bill hAll Star

I fancy myself a entry-level statistician and all I really would say is you don't need to know what's going on. Just tell yourself that it's a pretty good valuation to be treated with skepticism. Just take it as a generally good measure and use your judgment to disagree with a handful of things with it. Recruiting rankings are a great tool 80% of the time. We all know that it is off on Wisconsin Badgers recruiting when projecting wins/losses (but it does tell us that when matched with Ohio State, they're still "out-talented" in football). So do things like that. Take it as a pretty good system but filter out the idea that the Badgers are the 35th best team in the country and that Tennessee is the 5th best. Beyond that, it's pretty darn good.

It's the same with KenPom in basketball or recruiting rankings. If someone takes the system and applies it as the bible, they'll be wrong. In both cases, the creators will admit that there are some factors that we just cannot judge and there is also just variance in real life, of course. That said, all of this stuff is "as good as we can get." Those are excellent systems to approximate with. I just laugh when I hear someone say, "recruiting rankings just don't matter! Look at all of those 2-star guys in the 1st round of the draft!" Well, yeah, they still are correct given that there is a much higher of 4 and 5 star guys. Rivals or 247 will admit to you that it's impossible to be much more exact than they currently are with 16 and 17 year-old kids...but it's pretty darn good overall. I'd rather have it than not have it.

The success all depends on the health of the young-ish guys they've had. If Heaney and/or Skaggs is back to form and Richards stays healthy, the rotation is fine. They probably need some bullpen help. Obviously this assumes that Ohtani doesn't need Tommy John. Ohtani Richards Skaggs Heaney JC Ramirez Shoemaker* Probably being a bit hopeful that Heaney returns to form and is truly an MLB caliber pitcher, but that's not too bad. They also have Shoemaker, but I'm not sure about him since he had surgery last year. He should be back but I'm not sure he'll be the same.

I think that infield has a great chance of being below average offensively. Should be outstanding defensively. At least those three guys should. 1B is another question. They may be throwing the statue formerly known as Albert Pujols. My guess is that Pujols has been demoted to almost strictly DH-only for 80% of the games that Ohtani is off. Pujols will face lefties as DH, a fair amount of righties when Ohtani doesn't pitch, and obviously will DH when Ohtani is pitching. Ohtani will pitch, DH 30-40 games against RHP, and be a pinch hitter off the bench. Just a guess. Valbuena/Cron will platoon at 1st. Maybe Pujols sees 10 random 1B games spanning between interleague and just games that he covers while there are random injuries/ailments/rest of other players. He only logged 50 innings at 1B last year.

Way too much. He'll be playing OF for the Phillies now, it seems.

9 games @Fenway/@NYY/@Camden/@Toronto each = 36 games = roughly 5 starts/year. 81 games @Tropicana now switched to @Miller = ~16 starts/year. Also factor in that Cincy and Chicago in summer are pretty much equal to the AL East parks he goes to so take that 5 number from above and let's call it 3. So he's traded out 16 more games at a HR park and got back 2 from switching divisions of road parks. I'd say he's got it harder now stadium-wise. Just say out of the 32-34 games he started in years past that he'd pitch 8 or 9 in hitter's parks. That number should now be about 20-23 depending on how many he gets/avoids in the NL West. Factor in that he's not facing the DH for the most part anymore and I'll call it a wash.

Addison Reed is the one guy I probably didn't want coming into this whole thing simply due to the fact that I think he's stable and pretty good but might be the one that comes attached with a 4-year commitment.

They also signed Drew Smyly and are probably looking into another deal.

That doesn't mean you throw it in the trash, though. xFIP can be tricked a bit by groundball pitchers but that isn't a reason for me to dismiss it entirely. It's useful. But I agree that I would not use it as a reason to slam the Brewers this year because I agree that that projection does seem quite low.

I'd sure hate to have been playing in the playoffs last year. Would you prefer the reference of the 2011-2012 Marlins offseason of Jose Reyes, Mark Buerhle and Heath Bell? Sure, but I'm not sure many people were truly crowning that team. I'm not disagreeing with the premise.

I'd sure hate to have been playing in the playoffs last year.

I don't really have any problem that that Fangraphs analysis except for the Brewers. I'm one that thinks we might have overachieved but I don't think we're a 73 win team. I'm sure if I nitpicked I could find a few other issues with teams in the middle but for whatever reason, they can't peg the Brewers. Kinda similar to when a lot of the ratings couldn't get the Royals for a year or two.

You also have to offset it a bit with the fact that he'd be pitching in Miller Park half of his games. Sure, he misses all of the hitter-friendly AL East parks but Miller Park would hurt his home numbers.

Now that's what I call perspective. Looking forward to the Brewers laughing at these other teams real soon, if not this year. We may laugh someday, but my issue is that I feel like the Cubs have been biding their time at around $170 million/year the last several years and will strike on Harper or Keuchel and pay a little tax for one year and then the payroll will slide back down again in years following that. Zobrist is gone after 2019 and Lester's deal goes down. Heyward's drops down next year. They have a lot of arbitration to pay for guys but they can squeeze a mega-contract in there. They essentially can bring back their entire current roster in 2019 for $170-175ish. They may not even have to go over the tax threshold to squeeze one of those guys in. It's true that Bryant/Rizzo/Hendricks/a lot of the rest of the gang is coming due after 2020 or 2021, but that is a pretty long ways off. I'm sure the Harper or Keuchel contract may look bad in 2022, but while I'm very patient on the Brewers and totally am on board with Stearns not going in on this year and just letting this play out over the next few years, I'd wish the Cubs would open the door up for us just a little bit more, a little bit earlier. I'm sure somebody will come in and tell me they don't think this year's Cubs team looks as good on paper due to some regression and guys like Arrieta/Davis being replaced with guys with a lot of risk, but I do think on the whole that the Cubs will field a 90+ win team in general for the next several years with maybe 100 again if and when they make their big splash after this coming season.

viewtopic.php?f=66&t=36142 I think he actually is looking for this one: Royals Trading Partners? - Danny Duffy, Whit Merrifield Merged the two threads discussing Danny Duffy and Whit Merrifield into one thread. Yeah, there it is. I must have been trying to access it while they were being merged or just clicking on the one that pointed to the old thread.

viewtopic.php?f=66&t=36142 There was like a 2-3 page discussion on Duffy and Merrifield along with it that disappeared and it was under a different title.

What happened to the Royals thread?

I'm not a huge fan of Merrifield, but I wonder if taking most or all of Hammel's remaining salary would help facilitate bringing in Merrifield for not much in prospect costs. If nothing else, I think with Hammel's slider that he might be a good reliever if he's open to it later this year or next.

Trade was to facilitate Piscotty being closer to his mother with ALS in NorCal. Dare I say...classy...move?

Saying this is no different than saying anyone can be traded at any time if offered the right deal, which will always be true It's a little bit different, because while we'd trade Knebel or Santana if blown away, we may still get an offer and say, "eh, we still could win this year." Yelich probably wants out and if the Marlins get a good offer of younger prospects, they probably should make the deal. There's much less of a reason to say no.

Yelich could definitely be traded. Sure, he's on a team friendly deal, but by the time they come back out of this rebuild he'll only have about 2 years left on it. If someone blows them away with an offer they'd definitely make it.

Did I miss something or are the Cubs and Cards set to lose a bunch of talent for 19 and 20 and not make more shrewd moves before then? Ever since the Cubs came out of the All Star game last year, Theo's been kicking Stearns behind and now we have the Cardinals getting just what they were after. I'm not sold that Stearns is some boy genius. He's hit on some and missed on others. But doing nothing won't cut it either. From reports that have surfaced it seems that his focus is all over the place whereas the main competitors are focused and getting done what they set out to do. I'm concerned because as of now, this roster isn't as good as the one that finished the year. Letting Swarzak go elsewhere for really an amount that is in line with other late inning relievers is concerning. Are they really ready to pay the going price for quality? Doesn't seem so. I'm extremely pleased that Stearns didn't dump a bunch of future value to try to chase the Cubs after the ASB this past year. The Cubs are unfortunately going to be good for another 3 years at least. The Cards, I'm not so sure about that. However, I don't see any way that the Brewers can easily catch the Cubs this year without dumping 3/4 of their prospects that all should be coming up to help overtake the division 3 years from now. And I think that this year and maybe next, we can still beat the Cubs. But let's not be foolish and blow our wad just so we can raise a banner for losing the division to the Cubs by only 3 games.

It really is unbelievable what that Fernandez death did. With the way their offense blossomed last year, they were a playoff contender if you add Fernandez to that team. I have no idea what the effect that would've had on the sale, but I'm not sure even Jeter would want to blow it up even given the goal to reduce payroll.

Stanton is a strange case because rarely do teams have to decide on getting out from under 10 year contracts of [still productive] players, but the Marlins are not making "head scratching moves." If you're saying that about the Marlins, you'd have been saying it about the Cubs and Astros 5 years ago.

He sure didn't know the value of Stanton. Man would I be upset if the Brewers had traded Fielder (Giancarlo) and Hart (Ozuna) around 2009 for the return the Marlins got. Well the other option was to let Ozuna walk 2 years from now after 70 win seasons and then be paying Giancarlo Stanton $30+ million/year for the next 8 years after that after he crosses the age of 30.