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Not a lot of fastball/curveball guys out of the pen anymore in baseball, and his curveball is his best pitch. That's the main reason I don't see the bullpen utility for Burke, because curveballs are challenging to be consistent with/find in short stints. Of course, his stuff could always get better disrupting everything we know about him. It's happened before, but it's not something I would expect or predict.

It's become a meme that Getz is dumb for not trading Robert at the end of 2023. That's hindsight. We now know his production was going to fall off the table. We now know 2023 wasn't the year he magically became healthy to play 145 games a season. Yes, in hindsight, we know that the 2023 off-season would have been the perfect time to trade him. Hell, with this crystal-clear hindsight we possess, why not say that the Sox should have had a fire-sale right after the 2021 season? Moncada just put up a 4-bWAR season. They would have gotten a haul for him.

As the local I'll ask you: would any location be within very, very close walking distance of said train?

I really get the feeling they now have to move him for SOMETHING after the latest signing.

They do have a train line that goes right through Hammond.

You can still easily get to Jets/Giants games via public transit from NYC. Takes me just as long to get to Yankees Stadium or Citi Field. Unless everyone thinks Indiana is gonna dump an astounding amount of capital into public transit, that's not gonna be the case for the Bears.

To my eye, for whatever that’s worth, his stuff is pretty good overall. I just get the impression from watching hitters that it’s easy to pick up and plays down. I do think, however, he could be a weapon out of the bullpen if starting doesn’t work out.

I read where the KC Royals have bought land in Kansas. Losing a baseball team and football team in KC can't be a positive thing for that city.

Run values added are going to be derived from your overall value which is heavily tied to results. Depending on the system you use, the correlation is high enough that you won't see a lot of positives with negative outcomes, but you can see individual pitch values where a pitcher is succeeding despite failure. Burke really doesn't have anything to hang his hat on. I'll also agree that FIP is a better predictor of future production; xERA isn't much better than actual ERA. His FIP being as bad as it was is the #1 indicator of his flaws, but I figured we could get more granular.

I know Hammond's Mayor decently well. He will give away the farm to get the Bears there. Literally anything he can do, he will. I would also bet money that our Governor would back up the truck for something like this, as we love giving billions in abatements and relief to things like data centers, which provide little to no jobs and economic activity, so a football team wouldn't be much different. I don't know how much the Bears want to leave Chicago, but I will promise you that Indiana will bribe the hell out of them to do so.

There has to be a positive for a state like Kansas to welcome the Chiefs. They view the Chiefs as an asset. I'm assuming Indiana view the Bears as an asset. I saw where they are already doing studies in Hammond for the stadium. Looks like Hammond is the spot for the new stadium.

Thanks. I didn’t realize Skubal had that velocity increase. You didn’t really answer the questions from my first paragraph, so I turned to Chat. It sounds like the run value stats are measuring results more than pure stuff, similar to ERA. Does that sound right? You could locate a perfect fastball with the bases loaded, but if the hitter breaks his bat and bloops one in for a couple RBI, it’s hurting your fastball run value (just like it’s hurting your ERA). Now, usually the best pitchers have the best ERA, so I’m guessing the best pitchers also have the best pitching run value stats. But it sounds like stats like FIP and xERA would be better predictors of future success. Would you agree with that?

Burke's command absolutely is the problem. The issue with most pitch metrics when used without proper content is they leads you down the wrong lesson path. Burke raw stuff is solid, but he commands it so poorly, mainly by wasting a lot of non competitive pitches far out of the zone that he overcompensates by throwing strikes. His zone % is actually quite high (he throws a lot of strikes). Pair his inconsistent fastball velocity with poor command and you get into a situation where you throw a lot of avg fastballs down the middle of the plate to prevent a walk. He's throwing a lot of strikes but usually with fastballs behind in the count, which had a tendency to get hit hard. He's had individual games where his fastball sits at 97 and his swing strike rates on the curveball is absolutely elite. There's a lot to work with there, but poor command like this usually ends with a guy finding his way into the pen.

Arguable but not what I was addressing there.

Your fortunes do not change in 2026 if he is here or not, but it does change from 2027 on if you can trade him for a controllable piece and a comp pick.

The only thing that finished + for him from a pitching grade last year was location. His command was above league average, even with the high walk rate. Problem is he picks around the edges because his stuff isn't good enough.

The problem is you're claiming ebbs and flows in performance are driven by development and not standard performance distributions. In his final 10 appearances, he faced Cleveland twice, the Royals once, the angels once, the Nats once, and Baltimore. That's 5 of the bottom 8 offenses in MLB last year.

Yea this whole discussion has gotten weird. It's clear posters here want to make a trade for the sake of making a trade. Sox have the worst outfield situation in baseball even with him and he is certainly not even close to blocking anyone. Nothing good can come from him leaving the roster. If there return is great, then whatever, but the thought process above is just really dumb.

Yeah, I was actually pretty optimistic about cannon and still think be may be able to move to the pen because his sinker had been effective until last year. It took a huge step back last year though, and it's possible the league just figured it out. Skubal was very mediocre when he first came up. Before the injury he only threw 94 mph. When he came back he was throwing 96 mph. That 2 mph took a medicore fastball and made it a good one.

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly spiked the football and said the move shows her that Kansas is ready to play on the country's big stage. “Today we are announcing an agreement to bring our beloved Kansas City Chiefs right here to Kansas," she told reporters in Topeka. "For the rest of the nation, I say take heed. Kansas is not a flyover state. We are a touchdown state.” SIGH. Politicians.

The Kansas City Chiefs of Kansas.

https://www.instagram.com/ys_passion_official/reel/DRyRBD6geTC/?hl=en Don't think the Yakult Swallows cheerleaders will fly in the US. This is very very tame compared to the Korean and Taiwanese dance teams that often draw more attention than the action on the field. The most shocking thing for American baseball fans in Japan is the majority of stadium vendors, especially beer sales, are conducted by young women lugging these canisters/mini kegs of beer up and down the steep stairs (think GRF upper deck at Tokyo Dome)

We've had months and months of attemptng to trade Robert and nothing good enough to accept, yet. Maybe Carlos Rodriguez has some fresh ideas/relationships to plumb? At any rate, this is like the endless arguments about Fairbanks and why he ultimately will get more than 1/$11...that number will be 2/$20-24 instead.

No simply providing a list of those players traded at the deadline. Even the top four (if they were actually on the same team) for Robert wouldn't have been enough. Manzardo is a decent/average 1B but hardly a star or guy you give an early contract extension to.

nevermind