Eminor3rd

I think Lind is a bit of a defensively liability as well, where LaRoche was at least considered a good defender in his prime, even if he's lost a step since.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 11, 2015 -> 12:58 PM) What would "coming on board" entail. The White Sox used more shifts than most last year. They bunt fewer times than most. Hasn't Cooper been one to preach lowering pitch counts by getting guys early in the count even though he isn't a pitch count guy? I think you're illustrating the key point here, which is that this isn't a matter of a team choosing GOING SABR or STAYING OLD SCHOOL. The reality is that sabermetric research has already infiltrated the game, in that it affects every team in some way. There are certainly teams that rely more on it than others, but the best concepts have risen to the top. And this was never really about the stats themselves, but rather about the ideas that the math is uncovering. This stuff has been adopted; it has not replaced anything. Billy Beane didn't fire all his scouts. This was never about rigidly employing a mutually exclusive approach, it was just about looking to the fringes to find new ideas to integrate into the system. The "us vs. them" civil war that has ensued in the public sphere can be attributed ENTIRELY to the media, the center of which was Michael Lewis' "based on a true story" Moneyball effort.

Agreed. I mean, depending upon the extent of his health issues. Hard for us to have an informed opinion on that. Might be safe to assume that the reason he hasn't signed yet is because the teams see something really ugly.

QUOTE (WBWSF @ Feb 11, 2015 -> 09:55 AM) Taking Castro over Ramirez at short equals taking Mark Grace over Frank Thomas. Castro can't carry Ramirez jockstrap defensively. Lol no it's not. It's a completely defensible choice. Castro is a much better hitter and is way younger/less likely to fall off a cliff this year. The choice is basically a wash.

Welp. Time for another rebuild.

This is WELL done

QUOTE (Mike F. @ Feb 9, 2015 -> 07:58 PM) I just heard on MLB Network that the Sox could possibly be interested in Francisco "K Rod" Rodriguez. Would you guys be ok with him on a 2 year/$20 million deal? That gives Robertson an elite set-up guy ahead of him, and Petricka/Putnam/Duke would just have the cover the 7th inning. What do you guys think? I'll pass. Find me a reclamation/depth starter for a 25-50% of that.

QUOTE (lasttriptotulsa @ Feb 9, 2015 -> 01:10 PM) In 879 opportunities to ground into a double play in his career, Alexei Ramirez has done so 113 times (12.9% of the time) In 106 opportunities to ground into a double play in his career, Avisail Garcia has done so 14 times (13.2% of the time) Obviously that is a fairly small sample size for Avisail Garcia, but there really isn't much difference between the two. With his power potential, I would rather see Avisail hit in the 5 spot and get the extra 30-40 plate appearances that are going to come with it versus the 7 spot. If Alexei is a better run producer this year that Avisail, I don't think we are going very far. I agree he should be 7th, but that's because I don't think he's going to be very good. I also agree, though, that if he ISN'T very good, we're going to have a hard time succeeding. I wouldn't worry about batted ball type though, if he's hitting at all, everything will be fine.

QUOTE (MDWhiteSoxFan @ Feb 8, 2015 -> 07:30 PM) This... what were his advanced statistics all the years he was in Pittsburgh? We're they saying he was incredibly unlucky for multiple years? I am actually curious and have no idea how to look up the advanced stats. The transformation for Bautista, from what I understand, is solely due to a change in approach and swing mechanics. Basically, he was taught to be a complete/opposite-field type hitter his whole career, but when he failed and got to Toronto, they just told him to let it rip every time, figuring he didn't have much to lose at that point. Turned out he was a natural slugger trying to be something he never was. I think David Ortiz has a similar story. Neither of them have anything to do with advanced/traditional stats at all. I don't think there exists any type of model that can predict shifts in performance based on radical changes to approach/arsenal.

All the data from UZR/DRS, to my knowledge, ARE collected by humans watching the games. The values are calculated by some sort of grid system that, combined with the human's judgement of how the type of ball it was (liner, fly, etc.) determines the difficulty of the play essentially by how often the play is made. The run values that are then assigned are based on linear weights derived from the difference in run probability from the base/out state that now exists versus what existed before. The new MLBAM stuff everyone keeps talking about IS collected by computers/cameras. That's why it's so exciting -- it's going to give us completely objective/factual data on reaction time, route efficiency, acceleration, etc. for the first time ever.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 8, 2015 -> 03:23 PM) Why wouldn't that mean the quality of hitter is better? 7000 more whiffs in 2014 than 2005. That is 35 2014 Chris Sales. The quality of hitter IS better. There's no reason to believe that both hitters and pitchers would improve in a linear fashion at the same pace, though, and it's not surprising that it looks like we're approaching the point of velocity where humans just can't really manage it well. There are other factors, too. Pitch FX shows that there's a much wider strikezone than there was 15 years ago, for example, and it's certainly possible that part of the talent imbalance is simply coincidental and temporary. But there's no question that today's athletes, on the average, are better than they used to be.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Feb 8, 2015 -> 02:17 AM) Why are we to believe that pitchers have significantly improved and are actually better in this generation? They haven't. They aren't. It's simply perception. Back in the 90's, the hitters seemed better because of their glaring statistical numbers. Now that has shifted to the favor of the pitchers, but it will swing back again. It always does. Whether it's changes to the baseball, the calling of the strike zone, steroids, Tommy John recoveries...all these things will return to mean, just as the National League was the dominant style from the late 50's to the 70's and then shifted back to the American League (along with the DH change) until returning to balance again in the last 5-10 years. Are we to believe that parents all across America are suddenly training their children to be left-handed pitchers instead of catchers or 3B? It's simple -- there are more players playing baseball across the world than ever before. The fields of training and medicine are more advanced than ever before. The game has evolved in a such a way that specialization in pitching is encouraged, thus increasing the pool of players that can be useful even further.

QUOTE (Reddy @ Feb 8, 2015 -> 12:12 AM) um... yes? emphatically yes? Lol pretty much.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Feb 8, 2015 -> 12:05 AM) How many pitchers from this current generation are going to make the Hall of Fame or even make it to 200 wins? There might be more focus on pitching than ever before...but it's obviously going to shift back to hitters at some point, because casual fans clearly prefer offense to defense. If that wasn't the case. soccer/football would be much more popular in the US than it is. http://bleacherreport.com/articles/226964-...-the-90s/page/8 Take the "Top 30 pitchers from the 90's" and adjust their statistics to the new norm of the last few seasons for offense. Yet another factor is the fascination with radar gun readings, many of which have been cranked up 2-3 MPH higher than reality in order to get fans more excited about numbers in the 100's. Are we to believe pitchers magically are throwing much harder in the last five years than at any time in history, after basically having the notion that guys in the 50's and 60's like Sudden Sam McDowell, Ryne Duren or Nolan Ryan threw that much harder than anyone in modern baseball? This is one of the strangest posts I've ever read.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 7, 2015 -> 11:12 AM) DP arguments about strikeouts are beyond lame. If you hit the ball there are no strike em out, throw em outs either. Strikeouts are fine if you are Mike Trout. They are not fine when you fan 140 times and have an OPS under .700, which there were several in 2014, including Flowers. I think there were 36 players that fanned over 100 times and had an OPS under .700. If you cannot hit, at least move runners around some other way. No one freaks out at run producers fanning. Its the ither guys. 100 strikeouts in a season used to be embarrassing, now 4 guys a team on average reach that level and far beyond. Strikeouts are way up, runs are down. Hit the ball.Some of those will become hits. Some will become errors. Some will be iuts that don't make a difference. Some will become walks as you foul off a tough pitch or 2. Some will be double plays but not nearly enough to offset the good that can happen if you just hit the ball. You're once again missing the forest for the trees because you're focusing on one tangential point from my post. No matter what you want to think, you cannot tell me if a guy is good or not based on how many times he strikes out. Those strikeouts are a factor, but you can be a good player despite them. That's the whole point I'm making.

QUOTE (JUSTgottaBELIEVE @ Feb 6, 2015 -> 11:03 PM) Using Mike Trout as the baseline for any argument is silly. He's the exception, not the rule. How many guys can strike out near his rate while still hitting near or over .300 with an OBP of around .400? I'm not going to spend time looking it up but my guess is you'd be hard pressed to find many. In defense of the previous poster, I DO believe the high strikeout rates of a few of the Cubs' prospects is a real concern. I think far too many posters on this forum too quickly discount this issue. Baez is going to have an awfully hard time being a productive offensive player if he's striking out 35%+ of the time even if he cranks out 30 HR. Same goes for Bryant. The question is if Bryant strikes out at an incredibly high rate is he more likely to put up numbers closer to Mike Trout or White Sox Adam Dunn? My guess is he would end up closer to the latter which would obviously be a huge disappointment for those expecting all star worthy numbers from him over the next few years. You're talking about something completely different with your example. Mike Trout is irrelevant. I'll try to boil it down further: 1. Strikeouts do contribute to bad offense. 2. Bad offense is bad offense regardless of strikeouts. Good offense is good offense, regardless of strikeouts. 3. You can say "Kris Bryant won't be good because he'll strikeout too much." You cannot say "Kris Bryant cannot be good if strikes out a bunch."

QUOTE (Douglas Rome @ Feb 7, 2015 -> 10:38 AM) baseball has been very very good to Diane V. how much has he made in the last 4 or 5 years? More than enough to go back to Havana and sit on his front porch and eat tacos and get big and fat and live like a king. thanks, douglas I don't think that's how defection works...

QUOTE (JUSTgottaBELIEVE @ Feb 6, 2015 -> 09:51 PM) I don't think it is as simple as less strikeouts equals more double plays. Or vice versa, that more strikeouts means less double plays. It depends on the type of contact, runner distribution, etc. Guys like Matt Kemp and Ian Desmond struck out a lot last year but were also near the top in GIDP. On top of that I would bet that on average the guys that make consistent contact that are near the leaders in GIDP are also reaching base on error more than the big power guys that strike out a lot. How does that factor into advanced metrics? ROE is counted as an out towards BA, OBP, OPS, etc. I know the hardcore sabermetricians don't want to hear this but common sense tells you that if all else is fairly equal the guy that puts the play more often than the other guy will be more valuable to an offense. I don't think any compilation of advanced statistics can argue this point because there are too many variables to precisely quantify it. At that point when the stats cannot tell the whole story, it doesn't hurt to use a little common sense IMO. All of that is factored into linear weights averages. All of the things you mentioned are salient points, but they can all also be counted and their impacts averaged. Further, they've run year-to-year correlations to find out which factors are consistent and which act as randomness, allowing them to assign credit to players with repeatable skills and treat players who have exhibited non-repeatable "skills" as regression candidates, both positive and negative. Anyone who doesn't understand how linear weights work in baseball statistics should refer to Tom Tango's research from the early part of the 21st century -- it forms the foundation for how sabermetrics treats offense (at the plate, not the basepaths), and I've never seen even the most ardent traditionalists even try to put together a coherent argument against it. There's a ton of stuff in sabermetrics that is shaky, but this is not one of those things. And I think if you look into it, you'll agree. It makes a ton of sense. Regarding the bolded: You're right, but no one is arguing otherwise. The whole point though is that all else ISN'T equal in the cases we're referring to. As wite and I both said: there's no doubt that strikeouts contribute negatively toward offensive output (although it's less negatively than common sense suggests because of double plays), but strikeouts are only a component of offensive output, and we can just look at offensive output as a whole. People get too caught up in one component of hitting at a time as if we can't just look at how many runs a guy produces. And you can do that with both traditional and advanced stats. I hate the RBI stat, but even if you love it, you can look at RBI and see that Mike Trout drives in a whole bunch of runs DESPITE the fact that he strikes out. The strikeouts affect that number, but why wouldn't you just judge him based on the runs he produces? The K's are baked in there. If a guy is 20% above average at the plate but strikes out a bunch, he;s still 20% above average at the plate.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Feb 6, 2015 -> 05:51 PM) Eminor3 was talking about on field antics in comparison to Sale, or at least I thought, and Balta switched over to media relations. Regardless, I don't think him playing with fire was a detriment. Maybe Peavy showed up one of his defenders a few different times but it's not that big of an expense considering the energy he brought on a regular basis. In the media, Sale and Peavy are entirely different. Based on what we've seen so far, Sale shows great composure with the media. When I said "like Balta said," I was referring to just the phrase where he said that it was all fine when he was pitching well, not the rest of his post. Sorry for being confusing. Also, I didn't mind Peavy's intensity much at all when he was here, but I think it's gotten more out of control in the starts I've watched form him the past two years with BOS and SFG.

QUOTE (Stev-o @ Feb 6, 2015 -> 04:45 PM) I'm not "big" on the new metrics, but, isn't there something about "productive" vs "non-productive" outs? Obviously, you're better off having a guy sacrifice himself to get a batter into scoring position than him striking out. IMO, all outs are not the same. Yes, but runner distribution isn't predictive. So basically you can look back at a season or game and find out which hits or outs were the "biggest" and most important, but if you're talking about building a roster for the coming season, there's no reliable way to ensure that contact will come at the right times, so you have to assume that it will be the average number of times, which is baked into the linear weights values for all of the events, which comes out in total production, which brings us back to square one. So if two guys are 100 wRC+ guys, but one strikes out more, they're still equally valuable. You can look at stats like WPA and Clutch score to see which guy had the bigger impact, but the difference between those leverage related value and the context-neutral linear weights stats does not carry over from year to year. Also, it's beside the point, but a lot of the extra benefit (on average) received from contact outs versus strikeouts is negated by double plays. So the difference ends up being smaller than it intuitively seems.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Feb 6, 2015 -> 02:25 PM) I don't know if that ever was a detriment to Peavy. Obviously Peavy was more expressive on a regular basis but I don't know how you'd be able to quantify any effect that had. Sale on the other hand had his moments where he'd blow up but they were just more memorable than Peavy's day-to-day antics. I remember Sale going ape on the water cooler against the Rangers in August 2013, I remember him freaking out in Detroit last year and then just throwing big fists pumps after big outs. Either way, I don't understand your parallel here or how Peavy's attitude became in issue. Seems like more a comparison of convenience than anything. I am biased because I played with a lot fire and like watching animated guys. Like Balta said, it was fine when he was good, but eventually, as he became more and more of a cartoon haracter, it started to make him pitch hurt leading to disastrous results and went so far as to even give up a huge pennant race homerun after telling the batter he was going to throw a fastball. If you watch him now, you can hear him screaming more clearly than ever, and then you look at his numbers and realize he's just declining more and more.

QUOTE (shipps @ Feb 6, 2015 -> 01:21 PM) I am curious to see if Rodon is a hardass like Sale. If he has the same type of edgy competitiveness to him that will be pretty awesome to see the two feed off of one another. QUOTE (raBBit @ Feb 6, 2015 -> 02:15 PM) I think he might be even more of a visual competitor than Sale. Where Sale gets pumped up and mad at himself for the most part, Rodon does that and has had incidents where he'd freak out if NC State's manager. Brett Austin has also told stories of Rodon growling on the mound. Sometimes I fear Sale will develop into Jake Peavy, to the point where his physical loss of control actually becomes a detriment.

Ronon!

I think he's gonna hit fewer homers. His sophomore campaign will be a challenge as pitcher's have a year of data on him, but I think he'll adjust and have a very good season. It just won't be quite as good as last year. I say 27 homers, 140 wRC+ or so if he stays healthy.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Feb 6, 2015 -> 11:20 AM) The 2015 Cubs are going to be an interesting case study regarding this because they are going to strike out a lot and I don't think there's any question of it. Ultimately though, strikeouts are only a portion of offensive output, and offensive output is only half of winning games. Logistically speaking, strikeouts will have an effect, but if the offense scores a lot of runs and the pitching staff limits opposing teams, strikeouts won't matter. This is the critical point. It's the exact same thing as the "Dayan Viciedo hits homers though" argument. No one is saying that strikeouts "don't matter," it's that they don't get scored in games. They are a significant factor in the effectiveness of someone's offense, but if a guy is effective offensively DESPITE strikeouts, then they don't mean squat to who wins the game. Just like Viciedo -- homers ARE important because they help make a guy a good offensive contributor, but if he isn't a good contributor DESPITE the homeruns, he's still a negative at the plate. So you don't say "team that strikeout don't win much," you say "teams with bad offenses don't win much," and possibly add that strikeouts could contribute to that bad offense. But you have to accept, also, that they may strikeout a ton but still have a good offense.