In Closing and Summation (for now)

From what I've learned this semester in the way of social media tools and how they enable people to exist in cyberspace, I've come to realize just how advanced we've become as a culture. I believe the culture that we belong to is the one that has regular access to the Internet and who uses it regularly for both personal and business purposes. For this class, we've had to use a few different web tools that I have never used before. I've come to realize their uses and limits, and think of better ways to use them. Going one step below the practical nature of the tools, we've learned a lot about the theory behind sharing information in the public domain and I've come to realize the difference between writing for an audience and publicly sharing my work. I feel like when your share your work with everybody and everybody can form their own opinions on your opinions, then there is a dilution in the quality of critique of the work. Therefore, there is a certain responsibility that is waived once your work hits the public forums. Why should the author who pens the information be subjected to a harsher scrutiny than the people who read and comment on it? That is the nature of information once it hits the Internet: if the work is not specialized and appeals to the masses, then it should be shared in a public domain, but since it is going to be analyzed every-which-way, there ceases to be a reason for why it should be stripped of any non-confirmed reporting/non-fact-based opinion. The future of internet media is clearly publish-then-edit due to the immense potential of thought evolution that this process creates.

Now, for the specific things that I now know how to negotiate better due to this course:

**I have had much experience writing on Blogspot in the past as well as using MySpace, Facebook, etc, but now I'm beginning to see the significance of using Netvibes as a way to congregate my material on one page. I feel like we could have used Netvibes a bit more, perhaps by setting up our own pages like we did for the first Wiki assignment. I think that would also give a nice glimpse into the personalities of our peers.

**Aside from Wikipedia, I had never used a Wiki before. I did not realize how much went into the creation and development of such an immense (yet seemingly simple) project. I think where Wikipedia succeeds, our Shirky project failed a little bit. Wikipedia is dependent on people caring about the subject matter and wanting to put a stamp on the online publishing world. I think if the Shirky project was a semester-long project where we were graded on the presentation of the pages (i.e. if we paid much more attention to content instead of mainly just the process), then it would have benefited us more in the long run. As part of the generation who will be spending much of their lives revolutionizing cyberspace content, I feel that a three-month-long project working together solely through an Internet-based venture will help us tremendously in practicing the organization and planning skills that will be required of us in the future and in our professions.

**I think an Advanced level of this course would be most intriguing. I would take it this summer even though I would already have graduated, and I do not think that I'm alone in this.

I'm glad that we were able to experiment writing blogs based on whatever issue we were interested in. I hope I adequately described the conflict between MLB (the owners) and the MLBPA (the players) in regards to the methods of attributing value to salary arbitration-eligible players. Players end up becoming prisoners of the teams because of the sharp decline their value takes when they are incorrectly awarded Type A status. I feel like there is an amalgamation of interests that should be discussed during the next CBA talks after the current agreement expires on Dec 11, 2011. I was able to develop the ideas that I set forth in this blog into a paper for my graduate Sociology course on Wealth Stratification, and I have since sent that paper to a number of people on several MLB teams, in hopes that I can land a baseball operations internship for the spring. This blog was the perfect medium to begin crafting my ideas because of the promise of visibility in the public domain. While I felt no reason to be accountable for my opinions, I did want to exhibit a certain level of accuracy in order to appear as knowledgeable as I believe I am. Writing for an audience but not limiting viewership surpassed any expectations for my writing and analytical skills - and isn't personal development a key component of a revolution?

In Summation, but not in closing

As the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close, Major League Baseball has many choices to make to direct the new era of baseball. With an ever-increasing intellectual fan base brought on by the technology innovations in the past ten years, MLB has the ability to shape the game that will maximize its attractiveness in every market by giving teams the freedom to run themselves as they see fit. This starts with the ability to evaluate and compensate talent in new ways with more sophistication than in previous collective negotiated agreements. The need for this kind of evolution coincides with advanced baseball analysis philosophy permeating into mainstream media. Employing the recommended changes to the new collective bargaining agreement will allow both owners and players to maximize on their performance. It is vital to the relationship between both that respect is given to each side during the negotiations so that progress is made to solidify these changes in MLB policy. This blog has shown how much sense it makes for both sides to reconfigure the MLB Draft and Free Agency system in order to increase the level of competitiveness and revenue for all of the organizations in the league.

WAR, What is it Good For?

The statistics chosen leave a lot to be desired. The current system assumes that a hitter can only be valuable if he has a high OBP and hits many home runs, and that a pitcher must accumulate a lot of wins and strikeouts, and have a good ERA. The study of analyzing baseball statistics – sabermetrics and the associated sabermetricians who analyze the data – has been developing more progressive metrics every year as an on-going process to develop correct notions in the art of properly critiquing baseball. (Halverson & Halverson, 2008) Tango et al. have developed a metric called Fielding-Independent ERA (FIP) that takes team defense, the stadium’s park design and a constant for the league into account along with the pitcher’s ERA to determine how many earned runs are purely the pitcher’s faults. When discussing pitchers in different leagues and on different teams, it is no longer acceptable to use their ERA – as that measurement has been deemed obsolete by the improved FIP. As an anecdote, the 2009 American League Cy Young winner, Zack Greinke, was quoted after winning the award: “That’s pretty much how I pitch, to try to keep my FIP as low as possible.” (New York Times, 11/18/2009) By correcting for the number of innings pitched, it will be possible to show a more complete picture of value for pitchers. Hitters have a similar stat called Weighted Runs Created (wRC) that involves using a player’s OBP to show many runs that player produced with his bat. By breaking down traditional measurements and developing them into more sophisticated metrics, it is possible to bridge the gap between conservative and progressive thought in Major League Baseball and bring change to the currently antiquated free agency system.
The league may still argue that the statistics currently used are actually proper ways of analyzing players and may reject the proposed system of using more complicated sabermetrics such as FIP and wRC to determine the production of each player. However, there is another equation that is more widely discussed in mainstream sports coverage media than the lesser known FIP and wRC. That equation is known as Wins Above Replacement, or WAR. (Hakes & Turner 2009) WAR is a metric developed by Baseball Prospectus that essentially computes the number of runs a player creates with his bat and saves with his glove, and then determines how many wins that player is worth to his team above a replacement-level player (a replacement player is set to zero wins). Among the potential free agents, there are 26 Type A's, 52 Type B's, and 102 unranked. Table #2 shows the WAR values for the top twenty-six of the three types of free agents (A, B, unclassified) available this offseason.

Table 2.

Free Agent Class Average Wins Above Replacement (WAR)
Type A (top quintile) 4.6
Type B (top half of second quintile) 4.9
Type B (bottom half of 2nd quintile) 1.5
Unclassified (bottom 60%) 2.9


The ubiquitous nature of the WAR values depicts the ineffectiveness of the current MLB free agent system to determine the true value of players. To have such a system that ranks players based on obsolete, archaic and irrelevant stats shows how disorganized MLB leadership is. More than this, these facts show how the MLBPA is actively (though not intentionally) preventing its players from obtaining the contracts that they deserve.

Making sense of it all

Over the past four weeks, I have been analyzing the current state of affairs in MLB. I have empirical evidence that shows why the current system needs to be changed, developed a new metric for ranking the free agents and have shown the paradox existing in MLB today with its utilization of advanced media technology. With the current Collective Bargaining Agreement set to expire on Dec 11, 2011, it is imperative to discuss these topics now so they are out in the open.

Shirky says that just because something is published online, that does not mean that it is intended to be heard by everybody. But in this case, eavesdropping will put pressure on the traditional culture of MLB to embrace the benefits of accelerating some of their policies to adopt current technology and thought. That's why I intend to update this blog after the course finishes and publish it publicly.

Updates coming soon..

Do Not EatThese Wings

The man on the right is not messing around. They are hot. They will make you sick for days and leave a burnt hole in your stomach for at least 72 hours. Do not eat the suicide wings from Buffalo Cantina.