gusguyman

Updated: What Tim Anderson has to do in his last 40-60 ABs to finish the season above .400 after 3/5 tonight: ______________ | ABs | Hits | -------------- | 40 | 20 | | 41 | 21 | | 42 | 21 | | 43 | 21 | | 44 | 22 | | 45 | 22 | | 46 | 23 | | 47 | 23 | | 48 | 23 | | 49 | 24 | | 50 | 24 | | 51 | 25 | | 52 | 25 | | 53 | 25 | | 54 | 26 | | 55 | 26 | | 56 | 27 | | 57 | 27 | | 58 | 27 | | 59 | 28 | | 60 | 28 | ______________ Not updated: I still think he's hot enough to have a real chance!

Dane Dunning didn't have his A stuff tonight. Maybe not even his B stuff tonight. He fought through the inconsistency to give us not just a QS, but a much needed 7IP. Gio has shown us how important it is to be able to win on nights you don't have it. He also has shown how hard it is to learn that skill. For Dane to come out and do this tonight, vs a loaded Twins lineup, as a god damn rookie... I know other pitchers are supposed to have higher ceilings, but I am just so fucking geeked for Dane Dunning man!

Lock it in boys and girls, I'm riding or dying with this prediction.

lmao, my sincere apologies that you need a TLDR for 5 sentences my man. Maybe you should take your own advice and just enjoy the Sox win? You sure ain't enjoying losing this ridiculous sox talk beef.

I literally said "In my opinion" - maybe I was right and RR got lucky. Maybe I was wrong and there is a reason I'm on my couch and RR is in a dugout. And FWIW, if we weren't having this conversation I was just about to post that I really like using Fry here. If you want to fight with someone who just trolls RR no matter what, fine, go find that person. I swear, the only thing more tired than game thread b****ing is people trying to police the game thread b****ing.

Or... I'll sit on the couch and watch the game and enjoy our first place White Sox AND over analyze. Are some of y'all not able to separate your emotions from your mouths or something? I'm having the time of my life with this team and this game, but I can disagree with RR with a smile on my face lol. I swear, some of you seem to think watching a baseball game should be like watching little league. Just "ra ra ra" and "go team"

That decision didn't bite RR in the ass but it got close enough to smell what he had for dinner. Its another example IMO of RR putting players in a position to fail, whereas good managers put their players in positions to succeed. All that said, Dunning is a fucking stud for executing and rewarding RR's faith. Edit: No clue why this posted so late ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I liked letting Dunning come back out for the 7th. I do not like letting Dunning continue after the first baserunner of the 7th, doubly so against Buxton.

Especially with no mid-series offdays in the playoffs this year. Rest is not guaranteed.

Because of his fielding Robert still has the war edge: 2.2./1.8 b/fWAR to Lewis's 1.8/1.8. He also has had more jaw dropping highlights go viral nationally, and is playing a critical role for a breakout playoff team, which matters for individual awards like this. If the season ended today, I think Robert is still at least 50/50 to get ROY, I don't think he is behind at all if they finish like this (lewis has also scuffled a bit for a few weeks). But I do think that if either goes on a hot streak and the other does not, they will take the award. EDIT: OK that might be my fault, my bad

If anyone is interested, TA (based on season averages) has about 50 ABs left in the season (ABs not PAs). If it is exactly 50, he needs 25 hits to end the season over .400. Here is a quick table I generated saying how many hits he needs to finish .400 depending on how many ABs he ends with. ______________ | ABs | Hits | -------------- | 45 | 23 | | 46 | 23 | | 47 | 23 | | 48 | 24 | | 49 | 24 | | 50 | 25 | | 51 | 25 | | 52 | 25 | | 53 | 26 | | 54 | 26 | | 55 | 27 | | 56 | 27 | | 57 | 27 | | 58 | 28 | | 59 | 28 | | 60 | 29 | | 61 | 29 | | 62 | 29 | | 63 | 30 | | 64 | 30 | ______________ He'll need to stay hot, but for Tim I don't think it is impossible!

Was that inning glass half full or half empty? Dunning painted some corners and got a quick three outs, but all three were real solid contact. You could make just about any prediction for his night and justify it with that inning...

Maybe a cold take but I think we win the division if we win tonight. Obviously not mathematically guaranteed, but I am really confident we win at least one of Gio and DK's starts the next two days, especially facing Maeda, who isn't a lefty but who the sox apparently think is a lefty so they will crush due to placebo effect. Leaving this series with a 3 game lead and the tie breaker, I think we get it done.

This is bad news for the Sox IMO. The debate over our third starter is mostly moot now because both Cease AND Dunning will be throwing every 4 days. Of course, its good bad news, because if we are worried about Cease and Dunning throwing we have made it to a round with more than three games.

No one is answering this question because 1) it is an over-simplification and 2) the unsimplified answer is really hard to find. BUT, I was really interested so I spent way, way too long looking into this: First, to answer your question itself. Here are Dyson's career stats: Here are Eloy's You can see Eloy generally adds about -3% to -5% to success rate, whereas Dyson generally comes out to about 5% added in large sample sizes. So we are looking at probably a 10% swing in catch probability - Eloy has a success rate of 83% while Dyson has 93%. Of course, the thing this does not capture is that Eloy's biggest weakness may be going after balls in the gap - we have seen he is very slow to get the ball back in. So let's say a batter has, idk, a 10% chance of taking an extra base against Eloy that they would not have gotten against Dyson. Eloy has played LF for 5733 opponent PAs, and he has fielded 542 balls in that time, so on average he fields a ball in 10% of the at-bats he plays in LF. Now, the chances may have been lower or higher in this inning, depending on batter profiles, pitcher arsenal and velocity, etc, but lets talk on average. Of the balls Eloy fields, about 60% are catching flyballs, the rest are retrieving a ball from somewhere in the outfield. So each batter has an extra 1% chance of getting on, and an additional 1% chance of taking an extra base. Most of the balls that Dyson catches that Eloy won't would be pretty tough, so lets say each batter has a .25% better chance of a single, .65% better chance of a double, and a .1% better chance of a triple, since those are rare. Add in the effect of taking an extra base, almost all of which would be stretching a single to a double, and I'd say (very roughly) that the average batter has .25% better chance of a single, 1.5% better chance of a double, and .25% better chance of a triple. Now to answer the question you are simplifying - how much does that affect the Sox overall chance of winning? And how does it compare to the offensive advantages of leaving Eloy in the lineup? This is a pain to answer mathematically - you have to recursively calculate a ton of stuff because the win percentages change based on which batters get on (i.e. are there no outs still or two outs). You can use Markov Chains to calculate expected runs from 24 base-out states but that doesn't take into account the batters and the pitcher or handedness or a tons of other super important stuff. Over the last year I built a basic Monte Carlo baseball simulator to account for these things. It isn't particularly advanced, but it can give us a rough estimate here, so I'll take the opportunity to use it instead. To answer the latter question first, let's look at how important Eloy is if you assume the Twins at least tied it up, and also don't take fielding into account. I ran 100,000 simulations, and I found that with Eloy in the lineup, the Twins won 60.5% of games when they scored at least 2 in the top of the ninth. With Dyson in, the Twins won 61.3% of those situations. Note that the Twins chances of winning here are much higher than 50% because in some of these situations they scored more than 2 runs and took a lead into the bottom of the ninth. So if we assume the Twins at least tie it up, having Eloy in the lineup over Dyson is worth about 0.8% towards the White Sox' chances of winning. Not a ton, and the overall effect is that the Twins have a 6.11% chance of winning with Eloy in while 6.30% chance of winning with Dyson in. But again, that is ignoring fielding, so let's see what happens when we take into account the fact that Dyson lowers the chances of the Twins tying it up in the first place. I ran another 100,000 simulations for both Eloy in and Dyson in, this time adjusting the opponent chances of hits as described above. With Eloy in the lineup, the Twins had a 6.18% chance of winning. With Dyson in the lineup, their chances of winning were 6.24%. In case you thought I woefully underestimated the importance of Dyson's defense, I reran the simulations with the defense having 5x more of an effect. In this case, the Twins win% with super Dyson was 6.19% Basically we are talking near negligible differences, and the White Sox chances of winning were slightly better with Eloy in. Really though, this exercise just goes to show how tiny of an effect individual strategic choices usually have on a team's chances of winning. These things just don't matter all that much in baseball, and I'll argue about them until blue in the face anyway. TL;DR: The difference between Eloy and Dyson on overall win percentage was negligible, and there is a mathematical argument that leaving Eloy in was the correct choice. BTW, I saw someone mention that RR only left Eloy in because he was leading off the ninth. So I reran the simulations with the scenario that Eloy instead made the last out in the 8th, and EE was leading off the ninth. In this case, leaving Eloy in gives the Twins a 6.22% chance of winning, while putting Dyson in gives the Twins a 6.17% chance of winning, and now subbing Dyson is (again, barely) the correct answer. So it was fair to treat Eloy leading off as a major factor. If you think I messed up any of the estimates badly let me know, I am happy to rerun with different settings.

We just watched him almost give up a second inside the park homerun in just a 60 game season. I think a little overreacting is understandable.

I know some people really don't like him here but Jim's been killing it on the tweeter this season

FUCK YOU MINNESOTA LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

He still fucked up in missing a catch most LFers would have caught BEFORE the umps got the call wrong

Horse shoes wouldn't have a 3 inch flared base so it may have gotten stuck in his "pocket".... why are you all looking at me like that?

Nomar would be worth like half a WAR more already if he took pitches to the body like Yaz just did

The Riv-El-ry

I'm really worried about Cease. Obviously too early to give up, but he is following the ReyLo development path so far: Instead of hitting the zone more, he is missing bats less. He has been really bad in long stretches this year. Sure, Giolito went from the worst pitcher to a TOR arm, but the whole reason that is incredible is because that just doesn't really happen much. I don't like the chances of us having two pitchers manage that trick, but boy do I hope I am wrong.

Usually showing your cajones to some adolescent males is a crime.

No one in existence has ever said it isn't a great thing, they've just said it isn't a great measure of current individual performance nor a great predictor of future individual performance. Still awesome to see a guy on your team do it though.