Archive for Administrative Stuff
You can now get your Yankees tickets on RAB
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During the last few series I’ve been winging it with Yankees games. If there were cheap tickets available on StubHub I’d jump on them, making last minute plans to hop on a bus up to the Stadium. During the Phillies series, though, I encountered a logistical issue. StubHub stops selling tickets two hours before the game. So while I waited for tickets to come down below $10, they became unavailable completely.
It made me desire more options for finding tickets. There are sites out there that search multiple directories, but I’ve never had much success with them. So when the guys from TiqIQ got in contact with us, we were receptive. What they’ve provided us is essentially our own outlet for Yankees tickets.
As you can see in the photo above, the TiqIQ-powered RAB Tickets lays out options for you, from which you can select the best seats at the best price. Here’s what’s going on for the Jays series this weekend:
And here’s what TiqIQ provides:
- Aggregated Listings: TiqIQ track tickets from major sellers including Stubhub, TicketsNow, eBay and TicketNetwork.
- We show these in both a Market Tab (Stubhub, TicketsNow, TicketNetwork, eBay) and Auction Tab (eBay)
- TiqZone Categorization: TiqIQ breaks each stadium up into TiqZones, which are groupings of sections that we’ve determined are comparable in value.
TiqIQ Statistics: TiqIQ provides ticket-level buying intelligence through the IQ rating and TiqIQ Statistics. - Event Details: TiqIQ gives you time and location information on the event.
If you’re looking to head to a game now or in the future, make sure check RAB Tickets along the way.
Open Thread: The RAB Mailbag
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Photo Credit: Ross D. Franklin, AP
We’re going to try something new here, the RAB Mailbag. It’s exactly what you think it is. Send us questions either via email or through the Submit the Tip box under The Montero Watch, and we’ll pick the best and answer them once a week or whatever it ends up being. It’s a trial and error thing, we’ll figure it out as we go. If some questions require a longer, in-depth post, we can certainly do that too.
Anyway, here’s tonight’s open thread. The Mets are playing the Twins, and there’s another game on MLB Network, but who you see depends on where you live. Clemson and South Carolina play at 9pm ET (on ESPN2) in the College World Series; it’s an elimination game for USC, and if Clemson wins they advance to the finals. UCLA and TCU are finishing up their game (on ESPN2 as well) as we speak. If UCLA wins, they go to the finals. The regular game thread will be up later, so kick it here until then.
RAB’s Ground Rules for the 2010 MLB Draft
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It’s the most wonderful time of the year, MLB Draft Day. D-Day has historically been one of the busiest and most trafficked days of the year for us at RAB, so we need to take a moment and lay down some ground rules and explain how this thing is going to go down.
First and foremost, please take a second to review our Commenting Guidelines. Even if you’ve been with us since day one, give them another look as a refresher.
Secondly, the draft is three days long this year, and I’ll be liveblogging all three days. The liveblog will mostly be me relaying news, sharing thoughts, taking questions, etc., but the liveblog posts will also serve as a draft open thread. Please keep your draft related comments there. We’ll obviously have plenty of non-draft content on the site as well, so keeping your discussions in the appropriate threads will make everyone’s life easier.
I will also be posting short capsules on select players after the Yanks pick them. I won’t write up a capsule for every player the Yanks pick, just the notable ones. For example, here’s Slade Heathcott’s capsule from last year. Use these posts to discuss that player and that pick only, any other draft talk should go back in the draft open threads. No one likes to repeat themselves in a bunch of different spots, so this is to everyone’s benefit.
It’s unlikely to happen because we’ve since upgraded to a dedicated server, but we have experienced technical difficulties on draft day before, and I suppose there’s still a chance the site may crash at some point. I’m hopeful the liveblog will help alleviate the load on the servers, but who knows. The important thing to know is that if the site does crash, you have to please be patient. Hitting refresh a million times a minute will only make it worse. Wait a minute or two before you try to reload the site. We’re fully aware of it whenever the site goes down, and trust us, we’re doing all we can to get it back up and running.
Finally, the best way to follow along with all of the draft content we’ll have over the next three days (and beyond) is to subscribe to our draft feed. You should also subscribe to our regular RSS feed so you don’t miss anything else. If you’re not familiar with RSS feeds, check this site out. Basically, an RSS reader like Google Reader will bring the information right to you, so you won’t have to check your favorite sites multiple times per day. Once you start using one, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. Other than RSS, you can also follow RAB on Twitter @RiverAveBlues or @RABFeed. We use the former for random thoughts or to discuss stuff things with you guys, while the latter just automatically tweets a link to each new post. You can also follow the three of us individually @mikeaxisa, @bkabak, and @joepawl. And finally, there’s also our Facebook page.
Draft day is without a doubt one of the most exciting days of the year, and we ask that you follow along with our ground rules to make it a more enjoyable experience for everyone. Thanks in advance.
The 2010 RAB Pledge Drive reminder
Posted by: | CommentsIn case you missed it, we’ve announced our plans for out 2010 Pledge Drive benefiting Curtis Granderson‘s Grand Kids Foundation. Details can be found by clinking on the link. We’ve already raised $12.30 through two games, and are on pace for close to $1,000 this season. It’s never to late to get in on the action, and we can make your pledge retroactive to the start of the season, or effective today. We’re pretty flexible. Thanks in advance.
The Montero Watch
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All hail the Jesus. (Photo Credit: Kathy Willens, AP)
Oh yes, we’re going big this year.
If you’re a new relatively new reader, then let me explain. Every season we select one prospect to follow as the season progresses, tracking their stats in the sidebar for all to revel in. Past “watch” subjects include players like Phil Hughes, Joba Chamberlain, Mark Melancon, and Andrew Brackman, but for the first time ever, this year’s subject will be a position player, and there really wasn’t much of a debate.
Catcher Jesus Montero is not just the Yanks’ top prospect, but he’s arguably the best prospect at the position in all of baseball. Last year he hit a studly .337-.389-.562 with 25 doubles and 17 homers in 92 games split between High-A Tampa and Double-A Trenton. Now that he’s reached his 20th birthday, the Yankees will finally unleash his fury on the unsuspecting Triple-A International League.
The Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees start their season next Thursday, April 8th, against the Buffalo Bisons at home. As if Montero needed any more help, he’ll get to kick off his season by pounding on some Mets’ minor leaguers. Hide the women and children folks, it might get ugly in a hurry if you live upstate.
Once the actual “watch” goes up on the sidebar, probably Sunday or Monday in place of the Opening Day Countdown, you’ll see two rows of stats. The top one will be Montero’s performance form his most recent game, and the bottom one will be his season performance. It’s pretty simple, but it’s always worth typing out.
Anyway, I hope you all enjoy this year’s choice. I suspect there won’t be any objections.
The 2010 RAB Pledge Drive
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It’s that time again, time to announce our plan to use RAB’s popularity for the betterment of mankind. Last year we managed to raise $1,500 for Joe Torre’s Safe At Home Foundation, and the year before we were able to raise $1,050 for The Jorge Posada Foundation. This year’s charity of choice was founded by one of the newest Yankees, Curtis Granderson.
The Grand Kids Foundation was established in 2008 as an educational-based organization that helps purchase books and school supplies for needy families, and also provides equipment and facilities to baseball programs that help keep inner city kids off the street. You can learn much more about the foundation at it’s official website.
Last year we based the pledge drive on the number of runs scored by the team, and the year before it was the number of strikeouts by the trio of Phil Hughes, Joba Chamberlain, and Ian Kennedy. This year, I’m going to go with the number of times that the charity’s founder reaches base in 2010. The idea is simple, you guys pledge a certain amount of money for every time Curtis Granderson reaches base on a hit, a walk, or a hit by pitch, and at the end of the season we’ll collect it all and send it on in to Grand Kids.
Even in what was considered a down season, Granderson still managed to reach base 231 times last year. So, if you pledged just $0.05 for each time he reached base last year, your donation would have been just $11.55. A $0.10 pledge would’ve had you on the hook for just $23.10. Every little bit helps, and you can see how easy it is to help out without breaking the bank.
We collected the donations at the end of the year via PayPal, personal check or money order the last two times we did this, and we’ll do the same thing this year. If you wish to pledge – and we hope you do – just send an email to me at mike (at) riveraveblues (dot) com, letting me know how much you wish to pledge. Please put something like “Pledge Drive” in the subject line to make the admin work easier.
Thank you in advance, and let’s go Yankees!
Open Thread: Regular Season Reminders
Posted by: | CommentsThe regular season kicks off on Sunday night, but I figure most of you will be out partying Friday and Saturday evenings, so I wanted to get this out of the way now. Below you’ll find a list of all the different ways you can access our fine blogging establishment, some of which you may find easier than others.
Before you get into that, make sure you review our commenting guidelines. Emotions run high during the season, especially during games like the one we’ll see at Fenway Park on Sunday, but we have to make sure we maintain some sort of civility in the comments. Please review them, even if it’s just a fresher.
RSS Feeds
Hopefully by now you’re taking advantage of the magic that is really simple syndication, or RSS. If not, that’s cool, but I recommend signing up for something like Google Reader. This site will tell you everything you need to know about using RSS feeds, but in short, you can subscribe to the feed of your favorite sites, and instead of manually visiting each one multiple times a day, the information will be brought right to you as it’s posted, all in one convienent spot.
Our main feed can be found here, but we also have a feed specifically set up for our amateur draft coverage. The main feed will bring you all of RAB’s content, the second is just for draft coverage. As you can imagine, it’s not very active between mid-August and March.
Subscribe via E-mail
If RSS feeds aren’t your cup of tea, you can get RAB sent right to your inbox. Just stick your email address in the appropriate box to the right (the one that says “Subscribe to RAB via email,” duh), and all of our content will be emailed to you as it’s posted.
Twitter
Has anything changed sports coverage in recent years as much as Twitter? Any breaking news will be posted their first, in 140 characters or less. You can use a (free!) service like Tweet Deck or Echofon to easily follow your friends, favorite sportswriters, celebrities, whoever has a Twitter account.
We have two separate Twitter feeds here. Our main feed is @RiverAveBlues, where the three of us will muse on various topics, post any breaking news, engage in playful banter with readers, stuff like that. It’s worth signing up just to read Ben’s knee-jerk reactions during the games. Our second feed is @RABfeed, which will automatically link to all of our posts as they go up. That’s pretty much all it’s there for, but it’s very useful.
If you want, you can also follow the three of us on our personal accounts: @bkabak, @joepawl, and @mikeaxisa. I can’t promise everything we tweet about will be about the Yankees, or even baseball for that matter, but you won’t regret it.
Facebook
It’s probably our least utilized social media presence, but there’s still over 850 people that are fans of RAB’s Facebook page. I’m not much of a Facebook person myself, but I recommend hitting our page up to connect with fellow Yankee fans.
Radio
I appear weekly on on The Shore Sports Report with Mike Krenek and Joe Giglio to talk about the Yankees, which airs on FOX Sports 1030 AM and WOBM 1160 AM. I post a reminder beforehand letting you know when exactly I’ll be on, but usually it’s Thursday around 4pm ET.
Contacting Us
If for any reason you want to contact us (maybe you have a question, or a link to a cool story, etc), the best way to do so is to use our little “Submit A Tip” box. You can’t miss it, it’s just to the right of the main column. If you want to tip us off to a trade rumor that we’ve missed, or something like that, please make sure you send us a link. Otherwise it’ll only take us longer to get a thread up about it.
If you want to contact us individually, then just drop us a line. Our addresses are in the far right sidebar. I know I haven’t been the best at replying at a timely manner, but my early New Years resolution is to improve on that.
Other Places To Read Us
Believe it or not, the three of us all use our blogging superpowers for good elsewhere as well. I contribute to MLB Trade Rumors and soon enough RotoGraphs, while Joe contributes to FanGraphs and ESPN’s TMI Blog as well. Teaser: He’s got a Yankee-related post going up at TMI tomorrow.
Ben also runs a wildly popular blog about the New York City subway system called Second Ave. Sagas. He’s been on TV and has been recognized by the Village Voice for his MTA awesomeness. Check it out.
So, you got all that? There’s a ton of ways you can have RAB’s content brought right to you, but nothing quite duplicates the experience of coming to the site, reading the posts, then debating the topics with our great group of commenters.
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Here’s your open thread for the night, so go ahead and talk about whatever you want. The Isles are the only local team in action.
Today is no Joba, no Hughes day
Posted by: | CommentsThe fifth starter race has been an absolute drain in Yankeeland this past week, culminating yesterday when Phil Hughes was officially given the job. We all need a break from this, so we’re going to declare today No Joba, No Hughes Day. No talking about those two and their situation at all. There will be plenty of fresh content today, scroll down to see the latest post, just keep to conversations on topic. Thanks.
The Stats We Use: OPS+, wRC+, and ERA+
Posted by: | CommentsIn previous installments of this series we’ve covered the basic offensive, defensive, and pitching stats we use when discussing player production. Those familiar with the statistics will recognize what it means when we say a player has a .355 wOBA. Those who aren’t, though, might have a bit of trouble determining exactly what that means, even if they’re familiar with the workings of the statistic. To make things easier, we have a number of stats which compare production to the league average. We’ll dive into these today.
OPS+
Baseball Reference has changed the way we view statistics. The site makes everything presentable and easy to access, so we can look up our favorite players and see exactly what they did. One statistic that B-R founder Sean Forman created was OPS+. OPS, as you likely already know, stands for On-Base Plus Slugging. Since the ability to get on base and the ability to hit for power represent two of the most important things a batter can do, mashing the two stats together made enough sense, even if it double-counts singles — not to mention combines two stats that have different denominators.
The other problem with OPS is that it deals with two statistics on different scales. The maximum OBP is 1.000, while the maximum SLG is 4.000. The answer, then, is to weight the statistics when combining. Forman went with (1.2*OPB) + SLG, and then placed that figure on a scale where 100 was league average. That made the stat easier to understand. Instead of having just a number, OPS+ put the number in context by comparing it to everyone else in the league. Now we know that when a player has a 120 OPS+ that he’s well above league average. We might not have been able to discern that by just seeing a, for example, .870 OPS by itself.
Improved as it may be, OPS+ is not perfect. For instance, Tom Tango believes that OPS+ still undervalues OBP, and that the calculation should be (1.8*OBP) + SLG. Even so, OPS+ is an improvement over straight OPS, not just because of the 1.2*OBP calculation, but also because of how easily it tells us what we want to know. But, perhaps there’s a better stat for this.
wRC+
Uh oh. Another stat with a lower-case letter. For some this might mean trouble. It’s not, though. In fact, it works right along with wOBA to provide us with a scaled view of player production.
The story of wRC+ doesn’t go back too far. In December Alex Remington wrote a wOBA primer, and Tango made a comment about one of Alex’s lines regarding wOBA in relation to OPS and OPS+. Later, in the comments, Tango said that he did not want wOBA+, but rather wRC+ — weighted Runs Created on a league scale. He used the BaseRuns formula to demonstrate how easy it would be to implement, and FanGraphs proprietor David Appelman (a great guy, really!) implemented it. The whole process took about a day. No joke.
The basics of wRC+ can be found in the wOBA primer. It uses the same system, basically, but instead of outputting a rate stat it outputs a counting stat, weighted Runs Created, or wRC. The number is park adjusted and scaled to the league. Like OPS+, 100 is league average. I prefer wRC+ to OPS+ not only because of the slight flaw in the OPS+ calculation, but because it assigns a proper value to each component, whereas OPS+ still uses the arbitrary measures of two for a double, three for a triple, etc.
ERA+
Like OPS+, ERA+ can be found at Baseball-Reference. This one won’t take but a paragraph to explain. Like OPS+, ERA+ is on a scale where 100 is league average. You can compute it right from home, too. Just take two minus the player ERA divided by the league ERA and multiple by 100. In other words: 100 * (2 – playerERA/leagueERA).* That’s literally it. The advantage, of course, is that you can determine how much better than average a pitcher was, no matter what the run environment.
* They did change ERA+ just yesterday. It produces the same results, in that the players are ranked the same. The formula change just makes ERA+ linear. That is, a player with a 122 ERA+ is 22 percent better than league average. The old way didn’t handle it like this. Sean Forman, proprietor of Baseball Reference, explains: “With the new formula, the equation is linear, so if the league ERA is 4.50 and you have one pitcher at 3.50, one at 3.00 and one at 2.50 you get ERA+’s of 122, 133 and one at 144 (one is 22% better than the league, one is 33%, and one is 44% better). It seems to me the numbers make a little more sense this way.”
I’d like to see this expanded to FIP. It shouldn’t be hard to create FIP+, and I do wonder sometimes why it’s not a readily available stat. Probably because FIP stands fine by its own, since it’s not really based on the same value scale as ERA. Still, I do like the concept of adding context by scaling to 100. It gives us a one-glance idea of how a player performs compared to his peers.
Next up
There will be one or two more posts in this series, touching on some other offensive and pitching measures. The ones in the series so far, though, are the ones we’ll primarily use.
Happy Birthday to us!
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Hard to believe it’s been this long already, but RAB turned three years old on Saturday. We share a birthday with Yankee farmhand Jason Hirsh, former Yankee cult hero Shane Spencer, former Yankee draft pick Donzell McDonald, Livan Hernandez, and some kid named Verlander.
A big thanks goes out to your guys, our readers. You make it all worth it, and RAB wouldn’t be where it is without you. The last year in particular has been overwhelming. Ben, Joe, and myself are all stunned by how much the site has grown in that time. Of course, when the team we cover wins the World Series, the positive vibe tends to trickle down. It was a great year all around in Yankeeland, and we’re looking forward to doing it again in 2010.
Just 5 days 'til pitchers and catchers report.
