Turd Furgeson

I can't say I understand the ranking, is it still 2013? How can Buxton rank higher than Sano at this point? How can there be 20 better players in MLB under 25 than Sano?

I don't think he's an ace. He's playing like one this year and that's what matters but an ace is someone who has an elite skillset that has pitched 220+ innings in recent seasons. Consistency over multiple seasons is very important.

All things are flawed, no one thing is perfect and that includes the eye test. So in order to reach the closest approximation of what happens on the field we should utilize all the tools that are available to us. WAR doesn't say they are significantly more valuable, there is a less than 1 WAR difference between them. You're comparing Sano to pitchers, I'm not 100% confident in its ability to compare value of position players and pitchers but to me that doesn't really matter. Also, it seems you're using baseball-reference WAR rather than fangraphs WAR, that's not to say baseball-reference is worse necessarily but I think fangraphs captures defense a bit better because they do things differently. Also I'm pretty sure that a difference of 1 WAR is within the margin of error and furthermore there's a fair bit of noise in a 1 year sample of WAR. It boggles my mind that people dismiss the value of defense at all positions. I mean, if you're talking about 1B then sure it's probably the easiest defensive position but if you didn't know, WAR penalizes players heavily just for playing that position because it is much easier to play then most others. Fangraphs goes into great detail about how they arrive at their numbers and things like positional value are taken into account.

Perhaps you underrate it. I think WAR can be unreliable at times in small sample sizes because UZR takes a large sample size to remove a lot of potential error and it also struggles with evaluating defensive shifts. I do think defense is really important though. Tracking down a fly ball in the outfield that other players wouldn't get to may mean that you save 1 to 2 runs, which could mean the difference between a win and a loss. Part of the reason our pitchers are doing well is because our defense is good.

Mike Trout is just too good. It'd be very difficult to win an MVP over Trout if you're not a very good defensive player.

I just find Sano to be a very difficult to predict hitter. He has 80 power, he has great pitch recognition and plate discipline. Those things are great. He also really struggles to make contact. His K% was sky high last year and so was his BABIP. The thing is, he hits the ball as hard as anyone not named Stanton, he uses all fields pretty well and he has a good line drive rate. The BABIP will inevitably come down but I think he'll keep it pretty high.

I've seen Buxton's hit tool praised plenty of times. When Buxton was first drafted I remember John Sickels being a bit wary about his hit tool but those concerns soon vanished in 2013. I'm not sure its the hit tool more so than the pitch recognition and approach.

I would be hesitant to compare anyone to Harper at this point. Harper has always been pretty good at drawing walks and he's taken it to a different dimension this year. Not to mention Harper was getting 80 grades on his power at 16 years old. I'm not sure if there were many people who even thought Rosario had plus power. His defense in the corner might have been underrated though mainly because he played a lot at second base.

2 years is like an eternity at that age.

He was filling in because of an injury is my understanding.

I just did a quick search at fangraphs and apparently Brian Dozier is having the most extreme pull% in the past 10 years, at 61%. He's a flawed hitter that just isn't good at using the entire field to hit, up to this point. Teams are putting the shift on him and he's not getting pitches to pull anymore but he's still trying to pull them.

I think people get upside and expectations mixed up. Buxton may very well have Trout upside and that's special because there are very few players you could ever say that about, but the likelihood that he reaches that upside is very low. The nice thing is that he could actualize 60% of his upside and be a multi-time all-star.

He has too much of a fly ball swing right now, he needs to hit more line drives.

I think it was in the other Buxton thread but someone brought up his lefty/righty splits and I was actually surprised to see how extreme they are. vs RHP .638 OPS in 80 PAs vs LHP .275 OPS in 41 PAs Long term you'd obviously expect him to hit lefties better than RHPs and he's hitting RHPs at least at a much more tolerable level. I think there's some reason to be optimistic.

Here's the deal, Byron Buxton has had very little time in the minors, 276 career games, 160 games above low A. He also came from some rural Georgia town where he wasn't facing good competition. Even Mike Trout had a few more career minor league games than Buxton and he got his call up at 19. It's not normal for up the middle prospects to hit well in their rookie seasons, particularly if they aren't even 22 years old. The only thing to take away is that he should have had more minor league seasoning before getting the call up.