umphrey

Jon Perrin 37 K 0 BB this year has me super interested

Flores earned it in the minors, he's only played 19 games for us and 12 for the Yankees last year. I think he should get 300 PAs this year one way or another.

It's pretty rare to see a guy with higher than 12% walk rate unless they are an elite hitter who pitchers are trying to avoid. Walsh is at 31% now.

He plays pretty good defense though. I'd give Broxton and Flores until June at least even if they never hit anything.

Freeman and Pena actually have pretty similar stat lines except Freeman held a decent ERA for a few extended periods of time

It was a fine trade for both sides, I'm sure they were happy to get 1B depth with options and they didn't need Broxton. They probably wouldn't have made the trade if they had to put Rogers on their 25 man.

I wouldn't feel bad about that trade if Segura puts up a 3-4 win season. I don't think he would do that in Milwaukee and if he does it in Arizona I think a change of scenery will have a lot to do with it.

Best: Davis trade Worst: Sardinas I guess? I liked the Davis trade because Nottingham is such a good fit for us. Sardinas for Flores was the most meh move for me because I don't like either player much. Flores is fine, but we just traded a util guy for a 4th OF. I wanted to defend the Lind trade a bit because we got 3 live armed teenagers which could potentially fill out a weakness in our farm system of high upside pitching. Didn't Stearns make the Flores trade before he got most of Kirk Nieuwenhuis, Rymer Liriano, Keon Broxton and Eric Young Jr? I don't think he makes that trade if he knows he has all those guys available.

A year ago I think he was untradable. Now I think we could salary dump and maybe get back a couple interesting prospects outside the top 100.

He needs to hit a little bit better but it is possible that we trade Aaron Hill next July and someone takes the other half of his contract and we basically pay him nothing. Especially if we play him around the diamond a little bit, a contender would pay $5M for an experienced utility guy assuming he can hit a little better.

If there was a player worth $300M and we could sign him for $200M I would want us to do it. Take any surplus value when possible. Won't be hard to trade a great player on a team friendly deal if needed.

Hypothetically if they were competitive in September who would pitch? Peralta and Nelson are the only ones with 170 inning experience so we have those 2 plus Garza (hopefully he takes his vacation in the summer) and Jungmann on his first full go around.

Starting out with 30 wins 20 losses is pretty much meaningless to me. Teams aren't going to be trading players at that time anyway. Hold out until the trade deadline and unless we are in division 1st place at that time we should trade away vets and call up rookies. The only guys that matter are Lucroy and Garza however and I guess Braun in theory. I want them to trade Lucroy this off season, Garza at the deadline and I have no idea with Braun.

I definitely think B is true. Rogers has been a very good hitter every year of his 5 year career and even though he's older, ages 28-32 are really nice for a 1B. Not to oversell him but I think he is a nice add for a team with tight payroll and some expendable prospects.

I checked, we are probably projected at 2nd worst behind the Rockies. Twins are close and the Reds might only be above us because they are extrapolating off 95 fluky innings from Raisail Iglesius and a John Lamb prediction entirely based off K rate that won't last.

Steamer is pretty good. Here are a couple noteworthy things about it if you're unfamiliar: 1. They predict FIP, and they pretty much assume FIP = ERA. FIP is mostly driven by strikeouts, walks, and HR rate. There are players that consistently overperform or underperform their FIP, and Steamer does not pick up on it. It's a big debate whether or not Jungmann is one of those guys, but all of the analytics are predicting he's not and that last year was a fluke. 2. It takes about 2 years of MLB time to get any certainty in Steamer. If Davies and Garza have 3.00 FIP/ERA at the all star break next year, Davies projection will improve drastically but Garza will not move hardly at all. Steamer doesn't know what to do with a guy like Davies but it knows Garza very well at this point. 3. To answer the "how they work" question, they look at fundamental stats as opposed to "luck" based ones and use those to build a predictive model, then adjust for age and level shift. For example, Davies averaged about 8 K/9 in the MiLB, so they think that will drop to about 7 K/9 with the increased difficulty. That goes in to a data model along with other numbers to predict FIP and ERA. Garza is in his 30s so they pretty much predict based on his last 3 years with a tilt towards the more recent data, and knock off a little bit for getting older. 4. Steamer goes bananas for strikeouts, and we don't have many high strikeout guys. Example: They are predicting a career year for Strasburg because he's been a 10 K/9 guy for a few years. On the other hand you have Edinson Volquez who started the WS tonight, good ERA but he hasn't reached 7 K/9 in the last 2 years so Steamer says he's pretty much Matt Garza. I don't disagree with this, Volquez is not good and I think Steamer is correctly calling him fluky. It's important to remember that these predictions are baselines. 1-2 guys could improve their ERA by a full run through luck or mechanical improvements, but Steamer doesn't include luck or mechanical improvements. Conversely, 1-2 guys will probably get hurt or be terrible, but we can easily replace with a guy who will throw a 4.5 ERA so a lot of these predictions are kind of like the worst possible scenario in our case.

Anyone can cherry pick counter examples but it's not rocket science to know that higher pick = better odds and higher draft budget. The last draft I followed closely was 2014 and there was a pretty big drop after the 4th player taken in that one. 2013 it was really the top 3. 2012 had a really strong top 2 and then was pretty deep through 11. Most years there has been a pretty big difference between a top 3 pick and 7-8 pick but it really depends on the class. http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/history/draft/draft.jsp#season=2014&player_name=&draft_type=JR&draft_team=&draft_round=&page=1&sort_order=&sorted_by=

We still need to figure out a way to get a #1 pitcher without trading away Arcia or Phillips (or whoever our top prospects are in 1-3 years). Top 5 pick next year would really help.

If it was me I would press a little bit and float the idea that I have other prospects in the works. Say something like "I would really like to work for your company, it is my first choice, but I don't intend to stay available on the market for long". Showing confidence in my abilities has always worked in the past. Make sure to time it right, maybe it's best to do that kind of thing early Monday morning rather than later in the week and if you have any feel for the flow of their business try to do it during a positive time.

Disagree, he has some improvement to do to crack that list. There are some MiLB players like Seager, Baez and MLB 2B like Dee Gordon and Ben Zobrist I would easily take over Segura as well. 1 Brandon Crawford 2 Jung-ho Kang 3 Xander Bogaerts 4 Adeiny Hechavarria 5 Carlos Correa 6 Francisco Lindor 7 Andrelton Simmons 8 Alcides Escobar 9 Asdrubal Cabrera 10 Jhonny Peralta 11 Wilmer Flores 12 Brad Miller 13 Didi Gregorius 14 Jose Iglesias 15 Troy Tulowitzki 16 Freddy Galvis 17 Zack Cozart 18 Eugenio Suarez 19 Erick Aybar 20 Ryan Goins 21 Nick Ahmed 22 Marwin Gonzalez 23 Marcus Semien 24 Jose Reyes 25 Ian Desmond 26 Ruben Tejada 27 J.J. Hardy 28 Eduardo Escobar 29 Elvis Andrus 30 Jordy Mercer

I always thought the energy was good for the team. I can't remember him looking for trouble too many times but he isn't one to run away from it.

He would be a starting 1B/DH on a team that finishes 3rd or 4th in their division. You could put him on a team that's built around OBP more than the long ball, bat him 5th or 6th and rest him twice a week against LHP and he would be productive but not the kind of guy that is worth $10M/year. On the open market maybe someone gives him 2/$25M or something like that based on his nice 2013 but I think that would be grasping at straws.

I thought day stats were usually better because there are more games against Sunday lineups

Baez was similar, he went to the MLB and struck out 40% of the time and he's still waiting on a 2nd try. Joc Pederson is striking out 30% of the time, hitting very good though. Springer has been great with 30% K rate. If he can keep it under 30% I think he can be fine maybe even good.

We are hoping for Lara or Gatewood but Gatewood is 19 and has real problems with contact and strikeouts while Lara is 17 and we don't really know what his problems are yet. If I had to guess who our 3B is in 6 years: Lara, Gatewood or the field I would pick the field. Dave Denson needs to save us all as the only 1B or 3B listed in our prospects top 30