That's right, Part II of our epic adventure through the lands of Westeros, er, Astros FanFest is hitting right now. If you missed Part I, here's a link...now, onto the diary.
12:01 p.m. - After the open panel, our merry band of bloggers went upstairs into the Club Level for the meat of FanFest. First thing we see? Actual meat, in the form of a nachos competition. The competitors were Texas Brisket versus Cheeseburger. There was a pretty good line, so I did not try either, but c'mon. Brisket had to win, right? BBQ is delicious.
12:05 p.m. - Behind the Great Nacho Debate of 2012 was an alumni autograph signing for fans. This FanFest event wasn't entirely free. Fans had to pay $10 to get autographs from current players, but the alumni signings were free. Oh, and before you get all bent out of shape about this new ownership group pinching pennies, the money went to support the Astros' Urban Youth Academy. So, you know, it's a good cause.
At any rate, the biggest question from the blogosphere at this table of alumni is who the heck some of the players were. We got clarification on some of them, like Scipio Spinks, but the one that floored everyone there was the inclusion of...Charlie Hayes!
Everyone remembers Hayes from his Yankee days, but few remember the 31 games and 58 plate appearances he got for the 2001 (division-winning) Houston Astros. I did, but I was the only one and I even had the years off, thinking he played around 2002 or 2003. Oh well. I guess when trying to fill out these alumni events, sometimes you have to move down the bench a bit.
At the opening panel of the Astros’ FanFest on Saturday, I had a pretty jarring realization. New Houston general manager Jeff Luhnow looks almost exactly like ESPN.com and Grantland.com sportswriter Bill Simmons.
Really, it’s uncanny. I couldn’t stop thinking about it as he gave reasoned answers about how Houston is attempting to make itself relevant again. So, I thought I’d steal a page from Simmon’s book and sum up the FanFest event with a running diary. Enjoy…
9:30 a.m. – Because Port Arthur is not Houston, I had to get on the road pretty early. Luckily, the rain that has poured on the area for the past week decided to take a day off. Saturday’s weather was the first time I’ve worn sunglasses in a month.
10:45 a.m. – First time I haven’t had to pay for parking at Minute Maid Park. It’s a nice feeling.
10:48 a.m. – It’s cold both inside and outside MMP on this day. And guess who didn’t bring a jacket? The lesson, as always, is I’m an idiot.
10:50 a.m. – I get inside with my freshly minted press credentials for just that day and meet the other writers who are covering the event. The Astros, through social media director Alyson Footer, invited a number of bloggers and writers to attend in an official capacity with an opportunity to interview Brad Mills, Bud Norris and J.D. Martinez. Which is why I spent my Saturday in Houston hanging out with a big chunk of the Houston Astros blogosphere.
Next month my things to do list include:
Baseball season tends to get a bit chaotic for me. I watch 150+ games via MLB.TV and try to get to Atlanta for a live game or two when the Astros are in town. I tend to schedule stuff around my baseball obsession, especially day games, so typically my nights are shot and the grass will grow a little bit longer than I'd like. That doesn't mean I don't attend family functions or even go out anymore, it just means all my friends have gotten married and typically decline any sort of male interaction.
I consider myself lucky that I found one who has supported my baseball obsession and put up with my gaming addiction (see: Mass Effect 3). She also doesn't boss me around or guilty me into staying put at the house. Which really isn't a bad thing considering she's the one that wanted to get the pool table, but I digress.
I live on the East Coast which means a majority of the games I watch typically start at 8:05PM EST and end some where around 11:00 PM EST. If the game goes into extra's or I have game recap duties that night I'm pushing midnight before I get to bed. With a 6 AM wake up call in my future, doing that four nights a week tends to wear on me. Sure I could catch up on the weekends but my toddler typically has other ideas.
But it's all good, because we make sacrifices for the things we love.
Speaking of my daughter I found this wonderful game on the internet. She turns three next month and is starting to pick up more and more things. Meaning it's the time in every kids life when their parents begin to push their own obsessions on them. I'd like to think I'm better than this, but I'm not.
My final "to do" in preparing for the season is making a trip down to Florida to see the Astros play. Due to the schedule we'll actually be in Kissimmee for one game, but we picked a weekend in which they'd be playing no more than two hours away from the ball park. I'm excited as it would be the first time I've ever gone to Spring Training. If anyone has any suggested dinning venues and/or regular tips I'd love to hear them.
What are some of the things you're doing to prepare for the season? For college students are you trying to get ahead of your school work? Are you trying to build up some good rapport with your significant other so that you can stay up way past your bed time? Are you trying to get more rest like me? Or going to Spring Training?
Or am I flying solo on this one.
Yesterday, Baseball Prospectus released the first 2012 iteration of their annual stat projection system, PECOTA. Please note that this is a projection system, not a prediction system. It's a fine line and sometimes BP writers get huffy when PECOTA is incorrectly labeled.
As the release of the inaugural PECOTAs are always, for me, a momentous occasion on par with Christmas, Halloween, Guy Fawkes Day, and International Talk Like A Pirate Day, I gleefully neglected work and family to fire up Microsoft Excel to wade through the prognostications.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with PECOTA, it's a baseball stat projection system named after Bill Pecota, as average a player as there ever was. The projections are based on quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and super string theory, where the end result is a collection of stats that represents the weighted average of the different calculation iterations.
For the type of people who fight Saber Boy for a living, what this means is that the projections represent the most likely performance of a player. I'm done trying to explain it. If you want to know more, Google is available.
Anyway, I dove into the Astros' PECOTA projections, starting with the hitters, and my comments are below.
NOTE: The article image has nothing to do with the Astros or with this article. I just thought it looked funny.
Several weeks ago, I approached David and Tim about managing Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball Leagues for the readers of The Crawfish Boxes. I say approached only in the metaphorical sense, as the conversation was facilitated by the wondrous technology of electronic mail, but the end result was the same. I was aware that TCB had operated fantasy baseball leagues in the past, and thought to myself, "I just gotta get in on that."
So after I dutifully volunteered, they gave me the go-ahead.
So imagine how smug I felt upon logging into the virtual writers desk provided by SB Nation and saw at the top that there was an ongoing campaign between Yahoo and SB Nation to initiate just such Fantasy Leagues! Clicking the "Edit" button, I was greeted with the following:
---------THIS IS THE POST SCRIPT----------
Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball supports SBNation for its commitment to furthering America’s hardball obsession. As the #1 Fantasy Baseball game, players can count on Yahoo! to provide all the research, stats, live scoring, video highlights, and mobile apps to make this season the best yet. Game opens 2/9/12 – Sign up!!!
Because I'm contrarian, I decided to not make the blurb a post script, but rather an integral part of my unnecessarily long lead-in to this post.
Cutting to the chase, we would like to invite you join the TCB Fantasy Baseball League when it opens.
I will follow up with more information once the league is set up.
It appears that several members of my twitter feed feel that with the Super Bowl now over baseball season has begun. The NBA, NHL and March Madness might have something to say about that, but I'll play along.
While baseball still does have two months until it engulfs our lives, pitchers and catchers report in less than two weeks and a week or so after that Florida and Arizona will again be filled with the crack of the bat and the whizzing of fastballs. With that in mind here are the Astros Spring Training story lines to keep an eye on during the month designated March Madness.
Who Wins the Third Base Job
It seems that the battle is between Jimmy Paredes and Chris Johnson despite my best efforts to get Matt Downs thrown in the conversation. Paredes has the defensive upside while Johnson has the power upside and Downs apparently has the pine upside.
Clack has already discussed in-depth Johnson's upside and ability to bounce back from his sophomore slump. I'll add that when Johnson went down to AAA last year he posted a BB% of 10.6 which is encouraging. With a .383 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) Paredes has got some serious regression coming his way. Whats interesting about his case is that he also struck out at a 26.3% of the time which is high, even for someone like Johnson. Paredes strikeout number had never been above 20% in the minors until the 2011 season (20.7% at AA).
Paredes strikeout rate could be a case of being rushed to the majors; spending more time in the minors could help his development. Let's also not forget that he only recently started playing third base on a full-time basis and still needs some work at the hot corner. In the minors he's played 112 games at third base and 197 at second base.
In limited playing time the pine rider posted a .276/.347/.518 line accompanied by a .315 BABIP. At the third base position that's an above average offensive player. Defensively he's closer to Johnson than he is to Paredes. Thing is Downs has been shifted around quite a bit in the infield as well and has even found a little time in the outfield, so given some solid time at one position we could see some improvements. Downs is probably better suited for second base but you can't ignore that offensive production at the third base position, even if it regresses a bit this season.
We have an early winner for the most obvious headline of 2012, right? After seeing that the Astros invited a unique mix of prospects to spring training on Monday, my thoughts turned to how likely it was that George Springer broke camp with Houston as a starting outfielder.
It was crazy. It was silly. It was ill-advised, but it was what popped into my head all the same. I decided to go home and trot out Baseball Reference to see how many games certain Astro first-round picks had in the minors before reaching the majors. I thought I remembered Craig Biggio getting up to the majors quickly, and Lance Berkman did too, but I wasn't sure how quick.
Turns out both had over 100 games, with Berkman topping 200 minor league games before making his MLB debut. Springer has 8 career games.
That alone is the biggest reason why he won't break camp with the team.
What surprised me is I did find some precedent for a first-round pick not playing very much in the minors. It just so happened to be one of the Astros two former No. 1 overall picks. Floyd Bannister, who was selected out of Arizona State, only needed 7 games in the minors after he was drafted in 1976 before breaking camp with the big league club in 1977.
Bannister went on to post a sub-4.00 ERA and win 16 games in a season, but he did not do either with the Astros. Oh, and he is not a position player. Both of those things bode poorly for Springer.
So, if we're just talking about position players, is there any precedent with other teams? Not really. Mark Teixeira was a pretty sure-fire prospect back in the day, but he spent 86 games in the minors the year after being drafted.
Rickie Weeks actually debuted in the majors the same year he was drafted in 2003, but only spent 7 games in the majors in September and was in the minors for the entire next season. Troy Tulwotzki spent 122 games in the minors before making his debut. Buster Posey spent 125 games in the minors.
Ryan Zimmerman is the closest we came, but even he spent 67 games in the minors the same year he was drafted No. 4 overall and spent 20 games in the majors that same September. He opened the next season as the starting third baseman, but he's got 59 more minor league games than Springer...
Gordon Beckham is another very close test case for Springer, since he signed late, spent 14 games in 2008 in the minors and played 45 more in 2009 before making his MLB debut.
If the Astros followed that timeline, that'd put them calling up mid-May to the big leagues, which could, I guess, be feasible (but not really).
Oh, and don't forget about poster child for this Pete Incaviglia. The college slugger who single-handedly made baseball outlaw draft pick trades never spent a day in the minors, moving straight to the major leagues. Unfortunately, he didn't exactly develop into a future star.
So, does the Astros invitation to Springer mean anything? No, it just gave me an excuse to dig through Baseball Reference for a couple hours. Winning!
We had some great submissions from last weeks article asking you, dear readers, to come up with a slogan for the 2012 season. I think I've managed to snag the good ones. I didn't use anyone's from the generator and I tried to go with the more positive ones because that's the point of a slogan, but a few may of slipped by the catcher.
I can't guarantee we'll have the slogan displayed, but if we have a good turn out I am going to see if I can finagle David into displaying the slogan somewhere on this site.
The vote will be up for a little over a week, ending Sunday the 12th at 6PM CST. We'll announce the winning slogan on the next podcast which will be recorded on the 12th.
Without further ado here are the five slogans you can vote on. Feel free to vote as often as you want.
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