Mar 28, 2007

Who's the real Evil Empire?

Red Sox owner Larry Lucchino made the comment in 2003, comparing the Yankees to the Galactic Empire led by Darth Vader (or technically the Emperor) from 1977's Star Wars. Thinking about it (Star Wars) today, I realized something: Darth Vader used a red lightsaber, and Luke used a blue one. Corresponding colors perhaps?


Random thought:
I respect the hell out of Baseball Prospectus, but some of their equations/statistics don't sit right with me. One stat for measuring pitchers is SNLVA - Support Neutral Lineup Value Added. It measures the pitcher's effectiveness in winning games versus an average pitcher. Johan Santana's 2006 score: 5. So what BP is telling us is that the best pitcher in the game is only worth 5 more wins than Javier Vazquez or Jon Lieber (4.84 era, 4.93 era respectively) who both have scores of 0 (meaning they were exactly average last year in terms of SNLVA)?
I understand about park and league adjustments, but still! - for comparison, Chien-Ming Wang had a score of 2.3. How can I possibly believe that Wang gave the Yanks basically just 2 more good chances to win over those average guys mentioned earlier?
And nevermind SNLVAR, which is the same except it compares each pitcher to a replacement pitcher (basically defined as a fringe ML pitcher). Santana's score: 8.4. Wang: 5.1. Not plausible.

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