nrockway

That seems like a good thing, right? That's a pretty good FIP that's also pretty close to his ERA which might suggest his ERA isn't an outlier (the point of FIP ostensibly, does the ERA make sense?). Even so, Fangraphs' FIP-derived WAR has Fedde at 33rd (and Crochet a spot below). Do we think Fedde will continue to strike out 10 batters per 9? Probably not but I bet his HR rate goes down too. Personally I prefer baseball-reference's WAR calculation for pitchers. It seems more based on what actually happens in a game than however some eggheads weight the relative importance of a strikeout to a groundout to a walk or whatever.

yeah I thought this guy would have a better understanding of baseball than "so Steve what pitch do you think he's gonna throw next?" the response is "well he throws a cutter or a slider so I'd guess one of those" or "he's just thrown 12 fastballs in a row, what do you think?" in fairness to him, he seems to be improving and the chemistry with Stone is certainly better than it was the first week. I think Schriffen should know more about baseball though and it doesn't seem to me that he's doing the prerequisite prep work to understand who players are and what their player profiles are, what teams they used to play for etc. You listen to another team's broadcast and they can tell you a bunch of information about nobody call-ups on other teams, I don't think you get that on Sox broadcasts, and even though I like dogs I don't really need a guy to tell me how much he likes dogs for 3 hours.

Curtis Mead is really rough defensively. Looks like a poor man's Julien.

so we're all in agreement that Fedde would be a shoo-in for the pitching triple crown if there wasn't the "wins" component of it, right?

I think the worst thing about the nationwide jingle is that every single time they're like "oh ha ha that wasn't great we'll do better next time"

Shewmake just needed to shave.

I like this trend that's starting to develop where I get up for a couple of minutes and I come back and the White Sox have scored a run. 2 runs at that. Bizarro Sox or Bizarro D Rays? Both? edit: definitely meant to post this in the game thread.

he got off to a very rough start but has been solid for a couple weeks. No runs given up in his last seven outings, all of his earned runs came before April 9; 3 very rough outings out of 11 total. Excited to see what he can do!

Vaughn going for routine flyballs has me sweating bullets

I love the randomness of baseball. This is how AB's numbers get back to "normal", weird fluky stuff.

I'll say it until I'm blue in the face but there's no logical reason that any American sports team should be privately owned. Are these guys taking on some kind of risk I'm unaware of owning the safest investment imaginable? I don't care if it sounds like communism, they should nationalize the MLB. The sport would be better off for it. The fan experience would be better. It's probably a good source of much needed, and hard to come by, public revenue. There literally is no risk in owning a professional sports franchise, it's one of the safest investments imaginable, yet the public still foots the bill for their capital costs and we don't get an ownership stake.

it was also Flexen! ? I've already posited an adjustment to FIP called "pitched against White Sox" (PWSx) so that fans don't get the wrong idea that the likes of Andrew Abbott and Simeon Woods-Richardson are Cy Young contenders. But now how about a "pitched while Dominic Fletcher played center field behind you while gross, man and that other guy wiped up the corners" (PWDFPCFBYWGMATOGWUTCx).

I'm pleasantly surprised by what guys are doing at every level to be honest. Even after Colson and Thorpe graduate, I think there are some studs, guys who might move up/into top 100 territory. AAA isn't the most impressive level to me. I'm not willing to say it's a "successful" farm, more like let's wait and see. early returns seem positive.

holy cow we're actually winning by a convincing amount. in pham we trust

seems like whenever Fangraphs updates their rankings, Sox will assuredly have a top 10 (they are 12th, right below SDP, before factoring in the Cease trade) system by their rankings. Probably top 5 considering all the graduations coming for the teams above the Sox. Citing Bleacher Report is probably dumb but the farm system seems to be in genuinely OK shape.

That guy would've lost so much money if he had made good on his empty threat to move to St Petersburg. No one is leaving Chicago by choice for a third tier city. I don't think JR has any political capital remaining to get the sort of deal he wants on a ballpark. In any state.

I thought it was pretty candid to say "the people who sell tickets have a tough job right now, please stop screaming at them".

it's amusing that he signed a $5mil contract and Belt is a free agent.

wouldn't mind seeing Duke Ellis. .830 ops at AA, 16 stolen bases in 13 games! there are a bunch of solid outfielders on this team but I guess there's no real point in rushing them. Colas or DeLoach should be playing over Benintendi. The Red Sox have the nerve to bench their highly-paid corner outfielder, and Yoshida is a much better player than Benintendi is, so why is Benintendi's spot apparently safe?

Every night lately I think to myself, "what a day, let's relax by watching the replay of my favorite team play my favorite sport." Now I have the good sense to click on any random page of the game thread and gage the reaction of fans to see if it's worth wasting two hours. Thus far, it's not been worth it. The minor leaguers are kinda fun to watch at least.

C Edgar run C Edgar catch C Edgar hit One, two, three extra base hits WRC+ goes up up up

I get the logic behind the positional adjustment and I don't take fault with that necessarily. Well I do a little bit, it overrates bad players who play premium positions and underrates first baseman defense generally -- but that's not really my point here, I'm more so critiquing what they give precedence to or ignore when making the calculation. I think Vaughn is a better defensive first baseman, relative to other first basemen, than dWAR calculations gives him credit for. I can't prove it quantitatively, it's just the eye test, he's saved some really god awful throws and turned them into outs. There was a play the other day, I forget who fielded it on the left side of the infield, maybe Mendick, it was a tough, close play but the throw was offline and in the dirt. Vaughn looked like a 200 pound ballerina, I don't know how he contorted his body to make the scoop. I'm exaggerating a little bit but I'm generally impressed with his play at first base; he's missed some hard grounders he probably should've fielded which I think is what's counting against him, but I bet he's saved a couple of runs making catches that other first basemen wouldn't get to (see: Michael Busch. literally the worst first baseman I've ever seen...I'd still rather have him than Vaughn).

I think however fangraphs calculates defensive WAR for first base and catcher is way off. Both sites do first basemen dirty, to my eye Vaughn has been pretty good defensively. He's turned a lot of bad throws into outs that I don't think other first basemen get. I don't think they do a "zone rating" for scoops/stretches but they should. The catcher point is mostly an aside, but boy does Fangraphs love "framing", something that can't actually be effectively quantified, is a skillset that is predicated on umpire ineptitude and will become entirely useless the second the automated strikezone replaces the home plate ump. Let's consider two catchers: Salvador Perez and Yasmani Grandal. Perez has a fWAR of 16.5 and a bWAR of 34.3. He's so bad at framing that it cost him 20 WAR. Now let's look at Grandal, 38.6 fWAR, 19.6 bWAR. Framing evidently earned him 20 WAR. How can there be such a discrepancy between the two calculations?

The entire team still makes very dumb defensive lapses (how about that Harper run down) which can only reflect on the coaching staff

Shewmake had been worse than I thought defensively but I bet most of that negative war is in the outfield. Benintendi and Grossman are two of the worst defensive outfielders I’ve ever seen play baseball. These are the kids you stick in right field because nobody is left handed in little league. Fletcher is ok but doesn’t have the range to play cf and it shows