bill hAll Star

I'm telling you guys - if the ball remains juiced next season, guys like Eric Sogard, Tommy La Stella, and LaMehieu become coveted assets. Those guys get the biggest benefit. If the ball is not juiced, Sogard is in AAA, La Stella is an MLB utility man, and DJ is a slightly above average starting 2B. This isn't a "aw shucks we don't know how these guys will do outside of Coors." We do. Luckily for DJ he lost one cheat code and gained another cheat code. LaMehieu's spray charts and hard hit %s remained very similar. He didn't hit the ball in the air any more than he used to. Because of the juiced ball and his approach at the plate, he maintained a Coors Field BABIP (the ultimate batting average cheat code) outside of Coors Field. That's all it was. Take away the juiced ball and he hits .275. Somebody find me an MLB mainstay that was a better hitter away from Coors other than career regressions like Murphy or Desmond. The list is essentially empty other than DJ in the juiced ball year. Everyone else falls off a cliff other than oddities like this.

DJ LeMahieu is a good example: 2018 H/R splits H: 317/360/433 R: 229/277/422 2019 Yankees line: 327/375/518 I addressed it a few posts. He is a unicorn. He is the type of hitter that thrived with the juiced ball. Players that hit the ball hard to all fields turned into superstars (see: La Stella, Tommy and McNeil, Jeff). He went to Yankee Stadium which is easier to hit home runs in than Coors is. He hit 19 there and only 8 on the road. I think it's pretty easy to have a better prediction of guys outside of odd things like that happening. Unless a guy goes to the 2nd best hitting park and the baseball gets juiced, nothing like this will ever happen again. If they unjuice the baseball next year, DJ is going to hit roughly .270-.280 as he did on the road prior to Coors Field. With the Yankees he may go a bit higher than usual and hit 20 homers instead of his 10-15 he did with the Rockies because Yankee Stadium is a better HR park (especially for his swing) than Coors. Everyone else that has left Coors Field recently has gone as expected. Just chop roughly .100, maybe .150 depending on the hitter and new ballpark off of their OPS. Other than guys like Charlie Culberson who was just a rookie when he played his Coors seasons and then developed into a better player years later, you can't really find many other examples of guys that have put up better numbers after they left.

We as simple fans can make reasonable guesses. Very smart organizations like the Yankees and Brewers actually have the tools to make a pretty good guess at these things. One of the only successful players to leave there in recent times is DJ Lemahieu and I think they guessed that he'd hit enough homers over the short RF porch that it was worth it. He also is a great defender and as I noted before, the juiced ball was huge for him. Likely more than it was for others. Trevor Story is already a passable hitter outside of Coors. It's not like he'd go belly up at the plate away from there. Story is actually trending right along the Tulo path. If Tulo was healthy, we'd have seen great defense + decent offensive numbers in Toronto. He only had one season that we can really look at (2016), and he put up a 3 WAR in about 3/4 of the season with a .761 OPS (I'd bump Story's numbers up a bit if we still have the juiced ball next year). Thing is, though, the Blue Jays got Tulo at age 30. The Brewers will get Story in his age 27 season in this scenario. Corey Dickerson similarly was a completely reasonable hitter outside of Coors as expected. He dropped from roughly a .900 OPS guy to probably an .800 OPS guy. Problem is, he is a poor corner outfield defender. Not much use for him. I would reasonably project Story putting up a .265/.325/.450 slash line with 25 homers for the Brewers and good/great defense. If the ball remains juiced, maybe bump all of that up slightly. Tulowitzki did about as expected other than age/injury. Right about what I'd put Story at above. He just got old and fell apart so he underwhelmed those modest expectations in part of his time there.

My biggest concern is Story's performance away from Coors. At Coors, he puts up a 1.000 OPS. Away from Coors, he's an .800 OPS. The latter number is not bad for a SS, but it's not great. I'd be afraid we'd get a good, but not great player, who will be really expensive, and under control for only three years. Still, it's an interesting idea. I like Gray (and Hoffman as a throw in). And many players thrive outside of Coors (look at LaMahieu). It's not like Story couldn't adjust to playing in a different environment. LaMahieu is a perfect hitter for the juiced ball and Yankee Stadium is almost as good of a park as Coors. Better for homers (but not even close for AVG/XBH). But DJ squares up the ball well to all fields, which is the type of hitter that absolutely thrived on the juiced ball this year. He basically hit a ton of juiced ball homers in Yankee Stadium this year. That's the explanation for his explosion away from Coors. He used to be terrible playing away games. All of that said, the benefit of Story, even if he's a .780 OPS guy outside of Coors, is that he's a great defender. That means he's a really good shortstop. Hiura plays bad defense at a not-important position but might be a better bat. Wade Davis was fine outside of Coors the past few years. He fell apart late this season away but I think he'd be a useful bullpen arm to potentially revive. Hoffman is probably a lost prospect but could be revived to give you 2-3 nice years of pitching control. I like this deal. I'd do it.

I think the biggest problem lies with finding an answer to these two questions. Means is among the top 2-3 assets in the entire Orioles organization. I don't think he's all that valuable to the Orioles. Not only did he regress back to what he is (a back-end rotation MLB starter) as the season went by, but he doesn't line up that well with their window, anyways. Sure, he'll have 2-3 years of control left when the Orioles hope to be contending in 2022 or so, but it's possible that he fades by then anyways. If someone wanted to give up a future asset for Means, I bet they'd take it. Teams will want him as a decent MLB pitcher with upside but I don't think there is a line of teams offering high end prospects. Means' BABIP was extremely low and he had a relatively high LOB%. He's got a nice changeup to stick in the league, but it's possible that he's up to a 4.50-5 ERA next year and completely forgotten about. If Stearns thinks he has something to work with then I'll trust it but otherwise I'd pass unless he's given away nearly for free.

I guess the summary of what I’m saying is the Nats and Cards can both cover all of the innings with good pitchers. The Cards starters will mostly go shorter but have a deeper bullpen. It’s not like the Nats are the Twins, where if Berrios/Odorizzi/Rogers didn’t throw shutouts in all of their innings, they HAD to pitch an Uber driver and that group wouldn’t be making up ground. Ok, end of thought. It looks like the first Nats starter IS pitching pretty well...

That's the path to victory for the Nats. And ultimately they beat both the Brewers and Dodgers by winning games in the late innings. But I think the Cardinals are smart and talented enough to get these games to the bullpen where they will have an edge. “Nats bullpen” evokes negative thoughts, but they have 3 good relievers in Doolittle, Hudson, and Rainey and Corbin/Scherzer may fill in a bit. If the Nats are using their 4th/5th/6th best bullpen arms that means that the Cards have roughed up Max Scherzer or Stras handily. They don’t have to use the bad bullpen guys unless things have gone sideways. You can say, “the Nats starters have to be really good” but you can just as easily say, “Dakota Hudson for 5 + Brebbia for 2 have to be good enough to beat Strasburg’s 7 innings” because that’s what the matchup is.

I know that we discussed this on the other thread, but what is stopping the Nats from (other than game 1), having Scherzer/Strasburg/Corbin covering 70% of the innings with Rainey, Hudson, and Doolittle covering almost all of the rest? And Sanchez is fine to use a bit. If the Cards light up one of the Nats' starters, they can just punt the game with Rodney and whichever other garbage men they have on the staff. That could be described as, "need near perfection from their starters," but that is just as likely as the Cards cobbling together middle/late innings from their superior bullpen. The only difference is that the Nats will have to bat their pitcher a bit more often. All you need to really map out is the innings that good pitchers will pitch. The Cards have a good starting staff and a deeper bullpen but the Nats have an elite rotation that they can creatively use to cover just as many innings. I don't really have a take on this series but if I had to pick, I'd take the Nats given they will have the slightly better pitching for the series for pretty much all of the innings. FWIW, the Nats are -135 to win the series in Vegas (which means they are slight favorites).

I don't think it happens, but wow that would be an incredibly terrifying rotation. I can't think of a better rotation in recent memory. Maybe the Hamels, Lee, Halladay, and Oswalt from the Phillies comes close. We only saw it for half a season and Greinke has been iffy (but he's the Thor match, who is also up-and-down), but what about the current Astros rotation?

The problem is Joe Kelly has been a 1-inning guy. He should have never been brought out for that second inning of work, regardless of where his pitch count stood. Kelly worked more than an inning 7 times this year by my count and was not bad in doing it. He also breezed through his first inning of work so pitch count wasn't an issue, which I know you acknowledged, but maybe Roberts thought that Kelly was his best guy left and wanted him to pitch to Rendon/Kendrick (he got to walk Soto). I am not totally against your idea, though...I especially might've taken him out of there once he got into trouble

Granted, if the Brewers are competitive at the deadline, maybe it ends up being an opportunity lost instead of an offseason "help both sides" trade, but if I'm the Dodgers, I'm waiting until the trade deadline if I have a directive to go out and overpay for relief help. The Padres are improving but they should be up by 10 games at the deadline. Make your move then. Also, I know that Kershaw is "playoff Kershaw" and all, but you still got to run Clayton Kershaw out there, Maeda who was dominant, and then Joe Kelly...and that might be the punchline to a joke to some, but Kelly was very, very good after May this year. Better than Hader. Just as most logical Brewers fans will say, "well, Hader has his warts but we were missing Knebel (and others) putting him on an island and in that game there was a broken bat hit, a weird HBP call, and an error...I'm not THAT worried about Hader" you can justify the same for Kershaw and Kelly. One of the homers off of Kershaw was dug out of the ground. I don't have much of an excuse for Kelly but he was filthy over the past 5 months of the season and hadn't had many issues other than that one inning in the playoffs. It's the cruel reality of baseball playoffs and a small sample. "If we want to win a title, Hader, Knebel, Burnes, and Woodruff are the guys we need to build around and then we need to add more bullpen pieces. Jeffress choked." This is not a perfect analog/comparison from 2018 to 2019 but now Hader somewhat choked after he was our reliable playoff pitcher in 2019. Burnes fell apart. Point being, you can say, "these are the guys that choked in the playoffs last year, we need to add new, reliable pieces" only to have those "new, reliable" pieces be the Achilles heel in your next playoff run. Of course you can always minimize the chances by adding as many good players as possible, but it's harder than just saying, "our [really good] bullpen choked. Let's get different guys in here and see if they don't."

The Twins have a lot of money to spend even with relatively cheap ownership. They need to drop roughly $75 million of 2020 dollars on pitching.

Any model where you can stretch your good pitching to cover 90+% of the playoff innings can work. You could be the Astros or somewhat the Yankees and have a $200 million payroll + a well-drafted team and have Verlander open with a lock-down bullpen to finish. That is preferable. But if you've messed up your bullpen depth over the past few years like the Nats or you're the Brewers and don't have the payroll for a Scherzer or Kershaw, you have to get creative. The Brewers bullpenned their way to it, the Nats are creatively using their starters. Of course you're risking guys tiring out or having zero fallback if something unforeseen happens, but it's the best risk to take. It's a better idea than not using Scherzer or Corbin out of the pen with a small lead late in the game because, "well, this is baseball, we're supposed to call on Fernando Rodney here." Personally I believe that Miguel Sano and Eddie Rosario were "pressing with RISP" because they were facing Zach Britton or Luis Severino or Chapman or Chad Green or Ottavino instead of Buck Farmer or Hector Santiago. The Twins essentially did not face a bad pitcher all series. Loaisiga is a good pitcher but I guess hittable and Lyons is hittable. They faced those guys for 2 innings in garbage time on Saturday and that is it. So it is not surprising that an offense that put up numbers with a juiced ball mostly against bad pitching did not do all that well against the Yankees with a bunch of All Star pitchers. The Yankees did get 4 runs on Tyler Duffey, a solid reliever. Beyond that, almost all of their runs came against: -Kyle Gibson (marred by e.coli all year) -Zach Littell -Cody Stashak -Randy Dobnak Berrios, Odorizzi, Rogers all did great. Romo was OK. So personally, I think the Yankees had slightly superior hitters hitting against a bunch of replacement level pitchers. The Twins were "pressing" against 95% All-Star/Hall of Fame pitchers. That's the difference. I'm not sure the Twins were pressing...I don't know if even the clutchest of hitter is going to do much off of Adam Ottavano or Chad Green after his mechanical adjustments made him unhittable this year. Those guys throwing their best stuff is going to get anyone out.

That was my point. Because they don’t trust their bullpen they had to use starters in unfamiliar roles and it wasn’t working. Now their starters might be out of whack, though Scherzer fought through for 7 innings to tie up the series. I think it's worked out as well as it can with their starters. Similar to the Brewers getting to the 8th inning over the heavily favored Scherzer/Strasburg combo, the Nats, a very good team, have cobbled together their starters as well as they can to creatively get to Strasburg in an elimination game against the favored Dodgers.

It does to me. The Brewers had pieces to assemble a dominant bullpen. The Twins had Rogers. That's it. Romo is a guy that will get lit up in these situations. After the Pineda suspension and given that Berrios' velocity had been ticking down all year, they were going to have to expect to bullpen 75% of the innings...except Woodruff, 2018 Burnes, Hader, Knebel, and [eh] Jeffress were not walking through that door. The weirdest thing to me is they correctly chose to bullpen game 2 and then didn't use their 2-3 best guys. So you've got a terrible pitching staff at this point of the year and an offense that mostly thrives on popping homers against Hector Santiago and Buck Farmer. You're facing actual prolific power hitters and a dominant bullpen with decent enough starters. Not going to end well.

To be fair to the Nats, their bullpen implosion in the losses has been Patrick Corbin in game 3 and in game 1 they weren't winning anyways. They are being creative to only use their 3-4 good/great starters and the very top end of their bullpen unless they are punting the game. The Dodgers are just that good.

Hader would've started the inning and someone would be ready if he got over 45 pitches. Odds are, that would be Guerra or Peralta or Lyles getting 1 or 2 outs.

It's still early but Dubon may have the career that [if Pomeranz doesn't stay and Black is nothing special] will draw fans' ire even if it shouldn't. I foresee a Freddy Galvis with the juiced ball future for Dubon. A high batting average, steals, and homers with the juiced ball and the casual fan being impressed with his lack of strikeouts. Of course, he'll be the type that could and should be DFAed at any moment since he is not an elite defensive player and carries a bad OBP along with not a great SLG, but that won't stop the casual fan from complaining that we really botched it because, "he's hitting .270 with 19 homers and 22 steals. What were we thinking?" Especially given the understandable dislike of having Arcia in there every day.

I think there is a very strong suitor for Cole in the LA Angels.. Apparently he grew up 10 minutes from their park and as a huge Angels fan.. That would be such an Angels move too. He makes them better but not significantly and signing Cole would mean he, Pujols, and Trout are making about $100 million a season between them. Add in Justin Upton and that's about $125M for 4 players. That's about the Brewers whole payroll this year. Good luck putting together a halfway decent team with the budget space you have left without a top flight minor league system. They've kinda done this every year but it is becoming more and more imperative. Before Trout signed the extension it was, "well, who knows if Trout is here in 2021, I know that we're overpaying _____ but let's just do it because this is our chance to win with Trout given our farm system isn't going to support him anytime soon." Now that they have him, though, his extreme prime will be over soon and actually adding an ace pitcher could make sense. Their minors system is OK but obviously still the reason they're struggling. All of that said, other than Upton, their big/bad contracts are clearing soon. Simmons is potentially worth the $ but he's gone after 2020. Cozart's dead $ is gone after 2020. Pujols is gone after 2021 and maybe he retires since he is likely already in his mid 40s. Yeah, they may be starting another stretch of bad contracts if Trout begins to regress in 2022-2023 and Cole fades as well, but I actually think if they can make this signing, they should. Don't go overboard outside of this but they still will have a reasonable payroll going forward. Top-heavy so they're going to have to pray that their farm system improves. There isn't much other of a way to do it other than trading Trout.

You can't just make Cain's salary disappear. I also don't think this adds up to $135 even if you can remove Cain, but I am not here to calculate that right now.

I'm assuming that he wants to risk this thing up to the end of his current deal to get one massive payday since he didn't get that chance before. I'm not sure how an injury that is going to keep him out ~2 months is going to change that.

I do find it funny that Maddon keeps lining up Quintana (granted, sometimes it may just happen by dumb luck) against the Brewers. Yes, the Brewers struggle against lefties. His his ERA is 3.04 against the Brewers since joining the Cubs which is nice but not that spectacular. If you take it from the middle of the 2018 season when the zomg they can't hit Quintana narrative began (I arbitrarily chose July 4), he actually has not been very good with a 4.37 ERA against the Brewers. Point being, a lot of the dominance when this whole narrative began was against Rickie Weeks, Corey Hart, Maldonado, Cody Ransom, Cesar Izturis. He threw 8 shutout innings against that group and 7 innings of 1 run ball against a team that had Hector Gomez, Adam Lind, Elian Herrera on it. Then he got in with the Cubs and had 2 great starts against a Brewers team that does have some carryover with this one. Point being in all of this: How good is Jose Quintana against the actual current crop of Brewers hitters? Slightly better than his career averages. But the stats always had to include the 2012/2015 games against teams with no carryover (other than Braun) because yeah, he must pitch really well against teams with blue and yellow jerseys or something.

He's coming home.

He's also not a CF. I really wish people would stop assuming that Grisham and Cain are interchangeable defensively. They are not. But that doesn't matter...many fans would be happy with a $120 million payroll and a LF playing CF instead of $135 million payroll with a 2 WAR CF getting paid $17 million in CF.

I'd just keep both unless the Brewers are dead set on some expensive piece to add in 2020 and we're right up against Attanasio's top budget. If Cain falls off a cliff and Grisham is truly good, then go to Grisham for good and let Cain be a 2 year/$35 million backup for 2 years in 21-22. I don't think the odds of Grisham emerging to a legitimate starter and Cain falling off the cliff both happening are that likely. In 2021, Cain's salary should not impede much even if he's useless. I wouldn't get rid of him just to get rid of him and run to the greener grass of Grisham.