ashbury

That part of the math, I believe. It's the part about the ERA going up only to 3.00, as stated in the post I was responding to. I don't believe he'll be anywhere near that effective when going 5 innings, start after start. He didn't become dominant until he was made a reliever; IMO he goes back to being non-dominant as a starter.

But what if Daffy Duck or, say, Duran, can't give you 200 innings of that, and his best use turns out to be 5 innings of all-out effort? Times 32 starts is 160 innings. You still on board?

The Massachusetts Turnpike through Allston and Newton during the afternoon commute is brutal. Do not recommend. This trade proposal is incomplete without addressing how to shore up catching if Vazquez is moved.

I think you would enjoy membership in SABR, which is at heart a historical society.

Nope. Wouldn't be legal to bat him in this situation. Arraez is the guy on third who got things started. 😀

By clicking the link, I was heartened to learn that a leftfielder about to turn 28 has been signed to try his hand at pitching. Or, perhaps I learned that the link was not to the player we signed.

There is the Bus Test: "if this guy got hit by a bus tomorrow, would he get in the HoF?" I think the answer's a clear, if reluctant, no, as does Cody in the OP. He checks some boxes, and his defense carries him farther than the raw offensive stats would. But right now he's barely over 1000 base hits, and that doesn't cut it except for very special cases like some awfully, awfully good Negro Leagues players held back by spotty league schedules. He's only got 9 seasons, short of the customary minimum of 10. Another 600 base hits and now he's maybe in Hank Greenberg and Mickey Cochrane territory. Assuming those 600 base hits don't take 6 seasons to accumulate. Anyway, way premature. Hall of Fame is a marathon, not a sprint. But you can't just walk the whole way, either.

Tension is the right word. I look at it slightly differently., though we end up in pretty much the same place. What if his level of aggressiveness is already about right? In AA this year, he'll be facing more capable pitchers, as with every promotion. At single-A, a lot of pitchers will put themselves in a 3-0 hole if you let them. In the majors, most pitchers will put you in an 0-2 hole if you let them. A batter with the right aggressiveness will spit on those single-A pitches but could try to do something with the major league ones, without actually changing a thing in his approach. The detailed stats would look like he was more aggressive, when he really wasn't. The key for him may be improving his contact rate, as you say, which currently suggests big holes in his swing. Waiting for your pitch, and then batting only .240, is a worrisome sign. Moreso than most prospects, he has a huge range of possible career outcomes. For all the hype, he could bust. I'm an optimist, so I'm about as averse to trading him as Brooks Lee, even though his floor is much lower. It's a bit like stock-picking, where you can absorb 100% losses on some investments and still come out ahead with a few big winners. But unlike money, where every dollar is on a par with another and you can bunch them together over time, hitting big on one baseball investment can help propel you to a pennant since there are only 26 spots on anybody's roster - you can't win the pennant with 50 1-WAR players. If you have a player in your system with a 5-WAA season in him, you'd better not trade him for 2 years of Sonny Gray who gives you 5 WAA combined. But now I'm changing subjects. 😀

You can include Aaron Sabato, or you can include his baseball card. Each has approximately equal trade value to another club.

Only one man has sustained (across 3000+ PA, i.e. 4 or 5 full seasons) a BABIP higher than that figure: Ty Cobb. Different eras, obviously, but to speculate that Julien might establish a mean anywhere near that high would put him above renowned batters Shoeless Joe Jackson and Rogers Hornsby, those next in line behind Cobb, and significantly above Carew, Gwynn, and Mauer, who also rank highly in historical terms. Depending on how loosely you meant "close," Julien's tracking as an inner circle Hall of Famer right now, if you're right about that. 😀

Building a traditional top-of-the-lineup with purely tactical advantages in mind (speed at the top, bat control #2, power in the third spot) means that 60+ percent of the time the first assumption of getting the speedster on base doesn't even happen, and then even if he does the second guy may fail 60% of the time in his role, likewise the third batter. 40% times 40% times 40% gets down below a one in ten chance that a traditional choreography pans out, in these tactical terms. Better to just put three top offensive bats at the top and just let them accrue more plate appearances than their lesser teammates. They'll get on base, then drive each other in, because they're good. It's rare that a player with otherwise good batting skills is so deficient in the other aspects of scoring runs that you have to do anything drastic. Since one of those candidates, Julien, has a strong platoon split, this means a different preferred starting lineup depending on who pitches (as the article states). Jeffers isn't mentioned in the article, but if you believe in his bat, then he belongs high in the batting order on the days he catches, while someone else takes his place up there on his days off. Finally, the trend is to rest players periodically, moreso than in decades past, so whoever at the top of your preferred lineup will be replaced by someone on those rest days. All in all, I don't expect to see anything resembling a set batting order this season. Pragmatism will be the keyword.

People who railed against Sano's physical fitness would have a field day with Manoah on the Twins staff, at the first stumble.

It's splitting hairs whether Kim Ng quit or was fired, but trading a starting pitcher for a position player is perhaps part of what caused the falling-out. Pitching is the coin of the realm. They won't get someone like Pablo Lopez back if they trade Arraez now.

I only looked at two pitchers who came to mind, Brock Stewart and Matt Wisler, and at least for them, the success didn't come from reducing walks appreciably but from avoiding the longball. The latter is a "skill" that fluctuates a lot from season to season for many relievers (*cough* small sample size *cough*), so I would want to invest more research (which I will not) before drawing much of a conclusion.

Concur. He was an All-Star two seasons before his supposed "one" hit. Similar story with Roger Maris. People say he was all about 1961. This ignores his winning MVP in 1960. People, sheesh.

In other contexts, notably Hall of Fame discussions, I like to compare and contrast the baseball-reference.com notions of Wins Above Replacement (WAR) and Wins Above Average (WAA). The former sets a baseline of a mythical AAAA replacement player who can barely hold his own in the majors, while the latter sets a much higher baseline of a mythical average major leaguer. I find that WAA holds more closely to my own idea of a HOFer, as it gives less credit for mere longevity and rewards those who are truly stellar. Paradoxically, using WAA for the worst instead of the best players seems to shine a different light as well. Instead of finding guys who just weren't good at all but managed to get second and third chances from the team, we get guys who plodded along for season after season at a below-average pace, but never bad enough to get kicked out (due presumably to lack of better alternatives coming up in the minors). You can't really field a team and call it major league, if all your players are negative WAR. You can, by contrast, call a team of negative WAA major leaguers, but (almost by definition) you can't win a pennant with them. Here's that list of top, er, bottom negative WAA: 5. Jason Kubel -7.3. He had such promise, but the knee injury changed his career trajectory. He wasn't wrecked, though, and had enough skill to remain in the majors a long while. The bat couldn't quite support the loss of defense. 4. Gene Larkin -7.5. 1991 World Series winning hit aside, a pretty thin resume for that much playing time. 3. Luis Rivas -8.2. Indeed, the guy who prompted this discussion shows up by this measure. Our instincts aren't wrong, he was pretty bad and for an extended period. 2. Denny Hocking -8.2. Jack of a few trades, master of absolutely none. It's reasonable to speculate he held incriminating photos of Gardy. 1. Randy Bush -9.9. A charter member of Stew Thornley's All-Time Dirty Name Team, and that really may be his only claim to fame, other than of course possessing two World Series rings that other, better players earned for him. This WAA list is not "better" or "worse" than the list in the article, just a different viewpoint of what it means to be "negative".

The Royals did manage to unlock one half-season of value from him in 2000. Worth the wait? Um, no. Meanwhile, the Twins (and 9 other teams after them) whiffed on selecting Manny Ramirez.

Milwaukee may have wasted his one "career year" in 2022 at age 29 by leaving him languishing at AAA despite good numbers all season. Last year was pretty dismal for him. It's a long season and he'll get his chances in St Paul, but I hope none of his age-31 innings come at the expense of younger arms with more of a future.

It doesn't change your point (that Pablo had a really good year), but this isn't what xwOBA is at all. The "w" stands for "weighted", and means that extra base hits are given more value than just singles or walks. wOBA is more like OPS, for my purposes at least - an overall measure of a batter's offensive effectiveness, not just one (on-base) aspect of it. You also may or may not like the "x" part, which is for "expected". It doesn't tabulate actual on-base results at all, but instead looks at new-fangled measurements like exit velocity and launch angle to calculate the likelihood of a given ball in play falling safely and whether for one base or for extra bases. Luis Arraez gets on base a lot. But xwOBA doesn't rate him as well in 2023 as, say, Corey Seager, who gets on base just as well but hits for more power. Here is a pretty readable explanation with more detail: https://www.mlb.com/glossary/statcast/expected-woba

"Just exactly what are you saying the five tools a wife is supposed to have are, MICHAEL?"

Needs two l's. 😄

So a player who has clearly mastered the game at the college level gets placed at AAA the day after he signs? I don't recall that happening.

That's because courtesy of arbitration they were about to have to pay him ... .

In 2022 he looked as though he just needed to get away from Coors Field. In 2023, though, it was consistently bad wherever he pitched. What do you base hope on? He's pretty expensive for 3 years if he can't turn it around. BTV assigns him negative value, so at least he won't cost anything much to acquire - but what have we got if we acquire him?