mike

Pat Gillick is the new GM, not sure how I feel about it. Thinking about the contenders the only person I would have been generally happy with was me, but they didn’t call me in for an interview. Gillick no doubt has had success in his career but its getting up there in age. (Yes, I cheer for a team with a 78 year old head coach.) The other part they keep mentioning is he will continue the ‘grooming’ process for Ruben Amaro Jr. I didn’t know the process had started and if it started with Ed Wade then I’m not so sure I want the process to continue. That’s all a few years and nothing to worry about yet.

Gillick will need to get to work immediately in order to fix this team, if that can even be done. I think this team is destined to win 86 games/year. Unless both Gavin Floyd and Cole Hamels make the rotation and are as good as we were told they were a few years ago. Starting pitching is the key. Replacing Bell and Lieberthal might win us a few more games and even get us a wild card but without a few dominant starters we won’t go past the first round. I’ll put Myers in to that category and let Lieber or Wolf pitch a Game 4 but we need more.

I’m excited for the off-season. We should be active and pop up in all sorts of ESPN.com rumors and get my hopes up unnecessarily, what else is that rumor mill for?

Can’t keep all those computer rankings straight? I cam across a site today that complies all of the rankings together, there are 41 of them on this page I believe. You can find a ranking to prove just about anything you want. The rankings are averaged out to give an overall ranking. As for Penn State, they are #29 overall but they are as high as #2 and low as #51. I’m not so sure how the poll came about that #2 ranking except that they took every undefeated team and hit random.

See All the Numbers

This is the first time in many years that I’ve moved away from Yahoo! I barely remember the pre-Yahoo! days of buying a program and doing a lot by email. This year there were some new free contenders to Yahoo! that were worth checking out. ESPN should put out a quality product although their fantasy games are usually a pain to get in to. Fox Sports offered free leagues with live scoring as did AOL. AOL looked a little better so we decided to give them a try.

We’ll get Fox out of the way first. I tried to access their site last night and you couldn’t even make a team. I read the message board and people were saying they did their draft on Fox but decided to move because it was always down. Problem was it was never functioning long enough to get the rosters.

We had planned for a 9:30 draft and every one who I expected for the live draft was on time. Except of course for the draft room on AOL. It did not load at all. It should be mentioned that AOL was the only one that did not schedule drafts. Thats great since I never know when we will actually get started. However it didn’t work out so well for the servers.

A backup plan was developed to move over to ESPN. I had created a league there before I heard about AOL. We were able to get everyone signed up over there and schedule an auto-pick draft that would be done Thursday morning, plenty of time to set rosters for the opening game.

Around 10:30 AOL amazingly starts working. The draft room was incredibly slow to respond, its was really designed terribly. I had to set the absent members to auto-pick after a few minutes, it couldn’t figure out that if someone wasn’t there that they wouldn’t be picking? I guess this is possible if I had someone on the phone and I could pick for them. The auto-pick went along with the AOL rankings, which heavily favored defensive players. These teams maxed out on DL, LB, and DBs before picking any offensive players in some cases. Really, really dumb.

We are keeping the ESPN league cause, why not have 2? Plus, in that one punters and head coaches are included.

Anyway all this chatter just to annouce my roster …

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Really? FSU-Miami? A poorly played game with very little offense? The worst game I’ve seen since the 6-4 PSU-Iowa game. If either of these teams played Penn State the game would never end. No one would score.

Why do the Braves and Seminoles do their chop to the same music? Is it that Atlanta and Tallahassee are so close that its the same tribe? Isn’t there another chant that could be used, at least for varity?

A comment posted on 10/1 to my old system, so I’ll put it here:
It started at FSU w/ the Seminoles. Deion Sanders brought it back from his alma mater (Florida State University) to the Atlanta Braves back in the early 90’s, where we adopted it. (I’m from Atlanta).

I attempted to watch Real Sports tonight, the one with the Randy Moss interview. I wound up only getting to see the last segment because Beau somehow lost his collar (likely Lady ripped it off him but it was too dark to locate). To wrap up Bryant Gumble did his little closing statement. He built it up as addressing all the sports heads of the various networks (ESPN, Fox, NBC, etc). It had potential, there are a great number of things to address at these networks. His problem … he doesn’t like the Gatorade bath. He says its old and not funny (was it supposed to be funny?). Claims that if these channels stop putting it on TV then it will stop. I don’t think the players do this to be on TV, its because they won. They are congratulating the coach. At least I know now, if I ever watch Real Sports again, turn it off before Gumble has a chance to speak.

Last night I was looking at the baseball standings on Sportsline and noticed how they always denote at the bottom that a team’s magic number will be in (). However, they don’t bother to use the magic number until near the end of the season. I want to know this no matter how large it is. I did a search and the first site I found was very cool. RIOT lists the number of games a team needs to win to win its division or wild card as well has the number it needs to win to avoid being eliminated. For example, the Phillies currently 35 games left. If they were to go 34-1 the rest of the way they would win the division, no matter what the Braves or anyone else does. If they falter and go 33-2, they would still win the wild card. Another interesting note is that no team is eliminated yet. Even with the Royals 19 game winning streak they weren’t eliminated. It will likely happen next week, they only need to lose 5 more games. I’m sure I’ll be checking this page out almost daily.

Some other neat standings related sites:
Baseball Prospectus Playoff Odds Report – They run a million simulations each night. Here they show the average final record of each team and the probability that the team will make the playoffs. As of today the Phillies have a 10.6% chance at winning the division and a 16.5% chance at the wild card, making their chances of making the playoffs about 27%.

Pennant Race – Graphs each team and their record throughout the season. You can browse by division or make a custom graph. Really interesting to see the Astros and A’s climb back to the top.

During my free time last week I put together a little web site for sports news. It works like this: users submit stories they find on the web about their team (right now Baseball and Football work). The most recent stories all appear on the front page. There are also pages for each team that have the most recent stories related to that team. Finally users can recommend a story and the recent top stories are then displayed. Please check it out, if it gains any sort of interest then I will add some of the other features I’m thinking about. sports.jankeweb.com