Jake

For all we know, it's Hahn that is in love with Ventura and JR who doesn't give a s*** who manages

ADA has certainly not made it easy to like him. I also have a feeling that L Garcia was playing CF because ADA doesn't like it, too. I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that ADA was a better hitter than Leury yesterday, either

FWIW, I worked for about 10 years with a House disciple in the Chicago area and he didn't teach a "wrist/elbow snap" slider. For the most part, he didn't teach sliders. He'd teach circle changeup as first offspeed pitch, then curveball, and then reluctantly would teach slider as essentially a variant of the curveball (which is basically what it is). He was a big fan of the knuckle curve, but I never worked with him on that. He started working with that a lot right as I was going out the door.

A lot of managers believe (and, apparently, players too) that guys get out of whack when their batting order position is changed. Given how little the batting order matters to game outcomes, who cares if you put a bad player higher in the order for a few games while you wait for the normal guy to come back? Parent had just said to the media yesterday that ADA felt very uncomfortable hitting leadoff.

Danish was often clocked in the 94-95 range before being drafted. Perfect Game has recorded his velocity in tournaments way back in 2012 where he sat 90-93. I'm going to assume that, over time, we'll see Tyler get back to that. It seems that we have asked him to consciously back it off a little bit.

Johnson and Danish have extremely high ceilings. Johnson has plus speed, good contact rates, high walk rates, a lot of glove potential, and has pretty nice power production thus far for a non-HR hitter. His ceiling is borderline first-tier 2B. Danish has an ace ceiling. There's a reason they said he has Jake Peavy stuff. Those players just happen to have pretty low floors, too.

QUOTE (fathom @ May 12, 2014 -> 11:46 AM) In true Mr. Pessimism form, this has been a bad year for Sox prospects. Two shocking busts so far this year in Davidson and E. Johnson. Use of the word "bust" is debatable. Being bad for a month and some change isn't quite "bust" level, especially given their ages and experience levels. Johnson, in particular, has had a mysterious loss of velocity that I hope is resolved sooner rather than later, even if that means diagnosing him with an injury.

KW is probably our best GM. Himes had one hell of a run, though: Drafted Jack McDowell, Robin Ventura, Frank Thomas, and Alex Fernandez in consecutive first rounds. Got us Wilson Alvarez, Scott Fletcher, Sammy Sosa, and Lance Johnson for old Harold Baines and Jose de Leon. Also drafted James Baldwin, Ray Durham, Jason Bere, Bob Wickman, Joe Borowski.

So Eaton missed 5 games with an ankle and will miss something like 2 to 4 weeks with a hamstring injury. This is pretty typical stuff. Not a great start to his White Sox run, but I don't see evidence of an injury prone player. He averaged over 120 games a year in the minors, where not many players get that many games played. While people have wondered if his playing style would cause him injury, his arm injury was throwing-related and what he's dealing with now is somewhere between random occurrence and wear and tear.

QUOTE (scs787 @ May 10, 2014 -> 03:19 PM) A punter!!! Ole! Damn, dude has 4.6 speed and benched 225 23 times as a punter. Thought it was funny that one scouting report knocked him for average athleticism after I saw those combine numbers. That's about as good as it gets for a punter. Not a high bar to clear to improve our punting game. I'm not going to pretend to know whether he'll be any good.

Fales sounds like a player that ought to develop into a very solid backup and could thrive with the coaching and weapons we have in Chicago a la Josh McCown

Will Sutton Ego Ferguson Jay Ratliff Stephen Paea Nate Collins LaMarr Houston Jared Allen Willie Young Israel Idonije David Bass Cornelius Washington Austen Lane Tracy Robertson Trevor Scot

Kolek - elite velocity that has been spotted for over 12 months, was still top .1% for age before that. Great body. Good motion, shows some refinement on the mound. Good looking breaker at two speeds. Sparsely used change. Unbelievable upside but middle relief downside.

How is Eaton injury prone? He never missed a game until he tore his UCL (Tommy John ligament). Near-zero risk of reinjury there for non-pitcher. This is the first concern with legs and it looks like a rather minor injury at that

IMO, you can't say don't draft a G in the first round out of principle, but then say it's a bad idea to pick a CB when there are great S on the board

QUOTE (thxfrthmmrs @ May 8, 2014 -> 10:23 PM) Keppinger started his minor league assignment a week ago... Either way, if he's putting up pathetic numbers against 21-22 year olds, I don't think he will be brought up. You can't put guys on rehab assignment indefinitely. There's a time limit

I love Hawk. Whenever I get stuck watching another team's broadcast, I just feel like muting it. Vin Scully is one of the only other guys who makes it worth listening just for the great way in which the game is broadcasted. While this isn't you flavum, I saw some folks on Twitter last night loving how old and perhaps sickly Hawk looked on TV. These people are f***ing disgusting, cheering an old man to die because he sounds too much like an old timey fan on TV

I skipped some of the conversation, but the key things to think about regarding "clutch" are definitional. If Abreu is a 1.000 OPS hitter in a neutral situation, is he a choker when his OPS is .850 in the clutch? What if he's at 1.000 OPS? If Leury is a .550 OPS hitter normally and .700 OPS in the clutch, is he a really clutch hitter? There's your first problem. When defining clutch, are we measuring a hitter against himself or against the league? Chances are, even if Abreu was "not clutch" insofar as he was a significantly worse hitter than he normally is in clutch situations, he'd still be the best choice in a clutch situation. The other big problem in terms of definitions is deciding what constitutes a clutch situation. Often, "late and close" is used as a surrogate for clutch spots. This means 7th or later, batting team is ahead by one run, tied, or losing by an amount such that the tying run is at least on deck. Of course, you wouldn't say an Abreu strikeout to lead off the 7th of a game when we're losing by 1 constitutes a choke. Sometimes you could argue it was productive if his presence caused the team to use a righty against Dunn. Anyways, we often see that a play becomes clutch after the fact; there was no particular pressure to succeed in this hypothetical situation, but if he hit a bomb we'd probably label it an example of his acumen in the clutch. RISP is another surrogate, but suffers from some of the same pitfalls. Do we start patting Tyler Flowers on the back for a bloop single with nobody out and the bases loaded in the second inning? So clutch! Then again, maybe that is clutch. It's more clutch than most other singles. If you narrow the definition of clutch too much, you end up making all claims about the clutch borderline unfalsifiable. PK is the most clutch hitter in history because he hits grand slams 100% of the time that he bats with the bases loaded in the World Series. You get the idea. You work with unbelievably small sample sizes and you start to fine tune your definition to prove your hypothesis rather than coming up with an idea of clutch and seeing if the data confirms your beliefs or not.

I like Rodon the most. I think I may like Kolek over Aiken, but I recognize that he will need quite a bit more development than Aiken and I haven't yet decided how to weight that in my mind.

Jews in USA =/= Jews in Israel =/= the people ruling Israel

Putting Starlin over Alexei ruins all credibility for the all-city team. I won't even bother looking at it

QUOTE (ptatc @ May 7, 2014 -> 11:07 AM) This article is one of the primary problems I have with "advanced" stats. Both of these players are being paid to produce runs. You can determine the probable value of this all you want but Abreu has scored 22 and driven in 35 for 57 runs minus the HR as you don't want to count the run twice for a total of 45. Rizzo has 19 scored and 16 driven in for 35 minus the 6 HR for a total of 29. There is always the comment of RBI being useless because it depends on the teammates getting on base for the opportunity. In that case the percentage of runs driven in by opportunity works. Don't flame me because I know many of you like the +RC stat and all but when it comes down to it, I think it is all about producing runs from these guys and I really don't care what his weighted on base percentage is. It's great to debate and discuss but it's not as relevant. First of all, I think it's good that you approach it this way and do it without the "this newfangled stuff is terrible, you nerds are ruining everything." It allows the SABR folks to answer the primary criticism of what they advocate, which is that sometimes sabermetrics seem to be at odds with what is observed (I should say that sometimes sabermetrics do a better job at explaining what it is we see). Obviously, if Abreu finishes with a 110 wRC+ and knocks in 150 RBI, I'm probably going to want to say he was a better run producer than just 10% above average. If he were to do that, though, it would suggest something that these kinds of statistics don't really take into consideration (and for good reason) - it would mean that the hits, walks, and outs that led to 150 RBI happened in a way that was biased towards runs being scored. Generally speaking, the assumption that underlies these statistics is that most of your at-bats are no different than any other at-bats; not on the micro level, but on the macro level. Over time, few people seem especially clutch or especially not clutch. When a guy looks awesome in some aspects of the classic, counting stats and not so great with SABR stats, there might be some reason to believe that this particular player is better or worse in the most pivotal situations than what is statistically typical. For instance, let's take two pitchers. Tom Glavine was criticized by many as a first-ballot HOFer, including myself, for his not-amazing FIP over his career (3.95). It would suggest that his accomplishments were more about longevity than ever being truly dominant. His xFIP (same stat, but assuming league average HR per fly ball) was worse at 4.59. First of all, it's obvious that Glavine didn't luck into not giving up homers to that large of an extent for 19 years. He was just better than we assume at suppressing homers. There's more than that, though. I'll let FanGraphs explain some more: Basically, peripheral stats tend to be better at predicting future performance than counting stats. Furthermore, these "peripherals" are better at saying how well a pitcher truly pitched in a smaller sample. David Purcey threw something like 10-15 innings last year and had a low ERA but he walked a batter per inning and hardly struck anyone out. We know he was just a lucky SOB, especially since his walks weren't clustered in one outlier appearance. Rarely, you get a guy like Glavine who is an exception. Then we have Javier Vasquez, who is the opposite sort of exception. His career FIP was 3.91, better than that POS Glavine! His xFIP was even better, 3.75. His ERA? 4.22 (Glavine's was 3.54). An FIP-based WAR suggests that Javy was a good season or two away from matching Glavine for career WAR. His RA9-WAR for his career was 43.3, though, compared to Glavine's 88. That looks a little better, Glavine being twice the pitcher. It turns out that sabermetricians tend to agree that RA9 (which is based simply on the amount of runs surrendered) is much better for long-term evaluation of pitchers than FIP, which is better for evaluating small samples. We know what was wrong with Javy - his bad outcomes weren't randomly distributed. He liked to cluster all his walks, hits, and homers in the 5th-6th inning. This means he'll give up more runs than the accumulation of walks, hits, homers, strikeouts, etc. would suggest. FWIW, we see this kind of variability much more often with pitchers, who are more difficult to evaluate in ways beyond measuring runs allowed. Batters are easier to measure. We have a clearer idea of what every batting outcome is worth, run-wise. There is just a bunch of research that repeatedly demonstrates that players performing better in clutch or run-producing scenarios than other players do is a fiction - that is, they do it, but it is not because they are better in those situations. It's just random variation.

Marcus Stroman called to the big leagues. I love that guy, I wanted us to draft him so badly

I don't know what to make of all the weird off-court rumors, but I have a feeling that the Warriors will be a worse team with Jackson gone

Suppose we get Melo to agree to come to the Bulls. Boozer amnestied. Still have to move Taj. Taj+2 first round draft picks = top 5 pick?