We got a few autographs in the Spring edition of the A’s Magazine and our Spring Training ball. Gio Gonzales, Daric Barton, Josh Outman, Rajai Davis, Cliff Pennington and Corey Wimberly.  Not really any big names, but guys to watch in the future.  I don’t think I got any great pictures, though I did get a few of Reggie Jackson who was in his full practice gear.

The game went well for the A’s, who had a 5-0 lead leaving the first inning.  Both teams were shut down until the sixth, when the Diamondbacks were able to score two off of Vince Mazzaro and then another  in the seventh.   The A’s did score four more in the middle of that and two more in the seventh with help by a Josh Donaldson triple and a solo home run by Aaron Cunningham.  The final score was 11-3.

After the game, we headed back to the hotel for a short bit before leaving for Jobing.com Arena to watch the visiting Sharks take on the Phoenix Coyotes.  We were a little late and missed the first goal, but they saved two more Phoenix goals for when we were in our seats.  The Sharks were down 3-0 going into the first intermission, and were only able to score one in the second period.  As they have done more than a few times this year, the Sharks scored twice to tie the game in the third.  Unfortunately, a really bad interference call on Cheechoo by the referee resulted in a Sharks penalty and the Coyotes capitalized to score with thirty seconds to go in the game and take a 4-3 lead.

Hunter was a little less excited today than he was yesterday.  Still, he smiled at people when they would talk to him.  While getting autographs down near the field, Hunter got to shake Daric Barton’s hand.  I wish I had been able to take a picture of that.  Everyone though he was so cute at the hockey game in the Sharks jacket that we borrowed from his cousins.

Tomorrow we go to Out of Africa, a wild animal park about 90 minutes north of Phoenix.  We’re going to try and get there early so we can possibly drive up to Sedona for dinner and check out the views.

Phoenix Municipal is a pretty nice park.  Attendance was 5,303 people.  They say it can hold 8775 people, but it seemed like there was more people than 60% capacity, so maybe they count the standing room only limits.  It’s not too hard to get around in and the food lines don’t get too long since there are so many counters open.  About the only thing that it lacks is the variety of food.  Standard baseball fare here for the most part.  It also doesn’t have any outfield seating or picnic area like many other minor league and spring training facilities have.  I hope the city of Phoenix takes Lew Wolfe up on his offer to renovate and adds some outfield stuff and perhaps a new scoreboard.

I didn’t get any autographs today.  We didn’t get there early enough and really were just trying to get our bearings on the place by the time the players came off the field.  There’s a practice field right over the right field wall, and I got to see Giambi take some easy pitches from one of the coaches, and Ellis hit off a tee.  The catchers, Landon Powell and Kurt Suzuki were also practicing their catching and throw-em-out motions.  Tomorrow we’ll try to get there earlier and get some autographs.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, mentioned how cute Hunter was in his A’s onesie and hat.  We even had a couple of Japanese girls take turns snapping their pictures with him.  We were in the front row of the covered spots about a section or two over from home plate.  It was a pretty good view of the field and of Papago Park behind it.  Since we were in the front row, everyone had a good view of Hunter.  He talked a lot and was ‘yelling’ at people as they went by, especially the young kids.  A few people stopped with their young ones to say ‘Hi.’

While walking around we saw sportswriter Mychael Urban eating lunch in the VIP area.  He’s pretty tall.  Lew  also came out to sign some autographs and shake hands.  The Left Field Bleachers people were there and kept telling him to keep the team in Oakland.  He ignored it.

After the game, we drove up to Scottsdale and ate at The Saddle Ranch Chop House for dinner.  It was nice to actually eat dinner before eight o’clock for the first time in three days.  I had a steak with garlic mashed potatoes and Heather ate an orange chicken dish.  They were great, as were the cornbread muffins and buffalo wings.  The manager of the place actually called my mustache a ‘Rollie Fingers thing’ so that was good.  It looks like it would be a great place to go to watch a game, as they have TVs all over and the place is really spacious.

Tomorrow is game two, vs the Arizona Diamondbacks, so I expect it to have higher attendance than today.  Also, sunscreen.

I’m not new to MySQL databases or SQL queries, but the existence of a free baseball database was news to me, so I downloaded and imported the beast.  It’s quite an interesting blob of data and you can use it to analyize and discover tidbits about your favorite teams and players. 

I wanted to find out how payroll and team wins are related, specifically from this past year.  I was messing around with the database, and came up with a query for data that is probably easy to find out and already analyzed on lots of other websites. But where is the fun in that?  So I created a query that would take the sum of all players’ salaries on each team, and then divide it by the number of wins that team had.  A simple calculation, but a little more wordy when written out as a query:

SELECT t.teamID, t.W, t.L, (t.W/t.G) as wpct,
 sum(s.salary) as payroll,
 sum(s.salary)/t.W as dpw
FROM Teams t, Salaries s
WHERE t.teamID = s.teamID
 AND t.yearID = s.yearID
 AND s.yearID = 2008
GROUP BY s.teamID
ORDER BY dpw DESC 

I won’t go into detail on what each line of the query does, because you can find that out elsewhere if you are interested.  It query outputs the wins, losses, win percent, payroll and dollars per win that the team spent for 2008.  Here are the results, with dollars in millions:

teamID
W
L
wpct
payroll
dpw


NYA
89
73
0.5494
207.9
2.336


SEA
61
101
0.3765
117.7
1.929


DET
74
88
0.4568
137.7
1.861


NYN
89
73
0.5494
137.8
1.548


ATL
72
90
0.4444
102.4
1.422


LAN
84
78
0.5185
118.6
1.412


BOS
95
67
0.5864
133.4
1.404


CHA
89
74
0.5460
121.2
1.362


CHN
97
64
0.6025
118.3
1.220


LAA
100
62
0.6173
119.2
1.192


SDN
63
99
0.3889
73.7
1.169


SLN
86
76
0.5309
99.6
1.158


TOR
86
76
0.5309
97.8
1.137


SFN
72
90
0.4444
76.6
1.064


PHI
92
70
0.5679
97.9
1.064


HOU
86
75
0.5342
88.9
1.034


CIN
74
88
0.4568
74.1
1.002


BAL
68
93
0.4224
67.2
0.988


CLE
81
81
0.5000
79.0
0.975


WAS
59
102
0.3665
55.0
0.932


COL
74
88
0.4568
68.7
0.928


MIL
90
72
0.5556
80.9
0.899


TEX
79
83
0.4877
67.7
0.857


ARI
82
80
0.5062
66.2
0.807


KCA
75
87
0.4630
58.2
0.777


PIT
67
95
0.4136
48.7
0.727


MIN
88
75
0.5399
56.9
0.647


OAK
75
86
0.4658
48.0
0.640


TBA
97
65
0.5988
43.8
0.452


FLO
84
77
0.5217
21.8
0.260

What does this tell us?  I’ve highlighted the teams that made it into the postseason. Most of them were in the top half and around 1.2-1.4 million per win. 

There are two reasons you could have a high dpw:

1) High Payroll.  The more you pay, the more each win will cost you.
2) Low Wins. The less you win, the more those you do win will have cost you.

Let’s look at a few teams.

The Yankees with the highest per-win value (2.336m) had a tough year but came out six wins short of tying Boston for the wild card (assuming those wins didn’t come from Boston).  That number of wins would have lowered their dpw to about 2.2m.  Either way, their strategy, for the most part, is to pay for veterans who have proved themselves to be among the best in the game.  This year, it didn’t work out for them.

The Tampa Bay Rays, on the other hand, made the most out of a low payroll by taking their 452k per win to a World Series berth.  I imagine that their dollars-per-win will go up over the next few years as their young stars start to get into the mature part of their contracts, though I haven’t researched that.  Also, perhaps the higher revenue from an excited fanbase translates into more money for free agents.

Seattle has the second highest dpw value with their 118m payrool and only 61 wins.   Even though the Yankees have the highest dpw, I think the Mariners are the most offensive (as in offending, not in run production) team this year.  They are in a smaller market and have less revenue coming in than the Yankees do and the losing record and current roster makes me think that they are a lot of big changes away from being competetive.

The Oakland Athletics are pretty low on the dollars-per-win chart with a sub-.500 year that threatenend for awhile to be a winning year.  They are adding payroll this year and should pick up more wins, though I still expect them to be near the lower quarter of this graph next year. 

So what does dollars-per-win tell us?  Is payroll releated to team wins?  Yes, but not always.  A team like the Yankees can be successful year after year by throwing money at the best players, but that will not guarantee them a 100 win season each time.  They can do that though because they are in a large market and can count on the revenue coming in to make up for the higher cost.  Smaller market teams need to be smarter and more efficient with their payroll in order to compete for a playoff spot on a yearly basis since they don’t have the same kind of revenues.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with having a high dollars-per-win ratio. I think it depends on how you’re getting it.  If the team isn’t making it to the postseason (or getting close to it) then the players they are paying for are probably not worth what they are earning.  I think dollars-per-win could be considered an effiency thing, i.e, what is the team doing with the money they are paying out.  In the end (competetivly), nothing matters more than a World Series but you’ll never get there without the wins, so wins become important.   And in the end (business-wise) you just want to make money, and wins will keep people coming to the park.

Where to go from here?  First, I should take a look at previous years and see what the patterns are.  Do most teams come from the top, or is there always a team or two that comes from the depths?

It would be interesting to look at the similar calculation of net revenue-per-win, but I don’t know where to get those numbers.  The results would take into account their market and attendance and put it up against wins.  Teams that have a higher attendance dispite a poor team would probably rate well.  Maybe net revenue-per-win would mean more for the bean counters than the stat heads.

Am I assuming too much with dollars-per-win?  Have I made any mistakes?  Any other thoughts?

Frustrating rookiee mistakes were made with a Barton-off-the-shoulder foul-ball drop and Hannahan’s indecision after making a fantastic defensive stop down the third base line.  They weren’t the only ones.  Jason Varitek hit a ball that bounced off the white line on the right field wall back into the field.  The referees ruled it a double instead of the home run the replays showed it really was.  It ended up not mattering much because the A’s couldn’t manage to get anyone else home.

The two bright spots of the night were the solid six innings pitched by Joe Blanton and the solo homerun that Jack Cust hit on the first pitch in the second inning.   I managed to snap a picture of Cust making contact from our vantage point all the way down the left field side in section 234.  Except it was blurry.  Oh well.

Next up on the list of games is Travis Buck bobblehead day on April 19th against Kansas City.

SimYard has an interesting twist to it.  Your team is made up of semi-pro players who you find while interacting with the fans around The Park.  You pick a field at the park and wait for someone to accept your challenge, or you find a field with another team waiting and accept theirs.  There is no set game schedule or requirement to play specific teams.  It’s more like pick-up baseball. 

Currently, your team has a roster limit of 40 players comprised of the usual positions.  Each player has a set of internal stats that make up what kind of player they are, ranging from 1 to 20 (I assume it’s 20.  The highest I’ve seen is a value of 17 on one of my pitchers).  The stats fall into one of three disiplines: batting, pitching and fielding/baserunning.  Batting, for instance, is made up of the Hit, Bat Speed and Power stats.   They go up against pitchers who use the Finesse, Pitch Speed and Endurance stats. 

Each individual matchup in the game is determined by the server using these stats, pitch by pitch.  You can see the current number of balls and strikes on the status display and the results of the matchup show up on a representation of the field.  You have as much control over the batter or pitcher as a real manager does in the dugout.  Sure, you can call substitutions, but like in the real game, you don’t have time to think it over too much before play continues on.  Each pitch takes about one second, and a full game can be completed in anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes.  The automatic manager does a pretty decent job replacing pitchers when they get tired and ineffective batters in the later innings, so don’t feel overwhelmed with figuring out who to pull and when.  The pitcher’s endurance stat determines how long they can go in the game and how much rest time they need in between starts.  Typically, it’s anywhere from 10 to 20 hours, which would equate to about four to six days in real life.   

The games go much like any game you watch on TV.  You root for your players like you would your favorite team, yelling at the screen when hitters can’t seem to do more than create a breeze and your pitchers appear to be throwing underhanded.  Of course, you do the same when your four-slot knocks a grand slam or your pitcher goes a complete game.

The baseball season is 24 days long, plus two days of spring training at the start of the month and two days of a post-season tournament at the end of the month.  Even though there are no official leagues in The Park, standings and stats are kept.  A simple games behind calculation determines where your team is in relation to the others.  Since everyone plays a different number of games in the schedule-less format, you can play half as many games as one team and still be next to them in the standings.  The date of the seasons is set in the late 1890’s, which some consider the beginning of modern baseball.  Everything from then to now is a blank slate… ready for you to make history.  Each new month bring a new season, new standings and new opportunity.

The top teams will play in the post-season, however not much about that has been revealed to the public yet.  I do know that you’ll set your starting rotation and closers to pair up against your opponents, and the computer will schedule the tournament with as many as 64 teams. 

All of that is free.  Starting next month, there will be a way to take your team to the next level, by purchasing a stadium license and joining a league with it’s own schedule, standings and playoffs.  Not only will you be playing against better teams, you’ll also have to keep the fanbase you built at The Park happy with good seats, concessions and souveniers.  They’ll show their happiness by attending games and spending money at the park so you can turn around and offer your players contracts and keep them on your team.   

The game is currently in beta, so you may notice some changes as the month goes on, as SimYard developer Erick Robertson tweaks things and adds features.  Erick sure did his homework when he came up with the engine behind the whole thing, so be sure to let him know you enjoy the game if you see him in the game’s chat or forums.  

So come on out and check out SimYard.  Anyone who is interested in baseball, especially those who take part in fantasy baseball should find enjoyment in taking a team of players and trying to beat the pants off of everyone at The Park.  You can find me in there as, who else? LoneStranger.