Jake

I'll just reiterate that the choice is really simple: Unless he has a run of major, major duds like his last outing, you call him up as soon as he strings together 2 or 3 decent outings.

I used to find Farmer and DJ to be kind of funny/charming, but listening to them this year has been a slog. I haven't been getting that same funniness from them. There's a bug with the MLB.TV app on some Rokus where the stream is smoother if you use the radio audio feed instead of the NBCSN one so I've been getting them along with the video. They're terrible at describing what's happening in the game, but I almost forgive them since I usually have video. What kills me is how often they are wrong about what's going on. You wouldn't know if you're listening to the radio, of course. The clearest example is that if they complain about a ball/strike call, I'd give at elast 3:1 odds on the umpire being right per Statcast, etc. It's like they judge it with the naked eye instead of using the monitor in front of them.

FWIW, Moncada has the second most called third strikes on pitches that were outside the zone in MLB with 9 such blown calls. Matt Davidson is first with 11. For the sake of context, he's also struck out looking 22 times on pitches *inside* the zone, which ranks highly. Still, you're looking at nearly a third of his strikeouts looking ending on a blown call by the umpire. For more context, he's had 5 pitches in the zone called balls with 2 strikes (56th highest in MLB), so this isn't merely an artifact of him taking a lot of pitches. League-wide players on average get many more 2-strike pitches in the zone called balls than the opposite kind of mistake because the strike zone as it is typically called by umpires is smaller than the rulebook strike zone. And as one last fun fact about Moncada's struggles with the umpires, he's had 5 occasions in which a 3-ball pitch outside the zone was called a strike, 3rd highest number in the league. He's only had the inverse happen 2 times, making him one of the unluckiest full time players by that measure as well. Side note: Davidson has only struck out 14 times looking on pitches inside the zone, meaning it's about a coin flip when he's called out looking whether strike 3 was in the zone or not.

It's not monumental, but obviously the promotion of Zavala over Collins isn't based on play but some other consideration. That is unless there is some large, unreported disparity in their defensive development

I would also say that since his velocity had an upward trajectory as the game went on, I can only assume that he's trying to tone things down. The Clippers that day basically never got a good swing on his fastball and seemed almost fooled by it half the time. They also looked terrible against his offspeed once he started using it, but of course he was putting guys on so much it didn't really matter — they only needed a single well-timed hit to score runs against him. I suspect his issues are more mental than mechanical, which I do suppose is an argument for getting Coop's hands on him. Kopech has a pretty simple motion and in person it didn't seem very high effort. I'm guessing whatever problems he has with repeating his motion are probably fixable moreso by getting his mind right than having him try to do something different physically.

Have you ever looked at the talent disparity between these two players? Albies is a nice player, there's a chance he's better in the long run, but there are very good reasons to prefer Moncada.

He's in a funk right now but we've already seen him pitch really well for a pretty long stretch in AAA, so there's no doubt he can do it. There's no doubt he can win in MLB. Once he works through this, call him up. If he continues walking a lot of people, don't call him up.

I was present for Kopech's dud in Columbus a few weeks ago. He didn't look like he was struggling because he was trying to overthrow. He was 94-95 in his first inning, where he had walks/HBP/WP, 95-96 in the rest of the game where the command problems continued. Touched 98 a few times. Threw at least 25 fastballs before his first offspeed pitch. He did get knocked out of the game by a changeup that Adam Rosales roped into left for a single, though.

There are two kinds of pitchers who put up a great ERA for a while: 1. Guys who are totally lucky. Some combination of too few K/too many BB/too much hard contact to sustain their numbers for very long. Mat Latos is a recent example of this phenomenon. 2. Guys who pitch really, really well for a while and don't have good numbers because of luck. Luckily, Covey is of type 2. He's not lucky. That doesn't mean he'll always be good, but it's nice when a guy has good numbers because he's been good and not because of random variation.

I think Lopez was just as if not more important to the Eaton trade at the time and I suspect he was the one that the Nats were sorriest to see go. I think both teams understood something was wrong with Gio.

I don't like expanding the playoffs because baseball is a game where there's a lot of statistical noise on the way to determining who the best teams are. It means the playoff series, even with 7 games, aren't very good at sorting out who the best team is. The 162 games, on the other hand, do a good job of ensuring the best teams get in (even if there are going to be some spots on the fringe decided by luck). Expanding the field of playoff teams while shortening the series subtracts signal and adds noise.

What's Eddy Alvarez have to do to get some love (or at least bat higher in the lineup)? I know he's old, but he has an excuse for it.

I find this to be a strange example. To me, the Danks rookie experience is an example of how some players need to take some (or a lot) of lumps in MLB before they're ready.

I think scouting pitch framing is basically tilting at windmills. You need MLB's analytical tools to evaluate it IMO.

There is definitely developmental value to playing in MLB. The sooner you do that, the sooner they are ready. You don't want to play so many games with service time that you end up delaying your window for contention.

As I've probably already said in this thread, I'm just not that worried about him. I can't tell you what he'll do this week, and I can't tell you whether he'll be just adequate or great, but he's not going to flame out. I enjoy watching him because you know anything can happen each at bat. If this is him when he's bad, I can't wait to see what good looks like.

Why are we talking about trading Rodon? We have him for three more seasons after this one. It will be hard to win again if he's not leading our rotation when we make our run. The only scenario where trading him makes sense might be if he's pitching badly mid-way into next season and the Sox start to think he's on the verge of flaming out entirely.

I figured they'd have Hansen do some time in Kannapolis or a rookie affiliate as a pseudo-Spring Training.

Well Burdi has a track record of basically unmatched stuff and was dominating AAA (albeit with a lot of walks) at an age where Cease is at high-A. It's a hard comparison to make but if FG basically treats Cease as a reliever then they see a guy with slightly inferior stuff who is at a much lower level than the ones where Burdi looked like a potential MLB closer of the future.

Dylan Covey is more than two years older than Fulmer. What Covey's doing right now is good evidence of why you don't take a guy with good stuff and convert him into a reliever because he gets beat up after getting rushed through the minors.

Carlos is back.

Per Statcast, that'll be the 10th time this season that Davidson has had a pitch outside the zone called for strike 3. That's 2nd in the league behind Paul Goldschmidt.

Davidson's horrible luck with strike calls continues, this time bailing Sale out of the inning.

This is really a bit of a headscratcher to me. Weird message to send to Bummer that you can pitch fine but if an older guy in AAA pitches well the team needs to trade him so you get demoted.

I think the strategy for now is to let him be a butcher in the OF so we can get a longer look at his bat. If you give up on his glove so much that you don't play him in the field, you are taking ABs from Davidson who has out-hit him this year and has a similar pedigree. The optimal lineup for winning right now would probably be Yolmer in LF, Davidson at 3B, and Palka at DH, but Yolmer playing outfield is more hypothetical than anything else right now and Davidson's 3B defense is somewhat of an unknown quantity by now. I worry about a guy who is on a hot run with no walks, though it's encouraging that he has hit the ball so hard. The comparison to Delmonico isn't perfect because there were signs last year that Delmonico was on a lucky run. Look at the hit probabilities on Nicky's homers: most of them were worse than 50/50 and his average exit velo was not good. The main negative with Palka for now is that his defensive problems affect more than just his fWAR, it hurts our pitchers too. A couple of our young starters have had outings undone partly by bad plays from Palka. I think we're going to just tolerate that for now, hope he improves, and hope that the continued exposure helps us figure out what he's got. A final note about his minor league track record: It's not great, at least lately. Summarizing: 2015 in A+ (129 G): .890 OPS, 29 HR. 29% K%. Also, 24 SB???? 2016 in AA (79 G): .890 OPS, 21 HR. 29% K%. 2016 in AAA (54 G): .780 OPS, 13 HR. 39% K% 2017 in AAA (84 G): .760 OPS, 11 HR. 22% K% 2018 in AAA (17 G): .860 OPS, 3 HR. 29% K%. What stands out to me is that he hit a wall in AAA and hasn't really produced at that level. This was predictable from his high K rates at the lower levels where his overall numbers were still good. There was a positive development last season despite his worse production in that he did cut his strikeouts. They were back up this year in AAA but the sample is small and the difference from last year wasn't large. Strikeouts haven't been a major problem in MLB. Still, I'm always suspicious of guys who hit better in MLB than in AAA until I've seen them do it for a while or if they were called up young/inexperienced.