gusguyman

I didn't have time to look into it over the weekend but I was still curious so I got around to it this morning. TLDR: Yasmani bunting is a bit worse than Yasmani swinging away, but both are WAY worse than having Robert try to steal second base. So comparing the three scenarios depends a lot on what Robert's chance's of successfully stealing second are. Here is a plot of the Sox' chance of winning in the 9th versus the chance of Robert stealing second base. We can see that Yasmani sac bunting dropped the Sox chance of winning in the 9th from 42.6% to 37.6%. If Robert succesfully steals second, the Sox won in the 9th 63.4% of times. If he got caught stealing second, they won in the 9th 17.1% of times. Robert currently has a career stolen base success rate of 86.6%. If that is the true chance of success, having Robert attempt to steal second would have given the Sox a 57% chance of winning in the 9th. However, to be better than having Yasmani swing away without Robert stealing, the stolen base success chance only needed to be 55%. And to be better than the actual scenario (Yasmani bunting), Robert only needed a 44% chance to steal 2nd base. The Yasmani bunt win percentage is a bit of an overestimate too, since I had no way to take into account the possibility of the sac bunt failing. So we can see that having Yasmani bunt instead of swing was probably not a good decision, but didn't have a huge effect, but not having Robert steal 2nd was almost certainly a terrible decision. Methodology: Player performance for this simulation was based on the 2021 updated ZIPS projections on fangraphs, adjusted to reflect career platoon splits using data from the last three years. There isn't enough baserunning data on Robert yet so I ran the simulations with the chances of taking extra bases or advancing on an out set to league averages from 2019 (which is almost certainly a conservative estimate). I ran 100,000 simulations for each scenario. Reasons these win percentages might be an overestimate: ZIPS is not really buying John King's breakout yet. In particular, his walk rate according to ZIPS is much worse than he has shown so far this year. He may be a better pitcher than ZIPS indicates. ZIPS is still projecting Yas to be about what he has always been, so if you think he is worse than that, the Sox chances of winning would go down a bit, less so for the bunt. Double play chances are set to league average, but Madrigal has high ground ball rates and may be more susceptible than league average to a double play. Reasons these win percentages might be an underestimate: ZIPS projections for Mercedes and Madrigal are arguably too conservative. John King had thrown a lot of pitches already, and the simulation does not have a model for pitcher fatigue Robert is almost certainly much better than league average at taking extra bases General sources of innacuracy: No strategy is taken into account (i.e., you could have Robert steal second and THEN sac bunt him to third, or you might have fielders playing in and coming home with it, etc) King, Mercedes, and Madrigal have too small of sample sizes to be very confident in the platoon adjustments.

I'm going to push back on this mostly because I think it actually sells Kopech short. The innings limit is definitely the main issue, but this is also a guy who hasn't thrown in a game in two years, a guy who only had 15 MLB innings coming into the year, and technically a guy coming back from surgery. Most of us knew he would be great by season's end, but what he is doing right now is a huge surprise. He didn't just come back from a 2 year layoff and pick it up right where he left off -- he came back better. That is incredible, and I hope it doesn't turn into a "we should have expected this all along" because that narrative belies just how much work and dedication Kopech must have put in over the last two years to achieve this.

All ten strikeouts His first start he was perfect the first time through the order, this time he got 8 strikeouts. Kopech is going to break some records when he builds up his arm strength up enough to go 100-120 pitches a night.

I actually agree with your real point, but the other team has a guy who can catch and arguably play every infield position better than Leury. IDK if he plays in the outfield but I'd be willing to bet he can play a passable LF or even RF.

The OCD in me is very happy that now all of this will be blue by tomorrow

It might be lost in his late-game heroics at the plate, but I think its much more important that Nicky made some great plays in the field tonight too.

The fact that you describe great teamwork as being a pushover is exactly 0% surprising lol. Shades of that amazingly awful post one time about how Jason emasculated himself by talking about/to player's wives.

Cease is why we had to trade Dunning for Lynn. You can survive getting less than 5 innings out of Cease when Lynn is giving you 6+ each week. You can't go 162 games with 2/5s of your rotation getting you 4.2 a game.

I think we all hope Yoan can hit his ceiling as guy who hits .270-.300+, with an OBP .75 or more points above his BA, and slugging over 500. So out of curiosity I pulled up the first 3 guys I could think of who fit that profile pretty well: Anthony Rendon: Kris Bryant: Mike Trout: Looking at these other guys, its not Moncada's 2018/2020 that is the outlier - it is actually 2019 that is the weird one. Black Jack is absolutely right, these other stars do the majority of their damage on fastballs. So hypothetically is shouldn't be a problem if Moncada's pitch type splits look like 2020.... unless the only reason he had such a massive year in 2019 has to do with the fact that he had a weird, possibly unsustainable split over pitch types.

Good point, but also I think that still (especially?) means we will see an uproar. If you lose the chance at a perfecto because its pouring rain and the game has to be called early, that sucks, but its just bad luck. No one to blame. If you lose it because the MLB changed the rules to truncate a game, suddenly there is someone 'at fault' (or at least at fault enough for people to get really really mad about it).

While we are on the topic of double headers, does anyone else not hate playing 7 innings each? It definitely has taken some getting used to and still seems unnatural, but the games seemed more exciting with the potential for starters to actually go deep, and its nice to not have the bullpen get demolished just because of bad weather luck. Of course, if we had lost both instead of winning both I might have the opposite opinion lol, and when a pitcher eventually throws a 7 inning no-hitter/perfect game, people are going to riot.

FWIW I just re-ran the sim with baserunning turned off (so all baserunning follows the basic advancement rules of the 24 base-out state model), and the Chicago Madrigals were just slightly below league average with a runs per game of 4.37. So yeah his SSS baserunning stats were absolutely destroying the team, but also homeruns are good.

Definitely possible there is a problem, especially since this is so edge-casey. That said, when I ran the sims I looked into the stats and game logs a bit to see why they under performed so badly, and a couple things stood out: I am using Madrigal's career stats as his 'true distribution' but there are some SSS problems with that. In particular, Madrigal has pretty extreme L/R splits right now, but it doesn't weigh down his overall statline much because only 20% of his ABs have come against LHP, which is below league average for a non-platoon starter. So his 'true' wRC+ would be less than his actual 110. The model includes baserunning and double plays, which are especially punitive for the Chicago Madrigals. Being bad at picking up extra bases (or running into outs) has already weighed down his real world value immensely, but at least the White Sox have mashers behind him who can bring him home with dingers. The Chicago Madrigals are completely reliant on manufacturing runs with hits, so their terrible baserunning has an even greater effect. In summation, his 'true' wRC+ is less than his actual career wRC+, and his terrible baserunning causes the Chicago Madrigals to significantly under perform even the 'true' wRC+, since IIRC baserunning is not factored into wRC+. I think the latter factor is the bigger of the two. I agree team wRC+ should be strongly correlated with team runs, but this is such a weird edge case so I don't think its impossible for there to be an outlier.

Every. Fucking. Time.

I was curious about the debate so I dusted off the baseball simulator I wrote and simulated the 2019 season (that's what I have data for) assuming every White Sox hitter would hit according to Madrigal's career stats. FWIW the Chicago Madrigals were last in the league with a runs per game average of 3.52. I don't think that actually means much in terms of Madrigals value to the actual White Sox. Personally I am of the opinion that his stat line can be very useful in the actual Sox lineup. But it does show that a lineup of 9 Madrigals would not be a successful baseball team.

Yeah same. If only they had some sort of system where they could take clips of the high points of the game and clip them so we could just watch those. Maybe they could even use some sort of social media platform to distribute said clips. hmmmm, maybe a start-up idea?

Well yeah that tends to happen when you stop making hate-able mistakes every game.

If there was ever a field Nick could hit a HR on, its the insanity that is Fenway. He could definitely probably maybe tuck one around Pesky's pole.

We don't have a ton of data on it (He has only pitched in April one other time since his velocity jump) but his average velocity this April is in line with what it was that year too

Let's keep the win steak going, if for no other reason then so we can keep up these super informative starts to the gamethreads.

There are many things that its understandable to criticize Jason for, but his knowledge of advanced stats is definitely not one of them

Not long enough

Hate to break it to you, but if you haven't developed an ass by 21, it probably isn't happening. There are options I suppose, fillers and lifts and whatnot, but natty growth just doesn't happen much at his age.

Ron needs to hurry up and make an Abreu thread already so he can go on a hot streak, never fails