available? Carl Everett too?

I guess I’d say he was mis-used rather than over used. He pitched about 200 innings. I didn’t get the impression that he was particularly lucky with a lot of warning track shots. I think he suffers from being a strike out pitcher which means high pitch counts. Wherever he ends up he won’t have Ned Yost, so that’s a positive. He also has been a fastball/curveball pitcher. He does have 2 curveballs or perhaps the same one that he throws at two velocities. But this year after trying repeatedly over the years, he developed a successful change-up. I’ll bet wherever he goes, he has a good year.

represents a regression in his performance, compared to 2008. 3.05 vs. 3.41 ERA. The size of that movement is pretty typical of regression to the mean. Yet, even with regression incorporated, the resulting 3.41 ERA is still pretty good.

Both Peavy and Sheets are classic flyball/strike out pitchers. I would prefer Peavy, but that may be unrealistic, even though it will depend on how firm Peavy will be on limiting where he will play. The Braves’ GM said they wouldn’t give up their top prospects for Peavy, which ought to make the Astros feel a little bit better.

Lowe is another good free agent possibility, but I tend to think he will be overpriced for his age and performance. The reason I say that is because his name seems to appear near the top of all the big market (e.g., Red Sox, Yankees) teams’ shopping lists.

I have that problem, too sometimes…I think it’s because the normal “post a comment” box stays on the page and it looks almost exactly like the reply comment box

but it’s the best we’ve got to work with. Generally, I think the results of the systems are pretty good, but they can be flawed for individual players. Sometimes you will find that the 3 or 4 major defensive measurement systems disagree dramatically about a player’s defense, and skepticism is justified in those cases. For some of the systems (this depends on the data collection supplier), LF defensive measures tend to be suspect for certain ballparks like Minute Maid and Fenway. Then people add “adjustments” to Manny’s and Carlos Lee’s defensive numbers, because they aren’t really quite as bad as the data indicates. Again, I understand some skepticism there.

I have always been curious about the impacts of having a very good or very bad fielder adjacent to a fielder. I think players will adjust their positioning sometimes to offset or take advantage of the deficiencies/superiorities of the player next to them. For instance, I used to hypothesize that Berkman’s bad zone ratings at 1st base in the past were due to Biggio’s poor range, which caused Berkman to try to make more plays toward the 2d base hole. Now that Biggio is gone, Berkman’s RZR is tremendously good. Could be coincidence, or maybe not.

I don’t know about the issue of controlling for infield differences between ballparks. However, PMR (results are released after each season) which is devised by BaseballMusings.com will account for this factor (in theory at least). PMR is the only method which compares fielders only at their home ballparks to all the opposing players fielding at the same ballpark. That may introduce some other issues, but it does deal with the point you brought up.