[blogguy]

Thanks for popping in dinque!

I'm not sure that Sooner was talking about angles. His post could be read to mean "effectiveness" rather than just wins and losses. If we're looking at what happens to ERA and IP per start after big pitch counts, or coming back from an injury hiatus...that effort could lead to making more accurate lines.

Guys like Sprager, Nino Brown, Superfly, and others are successful years coming at things from different perspectives. Not sure that it HAS to be done only by making better lines than Vegas. As I've said before, sometimes it's a matter of understanding the percentage likelihoods that something's going to happen when "cocktails" of influences come together. We've seen enough differences between averages and means to see that finding a "right" line based purely on stats can get kind of messy anyway. Could be that we would have had inspired debate about whether Jose Lima should have been a 180 dog or a 220 dog whenever he took the mound. Since the lines were 120 or whatever...that would have been quibbling when everyone basically agreed that the lines were wrong.

Probably, whatever a final blueprint looks like will be an open-ended piece that handicappers can use however they wish. I can't see us all finding complete agreement on everything...but the act of working towards a consensus should help us see things we weren't otherwise seeing. Certainly dividing up a listing of possible influences amongst different volunteers should help ALL readers see some things they hadn't noticed before. Before doing today's stuff...I hadn't realized how bad Willis had been at home....how much Bonderman had struggled at home relative to road games...and probably five other things that I'd have to go back to look at to remember!

Will be fun to see what develops this week...