Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Insert Obligatory "Tired" Reference Here
Ah, Jon, I was all set to make a Blazing Saddles reference when I saw you'd already beaten me to the punch.
So who knows if Barry was just having a bad day, or if his "press conference" was symptomatic of something deeper. What I do know is that Bonds' absence makes the team, well, little better than the 2004 Diamondbacks. I looked at this issue in September and found that the Giants without Bonds were about 4 Pythagenport wins better than the D-Backs (see BP if you need to know what this is; it looks at runs scored at runs given up, adjusted for luck and opponents).
In the end, the Giants had 87 Pythagenport wins last year; the D-Backs, 62.5. Translated into Win Shares, that means 261 for the Giants and 188 for the D-Backs, a difference of 73. Bonds had 53 Win Shares; if you make the same Pythagenport adjustment to his Win Shares, it's 51. That means that the non-Barry Bonds component of the Giants were responsible for 22 Win Shares, or about 7 wins. In other words, without Bonds, the Giants could easily be looking at no more than 70 wins. This ignores, of course, the offseason moves of the Giants, which were generally considered positive, but also ignores the incredibly old nature of the Giants.
Talking about Barry is probably more interesting than looking at yesterday's game (a slightly shaky outing by Webb and Aquino).
And I don't feel like talking about my NCAA pool picks. My women's bracket at ESPN is at least tolerable as I've got 15 of the Sweet 16 teams in my bracket and my champion (UNC, natch) still around. My men's bracket -- urgh. You know those monkeys sitting at typewriters attempting to write the next "King Lear"? I have no doubt they submitted brackets as well, and most of 'em are ahead of me in my Yahoo! pool. At least my champion (UNC, natch -- I'm nothing if not a homer when it comes to free NCAA pools) is still around.
So who knows if Barry was just having a bad day, or if his "press conference" was symptomatic of something deeper. What I do know is that Bonds' absence makes the team, well, little better than the 2004 Diamondbacks. I looked at this issue in September and found that the Giants without Bonds were about 4 Pythagenport wins better than the D-Backs (see BP if you need to know what this is; it looks at runs scored at runs given up, adjusted for luck and opponents).
In the end, the Giants had 87 Pythagenport wins last year; the D-Backs, 62.5. Translated into Win Shares, that means 261 for the Giants and 188 for the D-Backs, a difference of 73. Bonds had 53 Win Shares; if you make the same Pythagenport adjustment to his Win Shares, it's 51. That means that the non-Barry Bonds component of the Giants were responsible for 22 Win Shares, or about 7 wins. In other words, without Bonds, the Giants could easily be looking at no more than 70 wins. This ignores, of course, the offseason moves of the Giants, which were generally considered positive, but also ignores the incredibly old nature of the Giants.
Talking about Barry is probably more interesting than looking at yesterday's game (a slightly shaky outing by Webb and Aquino).
And I don't feel like talking about my NCAA pool picks. My women's bracket at ESPN is at least tolerable as I've got 15 of the Sweet 16 teams in my bracket and my champion (UNC, natch) still around. My men's bracket -- urgh. You know those monkeys sitting at typewriters attempting to write the next "King Lear"? I have no doubt they submitted brackets as well, and most of 'em are ahead of me in my Yahoo! pool. At least my champion (UNC, natch -- I'm nothing if not a homer when it comes to free NCAA pools) is still around.
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