WestEddy

One would hope that will be part of his stated growth. Steve Stone or Hawk might garner respect for having played the game. Bennetti earned it through his preparation. Maybe Shriffen will become the trash talk announcer that players start to think is cool in time. He's got to get there, first.

While SS2k5 does get needlessly pithy, I've done some soul-searching, myself, while reading strings these last few months. WAR and defensive rankings are universally accepted methods of rating baseball players. Any "problem" you feel you have with their methods have already been argued by people who are way smarter than any of us, here. The people who have established them for Baseball-Prospectus and Fangraphs have already argued them out on their platforms. The undervaluing of 1B gets accounted for, oftentimes, in real time. Baseball-Reference has updated their model multiple times, which results in a reseeding of stats. Yes, 30 HRs at 1B may get lost at 1B, while 30 HR at SS is praised, but the ding in value often comes in defensive contributions. Pick two guys. Freddie Freeman, 1B, and Jackson Merrill, CF. They have wOBA's .011 points from each other, and their offensive score is 2.2 from each other. Merrill rates a 6.5 on defense, whereas Freeman is a -9.0. Merrill gets a 5.4 fWAR, Freeman gets a 4.2. While similar on offense, Merrill plays a harder position better, and Freeman plays an easy position below average. I'm not the best person to argue this, as I'm not a mathematician who knows this stuff inside out. So it's great that you decide to have a problem with WAR. It's okay to state that, have a few volleys, then move on. Otherwise, it turns into pages of "yes it is", "no it isn't", "yes it is".....

Hoopster made a bunch of arguments, one of which was that defensive ratings are subjective, which just isn't true. Read up on the MLB explanation of DRS, and you'll see it's a lot more comprehensive than somebody deciding a player could have caught a ball, or not.

Wendelken was drafted by the Red Sox. Came over in the Peavy 3-way with Detroit.

Old friend alert:

It would be totally cool if Heasley turned into a power hitting 1B.

RBIs are considered to not be indicative of too much, because a hitter isn't in control of the factors that create RBI opportunities. If runners don't get on base ahead of him, he will have less opportunity to drive them in. For a counting stat, RBI doesn't give you as full a story that HRs do, or OBP/SLG.

I understand being frustrated with WAR. One felt more in control of a baseball conversation when you could look at HR's, see one guy had 33, and another had 21, and come to the conclusion that the 33 HR guy is "better" than the 21 HR guy. Easy peasy. You can't just watch a game, look at the box score, and see who contributed what. But you're playing a little Skeptical Paradox game, here, pretending that nothing can really be known. WAR isn't computed by some guy drinking beer in front of his TeeVee. Defensive statistics are computed based on zone ratings that have nothing to do with the eye test. If a fielder is standing on spot X, which is measurable, and a ball is hit to spot Y, that is 15' from the fielder, with a hang time of 7 seconds, we know a lot about the catchability of that ball in play. We know how fast a runner can run from one base to another, how fast a player can throw a ball, all of this is quantifiable, and has nothing to do with the "eye-test". Players on offense create runs. Players on defense prevent runs. Creating runs are pretty quantifiable. You hit the ball, and get to a base by the time the play's over. The same happens when measuring defense. Again, completely measurable and quantifiable from a fairly robust data set. When running the formula for Pythagorean wins, a win is worth (roughly) ten more runs scored than the opponent. I'm mixing models, here, but if Jose Abreu can create 5 more runs on offense than average, and can prevent 5 more runs on defense on average, that would be worth one win, or 1 WAR. Again, mixing models, but that's how players are evaluated against each other.

Top right, there's a search box. I've never mastered it, and get frustrated pretty quickly.

It does. But he's years away from the bigs, and he's so young, he can develop better strike zone judgement.

It's most probably a depth addition. They'll need arms in AAA, as well as dudes to toss in the major league bullpen for a week, then DFA when the better guy gets off the IL.

Here's his 2021 prospect profile: https://www.prospectslive.com/scoutingreports/jon-heasley

Fun fact - Jon and John are very different names. Jonathan has the root of Nathan, John is a universal name with equivalents in most languages (Sean, Ivan, Johan, etc.)

I'm just wondering why other teams aren't poaching presumed Blue Jay and Padre international signings. Are the Dodgers the only team confident enough to start telling their commits to look elsewhere?

Okay. Ha-ha.

Lee is a backup catcher who had negative value in 24. Quero and Teel haven't played a full season in AAA. Are you saying the White Sox should run with those three and have complete confidence they will get average ML production from them?

WAR also takes defense and baserunning into account. Watching the games, you could just see players turning routine singles into doubles on Benintendi. I don't know if they're weighted the same, but that's like taking one of Benny's doubles into the gap, and turning it into a squib single. That's why everybody talks of just parking Benny at DH, if they can't trade him. As for Yolmer, that's a guy who turns singles into outs. Force outs into double plays. That said, I don't disagree with your first take. If they're not going to spend on Alonso, Vaughn is fine. I thought an Elko/Colas platoon at 1B might have done the same thing, but if you go grab a Josh Bell, or Rowdy Tellez, you're paying the same amount.

Does anyone have an idea where Patiño would rank in the Sox top 30 at this point?

And they underperformed that by 27 wins. 17 wins would have them in the mid-60's, which would almost call for a parade.

Just for context, here's what Zips thought the Sox would do last year (2024): http://blogs.fangraphs.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/White-Sox-24.png https://blogs.fangraphs.com/2024-zips-projections-chicago-white-sox/

I thought Chris Getz was teaching players how NOT to play baseball, so he ruined every single prospect in our system. It's refreshing to hear somebody say that wasn't the case.

Preller had actual MLB action taken against him and the Padres over concealing health info. Vargas seems to be the guy (to me) that came here, and fell flat on his face because of extenuating circumstances. I like the notion of "we can't just keep a revolving door of hitting coaches" without looking at the organizational processes regarding the exchange of information between levels.

Nor does wanting "fans" to do a Q&A with Getz. Any question not punctuated with expletives and accusations of incompetence will be viewed as "softball".

And my stance is that we don't even really know that Getz was a "bad" GM. There were so many layers of failure before and after his part of the process that most of this discussion rests on people who were just mad Getz got hired in the first place.