Eminor3rd

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 22, 2013 -> 02:25 PM) Ceiling? Not much if any. The guy hit one off of the facing of the Comcast Fundamentals Deck. Garcia has massive power potential. Not with the swing he has right now.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 22, 2013 -> 02:07 PM) Look at the title of the thread. It's bound to be controversial with one outspoken Ozzie supporter still around. Why can't he just be remembered fondly? Anybody who can lead a Chicago baseball team to a WS title is doing something right. Do you realize w/out 05 Chicago remains the laughingstock of baseball? That stuff at the end was inevitable. Managers are hired to be fired/replaced. It was bound to be ugly and the way it went down, Ozzie ended up being the bad guy with fans even though the front office was happy Miami took him off the Sox's hands. You seem to be giving him some massive chunk of the credit for the WS title. He was the manager, not one of the players. Sure, he had some part in it, but it's not like he put the team on his back and made it happen. Overrated player, overrated manager, totally childish and unprofessional person.

WOOO back end starters, yeah!

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 21, 2013 -> 05:59 PM) This is why advanced stats bother me. You can say all you want. The eye test tells me Ozzie was a good player. Not great or anything, but good. Didn't he even make the all-star team a few times?? I used both advanced stats and regular old stats to make that argument. What is more basic than batting average and homeruns? Point to any number at all to show he was a good player. I'm trying to find something and I'm not finding anything. Eye test? What looked good about that batting line? He was a really good defender in the 80's, sure. If your definition of a good player is "was good at defense for one third of his career and absolutely horrible at every other aspect of the game the entire time" then I really don't know why you hate guys like Alex Rios and Adam Dunn. Did he make an all-star team? Probably, but so did Cesar Izturis. In a year when he hit .257/.302/.322, lol. That means nothing.

Hahahaha

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 21, 2013 -> 04:02 PM) He was a good player and good ss. He probably should have taken more walks, but aside from that he was damn good. He was a glove-only player that got way more playing time than he deserved. Doesn't matter how you slice it, he was a poor baserunner and a liability at the plate. You can attack it sabermetrically or non-sabermetrically. Career .264/.287/.338 hitter with 28 homers over 15 years. Successful stolen base rate of just 61%, -11.4 career runs on the bases. Two of 15 seasons where he worked out to be an above-average regular by WAR, accumulating just 13.1 over his career -- ten of those wins coming from defense alone, nearly all of that during his first five seasons. In fact, by UZR, he was an elite defender from 1985 - 1990, slightly above average from 1991 - 1994, and a flat out defensive liability from 1995 - 2000. I'm just not seeing it. He was a bad hitter and bad baserunner who lost most of his range after the first third of his career. I'm open to arguments the other way, I just can't imagine what they'd be.

QUOTE (ron883 @ Aug 21, 2013 -> 01:39 PM) The score was recently talking about some celebrity softball tournament going on, and they mentioned ozzie was playing in it. my first thought was "i dont want this piece of crap returning to chicago." The dude is completely unprofessional, packed it up early with the sox, and has a complete jackass of a son. everything about this guy leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This old article pretty much sums up a lot of my feelings. http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/10/24/baf...aseballs-ditka/ how do you think he will be remembered? I hope that that people will dislike him for the piece of crap that he is due to the new age of media. The dude is completely ungrateful to the sox, and wasn't a major piece in the world series IMO. Will he become a chicago legend like ditka, or will people remember him for how awful he was in the later years? I'll remember him as a jerk. He was an overrated player, too. It's great that he was part of the WS, but the way his career ended was downright unprofessional. He got paid way too much money to act like a child

Semien homers off some Yankees jerk: http://www.milb.com/multimedia/vpp.jsp?content_id=29774691 Something about that follow through reminds me of Gordon Beckham.

I'm excited about him too, but let's not make him this into the next Gordon Beckham thread quite yet The biggest reason to be hopeful, to me, isn't that slash line (anyone can get hot for ten games), but the fact that he's been selective. He hasn't started walking yet, but if he keeps his O-Swing around league average like he has, the walks will come. And if they don't, it's fine because if he's only swinging at good pitches, he's going to be finding plenty of hits anyway.

QUOTE (TaylorStSox @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 06:00 PM) This always cracks me up with outfielders. We can't see the play develop on TV so fans missed the Aaron Rowands of the world diving because they broke in on a ball that was crushed or vice versa. It shouldn't happen as much with infielders though. The legend of Jim Edmonds

QUOTE (chw42 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 04:51 PM) Well in the eyes of pretty much all fans... Errors during crucial situations = this guy sucks in the field Great plays in not as crucial situations = this guy has range, but still sucks in the field. To the eyes of most fans: He made a diving play, he has great range.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 04:16 PM) Frankly, I'm just sick of losing and being one of the worst teams in baseball and IMO Lexi's errors have contributed to that greatly. He's not the only guy obviously whose weaknesses have turned the Sox into a joke of a team, though. Hope he excels next season. He's been a +5 defender this year. He hasn't made many more errors than usual. Even those he's having a rough year, he's still been an above average defender overall. EDIT: He's got 20 errors, his totals the last four years were 12, 16, 20, 20. Like wite said, it's more, but it's not egregiously more.

QUOTE (farmteam @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 03:36 PM) Because I think there's something to be said for having TWTW, at least on a small scale It's a different way of saying some guys pitch better under pressure. Except in this instance, the pressure is maintaining a lead. I think the TWTW is real, I just don't think that the Wins statistic quantifies it.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 03:43 PM) None of the stats I have seen give me what I want to see. That's the whole point. Take a pitcher, put him into different situations, and see how successful he is when things that aren't his fault are included. Take a guy like Javy Vazquez. Statistics loved the guy, but he always seemed to find a way to lose a game. A guy like Mark Buerhle who was statistically inferior in a lot of ways, usually found a way to win even if something bad happened behind him. I'd like to see a way to statistically quantify how big of a winner a guy is versus how big of a winner he should be for his stuff. Can he over come errors? Can he over come bad offense? Even though stats might say guys are similar, but their results might not be. Did you read the RA9 wins articles? I think comparing Ra9 wins to fWAR might be exactly that.

QUOTE (farmteam @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 03:16 PM) Would I rather have the guy who consistently 2ER in 7IP instead of the guy with 4ER in 6IP? Well duh. But if the latter guy, over the course of a few seasons, consistently gets wins throwing like that, I'm going to give him a bit of credit for at the end of the day getting the W. This doesn't make sense to me. You've successfully isolated how much of the effort can be attributed to the pitcher, why wouldn't you just judge him on that? Why would you add or subtract credit for how well his teammates played?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 02:57 PM) You are missing my point where. I want an expected win loss stat that actually does realize variables unrelated to pitching performance to see exactly how clutch a pitcher is. The idea is that if you took two pitchers with theoretically identical stats, defensive support, and offensive support over the course of a season, there would probably be a guy that won more often than the other one did, when in theory their win totals should be identical. It would actually give you a measuring stick for the "clutch" ideal. Some pitchers pitch over errors, while others go to s*** on the drop of a dime. Some pitchers pitch over poor run support while others seem to lose by one run no matter what their offense puts up. But you can just look at how pitchers perform with runners on or in high leverage situations. Why create a proxy for something when you can just look at the actual numbers? I'm still not sure I get what you want. Is it RA9-WAR? That's a relatively new FanGraphs stat where it calculates WAR based on ERA instead of FIP: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/introducing...ndent-pitching/

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 02:08 PM) Something that equates to where Kershaw should be. The idea being that if you factor in all of Kershaw's numbers, and then factor anything that isn't the pitchers fault (If he played behind really good offensive support, he should have more wins, if he played with a really bad defense behind him, he should have less wins). Once you combine all of those numbers you get a number that given his numbers, and what the team has done behind him, Kershaw should have say 15 wins (pulling a number of out air for arguments sake). In reality he has 12, so he has underperformed where he should be by 3 wins. Then you could also chart the guys who are overperforming their expected win totals for "clutchness" and guys who are underperforming their expected win totals for "chokers". But you can basically do this with FIP and ERA, and then you don't have to deal with run support at all. In both scenarios, you'd need to look further to find out how much of the disparity can be attributed to BABIP, good/bad defense, "choking," competition level, etc. If you turn it into expected w/L, you're just adding more noise to it by including more variables unrelated to pitching performance.

QUOTE (TaylorStSox @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 12:41 PM) Keeping Alexei in the 2 hole cost the team some runs. Now that he's moved out of it, his approach is better. Do you have evidence of this?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 12:16 PM) None of that actually translates to some sort of actual win total that can be compared to what a pitcher actually has. As chw said, fWAR is a FIP based metric, and is thus essentially this. You'd have to add more "wins" based on what a replacement level pitcher would actually produce if you wanted to compare it directly to an actual W-L record. I'm guessing that no one has done this yet because no one thinks it's particularly useful to think about W-L records, though I could be wrong. WAR by itself serves the purpose of giving you a number to compare pitchers, but it removes the context of the performance of the rest of the team that exists in W-L.

QUOTE (Harry Chappas @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 12:50 PM) Wouldn't a team of all 0 WAR players hypothetically go 81-81. Everyone is completely average? A WAR of 0 means you are average not that you suck. The Median for this stat, not the average is 0. Thus if every player had a WAR of 0, they would be average in every aspect of the game. Throw a player of 10 WAR on this team and now they are at 86 wins. This was the early 2000's Red Sox with Pedro Martinez. No, this is a common misconception. 0 WAR is replacement level, not average. An average player usually comes in around 2 WAR EDIT: Didn't see this was already said.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 10:58 AM) IMO someone is getting traded for a real hitter. Whether that is Danks, Santiago, Quintana... who knows. This seems to be consensus around here, and I'd like to see it happen. If I had my choice, I'd move Santiago and try to extend Quintana.

QUOTE (almagest @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 11:53 AM) For all of the hate against him, I feel like Ventura has done a good job at constructing the lineup. Unfortunately, he doesn't have much to work with. I agree, especially last year. This year, understandably, it's been more like "just move the hottest hands up toward the front."

QUOTE (Jerksticks @ Aug 19, 2013 -> 11:40 PM) Interesting point: The FO asked Dunn to change his approach going into this year despite his "productive" 2012. Even in his comeback year management insisted he change his approach. So many of you cling to his 41 HR 100 RBI as production, like he wasn't a problem last year. Management disagrees with you...why is that? I think I know. 110 hits. That's right. 110 hits all year out of the 3-hole. That's a minimum of 52 games without a hit. Lucky for everybody I did the math. He actually went hitless in 69 games last year. 69 if I added right. He started 145 games in the #3 spot and got a hit in barely half of them. Phantom production at its finest IMO. Sure you can't discount the 41 HRs just like you can't discount the 430 PA that ended in s***. Except that all research on batting order over the last five year has concluded that high contact rates out of the 3-hole have been extremely overrated historically, and that the 2, 4, and 5 spots actually benefit much more from the "traditional" 3 hole profile, which just happens to be ENTIRELY consistent with RV's use of the 2 spot, having put Kevin Youkilis there last year and having a rotating cast of the hottest contact hitters (Gillaspie, Beckham, Ramirez) in the 2 spot all of this year. Your speculation about management's attitude toward Dunn is just that -- speculation. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. There's just as much "evidence" to go against it.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 10:56 AM) It would be interesting to see if someone could come up with a way to isolate factors such as defense and run support while factoring in their own ERA and other pitcher numbers, to get some sort of an expected win total to see which pitchers "out-perform" their expected win totals. As they've said above, this is essentially what FIP (Fielding Independent ERA) is. FIP is a stat scaled to ERA that ONLY factors in things that a pitcher controls completely, which are Ks, BBs, and HRs. The idea is that the rest of what factors into ERA have at least something to do with defense. And so one way that people commonly identify pitchers that are candidates to improve or get worse is by looking for large discrepancies between FIP and ERA. If a guy's FIP is lower than his ERA, he has been getting bad results from some combination of defense and batted ball placement luck, and he'll likely see better results if he continues doing what hes's doing, and vice versa. This works out well most of the time, but there are some notable exceptions, typically whenever pitchers show abnormal consistency in homerun rates, either in an ability to suppress them or to give them up. Matt Cain is sort of the posterchild for a guy that always had a better ERA than FIP suggested he should. Zack Greinke is a guy who always had a worse ERA than his FIP suggested.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 08:06 AM) I never said that other stats aren't useful or should be ignored. I'm not sure where you got that. Of course they are useful. I said they are an important piece and in my view is where you start for starting pitcher. If I'mgoing to spend money on a freeagent. I want a pitcher who knows how to use his stuff not a guy who has stuff. So the underlying stats are important however I start with wins. Take Javier Vasquez vs. Mark Buerhle. One has better "stuff" the other knows how to use it. Most of vasquez stats are better. However, we've seen both pitch and who would you rather have. Edit: Looking back I did see what I said. It didn't come out the way I meant it. The only stat that matters was in reference to a season or career and as a primary variable with some hyberbole. I'm sorry, I thought you were talking about team wins. QUOTE (ptatc @ Aug 20, 2013 -> 07:52 AM) Yes. Because he has the most control over it. Does he have it all, no. However, he is the most significant variable in it. It obviously doesn't tell everything and can't be looked at only for individual games but needs to be over a season and multiple seasons. The advent of specialzed relievers has made it less important as the starter pitches less. I understand your argument that some pitchers are better than others despite having worse "stuff," but I don't agree that the Wins statistic is a way to root that out. Run scoring is half a win, run prevention is half a win. When you break down run prevention, it's partially pitching and it's partially defense. Even if you give 80% of the credit for run prevention to a pitcher, the pitcher still has LESS THAN HALF of the control over a win. He may be wield more personal responsibility than any other individual on the field, but it's not even half. He's never truly "in control." He can literally throw a no-hitter and still lose. All you have to do is look at the pitching leaderboards for ANY given year to see why this doesn't add up -- and it never adds up. This year, Chris Tillman has more wins than Clayton Kershaw, Yu Darvish, and Felix Hernandez. Bronson Arroyo has more wins than CC Sabathia, Cliff Lee, Zack Greinke, and Doug Fister. Freaking Joe Saunders has more wins than Matt Harvey! Matt Harvey is possibly the Cy Young! You might say, "well, that's why we look at other numbers too. We know there are flaws to Wins." Well, why look at it at all? What does this stat tell you? At best, it's a proxy for run support, but it's not even useful for that, because you can just look at run support! It's not that these arguments that Hawk/HR/etc. make that there's an element of rising to an occasion and being clutch that doesn't show up in the numbers is BS -- that element DOES exist. It's not BS and it DOESN'T show up in the numbers, despite a lot of effort that's been put into nailing it down. The Win stat is not a way to root that out. It's a number just like the others, except it's among the worst, because it tells us nothing that other numbers don't tell us more accurately.