Jake

I've yet to hear a great alternative, but the system is surely bad when it punishes teams for making the right baseball decisions (developing players in MLB the moment it is appropriate).

Normally you wouldn't let Covey make his next start but there might be a riot if we called someone other than Kopech up from AAA to do it.

I thought the Yoan looking K was not a product of him reverting to his previous approach but just misreading the pitch. He usually shows some recognition on the close strike 3 calls that there's a chance he's being rung up but he looked utterly surprised by it in this particular AB.

Unpopular opinion: Moncada can play some D

I'd say his ceiling is slightly worse hitting than this and a better job of keeping the ball in front of him behind the plate. Per Baseball Prospectus, this year he ranks: 102 out of 102 in runs from blocking balls (includes passed balls on pitches that didn't literally require a block) 95 out of 102 in runs from framing 36 out of 102 in runs from throwing 102 out of 102 overall catcher defense (just a fraction worse than Willson Contreras) Last year, he was 106 out of 111. Note that the largest component of catcher defense (in terms of how much influence it has over how many runs get scored) per most current research is pitch framing and both FanGraphs and Baseball Reference do not incorporate any framing metrics into WAR.

I think it is worth saying that executive/management experience has long been a very undervalued skillset in baseball front offices and it's a skillset that is probably rarely present alongside baseball scouting talent, given that those are both specialized skills that don't build on each other. Also I would advise being cautious with comparisons to Atlanta since we know they were brazenly cheating for years.

Right now he has been looking a lot like a player who is caught between two different approaches, something like you might expect if he's working on his approach but hasn't quite gotten it all the way there. Seems to me that he's not taking especially aggressive cuts, especially late in the count, but at the same time isn't getting much out of his cut-down swings. And he has had a number of at-bats where he has some pitches where he is overly aggressive (e.g., chasing outside the zone) while also taking some pitches he needs to try to hit. Looks a lot like he's trying to balance multiple things and isn't through that transition just yet.

Britton is having an issue with the spiked fastballs.

Also, Jose is something really special. Best hitter we've gotten to watch since we were a playoff team.

So he is working on it, it sounds like?

I haven't read the prior back and forth on this, but in a 1-run/tie game run expectancy as stated here is not an appropriate framework for deciding whether to bunt. There are a number of situations in which you don't care about the long-run expected number of runs, but instead the probability of scoring one run. That is, you may consciously want to trade away some of your chance at scoring 2+ runs in exchange for a greater chance at scoring just 1, because it may be all you need. I am certain someone else must have already run these numbers this way and maybe they still don't look kindly on bunting. Either way, it's important to consider the game situation and the extent to which you should be caring more about your chances of scoring a bunch of runs or scoring a small number of runs.

Hate that the Yankees have home crowd in our ballpark. I don't get too wound up about attendance, but I really hate the visiting team getting greeted with raucous applause when they hit a go-ahead bomb in extra innings. As for this, are we really sure that Moncada isn't working on anything? We've seen him doing what looks to me like cut down on his two strike swings to make some contact and we've also heard him tell reporters that he understands he needs to quit leaving so many close 2-strike pitches in the hands of the umpire.

I mean while I recognize that it isn't all that high stakes, it's not a decision I'd want to be charged with making. If Leury hadn't gotten hurt, I'd have given some thought to just demoting Engel.

What I am saying is the choice in the case of those guys wasn't to wait until mid-April the next season to get a bonus year of service time, but instead to wait until about June of the next year because they both had about 45 days of service time with the Nats. In other words, you would be deciding to hold them in the minors for ~4 extra months

If you bring up Eloy, there's really no reason to have both Nicky and Palka on the roster. They're both left-handed LF/1B who would be in line to get most of their ABs at DH. There'd be no rhyme or reason for deciding which one plays on which day at DH.

Those two already had MLB service time, though.

People also were chattering about how Abreu had a slow bat that might get exposed in MLB but instead he has been a consistently good hitter for 5+ years

What's the over/under wins for Hoiberg keeping his job? <=27 gets him fired, but it probably needs to be into the 30s a bit for him to really be safe. This is assuming everyone is healthy, which may be a bad assumption.

That pitch cut towards him, it was really a sneakily nasty pitch. I thought it was a solid AB all things considered though obviously I'd like to see contact in the zone there.

Back before the expansion of bullpens, every NL team tried to keep a guy like Palka on their bench to match him up at some point late in the game as a pinch hitter.

This is a pretty difficult question and will ultimately be decided by the scouting expertise of our management because the performance of the players involved won't settle it. I will say that my feeling is you simply can't demote a guy in Palka who has hit so many homers, especially recently, and especially in such important situations. Davidson, in my view, is not going to be seriously considered largely because he can play an adequate 3B and isn't in competition for reps in the OF — even if his presence at DH indirectly competes with the outfielders who are rotating through there. Delmonico hasn't done anything to deserve a demotion, but if I just accept the premise of the post and say I have to pick one or the other, I have to pick Palka for the reasons stated. Part of this is based on my feeling that although Delmonico has surprised with his ability to play MLB-caliber defense (don't confuse this for a ringing endorsement), upon seeing him play in the majors for a while I'm not seeing the upside with his bat. Delmonico's 2017 in MLB was much better than his 2017 in AAA, which always merits suspicion. Sometimes you see that because he started off slow and was called up once he hit his stride, but this was not the case for him last year — if you split his AAA season into two two-month parts, the first two months he had a .850 OPS and the second two he had a .675 OPS. That's after a .700 OPS run over 70 games the previous year in AAA. If you look at Statcast data, you would get the impression his 2017 in MLB was tremendously lucky. He had an anemic 82.5 mph average exit velocity, a .232 expected batting average (actual batting average was .262) and a .390 expected slugging (actual was .482). Here's a chart of his homers last year: Everything to the dead pull side and a number of them not very deep. Same story this year. Nothing about his batted ball metrics stands out as impressive and they would suggest he just doesn't have anything better than an average power tool. He has some ability to get to that power tool, but wastes most of it on grounders and liners. Which brings me to the next thing that concerns me about Nicky... Last year, he was only shifted on 11% of the time. This year, 44%. His wOBA against the shift is .217 vs .387 w/o the shift. He's actually made better contact this season per Statcast, but his luc caught up with him and so did the scouting reports. To Nicky's credit, he makes contact, takes walks, and is disciplined. He just doesn't produce and I'm not optimistic he will even if his good approach does make him destined for some hot streaks.

The way I see it is he's really unlikely to be valuable unless he develops his defense at catcher (which one presumes is what has kept him in the low minors so long), so moving him up to play him at a different position dilutes his potential value quite a bit — not that it was super high in the first place. And good catchers are sufficiently rare and hard to develop that nobody sees anything wrong with a relatively old guy coming up as a rookie at that position. Look at Kevan Smith, for example.

I've probably clicked the confused button 3-5 times around the site, though only when someone complains about it Can't believe anyone would care, I've never paid attention to it on my posts

This is right around the time last season when we expected him to hit a wall and instead he just stopped walking people and really dominated.

Yeah I give him the benefit of the doubt but if I didn't know better I'd think he was being a prick