Jose Can You See: Steroids Oz Not the Magic Shot to MLB

[Note:  I had worked on this a while back, just found it among my drafts, pretty much done, so I'm publishing it now, after a few edits]

As many of you know, I currently do not believe that the recently passed heightened offensive era is the steroids era.  As Eric Walker showed brilliantly at his websites, Steroids and Baseball and Sillyball, that era was more the Juice Ball era, not the Juiced Men era. 

One huge conversation starter for Steroids Sympathizers and those of us non-believers is the whole Jose-Ozzie Canseco connundrum:  if steroids is so great, then why was Ozzie such a dud.  One reasoning is that Ozzie didn't get the experience to enable that to happen, didn't get the repetition as a hitter since he started as a pitcher.  What follows is my response, which of course, I have updated and modified from the original, as it is my wont to do, I'm always tweaking.

Your 2013 Giants: Prospects Named to AFL Roster

As reported by MLB.com, the Giants are sending the following prospects to the AFL:

• Kyle Crick, RHP
• Andrew Susac, C
• Adalberto Mejia, LHP
• Jarrett Parker, OF
• Cody Hall, RHP
• Angel Villalona, 1B

Typically teams get 3 spots for both position and pitchers. Oddly, the Giants press release noted  the first five players (hence my order) but the roster (which I linked to above) has Villalona on the roster instead of the one additional pitcher that the Giants article noted.  The discrepancy is odd.

2013 Giants: July PQS

This post has the Giants Pure Quality Start scores for the month of July 2013, PQS as defined in Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster annual book and they published the details here (unfortunately, they removed the article; this link gets you at least to the PQS definition, read down to middle for details). I wrote on this first in 2006 and have compiled their stats on a regular basis, so I'm continuing it this season for continuity and historical comparison (there is the "PQS" label that you can click to see the old posts on this). Regular readers can skip to the next section.

This is the Quality Start with a sabermetric DIPS twist, and it gets really easy to calculate once you get used to it. I don't think it's the end all or be all, but then nothing really is that. It is, as I like to say, another piece of the puzzle. A dominating start is scored a 4 or 5 and a disaster start is scored a 0 or 1. DOM% is the percentage of starts that are dominating, DIS% is the percentage of starts that are disasters (any start under 5.0 IP is automatically a 0, or disaster).