SoxProspects News
|
|
|
|
Legal
Forum Ground Rules
The views expressed by the members of this Forum do not necessarily reflect the views of SoxProspects, LLC.
© 2003-2024 SoxProspects, LLC
|
|
|
|
|
Forum Home | Search | My Profile | Messages | Members | Help |
Welcome Guest. Please Login or Register.
|
Post by ramireja on Dec 9, 2013 9:40:09 GMT -5
Perspective on the Vazquez or Swihart question. Please don't jump all over me, I am not making any predictions here, just trying to make a point and use very vague comps with people everyone is familiar with. If you had two catchers, one who projected to be 85% of Pudge Rodriguez and one who projected to be 85% of Johnny Bench, I'm pretty sure the more Bench-like player would be the every day starter.
|
|
|
Post by philsbosoxfan on Dec 9, 2013 9:46:08 GMT -5
Different eras. Bench is pretty much considered the best two way catcher in history and Pudge the best defensive catcher in history.
Last post on it you guys knew exactly what I meant. If you didn't there's no sense in explaining it, it's beyond your comprehension.
|
|
|
Post by redsox1534 on Dec 9, 2013 11:05:49 GMT -5
Which one do the Redsox like more and want to be the guy? Think Vazquez is the guy they hope can be the guy behind the plate for a decade. If thats true and of course im just speculating Swihart becomes a very valuable trade chip.
I like them both, Swihart seems like a Jason Kendell and Vazquez something around Ruiz or Yadier Molina from 2007-2009 were hes gonna get 7-12 HRS and drive in 65 with a good 280 avg and good OBP with great defene and manage the staff like a pro. Even tho Swihart may have a higher ceiling and is more likely to reach it I just like Vazquez a little more.
Denny is some one else I love and he is rawer, younger and further away his upside with the bat is superior to both.
|
|
|
Post by redsox1534 on Dec 9, 2013 11:13:58 GMT -5
Also when talking defense with these catchers you can show stats that show how good they were etc. But one very important thing that a good catcher does and doesnt show up in stats is manage a pitching staff and all signs point to Vazquez being great at this and Swihart being avg at best, its something Blake may and can get better at but hes gonna have to work hard at it and some would say its something you have a knack for and some people got it others dont.
|
|
|
Post by iakovos11 on Dec 9, 2013 12:10:43 GMT -5
Also when talking defense with these catchers you can show stats that show how good they were etc. But one very important thing that a good catcher does and doesnt show up in stats is manage a pitching staff and all signs point to Vazquez being great at this and Swihart being avg at best, its something Blake may and can get better at but hes gonna have to work hard at it and some would say its something you have a knack for and some people got it others dont. What are these signs you're referring to?
|
|
|
Post by redsox04071318champs on Dec 9, 2013 13:49:43 GMT -5
Which one do the Redsox like more and want to be the guy? Think Vazquez is the guy they hope can be the guy behind the plate for a decade. If thats true and of course im just speculating Swihart becomes a very valuable trade chip. I like them both, Swihart seems like a Jason Kendell and Vazquez something around Ruiz or Yadier Molina from 2007-2009 were hes gonna get 7-12 HRS and drive in 65 with a good 280 avg and good OBP with great defene and manage the staff like a pro. Even tho Swihart may have a higher ceiling and is more likely to reach it I just like Vazquez a little more. Denny is some one else I love and he is rawer, younger and further away his upside with the bat is superior to both. I sense that Swihart is the #1 catching prospect in the system, the guy with the highest ceiling who can be a good defensive catcher and a real asset with the bat, an all-star type player. I don't know that Vazquez's offense projects anywhere near as well as Swihart. He should be a strong defensive catcher who isn't an automatic out at the plate as he can take pitches and work some walks. I think that Swihart is versatile enought to move to another position if Vazquez is a guy the Sox want catching regularly for them long-term.
|
|
|
Post by jimed14 on Dec 9, 2013 15:22:23 GMT -5
Was it Keith Law who recently said Vazquez was probably going to be way better as a major leaguer than anyone ever thought he'd be when he was in the minors?
|
|
|
Post by zil on Dec 9, 2013 18:59:47 GMT -5
I knew there would be at least one poster with reading comprehension problems. Johnny Bench career .267/.342/.476/.817 Pudge Rodriguez career .296/.334/.464/.798 x 85% Bench .226/.290/.404/.694 Pudge .252/.283/.394/.677 Warm up the HOF ballots 85% of Bench's career bWAR = 63.9 bWAR 85% of Rodriguez's career bWAR = 58.1 bWAR Average HoF catcher accumulates 52.4 career bWAR
|
|
|
Post by ancientsoxfogey on Dec 9, 2013 20:06:21 GMT -5
Regardless of what the stats or the tools may say, how long could we expect Swihart to be a most-of-the-games starter if his body type isn't going to allow him to build up a really strong lower body? He might well get worn down in a relatively few years.
Maybe the two of them more or less share the job if they both earn the right to catch in Boston, with the better offensive catcher also taking some games as a DH in a DH-by-committee approach after Papi's career ends.
|
|
|
Post by rjp313jr on Dec 9, 2013 20:19:58 GMT -5
I think using Piazza as one of the two maybe would've been better... Or not - just not sure why two all around catchers were used.
|
|
|
Post by Oregon Norm on Dec 11, 2013 20:05:34 GMT -5
The video link from Antonellis' Twitter feed on the left, really highlights Vazquez' pop time and it's amazing. It looks like a normal replay till the ball gets to him. After that it's almost as if someone punched the fast-forward button. Focus on his actions to get an idea of what the team has here. He's the real deal.
|
|
|
Post by joshv02 on Dec 12, 2013 15:19:15 GMT -5
using minor league pbp data ... For a catcher. No problems there! It's based on the hardest possible data: SB, CS, PB, WP, and it's been adjusted for confounding variables and context by one of the best sabermetricians on the planet. It absolutely represents his actual performance relative to his minor league peers, which is all I claimed to be measuring, indeed, all I wanted to measure. So when you wrote, while defining the defensive stats, "in this case the percentage of balls hit near a fielder that were turned into outs, as tweaked by one of the sharpest saber guys around" you were referring only to non-C defensive stats? Are you relying on minor league pbp data at all? If not, how do you determine if a ball is hit "near a fielder" such that it could be turned into an out? 1. Are the only defensive stats for C you are using SB/CS, PB & WP? How does that add roughly 20 points of EqA? 2. How are you adding in defensive runs saved for non-Cs? 3. I personally don't like the idea of adding in defensive runs saved to EqA as EqA works off of a .260 league average baseline, and by adding in defensive stats without truing up the .260 baseline, I don't know what the numbers really mean - other than one is higher than the other. I get the simplicity of it - just take a roughly RCs formula, put it into a format that looks like EqA, and include everything you'd like. I don't think it should work that way without a tweaking of the baseline/denominator. But, that is technical and not really that important. 4. Where can I see these defensive stats? I love Clay's work - have for years - but merely being labeled "Davenport translations" doesn't really do it for me.* I let my bpro account lapse years ago, so if you tell me that they are just in the sortable stats there I'll believe you - I don't see them in the publicly available. * The continual reliance on authority - Clay or Tom - is not convincing. It also isn't how they grew their name back in the usenet, then fanhome, days - as you know. No one cares who has the idea - people only care if the idea is good.
|
|
ericmvan
Veteran
Supposed to be working on something more important
Posts: 8,923
|
Post by ericmvan on Dec 15, 2013 8:36:55 GMT -5
It's based on the hardest possible data: SB, CS, PB, WP, and it's been adjusted for confounding variables and context by one of the best sabermetricians on the planet. It absolutely represents his actual performance relative to his minor league peers, which is all I claimed to be measuring, indeed, all I wanted to measure. So when you wrote, while defining the defensive stats, "in this case the percentage of balls hit near a fielder that were turned into outs, as tweaked by one of the sharpest saber guys around" you were referring only to non-C defensive stats? Name me someone who doesn't do catcher defense completely different from the other positions! Yes, that other description is for the infield and outfield. Davenport's system is conceptually identical to Total Zone for the PBP era. The number of ground balls hits to LF is your other data point besides 5-3 outs. For SS, it's ground ball hits to both LF and CF. It takes a lot of tweaking to adjust for confounding variables, of course. I'm not doing anything, of course, but taking Davenport's fielding metrics and massaging them. I weight them 3-2-1 and by games played, take them per 150 games, regress them to the mean pretty severely (seat-of-the-pants algorithm, but I trust it's in the ballpark), then convert the run value to the EqA points for a player hitting in 150 games. Since defensive stats work to a 0 baseline and EqA to a .260, you have a number that can be converted directly and linearly into WAR/150 games. If you're curious, I can post the formulas for converting to and from EqA for various other metrics. They are all empirically derived from data. I thought I'd posted this before. Clay has his own minimal but fairly awesome web site, where he not only is keeping alive all this data (DTS by league / organization links), he appears to have an old version of PECOTA (I'm calling it "Davenpecota") that he's using for projections on the player pages.
|
|
|
Post by joshv02 on Dec 16, 2013 8:55:55 GMT -5
Thanks, Eric. FWIW, I get a 404 error when I click on the minor EqA links: claydavenport.com/stats/pageEASpeak.shtml I think that the obvious objections to using PBP data for minor league players is itself probably, well, obvious so I won't continue to belabor it. Frankly, I find minor league pbp data to be worthless if not proprietary. (Technically: A point that JC Bradbury makes repeatedly -- As the average player won't be a .260 eqa and 0 defensive player [that is an above average player], you likely shouldn't just add them into the same formula with the .260 baseline implying average. Second, even assuming defensive stats with some significance, you'd have to age them differently than the component stats - like Clay suggests for speed vs. power, and as Tango has on his site -- such that they do not necessarily peak at age 27.) Yes, I'd love to see the formula. Thanks for making it public.
|
|
|
Post by azblue on Dec 16, 2013 10:03:19 GMT -5
Has anyone watched Swihart play? I know that there have been several televised Portland games, but I've not seen Swihart and am relying on scouting reports and stats to get a sense of his skill set and potential.
|
|
|
Post by sibbysisti on Dec 16, 2013 12:23:31 GMT -5
Has anyone watched Swihart play? I know that there have been several televised Portland games, but I've not seen Swihart and am relying on scouting reports and stats to get a sense of his skill set and potential. I saw him at Greenville in 2012. He hit a HR batting from the left side.. Other than that, SSS, so no conclusions other than following his stats in Salem. Look forward to seeing him in Portland next season.
|
|
ericmvan
Veteran
Supposed to be working on something more important
Posts: 8,923
|
Post by ericmvan on Dec 26, 2013 0:07:24 GMT -5
Thanks, Eric. FWIW, I get a 404 error when I click on the minor EqA links: claydavenport.com/stats/pageEASpeak.shtml I think that the obvious objections to using PBP data for minor league players is itself probably, well, obvious so I won't continue to belabor it. Frankly, I find minor league pbp data to be worthless if not proprietary. (Technically: A point that JC Bradbury makes repeatedly -- As the average player won't be a .260 eqa and 0 defensive player [that is an above average player], you likely shouldn't just add them into the same formula with the .260 baseline implying average. Second, even assuming defensive stats with some significance, you'd have to age them differently than the component stats - like Clay suggests for speed vs. power, and as Tango has on his site -- such that they do not necessarily peak at age 27.) But all I'm trying to do here is turn the actual ml performance into a number that represents how good it was. The Davenport Peak Projections are really, as I understand it, an age-and-level adjusted performance; the only thing that makes them a "peak projection" is that, in adjusting for age and level, he has looked at how various components translate between the minors and majors, in which necessarily there is aging in between. Fielding is not something so fiendishly difficult that it takes the best athletes in the world years to learn. It's always been true that a very young plus defender could step right up to the big leagues and perform well (they used to say that about Argenis Diaz). The amount of improvement from experience, year to year, is very small compared to hitting. And fielding doesn't have components that translate differently from others, or have special predictive value, the way plate discipline does. So I don't think you need to go though hoops to come up with a different fielding number for a guy who saved 10 runs while being a year old for his AA league, versus the guy who saved 10 runs while being a year young for low-A, when the question I'm asking is, how good was this season, objectively, as far as we can tell? You do need to be very sophisticated to make sense of the batting line, but I think that making that effort to tweak the fielding line would not be worth the effort. All but the two in bold I don't use much. Four decimal places notwithstanding, all are quick and dirty formulas based on regressions on the stats involved, for the years 2007-2009, I think. EqA = .4605 * OBP + .2254 * SA + .0151
EqA =.1534 + .0222 * RC/27 EqA =.2656 + .00124 * R/150 (+/-)
R/150 (+/-) = 1.052 * (EqA - .260) * 645 [average PA in 150 games; actually 643.8 in those years] RAR = 1.052 * (EqA - .230) * 645 RAR = (.4771 * OBP + .2335 * SA - .2216) * 645
|
|
|
Post by joshv02 on Dec 26, 2013 9:43:45 GMT -5
Thanks. All but the two in bold I don't use much. Four decimal places notwithstanding, all are quick and dirty formulas based on regressions on the stats involved, for the years 2007-2009, I think. EqA = .4605 * OBP + .2254 * SA + .0151
EqA =.1534 + .0222 * RC/27 EqA =.2656 + .00124 * R/150 (+/-)
R/150 (+/-) = 1.052 * (EqA - .260) * 645 [average PA in 150 games; actually 643.8 in those years] RAR = 1.052 * (EqA - .230) * 645 RAR = (.4771 * OBP + .2335 * SA - .2216) * 645 Sorry, I know how to create EqAs's - this is how I spent my time when I was supposed to be studying, back in the late 90s (thank gawd I'm too risk averse for online poker, and that it really wasn't a big thing then). Though, now you just made me re-read Patriot (and resubscribe to his blog), and David Smyth, and others, and go down that rabbit hole and waste the last 30 minutes of my life - again. And now I am slightly depressed, again, that the old FanHome/BaseballBoards sites were never archived. But, what I was wondering is how you feed defensive stats into the EqA formula. Though, I suppose as EqA is just a run-estimator moved towards a weird batting-average like scale, you just add in runs saved as part of the run-estimator. Anyway, all mistakes you make doing so will be generally universally applied so it isn't a big deal. Anyway, I just like watching sausage being made. No biggy.
|
|
ericmvan
Veteran
Supposed to be working on something more important
Posts: 8,923
|
Post by ericmvan on Dec 27, 2013 23:10:52 GMT -5
Thanks. All but the two in bold I don't use much. Four decimal places notwithstanding, all are quick and dirty formulas based on regressions on the stats involved, for the years 2007-2009, I think. EqA = .4605 * OBP + .2254 * SA + .0151
EqA =.1534 + .0222 * RC/27 EqA =.2656 + .00124 * R/150 (+/-)
R/150 (+/-) = 1.052 * (EqA - .260) * 645 [average PA in 150 games; actually 643.8 in those years] RAR = 1.052 * (EqA - .230) * 645 RAR = (.4771 * OBP + .2335 * SA - .2216) * 645 Sorry, I know how to create EqAs's - this is how I spent my time when I was supposed to be studying, back in the late 90s (thank gawd I'm too risk averse for online poker, and that it really wasn't a big thing then). Though, now you just made me re-read Patriot (and resubscribe to his blog), and David Smyth, and others, and go down that rabbit hole and waste the last 30 minutes of my life - again. And now I am slightly depressed, again, that the old FanHome/BaseballBoards sites were never archived. But, what I was wondering is how you feed defensive stats into the EqA formula. Though, I suppose as EqA is just a run-estimator moved towards a weird batting-average like scale, you just add in runs saved as part of the run-estimator. Anyway, all mistakes you make doing so will be generally universally applied so it isn't a big deal. Anyway, I just like watching sausage being made. No biggy. It's in the second bolded line. Just multiply the defensive R/150 by .00124, and that's the number of EqA points you add or subtract.
|
|
|
Post by joshv02 on Dec 28, 2013 11:12:01 GMT -5
Ahh. Thanks.
|
|
|
Post by charliezink16 on Jan 4, 2014 12:20:21 GMT -5
Anyone have a subscription to BA that can help summarize their recent CVaz article? One twitter account I follow had this to say:
Red Sox Stats ?@redsoxstats 6m BA has a short piece on Christian Vazquez up. Along with crazy defense, Red Sox officials think he's double digit HR, above avg BA and OBP.
|
|
|
Post by ancientsoxfogey on Jan 16, 2014 8:36:40 GMT -5
Nice article on Swihart by Chris just up.
Which brings up a point. In the article Swihart states that he is up to 200 lbs., which gives me a much different mental picture of his ability to withstand the rigors of catching than the vital stats listed on this site. Does SoxProspects have a standard protocol for updating vital stats? E.g., I can understand that you wouldn't change Swihart's weight based on his own self-assessment off-season, but could the organization make available updated stats from spring physicals or something so that numbers could be changed as appropriate?
I would note that in the article's photo Swihart's legs still look fairly skinny. I realize it's hard to see in civilian clothes in a sitting position, but it looks as though most of his additional weight is in his upper body. I'd be interested to hear from someone with more knowledge than me about catching whether, if his legs are still lean, that is a good thing (e.g., helps him keep his quicknesss as long as he doesn't build up too much weight.)
|
|
|
Post by joshv02 on Jan 16, 2014 8:51:32 GMT -5
Nice piece, Chris. Plus, that pic is just awesome, Kelly; don't know whose, but really cute kid.
|
|
|
Post by jchang on Jan 16, 2014 12:12:43 GMT -5
On the matter of time frame - it does seem that high prospects (that turn out to be above average MLB players) may spend less than 2 full years between AA and AAA. But given the technical requirements of catcher, it is reasonable to expect more than 2 years in AA/AAA for a grade 6 prospect to develop into a full time starter? Lets say that in 2015 Vazquez proves to be an adequate platoon catcher (but less than a full-time starter), and that Swihart play within the bounds of reasonable expectations at AA/AAA in 2014 and 15. Would the Sox go into 2016 with Swihart and Vazquez on the MLB roster? I am thinking that a veteran catcher would be signed for 2016 with one of Vazquez/Swihart in AAA. Of course all bets off if any one of the two develops much better and quicker than expected.
|
|
|
Post by Oregon Norm on Jan 16, 2014 12:31:54 GMT -5
The conjecture by scouts is that Vazquez is a full-time ML catcher, given his defense. The halving of his K rate tells me that there are also refinements in his approach as he prepares for the ML. Given that fine-tuning, if the power starts to re-emerge this year and the K rate stays low, you've got a frontline catcher for a first-division team. Vazquez glove is ready for the majors right now, though learning the current pitching staff is an essential. As I wrote earlier, however, he already has quite a bit of experience with some of that staff, and just about all of the emerging pitching prospects (I expect he'll see a bit of Owens from behind the plate this year if the latter continues with his progress). He's just about there, and remember he's only 23.
Given all that, what we need to understand is summarized by the first post in this thread: the Sox have two emerging probably above average catching prospects, maybe one or both well above average.
This is a great problem to have, but if you're the GM it has to be finessed if you're going to get value out of - or for - each of them. If you expect to trade one, that person has to receive enough ML exposure to show off the skillset. If that happens, however, the media weighs in and makes it a little tougher. If you expect to hang on to both over a certain span of time, you have to have a plan in place for diversifying the positional flexibility including the sharing of the position. Not easy. You'll have fanboys on one side or the other pushing their point of view, and that's understandable. Focus on either player and the potential is a real draw.
The "this one" or "that one" game has little appeal to me. They both have what appear to be some serious ML chops. I'd like to see the Sox get the most they can out of both. Whatever happens, it should be interesting.
|
|
|