Greg Hibbard

Another guy who hit well over his first 250 PAs is Joe Crede - .277/.305/.466/.771 He was basically a .245 avg/.725 OPS guy for the rest of his career.

In Gordon Beckham's first 196 PAs, he hit .302/.368/.465/.833 Over his next 1028 PAs, he's hit roughly .240/.305/.340/.645 I don't need to tell you guys that it's not exactly rare for a hitter to come up and initially light up pitching before the league can adjust to him This happens with pitchers as well.

QUOTE (ChiSox_Sonix @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 03:00 PM) Yes, there's no denying that, but if you honestly think he's more of a sure thing to help us than Viciedo from this point forward...well, to me that's being either ignorant or stubborn. So Viciedo is definitely going to hit major league pitching without any struggles. Interesting.

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 02:44 PM) Im not putting all the blame on Pierre, but he's a guy you can actually do something about!! Don't you guys see that!? We have a young guy, who is immensely talented at the plate (and his defense has been adequate this season with a cannon of an arm) ready to take his place, and we don't have a huge commitment to Pierre financially. It's like your refusing to eat your prime rib (that you already bought) because you've also already paid for your Arby's sandwich. Except that 100 PAs at this level isn't nearly enough to project a career on, nor is 13 bad games in April enough to end a player's tenure with a professional organization.

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 02:41 PM) Pshhh, if he hit better earlier in the game those "clutch" hits shouldn't even have to occur. Player A: 2-4 with a double and 2 RBI's Player B: 1-5, RBI Give me the guy who produces throughout the game rather than some s***ty plate appearances that leads to us having to come back again to win. He won three games in a row with game-winning hits, and you're looking for a reason to criticize even that. What point is there in further discussion? I'm sorry, but looking for reasons to criticize game-winning hits is unreal.

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 02:36 PM) Honestly, name one thing that is positive out of Pierre? And a legit positive, not some bulls*** that he's raised his OBP a tad while it's still sitting at a s***ty number. He's hit a number of clutch, game-winning hits recently that should have made up for some of the games he's lost with his glove.

QUOTE (Kalapse @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 02:20 PM) Of course it isn't but he's the most easily replaced. He doesn't have $38M or $44M remaining on his contract, his upside is minimal and there's a replacement waiting in AAA. You can b**** about Dunn and Rios all you want but they're pretty much unmovable. And when that virtually unproven replacement hits .240 for a month with a .260 obp and no ability to steal, then what? Is it more likely that a veteran of 11 years with nearly a .300 career average will improve, or that a player with no major league experience will struggle? I don't understand why people assume Viciedo will succeed or that there aren't tradeoffs when comparing Viciedo to even a struggling Pierre.

I find the histrionics in this thread pretty astounding, given that he is apparently returning to form.

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 01:58 PM) If Dunn was 0 for 10 in SB, then yes. I think you missed my point. What is Pierre's career ISO? Did anyone on here think we acquired Pierre for his ISO? EDIT: if I'm calculating this correctly, Pierre's career ISO is .067. I fail to see how asking a player to do what he's never been capable of doing is relevant to this conversation.

I can't imagine leading the majors in sacrifices can be viewed as a bad thing.

QUOTE (Kalapse @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 01:43 PM) He's had 2 horrible months out of 3, his OBP on the year is .324, his ISO is .047, he's 13 of 23 in SB and he's been hot garbage in the field. He's in the middle of a hot streak that's gotten his numbers back to bad rather than among the worst in the game, cherry picking some stats doesn't change the fact that he's beed awful this season. Of course no one's complaining right now he has a .900+ OPS over his last 10 games, it's a very convenient time to start posting some Juan Pierre stats. His ISO? Seriously? Should I start complaining about Dunn's stolen bases too?

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 01:33 PM) Whereas Pierre is among the league leader in making outs. Actually, he's not even in the top ten. http://espn.go.com/mlb/stats/batting/_/sor...Bats/order/true AB - H Uggla - 264 outs Melky - 261 Ichiro - 260 Stubbs - 259 Weeks - 258 Young - 254 A. Jackson - 252 Castro - 251 Rollins - 251 Rios - 249 Beltre - 249 Markakis - 248 Infante - 248 Pierre - 248 then there's roughly 20 others between 245-246.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 01:12 PM) According to advanced statistics such as WAR, he was the worst player in baseball for a pretty good chunk of time. Does WAR accurately calculate Pierre's value in terms of his SPECIFIC replacement, or in terms of "league average" aggregates? More specifically, would Viciedo have potentially cost us games with his glove the same way, and is 100 PA in the majors enough to speculate about his offensive value? I see a lot of contrition for falling in love with Beckham too soon but then praise for Viciedo as if he's the second coming in exactly the same fashion. It's an interesting juxtaposition, to say the least.

QUOTE (gatnom @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 12:22 PM) I only said that he was, for a period of time, the worst everyday player in baseball. For 13 games at the end of April, he went 7 for 51. Outside of that 13 game stretch, he has batted close to .290, including a stretch of 34 games where he had at least one hit in 27 of them. During the same 13 games, Dunn was 6 for 50 with zero home runs. That was the first example I thought to look at. I can find others if you want. So no, he was not the worst everyday player in baseball, even for that 13 game stretch.

Like I've said in other threads, if Pierre continues to trend back towards his norm, Ozzie deserves all the credit here. He'll never get it from most people.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 11:36 AM) You eliminated 33% of his season to tell us he's doing well. I would think that 2/3rds would be a more relevant number than 1/3rd, and that recent 60+ game trends that are more in line with career totals are more meaningful than a single 13 game cold stretch in late april, but you'd never know it around here.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 11:33 AM) In other news, Adam Dunn is sporting a solid OBP when you don't count his 100+ strikeouts. Do you really think this is comparable? I'm talking about a trend since a certain date, not cherry-picking ABs.

QUOTE (sircaffey @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 11:32 AM) 8 for 11 isn't good. It's roughly the same percentage Ellsbury and Crisp (#3 and #4 in the league leaders) have stolen bases at for the whole season.

Maybe over the last two weeks, but people kept framing it as if he was piss-poor for the whole season.

In other words, his OBP is 5 points shy of his career avg since April 30th. Isn't this the stat that keeps getting emphasized with respect to a leadoff hitter? If he's merely supposed to be on base, He's been doing it at the clip we should expect for the past 2+ months. 8 SB vs. 3 CS since then, too. Just sayin'.

Let's do this thing. I'm setting aside the evening for my Sox. I'll go down with the ship if I have to, but we haven't taken on too much water yet.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 12:12 AM) From listening to the Indians/Yankees game tonight, there's something about that team that's starting to make me think they can win the division. It would be completely improbable, but that entire team's starting to believe in itself again. They went from 15 games over all the way down to 4 I think, but they've been a resilient bunch all season. Missing Hafner for most of the season, Sizemore as a shade of his former self, Choo out 6-8 weeks, they're just getting it done despite all the obstacles thrown in their path. Same with the Twins. We, unfortunately, don't have that built-in health/DL excuse. Asdrubal Cabrera is just playing exceptionally well in all facets of the game, and Santana's starting to come into his own offensively. They've become a very difficult "out" because of Masterson, Carmona and Carlos Carrasco looking like he was a great get in the Cliff Lee deal. Even if Tomlin and Talbot are pitching over their heads, it's pretty impressive. And they'll get Alex White back at some point for depth. Chris Perez is having his best overall season as well. They're on a streak where they've won 6 of 9, but prior to that they were really awful for almost 2 months. I just can't put much stock in a team that started out an improbable 20-8 and then spent the last 60 games going 5 under .500. It reminds me very much of the 2003 Royals - a mediocre team that starts out with an outlier hot streak and then goes basically .500 the rest of the season and hangs around until September. I'd be very surprised to see them win more than 85 games. Keep in mind "getting it done" in this case simply means losing less games than the teams chasing you.

Part of me wants them to lose all 4 if they're going to lose 3 of them, because it would force some serious re-evaluation over the all-star break. If we win 2 games we're still in this thing. Any less, we are on the ropes, if not done. I still think the talent on this team is better than any in the AL central. Today's loss was absolutely unacceptable. All I can think of is "losing.....is a disease...."

QUOTE (greg775 @ Jul 6, 2011 -> 04:47 PM) Have we caught Cleveland yet? I don't look at the standings. At some point that might change. I've been just watching our product day in and out. Haven't seen the need to look at the standings yet. Not til I'm convinced we have the team to win any division. I was referring to the White Flag trade in response to the comment that Reinsdorf was a "do-nothing" owner.

QUOTE (klaus kinski @ Jul 6, 2011 -> 04:21 PM) There will be nothing done-it's a Reinsdorf team "Anyone who thinks this team can catch Cleveland is crazy"