How Do You Like Me Now?

UPDATE ABOVE

Thanks everyone – let’s keep growing this site and making it better. Thanks for all the ideas. They are duly noted!

Mark – I love your blog. I’m one of those who come and read it everyday but never post – just never found an opportunity to jump in. But since you asked for feedback, I thought I’d post something.

I like reading your posts because they offer original thinking and this is one of the few places I can find rational reasoning. I am aware of other Dodgers’ blogs and I also follow the Dodgers on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Every bit of news tends to get bounced around in this huge echo chamber without any value added commentary. I like how you can read between the lines when we hear from players and front office guys. In the world of PR, athletes and team officials, regardless of the situation, have things they simply cannot come out and say, and other things they will always say. Simply repeating these non-statements is simply not news for me. I like your takes because they analyze situations with this perspective in mind.

I also liked your posts on the old site because they often were based on first hand observation – like your discussions with Logan White. Or what you saw when you watched players during Spring Training. It’s information I don’t get anywhere else and it adds color and context to all the other Dodgers news.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and I have been a lifelong Dodger fan. As you can imagine, I am treated like an outcast here – even by coworkers, friends and family. Almost everyone I run across is a Giants fan and they hate the Dodgers. I like your site because it offers me a community of people who share my love of the Dodgers. Yours is the only site that I visit where I go almost as much for the comments as the articles/blog posts. When you stopped doing the original site, I tried joining some FaceBook Dodger groups. Initially, I liked them a lot – members can share photos and sometimes they livestream Dodger games. But social media tends to bring out some really ugly behaviors in people and as a natural consequence the group admins tend to get really autocratic about members posting opinions. IMO, they have every right to do whatever they want since they put in the time to maintain the site. At the same time, these particular group admins arrogance turned me off and so I vote by taking my eyeballs elsewhere.

Finally, I appreciate your perspective on using advanced metrics and analytics to assess the players and the team performance. I work in a tech company that specializes in software for large companies to harvest value from their enterprise data. What I’ve observed is that data and analysis can be leveraged effectively only when decision makers keep a laser focus on what is happening in the business (i.e., they can’t get distracted by the technology or having an abundance of data in a vacuum). Predictive modeling and statistical analysis will inherently bake in the human biases and assumptions of the people creating them. If those people know nothing about their business, then all the data in the world will not help these companies. However, when people start with a really thorough understanding of what is happening on the ground in their business, then data can greatly help them scale and speed their efforts to find insights. Similarly, I believe baseball analytics can be incredibly valuable but not without context through an understanding what is happening with players as human beings and team dynamics. I like how you often evaluate players using benchmark data. As fans, sometimes we can get emotionally attached to players and are blind to their performance decline and their trade value (or lack thereof). On the flip side, you often remind everyone that the goal is to identify potentially valuable players before they perform well because once they perform, they will likely command too high a price. I think many fans fail to grasp the idea of portfolio management or risk profiling. In the business world, you make lots of decisions on imperfect information and you have to expect that not everything works out. The keys are 1) ensuring that the cost of a wrong decision is low and 2) making lots of good educated guesses. The goal is not to have every decision work out, but to make enough low-cost investments so that you have a good chance of a handful of them working out really well. It’s pretty clear to me that this is how FAZ operates and I appreciate how your posts explain their moves in the context of this approach.

Apologies for the long post but since you wanted feedback, I thought I’d indulge LOL. Thanks so much for bringing back this site and keep up the great work.

Hi Mark and everyone else. I am thrilled to have the site back. I faithfully checked it for the last year hoping it would reappear. I really needed your help dealing with Vin Scully’s retirement. He’s been an enjoyable part of my life since the Dodgers came to Los Angeles.

I like the look of the site and the new rules. I like to have fun as a Dodger fan without taking it all too seriously. It is a game.

It looks to me as if the Dodgers will be excellent again in 2017. They have enough big league and minor league talent to head to the playoffs again. Their only real threat is the Giants. If they can fix their bullpen woes they’ll be very competitive again.

I am hoping that our starting pitching can avoid the whole sale injury list. Last year was incredible with so many players getting injured including the mighty Kershaw.

One last thought. I am willing to give the new announcer five years to prove his worth. He has a good heart and a good mind for the game. It is highly unlikely he can be the great story teller Vin is. There is only one Vin Scully. I’d encourage everyone to give him a chance over an extended period of time.

Randy