ashbury

Thought provoking analysis, SD. There are a lot of moving parts, so it's tough to forecast what the outcomes will be, but I would think this covers a lot of the possibilities.

What is a number like that based upon? Joe had 22 GIDP in 666 plate appearances this past season. Trevor led the league with 28, in 632. Obviously that's not close to 25%, so we must be talking about fewer PA. Focusing for simplicity on the greater DP threat, Trevor, I see on his b-r.com splits page that he had 48 PA all season where it was one out and only a man on first. 13 GIDP came from that, which is a 27% rate. Inning over, a very bad outcome, for those times. A strikeout (he also did those sometimes ) is bad too, but not as bad. There were also (if I added in my head correctly) 78 other PA with any combination of a man on first (and/or other bases) with fewer than 2 outs, from which came the other 15 DP. That's under 20%. A strikeout is bad too, but not as bad. And then there are the other 506 times Trevor came to bat, when a DP was a very remote possibility if at all. (Indeed none of his DP that season came when no one was on first.) That's 0%. A strikeout is worse in all those situations, by not even putting the ball in play for a chance involving your BABIP, nor adding a baserunner via a walk. If choosing a pinch hitter, sure, one would factor these chances in with the particular situation. For the starting lineup, hopefully what we're mostly talking about here, one is kind of stuck with the situational luck of the draw through the course of the game. The DP rips your heart out that inning. Strikeouts are death by a thousand (OK, one or two hundred) cuts, representing missed opportunity. Over the long season, I don't see the DP as markedly more deadly.

His SO have been climbing so fast as the competition quality increased. High-A was 28% of PA, AA was 35%, AzFL was 40%. And you're right. If we take 35% as his current baseline and if he could take back out 20% of that, and apply a 30% BABIP because he's now putting those balls in play (and/or walking), that's about .020 of OBP. That is enough to make an important difference in a career. Or of course you can just go by rules of thumb and say that he shouldn't strike out at historic rates like that.

One doesn't have to go with memory. He was a starter for the big club only two years, 2008 and 2009. The "splits" feature on baseball-reference.com tells the ERAs for these two years. Your memory is correct for 2008, with him showing good results until inning 6 when the clock seemingly struck midnight and he became instantly a pumpkin. But in 2009, after which point the braintrust apparently pulled the plug, he was the opposite way: 1st inning - 11.34 2nd inning - 7.80 3rd inning - 5.40 4th inning - 2.40 5th inning - 5.40 6th inning - 4.35 2010 he had only 1 start but still was no overnight success, with a season ERA as a reliever of 5.29 in short duty in the majors.

Yes, this is why teams pay no attention to the K/9 rates for their pitchers.

FTFY.

I am not intrigued by any of these lefty "names in the mix."

I found this online without having to search very hard, so I don't see a problem if I post it. Congrats to the happy couple!

If nothing else, he's providing great material for some future biographer working on their Hall of Fame plaques.

Gary Pettis, probably. Perennial Gold Glove CF, as you no doubt remember. When I looked up his records I see he only once had an OPS+ above 90, yet routinely racked up 500 PA and played in the majors 11 different seasons. An example of someone with elite defensive skills being able to carve out a career. Sure, he hit .236 lifetime, but it was an empty .236. / nah, he actually walked a lot, giving him a sufficient OBP.

You can't have too much good pitching.

I looked it up, and the Twins have had a Bud Bloomfield (1964) and a Terry "Bud" Bulling (1977), but never a Buddy. A new era is upon us!

Your article did not read itself, either, but it was well worth the effort.

My Beer League softball swing!

Fair points, spycake. It's an eternal balancing act between doing what's best for fans and what's best for the players. Losing the 41st man off your roster isn't the end of the world for fans, but (to me at least) it's a definite irritant. I don't want to punish another team for claiming a player, because it does provide opportunity for some players; it just seems like there's a perverse incentive in play here, when the claiming team changes their mind. I don't see how losing a player the claiming team never had in the first place is a disincentive for them to try to find a spot for the player when they have a genuine opening. The current process leaves me guessing some of the openings aren't genuine.

Wow, this makes you like, what, 124 years old now? I bet you and USAFChief can swap some stories, eh?

This part of the waiver-claim process needs to change. If you decide to drop the player from your 40-man, within some period of time I'll leave others to define, he should be revert back to the previous team and waivers resume, and the previous team can stash him if he clears this time.

Sorry but this sounds a lot like when my wife tells me, "it's up to you," and then later can say she didn't tell me what to do.

Well-called.

Yes, and if AA outfielder Tyler Goeddel is likely the first pick (by Philly), then it seems like Michael could be on some team's radar too.

That observation should make any infielder hang his head in shame.

This was the item that somehow I wasn't factoring in. The money's freed up to be redeployed some other way. Maybe not quite as favorably as retaining a player good enough to WANT to opt out. But it mitigates the loss, in the upside case. I'm still pretty meh about acquiring Shields for Nolasco, because his 2015 represents new information that wasn't available when his contract was signed a year earlier. The odds of the contract turning out to approach its worst case can't be the same as back then, yet the cost that factors in those risks hasn't changed. I just want the pain to end, not be extended by a year and to a higher degree, so that colors my approach to computing an expectation value or whatever. My thinking also might be different if I believed the team would be willing to eat the last two years of an untradable $21M/yr contract, were the gamble to fail and that was the way such a trade played out. The fact they haven't already jettisoned Nolasco speaks to that. But it's not April yet and maybe a poor spring really will mean cutting ties with Ricky. Which would mean they didn't make this highly hypothetical trade for Shields, but now this is getting pretty darn circular.

I don't think their methodology claims to be able to separate the cases of "bounceback candidate" and "about to fall off the side of a cliff" for individual players past 30.* It just seems to split the difference of recent seasons, with a small aging factor added. Which may be wise, but doesn't really count as independent data on the subject. * Nor do I.

I just hadn't remembered the details of Shields's contract. The opt-out changes the calculation of risk and reward, beyond the standard "will he bounce back or not" dilemma. It's also true that he could have a "good" 2016 but not one that would lead him to opt out. Then good seasons the following two or even three years would be a lot of value. Given that contracts for starting pitching aren't going down, you'd have to kind of thread the needle to get the level of goodness without it being "too" good. In sum, there's a significant cap on the size of the upside in getting Shields due to the opt-out, and coupled with the cost (both aggregate and per-year) being higher than Nolasco, I'm thinking the expectation value comes out pretty close to a wash.