Shouts and Plugs...

I am typically not that good at giving plugs to other sites. For one thing, I don't have enough time to go out and read all of even the most prominent baseball bloggers, especially the more long-winded ones. But even when they actually ask for a plug via email, I often... um...something, what was I saying?

Anyway, you get the point: Short Attention Span Theatre.

But today is different. No hard-hitting statistical analysis. No witty and entertaining writing. No arguing with Jayson Stark or Peter Gammons. No breaks for the bathroom.

Just commercials. Un-paid commercials. I apologize in advance.

So here goes:

The first shout goes out to Dan McLaughlin, whose Baseball Crank website is pretty darn good in general, even though he hates the Yankees. He's got an ongoing series on Win Shares, specifically regarding the levels that some prominent players have established for themselves over the last few years. He's analyzing each division in baseball individually, most recently the AL East. Go check him out.

Secondly, I've added a permanent link to BaseballOutsider.com, on the left, which may also be reproducing some of my stuff soon, but I guess we'll see. They're brandy-spankin-new, so they could certainly benefit from a few folks going to check them out.

Jay Jaffe maintains the Futility Infielder, and recently did a pretty extensive study of Defense-Independent Pitching Statistics. He does a good job of explainging the concept (Voros McCracken's idea) and then looking at who fared bes and worst in 2003. It's pretty full of spreadsheet data, without a whole lot of discussion, other than the explanations, so if you're not a big numbers geek like me, it might not be your thing. Just to warn you.

If you're an A's fan, and really, if you're not, you should be, there's been some interesting writing around some of the more mainstream baseball websites, who don't need me for publicity, but they're getting it anyway.

Baseball Prospectus' Dayn Perry says (sorry, premium subscribers only) that the Athletics won't be nearly as bad an offensive team as lots of people seem to think in 2004, despite the significant losses of Miggy Tejada and Rammy Hernandez. His points, essentially, are that Out-Makers Terrence Long and Chris Singleton are gone and that Jermaine Dye can't possibly be as horrendous as he was last year. He's probably right, but I'd still be worried, if I were the A's. Mostly because I'd have to get twenty five tax returns done in about a month, but also because of the offense thing.

Rob Neyer says that nobody should get too excited about newly-signed A's 1B Eric Karros' recent platoon splits against lefties, as it may just be an anomaly. I'm having a hard time with this one, since one of the things we do as baseball analysts is examine how players perform in certain situations, and against certain types of competition, so I'm going to look into this more.

I'll write to Rob and let you know what I discover. I may even do a series or column examining the issue of platoon splits. (For those of you who may be new to Boy of Summer, this means that I will most definitely NOT do a column on this issue. Just so you know.)

And last but not finally, John Perricone has got a whole new website design at Only Baseball Matters. Same great writing from the same great Giants fan, only with Space-Age Polymers! I mean colors. Pretty cool.