CBA Awards
A couple of weeks before I shut down my old site to move over here, I joined the United Cardinal Bloggers alliance.  One of their year end activities is the Cardinal Blogger Awards.  Instead of publishing my ballot over at my old site, I figure I’d publish it here as it also serves as a good year end wrap up post…  Of course these are only my views and Erik probably has his own opinion on these issues. My votes after the jump 1. Cardinal Player of the Year Matt Holliday Albert Pujols Brendan Ryan Write-in: __________

Reason 1,137,116 to Put Down Your Pitchforks
From the comments section at a blog post at The Hardball Times: If he (Carpenter) had been on the ballots in place of Vazquez and Haren, and in the exact same placements as Vazquez and Haren, Carpenter would only have received four more points – and that would still have been two fewer than Lincecum. In other words, if Law or Carroll put Carpenter on their ballots in either the two or three spot, Lincecum still wins. Carroll’s and Law’s votes, in the end, didn’t

Ranking Free Agents by WAR
Nothing like a little hot stove stoking to get the "Carpenter, Wainwright were robbed" taste out of your mouth. Ken Davidoff give us his rankings and predictions on where the players will go and for how much they will sign for. Relevant Cardinal info: 1. Matt Holliday, OF The most impactful player available. Prediction: Cardinals, seven years, $120 million 7. Adrian Beltre, 3B Poor offensive numbers distract from his excellent defense. Prediction: Cardinals, one year, $6 m

On the Cy
Keith Law is awesome. He made a 2nd place vote for Javier Vazquez in the Cy Young, defended his decision with referring to sabermetrics (and innings pitched) and then ripped the fanbase, tweeting* " Do the Cardinals sell a pacifier with the team logo on it?" I like it. *you can’t type the word tweeting and still feel cool. The thing is, Law’s ballot is defensible, if you subscribe to these new-fangled sabermetrics, and more and more people are. I know, they are ruining the game.

Simulation, CHONE, and the Cardinals
At the end of my last post I cautioned that the CHONE projections (and it applies to ALL projections) were a point solution (albeit the best guess at a point solution) and had to be thought of is concert with some error bars.  In an attempt to get my arms around the ramifications of that point I created a quick little monte carlo simulation in excel/vba to produce some distributions for offensive runs above average.  I’ll quickly outline the basic methodology used, to include my input set, and then I’ll present some initial results. Since I knew I was going to be using CHONE projections I went back and collected the archived projections from 2009.  I did