Brawndo the Thirst Mutilat

Don't forget Derrick Turnbow's regular "we'll spot you 4 runs on 8 BBs" turn in the rotation.

Yay! I'll never trust the broadcast team about anything ever again. Telling me yesterday they were sending down DiFelice to make room for Riske -- Trenni, stab your lying eyes!

Don't know if anybody else is watching the pre-game show, but the team has evidently made it clear to god and everybody that Riske will be activated tomorrow. DiFelice will be sent down. I am not surprised, but I am severely irritated, that Tavarez gets to stay.

Not that any additional evidence was required, but if Sheets winds up as just a Class B free agent... ...put it this way, how can anyone (with a straight face anyway) even try to argue that the Elias rankings are NOT utterly imbecilic?

Not because I think he is always right but because anyone who gets that far in any line of work has to be, at the very least, not a complete idiot. Never in my entire life have I felt quite as jaded and cynical as I do right now, at this moment. The best I can hope for, my friend, is that you and I have very different definitions of "complete idiot".

I don't know about anybody else, but I'm quick to dismiss Justice's report because he runs with the PTI and Around the Horn crew, which makes it extraordinarily difficult to distinguish him from a sock puppet. Maybe I'm being too hard on him, though. According to his wikipedia page, he not only starred in the original Godzilla film, he also won the best male performer AVN award in 2003. Talk about a renaissance man!

Rillo, I think TLB's got you on this one. Why not just admit that the joy in potentially beating the Cubs (whether for the division or in the playoffs) comes from schadenfreude, ressentiment, a lust for revenge (We'll get you for last year!!!), and plain, good ol' fashioned hatred? I know that's what does it for me. The "ah, for a worthy adversary!" stuff has always felt to me like it was a rationalization, necessary because (let's face it) the aforementioned qualities aren't exactly what Lincoln had in mind when he referred to "the better angels of our natures".

the players chosen with the Linebrink picks are Evan Frederickson and Cutter Dykstra. Ouch -- the only two early round picks this year I really didn't like. Can we just pretend that Odorizzi was a Linebrink comp pick and Frederickson was a Cordero comp pick? Since it doesn't really matter anyway? Eh, I suppose I should just get over it. Colby likes Dykstra, and not every "bloodlines" pick is an overdraft (just most of them). Perhaps they will succeed where others have failed and teach Frederickson to throw a strike every once in awhile. Still, not liking the odds of this trade looking great in retrospect 5 years from now.

I don't mind for a second someone comparing the two or even saying, 'Hey, this Dillon guy's no star'. I just dislike when people gloss over relevant facts in order to make a neater-sounding post. Fair enough. My comment was a general one...I was just surprised that so much umbrage was taken when I thought the intent of Rillo's post was pretty clearly to call me out on my biases rather than to say "boy that Dillon guy is lousy." "How dare you drag Dillon's name through the mud by comparing him to DiFelice?" was my stab in the dark at pinpointing what was motivating the general reaction.

Chapter 2 -- Old Mr. Fletcher Shut off the TV and peel off those Sunday gloves And I'll stain the clean that you've been counting Old Mr. Fletcher passed by here today After 40 years of toil he just up and walked away - also Bad Religion First thing to say: everyone should lay of TwR. He wasn't even trying to suggest that Joe Dillon and Mark DiFelice are comparable quality players, and has said as much in the thread. I do think that the outrage in this thread that anybody would dare drag Joe Dillon's name through the mud by comparing him to Mark DiFelice is pretty revealing. There is only one real difference between those two guys -- Dillon was lucky enough to have a hot streak at the same time he had a big league opportunity, so now he has big league stats to show that he's a decent player. Many of you don't believe that there are any other meaningful statistics. Others only believe in minor league statistics when they are achieved by a "stud prospect". TwR was trying to suggest that they have had a similar career path, and that I have a soft spot for guys who have had that career path. About those two points at least, he's right. Like a lot of stat geeks, I have a thing for "Ken Phelps all-stars" (known more generally -- and I think appallingly -- as AAAA players). The reason is pretty simple -- I believe that somewhere between the bottom 10% and bottom 20% of guys on major league rosters are worse than the top 10% to 20% of minor league vets rotting away in AAA. They aren't significantly or obviously worse (GMs couldn't get away with the bone-headed crap they pull if the difference was obvious), just worse. The reasons that they remain on big league teams are myriad. Some are fleet-footed, cannon-armed middle infielders who look really great in a uniform (but who, unfortunately, have no ability to tell the difference between pitches they should swing at and pitches they should take). Some are company men, Proven Vets whose best days are obviously behind them (and whose best days often weren't very good to begin with), but who are generally believed to be good "clubhouse presences" with "leadership qualities". Some are 6'5'' flame-throwers who light up the radar gun, but cannot throw a strike to save their lives. For that last type, TwR described this dynamic pretty accurately when he said this: He was the high talent guy who has been given every chance in the world because of his velocity, and since you can't teach something like that, you have to keep giving guys like chance just because they have a high ceiling He doesn't mind that big league teams have this habit. I find it entirely irrational (it almost never seems to work out). I also have a certain moral indignation about it, one I will readily admit prevents me from being entirely objective about situations like Mark DiFelice's. Let's say you spend a decade in the minors. It's probably not a terrible life, but it's not fame and fortune and first class accommodations either. You have some success most everywhere you go, but you have a couple of injury setbacks and for whatever reason, scouts don't think you have "major league stuff". You're probably just about ready to give up on "your dream" when, at age 30, you add a cutter and suddenly you go from somewhat successful to pretty darn dominant. You never walked anybody (1.6 BB/9 in 1200 minor league IP), now you're striking out more than a guy an inning for the first time in your career. You post a ludicrous 9-1 K/BB ratio over 150 IP in a little more than a season, mostly at AAA, and a big league team finally has a spot for you and calls you up. After just 6 major league IP, all of them of the mop-up variety, David Riske and/or Eric Gagne come of the DL and you're sent back down. It is reasonably likely that you will never get another opportunity. Your peripherals remained excellent in those 6 IP, but you gave up a couple of homers and as a result, your ERA was 6.35. In the minds of baseball fans everywhere, you are now a AAAA player because of those 6 IP. You were already a AAAA player to scouts because you don't light up a radar gun. Well, life isn't fair. Nobody said it would be. It is decidedly unbecoming to complain about it, and it requires an obnoxious sense of entitlement. So, allow me to complain on your behalf. There's no earthly reason that major league teams should look at one little piece of data (radar gun readings - 95 mph for Seth McClung, 89 for Mark DiFelice), which is admittedly useful in deciding who to draft (can't use HS stats -- no competition, college stats are barely more useful), but which has almost no correlation to big league success once you cut out everybody that can't make it in AA...there is no reason why that little piece of data should give Seth McClung 4 seasons worth of failed opportunities when Mark DiFelice only gets 6 innings. Especially when DiFelice has fared better against similar competition, at least if you know which stats you should look at to get the best approximation of true-talent pitching. (Heck, even if you insist on looking at ERA, you see a highly coincidental tie at 3.54 in the minors for both guys, which still leaves you at a loss to explain 4 seasons vs. 6 innings, particularly when the bulk of those 4 seasons were gawdawful.) Here's hoping I'm wrong. Here's hoping Mark DiFelice gets his chance somewhere, even if it isn't here. If that chance comes soon, I'm pretty certain he can succeed. I'm not going to cheer for yet another in a long line of Seth McClung's catastrophic failures in order for DiFelice's shot to happen, because as a fan my primary interest is in the Brewers having a good season, and I'm not sure how many horrific starts would be required before the organization finally gives up on McClung, and I'm certainly not sure that they have Mark DiFelice first in line to replace him. But I think that's a shame, and I'm not going to be shy about saying so. The intent of the post that sparked this mini-controversy was merely, "phew, that cartoon anvil (labeled 1 ton) hanging above our heads (known in some parts as Jeff Weaver) has fallen somewhere other than on our heads -- ok Seth McClung, if you're going to go back to sucking, it's safe now." The End

Chapter 1 -- The Wild Goose Millions and millions chase the wild goose tonight To conquer loneliness, they'll chase it all they're lives And when they find it they can just lay down and die It seems the game is mostly pointless in the presence of the prize - Bad Religion In retrospect, I should have added a qualifier such as "probably" or "likely" to the phrase "superior options" when I said that Villy and DiFelice were superior options to McClung. I don't know for certain. Here is what I do know that leads me to that conclusion. When you say "McClung has been great!" what I think you mean is that McClung has been great this season, or at most that McClung has been great since the Brewers got him. If you confine yourself to just McClung's 54 IP with the Brewers, it does seem to be a silly claim that a 31 year old career minor leaguer with an 89 mph fastball is a superior option. But Seth McClung has another 250 IP in the majors, and nearly 600 IP in the minors. His career major league peripherals are terrible: 6.5 K/9 (not nearly enough for a strikeout pitcher) and 5.3 BB/9 (way too high for any pitcher who isn't Nolan Ryan). Those numbers are more or less in line with his minor league peripherals -- the strikeout rate is a bit lower than you'd expect based on a lifetime 8.6 rate in the minors (but not much lower), the walk rate is exactly what you'd expect given a career minor league walk rate of 4.2 per 9. It is much more difficult to project pitcher performance than hitter performance. Pitching (especially relief pitching) is a higher variance proposition. Since my original opinion on McClung ("good heavens, this guy is terrible -- what are you thinking Melvin?"), was informed by 850 IP, I find it difficult to be swayed by 54 decent IP. Now, I'll grant that his mechanics look vastly different this year. I'll also grant that since being added to the rotation, he seems to have finally become aware of the fact that he has to stop walking guys in order to succeed. But I am very slow to trust "looks" and "seems" over that much data. Teams always claim to have "fixed" the mechanics of "high-ceiling" pitchers that have previously struggled to succeed. The fact that Seth isn't walking as many these days could just as easily be dumb variance, a 20 IP blip on a 1000 IP journey, as evidence of a fundamental change in approach. However, I have to at least acknowledge the possibility that McClung may have finally turned it around, even though I have to suspend my disbelief to do so. Ballplayers are not protons and electrons, so the strategies we use for predicting their behaviour are not as foolproof as, say, the laws of physics. The Brewers wouldn't even consider pulling him from the rotation now, and I'm not suggesting they should. What I am suggesting is that if the "Seth McClung, Starting Pitcher!" experiment ends as a spectacular failure (as it did all 3 times Tampa tried it), no one should be too surprised. And everyone should be at least a little miffed that he was given an opportunity over a guy who was a better bet to be a useful member of the rotation, even if he wasn't a good bet to "emerge as a #1 starter" based on his "raw stuff".

Edmonds last 4 seasons, by OPS+: 170, 137, 110, 88 Can't help noticing a trend there. I suppose there's no reason that the next data point in that sequence necessarily has to be quite as bad as the 38 OPS+ he was putting up in San Diego, but still... after today's dramatics, his Cub OPS+ is around 100, or right at league average. I stand by my "gotta be kidding me".

I don't think the claim that Prince > Hart as a hitter, both now and in terms of potential, should be controversial. Prince is 2 years younger and has already posted an offensive season that Hart is pretty unlikely ever to rival. If you add in defense (particularly if they plan on sliding Hart over to CF eventually, which most of us seem to think they will, and provided he can handle it), you could make a pretty reasonable case that Hart may be the more valuable commodity, but if you're just looking at hitting...I don't see it. Look, I'll acknowledge that Prince may eat his way out of the league eventually, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect that to happen before he's 28, which is all the Brewers really need to worry about.

I was gonna post in the Soriano thread about how dumb the Cubs are for calling up Hoffpauir instead of Murton (I mean, what do they have against that guy anyway? Whose daughter did he sleep with?). I got halfway through my post, and I lost heart. Sure, Hoffpauir has drawn all of 2 walks all season in the minors, but I'm sure he'll somehow hit 370 / 380 / 550 until Soriano is back anyway. Everything the Cubs do this season, no matter how dumb it is (Edmonds over Felix Pie? Ha Ha Ha Ha...oh, wait, what?...Edmonds is hitting again?...Gotta be kidding me...), works like a charm. No, scratch that, like a fairy dust-laden catchless magic monkey paw obtained from a genie-in-a-bottle.

I think that the trend we're seeing is that it is fairly easy to lock up pre-arb guys when their first arbitration hearing is at least a couple seasons away. That's not true for Hart or for Fielder. If they just wait until this offseason and do nothing, they know they're going to see a significant pay increase. Braun was going to have to play this season and the next at close to the league minimum, so he had a greater incentive to trade a couple of FA years for immediate money and security. Security is still an incentive for Fielder and Braun, but immediate money probably isn't as much of one anymore. Their first big paydays are coming soon whether they sign an extension or not. They could probably still get either player to sign an extension that takes them through their arby years, but I sorta doubt either of them would be willing to delay FA eligibility at this point. Without that concession from the player, the team doesn't really have much incentive to guarantee them a boatload of money.

Witrado with an update: http://blogs.jsonline.com/brewers/archive/2008/06/12/hardy-to-be-evaluated.aspx Not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, Hardy says he could have played today and the article indicates he "passed all his strength tests." On the other hand, no one is quite sure what's wrong, which is always worrisome.

TH reporting Weaver's release as well: http://blogs.jsonline.com/brewers/archive/2008/06/12/brewers-release-weaver.aspx Not that I'd mind if Seth keeps the good work up, but he can feel free to turn back into a pumpkin now. They'd have no choice but to go to Villy or DiFelice, who are both superior options anyway.

Circumstantial evidence exists to suggest that this particular PED might have been in use long, long before anyone might have initially suspected: Link

Hey Josh...I don't know how many baseball teams are making good use of this data yet, but they should be. I didn't mean to imply that there were issues with how you framed the study -- just that the weird little uptick at the end of the curve (which initially struck me as pretty odd) was actually rather easily explicable as a simple selection bias issue. In no way does that undermine the validity of your findings. Matter of fact, I've enjoyed all the PITCHf/x articles you've put out at the Hardball Times. Keep 'em coming.

Russ -- I buy your account as an explanation for Sheets's resurgence from pitches 90 - 100. He probably typically expects to come out of the game at the end of the inning when he is throwing those pitches, so there's no point in keeping anything in the tank. Given his usage pattern, I also wouldn't find it that surprising that he isn't doing that as much after pitch 100, which would explain why the velocity drops back down. Put it this way, if you're Ben Sheets, and you're pitching really well (well enough that you're still in the game after 100 pitches), you probably should plan on finishing the game. Even if you're up by half a dozen runs. Sigh. Or, he's just usually too tired after pitch 100 to find the couple of extra mph when he reaches for it. That seems unlikely, though. While it's treated as some sort of mystical barrier, there is probably nothing particularly special about the 100th pitch. We humans like round numbers for some reason. I think that the sample-wide uptick after pitch 100 has more to do with the selection bias issues, though.

Maybe pitchers don't reach the 100+ pitch point unless they are throwing well. Excellent point -- this would contribute additional selection bias in the 100 - 110 pitch range.

I'd be fine with Hernan getting the spot starts against tough RHP. In fact, that might make more sense. Otherwise, why the bejeezus is he on the MLB roster? If they only use him as a PH, Nelson would have been far and away a better call-up.

Hall is probably significantly better at 2B than Dillon, but I wouldn't go so far as to say he's "vastly superior" to Dillon defensively, in general. Hall's been quite bad at 3B this year. UZR has him at -20 runs / 150 games. That's not quite Braun bad, but it's among the worst regular 3B in baseball. I think moving him off of 3B will help his defense, because 2B plays to his strengths (IF range, making plays on the move), whereas 3B is more of a reactions / instincts position. His middle infield UZR ratings were quite good while he still played those positions regularly. But if memory serves, advanced metrics have always disliked his defense at 3B, even before this season. Standard caveats about the reliability of advanced defensive metrics aside, of course. On the other hand, I really don't think it's out of the question that Dillon might actually be a better defensive 3B than Hall. So, the right move is pretty obvious, isn't it? Hall starts at 2B most days (maybe have Counsell spell him against high K-rate RHP), Branyan / Dillon platoon at 3B. If Hall can't be made to see the additional PT as a worthwhile tradeoff for being moved off 3B, then he's being awfully stubborn. If I was Hall, I'd be about ready to embrace a super-sub role again, if only to decrease the chances that I wash out of the big leagues completely once my contract is up. Odds that the Brewers actually do this? I'd go about 3-1 or 4-1 against. My guess is Hall sees 0 starts at 2B over the next week and a half.

They don't use DiFelice, so they might as well send him down. Whether they need him or not is a totally different question. I'm still quite convinced that DiFelice is among the 5 best healthy starting pitchers the organization currently possesses, especially if the plan is to keep Villy in the pen for the time being. With the drastic decline in Bush's peripherals this season, I'd probaby rather have DiFelice in the rotation than Bush. It should go without saying that he's a better option than the Seth McClung experiment. I'd rather have Stetter than Shouse in that situation (need a K), and also any time your LOOGY has to go through a RH hitter to get to the other LH hitter(s) you plan on having him face. Shouse's historical platoon differential is cataclysmically wide.

a starting pitcher is sometimes willing to rear back and give a little extra on his fastball to get the last out or two of his start. Complete speculation but, I wonder if it's these "max effort" fastballs that has more potential to hurt a pitcher? Interesting take on what is causing the uptick from pitches 100-110 for all pitchers. I think it might just be selection bias, caused by the widely-used 100 pitch pull-point for most pitchers. Ask yourself this, what kind of pitcher is routinely allowed to throw more pitches than 100? Is this pitcher less or more likely than a pitcher who is pulled by pitch 100 in virtually all his starts to maintain more of his fastball velocity throughout his start? I think the answer is a pretty clear "more likely", in fact, I think that it is pretty close to a truism that he would be. Doesn't Parra throw a split or at the very least more than one type and speed of fastball? I think that would explain his FB speed being all over the place. Pitch F/X shouldn't have too much trouble distinguishing between 4 seamers and splitters. There would be a mph difference and a movement difference. As a complete aside, has anybody ever actually seen a Parra splitter? Every time Rock asks "was that the splitter?", I think it was just a change-up. If he does throw one, iit's not often.