Every year -- due mostly to the fact that two of their editors live here -- the Baseball Prospectus crew holds an event at a Barnes & Noble in downtown Chicago to sell and sign books, answer questions and talk about baseball. I've been at the last three of 'em in a row, and it's great fun. The third one was last night. Kevin Goldstein and Christina Kahrl have been at all three -- Nate Silver was at the first two, but has since moved on from both BP and Chicago -- but a surprise guest (to me) last night was Rany Jazayerli, one of the founders of BP who now puts up really long (but great) posts about the Royals on his own blog.The three of them took questions from the group for about an hour and a half. Afterward, I hung around with two other guys and listened/talked to Jazayerli and Goldstein for another 20 minutes or so. Good stuff.

Some of what went on, mostly out of order and presented as they occur to me:

• One of the most interesting points, I thought, came up near the beginning. Somebody asked the three of them whether they thought there might be collusion going on, what with all the free agents who have been having a hard time getting jobs and signing at deep discounts over the last couple years. Of course they said no, but the way they phrased what they thought was going on was something I'd never thought of before. Goldstein likened it to the "stars and scrubs" method in fantasy baseball auction leagues (I don't do auction leagues, but it's an easy enough concept): you spend the big money on superstars, and fill in the rest of the spots with cheap guys. Don't mess around in the middle, with the mediocre. Essentially (they said), owners are eliminating baseball's middle class. Which is actually exactly what people like them (and me) have been saying they should do for years -- keep spending $20 million on the superstars you can't replace, but stop spending $5-10 million on the average players and middle relievers you can replace pretty easily. I guess I didn't think of it that way because you don't really think of Bobby Abreu as one of those fungible guys, but the 35 year old version of Abreu pretty much was.
  
  
• I asked what they thought of the so-called "floating realignment" proposal. They all basically shot it down immediately, which is precisely what I would do. It was great to know I'm not crazy; a lot of smart people have taken the "yeah, this doesn't work, but something should be done" tack on this one, which I strongly disagree with. Oh, and the discussion then moved into a pretty funny aside about Buster Olney's crazy Howard-for-Pujols piece (which I wrote about here) and the crazy reaction to it.
  
  
• I happened to be sitting next to Bruce Miles, the Cubs beat writer for the Chicago Daily Herald, and I talked with him a bit. He seems like a very nice guy, but more importantly, he's a beat writer who loves Baseball Prospectus. If you're a Cubs fan, get your news here.
  
  
• Goldstein is maybe the most militant baseball guy I've ever met. What I mean is: I myself am pretty much all baseball, right? I kind of like football and everything, but I learned yesterday, for instance, that I might actually rather watch a spring training baseball game between two teams I don't care about than the NCAA tournament. But Goldstein goes a step or two further. He said last night that he'd be perfectly happy to see the NFL, NBA and NHL all fail, because that's good for baseball. And don't even get him started on college sports. It's pretty cool, really.
  
  
• In both 2008 and 2009, there was this one crazy guy there in a Cubs windbreaker who, at some late point in the proceedings, would raise his hand and yell something about how great Mickey Mantle was. Seriously, both years, same thing -- and it wasn't a question or anything, he just really wanted all of us to understand that Mickey Mantle was pretty great. He was sadly absent this year. There was one adamant White Sox fan who kept asking about/demanding a salary cap and raising his hand to make statements such as that, as a Sox fan, he was hoping the Twins would struggle in the new stadium. But it just wasn't nearly the same thing (I don't think he was crazy at all, just a really big fan who was maybe a little bit over his head).  
  
  
• Whenever Goldstein or Kahrl wanted an example of something a bad team might do, they said "like the Royals" in this either disparaging or kind of pitying sort of voice, and gestured broadly toward Jazayerli, who would kind of uneasily back away. Sometimes they did it on purpose and kind of laughed about it, but sometimes they didn't even seem to notice they were doing it. I seem to have been the only one who noticed the trend (it seriously happened a dozen times), or at least the only one who found it funny.
  
  
• I asked Jazayerli at the end whether he thought there was a chance the Royals would give Mike Aviles a shot to get his shortstop job back this year, or if they were stuck with the worst player in the majors, Yuniesky Betancourt. Rany is cautiously optimistic that they might have a short leash with Yuni if Aviles continues to show that he's healthy and hitting again. Good news for me for two reasons: (1) the fact that Yuni keeps getting PA (and chances to butcher ground balls) just makes me angry, as a baseball fan; and (2) Aviles is on my fantasy team (long story; very strange keeper rules, questionable decision). Then again, Rany was always the optimist of the two.
  
  
• Another thing about Goldstein is that for a guy who works for the stereotypical baseball-stat-geek organization of the world, he's incredibly old-school. Very into scouting and makeup. But he's incredibly smart about it, and speaks very persuasively about his point of view. Not that I've ever doubted the value of good scouting, but I have kind of tended to laugh off questions about makeup and character. It certainly makes sense that those questions would be important to a prospect guy like Goldstein or anyone who deals with minor leaguers on down (I continue to think that once you've made the majors and been successful, you've pretty much answered those questions). Just reinforces that there's a lot about young players and prospects that only their club (if anybody) knows.
  
  
• Rany made a great point about the current state of stats and sabermetric writing. Mostly, it's great to be a math whiz and everything, but it's getting increasingly hard to find folks who understand the increasingly opaque metrics and can write well. As much as I try to follow along with these things, the mouse wheel starts spinning if I see more than one or two graphs in a piece or a sequence of math terms I don't understand. I've started to gravitate toward writers who know their numbers well enough, but are, first and foremost, just good writers. BP has been doing a very good job, of late, of producing that sort of content.
  
  
• I got the sense that some of the stuff Goldstein said in the little after-discussion wasn't really meant for wide distribution (or even the only-very-slightly-wider distribution of this blog), but he made me think a lot about what we're doing with stats right now. I'll always check WAR or WARP, etc. before I form an opinion about a guy, and I'll always want to know as much as I can about the stats and all that. But it's occurring to me for the first time (after having it told to me by dozens of intentionally ignorant people who were fond of the phrase "mom's basement") that we really might be going a bit overboard with things. Just not for the reasons the "mom's basement" crowd (e.g. Mike Silva) thinks we are. 
  
  
• That said, sounds like BP is doing some exciting things with stats. I missed the announcement earlier this month, for example, that Clay Davenport, one of their cleverer numbers people, is going full-time (he previously had a full-time job as a meteorologist). And PECOTA, which had its problems this season, is apparently getting revamped somewhat (and coming out much earlier) for 2011.