The Arizona Diamondbacks sent pitching phenom Max Scherzer down to AAA yesterday. Normally when this happens with a young pitcher it's because he struggled a bit with his effectiveness in his first big league trial. Scherzer however had a .290 ERA with 14 walks and 33 strikeouts in 31 innings, so effectiveness wasn't a problem. The D'Backs are saying the move was made because they need a pitcher who can pitch in consecutive games (apparently that's restricted for Scherzer's current workload limits). I can't say I approve.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for bringing him along slow and not overextending his workload, but to me you should pitch at the highest level at which you are effective. Scherzer's been effective in MLB so...

There's a school of thought that says that Cubs really got all they could have asked for from Mark Prior in 2003 (nearly pitching them to a World Series). That you should just take it when it's there to be had and being cautious could mean you never get to capitalize on the player's talent (Scherzer could blow his arm out in AAA tomorrow).

I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but I think the best course of action is to limit Scherzer's workload while still taking advantage of the fact that he can apparently get Major Leaguers out. So I have to honestly say I don't like this move.

Dave Hollander seems to think that Cliff Floyd is Mr. Magic when it comes to baseball: "wherever Cliff Floyd goes, his teams win." Now, kudos for him for trying to mount evidence for this as he reels of a string of facts that I suppose were supposed to be convincing: EG, "George W. Bush was re-elected and three years later the Giants won the Super Bowl!" He wraps this fine argument up in what is becoming an industry standard: the "Bill James Can't Measure This" article.

Now Bill James doesn't need a defense from me. If someone is capable of defending himself in print, it's James. But I do every now and then like to do something I call "Sabermetric drive bys." It's like Sabermetrics but without all of the double checking and hard work. It's a bunch of numbers that generally get the point across well enough so that everyone can move on.

Cliff Floyd has played 1,555 games in his career. A simple way to check whether "wherever Cliff Floyd goes, his teams win" is to simply multiply his team's winning percentage that year by the number of games he played. Yes you could check his team's record in games he played, but that's more work than I'm willing to do over this.

Anyway when you do this, Floyd's lifetime record goes 765-790. So yes wherever he goes his teams do win, they also lose and slightly more often.

Now I'm sure there's plenty of ways to try and argue around that all the losses he was a part of were someone else's fault and all the wins were due to his single handed determination. But if Floyd's magical winning mojo is responsible for the Marlins in 1997 (where he was so crucial to the team's success they let him bat twice in the postseason), why the hell did he fall down on the job in 1998 when they lost 108 games? What kind of apathetic slacker is he? Hell the Marlins never finished above .500 again for the duration of his tenure. Those 66 games in 1997 must have drained him of all of his magic dust.

He moved on to the Red Sox for half a season where they played well and didn't make the playoffs. That offseason Floyd left and they hired me. They just missed the World Series the next year and won it the year after. So my magic winning dust is available to the highest bidder. The next year he moved to the Mets where due to Cliff's leadership, they went from 75-86 to 66-95. Apparently Cliff was still recuperating his magic win dust supplies from six years ago and couldn't pitch in just yet. Nor the next year at 71-91. Eventually though he rounded up enough of it to get the Mets over .500 for the next three years and the playoffs in 2007. Apaprenlty he now has a large supply since unlike in 1997, he has enough to magically turn the Devil Rays into winners.

I think people still think that guys like Bill James are arguing that you should listen to them and not someone else. What they are actually arguing is that you should look at the facts as dispassionately as possible, and let the facts determine your opinion on the matter. On Base Percentage is not a better indicator of run scoring than Batting Average because some egghead says it is. It's a better indicator of run scoring because, when you look at the facts, they so overwhelmingly demonstrate that it is. Guys like Hollander can pretend that's what they're doing, but they're really doing is coming up with an opinion and trying to find support for it somewhere in the numbers. As the saying goes, using statistics like a drunk uses a lamp post, for support rather than illumination.