Balta1701

This thread was made after Benintendi was already signed. This wasn’t saying sign him instead of Benintendi, It was saying that an outfield of Benintendi/Robert/Colas/Hamilton/Reyes is still not particularly impressive, particularly on the back side. It is difficult to say that assessment is wrong on paper.

I would say that if you want to win a title in the modern era you need to build a team that can push nearly 100 wins. Now a team good enough to win 100 games may not do so. They may lose multiple players to injuries and win 90 or even 82 games. They may win 97 games and not win a title that year or ever. They may need to come in as a number 1 seed , disappoint, and get playoff experience first. But basically all of them start as teams that can win 95 or more games, that talent level is a baseline. If you don’t have that talent level, you will run into too many teams better than you and you can’t find your way through that gauntlet.

Does it matter if you have a shot if in reality it’s an extremely remote shot? The setup you’re describing illustrates the point. Yes, the Diamondbacks, the Rockies, the Phillies have reached the World Series, but in all those cases they have to go through multiple really good teams on the way there. They drain everything they have getting to the title round and then get finished off by a championship caliber team from the other league, a team which has more depth and can sustain their run.

How about this one. Every single champion since 2003 has had a 94 win season or better. They may not have peaked in the regular season where they won their title, but they won at least 94 within 2 years of winning their title. The only one that peaked at 94 was the Giants. The Royals peaked at 95. The Red Sox had a run of 95 win teams. if you want to win a title these days, you need to put a 95 win team on the field. Sometimes your 95 win team will have a bad playoff run but gain experience to win the next year, but they won that many games for a reason, and it wasn’t a crappy division.

So the White Sox are taking on $50 million and paying the Luxury Tax? Jerry Reinsdorf.

If your window is open, you should probably close it. That cold front was serious it got all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve seen 4 people in this neighborhood here in Texas with busted pipes from freezing.

I’d actually like to know which team is this example of a team that is built to maybe win 89 games, sneaks into the playoffs, and then wins a title. The most recent example I have might be the 03 Marlins? 04 - Boston. Was a wild card team, improbable ALCS, but was also a perennial playoff team and will show up again soon. 05 - might be the team on here with the least sustained success. Might be the most out of nowhere title in 20 years. 06 - Cardinals - everyone makes a big deal of them winning 82 games, but the same team won 100 games the year before and was in the 04 World Series. That’s a sustained period of excellence. 07 - hey Boston again, maybe they weren’t a fluke. 08 - Phillies - was a surprise at the time but they made the playoffs 5 straight years. 09 - Yankees. Most recent example I have of a team getting a title in FA. 10. 12. 14. Giants. There were a couple wild card appearances in there but that’s seriously sustained success. 11 - Cardinals again. 13 - Red Sox again. 15 - Royals - complete rebuild, “best system in baseball history”, two straight World Series appearances. 16 - Cubs - made NLCS the year before, 5 straight playoff appearances. 17 - Astros. Bit of help from a trash can, but have made the playoffs every year since. 18 - Red Sox again. 19 - Nationals - was a wild card team, but had 5 playoff appearances and 4 division titles since 2012, never finished worse than second. 20 - Dodgers. Definition of sustained success. 21 - Braves - have now won the NL East 5 straight years. 22 - Astros again. This seems very non random to me. There are zero examples of the Rockies or Marlins or Diamondbacks or Pirates sneaking in with an 88 win season and winding up with a title. Teams like that have made the World Series a couple times but I don’t see a win. Every one of them is a multi-year contender who wins their division repeatedly, the shortest stint other than the 05 White Sox is probably the Royals who couldn’t afford to keep a team that made two straight World Series appearances together. Titles are going to franchises that are excellent for years.

And what he wants doesn’t mean what he gets either, but that doesn’t stop his agent from trying to get it. Straight up same contract, would you have taken Clevinger or Wacha?

Yes, he’s a free agent. He was notably better than Clevinger last year, so you have to expect he’s holding out for more money than Clevinger, possibly more than 1 year, and maybe a likely starting spot.

Bah, some of the best rookies turn out to be nothing and some of the best players in baseball struggle as rookies. His bat could be excellent and he could still struggle next year and be so bad that he winds up back in Charlotte midseason replaced by Hamilton, and that wouldn’t necessarily mean his career was on an odd path. But the white Sox can’t afford him to have any issues, which is the problem.

Texans have the 7-8 Jaguars who are leading their division next week and the 4-12-1 Colts in week 17. Bears have the 7-8 Lions who are 1 game out of a playoff spot and the Vikings who have a playoff spot clinched but who are currently 1 game ahead of the 49ers for the 2 seed.

There is not a single defensive play on there? Did you go back to talking about a different subject?

This is the stuff we old dudes first used when we were trying to figure out how to express defensive performance in some terms that can be quantified.

You’re taking it as those these are statcast stats. If those are available for minor leaguers I don’t know where to get them. This is literally “number of balls fielded divided by number of innings times 9”. That’s something that is available to everyone and that I can compare from one level to another. Other things do influence it, but a major portion of that is correlated to a guys actual range in the OF, so even for minor leaguers where I don’t know how to look up statcast numbers I can look this up readily and get moderately useful information about his range.

If a team is truly wildly overpaying for a closer I’d imagine the Guardians would get in on that action.

While it’s not perfect for reasons I will note, we do have one way of estimating his range, his RF - range factor, the number of balls he gets to over 9 innings. This is not a true modern stat but it does allow some comparisons. For example, when Robert came up, he was at 2.8 (I’m being lazy and not doing the last significant figure). Last year when he was no longer an elite fielder he was down to 2.4. Aaron Judge played some CF as a fill in last year. He was at 2.3. He was at 2.1 when he played the corner spot. Andrew Vaughn last year was at 1.8. Now, fewer balls go to the corner than to CF, so you can’t compare exactly from one position to another but we can tell that’s bad because we saw Vaughn last year. Colas last year was at 2-2.1 in his time in CF and 1.9-2 when he played RF. When Garcia was in CF for the 2020 Brewers, his was 1.7. Now for all the caveats. This is not a statcast number, more things can affect it than just a guys range. A team that gives up more fly balls will push this higher, more strikeouts and ground balls will push it lower. Defensive positioning will affect it and so poor coaches can push it downwards. Maybe the White Sox had ground ball pitchers at multiple levels and bad coaches and bad scouting. However, that number was pretty consistent across multiple levels, which would argue that it’s difficult to be dominated by pitching or coaching. This also doesn’t take into account throwing arm, and it doesn’t take into account how many errors the guy makes, all of which affect his total defense. If his number was 2.9, I’d be giving all the same caveats but also saying he may have the tools of an elite OF. But it’s at the other end, so again given all those caveats, but this doesn’t suggest he’s likely to be a very good CF. Likely he’s got more range than Vaughn and maybe a strong throwing arm makes him a really good RF, but for what I have to work with, this suggests he would not be a guy we want to rely on in CF. Maybe he can be an emergency CF and play there a couple games when Robert is out and Sheets is the only backup OF on the roster, but this suggests using him there long term during a Robert injury could be a bad strategy.

The other possibility is that they aren’t willing to do that until they move payroll somewhere else and that’s why we heard another surge of Hendriks talk this week.

Not saying they won’t or can’t, but it is worth noting that doing so may well push their payroll higher than last year (Duvall almost certainly).

We heard that Avisail Garcia could play CF and Andrew Vaughn could play LF from the same team sources. There should be more skepticism here.

The best answer is maybe? Right now if Robert went down for a stretch, presumably you have a 4 man outfield of Hamilton/Reyes/Colas/Benintendi and you figure out based on matchups. Not sure if Colas is survivable there, you can probably live with Benintendi there for a few games but nothing more. No that doesn’t feel like a championship plan.

What’s sorta ironic is that if he didn’t think this organization was terribly run to the point that getting be away from them is worth millions of dollars to them, AJ Pollock would actually have made sense.

I don’t know if they’re going to go with the replacements they signed, but I’d say that someone who can legitimately fill in as a CF would be quite important as well. Not only do you have to assume Robert will miss some time, but boy it would be nice to be proactive in resting him rather than playing him every day until he winds up with a grade 2 sprain.

How dare you guys suggest that Kimbrel is anything other than the best reliever in baseball. Nothing I said in the last year was more outrageous than that.

You’ll be in the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York. Tons of parks and outdoor spots, lots of waterfalls. Within driving distance of a neat glass museum in Corning NY, could drive to the Poconos or Syracuse or the lakefront.