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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 14, 2019 14:06:30 GMT -5
I've only heard him on a couple of playoff games I think but I recall having a positive impression of Merloni as a color guy.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 14, 2019 14:00:20 GMT -5
Dallas Keuchel on a one-year deal. I mean, why not?
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 14, 2019 13:57:25 GMT -5
I’m considering a bet on the Twins. They had awful results from a LOT of guys last year, especially Buxton/Sano/Dozier. They brought in Schoop for Dozier, and picked up Cron. If their young guys play even close to their talent, Berrios continues developing, and their power play works out, they could be a strong dark horse in an incredibly weak division. I don’t think beating the Indians is *likely*, but it might be a 10-15% shot. And the Rays are probably WC2, but I could see MN having a 10-20% shot there, too, depending on the A’s. Once in the playoffs, anything can happen. The A’s probably aren’t such a bad bet, either...they more very well-run and managed and should have better SP health. At least among the non-longshots, I think the Nationals are the clear pick here. That core is still fantastic and that division is still not particularly scary.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 14, 2019 10:45:36 GMT -5
I don't disagree with you, but the issue is that the Sox would really need to go all in with Swihart.\ I mean, if they think Swihart is good, they should have no issue going "all in" with going so far as making him a backup catcher. If they don't, then he should be gone. While I understand the mindset of trading the guy that they can get the best relative value for, at some point a World Series contender really should be picking the two players who it thinks are best (or at least fit the roster the best) and getting the best deal they can for the third one. If they're worried about "selling low" on Swihart, I get that... but they've spent the last four years or so undercutting his value. Another year of him getting 85 plate appearances as the third catcher and pinch-hitter in NL parks isn't going to recoup an iota of his value. I hate to be so blunt about this, Blake Swihart is not a player. He's not a good defensive catcher, and the last time he was an above-average with the bat in any respect was 2014 in AA. He's a 26 year old with sub-replacement offensive projections and we're still not even really sure if he can catch. As bad as Vazquez was with the bat last year, he had a well-above average contact rate. He's hit decently in the major leagues in the past. None of this is to say that Vazquez isn't a terrible hitter, but there's something there. What can you point to with Swihart? I don't know why the Red Sox are making this a thing. Vazquez is a useful player, Leon is (maybe) a useful player, Swihart isn't.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 13, 2019 17:58:47 GMT -5
Haha I'd like to trade my Tacoma for a Raptor or my Audi TT for a Porsche 911, my Wrangler for a Land Rover. It's nice to want. That seems like asking for a lot frankly. A starter good enough to start next year in this market? For those two? I like them, but both players value is crazy low right now. Can't wait to see how this plays out It's also super weird to me that Leon is the guy they're committed to keeping around, given how long the organization has been developing the other two, and because Leon is not good.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 11, 2019 14:25:23 GMT -5
A couple things: 1. Would his WAR have been higher or lower if he just did one? If it’s higher by doing both then it’s seemingly worth it. But how does it affect the rest of the team and it’s construction? Is it more a distraction you have to work around? Are you messing up other players schedules? I don't know that you can ever definitively answer questions like this without actually trying it and seeing what happens.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 11, 2019 14:12:49 GMT -5
I mean, everyone has TJ all the time in baseball. Not everyone hits dingers while they're awaiting the surgery. I can see both sides on this one, but personally, Ohtani has opened the door to two-way players more than he's closed it. Were the 50 innings worth it? I don't know, what's the value of doing something no one thought could be done? Isn't that the point though? You lose that bat because of pitching. I mean just my two cents but to open the door you need a guy that can do it and not get hurt. It's like he opened the door and them reminded everyone why they don't do it.
You'd really need a guy that is an awesome pitcher and a good hitter. Not a guy who looked like a better hitter than pitcher. Heck even if they were equal I pick hitting. It's just a safer path, because yea everyone seems to getting TJs. What would be interesting is if you could make him a closer. Limit his innings and wear and tear. Also you would be losing the DH at the end of games. I can see that. I just think being a starter and full time bat is asking way too much. Your not getting the rest you need increasing the chance of injury. He would have had the TJ as a pitcher anyway. It's not even THAT rare for position players. I don't get why that's such a show stopper for you. If two-way players can't be a thing because they'll get injured... I mean, I guess just use pitching machines from now on? And as far as doing a two-way player as a reliever, sure. Reliever, piggyback guy, maybe for a guy like Ohtani you even treat him as a "big game" starter, whatever. And yeah, it's also possible that none of these things are a good idea. All I'm saying is, after what Ohtani did last year, I'm more open to the concept than I had been previously.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 11, 2019 10:42:14 GMT -5
Ohtani is an example of the risks, the guy is having TJ surgery. His pitching takes away his ability to hit. I'd have to guess he comes back as just a hitter. I mean isn't that the lesson if your that type of hitter it makes sense to hit? Were those 50 innings worth him missing a lot of games and the time he'll miss next year? If the best modern example is a guy that pitched 50 innings, the injury limited his bat and he's now having TJ surgery I think you get why teams don't do it. I mean, everyone has TJ all the time in baseball. Not everyone hits dingers while they're awaiting the surgery. I can see both sides on this one, but personally, Ohtani has opened the door to two-way players more than he's closed it. Were the 50 innings worth it? I don't know, what's the value of doing something no one thought could be done?
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 11, 2019 10:05:12 GMT -5
Except that Babe Ruth didn’t play as a two way player very long. Basically two years. And in those years he did not carry a full time pitching load. Exactly. Babe Ruth was primarily a pitcher and a great one from 1914 - 1917 and then starting playing regularly in the outfield in 1918 while regularly taking a turn in the rotation but I think that his workload was scaled back some and then a bit more in 1919 when he got more regular ABs. When he got to the Yankees he limited his pitching and was the slugger we all know today, but he was rarely doing what Ohtani was trying to do last season.Here's the thing though: Ohtani is a relevant example of what's possible for modern professional athletes, and Babe Ruth is not. I think it was Sam Miller who said the weirdest thing about Ohtani isn't that he's been successful as a two-way player, it's that no one else has done it until him. I wonder how much of that is wrapped up in the legend of Ruth; his ability as a two way player has so often been cited as a mark of historically unique greatness. If the greatest ever couldn't do both at once, obviously no one else should even try. But, Babe Ruth had roughly the same physical resemblance to today's professional athletes as he did to a water buffalo. His status as the last successful two way player may be less a mark of greatness than a historical anomaly. IMO, what Ohtani's season tells us isn't that the two-way player is necessarily a good idea, but it's an idea that should be taken a lot more seriously than it has been in the past. We don't actually know what's possible.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 10, 2019 8:21:35 GMT -5
Counterpoint: this is an f'ing nightmare. The upside is that if Machado, as a superb 3b and passable SS who’s offensively superior to Bogey gets that deal, Bogey might be inclined to look at 7/$175M or a little less as being a pretty good offer. If he’s a regular 3.5-5 WAR player who might have a little upside left, I’m inclined to be OK with a deal like that that ends before his most pronounced decline years. $22-25M AAV isn’t awful/prohibitive and I think there’s something to be said for keeping the core together long-term, especially when $25M at the end of the deal is probably going to look more like $18-20M in present dollars. I wouldn't really describe that as "upside". It's just an example of a team you like benefiting from a crappy system as opposed to one you don't like.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 9, 2019 17:29:36 GMT -5
Counterpoint: this is an f'ing nightmare. Ah, posh. It’s good when the Yankees and Sox are good. Gets the blood pumping. Machado is very talented, but he’s a loser. I will love rooting against him. I’d far prefer a deathmatch between great Yankee and Red Sox teams — even at risk of losing — to a lesser Yankee team that the Sox just stomp. Where is the satisfaction in that? I mean, great, but I think the greater issue is that every move baseball has made in the name of "competitive balance" has resulted in a situation where a handful of rich clubs still sign all the best players but they do it at a relative discount while half the league rolls over for them.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 9, 2019 17:25:55 GMT -5
Remember that thing I said about players being the last to realize their own value, or lack thereof?
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 9, 2019 12:45:09 GMT -5
The distance between the pitcher's mound and home plate is 60'6". I always wondered why the 6 inches. Who thought that up and when did it happen? Does the extra 6" make a big difference? If so, should that add another 6" to help the batter and lessen the strikeouts? I just thought the extra 6" was weird. You can look it up easily enough but the short version is that the six inches was a mistake the stuck.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 9, 2019 12:44:23 GMT -5
Yanks offer $220 million to Manny. I love it. I think he should be a Yankee. He’d be the new ARod. Yeah, he’s good, so maybe it makes them better. Whatever. From a narrative perspective, it seems right. Lest anyone forget how evil the Yankees are. Counterpoint: this is an f'ing nightmare.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 8, 2019 10:30:51 GMT -5
The Red Sox will probably showcase Swihart a lot in the exhibition games and if he shows that he's acceptable at least defensively and I suspect he will be (I think there was one spring where he was having some throwing yips for a brief time), then I would anticipate that Swihart gets dealt toward the end of March, like around 3/20 as the season begins 3/28. But Swihart would have to look really good in spring training for him to command a return of any significance at all... and if he looks great in spring training, why are you going to bail out on a young player you've been developing for a decade in favor of Sandy Leon?
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 8, 2019 10:19:22 GMT -5
...and that worked for 30 years. Data has changed all of the original context. While arbitration prices are rising to reflect player value more closely, the pre-arb years are ridiculously under-valued since those are set wages with minor adjustments at the discretion of ownership. Look at what Trout was worth in his second year, look at what he was paid. Now that the late career contracts are being squeezed change is needed. How can the players use data and honest valuations to get that change? I think an underrated aspect of this whole thing is the players themselves being the last to get the memo regarding aging curves and the marginal value of wins and all that business. I remember when Longoria was traded to the Giants last year, Buster Posey said something about how terrible all these tanking teams were, and how great it is that the Giants weren't doing that stuff... ok, well, look at the final standings for those teams. I think these guys more than anyone buy into the value of the Proven Vet, and look at the weak free agent market as purely a product of teams being unwilling to spend. That's part of it, but I don't know that they fully grok how per-arb players are delivering orders of magnitude more value per dollar spent. This is all very speculative and wishy-washy, but I get the sense that among players, there's a mentality that older players should continue to always be paid a ton, and younger players should get nothing more than they already are. Like, I hear players complaining about free agents not getting signed, I don't hear them complaining about the Mike Trout pre-arb years. I don't hear them complaining about the team-friendly extension that Jose Ramirez signed, (probably) because he didn't get a significant bonus and certainly didn't make any money in the minor leagues. And I think it's going to make it much more of an uphill battle for them if they continue to insist that players who aren't the most valuable should be treated as though they are, while ignoring their most under-compensated members.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 7, 2019 20:20:04 GMT -5
I'm just kind of bumbed that the Sox will never have a chance to get Realmuto now. He'll sign long-term with Philly. They have the money. Congrats on every team in the NL East besides the Marlins and Braves when it comes to caring about winning however. Braves signed Donaldson, but they are still being extremely cheap after getting a new ballpark. I feel like we don't talk enough about how the Braves are a garbage organization from top to bottom.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 7, 2019 17:00:54 GMT -5
One rule change that I hate that HOF Jason Stark brought up is that MLB is looking to move the mound back 60.6 feet to 65 feet. That's one rule change I do hate. It would help player safety with come back line drives back to the pitchers, but velocity won't matter as much. All of a sudden a less skilled hitter can catch up to 95 mph.
I know strikeouts and contact in the game are a problem at the moment, but let's not completely tip the schales to the hitters. Raise or lower the mound all you want. Leave the dimensions of baseball alone. It's been 60.6 feet since 1893. You shouldn't change that. It would change the (effective) average velocity of the league, which wouldn't change the value of velocity at all. A guy who throws 98 is still going to miss more bats than one who throws 92.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 7, 2019 16:54:40 GMT -5
I was about to say something nice about the Marlins, and then I saw that Jorge Alfaro had a 23.8% swinging strike rate last year. The number on that obviously don't go back too far, but it's fairly safe to say that no one else in MLB history has played anything close to a full season while missing the ball that often. Alfaro still has a lot of valuable skills, and the prospect haul seems ok, but yeeeesh.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 7, 2019 12:56:55 GMT -5
So one pet peeve of mine with the opener is that teams can't really set their lineup, the way the Brewers did in the playoffs. I understand it, I just don't really love it. One thing I'd like to see is that, if a team's starting pitcher doesn't come out to start the second inning or face at least five batters, a team can sub back in a player they took out. You shouldn't get to neutralize a team's platoon just by pitching-handedness chicanery. You want to fool the Red Sox by putting in a RHP after the lefty "starter" faced one guy? That's fine, but Steve Pearce can be taken out in the second inning and swapped back in in the seventh. Yeah, I'm a little less sure of how I feel about this one, but I think I kind of lean towards banning all these weird opener schemes. Baseball is, again, just more watchable when you have a traditional starting pitcher, even if it's a 7% less optimal way of using your pitchers.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 7, 2019 11:43:07 GMT -5
The problem with eliminating the one out RP is that it's really unlikely to speed the game up that much. They keep doing these small things, that still don't add up all that much. The way to actually make the game 10-15 minutes shorter is to shorten commercial breaks, which they're just not going to do. Yeah, but I think one-out guys disrupt the flow of the game in a particularly egregious way. It's a thing that encourages people to disengage from the game right at the moment that it should be most exciting. It's the eighth inning, down a run, your team's big lefty masher is coming in, this is your team's last best chance to win, and... oh, never mind, call to the bullpen, time to go get a beer. Time to look at the phone, flip back to that other game, etc. It's a way to disengage people right at the moment of maximum engagement. And, no one likes it. No one's favorite player is a situation reliever. No one likes seeing their star hitter facing a guy who's essentially a trick pitcher. No one gets pumped up for that moment in the game. It's all downside, get rid of it.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 7, 2019 11:22:58 GMT -5
I think this thread is a red herring. If Machado, Harper, Kimbrel, et al had signed or were in deep negotiations this topic doesn't mentioned. The media pundits need fodder. 1. These would be most significant rule changes for baseball in decades. There's no scenario where they wouldn't be big news. 2. Why are people operating under the assumption that a Harper/Machado signing would somehow generate enough news to fill an entire offseason? We'd talk about it for a day or two and move on.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 7, 2019 11:14:52 GMT -5
That's true in the abstract, but Moncada murders curveballs. Righthanders should probably never throw him one. ?? Does he really murder curveballs when batting left-handed? I don't know how it breaks down by handedness but he's at .217/.253/.398 overall against curveballs in his major league career per Fangraphs. That's not quite as bad as it looks because pitchers tend to throw curveballs in two-strike counts, but still, he looks like much more of a fastball hitter to me.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 6, 2019 14:33:41 GMT -5
Dalbec is 6'4". Sounds like a 1b to me. Why is everyone so obsessed with what players are shaped like rather than what their skills are? Dalbec has a rocket for an arm. You're wasting a huge chunk of his value, just because he's tall? Chris Bryant is listed at 6'5". Scott Rolen was listed at 6'4". Plenty of guys have held down shortstop at that size. This is not a thing.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 6, 2019 11:47:38 GMT -5
Does changing the mound height create potential pitcher arm/leg injury increases. Are pitchers more dominant recently because of that situation like in the 60's or is it more a result of the increase in all-or-nothing plate approach? I've heard people suggest moving the mound back by a small amount (maybe a foot) as a less disruptive way of accomplishing the same goals. It would be a very minor change for pitchers, and fans wouldn't notice a thing, but it would effectively shave velocity off every pitch in the game, which should in turn have a fairly predictable effect on contact rates. I guess the 60 feet 6 inches measurement is held as a little more sacred than the hight of the mound, but A) that's dumb and B) the mound distance has changed a bunch of times too, just not as recently. In any event, it seems like the better option to me, and I hope they're not only looking at the mound hight.
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