“Hard work and talent is what brings you success,” Mlodinow said he told the group. “They are two big components of success, but also luck is a big component of success. Players have the talent but are subject to the random fluctuations that happen. You look at a player who’s on a hot streak and think that he’s seeing the ball better or concentrating better, but a large component of that is randomness.”

Mlodinow writes about how those theories apply to baseball and other sports in his book, entitled, “The Drunkard’s Walk,” which was published in 2008.

“When we look at extraordinary accomplishments in sports — or elsewhere — we should keep in mind that extraordinary events can happen without extraordinary causes,” he wrote. “Random events often look like non-random events, and in interpreting human affairs we must take care not to confuse the two.”

– Barry M. Bloom, MLB.com.

Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk is one of the more fascinating and enlightening books you’ll ever read. It’s downright awesome that he addressed the Major League GMs on Friday, even if a more thorough grasp of randomness league-wide could reduce some clubs’ competitive advantages.

Via BBTF.

https://twitter.com/rosstheboss66/status/266918955552215040

Something similar came up last week, but I assume it’ll keep coming up until Dickey’s situation is resolved. And as long as it keeps coming up, I might as well keep repeating myself.

SI think it will work out in the Mets’ best interests to trade Dickey this offseason — especially if it looks like the two sides are far apart in extension talks — if they can get at least a promising, cost-controlled young outfielder in return. I mentioned Peter Bourjos as a potential target a month ago, and though I don’t think Bourjos alone should be enough to get it done, I do think he’d be as good a fit as any of the reasonable possibilities I’ve seen floated: He’s young, he bats right-handed, he plays exceptional defense, he hit well in his one season of full-time play in 2011, and he’s under team control through the next four seasons.

Predictably, many people speculating about possible Dickey trades don’t seem to consider that teams far from contention might not want to trade away all their best prospects for a 38-year-old signed to a one-year deal. Rampant, reckless trade talk is an unavoidable part of the baseball offseason and there’s no reason not to have fun with it, but it’s always more interesting when you figure out the needs of the team that’s not the one you root for. Which is to say, I don’t think the Royals are going to trade Wil Myers and Bubba Starling for one year’s worth of Dickey.

I think I’m a bit more bullish on Thole than most Mets fans. He suffered an awful season at the plate in 2012, but it seems at least a bit suspicious that his offense fell apart immediately after he returned from his concussion. If he can recover, I think he’ll be acceptable — if never quite good. When he’s right, he gets on base a bit, which in a catcher is enough to make up for a bunch of other inadequacies. And he hits left-handed, which makes it far easier for the club to find a viable platoon partner in the Kelly Shoppach/Ronny Paulino mold. I think, ideally, the Mets find a right-handed hitting complement who can play a bit more often than just against lefties, and Thole gets about 90-100 starts in 2013 to show that his 2012 was a fluke.

https://twitter.com/TheSeanKenny/status/266917475273293824

What is it you think J.P. Ricciardi does?

https://twitter.com/RobvanEyndhoven/status/266917450900193280

Dude, were you not on the Internet yesterday? YOU MISSED THE PARTY!

https://twitter.com/Ceetar/status/266918578106806272

He should stay there. His UZR does not look pretty, but I’m not sure a single year’s worth of UZR data is more valuable than empirical evidence. And by the end of the year, Murph looked downright tolerable at second base.

Alternately, they can move him back to left field for LOLs.

https://twitter.com/JoeLoVerde81/status/266919365486731264

Movement: Spearheaded. You know, I’ve been looking for an excuse to get in touch with Citi Field’s executive chef. How do I go about getting this done? Do I just point out how great it would be to have delicious banh mi available in the Taste of the Citi area, or do I accentuate the negative and try to guilt them into it somehow? Why are the classless Mets ignoring thousands of Vietnamese living in Queens?

People keep equating the Mets’ seemingly amicable split with Jason Bay to a divorce. I’m trying to come up with a clever way to extend the metaphor, but I’m mostly at a loss. It was an ill-advised marriage from the start that saw very few happy moments. I suppose it’s like marrying someone purely for the person’s looks right before the person became indisputably unattractive. And even though the person was still very nice and trying hard to make it work, it became clear that without the surface beauty the relationship was doomed, and both parties ultimately realized the spark was gone forever and decided to cut their losses and move on. Something like that?

Either way, it doesn’t seem anyone harbors any ill-will toward Jason Bay. That’s good; he doesn’t deserve it. Bay didn’t sign himself to the huge contract with the vesting option, and given the circumstances there were probably a lot of ways he could have made the situation more difficult for the Mets. He gets the chance at a fresh start and rejuvenation, however unlikely, somewhere else. And the Mets can use whatever payroll they save in the short term — even if it’s as little as the Major League minimum — toward finding an outfielder that will outproduce Bay in 2013.

Given Bay’s performance in 2012, that shouldn’t seem a particularly difficult task, but it’s rendered tougher in the Mets’ case by their utter lack of right-handed hitting outfielders under contract in their system.

The closest they’ve got are a pair of 23-year-olds, Juan Lagares and Cory Vaughn, both of whom boast some promise but do not seem likely to contribute much at the Major League level by the start of 2013. Lagares’ 2012 line at Binghamton translates to a .557 big-league OPS, a mild uptick from Bay’s woeful year but not certainly not the type of number a club could abide from a corner outfielder. Vaughn has yet to play above A-ball, though his .243/.351/.463 line in the pitcher-friendly Florida State League appears to have been, by the ol’ equivalency calculator, the best overall performance by any right-handed hitting outfielder in the Mets’ system not named Scott Hairston in 2012.

As much as this will frighten my man Eric Simon, the alternatives in the system make the idea of working Justin Turner into a platoon role in the outfield appear a lot more palatable, though Turner’s reverse platoon splits do not help his case.

Presumably, though, the Mets will enter Spring Training with at least one Major League outfielder that can hit from the right side of the plate. That they split with Bay now, before that guy (or those guys) are on board, probably says a hell of a lot about their opinions on Bay’s prospects for a revival.

Shocking, but true. Manuel actually got an interview from the Rockies, so he seems to be several steps ahead of Howe, who has merely stated that he’d like to manage the Blue Jays (and also that he was misrepresented in Moneyball).

I’d LOL about this some from the Mets-fan perspective, but I know Angels fans LOL’d pretty hard when the Mets hired Terry Collins. And though the Mets have not won much under Collins, his stewardship hardly seems to be anything close to their biggest problem. Plus, let us not forget, there was a time — the halcyon days of August, 2008 — when a lot of us were pretty excited about the way the Mets seemed to improve immediately after Manuel took over. If teams only hired managers that had never failed before, Davey Johnson would be pretty much the only veteran manager with a job.

I’ve somehow missed this until today: Aaron Gleeman at Hardball Talk is recapping every episode of the current season of Survivor, which features Jeff Kent behaving Jeff Kentily. It’s hilarious, especially if you’ve been looking for evidence to confirm your long-held suspicions that Jeff Kent is a massive jerk. It turns out he’s misleading his team about his motorcycling hobby yet again, plus throwing teammates under the bus, and backstabbing, and also still not being very good at defense.

Also, apparently the other people on Survivor do not know that Jeff Kent played professional baseball, which Kent’s apparently trying to use to his advantage but which you have to figure must be eating him up inside. And for the first time in my life, I wish I were on Survivor so I could blow up Jeff Kent’s spot. Also, I think it might be funny to go on there and be all, “I’m here to make friends.”

Just not with Jeff Kent, obviously. Barry Bonds forever.