EverythingYouveSIERAThe world of advanced baseball statistics can be an intimidating place for those of us who slept our way through advanced algebra or haven't been a follower of the Bill James revolution from the beginning.

Still, that doesn't mean that we should feel left out when it comes to another way of understanding and appreciating the game we all love. With that in mind, BLS stat doctor Alex Remington will explore a new advanced statistic each week during the offseason, as he did last year, providing a simple primer for the uninitiated.

Today's statistic: SIERA

What it stands for: Skill-Interactive Earned Run Average, developed by Matt Swartz and Eric Seidman (first at Baseball Prospectus, and then later revised by the same authors at Fangraphs).

GarveyTommy

On occasion, Big League Stew honors a birthday boy per week by taking a longer look at his career. Please join us in lighting the candles.

Steve Garvey was indescribably popular in the 1970s. He was handsome, a fine hitter and the anchor of the Los Angeles Dodgers, arguably the best team of the decade other than the Big Red Machine. He was squeaky clean, and the baseball writers bent over backwards to make him look good.

But as Joe Posnanski writes, "When you look back on Garvey with a sense of perspective, it's hard to see him as he was 30 years ago because now that .329 on-base percentage jumps out like Glenn Close in the bathtub."  Garvey was exactly what a star looked like to the casual fan. He batted .300, he got 200 hits a year, he made the All-Star team eight straight times, he made five World Series appearances — hitting .319 overall in 28 games in the Fall Classic — and won a championship with the Dodgers. He looked like a movie star. And he had a movie star's success with the ladies ... while he was married to his wife. The revelation of the skeletons in his closet led to his public downfall.

In recent years, Garvey — who shares a Thursday birthday with 'Duk and turns 63 — has come into the news for money troubles. His lavish lifestyle has brought him to the brink of bankruptcy, but he and Orel Hershiser have emerged as the faces of one of the ownership groups bidding to buy the Boys in Blue back from Frank McCourt. As soon as he announced his desire to buy the team, he was fired from his position in the Dodgers' marketing and community relations department. As the sale proceeds, it will be interesting to see where he winds up.

Curtis Pride (AP)On occasion, Big League Stew honors a birthday boy per week by taking a longer look at his career. Please join us in lighting the candles.

Curtis Pride, who turns 43 on Saturday, had a relatively unremarkable career, but a very remarkable life: He is the only deaf player to play in the major leagues in the modern era. He played for 11 years in the majors as a journeyman backup outfielder and pinch hitter, and 12 more years in the minors, beginning in 1986 when he was 17, and ending in 2008 when he was 39. He played 421 games in the majors, batting .250/.327/.405, and 1,432 games in the minors, where he hit .278/.370/.446.

After being drafted in the 10th round straight out of high school, he worked out a deal with the New York Mets and the NCAA to allow him to play part-time in the minor leagues over the summer while attending the College of William & Mary on a basketball scholarship. A native of Washington, D.C., he is currently the baseball coach at Gallaudet University in Washington, the only liberal arts university in the United States for the deaf and hard of hearing.

His 421 games played put him 14th among District natives, and his 20 homers tie him for fifth — with Maury Wills, perhaps the greatest Washingtonian player. (Any advocates of Art Devlin, Doc White, Lu Blue or Don Money are free to criticize me in the comments.)

Todd Van PoppelOn occasion, Big League Stew honors a birthday boy per week by taking a longer look at his career. Please join us in lighting the candles.

It's tough to go through life as a cautionary tale. Todd Van Poppel is remembered as a draft bust, and it's clear that his entire career was colored by the weighty expectations that were heaped upon him as the consensus top prospect in the country in 1990. But he seemed uncertain that he even wanted to be drafted, convincing Sports Illustrated's Phil Rogers to write in an article the day before the draft:

Barring an unexpected change of direction, the next Nolan Ryan is going to do something the original Ryan did not: He will delay his pro career as a baseball pitcher to spend at least three years working toward a college degree. As a result, he is passing up the chance to be the No. 1 pick in the draft.

Van Poppel did pass up the chance to be the No. 1 pick in the draft. The Braves, frightened off by his desire to attend college, selected Chipper Jones instead, and have been thanking their lucky stars ever since. Twelve other teams passed up the chance to draft him before the Oakland Athletics took a flier on him with the 14th pick, and then managed to sign him for $1.2 million. It's hard to fault him for taking the money, but he was never able to live up to it.

Best Year: 2001: 4-1, 5 Holds, 2.52 ERA, 75 IP, 3.73 FIP, 1.35 WHIP, 2.37 K/BB
Van Poppel was long bedeviled by overly high expectations. He was rushed through the minor leagues and obviously unready for the majors when he was called up: his 5.04 ERA as a midyear rookie call-up in 1993 was actually lower than his 5.83 ERA in Triple-A earlier that year. After thoroughly failing as a starter, he spent most of the 1997-1999 seasons in the minor leagues, finally re-emerging as a very good middle reliever with the Chicago Cubs in 2000-2001.

Pedro Martinez in 2000 - Getty ImagesTwelve years ago, in his smash hit, "Back That Thang Up," Juvenile made the following prediction: "Cash Money records taking over in the '99 and 2000."

Mr. Juvenile was wrong, though. In '99 and 2000, the only man taking over was Pedro Martinez. Pedro's performance from 1999-2000 is the greatest two-year peak that any pitcher has ever had.

In both years, he made the All-Star team, won the Cy Young award, and finished in the top five of the MVP voting. As Joe Posnanski wrote a couple of months ago:

I have always loved what Bill James said about Pedro Martinez; he basically said that Pedro was a testament to the exponential power of numbers. Ten plus 10 is only 20. Ten times 10 is only 100. But 10 to the 10th power is 10,000,000,000, which is 10 billion. Martinez at his best had a great fastball, a great slider, a great curveball and a great change-up. Each individually was good enough to make him effective. Multiplied by each other, well... he was something beyond great.

So which season was better? Here's the comparison:

George FosterBig League Stew honors a birthday boy per week by taking a longer look at his career. Please join us in lighting the candles.

George Foster was one strong dude. He exploded for 52 homers in 1977 back when that actually meant something and was the only player between Willie Mays in 1965 and Cecil Fielder in 1990 to hit that mark. (For comparison's sake, there have been 24 seasons of 50 or more home runs between 1995 and 2011.)

Still, 1977 was somewhat out of character for Foster. He hit 52 in 1977, 40 in 1978, 30 in 1979, and fewer than 30 in every other season of his career.

After being drafted by the San Francisco Giants, who already had their corner outfield position occupied by Bobby Bonds, Foster was traded to the Cincinnati Reds. He'd spend the next 10 seasons as a key member of the Big Red Machine, batting a combined .326 in three World Series appearances. He then was traded to the Mets at the age of 33. They signed him to a five-year, $10 million contract, only to see him post

medwick1

On occasion, Big League Stew honors a birthday boy per week by taking a longer look at his career. Please join us in lighting the candles.

Joe Medwick hated being called "Ducky" and he hated being called "Ducky Wucky" even more. Medwick preferred being called "Muscles," but the writers preferred the former, so that's what they called him. He loped with an awkward gait — more like waddling than walking, said some, hence the nickname — and swung at everything. You certainly wouldn't want his mechanics on a Tom Emanski video. But oh my, could he hit. "He was the best bad ball hitter in baseball history," Frankie Frisch once said. At the tender age of 22, he was one of the best hitters on the 1934 Gashouse Gang Cardinals, and then he had five of the best seasons any right-handed hitter has ever had. From 1935 to 1939, he hit .347/.388/.568, averaging 52 doubles a year.

He wasn't a pleasant man. The commissioner of baseball ordered him to be removed from game seven of the 1934 World

EverythingYouveERAThe world of advanced baseball statistics can be an intimidating place for those of us who slept our way through advanced algebra or haven't been a follower of the Bill James revolution from the beginning.

Still, that doesn't mean that we should feel left out when it comes to another way of understanding and appreciating the game we all love. With that in mind, BLS stat doctor Alex Remington will explore a new advanced statistic each week during the offseason, just as he did two offseasons ago, providing a simple primer for the uninitiated.

Today's statistic: ERA+ and ERA-

What ERA+ and ERA- mean: ERA+ and ERA- are ways of measuring a pitcher's earned runs allowed in ways that are much more neutral than ERA, a statistic which can be distorted by park effect and league effect (like offensive context of the era, from the Deadball Era to the Steroid Era). They are very similar to OPS+, which I wrote about in January 2010.

The real difference between ERA+ and ERA- is scale. In ERA+, a