Eminor3rd

Yermin is your third-string DH homie

No team can “afford” it’s third-string catcher getting too many ABs.

Yeah, remember that 500-foot bomb Mazara hit in 2019? Luis Robert is immensely talented and has enormous upside, but he's got a LOT to work on to become consistent, so his performance for 2021 is high risk.

Right -- particularly in the case of pitching, there's a well-established model for how to juggle depth. The White Sox seem to not understand that it exists or are unwilling to try it. If one or two of our guys is hurt or ineffective and Bernardo Flores is suddenly pitching meaningful games, it's a completely unforced error.

I'm not going to make the argument that 7 AL teams should have higher median outcomes than the White Sox, but I don't think it's an implausible argument to make, and I certainly don't think it's so "off" that it's proof that a system is garbage like some are arguing. Hendriks is absolutely better than Colome, and fWAR supports this. However, fWAR is a DIPS-based statistic, and what that is measuring is how much of the "work" of the outs that are occurring can be directly attributed to the pitcher versus the defense/circumstance. Hendriks is better, essentially, because he allows much less contact and thus eliminates the factor of defense, resulting in fewer baserunners. However, that does not mean that his performance is guaranteed to produce better results, simply that it is more likely to produce better results. And what we saw in 2020 with Colome was nearly perfect results, even if he didn't actually pitch as well as Hendriks is likely to, and even if he relied on good defense and batted-ball luck to do so. So, if the question is "Is the 2021 White Sox closer role likely to allow fewer runs than it did in 2020?", the answer is almost certainly no. I agree that Hendriks could be deployed in a multi-inning role with some regularity, which would improve his gross production, but I'm very skeptical that the White Sox will do that. And even if they did, it would have to be a LOT more in order to make up ground toward a season of 0.81 ERA. In this instance, we are comparing a projection to what actually happened last year. Even if what actually happened last year was unlikely, it's still our baseline if we're trying to find out if the team got better. Yes, Lynn is exactly what they needed. But they GAVE UP something they also needed in order to get it. In the process of filling that glaring hole, they reopened the SAME hole. The White Sox problem is that they did not have ENOUGH pitching, so they needed to acquire pitching by using a resource OTHER than pitching. In fact, it's even worse than that, because since Lynn makes so much more money than Dunning they actually paid BOTH in current pitching talent and in money to make the upgrade. If you have some oranges but you need many more oranges, you should buy oranges with money or trade for oranges with something else. You should not trade oranges you already have, and you CERTAINLY should not trade both oranges and money. You may still end up with more oranges than you started with, but you have drastically reduced your total yield in oranges. This behavior isn't something we normally have to unpack as fans because it makes so little sense that it hardly ever happens in real life. "But Lance Lynn is better than Dane Dunning." Yes, but now you only improved your rotation by the DIFFERENCE between them. FanGraphs seems to be down right now but I think Lynn projects as about a 3.5 fWAR pitcher and Dunning projects at about a 2 - 2.5 fWAR pitcher (though to arrive there with ZiPS you have to adjust his IP, which is projected as like 70 innings or something). Most Sox fans see adding Lynn as adding 3.5 wins, but really it's adding 1 - 1.5 because the WHite Sox decided to SUBTRACT Dunning's 2 - 2.5 directly in the process. They spent $8m to add a win, and they still need just as many pitchers as they did before the move. "But maybe they could ONLY have gotten Lynn by including Dunning." Then get a different pitcher. There will SO MANY other options. How many 2 win pitchers signed for $8-12m this offseason? How many other, better pitchers were traded for prospects instead of MLB talent? If the guy at the fruit stand will only accept oranges in the deal, he's an idiot and you should go to a different store. I would amend this to say some areas of LIKELY regression. And it is much easier for a player who just played over his head to return to his norms than for a young player to learn new things to get closer to his promise. In truth, each instance of potential regression and upside is a unique event with its own probability. We, as humans, are particularly ill-suited to parse and sum them objectively to arrive at a net result. Which is why we use mathematical models, like... you know, PECOTA. That's certainly a plausible claim, but I don't know how you could possibly have evidence for it at this point, so I don't think it qualifies as a very good conclusion. Certainly not one that could survive scrutiny based on the information we have today. Yeah I mean, that's a fine opinion to hold, but we all need to understand that's as far as it goes. It's a hope we share. It's completely possible, but here's the kicker -- even if the every player on the team has a career year and the Sox win it all, it does NOT say anything about PECOTA. All that would mean is that a whole bunch of unlikely things occurred at once. PECOTA is not a genie claiming the Sox will end up the 7th best team in the AL. It's giving you its MEAN outcome out of tens of thousands of trials. Real life is ONE trial, and all kinds of things can happen. What it illustrates for us is that for the Sox to win, they need to achieve higher percentile outcomes. In other words, they nearly all of that upside to manifest. And this is, honestly, exactly where they were last year -- and it's pretty much status quo for this front office.

Calling him a "league-average hitter" misses the context entirely. He started out unstoppable, then became abysmal. He was swinging at absolutely everything the whole time. This suggests that league adjusted to him, and he needs to adjust back. Given that he's never had to do that, it's very much in question how quickly (if at all) he can accomplish it. His performance this year is very risky.

Why? If you factor in regression from the obvious candidates like Keuchel and Abreu, the extreme risk of Robert, and the fact that no projection system knows how to factor COVID-19 into the equation for Moncada, you need pretty major improvement from Jimenez/Madrigal/Cease to break even. Meanwhile, how much better did the team get over the offseason? They traded a 2.5 win pitcher for a 3.5 win pitcher, and added an elite closer to replace an unbelievable 0.81 ERA from Colome. Even though Hendriks is clearly better than Colome, do you think you're going to get a 0.81 ERA out of him? I've been saying it, but I'll say it again -- the front office essentially treaded water with this offseason if you factor in the losses. The team could win it all, but it's going to take additional upside from the young stars and near perfect health.

Lol, that is NOT how math works.

I see, yes, this makes sense on a PECOTA season-style projection, which is essentially an over-under. I don't think this applies to World Series odds, though.

In what way? They don't even have the same goals. Do you have a citation?

World Series contenders have more than three established starting pitchers. I'm sorry, but you're just wrong. Legitimate contenders have been investing in depth for like TEN YEARS now. The White Sox go into every "contending season" needing every player to perform to his full potential in order to succeed. EVERYONE in the industry, including the White Sox, know that this is a dumb plan. Fanbases get excited about a rebuild coming together because it produces a situation where three quarters of your team is filled with pre-arb players, so even a small-mid market team is capable of spending to fill up the last quarter. Where most teams see this state as an OPPORTUNITY to spend money to make an impact, the White Sox see this state as an excuse NOT to spend money. And the "argument" sounds exactly like your post. "Aw come on, don't focus on what we DON'T have, focus on what we DO have! Look at these several exciting players, isn't that good enough?!" That's not how teams operate when they want to win championships, it's how they operate when they want to maintain the relevance required to keep making money. It's not thinking like a winner, it's thinking like a fucking hedge fund manager. The truth is, of course, that money FOLLOWS excellence in sports. There are a ton of ways to make money in this country -- people like Steinbrenner do it with an unwavering commitment to dominate his field, people like Jerry Reinsdorf should stick to selling real estate.

Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections.

And decisions won't be made until the last possible minute.

So Collins is gonna have to prove he can ACTUALLY catch. This is a great depth/fallback move.

You cannot at all expect pre-covid benchmarks to apply to the mid-covid off-season.

Again, Bauer explicitly said this is how he wanted to do it. Right or wrong, he wanted his free agency to be a part of the entertainment process. Why would it be bad for an agent to reflect the desires and goals of her client?

It's how Bauer has wanted this whole saga to go the whole time. She's just reflecting it.

Former all day for me. Hendriks is the best player in the group but he upgrades at the least-needed point. Even better, the 3 million could have still gotten you Rodon on top.

It never made sense anyway.

Agreed. That Steve Stone tweet was flat-out irresponsible, IMO.

The fastballs were sitting 145 - 147kph, but yeah, a bunch of cutter-looking things in the mid 130's. And more junk than heaters overall.

EDIT: for reference, 145kph = ~90mph

Finding one example where things worked amidst a sea of common examples is a really flimsy argument. What if one of those three gets hurt during the six-month-long season that precedes the playoffs? Did someone else prove you only need TWO good pitchers? One? Yes, it CAN work, but there are more ways in which it DOESN'T. Teams who are truly committed to winning simply purchase depth so that they can avoid many of those ways.

I believe general consensus is that the ability to limit damage on batted balls is a real skill, but it is much rarer than people think and we don't have a good way to isolate and measure it. The only way we know if a pitcher is a legit "FIP-beater" is if he continually beats it for a bunch of years in a row. And then, by the team we feel confident about it, there's a good chance the pitcher's skills have declined or changed, and so it's still precarious to predict it going forward. I think Matt Cain was the big posterboy for this effect. He beat his FIP significantly like seven years in a row or something -- and then one year he just started getting shelled and never bounced back. The knee-jerk reaction was "oh see well he was just lucky for really long but it caught up with him," but the truth is more likely just that he declined with age and lost whatever skill made him successful. Like any stat that serves as a proxy -- which is nearly all of them -- there's a tremendous amount of information you can get from it, but it doesn't explain everything, and so it's important that we pay attention to nuances and try to resist using the stat in a context it wasn't meant to be used. That's all I'm trying to say, really.

Look up Voros McCracken and DIPS theory, then get back to me. The reason FIP is based on strikeouts, walks, and homeruns is because those are pitching-exclusive events that Voros McCracken determined are statistically stable year over year. Hence "Defensive Independent Pitching." He scaled his totals to ERA, then tested and proved that FIP on year is more predictive of ERA the next year than ERA is. I'm not making this up, Voros McCracken did this work, and published the research. FIP is a FanGraphs stat that stands for "Fielding Independent Pitching." This statistic exclusively measures "things that happened." You can anecdotally look around at things if you want, but these are facts.