ashbury

How's his fielding?

Getting a very good starting pitcher and giving up only one pitching prospect, not a top one really, and filling out the offer with a couple of good bats who don't handle up-the-middle defensive positions and likely would be blocked for a while at their respective spots, is the kind of package I hoped for. I wish a similar reliance on excess corner bats would have nabbed us either of the relievers, but oh well, pitching talks and bs walks.

Otoh trading for him means adding him to the 40 but then having as many as 3 option years before he must be on a major league roster. Rule 5 forces you to roster him that first year, all year. Wheels within wheels.

He turns 25 in December and had success at high-A and then not success at AA. His start last week was good. He'd be eligible for Rule-5 but IMO not a cinch to be snapped up as there are others with similar profiles I'm sure.

A waiver wire pickup. This is what our FO keeps trying for. Instead, they have to part with non-trivial prospect capital. In the moment, a reasonable trade. A little nervous that Lopez turns back into a pumpkin, reliever versus starter notwithstanding.

And then getting to keep them for about half the seasons that an actual draftee might be available to the team. IOW, not really that comparable. Greater certainty, for a shorter burn time. We cashed in one kind of thing, for a very different kind.

On a big day like this, we need grade-A snark about the one minor swap? Okay, I've always got plenty to spare, here you go:

Probably you already found it yourself when you asked, but in case it saves someone else from looking: https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=rodrig106jos These TD articles don't generally seem to get an editing pass the day after. It's not quite a Newspaper of Record, where people will refer back to it years later.

No one wants injuries, and every team gets them anyway. I don't give them a pass, though. They courted injury, arguably counted on it and thought they had a plan to work around it, presumably as a way to exploit a perceived market inefficiency. This FO has a reputation for conservatism, as did the last one. But just as the regime under Terry Ryan at times took on some unaccountable risks (Sano in RF? Tyler Jay?), the FalVine regime has too. Injury risk, for example. The present organizational philosophy, exemplified by Wes Johnson, aims to gain extra MPH from pitching arms - that can't come for free or else everyone would have done it long ago, and has to be a calculation on their part that the increase in injury frequency will be tolerable. So we're in the sixth year of their regime and the pitching pipeline still has a clog in the spigot; a few arms have graduated during those years. Turning to the here-and-now, they constructed the 2022 pitching staff by beginning with some young arms that have an injury track record; they supplemented that by signing Archer and Bundy who have similar recent resumes and would have to be handled gently, trading a key prospect for Sonny Gray who has been less than a workhorse the previous couple of seasons, and topped it off with a trade for a TJS candidate that the Mets looked over and turned down in Chris Paddack. They've threaded the needle with Archer and Bundy and Gray about as successfully as possible, which means not actually very much contribution from them by analytic measures due to short outings each time, Gray being by far the best of this group. (And, credit where due, Joe Ryan has been the exception to this entire narrative. That trade last July was a coup.) Sorry, but I'm not buying the "ohhhh, if we can just get some arms back from this unlucky spate of injuries" message. This has gone about like they constructed this roster to do.

Berrios was not controlled past 2022.

Beckham had played a little LF for Seattle a season or three ago. Not a lot, but surely he's had reps out there in practice over the years. They had given him the opportunity to be a utility guy in St Paul this season and while he didn't appear in a game there in the OF, maybe they gave him drills out there. Anyway, an unanticipated substitution but not total desperation, and a logical choice given the circumstances and options at hand.

Terry Ryan was gone in mid-July, the last time housecleaning occurred at the top. We've missed the deadline.

He did drop for a reason, and I don't know that his bonus expectation entirely accounts for it. Past the (early) first round, no draft picks should be viewed as sure things, and we kind of are treating Prielipp that way. Our FO took him as a high-upside candidate, but one of those in the second round means his floor is totally zero.

Yeah, those darn Analytics types and their fancy ERAs and propeller beanies and what not. OPS-against, and the dreaded WPA, might be what your are yearning for, though.

I just learned a new phrase, "broke on the draw." Except, I don't know what it means. Google was surprisingly unhelpful, if it's a card playing or horse racing idiom like I was expecting. Just tie-breaker? FWIW the phrase showed up a bunch of times, as news aggregators relayed your TD article already.

I don't quite understand the seeming certainty that we know where the bottom exactly is or will become.

Which recent firings do you recall where a deadline deal was the issue?

Whatever happened to Mike Wants Wins? It's like I don't even know that guy anymore.

No disagreement really. I expect that there are several in the TD readership who have had reason to think carefully about aspects of data visualization during their education or careers. Some cleaning of data is often called for. I hope you'll still give some thought to the underlying issue I raised, though. Kirilloff's season numbers show a slightly below average OPS, but his chart fails to give any indication of why that might be. Even though the omitted data is a small sample, it was so poor that it accounts for the difference. Maybe having the lower cutoff of the y-axis be .000 instead of something around .300 is all that's needed. A thick line to represent sufficient amount of data for a trend line, a thinner line to represent less sufficiency. Those kinds of tactics.

I wouldn't go by a recipe, but there does seem food for thought there. There's always the danger of small sample size. Also, past the first couple of innings, you have to guard against a certain kind of bias in the data: if a pitcher is simply having a bad game, it may affect the innings he is in, but won't affect the innings after he's taken out. So those later innings tend to carry an assumption that he's been doing reasonably well up to any given point. A better statistician than I might have some tools to correct for that, I don't know.

It is a joke. "Like two ships passing in the night." The way we classy people say "one night stand." Thanks for the grammar refresher though - it had been quite a while since Squirrel reminded us.

Except when it's two sheeps passing in the night.

MsPH.

Jose Miranda, not especially highly regarded for his defense at 3B, was committing errors at a much lower rate than CES at a similar age. As always, my caveat is that errors are one of the less important ways to judge a defender but I don't have an eye-test to go by and beyond a certain number a high error rate holds some meaning, plus the scouting reports I do see are not complimentary. Maybe his bat turns into the next coming of Nelson Cruz, but anything less and CES is another bat that profiles for 1B/DH, which is worth something but hardly the franchise's crown jewel.