jackie hayes

No, his ba, obp, walks, and slg are much worse than Dunn's. They're not even close.

I don't understand your powers , but please don't scare us like that again.

Fine, it's "fair game", but it's also irrelevant to anything that was being discussed. If you want to bring up a separate argument, don't make it sound like you're replying to anything. ("No Jackie, you didn't all those things.") I actually was saying "all those things" in this thread, and that's what I was defending. You admit yourself that I'd been saying those things by saying that I "rehashed" my argument. As for this other argument, that it's too soon to judge a trade (and I want to say again that I never judged this trade in this thread) -- by that logic, no trade should be judged (at all, you say) till the end of the season, and most trades shouldn't be spoken of for many years -- b/c there is some positive probability that someone involved in the trade might do something. Sports fans on a sports fan site are not going to wait for the historical record, and there's no reason to do so. The end result is indeed what's important, but it does not actually tell you whether the trade was good -- that is, whether one should expect the trade would work out well and was better than other potential deals, given what you knew at the time. If we judged all transactions only by the end result, they'd almost all be bad, either because a throw-in played better than someone else that could have been thrown in, or because you could have traded for some at-the-time unknown player who had a breakout season. If we only use the information that was known at the time, though, there's no reason to avoid discussing the wisdom of the Garcia deal right now. But if you want, we can start that Bell-for-Sosa thread now.

Thanks!

This is neat. If you have the numbers handy still, could you put down the rankings in each category? Something like... Perez 2 3 4 5 4 3 Pavano 1 4 3 7 6 5 Clement 5 2 etc. Just curious.

I have said something similar to that point, that KW overpaid, but not in this thread. You should stick to what I said here. I said that 47 abs is not our only diagnostic. We have his minor-league stats first -- if those 47 ML abs were very much out of line with what we think he'd do, given the minor league stats, then we'd probably ignore them. As it stands, they don't have much effect on my opinion of him (I think he's good, but not likely THIS good), but given his minor league stats, they're not an aberration. In other words, there's a lot more reason to like Reed than 47 abs. So your only real response to this is that minor league stats "do not gaurentee major league success". I never said they did. (Nor do past ML stats guarantee anything, thank goodness says Melvin Mora.) But they do give us some information about what type of a player he's going to be. That is where whitesox61382 disagreed -- he said minor league stats are "almost complete worthless" in determining a player's ML success. It's a fair argument, but every time I've seen actual studies, they find that minor league stats are very good predictors of ML success, nearly as good as past ML success (Bill James, David Grabiner). Unless you can show me a study that rejects this, I'm going to go on believing it.

ws61382, ws61382, ws61382... You still don't even understand my point. I am not basing any opinion of Reed on 47 abs. Period. End of story. Nor did I say he was a HOFer... Nor did I say he was a career .400 hitter... But you like to put words into my mouth. What am I saying? I'm saying that we all have a probability distribution over his future production (which will depend on ballpark, teammates, etc), which is influenced by Bayes' law, p(x|y)=p(y|x)p(x)/p(y). In this case, y="being as good a minor league player as Reed was", x="being a good ML". Use whatever definition of "good ML" you like. You are claiming that p(x|y)=p(x), because minor league stats are "almost complete worthless" -- that is, y does not tell us anything about x. That implies also that p(y|x)=p(y). I dare you to test that theory, using any dataset of all minor league players at some point, and tell me that there is no correlation between minor and major league performance -- it should be pretty easy to do if you have the data. Then tell me that I know nothing about the minors. As for Maggs, he had ups and downs in A, but he was good in AA and exceptional in AAA. He wasn't a shocking revelation, just not a sure thing. Examples don't prove anything, but if you use them, you should at least use someone who had awful stats in the minors, but was great in the majors.

You are fantastically misrepresenting my point. According to your logic, 47 abs from Reed are equal to 47 abs from Kelly Dransfeldt. That's classical statistics -- do you take that literally??? In fact, taking the classical theory seriously, if I were to go up to the ML and k 47 times in 47 po -- and I would -- and Reed did the same, you would rank us equally. C'mon, if the minor leagues meant nothing (which is your argument), there'd be no reason to have minor league teams at all. It's not right to make a statistical argument, then say, look, I found a guy who didn't forecast right! That's just a misunderstanding of statistics. There is always some variance. You have to argue that there is no signal of ML talent in minor league performance. No reasonable person, including yourself, would really do that. EDIT: I want to point out that "your belief that 47 AB's are enough to make an accurate opinion" is just plain wrong. I did not say that at all. My point is that we have more information than that.

That's exactly what I meant. Carlos got enough po in lf, but I think in rf we'd all be frustrated by now. I just think there is a noticeable difference between lf and rf, that's all.

Ehh...How comfortable would you have been exchanging Carlos and Maggs? I think Carlos has been underrated for a while now, but I still don't like the thought of swapping the 2 of them.

He used formal statistics ("sample size") to make an argument, and I pointed out that his statistical theory was wrong here -- Bayesian inference is much more natural in this case, and I think most priors on Reed were fairly positive. Examples don't cut it as a counterargument.

What? So LA will sign Delgado and trade him immediately? Has that ever happened with such a big-name player before?

This is just not a fair assessment. You're using classical ideas ("sample size") when clearly there is some information that we can gain from his minor league experience. That is, there are prior beliefs on his ML ability. There's no reason to throw away that information. In other words, if this were a nobody, coming out and hitting out of his mind like this, okay, I agree with you, small sample etc. But what Reed is doing now is exactly what lots of people said he was capable of. It's not a total surprise. You can't just look at the # of ML abs.

Well...b/c with the difference we could afford a pretty good player. Eg, the 7 mil+ would go a long way towards signing Pavano (if you like the guy...). I'm not advocating anything between the 2, honestly. Personally, I think Lee and Reed should both still be Sox next yr. But it's not fair to say the Reed is a "singles hitter". He's hitting in Safeco, he rarely strikes out, and he does hit a good number of doubles with a smattering of hrs. (Likewise, yeah, Garcia is a flyball pitcher, but he's also a pretty good strikeout pitcher.) Reed's been awfully good, both in the minors and so far in the pros, by any measure.

Why is Francisco even an issue? He was unprotected in the rule 5 draft, right? The trade itself didn't really mean anything, we could have grabbed him back.

And... Omar Minaya has reportedly reached an agreement w/ the Mets: the link. They're demoting Duquette. Whether it's deserved or not, I'd be surprised if he accepts that.

The NYT reports. "A city official, speaking on condition of anonymity..." Here's the link: Expos to DC Apparently, Angelos has a deal w/ MLB. To the Expos fan, condolences.

Ring, I'm pretty sure.

He was okay in the 1st half of the season, fine for a ph (very Daubach-like), but no way was he one of our top players! In the 2nd half, or maybe a bit less, he has been.

If Gload makes it for part of a season (really he only came on in the 2nd half), Thomas makes it easily. He was our best player while he was here.

Not a drop. But it sounds more like you're addressing everyone who thought the trade was a bad idea -- after all, in the thread itself, not one person claimed that we could have traded Borchard instead of Reed before your post -- which does include me, and I get ticked when I'm called "so damn incredibly knee-jerk reactionary". We overpaid because we could have traded Crede instead. It would not have been difficult to replace (actually, improve) on his production this year, so the question is, who was the better prospect at the time. I find it very difficult to believe that it was Crede. Not just in terms of pure potential, but also in terms of the type of player the Sox would need in the future.

Uribe hr! And Rooney's sounding a little funny there... Then the Sox take the lead. A gidp, but it's still a lead. Bases empty, 2 outs. Stretch this guy a little longer Jamie.

A little. I don't understand why he'd still be in the rotation now, anyway, unless he's a sure 100%.

Randa ties the game on a single to right.

Wow, I thought Borchard has been striking out a lot, then I saw Buck's stats. More than 1 k every 3 abs. Man... But he just got us.