Good analogy

I'd go with plan A.

I like gambling analogies.   I was sitting around with a buddy before the NFL games.   About 12:30 he said "I'm gonna call in my bets.  You want to make any?"   I took his sheet, picked a couple of games and won.   He missed on 3 of 4.   At 3:30 he said "I'm calling in my 4 PM bets.  You like anything?"  I looked at the lines and said "Nope.  I'm good."   He said "What kind of way is that to bet?  You're up, it's house money!!"  I said "Well, it was.  It's mine now."  He couldn't believe I wasn't betting on the 4 PM games.    He eventually had to move because he was so in debt to his bookie.  Or so they said.

you could leave Arias on the DL and see if the training bug hits him and he gains new points back.  As soon as the other guy starts playing to his level bring Arias off the DL and all is back to normal.  Granted, this is a little sketchy, but you have a prime opportunity to test out the bug and see what happens.

I'm a karma guy. Anytime I've screwed around with current reality over "well, this should make more sense", I get shitkicked.

Thus, don't screw with the karma. Not a math answer, I know.

Yeah but you suck at HBD.   So that gives me my answer.  Thanks, death!

You need to find out how much I mess with karma first.

The problem with waiting for "the other guy starting to play to his level" is that you have to let him do that for awhile first before you know that it's even happening.  What he's done so far has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what he will do.  The same chance vs. ratings equations apply now as applied then. 

I don't totally agree with that.  While his ratings haven't changed, worlds play differently.   There's no guarantee he'll "play to his ratings" in the future.   It's not like the guy sucked for the first 2700 AB of his career.   Do I think he'll maintain a 1.100 OPS?  No.  But I wouldn't say .950 is out of the question.   Of course, that means he's OPSing .800 for the rest of the season.  I think Arias can do better than that.  No sure Weaver can.

I'm not disagreeing with your thoughts about how he may play going forward at all.  It's up to you to project how he'll do (which is the whole point of HBD in the first place).  I'm just saying that whatever level you expect him be, you won't really know that he's there until after it happens.  What I meant by how he's done so far having no bearing is just that it's not relevant to his chances from one game to the next - it's only a statistical indicator of past events (and how randomness has played out).

I guess I'm wondering if the pitching/fielding dynamic has change a bit in the world.  I guess what I'm saying is that maybe he's not the .800 OPS I expected.  Maybe, due to changing circumstances in the NL in MG, he's a .900 OPS guy.   I didn't expect him to do so well nor do I expect it to continue.   Either way, it changes for everyone in my line-up and Arias is clearly a better option based on any rating VR.

Posted by MikeT23 on 3/14/2011 1:16:00 PM (view original):
I guess I'm wondering if the pitching/fielding dynamic has change a bit in the world.  I guess what I'm saying is that maybe he's not the .800 OPS I expected.  Maybe, due to changing circumstances in the NL in MG, he's a .900 OPS guy.   I didn't expect him to do so well nor do I expect it to continue.   Either way, it changes for everyone in my line-up and Arias is clearly a better option based on any rating VR.

There's an easy way to test that theory - look around MG for players with similar ratings and see how they've been doing this season.

Players can over or under achieve, randomly it seems. A player can throw a 250 b.a. 700 ops into a career of 300 b.a. and 850 ops for no reason. Ride the hot guy, and monitor the game logs.

Posted by antonsirius on 3/14/2011 2:12:00 PM (view original):

Posted by MikeT23 on 3/14/2011 1:16:00 PM (view original):
I guess I'm wondering if the pitching/fielding dynamic has change a bit in the world.  I guess what I'm saying is that maybe he's not the .800 OPS I expected.  Maybe, due to changing circumstances in the NL in MG, he's a .900 OPS guy.   I didn't expect him to do so well nor do I expect it to continue.   Either way, it changes for everyone in my line-up and Arias is clearly a better option based on any rating VR.

There's an easy way to test that theory - look around MG for players with similar ratings and see how they've been doing this season.

Don't know why I didn't think of this but I didn't.   But here's what I found:
Amongst the 175-190 position players in the NL, he's sort of unique.  Not a lot of guys below 60 in contact and above 70 in power/VR/eye yet still under 80.   But, of the half dozen or so I found, all but one is overperforming his career numbers.  None as much as my guy but an extra .050 on the OPS is reasonably common.  However, checking the last 4-5 seasons of team OPS VR, this season is in line with previous seasons.  So, for whatever reason, these particular types are just having good seasons.   Weird.

I don't know if this has come up in other threads, but in my league I noticed that there seemed to be a pattern to players who were having wild stat fluctuations this season [which just ended].  I never went so far as to crunch any of the numbers, but I have the distinct impression that WIS slightly changed the weighting accorded to each attribute.  I also got the feeling that it had begun to more seriously penalize sub-40 splits and to grant higher yield on above-60 splits.  This got me wondering whether they did this regularly...