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Post by ethanbein on Sept 19, 2015 17:43:35 GMT -5
Eh, remember, with his defensive ability in CF, he doesn't have to hit much to be a solid starter. If he's an 80 wRC+ guy (think .220/.300/.360 or so), he's a two win-ish player. I'm still comfortable penciling him into a starting spot. 660 OPS isn't good enough to start everyday in the majors Andrelton Simmons and Billy Hamilton are both average to above-average players with < .660 OPS. Bradley will never have Hamilton's baserunning value, but being a Simmons-type player is definitely reasonable. A 30+% K rate still gives him an incredibly low floor though, so if he hits more than Hamilton than Simmons, he's not a starter. I'd pencil him in as the starting CF, but I'd like to see a decent 4th OF signed who you wouldn't hate starting, since there's not much in the minors until Margot (who won't be ready until 2017 at least, if he's not traded).
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Post by ethanbein on Sept 17, 2015 11:52:17 GMT -5
Maybe he's somewhere between his hot streak and his cold streak and is around the 95 wRC+ hitter than he's projected for? That's a very good player still! Just not an infallible superstar.
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Post by ethanbein on Sept 15, 2015 9:12:22 GMT -5
I'm kind of curious as to why Swihart's small sample size is brought up in cons against him, yet Vasquez's aren't even mentioned when talking about his pros. Like CV's great pitch framing, yet he hasn't even played a full season in the bigs yet. But we start to mention BS's hitting and he gets critisized for not having enough time in the bigs, to believe that it's sustainable yet. Because pitch framing has been shown to be a very quickly "stabilizing" statistic (a catcher gets many framing chances a game), while Swihart's numbers are held up by a BABIP 30-40 points higher than the *highest* true talent BABIP of any player in major league baseball.
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Post by ethanbein on Sept 15, 2015 9:02:20 GMT -5
Endorse. His bad first half was a whole lot of bad luck. Obviously isn't a great fit on this team right now, but if a team with pitching loved Bradley, and Ozuna was available at a decent price, I wouldn't hesitate to make a couple of trades.
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Post by ethanbein on Sept 12, 2015 0:47:04 GMT -5
Eric, how can you feel so certain you know what this new approach means for his results when his minor league numbers this year were good contact, solid power, while his major league numbers have been very low contact, very high power? They've both been great results, but I don't know how you can feel so confident about what his new approach means for his future.
Throwing out data that doesn't fit your conclusion because you think you have a reason to is a pretty bad practice. Yeah, in highlight, maybe JBJ is completely changed and he runs a .200 ISO next year - in that case you'll look really smart. That's a possibility that just didn't exist a year ago, that's what he's done for himself this year. But there's also a very real chance that he could regress toward his approach from last year, or that pitchers could find holes in the new approach, or that many other things could happen to make him regress toward his career numbers. Almost every time a guy has a huge "breakout", he looks great scouting wise over that stretch. Some of those guys end up sticking with those numbers, but plenty go back to career norms. That's why projection systems are rightly cautious. It's fine to take the over on Steamer, but pretending there's no chance he's just an average hitter next year (let alone worse) is pretty unjustifiable.
(Also, Mookie Betts had way, way better numbers at every level, especially K/BB rates, at a much younger age. He looks like a worse prospect because of when the lists came out, but he could've easily been a top 5+ prospect around his graduation. I certainly would've had him there. JBJ has never been on that level.)
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Post by ethanbein on Sept 11, 2015 15:19:12 GMT -5
I tend to think of the outfield alignment question like lineup orders. It's fun to discuss, but ultimately, it won't affect things that much. Assuming that either Betts or Bradley is in CF and Castillo is in a corner (which noone disagrees about), I can't see the difference between the optimal alignment and a sub-optimal alignment being more than a handful of runs a year. When you have three center fielders out there, no matter what configuration you put them in, chances are good things will happen. I agree, but another way of putting this is they could pay an analyst a million dollars a year solely to figure out the optimal outfield alignment, and still come out ahead.
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Post by ethanbein on Sept 10, 2015 8:56:13 GMT -5
Seems like everyone is ruling out selling high on Bradley this offseason. I think it's worth considering. Not, it's not worth considering. We now know that his offensive floor is average MLB hitter, and he's a 1.5 dWAR player, so he has a 4.5 WAR floor, and 5.0 is an All-Star. His mean projection is upwards of that. Well, for one, 2 + 1.5 = 3.5, so that would be his floor by your projection. But I think it's ridiculous to assume that his *floor* is an average MLB hitter. This is a guy who was *destroyed* in MLB last year. I agree that he's turned a corner and is likely to be a good hitter going forward, but there absolutely is a real chance that he's a below-average hitter going forward - his contact rate is *down* over three percentage points from last year! Steamer, the only ROS projection system that takes into account in-season minor league data, has him at a 98 wRC+ going forward. I don't think it's unreasonable to take the over on that given the scouting we have, but I don't think that projection is that far off. Now, that's still a very, very good player (go look at Kevin Kiermaier this year for the ceiling there), but there's still some downside risk in that projection.
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Post by ethanbein on Sept 6, 2015 20:38:15 GMT -5
Draft redone today, who goes 100% before Benintendi? Swanson, Rodgers, ...
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Post by ethanbein on Sept 3, 2015 11:19:28 GMT -5
Sorry for beating a dead horse, but am I the only one who prefers Archer to Gray/Carrasco? I love what he brings to the table in terms of swing and miss stuff. More fly balls and less GB than Gray, but with our outfield, that's mitigatable. With Sandoval at 3B (and Hanley at 1B), GBs may sting us next year. Also Archer's contract is incredibly team friendly. Archer's contract is stupid good, but I think that's why he's basically in the Chris Sale category of untouchable. You bring in Mookie, maybe, but I don't think a package of prospects could get him.
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Post by ethanbein on Sept 1, 2015 10:59:10 GMT -5
Eric, you know well enough that a p-value isn't any sort of estimate of the size of an effect. I'm maybe willing to believe Joe Kelly might have a BABIP skill. But - what do you estimate the size of that skill to be? And, if it requires him to have worse K and BB rates to tap into it, that makes it even less of a useful skill. (We can table this discussion for now if you're going to start a new thread). The thread will have to wait a bit because it turns out that his two-seamer and four-seamer blend together in a way that makes it impossible for even the superior Pitch Info classification methodology to tell them apart. So I will either attempt to do so myself semi-manually, or just lump them together. In this case, to get a significant result despite the huge amount of BABIP noise in any individual start, you would need a large effect size. Now, his career BABIP as a starter is .293. But it's .264 in the 42 games where he walked 8% or more of batters (on 701 balls in play), and .333 in the 28 where he walked less than 8% (on 526). (Yes, his BABIP is an inverse function of his BB%.) The odds of getting the BABIP split at random are 1 in 113 (p = .009). You can also do a t-test on the unweighted means of the two groups of starts (which have identical variances), and p = .005. And I finally plotted BB% vs. BABIP and immediately saw that there was one huge outlier where he walked a career-high 25.0% and got killed (2 HR, .385 BABIP, versus Houston last 8/17). It's one of two games in his career that are huge xFIP and FIP outilers, games where he apparently had nothing and any wildness was going to just get him killed. (The other was his 7 R in 1.2 IP, 0 SO, 1 BB game this year in Minnesota.) Remove those two outliers, and you get p = .0017 for the inverse correlation, start by start. Alright, I grabbed the data myself. The average relationship (whether or not you include K%) is about 6 points of BABIP improvement for every extra 1 percentage point of BB%. But, of course, I think you'd agree that you have to regress that to the mean, since its highly, highly likely that at least some of this is caused by chance. I'd guess you have to regress 95%+ of the way to the mean, because I don't think this is a normal split to have, but let's say for now that it's mostly real. 6 points of BABIP of a 1% increase in BB% doesn't seem like a great tradeoff. You'd have to run the numbers with some run values, but that's probably only a small net positive. So, once you regress to the mean a little bit, I'm pretty skeptical that high BB, low BABIP Joe Kelly, if he exists, is better than just average old Joe Kelly.
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 31, 2015 23:48:54 GMT -5
Scott Lauber @scottlauber 18s18 seconds ago Allen Craig also will join #RedSox tomorrow, team announces. I get that there's not much downside when they can just outright him again later, but what's the point? He's a bad defender with a .077 ISO in AAA who hasn't hit major league pitching in years. He's never going to hit again. I guess he can't do much harm sitting on the bench, but if he gets a single start...
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 31, 2015 13:13:04 GMT -5
Also, relievers are already given extra credit for pitching in high-leverage situations in WAR, so that's not really a valid reason why RPs could be undervalued by WAR.
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 31, 2015 9:48:46 GMT -5
He has a BABIP skill. He's had it his whole career. He's using it now, whereas earlier in the season, he wasn't. Now, I made that argument when we got him, after looking at his situational splits. Now I've taken his whole career and looked at the relationship between his BABIP and his BB% and SO%, game by game. You know how noisy game-by-game BABIP rates are? They shouldn't correlate with anything with p = .013 over 70 starts. But, damn, they do, and in a way that both makes baseball sense and fits with observations of Kelly. I'm going to look at some pitch/fx data tonight to see if I can glean some more info, and then start a thread, where I'll explain the findings. BTW, it looks like the Sox brain trust tried to get him away from his BABIP skill, have him stop nibbling and try to strike more guys out. Someone dropped the ball analytically. Eric, you know well enough that a p-value isn't any sort of estimate of the size of an effect. I'm maybe willing to believe Joe Kelly might have a BABIP skill. But - what do you estimate the size of that skill to be? And, if it requires him to have worse K and BB rates to tap into it, that makes it even less of a useful skill. (We can table this discussion for now if you're going to start a new thread).
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 30, 2015 14:57:46 GMT -5
Woooooooo bunting with the platoon advantage...
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 26, 2015 18:59:41 GMT -5
Espinoza {is} making another jump in the September 1 rankings update). I've got it Moncada, Espinoza (!), Benintendi (!), Devers, Owens, Margot, Guerra, Johnson, but 2 through 4 are subject to change (Benny's the tough guy to rank). Very curious as to what the site will say. I made a new thread in the meta forum, for those interested.
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 26, 2015 18:59:00 GMT -5
This was cropping up on the main forum, but maybe should be here. What would you guys have for your top 10 as of today? Here was Eric: Espinoza {is} making another jump in the September 1 rankings update). I've got it Moncada, Espinoza (!), Benintendi (!), Devers, Owens, Margot, Guerra, Johnson, but 2 through 4 are subject to change (Benny's the tough guy to rank). Very curious as to what the site will say. Personally, I'd have something like Moncada, Benintendi, Espinoza, Guerra, Owens, Devers, Margot, Johnson, Kopech, Chavis. Beyond that, Trey Ball would probably be out of my top 30, and I'd move Logan Allen into the top 20. What do you guys think?
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 26, 2015 12:15:32 GMT -5
I find this incredible. I mean that in the original sense of the word, that it is so outlandish it's not even credible. Maybe it wasn't discussed with Hanley, so Lovullo says that to make Hanley feel better? Or Lovullo wasn't in on the discussion? Neither of those make much sense either, but moving Hanley to first was such an obvious move I was treating it as a given. How could this not have been discussed? I had the same reaction. All this means is it wasn't discussed with Lovullo. I'd be stunned if Cherington hadn't discussed this with guys like Hazen, Baird, etc., at the very least, if not with the coaching staff. Yeah, mentioned this in the other thread, but Cherington was asked about Hanley last weekend, and he said something along the lines of "clearly it hasn't worked out, and they'll have to figure out where he plays in the future, whether that's left field or somewhere else, and those are some of the discussions we had started to have"
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 25, 2015 17:37:39 GMT -5
Brian MacPherson @brianmacp 11m11 minutes ago Lovullo said trying Ramirez out at first base hadn't been discussed before Dombrowski came on board last week. Would he really know though? Cherington basically implied otherwise last weekend.
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 25, 2015 14:50:40 GMT -5
Red Sox Stats @redsoxstats 7m7 minutes ago Felger and Mazz insinuating Jackie Bradley is on steroids. They must have new ones that help players make contact with the ball. JBJ contact% 2014: 74.9% 2015: 73.6% But yeah, steroid speculation is the worst.
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 24, 2015 18:38:25 GMT -5
#fWARforpitchersisgarbage His bWAR is almost a win higher, too. #pitchingintheNLiseasy
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 23, 2015 17:51:22 GMT -5
I'll say what I thought on draft day, and have had no reason to change my mind: Benintendi was underrated by scouts because he didn't play in the Cape (overrated) and they didn't know he was draft eligible (not his fault). Putting up those kind of numbers in college isn't everything, but it's not nothing either. I'm not surprised that his performance is carrying over and I think by the time prospect lists come out a year and change from now, Benintendi will look like the steal of the top half of the first round.
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 23, 2015 8:53:39 GMT -5
Interesting comment from the Red Sox guys at Saberseminar: Pat Light wasn't necessarily told not to throw his split in the pros - the player development guys helped him develop it from a change of pace pitch in college to the weapon it is now, and it really locked in the second half of last year. Once he showed that, they moved him to relief. A little bit of a different story than we've heard before.
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 21, 2015 15:27:39 GMT -5
If I had to predict numbers for a full season I'm thinking like .250 .325 .425 with a .750 ops. He could have a higher average and on base %, but he could also have a lower slugging %. 3 weeks ago you would have traded him for a reliever, now we are predicting him to have numbers of a young hall of famer. Steamer has him at 252/.319/.391, which would put him at a 93 wRC+. That's something like a 3 win player, and it could turn into 4 if he hits a little better. That's his reasonable upside though - it's pretty unlikely that he keeps hitting like this and turns into Manny Machado. He's raised his stock this year from 4th outfielder to solid 1st division starter. No need to oversell it, that's enough change on its own.
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 20, 2015 16:43:49 GMT -5
On H Ramirez, some one said that all Redsox LF get a negative dWAR because of the configuration of Fenway, just not as bad as -2.3 There could be a bias there, but UZR/DRS do at least try to adjust for park.
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Post by ethanbein on Aug 19, 2015 16:33:18 GMT -5
I don't understand why Gammons would even be talking about Benintendi in a trade package. He can't be traded until next summer. I realize that he was just speculating about value, but Benintendi shouldn't be included in current value. New draftees can now be traded the offseason after the draft (which they more or less already could be, but as PTBNLs). www.fangraphs.com/blogs/mlb-fixes-the-trea-turner-problem-for-everyone-else/
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