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Post by cologneredsox on Aug 20, 2015 6:57:10 GMT -5
Thx for the explanation. I knew it kind of matters, but Espinoza didn't look that small to me, especially for a 17 year old...
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Post by m1keyboots on Aug 20, 2015 22:51:28 GMT -5
Height matters insofar as it helps pitchers get better plane on their pitches (including having a release point closer to the plate, thus increasing deception) and suggests that a guy can hold up better to the physical demands of being a starting pitcher. The Epstein/Cherington administrations have long preferred tall pitchers. pedro martinez and his long fingers and release past his body beg to differ. I realize they're two totally different aspects. Just saying though ,extension can be achieved in many ways. Walden included. Also, I just like to see what you'll say bc you seem so thought out, and we went back and forth on Mookie and JBJ this year in Center. Mookie raked at the end of last year with better MI numbers but poorer defense in center while JBJ had some solid numbers in the minors and has started raking albeit with still getting robbed on line drives. JBJ any closer to CF for sox if he keeps hitting through the end of the year like a mooks did last year? I digress I think Espys release being simiar to pedros and reports on this site of him having abnormally long fingers like pedro (which allowed Pedros fastball to jump and skip at hitters for years), wouldn't you think something like that woild be enough to negate not having an anthony ranaudo/matt barnes downward plane but being only 6'1 with great release extension?
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Post by telson13 on Aug 20, 2015 23:01:25 GMT -5
Height matters insofar as it helps pitchers get better plane on their pitches (including having a release point closer to the plate, thus increasing deception) and suggests that a guy can hold up better to the physical demands of being a starting pitcher. The Epstein/Cherington administrations have long preferred tall pitchers. pedro martinez and his long fingers and release past his body beg to differ. I realize they're two totally different aspects. Just saying though ,extension can be achieved in many ways. Walden included. Also, I just like to see what you'll say bc you seem so thought out, and we went back and forth on Mookie and JBJ this year in Center. Mookie raked at the end of last year with better MI numbers but poorer defense in center while JBJ had some solid numbers in the minors and has started raking albeit with still getting robbed on line drives. JBJ any closer to CF for sox if he keeps hitting through the end of the year like a mooks did last year? I digress I think Espys release being simiar to pedros and reports on this site of him having abnormally long fingers like pedro (which allowed Pedros fastball to jump and skip at hitters for years), wouldn't you think something like that woild be enough to negate not having an anthony ranaudo/matt barnes downward plane but being only 6'1 with great release extension? I'd be curious to see what his release point is (measured) and what his effective FB velocity is. With good extension he could theoretically approach the sort of distance a 6'3"-6'5" pitcher might, and his movement is certainly pretty good from what I've seen. His FB spin rate was also high as noted by someone on here a while back, and four-seam spin rate correlates strongly with swing-and-miss. If I recall, Barnes has a high FB spin rate and was known in the minors for getting Sw-M with his FB, even if he's struggled to do so in MLB.
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Post by jmei on Aug 21, 2015 6:33:45 GMT -5
Yeah, short guys can get good extention, too, but all things equal, taller guys generally get more.
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Post by semsox on Aug 21, 2015 7:17:06 GMT -5
Am I crazy, or isn't the primary benefit of these abnormally long fingers the elite change-up potential? Pedro has it, and from the accounts it sounds like Espinoza's change-up is also potential plus to better. I would think that just from a physics perspective, the additional surface coverage of longer fingers would help reduce the release speed of the ball relative to someone with smaller fingers.
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Post by chavopepe2 on Aug 21, 2015 7:26:06 GMT -5
Am I crazy, or isn't the primary benefit of these abnormally long fingers the elite change-up potential? Pedro has it, and from the accounts it sounds like Espinoza's change-up is also potential plus to better. I would think that just from a physics perspective, the additional surface coverage of longer fingers would help reduce the release speed of the ball relative to someone with smaller fingers. I think you are correct in how longer fingers help when throwing a changeup, but I think the benefits extend beyond that. With longer fingers the pitcher can put more of a whip-like finish on his fastball which would both add velocity and movement.
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Post by telson13 on Aug 21, 2015 17:57:24 GMT -5
Yeah, short guys can get good extention, too, but all things equal, taller guys generally get more. Absolutely. I guess the next question is, how good are the pitcher's mechanics? Because a guy who has natural athleticism and strong legs can probably stride further and maintain a linear progression to the plate. Of course, that may hurt him too by reducing deception and causing the ball to flatten out. Really, I'm just curious...Pedro obviously wasn't a big guy by any stretch and probably didn't have the best "effective" velocity (which makes me wonder even more how anyone could hit a Randy Johnson), but hitters still missed on his FB a lot. Another reason I liked seeing Espinoza's spin rate so high.
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Post by larrycook on Aug 21, 2015 18:52:10 GMT -5
Height matters insofar as it helps pitchers get better plane on their pitches (including having a release point closer to the plate, thus increasing deception) and suggests that a guy can hold up better to the physical demands of being a starting pitcher. The Epstein/Cherington administrations have long preferred tall pitchers. pedro martinez and his long fingers and release past his body beg to differ. I realize they're two totally different aspects. Just saying though ,extension can be achieved in many ways. Walden included. Also, I just like to see what you'll say bc you seem so thought out, and we went back and forth on Mookie and JBJ this year in Center. Mookie raked at the end of last year with better MI numbers but poorer defense in center while JBJ had some solid numbers in the minors and has started raking albeit with still getting robbed on line drives. JBJ any closer to CF for sox if he keeps hitting through the end of the year like a mooks did last year? I digress I think Espys release being simiar to pedros and reports on this site of him having abnormally long fingers like pedro (which allowed Pedros fastball to jump and skip at hitters for years), wouldn't you think something like that woild be enough to negate not having an anthony ranaudo/matt barnes downward plane but being only 6'1 with great release extension? In my mind, the reason Pedro had the devastating change up was because he had a thick layer of callus built up on the ends of his fingers.
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Post by m1keyboots on Aug 22, 2015 8:37:49 GMT -5
To me it was a combination, of the snap he got from the length of his fingers, to his arms speed. And of course that ridiculous parachute almost knuckle ball movement. Which might well have been caused by calluses who knows? Good point.
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Post by burythehammer on Aug 25, 2015 11:20:49 GMT -5
JJ Cooper on twitter:
Question: from a frame and stuff perspective at that age, who does he compare to?
Cooper: The names we've heard very smart baseball people throw around are frighteningly good.
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Post by ericmvan on Aug 25, 2015 16:08:36 GMT -5
JJ Cooper on twitter: Question: from a frame and stuff perspective at that age, who does he compare to? Cooper: The names we've heard very smart baseball people throw around are frighteningly good.That baffles me a bit. Who's the other name besides Pedro?
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Post by ericmvan on Aug 25, 2015 16:42:37 GMT -5
BTW, minimum 40 IP, Espinoza has easily been the best pitcher in all of domestic rookie ball -- 3rd in FIP, 5th in BABIP -- and he's the only 17 year-old.
And, yeah, you say that Julio Urias pitched in high-A ball at age 17 as recently as last year, and I say, yeah, and as good as he was, he still had something like a 46% GB rate (there's a bug in B-Ref's parsing algorithm which occasionally misses a play or counts it twice. The AE rate I've posted here has been corrected).
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Post by templeusox on Aug 25, 2015 16:56:22 GMT -5
JJ Cooper on twitter: Question: from a frame and stuff perspective at that age, who does he compare to? Cooper: The names we've heard very smart baseball people throw around are frighteningly good.That baffles me a bit. Who's the other name besides Pedro? Probably Pedro, Gibson, and Seaver.
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Post by Chris Hatfield on Aug 25, 2015 17:06:25 GMT -5
BTW, minimum 40 IP, Espinoza has easily been the best pitcher in all of domestic rookie ball -- 3rd in FIP, 5th in BABIP -- and he's the only 17 year-old.
And, yeah, you say that Julio Urias pitched in high-A ball at age 17 as recently as last year, and I say, yeah, and as good as he was, he still had something like a 46% GB rate (there's a bug in B-Ref's parsing algorithm which occasionally misses a play or counts it twice. The AE rate I've posted here has been corrected). And I say he's faced three teams, and they all suck at hitting. Look at how many other pitchers on his team are shoving this year - certainly not to the same degree, but Allen, Pimentel, Raudes, Steen, and De Jesus all have excellent season numbers, and other pitchers have shown flashes. I'm very excited about Espinoza based on the scouting reports, but I think I realized today an important point about just how little GCL statistics matter.
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Post by ericmvan on Aug 25, 2015 23:47:02 GMT -5
BTW, minimum 40 IP, Espinoza has easily been the best pitcher in all of domestic rookie ball -- 3rd in FIP, 5th in BABIP -- and he's the only 17 year-old.
And, yeah, you say that Julio Urias pitched in high-A ball at age 17 as recently as last year, and I say, yeah, and as good as he was, he still had something like a 46% GB rate (there's a bug in B-Ref's parsing algorithm which occasionally misses a play or counts it twice. The AE rate I've posted here has been corrected). And I say he's faced three teams, and they all suck at hitting. Look at how many other pitchers on his team are shoving this year - certainly not to the same degree, but Allen, Pimentel, Raudes, Steen, and De Jesus all have excellent season numbers, and other pitchers have shown flashes. I'm very excited about Espinoza based on the scouting reports, but I think I realized today an important point about just how little GCL statistics matter. According to BP, the hitters he faced had a precisely average TAv for rookie ball -- .263. Allen faced .259, Pimentel .247, Raudes .255, Steen .246, and DeJesus .247, so your general point is correct.
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Post by jimed14 on Aug 26, 2015 12:11:39 GMT -5
And I say he's faced three teams, and they all suck at hitting. Look at how many other pitchers on his team are shoving this year - certainly not to the same degree, but Allen, Pimentel, Raudes, Steen, and De Jesus all have excellent season numbers, and other pitchers have shown flashes. I'm very excited about Espinoza based on the scouting reports, but I think I realized today an important point about just how little GCL statistics matter. According to BP, the hitters he faced had a precisely average TAv for rookie ball -- .263. Allen faced .259, Pimentel .247, Raudes .255, Steen .246, and DeJesus .247, so your general point is correct. Isn't it difficult to determine with statistics whether the group of hitters is bad because the pitching is good or whether they're bad because they're bad when you're talking about only 4 teams?
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Post by joshv02 on Aug 26, 2015 12:35:30 GMT -5
But you aren't really saying that. You are saying "do Espinoza's stats differ from the league average b/c he faced worse competition than the league average."
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Post by Chris Hatfield on Aug 26, 2015 12:46:17 GMT -5
Yeah, what jimed said is part of my point. Espinoza in 10 GCL starts has faced the Orioles 5 times, the Rays 4 times, and the Twins once. Allen's 7 starts: 3 against the Rays, 3 against the O's, 1 against the Twins. Josh Pennington made 7 appearances and didn't face the Twins at all. Gerson Bautista has made 11 starts, 6 against the Twins including 4 of his 5 starts in July, 4 against the Rays and 2 against the O's. So you could say that the Rays and O's have the numbers they do because they are facing good pitching, that the Sox pitchers have good numbers because they're facing the same two or three bad lineups, or it could just be somewhere in the middle. Consider that the GCL Rays have a team OPS of .560. .560! And the O's are the only team in the division with a team slugging percentage that's higher than its on-base percentage.
Not saying this definitely means anything, but I'd guess it's not out of the question that the sample isn't broad enough to make many conclusions, right? I feel like it's almost like the NFL, where scheduling plays a pretty significant role in what a team's record is because they don't play every team.
And to be clear, the point I'm making isn't what the Red Sox pitchers' stats are relative to league average. The league is pretty irrelevant here, right? It's three pods of teams (two of four teams - East and South Divisions, one of eight teams - the Northeast and Northwest Divisions) that each play a round-robin season. The players in the East Division have about as much to do with those in the South Division as players in the Arizona League do. So for the GCL, any stat scaled to the league average probably has some issues because it's not really a league in the sense of the word and because each of the sample sizes could be skewed because of a lack of diversity in who each team is playing.
I remember talking to a scout once and he was saying if he had his way there wouldn't even be publicly available stats from the complex leagues because the games are so meaningless. I think that goes too far, but maybe there was something to that in terms of the weight the numbers should be given.
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Post by ericmvan on Aug 26, 2015 13:00:40 GMT -5
^ Yeah, this is part of my point. Espinoza in 10 GCL starts has faced the Orioles 5 times, the Rays 4 times, and the Twins once. Allen's 7 starts: 3 against the Rays, 3 against the O's, 1 against the Twins. Josh Pennington made 7 appearances and didn't face the Twins at all. Gerson Bautista has made 11 starts, 6 against the Twins including 4 of his 5 starts in June, 4 against the Rays and 2 against the O's. So you could say that the Rays and O's have the numbers they do because they are facing good pitching, that the Sox pitchers have good numbers because they're facing the same two or three bad lineups, or it could just be somewhere in the middle. Consider that the GCL Rays have a team OPS of .560. .560! And the O's are the only team in the division with a team slugging percentage that's higher than its on-base percentage. Not saying this definitely means anything, but I'd guess it's not out of the question that the sample isn't broad enough to make many conclusions, right? I feel like it's almost like the NFL, where scheduling plays a pretty significant role in what a team's record is because they don't play every team. The proper way to adjust for this is recursively and bidirectionally. Every hitter has his TAv and every pitcher has his TAv allowed. You calculate the average TAv of the hitters each pitcher has faced and adjust his TAV allowed accordingly, and at the same time you calculate the average TAv allowed of all the pitchers each hitter has faced, and adjust his TA accordingly. Then you do it again, and again, and ultimately, if there is enough variety in terms of hitters and pitchers facing one another, the figures stabilize at their true values. In Espinoza's case, the first-order adjustment is 0, because the guys he faced were league-average. To make his number less impressive, those apparent league-average hitters would have had to have been facing collectively weak pitching staffs. In a virtual four-team league, if there is very little offense in general, yes, it's impossible to tell to what degree the pitchers have been good versus the hitters being poor. But the data does show that Espinoza's dominance over all the other pitchers who played in the same virtual league has been huge.
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Post by jimed14 on Aug 26, 2015 13:37:08 GMT -5
^ Yeah, this is part of my point. Espinoza in 10 GCL starts has faced the Orioles 5 times, the Rays 4 times, and the Twins once. Allen's 7 starts: 3 against the Rays, 3 against the O's, 1 against the Twins. Josh Pennington made 7 appearances and didn't face the Twins at all. Gerson Bautista has made 11 starts, 6 against the Twins including 4 of his 5 starts in June, 4 against the Rays and 2 against the O's. So you could say that the Rays and O's have the numbers they do because they are facing good pitching, that the Sox pitchers have good numbers because they're facing the same two or three bad lineups, or it could just be somewhere in the middle. Consider that the GCL Rays have a team OPS of .560. .560! And the O's are the only team in the division with a team slugging percentage that's higher than its on-base percentage. Not saying this definitely means anything, but I'd guess it's not out of the question that the sample isn't broad enough to make many conclusions, right? I feel like it's almost like the NFL, where scheduling plays a pretty significant role in what a team's record is because they don't play every team. The proper way to adjust for this is recursively and bidirectionally. Every hitter has his TAv and every pitcher has his TAv allowed. You calculate the average TAv of the hitters each pitcher has faced and adjust his TAV allowed accordingly, and at the same time you calculate the average TAv allowed of all the pitchers each hitter has faced, and adjust his TA accordingly. Then you do it again, and again, and ultimately, if there is enough variety in terms of hitters and pitchers facing one another, the figures stabilize at their true values. Couldn't you also calculate these stats for a backyard whiffle ball league? What does it tell you though?
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Post by ericmvan on Aug 26, 2015 15:49:52 GMT -5
The proper way to adjust for this is recursively and bidirectionally. Every hitter has his TAv and every pitcher has his TAv allowed. You calculate the average TAv of the hitters each pitcher has faced and adjust his TAV allowed accordingly, and at the same time you calculate the average TAv allowed of all the pitchers each hitter has faced, and adjust his TA accordingly. Then you do it again, and again, and ultimately, if there is enough variety in terms of hitters and pitchers facing one another, the figures stabilize at their true values. Couldn't you also calculate these stats for a backyard whiffle ball league? What does it tell you though? All the players on any randomly selected four teams in the GCL in a given year are going to be reasonably close to the GCL long-term average. Certainly closer than a set of players from another level of play. They might be 10% better or 10% worse than usual (which, BTW, is the same order of magnitude of other sources of error that we routinely ignore). But ... If you've got a pitcher dominating even a weak group of players to the extent that his stats translate conservatively to being able to pitch decently four levels higher, we know a great deal about that pitcher. What you're arguing here is the old "we don't have perfect knowledge so we know nothing" bit which frankly (and I'm not picking on you, because it's way too common) is just wrong and tiresome to the point of distraction. It cropped up a week ago with someone dismissing a small sample size as inherently meaningless because it was small, which is just absurd. If a rookie pitcher struck out all 27 batters he faced in his debut, you wouldn't say, OK, that was just 27 batters. Bill James has been making that point for thirty years, and people still don't get it, or the more general point that all data tells you something.If you had a thousand guys who began their career 3/5, 2B, HR, BB and a thousand guys who began their career 0/6, 3 SO, you indeed couldn't really learn anything useful about any one guy, and yet as a group the first thousand guys would end up better than the other thousand. And we could say with absolutely certainty that the guy who started 3/5, 2B, HR, BB was more likely to be a good MLB hitter than the guy who started 0/6, 3 SO. The reason we ignore it is not because we don't know that, it's because the difference in the odds is too small to be useful. It doesn't help you in the least to know that the first guy is, say, 1% likelier. But if you understand that he is truly, really, absolutely, 1% likelier, then you realize that at some point such differences can become useful even when the sample size is still apparently very small. And the same principles apply completely to sources of noise other than small sample sizes, like we're talking about here.
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Post by jmei on Aug 26, 2015 16:35:54 GMT -5
Espinoza's dominance over all the other pitchers who played in the same virtual league I will repeat my point from earlier-- this is just not true. While Espinoza has performed very well, especially considering his age, this continued narrative that he's leaps and bounds better than the rest of the league doesn't hold up. Among pitchers with 30+ IP, he's fifth in FIP, ninth in K%, 22nd in BB%, sixth in K%-BB%, second in ERA, third in batting average against, seventh in BABIP allowed, and second in WHIP. Keep in mind that he's rarely faced hitters a third time through the order, which gives him a systemic advantage over the rest of the league. He's clearly one of the best pitchers in the league, yes, but there's a tendency to think he's better than he is when we look at his raw numbers and aren't taking into account the pitcher-friendliness of the league enough.
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Post by Chris Hatfield on Aug 26, 2015 16:38:56 GMT -5
Honest question - what do the same translation numbers say about Carlos Pinales's 2012, Raynel Velette's 2010, and Roman Mendez's 2009? At the plate, what do they say about Jeremias Pineda's 2012?
Note: I'm not saying this is directly analogous to any of those situations at all. I'm curious, given that those players also dominated at this level. I'm just generally skeptical of minor league translations and moreso the lower on the ladder you get.
As for the point I'm working through in my head, it relates to the usefulness of GCL stats generally. None of it has to do with Espinoza in particular (by the way, he's making another jump in the September 1 rankings update).
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Post by ericmvan on Aug 26, 2015 17:21:02 GMT -5
Espinoza's dominance over all the other pitchers who played in the same virtual league I will repeat my point from earlier-- this is just not true. While Espinoza has performed very well, especially considering his age, this continued narrative that he's leaps and bounds better than the rest of the league doesn't hold up. Among pitchers with 30+ IP, he's fifth in FIP, ninth in K%, 22nd in BB%, sixth in K%-BB%, second in ERA, third in batting average against, seventh in BABIP allowed, and second in WHIP. Keep in mind that he's rarely faced hitters a third time through the order, which gives him a systemic advantage over the rest of the league. He's clearly one of the best pitchers in the league, yes, but there's a tendency to think he's better than he is when we look at his raw numbers and aren't taking into account the pitcher-friendliness of the league enough. I'm talking about the last four starts and, furthermore, mostly as evidence that the results back up the scouting reports.
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Post by ericmvan on Aug 26, 2015 17:44:11 GMT -5
Honest question - what do the same translation numbers say about Carlos Pinales's 2012, Raynel Velette's 2010, and Roman Mendez's 2009? At the plate, what do they say about Jeremias Pineda's 2012? Note: I'm not saying this is directly analogous to any of those situations at all. I'm curious, given that those players also dominated at this level. I'm just generally skeptical of minor league translations and moreso the lower on the ladder you get. As for the point I'm working through in my head, it relates to the usefulness of GCL stats generally. None of it has to do with Espinoza in particular (by the way, he's making another jump in the September 1 rankings update). Mendez had a 2.29 FIP. I was doing my translations off of Espinoza's 0.89 over his last 4 games (while, BTW, ignoring his .212 BABIP). So I think that answers your question; no we haven't see anything like that recently. By the way, the way to understand these translations is backwards. Espinoza's FIP translations work out to average AA pitching, and that doesn't mean at all that he could have been average in AA. What he would have done in AA is a mystery. What it does tell you that he dominated the hitters he faced the way an average AA pitcher would have, or the hitters (however good they actually were) hit collectively as if they had all been promoted to AA and faced average pitching. Except that the BABIPs would have been much higher, probably. And as I just said to jmei, these numbers really only serve as very welcome confirmation that the results match the reported stuff. For his first 6 games, we were drooling over the scouting reports and kind of wondering why the results were merely really good. Then he struck out 39.0% of the batters he faced while walking 1.6% and giving up five singles and a double on 32 balls in play, 25 of which were grounders (there was also a bunt hit). And we said, OK, that's more like it. And no, we didn't say, oh, but the opposing hitters were relatively weak for GCL guys! And to help you wrap your head around this, no, GCL stats aren't very useful at all, but anytime a guy with scouting reports like AE's has a set of numbers this extreme, it is meaningful, in that it eliminates the possibility that, for some reason, the exceptional stuff doesn't lead to exceptional results.
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