It must be said - Hawk Harrelson has to go

[Balta1701]

Why pay a bottom-of-the-order hitter that kind of money.

When Elvis Andrus is getting $120/8...I don't think there's any reasonable complaint about Alexei making $9 million.

[caulfield12]

And, the fact that Alexei was the most "underpaid" SS in the game for much of his White Sox career.

 

JR is nothing, if not loyal, and tends to reward his employees (based just as much on past performance), like the final contract to Contreras.

 

 

 

Here's the whole problem with using this SABR argument for Keppinger.

 

You can use the "exploited a market inefficiency" argument for the Rays picking him up and making him a useful, quasi-regular player.

Or just the development of multiple players on a team that can play all around the diamond (like Kepp, Sean Rodriguez and Zobrist, in keeping with the Chone Figgins tradition started in LA).

 

The problem here is that there's now so much focus on SABR analysis that the reverse ends up happening. Valuable "complementary" players like Keppinger become overvalued.

 

The White Sox bought him at his all-time highest value, then were forced to make him into an everyday player at 3B, and now at 2B.

 

Offensively, he hits with a good SABR skill-set profile, but not defensively.

 

When you overpay players at the top of their market, and then you're paying guys like Thornton almost as closers, that's exactly when YOU get exploited by other teams because your payroll becomes limited and/or you have to bid at the top of the market for replacement hitters like Dunn.

 

If the Sox identified Tyler Greene using this methodology, and he goes on to become a regular this season, that's one thing. But to overpay for a similar player in Keppinger who just happened to have a career year/anomaly/outlier and then predict it would repeat, especially when he was facing ALL types of hitting, well, that's not sound either.

 

If the White Sox are really so smart that they could project Keppinger to be able to repeat his stats from 2012 and Gillaspie to be an everyday player using SABR analysis, more power to them...but I'm more willing to believe they were concerned that they didn't have any back-up insurance for 3B other than Morel and needed to bring another player into the mix.

 

 

Edited April 27, 2013 by caulfield12

[Marty34]

When Elvis Andrus is getting $120/8...I don't think there's any reasonable complaint about Alexei making $9 million.

 

And if the Sox were a top 5-10 organization in terms of talent like the Rangers instead of the bottom 10-12 that they are it wouldn't matter.

[Marty34]

I'll believe the sabremetric hype when a top 5 revenue team consistently adheres to sabremetric principals and wins with something like a top 10 payroll.

[caulfield12]

http://mlb.si.com/2013/05/28/dustin-ackley...trics-mariners/

 

 

Not sure aligning ourselves through Harrelson with the likes of the Mariners or Royals (lowest walk rate in baseball) is doing any favors.

 

At least the Astros seem to have an approach and system in place.

 

The Mariners seems to be internally at odds with each other, not unlike a scene from Moneyball with the scouts and "eggheads" who've never played baseball but attended Ivy League MBA programs.

 

 

Dave Cameron/ussmariner.com

 

Eric Wedge Thinks Dustin Ackley is Our Fault

Dave · May 28, 2013 at 12:20 pm · Filed Under Mariners

 

The man just keeps getting better and better. Here’s a quote from Wedge on Dustin Ackley‘s struggles, as published on MLB.com.

 

Wedge was talking about Ackley’s demotion to Triple-A and his mental approach, and he intimated that Ackley might have been too concerned with pitch selectivity and high on-base percentage, leading to a one-liner that hit on one of baseball’s most intriguing ongoing philosophical battles.

 

“It’s the new generation. It’s all this sabermetrics stuff, for lack of a better term, you know what I mean?” Wedge said. “People who haven’t played since they were 9 years old think they have it figured out. It gets in these kids’ heads.”

 

Hear that, everyone? We’ve gotten in Dustin Ackley’s head. His struggles over the last year and a half? Sabermetrics is to blame, what with all of our promoting “on base percentage” and “swinging at strikes”. Dustin Ackley’s failure is because all these new age ideas have gotten in his head.

 

Which, of course, perfectly explains why Ackley is posting the lowest walk rate of his career this season. His focus on drawing walks and getting on base has caused him to not draw walks nor get on base. We’re ruining everything!

 

Except, you know, here’s a thing Mathew Carruth wrote about Dustin Ackley on FanGraphs last summer.

 

On the other hand, when it comes to called strikeouts, Ackley has had a tougher go. His patience at the plate, some might deem it passiveness, has seen him post higher than average called strikeout rates at every level, ballooning somewhat in his years in the Majors. Dustin is no Drew Stubbs (10% of Stubbs’ PAs have ended in a called strikeout), but Ackley’s rate was 7.5% last year and is 6.4% this year whereas the average is about 4.5%.

 

Having visually watched Dustin Ackley for a little over a year now, that is not surprising either. The most vexing problem has been watching him take, and get called, on the so-called lefty strike repeatedly. Ackley has seemed a bit obstinate in accepting that, though technically not a strike by the book, the rule book isn’t the meaningful arbiter, the home plate umpire is.

…

As pitchers got to know Ackley, it appears that he may have developed a reputation that he had a weak spot there and he began to see more and more pitches in that location. It dipped back at the beginning of this season, but quickly climbed back up and has stayed above average for the rest of the season. Pitchers were, intentionally or not, exploiting Ackley’s weakness.

 

Using “sabermetrics”, Carruth (among many others) noted that Ackley takes a ton of called strikes on the outer half of the plate, and wrote that to be successful, Ackley would have to start swinging at these pitches more often. Yes, a sabermetric nerd suggested that Dustin Ackley was too passive at the plate. Huh. What do you know?

 

The idea that “all these people who haven’t played since they were 9 years old” have gotten in Dustin Ackley’s head by telling him to not swing at strikes is hilarious. We’ve been writing about Ackley’s weaknesses on the outer half of the plate for quite a while. I’m pretty sure that you won’t find any sabermetric thinkers who believe that taking called strikes in the same location over and over is a good offensive philosophy.

 

If you want to sum up the philosophy of “sabermetric thinking”, it’s basically take pitches out of the strike zone and swing at pitches in the strike zone. A lot of hitters swing too often, chasing pitches they have no chance of hitting with any authority. We would tell them all to try and be more selective. Some hitters don’t swing often enough, taking pitches down the middle in hitters counts when they should be trying to hit the crap out of meatballs. We would tell them all to try and be less selective.

 

You can probably make a pretty good case that Ackley has been too passive, though perhaps that’s the symptom and not the cause. Ackley’s swing has progressively become very pull-oriented, and he no longer covers the outer half of the plate very well. Perhaps Ackley isn’t swinging at pitches on the outer half because he knows he can’t hit them particularly well with his current swing. In that case, swinging more often wouldn’t be the solution; that would require an adjustment to his swing to get better coverage of the outer half of the plate.

 

But, what do I know, I haven’t played the game competitively since I was nine years old 18-years-old. Everyone knows that the only people capable of offering any kind of intelligent analysis of baseball players are those who have Major League experience. You know, like Eric Wedge. That’s what’s made him such a successful Major League manager, with his career record of 725 wins and 784 losses. And, you know, clearly Wedge knows how to develop young talent, since he helped all those young players turn into superstars in Cleveland.

 

Oh, wait, Cleveland’s young players didn’t develop as well as they were expected, and Wedge has had two winning seasons in 10 years as a big league manager. Hmm. Maybe experience isn’t the only thing that matters after all?

 

Eric Wedge is going to be fired in the not too distant future. That move, in and of itself, won’t turn around the Mariners franchise. But it won’t hurt.

And no, before you ask, I don’t think I could do a better job of managing a baseball team than Eric Wedge. His job is hard, and I’m not qualified to do it. But there are a lot of other people in baseball who are, and who know more about the game than Eric Wedge. The Mariners would be better off with someone who has actually learned something about the sport in the last 30 years rather than someone who thinks that all this new age numbers crap is getting into the heads of his hitters.

Edited June 2, 2013 by caulfield12

[The Ultimate Champion]

You can't look at stats to tell you what a player is doing wrong, you look at approach, mechanics, mindset, etc. and if everything checks out & the player isn't performing then it's just because that player isn't good enough to stick. Bare bones, baseball is a hard game as it is, and at the most elite level in the world it's extremely difficult to play. Add to it the pressure of each situation, the pressure from the fans, organization, whatever.... the demand for results is off the charts, and it's a mental game just as much as it is a physical game. I think people get way to carried away with prospects anyway. Just because the raw physical ability is there doesn't mean he's good enough to play it. In many cases the best thing you can hope for re: a failed prospect/fall-from-glory MLB player ala Ricky Romero is that a change of scenery will destroy whatever negative associations he's making that are preventing him from achieving & will help get his mind right. This game is littered with players who have fallen off cliffs, never turned out, etc. Farmio has said several times on the radio that there is a pass you get, or something like that, which you only get after X amount of MLB service time, and this allows you to get the best seats at available at any MLB game anywhere in the country at any time. I forget the number of these passes handed out, but Farmio has one & he's said before how few of them have been handed out. Baseball is hard.