ashbury

It would be easy to joke they should rebuild the warning track about 10 feet shallower because Buxton's so fast that he needs more warning. But he missed that ball, so I infer that he was aware of the fence - it looked barely catchable if there were no obstacle. He just seems to have a Plan B that he'll cushion the impact somehow. Somebody needs to explain to him that he's not indestructible.

The top guy on your board is going to be some over-slot guy every time. That's why (apart from the 1:1) pick) they are still available - nobody else felt they could afford them either, nor take a chance on drafting but not signing them. Nobody has the draft budget to do it that way, not because of cheapness by the individual team but because of the draft pool process.

I saw only Buxton's double last night, but if the closed stance is giving him a better chance at outside pitches, he certainly isn't giving up anything on being able to turn on inside strikes. Nice!

If you believe volatility is an issue, regardless of a bullish longterm view, then paying off the mortgage lets you apply your old mortgage payment to buying new stock, taking advantage of dollar-cost averaging. Rather than ride out a bad patch with your portfolio, you say, "hey! they're having a sale on stocks this month!"

A couple/three problems I see with this. I consider myself on the more analytic end of the spectrum here, and I want numbers to back up my management decisions, but I find it hard to believe a ranking of amateur baseball prospects is absolute enough to do more than put them into rough groupings. The 1:1 pick can be a little special, in that some years one player may stand out alone. Otherwise, even at the top you have a group where the best forecasting is still just "well, one of these [four, whatever] guys will probably turn out to have the best Career WAR* [or whatever metric] out of everyone". And then after the team's first pick, the fuzziness only increases; there's not a lot of daylight there between a dozen or more choices. Second, and maybe more importantly, the draft pool money system MLB instituted has a huge impact. If you have identified a few top choices, as the Twins no doubt did, and had a guess for both Career WAR and signing demand, it may be wiser to do as the Twins did. Say your WAR estimate** for Greene is 50 (borderline HOFer) and for Lewis it's only 30 (everyday player for years), but Greene will cost a lot, then clearly you should just go ahead pick Greene anyway, because you can't make up the lost 20 WAR by picking up one or more high schoolers who drop, and whom you can lure with a million additional dollars, with your next picks. But I'm betting that a competent probabilistic forecast would put the candidate prospects much closer in estimated career WAR than that, this year at least. Suppose the best minds in your front office guesstimate Greene 50, Wright 48, Gore 47, Lewis 47, McKay 42, but you've also got your eye on Enlow at 30 who you think may drop due to signability, and anyone else likely still there at your second pick is more like a 20 at best, such as Rooker, then (as actually occurred) picking whoever in that top group will sign cheap enough could give you 47+30 instead of 50+20. I think the disagreements here (or anywhere) on whom to pick 1:1 come down to an assumption whether there is a lot of separation or a little. Precision, separation, and draft pool. These are what lead me away from expecting to construct a predefined ranking of prospects and then just pick the top one at each turn. * Just to be clear, I'm referring to "WAR" very generically here, and not a specific implementation seen anywhere. Simply, "how many wins do you think this guy will add to your standings over the years?" As the analytic type, I do think you have to look at it in approximately those terms. Accomplishing it is the trick. ** And by WAR estimate I mean an average over all reasonable outcomes, including injury preventing a career at all, but also the faint chance of a 120 WAR meaning an inner-circle HOFer. Expectation value, for those who think in those terms. Not simply best ceiling, or best floor (whatever floor means for an untested amateur).

Any list in which Matt Belisle ranks high is not one I feel very interested in researching further.

Yes.

How do you factor in the inherent uncertainty when scouting young players? Literally no franchise consistently picks future major-leaguers in the second round and beyond. They're all trying to pick the "best player". The misses outnumber the hits, and yet gold is found in the later rounds. How does "pick the best player" provide any guidance? I don't mean to be belligerent, I'm just trying to understand what you're offering.

A tall guy whose last name looks like it translates from some Germanic root to "upper/over". I like it. He and Max Kepler can kid around about it, if he makes it to the majors.

Exactly. Every game counts, when you are discussing pennant races and end-of-season awards and so forth. But when forecasting, sometimes it's wisest to just give a guy (or a team) a mulligan for the first portion of a season. There's a danger that that turns into cherry-picking, but there's a reverse danger of continuing to factor in bad results when a partial correction may already have occurred. My interpretation of this year's stats is that we have a light-stick gold-glove in centerfield, not a sub-mendoza black-hole in the batting lineup. A fairly empty .240 BA in center doesn't lead a team to a World Series, but good teams live with that if they must, especially if there is still room for growth. This mark of a good player sticks in my mind: "he can beat you, even on days he's not hitting". Byron can kind of do that.

It depends on whether he is pressing because he is having trouble with pitch recognition, orhe is having trouble with pitch recognition because he is pressing.Such a chicken-and-egg question is not something that can be guessed confidently at a distance, and is probably a bit difficult close-up too. But I'll still guess that it is the former, in which case a trip to AAA would be of limited value; he just won't see enough major-league stuff there to do him good.

My theory is a little more big-picture: FalVine are all about gearing up for the cohort that marks the next five-year window of contention. Only Rooker looks like he might contribute significantly in a year or two. The extreme emphasis on high-schoolers for the high-end-talent portion of the draft won't start to bear fruit until 2021 at the soonest. The major league team needs pitching now. They no doubt have some kind of plan for addressing it, while the current cohort still is together and productive. A major free-agent signing, a major trade involving the current pipeline of prospects... some combination. But not this draft. (Bluebirds among the new college draftees of course may always fall into one's lap.) That's my draft theory. The tactics of this draft are an interesting but secondary matter. The strategy is much easier to execute when the constraint of worrying about the current 40-man roster is removed. That's how I read the 1:1 pick, and most of what followed.

Can we option Byron to New York and then call him back "up" when he learns a few things?

Moderator's note: Look, the moderators have been clear all through the draft process, that it's a given we are all amateurs, and that real judgement of any draft isn't possible for a few years at least. And yet we are all entitled to discuss the proceedings, if done respectfully. Please don't attempt to squelch the opinions of others. Discuss the topic, not the qualifications of the other posters. (This is addressed to all posters, not specifically you.)

Very prescient episode title.

You might have missed this part.

I don't think it's that dire. The June draft is covered by a bonus pool for each team to distribute amongst all their draftees. The pool is computed by adding the slot bonuses for each pick the team has. Failing to sign a given draftee reduces their pool by the amount of the slot the player was drafted at. Conversely, going over the total pool limit is taxed punitively by the league, including loss of draft picks for going as little as 5% over. Within this structure, there's some game theory involved. For example, it's harder to sign high-schoolers than college players, for a combination of reasons, and thus the bonuses necessary to sign them tend to be higher. Saving some money on the early-round draft picks gives the team flexibility to lure lower-round picks to sign. The Twins are likely to spend their full bonus pool, or close to it, as will every team. As the #1 picking team, their pool is the largest. They will spend the most. There are various reasons to be critical of the Twins' spending pattern, but I don't think draft bonuses are one. These two links show this year's pool sizes, and the rules governing them, respectively: http://www.baseballamerica.com/draft/2017-mlb-draft-slots-bonus-pools/#PZVTGOX2RXUPsp7Z.97 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_draft#Bonus_pool

Moderator's note: even more so than usual, it's important to stay on the topic, and not make fellow posters be the topic. Do not scold people for having opinions.

Earlier I expect it was the high walk rate. His last 7 appearances have been pretty clean in that regard. I'm guessing a promotion is in the offing at last.

1 walk in the last 7 games (8+ innings). I was on the go-slow side (a small faction here) due to earlier walks, but now the last obstacle is removed. Move 'im on up.

I never heard that particular formulation of the principle. Into my handy-dandy quotes file it goes. Very nice.

Well this spiraled quickly.

In college we had students from all over the place, so when a Professor in one of my classes said as an aside, "it's all Greek to me," probably because he had written some math symbols that were squiggly Greek and he didn't actually know what he was writing, he paused and put Nick, our token Greek guy, on the spot and asked what people back home said in that situation. The reply was "it's all Chinese to me". Well, we had no shortage of Chinese guys in the classroom, so we asked them. "It's all Russian to me," was their response in unison. I guess my school wasn't hot stuff, because we didn't actually have a Russian, or maybe it was the quaint custom in those days to not invite our adversaries to learn secrets along with our students. But I bet they had some other language to blame, and so on, and so on, and eventually it would have circled back to "it's all English to me" if we had kept at it.

I took a look at his 2012 Adopt-A-Prospect page. Back then, at 17, he was 6'4" and 175. He shrank.

What happens if Heston pitches well in Santiago's absence? If he's kept on the 25-man, who goes down when Santiago returns? He can't be optioned, so do we DFA him after a good game or even two? I can't imagine Heston being a long term answer, but even a AAAA guy can surprise you in the short term, and the optics of then discarding him would be bad. This roster is still a nightmare.