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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 8, 2023 11:22:35 GMT -5
Not sure he deserved a raise Agree. Seems like an overpay. Still, only 1 year, but I would've preferred an incentive-laden deal. Kiké was worth $38.8M on his previous 2-year contract, and that's not including the 2021 post-season.
(FG has it only $35.5M, but I'm adjusting for his good situational hitting. He has 12.1 fWAR in his career, but 15.1 adjusted.)
But I didn't hunt down this thread to talk about that. Which one of these numbers is not like the others, and can you guess what they mean? 5 5 11 1 6
The 11 is a clue, right? It's the years of control left on the likely 1 through 5 hitters come mid-season: Yoshida, Story, Devers, Turner, Casas.
We are really set for LHB for a while. For RHB, Story is it. Kiké and Turner are signed for this year only, and Turner is 38.
If you look at top 30 prospects with an ETA earlier than late 2005, and that are either projected elite bats or bat-first prospects, you have Meyer, Casas, Valdez, Kavadas, and Abreu swinging from the left side, and lonely Nick Yorke swinging from the right. And it's unclear that he'll be a 2 or 4 hitter when he arrives, or where he'll play.
Furthermore, if this year's FA crop was any indicator, this may be an MLB-wide thing: plenty enough good LHB, fewer good RHB.
But the 2021 Kiké was a legit cleanup hitter (even if they strangely hit him first). A return to that form is a possibility ... and would be a heck of a lot more important than it might seem, given how thin we (and maybe many other clubs) are from that side of the plate.
So all eyes this year should be on Kiké and Yorke, and on Rafaela as a potential better-than-average 6 hitter, and of course we'll be watching Bleis and Jordan for longer-range solutions to this problem.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 8, 2023 4:33:44 GMT -5
I'm bullish on everyone. Everyone.
And in other news, the sun will rise tomorrow morning.
Seriously ... no one has mentioned Trevor Story? I'm calling a return to his pre-2021 form and maybe even his health. sWAR is fWAR adjusted for situational hitting.
PA sWAR Per600 2016 415 3.1 4.5 2017 555 2.5 2.7 2018 656 4.9 4.5 2019 656 5.5 5.1 2020 259 2.0 4.7 2021 595 3.3 3.3 2022 396 2.1 3.2 There's 2 to 3 extra wins of team improvement.
Notstarboard mentioned Story above. I have a vivid memory of coming back to my laptop, switching from Excel or Word to my browser, and seeing a finished but never-posted entry in some SP thread, from hours ago. Now I know which post that was!
Not the first time I've done this, BTW.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 8, 2023 3:53:07 GMT -5
I'm guessing slugging average. Which makes more sense as a name than slugging percentage. Intuitively, average sounds like number of bases per at bat, percentage sounds like how often you get an extra base hit. I'm curious as to why someone with the same OBP and SLG but lower BA would be better off. Are doubles worth more than twice a single by run value? That was my best guess too! I was wondering if I was missing something since this didn't seem to relate too much to the Casas discussion, but I think I was reading into it too much
If you have the same OBP and SLG but lower BA, that implies that you're walking more (OBP minus BA is greater) and getting fewer hits (BA is lower), but more of your hits are going for extra bases (fewer hits result in the same SLG). I don't have a good quantitative way of showing why this is better than hitting more singles, but it seems intuitive.
This basically amounts to walks and extrea-base hits being more valuable than the OBP / SA equivalent in singles.
It's really easy to do a regression analysis on team scoring with RS as the target and BA, OBP, and SA as the factors. The BA factor is much less important than OBP and SA, but is still statistically significant (given enough team seasons), and it's slightly negative.
Or at least this was the case 20 (?) years ago when I did this. I doubt it's changed.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 8, 2023 3:27:00 GMT -5
I'm not changing WAR at all. I'm simply adding an extra component of the game that isn't being measured.
So you backed check the data for the whole season making sure positional players got 570 fwar? That's fangraphs war system based on replacement players and their win percentage. 1,000 fwar per season, 570 to positional players, 430 to pitchers. You can't just adjust numbers because you think it makes more sense. It has to fit into the war system and calculations. Assuming that the average for Batting (Runs >) Wins Above Average is close enough to zero (and I checked, and it's very close, off by accumulated rounding errors), then the situational hitting adjustments sum to zero as well. They have to. Win Probability Added also needs to sum to zero because it's relative to average. So all I'm doing here is measuring two diffeent sum-to-zero measures, WPA and BWA, and crediting or debiting the hitters who have more or less WPA (which is situational) than BWA (which is not).
It's really simple. And everything in the WAR system works the same way except the translation from Wins Above Average to Wins Above Replacement. It's just a sum of measurable skills, above or below average, and then you convert the resulting Wins Above Average to Wins Above Replacement by adding positional, playing time, and league quality adjustments. You don't have to consider the Average to Replacement element at all when you are measuring a new skill to include in WAR, like, e.g., pitch framing.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 8, 2023 0:46:17 GMT -5
Spotrac has them as $13.51M under. This includes a weirdly specific Arb estimate that is 1.00977 x the 19.7M that MLBTR has.
I am fairly certain that they have the option of taking the $17.5M arb agreement and doing the remainder as a 10-year extension. In that case, they have $26.1M left.
Bonuses that seem in reach total $4M.25M. Kluber $2M for 30 starts, Turner $1M for 560 PA, Paxton $1M for 26 starts, and Rodriguez 0.25M for 70 games.
Red Sox Payroll is adding $13.75M for Bonuses, Future Bonuses, and Incentives. They also have Hosmer as $.072 when it's really $1.75M (which I looked into and appears to be correct. It's leftover AAV from his big contract being front-loaded).
The Cotts sheet doesn't have Whitlock's correct AAV and has different Arb estimates.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 8, 2023 0:04:53 GMT -5
Hardly ideal but maybe there is another option. If they move Kiké to SS and keep Story at 2b, maybe they sign Adam Duvall for CF? Pollack is the only other guy who might be able to handle CF? And these two might be lousy defensive CF options and if they are, other than as a backup, Bloom shouldn't pursue it. I do think either would be better than Duran if it did come down to Kiké having to play SS. Duvall in CF and Kiké at 2B or SS is possibly better than Andrus at SS, if Duvall has a big edge on Andrus in fit to Fenway, and/or in benefiting from no shifts. Both of those are hard to estimate, so for such a low-level decision I'll just trust the team.
Meanwhile, here's an outside the box idea: Javier Baez. He got a stupid contract from the Tigers, and maybe they're stupid enough to try to get out from under the contract by finding someone who will take some part of it off their hands -- fearing that in another year his value drops further and they're stuck with the whole mess. I have no idea how much they'd have to eat before it makes sense for us, but there is obviously an amount where it's a good idea (since all of it would be).
And while I agree that Correa is very unlikely to take another 1-year deal, he might make an exception to rejoin Cora for a year here, especially if there is a chance that his medicals will actually look better a year from now. The Sox could offer him a $20M contract with a $20M player option or $10M buyout, stay under the tax limit this year (by splitting the Devers extension between $17.5M this year and the balance over the following 10 years), and he ends up making $30M and goes back to free agency again. *
I've pointed out that he's overrated because he doesn't hit good pitching as well as expected, and can be counted on to be worth a full 1.0 less that what WAR tells you he is. But he'd still be a serious upgrade over Andrus. I'd actually hit him 9th as a second leadoff hitter, if Kiké can be anything like he was two years ago, second half..
* This trick of splitting a one-year contract into two parts, the second a buyout for the following year that they're sure to take instead of a matching offer for the first half -- that's brilliant. I expect there to be a limit set on option buyouts in the next CBA ... it really is gaming the tax limit system.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 7, 2023 21:21:50 GMT -5
Incidentally, this adds up to 25.5, and if you just add on fangraphs depthcharts projections for their pitchers, which total 14.5, you get 40 WAR. Add that to the 47.5 replacement-level baseline and you get 87-88 wins.
Mine was 27.7 so similar enough, but a question for Eric is does the same WAR + replacement baseline work for his adjusted WAR numbers? Like is every plus win for clutch in your model offset by a minus somewhere else? Basically, your projections assume a zero "clutch" for each hitter, and hence zero for the team. And for projections, 0 for the team is generally what you want.
The Sox in 2022 were killed by their negative situational hitting differential, and nobody is taking that into account. It's a team psychologival thing where everyone presses. A few years the Sox were unimaginably bad in just the 9th inning, IIRC. OTOH, the Marinerts this year had crazy good numbers. You have some success, people get confident and relax.
The only guy on the Sox who has projects to be different from their unadjusted WAR is Verdugo. I mentioned that he was 1/31 with Leverage Index of .04 or below last year; what I didn't note at the time is that just the OPS difference between that and the rest of his season had less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of happening randomly.
I have two posts I have to write for the former "Clutch" thread (I'm changing the title again!). One will break down all the ways I know of that a player can acquire a situational hitting differential, and also explain why it has been hard to demonstrate that it exists. The other will rebut Jimoh's criticism that I was slicing and dicing Verdugo's numbers arbitrarily, which couldn't be more wrong (not always the case, mark you, when he criticizes me).
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 7, 2023 19:49:48 GMT -5
For the purposes of this comparison, I'm swapping last year's SS and non-Verdugo corner outfielder. Which is to say, those two slots are more by batting order than by position.
Who Crowd 2022 Who Yoshida 2.3 4.8 Bogaerts Story 3.9 1.9 Story, Arroyo Devers 5.6 5.3 Turner 2.7 -0.7 Martinez Casas 2.9 0.4 Dalbec, Cordero, Casas, Hosmer Hernan. 2.1 1.1 Hernandez, Duran Verdugo 3.1 3.5 SS 1.3 -1.6 Bradley, Pham, Cordero McGuire 1.8 2.3 Vazquez, McGuire Wong 0.8 -1.1 Plawecki, Wong Bench 1.0 0.7 Refsnyder 0.0 Cordero, Arroyo -1.2 Sanchez, Downs, Almonte, Davis, Chang, Shaw, Arauz 27.6 15.4 The Gang of Seven replacement-level subs were -1.2 WAR, and they had 206 PA. That's a full bench spot. They combined for a .210 wOBA. As a result, the entire bench was -0.5 wins.
Arroyo, who was a high-leverage beast in 2021, was -0.5 wins in his 300 PA and that put him as below replacement level on the season.
Plawecki was a mind-boggling -1.4 Sit-Wins, which is -14.8 per 600 PA.
JDM wasn't really quite that bad, because the positional adjustment for DH is way too extreme (it's actually tougher than 1B, in reality), but folks used the same misunderstanding in estimating Turner.
----
So this crowd-sourced estimate (three's a crowd, right?) puts the Sox at 92 wins (since playing fewer games against the AL East is worth 2). Without any improvement in pitching.
Doing this for pitchers is much trickier because using FIP for WAR (FG) is just plain wrong, and so is using DRS for a defensive adjustment when Statcast is available (b-Ref). I'm going to think about how to do that, though.
I did a best-case version (which is to say, I just let my optimism take over) and came up with 100 wins. And I think the pitching should be better as well!
They are already a genuine contender.
(Nobody though this in 2021, and my prediction was 92 wins and the first WC.)
To go further, this could be the best team in MLB without a single "where did that come from? Nobody saw that!" performance. Which of course is also a sneaky way of admitting that you have never seen a team with more variance in player projections. Once-great guys coming off injuries but now healthy, young players with great big upsides but ... young players, and a Japanese mystery man to top it off. And that covers almost everybody on the roster.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 7, 2023 17:31:29 GMT -5
Great job, voters! Three is plenty enough to get a sense of things.
I'm compiling them and will post the results next to the 2022 reality in just a bit.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 7, 2023 16:19:16 GMT -5
All four of these things seem related:
- Sox are talking trade for a SS or 2B
- Elvis Andrus, the best remaining FA SS, is unsigned
- Corey Kluber's deal has not yet been made official
- Raffy Devers' contract extension, ditto
They'll need to clear two roster spots for Kluber and the SS. One obvious candidate is Ryan Brasier, who has some trade value, and the best remaining option would seem to be to trade either Josh Winckowski or Connor Seabold, who are currently 9th and 10th on the MLB starting pitcher depth chart and may soon be passed by any or all of Bryan Mata, Brandon Walter, or Chris Murphy.
If they're trading for a SS, there's a decent chance that one of these two guys (lumping Winck and Seabold together) is going the other way. Maybe both are. There's even a scenario where Ort is in the deal and they keep Brasier and either deal him in ST, or are happy that they kept him because of a rash of bullpen injuries. So the remaining roster moves very much depend on the SS / 2B solution.
They also need to stay under the tax limit. Right now they have about $14.4M if Devers' arbitration agreement is tossed out and the extension is spread out over 11 years, but $27M if they accept the arb agreement and spread the extension over 10. Doing so increases the AAV by $1.25M (from $30.1 to $31.35) which is not a big deal, but you'd avoid it if it had no downside.
Signing Andrus would likely push them too close to the limit for comfort, squeezing their ability to make deadline deals. So if they do that, they keep the arb, and they'd also be in a position to pick up a better backup CF than Duran in ST or early in the season, if he's still butchering it. If they trade for a SS, it's a lot likelier that they can tear up the arb agreement and get that AAV reduction for the following 10 years. So the nature of the extension is also dependent on the SS fix.
As far as Andrus remaining unsigned (and therefore Iglesias), they have to have talked to Andrus, and they may even have a deal in place (and he may also have a deal with another team that's his second choice). And / or some of the teams looking at Correa have interest in Andrus, complicating things in a way I'm not going to think through!
(It's of course possible that they like Iglesias better than Andrus, but there would have to be a big difference in the combination of their fit to Fenway and their benefit from the shift ban to make Iglesias the better choice.)
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 7, 2023 7:53:27 GMT -5
I think the point of Eric’s leverage-adjusted WAR is not to adjust for psychological factors (“clutch”), which may or may not be predictive, but to factor in the quality of pitching in normal vs high-leverage vs garbage time situations. It seems reasonable that that’s a skill. We all can think of players who fatten themselves on AAAA pitching while having trouble hitting elite pitching (see Cordero, Franchy), and to the extent that’s predictive, the ability to deliver in more important (highly leveraged) situations against better pitchers makes a player more valuable That’s longest HR in redsox statcast history off of elite Zack Wheeler thank you very much. The slander for the King of Worcester!!! And in fact Franchy was +1 win situationally in a Sox Uni.
Franchy's problem is / was JBJ Syndrome, and he maybe has it more severely. If he had Manny Ramirez's hot to cold ratio he'd be ... David Ortiz. But he seems to be really bad at recovering his mechanics once lost and really good at losing them.
He had that stretch early in the season, from May 14 to May 29 where he hit .326 / .360 / .587 in 50 PA, including the walk-off slam. He then went .111 / .216 / .200 in his next 51 PA.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 7, 2023 7:33:58 GMT -5
Has anyone heard if the FO is down on Casas? I think I’m seeing a guy who won’t be a traditional 1B type. Less jacks but higher average. Walks. Contact. Maybe a little seasoning he starts to put some wood on the baseballs "Less jacks but higher average" is actually the opposite of what we will get with Casas, no? Little known fact: given the same OBP and SA, the player with the lower batting average is slightly more valuable.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 7, 2023 6:25:14 GMT -5
I've just created a very cool breakdown by position of situation-adjusted fWAR for the 2022 position players. The challenge was to correctly divide Arroyo between starting 2B and bench, and Franchy between starting 1B, starting corner OF, and bench. (Vazquez and Duran had little slivers of bench assignment, and Dalbec a sliver at 3B, but none were large enough to show up in the totals.
What I want folks to do before I post this is to estimate the WAR we'll get at each at each of 11 positions. (The three bench positions other than C did not really sort out well in 2022, so I've lumped them together.) I think folks may be surprised at the difference between their total and last year's reality.
I don't need a whole lot of responses here, nor do you have to spend a lot of thought. I'm actually more interested in gut feelings!
You can copy this or even quote this answer and insert your guesses.
I've included the last four year for the current incumbents as a guide (with the SSS 2020 in parentheses). All are per 600 PA unless they exceeded that (indicated by *); catcher is per 400 PA and backup catcher per 200. Order is projected lineup.
_____ Yoshida ?
_____ Story 5.5*, (4.1), 3.3, 3.2
_____ Devers 6.0*, (5.0), 4.6*, 5.3*
_____ Turner 2.7, (8.6), 4.8*, 3.4
____ Casas 4.5
_____ Herandez 1.1, (0.2), 3.4, 2.1
_____ Verdugo 2.7, (4.9), 3.9, 3.5*
_____ SS ?
_____ McGuire [0.2 2019-20], 1.7, 2.3
_____ Wong 0.8 (per 200) PA
_____ Refsnyder, Arroyo, Duran, etc. (600 PA total)
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 7, 2023 3:36:05 GMT -5
Has anyone heard if the FO is down on Casas? I think I’m seeing a guy who won’t be a traditional 1B type. Less jacks but higher average. Walks. Contact. Maybe a little seasoning he starts to put some wood on the baseballs I certainly haven't heard that the Sox are down on him. I marveled at his strike zone judgement and patience. (Can one infuse his stem cells into Dalbec?). Yet it surprised me given that, his relatively short swing and those at more hittable pitches, that he had so much (to me) apparent swing and miss. It’s an itsy-bitsy teeny-weenie (but not yellow or polka-dot, and how many people get that reference?) sample size, but despite a slow start Casas finished with a 4.5 adjusted fWAR per 600 PA. More than half of that was his situational hitting adjustment, and his approach and tools project as someone who can hit good pitching.
I mentioned elsewhere that I was completely blown away by his “makeup” as evidenced in an interview. I don’t see why the Sox wouldn’t be as high on him as I am.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 6, 2023 17:07:53 GMT -5
You spent a lot of time on a C we traded Jake Diekman for. Bloom and everyone knows we need to upgrade this position at some point. We just had way bigger needs which most have been filled. In a perfect world Wong wins the starting job this season and shows out. You spent very little time giving any reason for that conclusion - for instance, an explanation for why a catcher with a nearly identical career wRC+ to Vazquez and considerably better WAR/500 PA numbers, and who costs a pittance, needs to be upgraded.
In fact I'd argue against eric from exactly the opposite direction: you don't need to think they expected to "transform him as a hitter" to justify the acquisition; they could well have thought he was an upgrade on Vazquez simply based on his pre-Boston track record, when he had already racked up 2.7 fWAR in 566 PAs. Maybe his performance with the Red Sox last season was simply a hot streak; maybe someone did identify a tweak in his approach that helped him (until the league inevitably adjusts next year). But you can regress him all the way back to the hitter he was before he came here and he's still a starting caliber catcher, based on the best available numbers.
I put the key thing first but failed to explain why it's key!
Nobody strikes out 25% more on a hot streak. That's a change in approach.
And I think that it's the simplest one to communicate. "Hey, you're bat speed is solid but you're selling it out to make contact -- weak contact. Swing harder."
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 6, 2023 8:27:51 GMT -5
So, the Sox, as part of their plan to try to make the playoffs, trade an important clubhouse piece to obtain a weak-hitting backup catchers, whom they hand the starting job to.
This only makes sense if they think they can transform him as a hitter.
Did that happen? Beyond any doubt.
All of these numbers are against RHP only.
(He actually had a .350 xwOBA and .458 wOBA in 17 PA vs. LHP for us, versus .219 / .172 in 30 PA for them ... but that's way too small a sample to infer that he has also reduced his platoon split. That's TBD.)
He had crazy karma / BABIP (wOBA - xwOBA) for us, and that can be explained by teams having the wrong book on where to play him. He's not going to put his insane Sox numbers up again. But consider ....
He fanned 25% more with Our Sox and walked 49% more. That's the profile of someone trying to hit the ball harder.
There were 278 hitters last year who put 200+ balls in play. Had McGuire qualified, where would his 82.7 mph EV with the Old Sox have ranked?
Dead last. But if he had put 150 balls in play instead of 105, he would have ranked only 332nd out of 333.
With the Red Sox he was 89.0. MLB average was 88.6. He would have ranked in the 54th percentile of the 278, one slot behind JDM and two ahead of Alex Bregman.
His launch angle was up 12%. He cut his popups in half, from 12.4% to 6.2%.
Let's look at his batted ball types. "Results" are xwOBA.
He had 29% more pulled fly balls with 7% better results. His liners were up 36% with 11% better results. His grounders were unchanged in frequency and distribution, but his opposite field jobs had 25% better results and the others 13% better. He had 10 oppo-fly balls for the Previous Sox, with very bad results ... he cut that to 1 with the Current Sox.
The only negative in this transform: his fly balls to CF were up 62% with results 70% worse. But that was just 8 PA, and even with that and his extra K's, his xwOBA went from .255 to .286. If you include the LHP, it's a .304 xwOBA; Vazquez was .303 for us.
(Hmm ... MLB LHP held LHB to a .290 xwOBA; the guys McGuire faced for us allowed .293. So it was a typical group.)
A .286 wOBA was actually what McGuire had last year, and ranked 20th in MLB out of 34 catchers with 250+ PA behind the plate. That's a very solid rank for a plus defender. Among 37 catchers with 250 PA last year (at any position), McGuire ranked 11th in fWAR per PA and 12th for fWAR per G; CV was 15th and 14th. And the magical thing is that his crazy karma with us exactly exactly balanced his not playing for us all year, in his transformed fashion.
Catcher vs. 2022 is at worst a wash and is likely a small or even solid upgrade.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 6, 2023 3:13:29 GMT -5
I will preface this by saying I am glad they signed him and I think the contract will be fine. But man, that ZiPS projection scares me, and it is exactly why I didn't think they would sign him. ZiPS thinks Devers will put up 27 WAR over the life of the contract, which comes out to over $12 million/win. That is not comforting. I really hope Devers' bat can stay elite, because if he is more of a 115 OPS+ hitter in his thirties as the projection system thinks this deal is gonna look bad.
Edit: I am just realizing that the ZiPS projections start in 2024, not 2023. So the projection isn't quite as bad as I thought as it's closer to $11.5 million/win. Still definitely on the expensive side though.
You know what Zips doesn't know, but the Red Sox do? That when Devers went on the IL with his hamstring pull just after the ASB, he was on pace for something like a 7.7 WAR season, and after he came back he was something like a 1.1 player. The FanGraphs data has it as 7.4 to 1.7. but they have to be spreading his -2 defense equally over the season, and I remember him being +1 in June or early July, so I'm guessing 0 at the injury and all of his -2 after it.
And that was his age 25 season. Players of his ilk tend to peak at 28 rather than 27. The ZiPS projection seems to have him as already peaked.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 6, 2023 2:17:54 GMT -5
Kim was a 5.1 WAR SS last season.At 27 years old 2 years 14 million of that for Houck and Andrus. NO BRAINER!!!! Are you guys messing with me? LET ME REMIND YOU. You were willing to pay Bogaerts 30 million a year. 5.8 WAR 30 year old SS. ACTUALLY 2.3.
That's when you use a much more accurate defensive metric (knocking off 1.4 wins) and adjust for the fact that he destroyed awful pitchers in meaningless situations in blowout games while performing even worse than you'd think in important situations, given the previous (knocking off another 1.4 wins).
How many times do I have to point this out?
Can the mods spin off a Kim thread so that the rest of us don't have to deal with this fetish?
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 4, 2023 21:32:02 GMT -5
Fine... I'll say it. I would have rather given that deal to Carlos Correa and traded Devers. Devers' ages 22 through 25 seasons have been better than Correa's 24 through 27. And that's based on rate per game and doesn't penalize Correa's injury history. Of course, he's presumably health... oh, wait.
Correa had 10.5 fWAR ages 22 to 25 (with situational adjustment*).
Devers has 17.9.
*Correa's situational hitting wins per 600 PA, starting in 2017:
-1.3 -0.8 -1.1 -1.8 (60 game sched, adds noise)
-0.9 -1.3
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 4, 2023 21:11:40 GMT -5
To compare this with other big contracts, you have to adjust for the differing lengths, and look at ages. I looked at the number of regular players (300+ PA) and stars (ditto, 4.0+ fWAR) by age, the last 20 full seasons. Age Reg Star Star% 26 752 133 17.7% 27 777 150 19.3% 28 755 154 20.4% 29 717 137 19.1% 30 663 112 16.9% 31 642 98 15.3% 32 500 71 14.2% 33 428 56 13.1% 34 324 39 12.0% 35 238 29 12.2% 36 173 14 8.1% 37 123 11 8.9% 38 83 3 3.6% 39 45 1 2.2% 40 34 1 2.9%
Age 30 is a big filter for star % that is not relevant here. What's really informative is the big drop at age 36 and the essential disappearance of star seasons at age 38 and beyond (2 by Bonds, 1 each by Papi, Edgar Martinez, and Nelson Cruz).
So a quick and dirty length adjustment would be to count ages 36 and 37 as half-years and ignore 38 and on.
And here’s the last four seasons for four guys (fWAR per 600 PA with situational adjustment), plus their crudely estimated true $/ year.
Bogaerts 5.7, (3.1), 3.7, 4.6 = $40M
Turner 5.7, (4.2), 5.6, 6.4 = $43M
Correa 6.0, (1.4), 4.9, 3.1 = $35M
Devers 5.1, (5.0), 4.2, 5.2 = $33M Devers' certainly looks like the best contract even before you factor in his age window being moved 3 years younger compared to Xander and Turner, and 1 year younger than Correa.
I like this great deal a great deal.
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Best part of this will be Dan Shaughnessy's reaction in the Globe (he's been convinced that ownership has become unwilling to spend any real money). I've grown quote fond of him, because he's an old school guy who is actually interested in learning more about the game, and will change his mind if given a good argument. He's just been given $314M worth.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 2, 2023 5:16:13 GMT -5
Sorry, but I can't fall for any of those major brain wave differences between RH/LH major sided people, other than each uses a different side of the brain more predominantly.. Nothing else.. That long post above reminds me more of the dribble coming from teachers in early elementary school, who would walk by desks and use a ruler to smack our hands when we would get caught using "the devils hand" to write with. As a lefty.. All my life quite often get a chuckle when see off the wall nonsense like the above written about "us". Throwing a baseball 90 mph to a specific spot 55 feet away, with a specific grip and spin axis, while trying to maximize spin rate, is likely the second most difficult motor task in human history. Hitting the result is of course first.
An otherwise meaningless difference in neural connectivity and/or behavior due to using the right hemisphere instead of the left would be sufficient to create the observed longer learning curve for left-handed pitchers.
Seriously, you're comparing handwriting to pitching? (I am very sorry that your teachers smacked your hand.)
And I just re-read my post and was reminded that it contains a proof of the claim that righties have some kind of motor-control advantage. I'll post a longer version of that tomorrow.
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 2, 2023 4:30:06 GMT -5
That was because he had 79 PA with one team leading by 5 or more runs ...hey, what quality pitchers are on the mound in a game like that? -- and hit .338 / .430 / .544. In his other 503 PA he hit .238 / .308 / .359. His leverage splits in OPS+, high / medium / low, were 60 / 88 / 127. But it was actually steeper than that; he had 35 PA with a Leverage Index of .03 or lower and hit .500 / .571 / .833.
All that actually knocked 38% off his fWAR. Not 3.7-- actually 2.3.
In contrast, Andrus had 69 PA in garbage time and hit .139 / .188 / .231, but otherwise hit .264 / .319 / .428 in 508 PA, with leverage splits of 123 / 106 / 85.
That actually added 27% to his WAR. Not 3.5 -- actually 4.4.
You don't need all of the two adjustments to be predictive in order to have Andrus as the better option for this year (and you'd add a team option), and that's without factoring in keeping Houck (or whomever).
Do you like Miguel Rojas as a trade acquisition? Career 99 wRC+ in high leverage situations (110/136/148 in 22/21/20) — almost identical to Andrus. He has been a plus situational hitter in 6 of his last 7 seasons, averaging 0.5 extra WAR per 600 PA. So he's underrated. If there were no Andrus available, sure, he'd be on the list. But Andrus is a much better option.
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 1, 2023 14:42:30 GMT -5
Kim could put up an 85 OPS+ and still be well worth it, that’s how good that glove is I wanted him during his free agency and now that he’s had a year with a slightly above average bat in the show I want him more “Placeholder” is I guess a term that would be accurate, but he’s more than that. He wouldn’t just hold that spot, he would produce from that spot- at least defensively, and possibly offensively. The beautiful thing about him is that he can be a plus 2B or 3B whenever Mayer is reward (if he’s ready). Bat obviously plays a little less at 3B but it’s not like he’s completely absent of pop and without looking at his spray charts and just going off what I’ve seen of him he’d be a good fit for Fenway. That not rooted in fact though, just rooted in the limited times I’ve seen him There will be a premium on up-the-middle defense in the coming years imo That was because he had 79 PA with one team leading by 5 or more runs ...hey, what quality pitchers are on the mound in a game like that? -- and hit .338 / .430 / .544. In his other 503 PA he hit .238 / .308 / .359. His leverage splits in OPS+, high / medium / low, were 60 / 88 / 127. But it was actually steeper than that; he had 35 PA with a Leverage Index of .03 or lower and hit .500 / .571 / .833.
All that actually knocked 38% off his fWAR. Not 3.7-- actually 2.3.
In contrast, Andrus had 69 PA in garbage time and hit .139 / .188 / .231, but otherwise hit .264 / .319 / .428 in 508 PA, with leverage splits of 123 / 106 / 85.
That actually added 27% to his WAR. Not 3.5 -- actually 4.4.
You don't need all of the two adjustments to be predictive in order to have Andrus as the better option for this year (and you'd add a team option), and that's without factoring in keeping Houck (or whomever).
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 1, 2023 8:27:43 GMT -5
The reason you feel that way is that it's insanely obvious. Or should be.
[...]
Eric, why do you talk like this? Just to get people's attention! And be entertaining. A sentence like that announces its degree of exaggeration. There's not a whole lot of difference between that opening and my closing the Henry Owens history by paraphrasing A Fish Called Wanda.
What I think you're missing is the implicit "to me" after the claim. Hence the "Or should be" ... if you stop and think it through. Even if we weren't looking for a stopgap, how much sense does it make to trade a valuable piece of talent for a player, when there's a free agent available who is very likely better?
My original impulse was to say bad things about the whole discussion, but I thought that agreeing with the one guy who was seeing things clearly was better. ematz was being modest by characterizing his conclusion as the way he felt, so I thought I'd promote it to being incontrovertible (the word I had in mind when I decided “insanely obvious, or should be” meant the same thing and was more colorful).
I mean, I have often strongly championed ideas or takes on things for which there were decent counterarguments. This is not one of them. You would need to make a stat argument that Andrus's better season at the plate last year was a fluke ... and in fact I believe I can do just the opposite (but won't go into it here, for various reasons).
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Post by ericmvan on Jan 1, 2023 6:48:35 GMT -5
Nick Pivetta and Schrieber for Kim and Grisham. The Padres GM likes big names, paydown Sale and send him for both of them. Yeah unrealistic, yet aren't we do for something like that? Then go resign Wacha. Not a fan of trading Houck even if it's not a bad deal and makes sense. We need more players like Houck, not less. I would rather not trade Schreiber, he's the best bullpen arm the Sox have right now and controllable for 4 years. I get trading Pivetta if it gives you another team need. Pivetta is more replaceable. The thing with Houck is, none of us know who he is. Is he a starter? A closer? A tweener? He's got 2 really good pitches, but spotty command. Actually, he has 2 elite pitches and 2 good to quite good ones.
Almost no one in baseball has a bigger separation in movement between his 4-seame and sinker. If you're looking for one and get the other, you're in big trouble. They function as two distinct pitches. So ....
I'm comparing him to the 146 starting pitchers who threw 80 IP or more last year, and using his carer numbers for percentage thrown and effectiveness.
He'd have the 19th best slider, but only Dylan Cease and Ohtani threw it more often.
He'd have the 20th best sinker, but only Syndergaard, Bassit, Montgomery, and Alcantara threw it significantly more often (a few other guys threw it a little bit more -- essentially the same, and less than Houck threw it last year).
His 4-seamer would rank 33rd, but most of the better guys throw it more often.
His splitter would rank 30th among changeups and splitters, but he's only throwing it 6% of the time.
His career results as a starter are that of a #3. He may well never get better than that, because of his command, but it's hard to see a guy with that kind of stuff and decent command (too often erratic to be good) as a below average pitcher, and above or below average is the line between 3 and 4 starter.
As for his role this year, I believe it's high-leverage multi-inning reliever when the six starters ahead of him are all healthy, and in the rotation whenever someone's not. (Yes, I think they'll use a 6-man rotation to limit the innings of Sale, Paxton, Whitlock, and Bello, and (with less need, but still a good idea) Kluber.)
I do think they may still be shopping him to get a #2 starter with fewer years of control, but it would take an opposing team that was as high on him as I think they are.
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