I've enjoyed your blog over the years and wish you well, Lenny. Good luck to you!

Hip Hip Jorge! He was always one of my favorite Yankees! http://ryankantor.com/2012/02/17/aj-burnett-will-...

AJ and Hughes are forced into the bullpen with Freddy Garcia in the rotation. Great news for NYY!
http://ryankantor.com/2012/01/14/hiroki-kuroda-an...

Lenny, how well did this post pull? How many visits? I'm just curious. Thanks

Love your reference to Moneyball. Agree that Cashman made the right call. I made a funny blog post on my blog arguing the same points. http://ryansrantsandtommystirades.wordpress.com/2...
Well done!

Article about best trades by each MLB team. Here's the one for Oakland.
Billy Beane is generally regarded as one of the best GMs in the game, but he took some heat for breaking up Oakland’s pitching trio by dealing ace Mark Mulder before he could hit free agency.

Mulder, just 26 at the time, was coming off consecutive All-Star selections when he was dealt to St. Louis to join Chris Carpenter atop the rotation. He was brilliant in his first season with the Cardinals with a 3.64 ERA in 32 starts and over 200 innings, but he broke down quickly after that and was out of baseball entirely by 2008.

Luckily for the A’s, Beane knew that Mulder was a health risk and decided to cash in his chips at the opportune moment.

Calero was a decent reliever who appeared in 179 games for the As over four years. Barton broke though as Oakland’s starting first baseman in 2007 and has a .740 career OPS in five seasons. He’s still just 25 and won’t be a free agent until 2015.

The real prize, however, was Haren. The tall righty made 34 starts in each of his three seasons in Oakland, seemingly getting better each year. Beane capitalized on Haren’s success and traded him to the Diamondbacks for a package that included current lefty ace Brett Anderson and All-Star outfielder Carlos Gonzalez, who was shipped to Colorado in a deadline deal for Matt Holliday. Beane then turned Holliday into Brett Wallace, who was then again traded for Michael Taylor, now one of the top outfield prospects in baseball.

There are perhaps as many as 20 players with ties to the Mark Mulder trade, and all of them passed through Oakland at one point or another. Beane should be building space ships, not trading baseball players!

DAN EPSTEIN:

You make some great points. It seems like the A's have strayed away from true Moneyball, but in that you may have answered your own question...why do the A's stink now?

The Twins have done an impressive job, but they also have never done anything worth discussing the playoffs. I account that to bad luck (in the tiny sample size that is the MLB playoffs) and the human factor I mentioned in my previous comment.

UNCLE MIKE:
Success over 10 games does not prove or disprove the theory. The theory doesn't state that if you have the best on-base% you'll win the most world series. It simply states that OB% is the strongest predictor of runs scored. Even moreso than homeruns. This has been statistically proven (I assume they ran a regression or a chi-squared test for association).

10 games is simply too small of a sample size to test a theory like this. The book also gets into what they call the "human factor" when Chad Bradford blows a huge lead in what would eventually become their 20th straight win. This points to an unquantifiable factor (guile) that plays a role in the big games. Nonetheless steals, sac bunts, aggressive hitting...all generally bad. I'll stick by my original assertion.

It is in fact not a blog about WordPress, LOL. I'll come back to answer the more detailed questions ASAP.

Who's the replacement, the actual backup CF or the league average CF? If it's the former then it's not a fair means of comparison. Granderson/Verlander for AL awards.