WestEddy

Begin speaking of Jacob Amaya in whispered, "we're seeing greatness" tones ..... NOW!

New friend alert:

James Fegan has more:

Top 4 announced:

Oh, sure. If they explode, they're still going to lose 100 games. But we're finally at year zero of the next rebuild. Last year was like the plane crash on Lost. This year is like early season one, where everybody's just gathering provisions and making friends.

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I don't know. I'm excited to see the infield competition, and how that shakes out. I'm also very interested in watching the young rotation of Cannon, Martin, Burke and Thorpe. Last year, my senses were dulled to Lopez, DeJong, Pillar, Flexen. At least we're watching the next team develop, a bit.

Teams probably positioning to sweep up some commits.

WS2023 brought him up. Only cost international signing space

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.