January Update

As I'm guessing lots of people can tell you, keeping up a blog when you know there aren't many people reading it can be hard.  Especially a baseball blog in the middle of winter.  I find myself more often at Redleg Nation responding to one of Chad's posts, where I know people will actually read what I write.  But anyways, the point is that if this is ever something that will develop, I need to do it consistently, whether people are reading or not, because it's about the practice and the experience (thanks for the advice Rob!).

So, since I wanted to get something down yesterday but ran out of time, I decided to give the blog a quick make over instead.  As you can see there's a new background and color scheme.  I think it gives it a more open and airy feel, like you might actually be at a ballpark watching a game instead of staring at the inside of some random Reds fan's boring computer.  I did miss the red though so I added a border and a familiar friend at the top, though I'm not sure it lines up perfectly on all computers, and I don't know if I can move the title over a little to prevent it from overlapping (ah well).

Anyways, I would like to advertise for an upcoming post involving fan projections done on the fantastic website, fangraphs.  If you're a baseball fan and you've never been there, I highly recommend it.  The amount of information available is mind bottling.  And if you're a stat-minded fan, well, you may have to change your pants.  There they allow every fan to enter projections for each player.  They actually do it in a very interesting way and I'm obviously not really sure about all the assumptions they make, but it's very cool, and after you enter all your inputs, they will even calculate a WAR for each player (that's Wins Above Replacement - more details are available at fangraphs).

Point is, I've done a set of projections for the Reds, and I'd like to go over the results.  As you might imagine, it's hard to tell how trustworthy any of this is considering I'm guessing how baseball players will perform (an impossibly hard task), and I'm doing it for the team I love, so clearly I'm not unbiased.  But I tried to be as fair as possible.

So, until that is made available, please spend all of your time at the sites linked above.  Thanks.