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.

2 Random Thoughts

• So I've already stated my new lease on (blog) life.  However, I also wanted to mention that I was severely off base in a post made earlier this year titled "About this blog".  I stated that there must not be a notable Reds blog, especially one with a "sabermetric focus", if the Reds' spot on Rob Neyer's Sweet Spot network wasn't yet filled.
  
  
  Well, as I should have known, of course there are Reds blogs, lots of them, and lots of good ones.  And that spot has since been filled by Redleg Nation, which is a fantastic blog that I now check every day.  And on top of that, they are actually very sabermetric friendly over there.  So, I'm not saying that anyone noticed, but I wanted to right that wrong.

• On the way home earlier this week I listened to ESPN's radio affiliate in Chicago interview the newest White Sox player, and former Red, Adam Dunn.  The guy is still a great interview and was a great player for the Reds and it's a shame the perception many in Cincinnati had of him.  I know it's been said plenty of times but his style, both on and off the field, was misunderstood and when he left the Reds definitely missed him.
  
  I was hoping to have some stats prepared to show just how valuable he was to those Reds teams, but I mostly just wanted to get this down (and it's not like you can't look the stats up yourself!).  Anyways, I will definitely be following him up here in Chicago and wish him the best.