Brawndo the Thirst Mutilat

Strongly disagree. You have to project Mark Ellis as very nearly as good a hitter as Hudson. Their career OPS+ is identical at 99. Ellis is just one year older. Only reason Hudson gets the nod at all offensively (as opposed to declaring it a dead heat) is that he's coming off a better season than Ellis, but this will likely make Ellis somewhat cheaper. The main difference between these two players is that Ellis is by far the best defensive 2B in the big leagues, while Hudson is merely good. Advanced defensive metrics aren't perfect, but every year every one of them has Ellis at least 20 runs better than his peers (often it's closer to 30 runs better than his peers). If there is one player in the bigs I'm dead certain is worth 2 or 3 wins with his glove, it's Mark Ellis. If you gave me a choice between the two, even at equal dollars, I take Ellis without blinking. But, as I said, I suspect Ellis will be cheaper, which in my view makes it impossible to choose Hudson. I do agree that nobody else on that list is remotely worth thinking about in terms of displacing Weeks.

Since we've seen how closely TGJ's MLEs match up with his actual MLB performance, maybe folks would be curious about Escobar's MLEs. 2007 -- 254 / 281 / 296 2008 -- 281 / 318 / 361 He'll only be 22 in December, and it should be expected that he's still improving. As for whether that makes it reasonable to expect something better than that 2008 MLE line if he is a regular next year...color me sceptical. I think his 2008 numbers were close to the top of the range of possible outcomes given his current true talent hitting ability. Given his lack of power and discipline, I don't think it is fair to expect him to come in and help the big league team with his bat in 2009. I would put the following as a reasonable ceiling and floor for what to expect from Alcides in 2009 if he's at the big league level: pessimistic -- 265 / 295 / 315 optimistic -- 290 / 325 / 370 If he is close to the bottom end of that, there is almost no way his glove can make up for his presence in the lineup every day. Even if he's the best SS in the majors with the glove, that wouldn't be good enough -- he'd have to be Ozzie Smith, i.e. a once-in-a-generation defender. If, however, he is close to the optimistic projection, he'd be a real asset if he can save 15 - 25 runs more than an average SS with his glove, which might be within his capabilities. So is he ready for the bigs or not? This is one of those really tough, close decisions that I think an intelligent GM could go either way on. Depends how much gamble you've got in you, and what the alternatives are.

This is almost certainly correct. Moreover, I've always suspected (without really knowing) that this is (generally speaking) the way all journalists are trained to view their work. You know, I get it -- capitalist society and all, gotta write what sells papers in the style that sells papers. But it's as if, as a society, we never for a second stopped to think about whether everyone writing newspaper and magazine articles, television programs, films, books, etc.etc. for an audience they regard as much stupider than themselves might be making the stupid audience even stupider, if it is not in fact actually creating the stupid audience in the first place. I've read the Federalist Papers. I blame James Madison. I know my post on the Kendall blurb comes across as condescending and mean-spirited...but the thing is, either these guys really are that dumb, or they really are that cynical, which in my view is far far worse.

Here's my other favorite tidbit from the article, from the Kendall capsule: batted .351 with runners in scoring position and less than two out This really caught my eye, because you always see the inverse stat as a measure of clutchness. Why would we care about Kendall's RISP performance with less than two outs rather than his RISP performance with two outs? Well, because we have started with the thesis that Kendall was / is a clutch hitter (probably because he's gritty and doesn't strike out), and we are searching for evidence that backs up this thesis. This is the paradigmatic example of the exactly perfectly wrong way to use statistics. So, anybody as curious as me about how Kendall fared with RISP and two outs? .123 / .313 / .185 You can almost see the hamster wheel spinning in Witradocourt's head. "Kendall is clutch. Gotta show the readers that. How did he do with RISP? Crap, only .246. That's exactly what he did overall. How about with two outs? Supercrap, .123. That's terrible. Wait a minute -- if he was .246 overall with RISP but only .123 with two outs, that means that...by God...that means something...wait, almost got it..."

All the MLEs you could ever want, as well as minor league split data going back a number of years, can be found at Jeff Sackmann's wonderful http://www.minorleaguesplits.com/. TGJ's MLE OBPs: Last year: .296 Career: .313 TGJ's actual career OBP in about half a season's worth of PA: .300 Not only isn't he a viable leadoff hitter, he really isn't worth a roster spot in any capacity. We've already seen that it's difficult to find a manager who won't be tempted to use him as a PH in rather critical late game situations. You really shouldn't keep an OF on the roster just to be a pinch-runner and late game defensive replacement.

FtJ, you know we're boys and all, but I'm pretty sure Junior Spivey is quite available right now if you'd like him back. People seem to hate Weeks because he was supposed to be a superstar, and he isn't (at least, not yet). I don't get it. I mean, I'm disappointed he hasn't hit better too, but that doesn't make it impossible (or even difficult) for me to see that a currently slightly below average starting 2B who is still cost-controlled for a few more seasons (3, right?) is actually a rather valuable player. Disappointing does not equal bad, much less sufficiently bad as to warrant being thrown overboard (maybe keel-hauled is a better metaphor for they way some would seem to want to have it). His defense has improved to livable-with, it's just that a rangy error-prone guy (Weeks) seems like a worse defender than a sure-handed statue (Durham) because it's easier to see his mistakes. Throw in the fact that his IsoP and BB% make him a candidate for a huge breakout season if he ever figures out how to hit line drives again instead of popups (year to year LD%: 20.5%, 20.5%, 17.1%, 15.1%) and I just can't see why anyone would want to "give up" on him. I'm still convinced that his breakout hitting season is coming next year or the year after that, and until it does, he just ain't killing the team like some around here seem to think.

That's my reading. Of course, they don't tell you what the expectation level was, and they don't tell you what method of performance evaluation is being used to compare expected to actual, so it's not terribly easy to evaluate whether Witrado and the Prince of Darkness even did a good job executing this project as they saw it. The capsules provided for each player almost never talk about what the actual expectations were, but Mike Cameron's (B-) is one time that they do: "Strikes out far too often (team-high 142 times in only 444 at-bats) and .331 on-base percentage was much lower than expected." So, I'm not sure whether they expected fewer strikeouts from Cameron. It wouldn't have been entirely unreasonable to expect slightly fewer strikeouts -- he struck out 32% of the time this season vs. 28% for his career. That's not a huge difference, but K% is a super-stable stat, so it wouldn't be crazy to say he disappointed on that score. It would just be crazy to care very much (at least, from a retrospective analysis, grading past performance perspective -- if you want to argue that a slipping K% may signal an imminent age-related performance collapse, that's a different story, but that ain't what they're doing here). It is 100% clear that they expected a better OBP than the .331 Cameron posted. So did many around here, judging from posts I seemed to see all the time. Why anyone would have expected much more than that is totally beyond me. His career OBP is .340. Here is how several projection systems predicted his 2008 would go: ZiPS: .341 Marcel: .333 CHONE: .331 MINER: .314 (Whoa -- Sackmann really had him falling off a cliff. Missed on that one.) What did the J-S guys expect? .360? If .331 was "much lower than expected", it's got to be at least that, right? Given that this is one of only two places they talk specifically about the expectation levels that form the basis of these grades (the other being Kendall's punchless offense -- " what you'd expect"), it reallly makes one wonder how based in reality the expectation levels could be. Based on the available evidence, I give the "preseason expectations" that were used to derive these grades a grade of D, myself. Links, though I'm sure you all know where to find this: Player Grades Team Grades

DiFelice should be considered an option, and very likely a better one than Suppan. Possibly also better than McClung (one decent partial season does not a good SP make). Whether the Org sees it this way is doubtful, though, as they are a bit too radar-gun infatuated. Villaneuva could also be given another shot at starting. Guess I'd prefer to plan on DiFelice in the rotation, because McClung, Torres, and Villy could be a very nice back end of the BP, provided the manager is willing to go outside the one inning at a time, available every day Tony LaRussa BP model.

You can't outlaw conventional language usages without venturing into 1984-land, so I'm not on board with this plan. I am, however, totally on board with the requirement that quotation marks be added, the entire phrase capitalized, or a added at the end. Or, in keeping with board conventions, blue font. To wit, from now on, these are your choices if you wish to refer to this concept: "Big-Game Pitcher" BIG GAME PITCHER Big-Game Pitcher Big-Game Pitcher or, my favorite: "BIG-GAME PITCHER"

And last season, as a pinch hitter, Dillon hit .406 / .441 / .594. Of course, since both of these samples are less than 50 PA, they tell you essentially nothing about his actual hitting ability, which is orders of magnitude beyond Escobar's at this point in their respective careers.

The "versatility" of a player who has played exclusively SS his entire minor league career is cited as the reason that he was added rather than a player who has seen substantial playing time at 1B, 2B, 3B, and OF? Now I've heard everything.

MVP Will win: Pujols and Morneau Should win: Pujols and Sizemore Cy Young Will win: Webb and Lee Should win: Lincecum and Halladay

Totally understand that perspective, but mine is almost the polar opposite. This is why I exclusively cheer or boo (when I do boo, which is almost never) guys solely based on whether they are good or bad at baseball. I really have no idea whether they are bad people or good people, and I try very hard never to make any attempt to infer as much from their public actions of charity/selfishness or their comments/behavior toward media types. Gagne almost certainly used steroids -- for some people that is plenty enough to brand him a jerk for life.

I wasn't really being serious. Guess I could have made that more obvious. That whole paragraph was supposed to be over-the-top belligerence to demonstrate that Mota doesn't have any right not to be criticized -- nor can anyone -- since I was able to say that. You can say that I was wrong to say it, but that doesn't mean I didn't have the "right" to say it (in Hobbesian terms, a right is basically a power). So if Mota has the "right" to have people get off his back, but I have the "right" to say something as awful as I hope he dies of syphilis, where does that leave us? There were parts of that diatribe that were more sincere than others, but the end bit about syphilis was decorative. I apologize if I've offended anyone.

There is no such thing as the sort of "right" of which you speak. If anybody disagrees, s/he should google "George Carlin you have no rights" and check out the youtube clip (as long as you're not at work or around sensitive ears), then realize that the notion of rights Carlin lays out right at the end of the clip is basically identical to the notion Thomas Hobbes had when he coined the term (at least in it's modern philosophical form). Everything anybody else has attempted to do with the concept of rights since then has been wishful thinking. If you don't believe me, allow me to demonstrate: Guillermo Mota as an ugly, sucky schlub, perenially overvalued by baseball men who fetishize radar gun readings and can't figure out why someone with such nasty stuff should be so useless at getting hitters out. He has been in MLB about 4 years longer than he needed to be, despite the fact that he's been lousy his entire career, with the narrow exception of a 1.5 year anomoly when he was a quality setup man in LA (and very likely sharing needles with Gagne). This 1.5 year anomoly has snowed a long line of GMs into acquiring Mota, and a similarly long line of managers into believing he'd be a good option in high leverage short relief situations. Said beliefs have gone a long way toward costing a fair number of these poor fools their jobs. I do not care how well he has pitched over his last 20 IP, I still fervently hope he dies of syphilis. I can say all of that if I feel like it, and nothing Mota can do can earn any sort of anything that would prevent that. Besides, even if that was possible, 20 IP isn't enough to do it. Heck, Prince Fielder had one of the top 5 offensive seasons in franchise history last year, and that obviously didn't earn him a right to avoid an endless stream of fat jokes 'round these parts in '08, just because his performance fell off a little bit. On the level, all the good will Mota will get from me is that I'm quite glad he didn't torpedo the whole darn season pitching all these important innings lately (e.g. the way he torpedoed the Mets' season last year).

I don't want the team I follow to employ much (if any) small ball for a myriad of reasons, most of which have been mentioned by others already in this thread. But that isn't why I hate small ball. I hate small ball because of garbage like this: What's Brewin': Small ball lights a fire By my count, the Brewers attempted 3 bunts last night. CC bunted into a DP in the 3rd. Hardy bunted successfully in the 6th, and it is possible that without employing the sacrifice there, the team fails to score the 1 run it ultimately scored on Hart's sac fly. Hall bunted unsuccessfully in the 7th, possibly wrecking a shot at a big inning. In the inning that really mattered, the 3-run 4th, nothing remotely resembling a small ball strategy was used, and if it had been (if at any point they'd given up an out), the Brewers very likely would have cost themselves the opportunity to eventually draw 2 bases-loaded walks and score what proved to be the game winning run. Yet this author feels it is appropriate to attribute the win to Dale Sveum's precious small ball philosophy, because the team scored 4 runs on just 2 hits. And this is the kind of reasoning I see as more or less omnipresent among those that cover baseball for a living (tv, radio, print, online...pretty much everywhere outside of a few stat geek websites). In a shallow, superficial, meaningless sort of way, I guess this helps baseball fans that think they're more than casual fans feel superior to chicks that dig the long ball, or something. What other possible point or purpose this sort of blatantly misleading (deliberately dishonest?) story could serve...well, I got nothing.

Haikus hard to write? Nonsense, I say. Just you wait... 'Til limerick night.

...which, I must say, would be a fine career trajectory for him. Especially given that the Brewers already figured out he's not an IF and moved him to a position where he's already probably something of an asset, and in time might truly excel. It took Soriano's various teams more than half a decade to figure that out.

Our only hope for a Counsell start-free playoff run is probably a Sept. call-up for Gamel (fairly likely), coupled with an insanely hot run of hitting in whatever limited action he sees (less so) and no defensive miscues if he gets any early action at all at 3B (now I'm feeling like a bit of a dreamer), resulting in a "he forced his way into the lineup" type scenario for the last week and a half or so (Yost bench Counsell? Is that a flying pig?), followed by even more insanely hot hitting and mistake-free defense (might as well buy a lotto ticket). My gut says that Branyan's pre-injury benching is a strong clue he won't be back, even if healthy. Hall's not going to suddenly earn his way out of the platoon and into the regular lineup, because single season splits are all Yost has ever cared about, and there is just no way Hall will get enough PA against RHP to raise his .166 AVG against them far enough for Yost to believe that he can hit them again.

Another way of describing it would be that Mota has been 3-hittable his last 8 IP. Stink for 4 years (and for 8.5 years in a 10 year career), and you'll find it takes somewhat more than 8 innings worth of successful pitching to change my opinion that you stink. Bateman's career MLE FIP is a very solid 3.83, though his historical platoon splits would make it difficult to trust him against good LH hitters (career MLE FIP vs LH = 5.47). He's certainly worth a look, and I don't think Robideux was a bit out of line for suggesting he's probably better than Mota. He's probably better than Gagne too, and maybe half the rest of the bullpen. We'll have to see whether they're willing to add him to the 40 man. Could be that with Dillard, DiFelice, and Stetter returning, they won't really feel a pressing need to do so. I hope they do...he's a lot like Steve Bray in that scouts are surely so thoroughly unimpressed by his stuff that if he struggles (even for a short duration) early next season, he'll likely find himself back in AA and permanently off the team's radar, which is a shame given all the success he's had to have in order to get this close.

Albert Pujols is a classless d-bag? Buh-buh-buh-but he's too good a Christian to have used steroids. How can this be? Say it ain't so, Al...

With respect to AVG and it's place as a slash stat in AVG / OBP / SLG, there are a couple reasons why it is useful to include it. Take two hypothetical hitters with equal OPSes: Hitter A: 350 / 400 / 500 Hitter B: 250 / 400 / 500 If you ask me which of these two hitters I would rather have had (past tense) for the time these numbers were accumulated, I'd rather have had Hitter A. Hitter B is getting some more extra base hits, but that's not enough to offset the additional runner advancement value all Hitter A's extra singles have over all of Hitter B's walks. This is a rather narrow difference though, as almost all of a guy's real offensive value is captured by OBP and SLG. If both of these lines were posted over 600 PA, the difference would be less than 10 runs (measured by linear weights). If you ask me which of these two hitters I would rather have going forward (present and future tense), I'd rather have Hitter B, and it's not remotely close. Assuming this is all the information available for making the choice, you have to recognize that AVG is a lot less stable than IsoP (isolated power = SLG - AVG) and walk rate. Therefore, in making any kind of sensible estimate of true talent hitting ability (or any projection for future performance), you would regress AVG further toward the mean than the other rates, which will leave Hitter B as obviously the better hitter. The difference might look something like: Hitter A (true talent; future projection): 310 / 370 / 460 Hitter B (true talent; future projection): 260 / 390 / 490 That's a total guesstimate, but this shows one of the reasons why statheads around here are generally more Weeks-friendly than others. A low AVG is a sign you were somewhat less valuable than your OPS suggests in the past, but it is also simultaneously a sign that you are likely to post substantially higher OPSes in the future. A lot of other folks around here seem to think that Weeks will just continue to hit .230 forever.

You can't get from point A to point B in a single syllogism, but that doesn't mean the logic is wrong. If every team takes the free out at 3rd over the chance to prevent the run at home, then it is extraordinarily likely that the free out at 3rd is more valuable than the chance to prevent the run at home. Every team takes the free out at 3rd. Therefore, it is extraordinarily likely that the free out at 3rd is more valuable than the chance to prevent the run at home. If it is extraordinarily likely that the free out at 3rd is more valuable than the chance to prevent the run at home, then the team giving up the free out at 3rd is almost certainly helping the other team by giving them the free out at third. It is extraordinarily likely that the free out at 3rd is more valuable than the chance to prevent the run at home. Therefore, the team giving up the free out at 3rd is almost certainly helping the other team by giving them an out. I have to add the qualifiers because it is possible that every single team is wrong to take the free out -- just not remotely likely. I'm sure it won't be too hard for small ball fans to find a premise they disagree with here -- I've just seen way too many studies that conclude that every small ball strategy you can think of costs you runs in the long run because it underestimates the value of an out. Out conservation is paramount. Moreover, it should not be up to the runner at 2nd to decide whether Sveum was an idiot for sending the runner home, and by how much he was an idiot, and then (if he was a huge idiot that time) sacrifice himself to prevent Sveum from being exposed (as a huge idiot). The runner at 2nd should make his turn, wait to see if the throw goes home, then take 3rd if he thinks he can make it safely. If he doesn't think he can, or if they cut the throw off, he parks his keister on 2nd. If the runner is thrown out at home, that's on Sveum and not on the runner at 2nd. If Sveum is a huge idiot all the time, maybe they should think about getting a new 3rd base coach.

More grist for the mill that is the endless overestimation of the impact of deadline deals. The Sabathia acquisition is as big as you can get, and it's still ludicrous to propose that it has resulted in a 300% increase in attendance, even in the games he starts.

was not logically sound since it can be both a good offensive and defensive strategy by both teams at the same time. It can even be a sound strategy if every other team takes the easy out. Really don't think it can. Given that the runner from 3rd has already been sent home, either the guaranteed run plus the guaranteed out at 3rd is more valuable than the chance at an outless run / risk of a runless out, or it isn't more valuable. There is no way for it to be both more and less valuable at the same time, unless we're scrapping Aristotlean logic for something more extravagent (I could see Hegel arguing your side...). The fact that every team takes the free out at third is good evidence that they consider the guaranteed run plus the guaranteed out to be a more advantageous situation for them than the chance at a runless out at home. Either they are correct to do so or they are incorrect. rluz's numbers seem about right to me. Not sure if you'd need to factor in the opportunity cost of an out; probably that's already accomplished by looking at a good run expectancy table.