Jake

I suspect Grandal is wondering whether he made the right choice to sign so soon after seeing the contracts the starting pitchers have gotten

I'd be much more interested in scrutiny of Ozuna's bat which has shown more variation than his defense, which multiple metrics have shown him to be average or better at over many years.

-2 + 3 + -1 = 0 0 = average He was randomly varying around a long-term norm of being an average outfielder

Let's go back to operating in the world of facts. Until last season, Baseball Savant's outs above average had Ozuna as exactly average defensively and that metric as mentioned compares him against outfielders at all positions on the field. Other metrics have always liked his defense. As far as I can tell, this bad-defense narrative exists only because of the couple terrible plays at the wall he had. Worth noting that he at least used to have a strong arm but played through a shoulder injury in 2018 and said he didn't have his strength back in the beginning of 2019 following his offseason surgery.

Their offense is terrible. I hope I never hear another word about the crazy aggressive defense because for now it's doing fine. I'd like someone to figure out why a team with a bunch of shooters can't shoot.

Lauri has taken a number of very ill-advised attempts at dunks where I doubt he could have made them even without the defender due to his distance from the basket. Refs not eager to bail him out because of it although my only guess is he's trying to dunk rather than shoot to initiate more contact

It was a hell of a gamble Boylen took down the stretch. After a 13-point 3rd quarter, he says screw the defense I'm going with 4 guards to try to get some offense. And, of course, the defense was indeed screwed down the stretch (allowing 41 points in the 4th) by playing so small...but they did get 47 points in the 4th quarter as well. And yes, the main problem with the team in my view is Lauri. I don't think his effort level is low, but something's wrong with him. I don't know if it's physical, mental, or what. I remember hearing he was going vegetarian at one point, so I always wonder if he's not actually well-nourished for the grind of the season. But if he just made open outside shots, we wouldn't really be talking about this. His shooting problem may very well be physical, but I don't know that it's physical in the sense that if he got stronger/healthier it would improve...it might just be technical.

Bulls player ratings per Nate Silver's new RAPTOR statistic, which is particularly strong at quantifying defense (compared to all other alternatives):

Coach of the year!

I don't think the "chase the two" kind of thing is all that uncommon. My first college start, the senior catcher told me "chase the two" (or some other number) with a man on second and once I looked at the signs I had to call him to the mound and ask him what the hell it meant. So at a small school, we had been using that sort of thing for a while. That general type of thing is not much different than the "indicator" most 3B coaches use to relay signs to batters.

According to this article (paywall), Bulls have been making Coby guard the 3 a lot and even switching him onto bigs and he's held up fairly well. Looks to me that the problem with Hunter so far is mostly just his offense, where he's been a low-usage player and doesn't contributing much beyond scoring (which he does inefficiently). I wouldn't read into the defense as much because I believe it's a noisier metric and his number isn't bad. Could also reflect things like help defense that are really hard to see without studying tape. Also, I'm feeling pretty good about the Bulls not picking Cam Reddish.

Rookie rankings using Nate Silver's new RAPTOR metric, which captures defense much better than any other advanced statistic:

I honestly don't think it makes sense for the Sox to sign two starters to multi-year deals. You could justify a major signing like Wheeler and then someone like Gio Gonzalez on a 1-year. Also, isn't this thread about Grandal?

Ryan Arcidiacono is a good professional basketball player.

I like what we've got in White. How good will he be, I'm not sure, because it's not clear what kind of a shooter he'll be. But he seems to be playing adequately in every other facet of the game so he'll live and die by his scoring.

I'd be more excited to see the Sox make a serious offer to Ryu than Odorizzi or some of these other guys besides Wheeler. Yes there's injury risk, but you also know he's probably going to be great whenever he goes out there for you.

Really liking how Coby White looks, especially his ability to finish at the rim. I thought that would be a problem in the NBA. He's super confident out there and it can be hard to teach that as well. And good lord LaVine can put the ball in the hole, he's really getting fun to watch. I think we may have found a useful role for Dunn too.

I'm clearly a glutton for punishment because I'm excited about this Bulls season. Not in the "this team is going to advance in the playoffs" kind of excited, but like the arrow is pointing up and this roster may include players that are on the Next Good Bulls Team.

The Samardzija move was bad no matter what Samardzija did because he was going to become a free agent. It made it a very low upside move for the Sox and while Phegley/Bassitt were not high upside players, Semien was a relatively high upside one. Worth noting, however, that there's a good chance that Semien would have been cast off by the A's if he hadn't crossed paths with Ron Washington. He played some shockingly bad defense at shortstop in his first years with the A's (35 errors in one season!). To be honest, I was surprised with how underwhelming Semien's bat was until this year, but now that he's playing some very strong D and has finally found the kind of stroke he had as a minor leaguer he's looking really good. I have a hard time looking back on the Peavy move as some terrible thing. He was making a lot of money and got hurt right away. But we gave up nothing. Clayton Richard had one decent year that seems largely predicated on luck and playing in the best pitchers' park around. There was real upside on the Sox side of the deal and there was very little upside on the Padres side. Sox had very bad luck with Peavy getting hurt in an unprecedented way right after he was acquired and he still ended up providing some decent value.

Another possible explanation for this is that Ryan Goins getting an apparently permanent call-up is what led Escobar to believe he was lied to. May have been given the impression that if injuries created a need for a veteran IF to get called up, it would be him.

I suspect that sometimes stuff like this happens because of miscommunications with the agent

Was Skole already on the 40 man? At any rate, I'm not as down on the idea as others. I really would like to see someone other than Palka and I can live with the desire to call up a lefty. Makes sense to let Collins gets his reps at catcher down there and call him up in September. Skole has slowed down since his blazing start to the season but he's got some pop and has earned a shot.

Collins looked so bad last time here that I'm not sure that they'll want to call him back up despite his strong play since he was sent down. I assume they'd want to be able to get him more catching reps than he'll be able to get up here as well.

I'd like to know how we ended up underspending our international pool — I didn't realize we were trading current-year money. So in this case, it may not be this trade that is a huge fuckup but something else that happened before

This is a real headscratcher to me. Unless there's something we don't know about these prospects, it seems like we just gave up a big chunk of a very finite resource (int'l pool $$) to save a little money on Nate Jones