Thurston Fluff

ZiPS uses those 2 years of actual production. And mashes it all together to it to come up with something that inaccurately projected what his production would be in the past. I get that it is trying to project him going forward which is an inexact science. I even understand it very well could be a two year anomaly. I just don't get why you want him replaced for two bad months with someone who looks to be about the same type of player at this point. Let it play out. The team is doing well at this point so no radical changes need to be made. Especially with someone with limited AAA and zero major league experience.

Why does zips count more than two years worth of actual production? I ask merely for information.

I wonder how long the residual effects of that 19 inning game will last for the Reds. Hopefully one more series. That was an entire extra game they played other teams don't have to so that may have an effect on the Reds for a while. Overall I think the road woes are more coincidence than anything. Pitchers like Greinke, Marcum and Yo can pitch well anywhere and our offense is slowly but surly getting healthy. The only real issue with how they play on the road could be if it gets in their heads. It seems like RRR has reframed the focus from road vs home to how they are playing at the moment which might be a way to make sure it doesn't become mental a problem. All that said getting out of any trip 4-3 would make me very happy. More so against two very good teams. You guys have every reason to expect a series win in Cincy for the first time in a while. Our pitching is beat to hell and the bats aren't doing much at all. Trying to curse us?http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/devil.gif Please forweard me a lock of hair so I can hex you back.. Seriously though that sort of worries me. All team go through slumps like the Reds are in but few teams as good as they are stay in them long. Crossing my fingers it's at least two more games, hopefully three, before they get back on track.

There's no sample size with managers. So according to you it's possible to tell if a manager is good or bad based on one game? Decisions are very clear cut and purely mental. He has made bad decisions. In the vacuum of one baseball game yes. Over the coarse of a season I am not as willing to judge. Based on how one feels about the toll of playing daily effects a player's ability to play at a high level later, or other such nuances, maybe not so clear cut. When and how much someone plays now is often based on how much the manager plans on using them later. It is common to use bench players often early. It keeps the regulars fresh for the long haul and bench players sharp. It is also reasonable to expect managers to use players they don't know well in ways that allow them to get to know their real capabilities vs what they heard or read in reports or stat books. Once they see what said players can do they adjust accordingly. Those are all things that take time. Some things we can start to get a glimpse of. Like for instance moving Gomez down in the batting order or pinch hitting for Nieves late in games. Other things take more time. Like playing kotsay less and Hart more or how the Gomez, Morgan thing plays out. To me in game strategy is secondary to how hard the players will play for you. As long as you have the players in your corner and playing hard then I think you have 3/4 of the job covered. We'll see how the season plays out. That would be another thing I didn't mention that takes time to see. I couldn't agree more about how hard players play for you being primary over in game stuff.

Trying to judge a rookie manger based on 50 games is like judging a player based on his first 50 games. It just can't be done to any degree of accuracy so why even try? Is there really even a need to judge now? Doesn't attempting to now cloud the issue so it makes it harder to do so objectively when there is enough information to make one? Why is there such a rush to do so anyway? This is who we will have for at least two years and the team is winning despite more injuries than I thought it could survive and still win. Whether that has anything to do with who is the manager I have my doubts but it seems he isn't preventing the team from playing up to expectations. Given how little managers really matter anyway I'd say anyone who doesn't get in the way is all that is necessary to be getting one with at this point.

However, the problem I have is that Melvin, Ash, Roenicke...whoever it was, decided to fill out the CF and SS positions with Gomez and Betancourt. I think they decided Greinke along with Gomez and Yuni are going to win more games than Escobar, Cain and what ever other pitching option was available. I'm not so sure I disagree with that. As far as Hardy goes we would have had to trade for him again. He was Minnesota property not a FA. Along with that getting Hardy or any other options available at the time you would need a viable backup as well due to the fact none of the available options showed they can play all season without a couple DL stints. What good does it do to have an above average shortstop when they play half the time and someone worse than what we have now is left playing the rest? Obviously they were not comfortable with Gomez since they traded for Morgan. My guess is they aren't all that much more comfortable with Yuni but no Morgan type of option was available at a price they were willing to pay. That discomfort isn't the same as thinking it isn't a better option than not having Greinke though. This is not a team that can fill every hole it has like some teams can. This is a team that has to make value judgements and go with what they feel will win the most games within the means available to them. Sometimes that means getting by in one area to shore up another. As a Brewer fan I've come to grips with that reality so perhaps this sort of thing bothers me less than others. It allows me to watch and enjoy what we have not pine for what we are missing. For myself that is how I maximize my enjoyment of the season. It must be working because, overall, I have really enjoyed the season so far.

1. Trade for a Hardy-type SS and make Yuni B the backup at SS for the rest of the season and buy him out at the end of the year. I can't get behind any trade at this point. We are low on prospects as it is. There are two options for trading that make any sense at all. One is to trade a decent prospect for a decent upgrade. The other is to trade garbage for a lateral move. The first option depletes an already low prospect reserve. The other doesn't help and would limit our ability to trading for someone as an injury replacement later. This team was considered competitive as it was built and has shown itself to be so. Why change for marginal at best upgrades? Him and Kotsay split the 5th OF/PH role depending on situation. Boggs is in the role now but I am not in love with him like some are. I can get on board with this. Katin is far from perfect but he does have power. I'm also not sold on Boggs. Backup C: Rivera or Kottaras, Nieves DFA. I know I just said it but him being on this team amazes me. No great defensive skills and is so far from the Mendoza Line, that the Line is a dot to him This is my personal theory on why he's still here. He's kind of a player coach specifically for a very young catcher brought up sooner than he was ready. If he does actually help Lucroy I'm ok with him in that role. Not ecstatic but ok with it. IF there was actually someone good and capable of mentoring him I'd be all for that. I don't really see either of the other two as capable mentors so if that is his role I can deal with his limited offense.

Doesn't it seem like the player is the last to accept declining skills. IF anything I would say it's the Brewers who saw Counsell as too old. I have no idea if they do but it would make some amount of sense to go this route if they believe Counsell hit the age wall.

I used great stuff foam in the hole when we had that problem. Whatever it was in there didn't chew through it for some reason. My guess is it tasted bad but who knows. It was cheap, easy to use, effective and safe. One thing to keep in mind anytime you have small animals nesting you get larger animals preying on them. Skunks eat rats and gophers for instance. Don't really need to tell you why that isn't good.

When the other option presently is Mark Kotsay or Brandon Boggs, there is absolutely NO excuse to not have Hart out there at least 5-6 times a week. I can not understand the fascination with Kotsay that RR has, it's very distrubing. I think some are still jumping the gun on this. What a manager does early in the season is not necessarily what he does all season long. It is not uncommon at all to give more playing time to bench players early. Just like it's not uncommon to use a particular reliever that way. Lets just wait and see if he does this all season long or not before judging him. Kotsay is playing as well as can be expected. If the plan is to play bench players more often early why not use the guy who is playing above his head at that point? If kotsay gets 400ab's by season's end (barring injuries) then it will be valid a criticism. Until then why the rush to judge? It's not like it's going to help or change anything anyway so why not let it play out prior to judging one way or the other?

There is a difference between two guys with a wOBA range of like 10-15 points being discussed and ones who have much wider ranges though. No amount of hidden factors can turn someone like Betancourt into a good player. No but they may be able to show teh other options we had are not really better. Cruz is not very good in AAA even after repeating AAA let alone the majors, Punto may be as good offensively and better defensively but he has a history of not staying healthy. Same as Hardy. I don't remember off the top of my head the other legit options but I think overall using one stat to argue those types of players would have been better options is the issue some of us have.

Rowdy runt to the rescue.

Oh it certainly matters but it isn't something quantifiable when you are trying to compare say David Ortiz to Prince Fielder to Ryan Braun and making an argument for or against one being a better hitter than the other. At one point defense wasn't quantifiable so some people just wrote it off as not that significant. That turned out to be not true. Just because something isn't easily quantified doesn't mean it's nonexistent. What are we supposed to do you do when comparing two players with similar metrics? We could just say they are the same but you just said where they are close the flaws in the measurements can move things around a little bit. Isn't that pretty much what I've been saying all along? I'm perfectly fine with using those measures to narrow in on the player's value then go onto breaking them down to dissect the differences. I am less so when used to say things like two guys are the same for any circumstance even though they have vastly different skill sets. Same when metrically useless players appear to have value to me. Granted less so than when comparing between players but still somewhat so. but they are pretty good for judging broad strokes like you are doing with something like wOBA. But that doesn't seem to be the way it has being used. It seems like it is being used as the tell all end all of the discussion. It seems like someone gives the wOBA and that is that end of discussion. Anyone who dares say it's not a complete picture gets hammered or told they don't understand it. While the stat is great the use of it is sometimes less so.

In the last post you mentioned two relatively minor things. At some point don't those minor things add up to something a little more than minor? I used Gomez Fielder as an example. Please don't read to much into the particular players I used for the example. I wanted to use two that have obviously different skill sets to illustrated my point. I know there exists much more sophisticated projection systems that takes into account hit types (groundball/flyball tendencies), speed and other things. Not to go too far off subject but I saw something about line drives vs soft flyball outs in bapip that did a pretty nice job of showing why some players bapip can vary more than some others. For the life of me I can't find it again. You happen to know it? If so where the hell do I find it again?

To take it a step further looking at linear weights, a normal out on average is worse than a K with a runner on 1B and the same with nobody on which are the two most common situations to be in. Again this is a good starting point but far from end of discussion. The on average part is what I think sometimes gets overlooked. Yes, on average a strike out is better than a ball put into play out with a man on first. That can be calculated with large numbers to back that up. When assessing individuals there can be some who are going to get better results by putting the ball in play. Lets take Gomez vs Fielder for example. A ground ball by Gomez will be far less likely to end in a double play than Fielder's would. The aggregate doesn't take into account speed differences between individuals when assessing which out is more productive. They see every situation as the same. Additionally Gomez can get to second without aid by stealing a base so him making an out can lead to a better base runners in the process of making the out. IF for instance someone unlikely to move to second on his own was wiped out by the ground ball Gomez can turn that into a productive out by stealing second. He could not do that with a strikeout. Prince not only wouldn't have but most likely would have made two outs on a double play grounder. Type of player matters more than you want to give credit to. Advanced metrics are wonderful tools. Over the years here Rluz in particular taught me more about baseball through their use than anything I knew previously. I really do appreciate them. But they are the start of the conversation not the end of it. I fear sometimes pure stat people get so caught up in them they never look at how the average fits with the individual. Or, more importantly, how they may not.

I kind of think assuming any single stat tells 98% of anything may be where people go wrong. wOBA, WAR, OBP, they all have been used sometime or another as final determinants when they should really be used as quick and dirty assessment tools. Start with them to get a basic idea then use all the various stats to get a total picture. Breaking them down vs compiling them into one general picture may show useful areas to otherwise flawed players. I think the overall idea of assuming any single stat, no matter how well conceived, can tell virtually everything about a player is off base. (no pun intended) Sorry for the interruption. kind of been on an anti one stat tells all thing lately. We now resume your regularly scheduled programming.

I wonder if we can still play a passable corner OF spot. Probably as well as Kotsay plays center or Pujols plays third. There reason we have three catchers is Ron wanted a right handed hitter off the bench. 3TO doesn't fit that need. He's also had back problems for quite some time. As much as brewerfan takes Melvin and Ron to task for thinking they have the Kotsay of 2004 they we seem to think the same of 3TO. Then again that one homerun he hit this year was probably more fun to watch than all of Kotsay's singles and walks combined.

He is also too old to play more than 2 times a week though. That would be the main problem. Yuni did have a couple nice plays as well. He seems very good at turning double plays good hands and a decent arm. The one where he took Casey's throw coming across the bag was very smooth. His only real weakness on defense seems to me to be range. Only might be a poor choice of words. It really is limited. And Punto the the DL again. Yuni has that going for him as well. NO matter how much better of fielder Punto or Hardy may be if they can't stay on the field their team is going to be going with replacement level players at short quite often as well.

A full season with poor hitter at the top of the order rather than the bottom could mean a couple of wins. A lineup with players in ascending order of OPS vs. a fully optimized lineup could mean a difference of several wins. Isn't lining up a row of poor hitters going to create incredibly easy innings for a pitcher? I would think if a team has multiple black holes there are two choices to hide them. One is to line them all up at the bottom and hope just suffer through it every couple innings or sprinkle them out between better ones. If someone chooses the latter then there has to be one close to the top of the order. Which way is best I have no idea. Perhaps there has been a study done on that as well. Just looking at it I would think there is merit to both approaches. One gives the best hitters more ab's throughout the year but incredibly easy innings for opponents pitchers in every game. The other hides them a little better but gives them more ab's thus more chance to hurt the team in the long run.

I think they were surprised Cruz moved on. Given the Brewers circumstances I think that may have been a bad move on his part as well. Though last I checked maybe not much of a loss at all. He's got a sub 300 OBP in AAA so far this season.

The lineup on the other hand, not so much. There are clear good and bad decisions to be made and DPR has made the bad decisions way more often than the good ones. Hasn't there been studies done that showed lineups have very little effect on the outcome of games? Seems silly to fret over insignificant things to me.

Maybe the better terminology would be "I can't believe that this is what we have at SS in a year in which we did so much to upgrade other positions and are seemingly making a big shot at the playoffs." Those upgrades cost us in other areas. If this was a one year, all in, scenario it would be bad. Since it isn't we have a one year stopgap in place with the hope the upgrades in other areas compensate for it. If it does then we can win this season. If not there are upgrades to be had next season with far fewer holes that need to be created to do so. Top of the rotation pitching is the hardest thing to get. We have that in place for the next couple seasons. Finding a serviceable shortstop should be easier to do than upgrading the top of a pitching rotation.

I think we can safely say DM and RRR don't view defense as that important. I think that is a mistake but hard to argue when the outfield defense didn't hurt us and Kotsay contributed on offense more than Gomez likely would have. Lets just give it some time to see what happens when all the players are available and the season wears on. If we have to use him I like the idea of playing Kotsay while he seems to be hitting as well as he's going to. I do like resting everyday players more early on than maybe some others would so maybe it's less of an issue to me early on. If Kotsay ends up with 450 ab's and he reverts to Kotsay then I'll be at the head of the Ron is an idiot mob. Well maybe not the head of it. That's a pretty big crowd already gathering. I appreciate your skepticism of UZR. I'd be fine if its output was simply Great/good/average/mediocre/bad instead of this silly decimal stuff. I'd be fine if people mostly ignored a single season UZR. But Kotsay just hasn't been good for a long time. I have a skepticism of single season UZR. Thus I have a skepticism of any stat that uses it in single season proportions. UZR, when used properly, gives us something useful and objective to look at in a very subjective area. That is a good tool to have. Just like any tool though it has to be used properly. I just think WAR uses UZR like someone using a hammer to drive in a screw. But to be fair, he was referring to Kotsay's numbers since 2004. He wasn't always a starter during that time but he played in 638 games since 2005 and his UZR/Defensive WAR has been negative every year: That's fair. One question I have that you could probably answer is how well does UZR work for part time or DH guys like Kotsay has been the last few years? I've looked up how WAR is calculated plenty of times and know the components of it but haven't figured out where WAR balances out the unequal proportion of events occurring? Seems wrong to weigh the UZR portion of an every day centerfielder and DH who plays the field twice a week the same and I haven't seen where they take that into account. If you know how they do it please do tell. It's bugged me for a while now.

I was joking about the Roenicke comment. It seemed like you were defending every single decision Roenicke made so I thought it was funny. Lets start over. Hi I'm BUC I'm cool with anyone who has Kurt Russel as an avatar. I know I can be difficult to argue with but I try to bring reasoned arguments and like those who do regardless of whether they agree with me or not. I like losing arguments because then I feel I learned something. That should not be confused with easy to argue against. I will defend a point until it is disproved or persuaded by other reasoned points to the contrary. I am not a fan of quick judgments of managers and GM's because of how hard it is to know what they know. I make up my mind much quicker than I should on players and probably too slow on management/ownership. By well I'm sure he means a guy with a non-zero or so WAR. I really wish that stat had never been created. WAR is useless. It uses defensive metrics that are pretty universally accepted as not accurate in the sample size it uses. I simply cannot understand why anyone would accept an output as accurate when it uses input that is known not to be. I understand the desire to want it to be useful. After all what better thing could there be for a fan than having something that combines everything necessary to know about a player in one easy number? To bad it's impossible to do.

Whether LaRussa is a good manager or not is opinion. The difference between a good manager and a bad one is managing a good team. I hate the dude more than any other single person in baseball. Even I can't argue some of his success is due to his ability. Overall I agree managers are perhaps the least important determining factor in a team's success.