10.2.09

Baseball and getting back to blogging

I obviously have not been updating since starting graduate school ,mostly because I am still getting used to the level of work, and trying to get A's in all of my classes. I do have a few observations, and soon I will start pulling together information for pre-season predictions.

-The first previews of the season are out and Baseball Prospectus has the Marlins with 74 wins. I talked a little bit about us jumping 5-6 games from last season because of alignment and transactions. However it seems they are not going to align the team as I had thought, and didn't go after any free agents, and traded away 2 good relievers. I don't think they are going down to 74 wins, but I don't think 90 is a realistic view eithier.

-Everyone has written about A-Rod so all I will say is that the way that the names were linked, and the fact that the names and tests were not destroyed scares the crap out of me. If I were Alex I would want to sue the Major League Union over all of this. He can't for PR reasons obviously but I think this is the real travesty. I don't care if a guy took steroids that much, athletes have been cheating forever and there is extensive research that proves that it helps in recovery and dissipation of injuries but no conclusive results that says it helps baseball skills. At the most it may add a tiny bit of length to long fly balls. Hand eye coordination for hitting, selectivity, fielding all are pretty much unaffected. However the privacy issues that come from how the leak came about are very disconcerting to me as an American citizen.