Eminor3rd

Definitely deserves QO now

Thigpen out to the mound to inform Danks that he's been designated for assignment

QUOTE (SoxPride18 @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 07:57 PM) Chuck Garfien ‏@ChuckGarfien 1m Jim Hendry is scouting at White Sox game tonight. Asked him about Javier Baez. He gave all the credit to then-scouting director Tim Wilken. Hendry is a scout for the Yankees. Damn it... Whoops

Somebody, somewhere picked up John Danks for a spot start in his/her fantasy league tonight, and will never make that mistake again.

QUOTE (MU Mike @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 04:23 PM) Obviously I'm biased since I'm his older brother, but I think Scotty (Carroll) could be an effective middle reliever. I think the role suits him, and his bullpen stint this year was a good experience. By the way, love the enthusiasm for the Sox on this board. My brother may not be an all-star, or even a solid rotation guy, but he's a good dude who doesn't take himself too seriously. I think that's why some people have become fans of his. Like south-siders, he's a grinder whose persistence paid off. And maybe a little luck helped as well with so many guys going down earlier this year! I've really enjoyed my trips to the Cell this year to watch him pitch. Well, except for that Cubs game. That sucked. He felt awful after that game. Welcome to the board! I hope Scott feels proud of what he's accomplished even if he doesn't stick as a starter. He may not be Pedro Martinez, but he's still one of the best baseball players on Earth. You have to be pretty special to be useful at the ML level at all.

QUOTE (SCCWS @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 04:56 PM) I'll try and simplify it. Jones was an average reliever last year. If you take his ERA-Opp BA--WAR he was not above average. I said he had a good year w strikeouts but then allowed batters to hit .247. That is high when you consider Reed 's was .215. Regardless of the reason, look at the ERA of the top 25 AL relief pitchers and a 4+ ERA is on the high not the low side. In his rookie year his ERA was 2.39. Ok, you're saying that his RESULTS were mediocre. I can accept that. But, I would note that he PITCHED substantially better.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 02:15 PM) Yes I can complain about the bullpen because the guys he acquired to fix it, suck. Did he purposely acquire lousy relievers? No. So it is a part of Hahn's job he failed in miserably. Not to mention acquiring Paulino for gosh sakes. It's that simple. Considering one lousy trade (Reed) really affected the bullpen negatively, some of us HATE that trade. Hahn made that trade. But that's like when the girls on MY SUPER SWEET SIXTEEN complain about their brand new BMWs coming in the wrong color. You got gifted an awesome revamped offense that pushes your contention window up at least a year, and now you're complaining that the bullpen wasn't enough to be a WS contender instantly. Just drive your new yellow BMW around town proudly, greg. There are starving people in Africa (Houston).

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 02:17 PM) If Hahn used FIP like has been suggested, he replaced Reed with Belisario. He replaced a 3.17 FIP with a 3.64 FIP and paid an extra $2.5 million. I'm guessing he didn't use FIP. Dick, you're the only one trying to make the argument that it boiled down to only FIP and nothing else. Please stop. Everyone has now claimed or acknowledged that it's way more complicated than that.

QUOTE (Chicago White Sox @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 01:14 PM) Why do you think this? We signed Abreu last offseason and tried to go even bigger with Tanaka. Hahn is going to spend money if he finds the right fits. He's just not going to sign aging veterans to extremely long deals. Because I don't see any good fits in the class this year. Tanaka/Abreu, as SS2k5 said, were different because they are so young and full of "contract upside" -- their prices were theoretically limited by the risk of them not performing in a new environment.

QUOTE (SCCWS @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 02:08 PM) His ERA was over 4 compared to 2.50 his rookie season. Now some people don't like ERA for relievers. How about opp batting avg??? they hit .247 against him compared to Reed .215. Look at the top 25 relievers and most have BA against in low .200 range. Do you like War??? It dropped from 2.5 to .5. Jones is a strike out reliever who gives up hits. That is mediocre. That is last year. He was better his first year. His ERA was the ONLY thing that got worse last year, literally all of his peripherals improved substantially. He struck out more guys, walked fewer, and his HR rate stayed essentially the same (0.50 per nine to 0.58 per nine) despite his HR/FB normalizing to league average (~6% to ~9%). His groundball rate even went up. His fWAR actually doubled. The ERA increase can be almost entirely attributed to a huge swing in strand rate (85% all the way down to 62%), which, since he's a reliever and always throws from the stretch, is more likely attributable to luck/run sequencing than it would be if he was a starter. With all due respect, friend: What are you looking at?

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 10:06 AM) Frankly, what's encouraging about this hot streak is that he's hitting for power. Soft singles to right field don't breed much confidence, but hitting bullets all over the field shows some indication that maybe something is taking root. This is an important point. His streak at the beginning of the season was very clearly propped up by a ton of shank Texas-Leaguers. This one, at least from what I've seen, is much less like that.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 01:06 PM) I'm not even necessarily thinking of just one statistic, as much as I am that some statistics, but nothing else, should be the indicator of whether someone is a useful mlb player or not moving forward. It's usually a bit more complicated than that. I'd take it further and say it's ALWAYS a bit more complicated than that. I think part of the reason that we get so caught up in the stats on message boards is because we simply don't have access to the close looks and trainer-expertise that the teams do. The stats are the best nuggets of info that we laymen have, and I think you're right to suggest that we should remember that teams are making big decisions using a ton of information we'll never see.

I'm a little disappointed that WE didn't claim him... I mean I get that you don't want to send the message that you're abandoning your "plan," but it seems like the tire fire that is our bullpen should be pretty comfortable with the notion that their jobs are not safe.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 12:44 PM) With the way some folks summarily dismiss or glorify certain players at times, it can certainly seem that way. To be honest, the only people I ever see citing the argument that there's "one perfect number" to use in player evaluations are those criticising sabermetrics. They're arguing against an offensive notion in their heads that has never actually existed in reality. There are some numbers that are ideal for answering specific questions, but the broader the question being asked, the more information you need to answer it. And the more information you need to input, the less precise you can be. Most questions that fans want answered about players and teams are very broad and require a long look at a lot of different information. I don't think there is any proponent of sabermetrics anywhere in the public sphere that disagrees with this. This applies to all statistics, btw, not the newish ones. "Who is the best hitter" is answered poorly by using just RBI, just as "who is the better pitcher" is answered poorly by using just WPA.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 12:31 PM) I think he's saying you shouldn't go all in on one methodology if one can't particularly trust the results. Yeah, but literally no one has made an argument that you should. Not the posters here, not the media pundits, not the general managers.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 12:26 PM) As someone who lost his mom to cancer, I have some thoughts on cancer treatments in the US. I read the Sox shouldn't spend a lot of money on relievers because their performance varies from year to year, so why would FIP apply? As someone who lost his dad to cancer, I'm right there with you regarding the state of treatment options for those of us without much money, but I sure as hell wouldn't have advocated "not trying because the outcome is uncertain." Because we simply never had a better option. FIP applies as one indicator of potential regression candidates. In Hahn's case (build passable bullpen for rebuild, don't spend a ton of money), he'd want to identify guys who may come cheaply because of bad ERAs but may have lower FIPs, thus indicating it's more likely they'll perform to their FIP than their ERA going forward. Now, if Hahn just auto-sorted an Excel sheet on FIP and doled out contract offers to the top ten, he should be fired, but looking at FIP is a good starting point and could be a descriptive indicator of the types of guys the FO was targeting.

QUOTE (JUSTgottaBELIEVE @ Aug 4, 2014 -> 05:26 PM) I have a hard time believing that Placido Polanco has a UZR/150 of 9.9 while Adrian Beltre is at 8.4 since 2010. Does anyone really believe that Polanco has been a better defensive 3B than Beltre over the last 4 years? For these reasons, I have a hard time putting defense at the same value as offense This cracks me up. How many innings have you watched of those guys over the past few years? So the measure of a good metric is "does it confirm what I already think"?

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 12:11 PM) Who cares if it is MORE accurate if it isn't accurate? So should we stop treating people for cancer until we find a cure that works every time? No, you use all of the best info you can, Dick. Why wouldn't you? All the poster did was cite some low FIPs to try to find an indicator of what Hahn might have seen in these guys. Does finding guys with high strikeouts, low walks, and low homeruns sound like a bad starting point for building a bullpen?

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 12:57 PM) I agree with reliever ERA's. One or two really bad outings can really effect them. But that doesn't mean FIP is accurate . But it is MORE accurate. As with anything, smaller sample data begets less reliable predictions, and relievers always have small sample data. So if you're saying something along the lines of "yeah, I'm not going to look much into results at all when projecting these guys, I'd rather go with scouting," I think that's a perfectly defensible claim. But if a guy IS going to try to use results to project, the fact that the guy is using FIP instead of something else is nothing to balk at because it is, in fact, among the most reliable indicators we have available to us.

No idea why they'd trade Turner for Danks

Great write-ups as always, even if people don't agree on the order. Thanks!

Yeah he won't get to us. Too bad. Hard to believe they couldn't have traded him before the deadline if they were five days from DFA'ing him.

QUOTE (scs787 @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 10:24 AM) People always say that FIP is "A better indicator of future success", so with that said here is look at the bullpen Hahn built...Kinda. ( Closer- Nate Jones- 2.64 Matt Lindstrom- 3.15 Scott Downs- 3.09 Ronald Belisario- 3.64 Daniel Webb- 2.34 Jake Petricka- 3.72 Now I'm not sure that the whole future success thing should really be used on a year to to year basis, but this shows you just how "good" the guys he brought together were last year. Those guys duplicate those numbers this year, which I'm sure Hahn was hoping for, then the bullpen is fine. Greg, VA, and whoever else who is arguing otherwise, please, explain how Rick Hahn is supposed to know these guys were gonna fail. Their regular ERA and FIP were good, so what else can he go off of? If you can't can't come up with a reason, then why blame Hahn? QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 10:28 AM) If FIP is an indicator of future success, it appears it needs a bit of fine tuning. QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 10:37 AM) FIP is one of the most overused and overrelied upon new stats out there. There are inherent flaws in the calculation and favoritism towards certain statistics. On an aggregate level, FIP is more accurate than ERA when predicting future ERA. That is an indisputable fact. You can run calculations and find it to be true. It is not magic, it is not perfect, but that does not make it useless. It is better than ERA at predicting ERA. That's how you should use it.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 09:08 AM) I would be shocked if all of them were claimed. And if they were, I would expect you'd see some of those guys go for nothing. I think like half of them have no-trade clauses and all of them that do have publicly shown reluctance to get moved. Otherwise, yeah.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 07:19 AM) You think they'll get claimed? Those guys? Yeah. Maybe not Papelbon. No Ryan Howards in that list, though.