we start panicking?

I must say I'm truly demoralized... Might I also say that this season so far sucks ass profoundly....

Half of April is already done - if this continues for a few more weeks, not only will I be extreamly ticked off, but I think JP has to do something - maybe callups?

Funny stuff there Eddie.

I recall a similarly weak hitting display in spring training right? So I know what the problem is - it *must* be the new uniforms. Nothing much else has changed since last year.

Bring back the blue T-bird!

(I chose Toronto as my team on the grounds that they had the best logo - I'm especially offended that they scrapped it!)

I can hear the 'go leafs go' chant.... ah those witty fans...

It's like they're cheering for their favorite hockey team... but they're not really cheering for the purpose of helping their hockey team, they're ACTUALLY doing so because they wish to make a subtle cynical commentary on the state of their struggling ball club... oh they are so funny....

Tonight's ballgame was brought to you by Carlos Delgado, the letter K, and the number 3.

Tonight's ballgame was brought to you by Carlos Delgado, the letter K, and the number 3.

Nice job.

I don't see any reason not to bring up a call-up or two. Baltimore and Tampa Bay seem to be okay doing it. I don't think it will adversley affect the player in the long run. Especially, if you are calling them up from AAA.

Blaagh. I think that describes it best.

Unfortunately, I don't think the Jays have hit bottom: clearly, they have some sort of mental block about hitting at home, and facing Pedro and the Red Sox for three isn't going to help. The next three games are likely to be ugly, but the Jays should get it together on the road. (I'll be happy to be proven wrong.)

Clearly, the "Jays go as Delgado goes" theory has a lot of merit to it: Carlos is colder than I've ever seen him before, and the Jays, right now, can't hit their way out of wet paper bags. (Attention, Will Carroll! Is Carlos hiding an injury?)

Someone has to sit Carlos Tosca down and tell him, in a polite but firm voice, that you don't really need to make all those pitching changes, honestly you don't. I can see flip-flopping your bullpen when you're trying to protect a one or two-run lead, but constantly using four or five guys a game when you're down three runs is just silly. If Carlos can't figure that out, or stubbornly insists on doing it his way, he should be shown the door.

I don't think there's any reason to blow up the current team and start calling up the kids. If Rios, etc., aren't ready, there's no point in starting the service time clock any earlier than you have to. If you bring up somebody now, you lose a prime year of their career five years down the road (when, presumably, they all become Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Diamondbacks, or Braves). Besides, the entire team can't keep on hitting .200 or lower forever. Can they?

I understand that the service time clock runs effectively from a date in June. Anyone know the exact date? Anyways, neither Rios nor Gross has hit well enough in Syracuse yet to merit any thought of calling them up.

Dave, Carlos Tosca used three relievers today. I wouldn't have brought in Kershner down 3 runs to face Gibbons with 2 outs and runners on 1st and 2nd in the eighth. I'd have let Aquilino work it out. Factors that a manager should take into account in making this decision:

-platoon advantage (Kershner has it)
-rest (Kershner worked 1.1 innings yesterday; Lopez did not work)
-performance of pitcher on the mound (Lopez had faced 4 batters, retired 2, walked one, and had given up a hit)

That said, this wasn't like the very poor bullpen use in Boston. This was a decision that reasonable people could differ on.

I'm not going to go "woulda, coulda, shoulda" and try to say this game might have gone the other way, but a couple of plays up the middle made a huge difference. The "safe" call on the steal when Cash had thrown Roberts out by six feet was crucial to the first two runs, and Roberts also turned a well-executed hit-and-run by Hudson into a double play, because he broke toward second with Cash. A first-and-third rally there, it's a different story.

Do I hate it that my team is 3-9? Absolutely. Am I worried about the club? Temporarily, but in the long run, not at all. There were a couple of silver linings today; Hentgen was much, much better and with anything resembling normal Blue Jays run support, pitched well enough to win. Phelps looked just fine at first; he showed soft hands on a backhand scoop to save a double play. Cat pounded a double off a lefty -- he's hit in nine of ten games this year, and drove in two runs in the other.

Some are better than others, but there are no bad days at the ball park. Robert Dudek and his family were great company, and Jerry Howarth was very generous with his time, answering almost every question Bauxites asked him. I'll be back on Tuesday, looking forward to seeing everybody up in the 500 level. All we can do is hope that Delgado snaps out of it against Pedro, which might ignite the entire offence, and Doc keeps all his curveballs down.

On an evening when many will be obsessed with hockey, if you're still looking for more baseball, don't forget about Blue Jays This Week, on The Fan at 7:05. I'm not sure who Mike Wilner's guests will be, but I noticed he had a long chat in the dugout with Brian Butterfield before today's game.

Coach, in one sense I agree with you that the team long term will be much better than this. In another sense I think this is a total disaster. The Jays have a very good chance of being maybe 8-9 games out after the Bosox series. Essentially the season will be over as far as the "casual fan" is concerned. There is also a growing possibility of spending a long period of the season in the basement as well. This would be terrible for marketing. If keeping some of the younger players is the long term goal, and that goal requires strong fan support this start is a total disaster. I can see a terrible year at the box office looming as people see the team "out of it" from the end of April. Maybe the Jays will keep their heads above water this week and disaster will be averted but with the way every aspect of the team is playing right now its hard to be optimistic.

Nigel, I'll concede that a stretch like this to open the season is more noticeable than if it occurred in August, and that "casual" fans are far more likely to overreact to a couple of unfortunate weeks than experienced, knowledgeable fans.

I missed today's game, but it sounds like that's a good thing.

For those of y'all who think, like I do, that Bayesian analysis explains two-thirds** of everything, here's a little look at what a 3-9 start means for the Jays in purely statistical terms.

Off the top of my head, I made up the following table of prior probabilities for the Jays being a team of a certain quality entering the season:

WPct  W/L   Prior 
            Probability
.400  65-97   0.2%
.425  69-93   1.1%
.450  73-89   4.3%
.475  77-85  11.4%
.500  81-81  20.5%
.525  85-77  24.9%
.550  89-73  20.5%
.575  93-69  11.4%
.600  97-65   4.3%
.625  101-69  1.1%
.650  105-73  0.2%

That's a normal distribution with mean .525 and standard deviation 0.40. In English, it means that my best guess on Opening Day was that the Jays were a .525 team, and I thought there was a 90% probability that they were a .475 to .575 team. (By "a .525 team," I don't mean a team that finishes with a .525 winning percentage; rather, I mean a team that has a 52.5% chance of winning any given game. Such a team will rarely actually win exactly 52.5% of its games.)

Now, for each potential quality of team, there is a certain probability (given by the binomial distribution) that the team will win exactly 3 of 12 games in a given stretch:

WPct  P(3 wins in 12 games)
.400  14.2%
.425  11.6%
.450   9.2%
.475   7.1%
.500   5.4%
.525   3.9%
.550   2.8%
.575   1.9% 
.600   1.2%
.625   0.8%
.650   0.5%

Using the prior probabilities and the probabilities of winning exactly 3 of 12 games, we can determine (using Bayes' Theorem) the posterior probabilities that the Jays are a team of a certain quality.

WPct  Prior  Posterior  Expected W-L
      Prob.  Prob.      (given 3-9 start)
.400   0.2%    0.6%     63-99
.425   1.1%    3.0%     67-95
.450   4.3%    9.2%     71-91
.475  11.4%   19.0%     74-88
.500  20.5%   25.7%     78-84
.525  24.9%   22.8%     82-80 
.550  20.5%   13.2%     86-76
.575  11.4%    5.0%     89-73
.600   4.3%    1.2%     93-79
.625   1.1%    0.2%     97-65
.650   0.2%    0.0%    101-61

The weighted mean best estimate for the actual quality of the Jays as a team drops from .525 to .505. However, while this means that the Jays should expect to win 50.5% of their remaining games, they already have 12 games in the bank, and they only won three of those, so their expected winning percentage over this 162-game season is (.505*150/162)+(.250*12/162) = .486.

So, if on Opening Day you expected this team to finish 85-77, you might now expect them to finish 79-83. Half of the drop in the expected win total derives directly from the poor record through 12 games, and half derives from what it suggests about the real quality of this team.

This is a statistical analysis and nothing more; obviously, there's an awful lot of relevant non-statistical information which I have ignored. I think it's useful, however, to look at exactly what can be statistically inferred from a small sample.

John

-----------------

** 95% CI = (0.50, 0.83)

The sad thing right now is there's no player on the bench I can imagine drumming up any excitement to a struggling team. We're slogging thorugh this thing with these guys, I'm sure.

I consider myself an experienced, knowledgeable fan and I'm worried. Not so much about the Jays but about the Orioles. The Orioles look very good. Everyone knew how well they would hit but no one gave their pitching much credit. They have a phenomenal bullpen and Riley, Dubose, Bedard all look to be solid major leaguers. I hope that Bauxites will, later on this year, be able to point out this post and laugh at me but the Jays finishing fourth isn't as inconceivable as it was on Opening Day.

Incidentally, my rather arcane post supports Coach's point. In their first 12 games, the Jays have won 3 fewer than we might have expected back on Opening Day. Probability theory tells us that we should now expect them to win 3 fewer games over the rest of the season than we originally expected. That's one game every two months. In other words, the 3-9 hole is a problem simply because it's a hole, not because this team doesn't have the ability to climb out. I don't think that the 1989 Jays' 12-24 start is a perfect analogy, but it's a useful one.

In approximately 8 hours time, some friends and I are going on an ill-advised road trip from Fredericton, NB to Boston (ostensibly to catch game 7 between the Bruins and Canadiens). The drive is about 7 hours long, but we gain an hour driving into Maine as we go from the Atlantic timezone to the Eastern one. That should put us in Beantown at approximately 10 AM, one hour before the Yanks/Sox do battle at Fenway.

Do any Bauxites know of a good pub in the Fenway area where we could take in the Sox/Yanks?

John,

I like your analysis, although the problem with this sort of thing is that it does take a statistician to really understand the consequences. I'm teaching a stats course at the moment and it really is all about interpreting the conclusions properly, as my students often fail to realise.

I don't have the energy to do the calculations myself but suppose your prior had a much higher variance. I think we all ought to agree that the Jays' ability, as viewed from the start of the season, had a high upside but also the possibility of moderately poor performance (due to the number of youngsters in hitting and starting pitchers with records of some inconsistency). Then the "damage" done to the posterior distribution by the 3-9 observation is presumably much worse (as I say I haven't done the calculations and I'm not a Bayesian so I don't have this sort of thing at my fingertips - is this actually a correct guess?).

Also I note the effect of your analysis on the Jays chances of 90+ wins. I figure 90 wins is necessary for contention for the postseason. According to your values, which I broadly like the look of, our chances of that have pretty much gone. Ouch.

I was like 8 in 1989, but didn't the jays fire their manager that year???

I know the the transition for Torborg to McKeon seemed to work for the Marlins... maybe that'll do the trick along with some mid-july/august callups???

Also, I loved the normal dist chart John N... that post rocked my world... The only comment that I could make is that I would've liked a histogram..... :)

"Incidentally, my rather arcane post supports Coach's point. In their first 12 games, the Jays have won 3 fewer than we might have expected back on Opening Day. ."

I think it's worse than that. The Jays have played 12 games and 9 were against weaker teams. The Tigers and Baltimore may have looked good, but neither are real contenders. Look at it this way...

Detroit-3 on road, 3 at home-Expected win total-4 or 5.
Baltimore, 3 at home- Expected win total-2
Boston, 3 on the road-expected win total-1

The Jays winning 7 or 8 games at this point is what should have been expected at this point. An 8-4 start with this competition would not have been unexpected. Going 1-2 in Boston is fine, but going 2-7 against Detroit and Baltimore is pathetic.

Andrew,

You're dead on with both points. The greater the assumed variance in the initial "quality distribution," the greater the damage done by a 3-9 start. (I don't have the numbers handy, but I had originally run the spreadsheet with a 0.05 standard deviation, and the drop was greater. Bayes' Theorem implies that the farther the winning percentage from .250, the greater the ratio of the prior probability to the posterior probability.) Moreover, the damage done is disproportionately in the far end of the upper tail of the curve. There's still a reasonable chance that this is really an 86-76 or 89-73 team, but the chance of being a 93-69 team or better has dropped from 5.6% down to 1.4% -- ouch indeed. (According to this analysis, of course.) I don't think even 93-69 would sniff the playoffs in the AL East this year.

I agree that it is reasonable to wonder about the variance in the distribution of prior probabilities, and it should possibly be greater than stated in my previous post. My justification for using such a low variance is that a lot of the variation we see in win-loss records is simply the consequence of chance. I gave the Jays a prior probability of 5.6% of truly being a 93-79 team (or better), but the chance of them actually finishing 93-79 (or better) would be a fair bit higher than that once you factored chance in.

I might follow up with more numbers later in case you're interested, but right now I have to run.

Thanks for the comments, and I hope I'm not over my head here. Where are you teaching a stats course?

John

Hey, I was actually at the game today. Here's a couple of things that stood out:

- This game was right there for the Jays to win. The O's made a lot of mental errors (the first 2 errors that they made were routine grounders that they just air mailed into the seats, and F-Cat's double had a lot to do with Bigbie half-assing it to the ball). Throw in a decent performance from Hentgen and all the Jays really needed was some offense.

- I like the idea of sending the runner on second when the shift is on against Delgado. It just makes too much sense.

- Argh! Johnson drops a line drive... another run to the Os which shouldn't have happened.

Oh, yeah. This. I was in the right field seats, and there were fans just getting on Sparky for no real reason. One fan started out, which then encouraged 5 children to yell out his name and various other things, and also had other people yelling his name. All this was fine, until Johnson tracks the line drive in the 7th, and a guy yells out "Johnson" just as Reed is about to catch the ball. The ball gets dropped, and you know the rest.

I'm not saying that the shout called Sparky to drop the ball, or that fans shouldn't have the right to heckle or anything, but if you are a fan of the team, think before you yell.

Jason

I was in the RF stands in last yr's affair with the pirates... Matt Stairs was getting it BIG TIME from the hecklers...

Fast forward, late into the game... the jays already have it in the bag... BUT Stairs jacks a solo shot RIGHT at the very fans who were heckling him... They shut up when he took to his position after that... I dunno, that was kinda cool :)....

I'm not saying that the shout called Sparky to drop the ball

Or caused even. Hey, I'm an Engineering grad, don't blame me. :)

Jason

Larry Walker found a dead body on his property. Not much more to say about that until further details emerge.

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=ap-walker-deadbody&prov=ap&type=lgns

I would like to say that I do not care about game 7....

I'm going to the dome... Doc v Pedro is a can't miss....

"casual" fans are far more likely to overreact to a couple of unfortunate weeks than experienced, knowledgeable fans.

Such as the visionaries at the Jays main page who suggesting that Delgado bats 9th, a dozen games in this season is a write off, JP and Tosca are placeholders (for someone like Bobby Valentine of all people) and that it is all of course, somehow Tosca's fault.

God I hope these are the former rather than the latter types of fans you're talking about Coach. Thank goodness for the Box, the quality of the posts here is always above and beyond, and is a testament to the intelligence, creativity and passion of each and every person here; to quote poli. history, it's a sad contrast to the "hokum and bunkum" over on the team's main page, as the number of trolls over there has turned almost all but the last of the great and intelligent posters away for good.

p.s. Saw you over there Majael, I credit you for still posting over there, as the amount of flaming is completely over the top now...

Or caused even. Hey, I'm an Engineering grad, don't blame me.

I'm not the only engineer round here?!? Sweet! Let's devise a plan to overthrow the lawyers!

Needless to say, it's also cause for hope that last year's team started 7-15 and went 79-61 the rest of the way.

Yes yes trolls simply do not seem terribly attracted to this place... at least for now... bastards seem to show up after something has been good for a while....

but seriously though... Does anyone think that Tosca is going to be fired this year in favour of someone more in JP's image??? I just can't see him lasting the month at this rate.

Yes yes trolls simply do not seem terribly attracted to this place... at least for now... bastards seem to show up after something has been good for a while....

but seriously though... Does anyone think that Tosca is going to be fired this year in favour of someone more in JP's image??? I just can't see him lasting the month at this rate.

Yes yes trolls simply do not seem terribly attracted to this place... at least for now... bastards seem to show up after something has been good for a while....

but seriously though... Does anyone think that Tosca is going to be fired this year in favour of someone more in JP's image??? I just can't see him lasting the month at this rate.

Matt, Tosca is JP's guy. Buck was here intitially and got canned near the end of 2002. Officially it was because the Jays had a woeful record but unless things were going so well Buck couldn't be fired, he'd have been gone for not being JP's guy and competing with a differnet philosophy. Now the entire club seems to be on the same page (maybe even the same line).

And if the triple post was a jinx I'll have to cabal knocking on your door...lucky for you there is no cabal.

Hmm... I always thought Tosca was just the best guy around out of the available remaining coaches after Buck was fired. I didn't realize that he was JP's guy per se....

as for the triple... occured by accident when I got frustrated with my compy and clicked the post button repeatedly... Some forums have it so that identical posts are blocked....

lol @ cabal... who are u? Clive Barker or something? :)

Hmm... I always thought Tosca was just the best guy around out of the available remaining coaches after Buck was fired. I didn't realize that he was JP's guy per se....

as for the triple... occured by accident when I got frustrated with my compy and clicked the post button repeatedly... Some forums have it so that identical posts are blocked....

lol @ cabal... who are u? Clive Barker or something? :)

AGH! Happened again...

I don't think Tosca was "J.P.'s guy" in the sense that Ricciardi handpicked him. Tosca was originally brought in as bench coach on the recommendation of Buck Martinez IIRC.

I just don't get what the big hoopala is about Tosca right now, it's not his fault the hitters aren't doing their job, and he has no control over how well the pitching has been for the opposition thus far (Schilling, Pedro, Nate Robinson - okay, maybe not that far).

Every team loses, in fact half every day do; while I'm not pleased with the results thus far, these things happen, and if anything we can just be thankful no one in the AL east has picked up the ball and tried to run away with the division already, and it's still early enough for a hot streak to be the difference between last and first place. Tosca's not perfect, but he's qualified for the job, and frankly all the talk about him not being experienced enough is unsettling; I mean, where do you honestly get the experience from if you're not given a chance somewhere? The man's got more than a decade's experience coaching professional baseball players in real games; the level at this point seems pretty irrelavent.

If things are this bad by the all-star break it may be different, but for now Tosca ain't going anywhere; with the exception of the Toronto Star and the Jays message board, everyone seems pretty happy with him thus far, and the (prior to this year) .531 winning% record seems to reflect that. I don't wanna seemlike his personal cheerleader or anything (although it's probably too late) but for all the bashing people do of Tosca, he seems to get the job done; people don't seem to be as hard on Frank Robinson, Art Howe, Buck Schowalter or Lou Piniella, and their results, or the lack of them, make this team's seem quite trivial.

So to summarize my lengthy and windy diatribe, frankly, I think Mike Barnett should be much more worried about his job than Tosca. Where's Paul Molitor where you need him?

The Jays team OPS is .657. Their team OBP is .298.

To give you an idea of how bad that is Pokey Reese's career OPS is .664 and career OBP is .309.

But,

the Yankees aren't doing much better with a team OPS of .711 and OBP of .334.

Or

the Red Sox whose team OPS is .728 with a team OBP of .346.

That is a worse OPS than Anaheim (749), Detroit (782), Oakland (789), Kansas City (804), Baltimore (805), Cleveland (818), White Sox (825), Texas (826), and Minnesota (885).

In other words, it is still early.

About starting to panic and overreact and call up players. That is just dumb. The Jays chance of competing this year was small before the season started. After going 3-9 against weak teams that very small window is pretty much closed. You don't want to start the service time clocks of the good players. Mike Green asked:

I understand that the service time clock runs effectively from a date in June. Anyone know the exact date?

The answer I is that it isn't an exact date. What it is that players get 3 years of MLB service time without needing to go to arbitration. Except the "super-two" players. The super-two players are all those players who have at least two, but not more than three years of experience and are in the top sixth (17%) of players with at least two, but not more than three years of experience. That top sixth, in spite of being called "super-two", isn't saying the best 17% but rather the most experienced. Also, to be a super-two the player must have accumulated at least 86 days of service in the previous year. And I'd guess that this usually means a call up of roughly mid-to-late June might miss that top 17%. A smart organization planning to promote a promising rookie (Rios say) would try to wait until it is almost guarenteed that the player isn't going to be a super-two player, unless waiting to promote that player is likely to be the difference between making the playoffs or not. And in the Jays case in 2004, unless Rios is Bonds in disguise, they should wait.

I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that if someone chants 'go leafs go' at the dome one more time than I'm going to have to smack them in back of their stupid heads!!! BANZAAAIIIII!!!!!!

John,

I had to go as well so I only just read your last comment. Thanks for confirming that.

Yes, I do understand that the variation in results would be wider than the variation in ability. Actually I think it's the sort of thing that a lot of other (i.e. not statistician) readers would appreciate seeing written up - it amazes me how little we allow for luck in this place. People talk about "sample size" a lot but I don't know how well it's really understood. (Should we really quote a season's batting average to 3 decimal places? back-of-envelope calculations suggest that after one season a non-bayesian 95% CI is +/- 0.040!)

I'm working at Oxford in the UK. Hence my choosing of Toronto as "my" baseball team because I liked their logo as opposed to any more sensible reason. They then changed the logo and the batting falls apart, humph. I'm not a stats researcher but I do give tutorials in it because there are no stats specialists at my college and I make a fair bit of use of stats in my computer science research.

Buck, he'd have been gone for not being JP's guy and competing with a differnet philosophy.

That is so true. I'm sure most of you know that Buck is now the Orioles color guy, and watching the games this weekend were one of the MOST frustrating things. I'm glad it's over so I don't have to listen to Buck go on and on about how good the Orioles are at small ball, how all their runs are "team runs." The 2 sloppy runs yesterday (missed tag/Hentgen error) he contributed to great fundamental team play. That and how good the Orioles because they always keep you off balance with their speed. Incredibly annoying. Bye Buck. Glad you're nowhere around here.

http://bluejayscheerclub.com
Despite a stellar five innings from Hentgen, the crowd at the Dome was ugly from the start. It sounded to me like they wanted a loss, and they got one.

Everything happens in 3's, doesn't it? Jays lose, Roadrunners lose, and the Leafs lose. I was at the ball game yesterday and Hentgen battled his ass off. He deserved a better fate. As mentioned before in this thread, the key play of the game was Hudson not slapping the tag on Roberts when Cash's throw was on the money in the 6th. I wish they had the radar gun on Hentgen on the jumbotron but the radio crew was saying he was in the 82-85 mph range. With only one K yesterday, it was obvious Hentgen wasn't going to blow the ball by anyone. He had to rely on location and on his defense. I think he tried to muscle up on the pitch to Tejada, who singled in the first run. Still, even after this outing, my gut feeling is I'm not that confident Hentgen is all the way back yet. I think the O's let him off the hook a couple of times, especially Matos getting picked off at 2nd. I hope I'm wrong because Hentgen is one my favourite all-time Jays.

I know there's still 151 games to go but I'm am pretty worried. Accuse me all of you want of pushing the panic button but good teams, contending teams, do not begin the year at home 0-and-6. Yes, I know it's only April but they have to get 2 out of 3 against Boston. Maybe the Bosox will have a letdown after playing the Yankees. Let's hope because the Jays need all the help they can get at this point.

Despite a stellar five innings from Hentgen, the crowd at the Dome was ugly from the start. It sounded to me like they wanted a loss, and they got one.

NFW - I think you're right. I was there with my 8 & 9 year old sons in sec 518 and about the 6th inning the older boy asked why everyone was so down at the game, so even he noticed the negative atmosphere. Earlier in the game, when Hentgen was pitching well, we tried to start a bit of a chant "Pat's Back!" but no one took it up.