JoeC

FYI, the baseball cube has college stats as well: https://www.thebaseballcube.com/content/player/146981/ No advanced stats to speak of, but at least it has SOME purpose.

How's TA's game-calling ability behind the plate? Asking for a friend.

Who is June Vaughn, and can she teach Andrew how to hit?

I for one will gladly eat crow...chet.

Yep. Gotta have the right players at the right time, and the right contingency plan. It's easy for people like me to b**** about it, but the fact of the matter is that it's f'ing hard to get it all right. You have to have so many different roles and so many components of your organization and operation working well, or at least all getting lucky at the right time.

I'll add onto that... we tried adding players using our limited prospect capital basically until 2016. When Hahn determined that the cupboards were bare, he got approval to tear it down. He did a great job of stocking the high end of the system, but the org did a horrible job at developing that high-end talent (the bats, especially, just performed to their floor). At the risk of triggering another WestEddy-ss0k5 war of words, we also did a s%*# job at developing ANY talent, especially on offense, so the bottom completely fell out when we suffered any sort of injury or loss at the big league level.

When we develop enough players through a quality minor league system to be able to confidently transition to winning. Basically where the org thought we were in 2020 ~ 2021.

Sure, but 3 chickens at the expense of 15 eggs? it is far cheaper to properly develop 15 eggs into reasonably prices chickens than to pay for 3 chickens.

Either way, it makes no sense to bring in a star player from the outside when the rest of the team is crap.

It was worth signing someone like him because the rest of the team was, you know, good. You need to have a good core. Not just 2 or 3 good players.

Found the article I was thinking of: https://sports.yahoo.com/news/royals-bannister-unafraid-math-194800629--mlb.html

One thing I remember about Bannister from his playing career is that he embraced analytics wholeheartedly. This is the kind of stuff he (I would think) would be looking at very closely.

Can someone just whip up an AI bot that deletes Schriffen’s voice to make the broadcast slightly less intolerable?

No. the “we ain’t taking that!!” was the most embarrassing.

Overall a positive piece IMO. If there IS an actual development plan in place between Chicago and Charlotte like Cannon suggests, that is what I’ve been hoping for for years.

Agreed. Honestly the closest comparison to baseball players is golfers IMO.

Sounds about right somehow.

Which honestly is more than I expected in a trade for Bummer.

That's a much simpler and elegant way to put it than my word vomit.

Sorry for the barrage of responses here. It’s kind of a point love to nerd out on. You just happened to give me an excuse to talk about it - lol. Last point - my point isn’t that hockey isn’t full of precise, repetitive movements. It absolutely is. But it’s got enough of them that a player’s success isn’t generally completely dependent on their ability to do one specific thing. So, back to my original post, baseball is far more dependent on precision movements. In baseball. A position player’s value is overwhelmingly determined these days by his ability to swing a bat. The nature of the movement is that it requires absolute precision with defined and rehearsed start and end points that players strive to replicate. A difference in, for example, the angle in which you stride as you lead into your swing can (and frequently does) impact a player’s performance in an outsized way. An injured wrist can be the difference between being a productive bat and being Martin Maldonado. Hockey, mechanically, is a diverse enough of a sport that there are enough things that you can do to still be productive. I think one thing I misspoke on my original post is that baseball has “more” precise movements. The point I meant to get across is the dependency on said movements, or the portion of performance that relies on the replicability of those movements.

Also, swinging a bat and pitching are literally like 90% of what determines the outcome of a game of baseball.

Also, this.

Perhaps you are missing my point. If you hurt your wrist, say, you can adjust your mechanics for taking a face-off and still be effective. Your mechanics are thrown off, for sure, but you can adjust. Baseball, when pitching or hitting, is so incredibly dependant on repetitive mechanics that smaller injuries will have an outsized impact on performance. With a damaged wrist like Luis Robert a couple of years ago, you can still absolutely be an effective hockey player. It will affect you, and it hurts like hell, but you can make adjustments. You might lose that little snap on your pass, or you might just straight up not be able to take a slap shot, for example, but there is enough that you can do to be effective elsewhere. In baseball, if you have a wrist injury like that, one major part of your game is just straight up f'ed. Can you try to play through the pain? Sure, but it's far more likely to affect your performance. Not saying it doesn't hurt hockey players (it does hurt). What I am saying is that hockey has so many other components athletically that, if you can stand the pain, you can perform. Similar injuries in baseball, by the nature of pitching and hitting, will have an outsized impact on your ability to perform. If you disagree, feel free to call out any pitcher for not pitching through a torn UCL.

I played NCAA hockey.

Baseball requires and is far more dependent on repetitive precise movements compared to a sport like hockey.