Jake

QUOTE (kev211 @ Aug 5, 2014 -> 11:12 AM) What was he doing before the glasses? Was he just going with his regular bad vision? Or was he wearing contacts? I don't see how switching from contacts to glasses would help any. Glasses still offer better vision correction, especially when it comes to people with vision problems like astigmatism. If he had allergies (I've been there), contacts can become unwearable as well. You'll have them coming out of place and getting literally covered with the gunk your eyes are producing

I think being short is a big part of the national doubt about him. Funny motion AND a short guy? No likey. I tend not to care about height when present stuff is plenty good

The key to the recent run has been that his K numbers haven't been unbelievably, remarkably, disgustingly high. At the peak of his early season run he had 40% K rate. He couldn't have been "fixed" at that point because you can't be a singles hitter who fails to put the ball in play 4 out of 10 ABs

Jesus Christ with the baserunning Adam

So how well does Tyler have to hit before we take him seriously?

T Flow fo shooo

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 4, 2014 -> 07:30 PM) Does anyone actually enjoy "Beer Money"? I wish they would just go back and broadcast old TWIBs. Jen Lada is so charming that I find it tolerable. There are a lot of cringe-worthy moments on there, though QUOTE (BigHurt3515 @ Aug 4, 2014 -> 08:01 PM) Not a good feed from Abreu but Noesi should still catch it It's really, really difficult to make that catch and step on the base at the same time. The ball has to hit your mitt at least a step before the base. It doesn't look like much, but it's hard to do both things at once and Abreu should always be coming over the top from that distance

I would say Danish has elite stuff. Low 90s sinker with heavy, heavy sink, a swing-and-miss slider, and a changeup that is now being raved about as an awesome pitch. Last year, BA said his stuff was reminiscent of a young Tim Hudson or Jake Peavy. The sky is the limit for Danish. It's just a matter of convincing people of his longevity and overcoming being just a 6-footer, something Marcus Stroman faced coming out of college.

I don't like the "helps every day" argument. He does, but he rarely can win you the game. A pitcher requires relatively little assistance to directly and almost completely determine the outcome of a game. And he'll do it every time he pitches. A hitter bats 4 times a game and makes a handful of defensive plays. When he can do too much damage at the plate, they'll walk him. Whether Abreu is at bat when you need a run is a matter of luck. Whether the starting pitcher is pitching when you need to hold the lead is a matter of skill.

QUOTE (BigHurt3515 @ Aug 4, 2014 -> 05:39 PM) Question with bold; How many good starting pitchers are out there and how many good 1B are there?? I am pretty sure there are way more good SP then 1B Obviously there aren't many on the level of Sale or Abreu I would imagine there are more "good" starters, but the problem is the need for five of them.

Adam Dunn of 2011 fits in at -3.0, the 11th worst season of all time. Mike Caruso's -2.7 in 1999 is the 18th worst.

It's nice to see the Cubs have decided to give a s*** about their fans and just try to put one of the organization's better players on the field. I mean, it's not nice because f*** the Cubs, but I wouldn't mind as a fan of theirs that they made this decision without considering the Super 2 bulls***.

The other thing about getting wrapped up in single season WAR numbers is that the defensive statistic underlying the calculation is susceptible to some year-to-year variation. UZR ideally has a sample size of three or more seasons, so when looking at a player's defensive component, it's always important to see whether it lines up with his career norms.

Sale, easily. 25 years old versus 27 years old. Starting pitcher vs first baseman - another easy choice. Getting a good first baseman is fairly easy. Getting a good starting pitcher is always difficult. The nature of projecting a pitcher versus a young hitter. There was rarely ever a doubt that Sale would be good because his stuff is so evidently great. He can throw 100 with a funky motion and has deceptive, nasty off-speed pitches. Everything thrown for strikes. Abreu has all the tools to be a great hitter but lots of guys do. Lots of guys hit like a great hitter for a long stretch of time and then fall off the wagon. Track record. Sale has been consistently a top 5 pitcher in his position in the major leagues for three seasons now. We have 90-some games for Abreu, total. Not even a minor league track record to fall back on. Abreu is as easy to project as Adrian Nieto is. While picking Sale over Abreu risks the possibility that Abreu is the next Frank Thomas, the risk of Abreu's talent upside is minimal because you're choosing one of, if not the best pitcher in baseball over him. Injury risk. Sale clearly loses here, but at this point he's done enough to make me feel comfortable that it at least is not a foregone conclusion that he has a big problem. The fact that his little bouts of soreness have been in the elbow are also encouraging because I'd be much more worried about major shoulder surgery. Don't forget that Abreu has teased us with foot troubles himself, the sort of injury that plagued guys like Big Hurt. Sale's age plays in here, too, because he could go down with TJS tomorrow and still be up and running at 26 or 27 years old. A lost season for Abreu cuts out some extremely valuable prime years, while Sale arguably hasn't even reached that stage of his career yet. Luckily, my team has both of them for a long time and on decent contracts.

QUOTE (CaliSoxFanViaSWside @ Aug 4, 2014 -> 04:31 PM) Good explanation as usual from you educated folks But many of the points you make can be made without the advanced stats. Their ages ,the late blooming,standard MILB numbers, Abreu's 1st year, sophomores slumps etc are all part of baseball past stats and folklore. Besides Abreu's near the best at his position now so it's probably a bad example of trading Abreu for Donaldson and much more useful for trading more similar players. Besides no stat can predict the future . I probably toot my own horn too much but I've had debates on here about choosing one player over another in the off season for certain trade possibilities and kept those debates in my mind while looking at the production of the players involved over the next few years and I'm usually right . Right - that's what I saying. To look at WAR and say "WAR says this guy's better but I totally wouldn't trade for them" would be a misunderstanding of what WAR is supposed to do. That's what I was trying to explain. There are all kinds of other things that go into projecting a player and deciding how to build a team.

QUOTE (JUSTgottaBELIEVE @ Aug 4, 2014 -> 04:09 PM) To me, it's a simple question. Who is harder to replace? Isn't WAR all about replacement value after all? In my opinion, it's always harder to find the star offensive player, the guy that makes everyone else in the lineup better (ala Miggy, prime Pujols, Bonds, Big Hurt), than a guy like Donaldson who is very good at everything but not great at any one thing. Generally speaking, it's far easier to find a good 1B than good 3B. The best 3B in FA this past offseason was Juan Uribe. The year before that it was some combo of Eric Chavez/Jeff Keppinger. The year before that, you had one good player - Aramis Ramirez. For 1B, several solid guys became available - Mike Napoli, James Loney, Justin Morneau. The year before that - Nick Swisher, Mike Napoli, Adam LaRoche. The year before that - Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder. With that said, it is harder to find a guy who is good at multiple things than good at one thing. Great at one thing? Always difficult. The whole point of this process, though, is there is no requirement for an amazing hitter. This entire discussion is about the fact that you can quantifiably reproduce the run value of a great bat by being an all-around good player. There's nothing magical about a great hitter that makes the hitters around them better. Who has Abreu turned into a good hitter this year? What about Barry Bonds? The only guy I can see him seemingly having an effect on was Rich Aurilia in the 72 home run year, though Aurilia played far worse the years before and after in the same spot in the batting order, so that seems dubious. There is a lot of research on protection that shows that, over many many years of baseball, protection is never measurable beyond the extent to which you would expect random variation in performance. While a great hitter is always better than not a great one, a good hitter that is a good fielder is usually better to have than a great hitter who can't field. The more a guy's game is focused on a single thing, the more that single thing can make his value disappear entirely. Compared to last year, Donaldson is having a bad year at the plate. However, because he's an excellent fielder and decently quick on the basepaths, he's still having one of the best years in the game.

Get your most trusted talent evaluators on the case and pay market value to the best one or two relievers that accept such a contract

The reports from people at camp was that Fuller had pulled Bennett down by the neck/collar

Advanced statistics make baseball better. They help to eliminate gut reactions and misguided assumptions over small sample sizes. It helps us to value different aspects of the game properly. Bill James always says that a statistic is no good if it doesn't surprise you. That's because a given statistic is supposed to tell you something you don't already know. We know Abreu is good. We know he's been phenomenal at the plate. We don't know how to properly value his contributions in comparison with other players that play other positions. To ask whether, based on this season's WAR, you'd trade for someone, is a misuse. It's not a projection - it's a measure. WAR is a way to look at players' contributions and separate them from context so you can make valid comparisons. A guy like Donaldson plays different competition, in different places, with different people batting around him, and at a different position. WAR is a way to look back and disentangle all those confounding factors. When I'm deciding between Abreu and Donaldson, there are several concerns for both players. Abreu, being new, has considerable upside that we just don't know about yet. Could he play even better than this? There's reason to believe so. However, given his newness to the league, maybe he could get dramatically worse. Look at the way Yoenis Cespedes's production fell off after his first year. At 27, Abreu can't punt too many years solving his sophomore slump. He also plays first base, meaning a down year at the plate means he'll be simply valueless. Donaldson plays a more valuable position and defends it extremely well - we have three years of sample size to back up his defense. His year last year, with a 7.7 WAR, is probably better than any year Abreu will ever have. However, he is a year older than Abreu. He's also a guy who wasn't worth a s*** until he was about 27. While "fluke" might not be the right word, there is reason to step back when a guy blooms this late and wonder what's going on. He was never an impressive upper-level MiLB player until he was 26 over 50-some games in AAA. Seems like a candidate for regression, if not a guy who might be thriving only under a particular coach or whatever is going on. So no, I wouldn't pull of that particular deal, money aside. We effectively have a prospect in Abreu, which I think makes him worth the gamble that his position or lack of experience could make us lose the deal.

Baez is a very flawed player. He's a bad defender, strikes out a ton, and doesn't exactly post Dunn-like walk numbers. That doesn't mean he'll be bad, but it means he's very far from a sure bet. I see a lot of Alfonso Soriano in him...the question is whether he'll peak as highly.

Well, if the bullpen's going to suck, it might as well suck in the face of immense talent

So there's two things making Donaldson seem more valuable. First is the defense, like we covered. A third baseman has much more control of run prevention - kind of. A really bad defensive 1B will have more negative value than anybody, because they can screw up just about every infield out. However, each play is measured against the "average" defender. The "average" 1B makes almost all the same plays that a great one does. That's not nearly as true of 3B and really not true of OF. Next is how good hitters are at a given position. The average 1B this year has a 111 wRC+ (was 110 last year). The average 3B this year is 101 wRC+ (was 97 last year). While in the recent past LF was a place to stash your guys with barely better than 1B defensive ability to get their bat in the lineup (average LF batter was as high as 110 wRC+ in early 2000s), today it's a place where the average LF bat is just an average bat (100 wRC+ this year, 99 last). On a side note, it interests me how poor the average DH is this year - 101 wRC+ compared to 110 wRC+ last year and a peak 120 wRC+ in 2002. So even disregarding how good he defends his position, Abreu is graded on a curve. wRC+ presumes that 100 is average. However, 111 is average for 1B. 101 is average at 3B. That means the expectation for Abreu's offense is 10% higher than a 3B and LF. 25% higher than SS! Another way to think about it is to look at it from the perspective of the non-1B. Look at Derek Jeter. His career WAR is 74.3. He's also a career negative value defensively as a shortstop, where usually bad shortstops end up with positive values just because of the position's difficulty. He has a career 120 wRC+. If you took away the positional adjustment to the way we look at his offense, or changed his defensive position to 1B, he's a slightly enhanced Paul Konerko, meaning Jeter becomes more of a 40-45 WAR player. That means not a Hall of Famer. Should Jeter be a Hall of Famer? The answer hinges on whether you think players should be graded on a curve based on their defensive position.

QUOTE (JUSTgottaBELIEVE @ Aug 4, 2014 -> 12:37 PM) I don't see how LF (Gordon) is a more defensive-minded position than 1B? Guys are moved out to LF to hide because they can stick (similar to 1B). If we were talking CF, SS, or C then that's a different animal altogether. None of these guys play a premium defensive position in my mind (3B is probably the closest out of the three) 1B is far and away the least important position. No position compares to it. Since 2000, there has only been one season in which a 1B has contributed a full win above average (it's harder for me to access the WAR value). That was Pujols in 2007. That defensive season was more than twice as valuable than the next closer in those 15 years. Out of all the 1B players to play a qualifying amount since 2000, only 25 times has a 1B had a season in which their defensive contribution was above the average player (of any position). They don't pull this stuff out of thin air. Each play is evaluated for its difficulty and its consequence. Making a very difficult play adds to your defensive value, especially if that play is likely to pay dividends in terms of saving runs. 1B are just not tested defensively nearly as often as any other position and the plays they make tend to be of little consequence. They never throw - that's a big deal. 1B rarely have to make defensive plays in which they throw; that's the big difference between them and a 3B (that, and the amount of RH vs LH hitters). Another way to think about it - how many players are good at a position that isn't 1B but would be bad at 1B? While not ideal, I'd argue that Adam Eaton would be fine at 1B. That's because he's a baseball player who knows how to catch throws. It's nice to have a tall guy, but that's okay because he'd make up for it by actually being mobile. The average CF, SS, or C is going to be far better at 1B than any 1B would be at those positions.

You guys have it. Those guys are kicking absolute ass defensively, not just good but elite defense at positions that are far more consequential defensively than first base. Even a good defensive 1B will struggle to contribute meaningfully at 1B and the expectations are higher offensively. To think about why it is important to move the offensive bar per position, just think about this - if, say, Anthony Rizzo played left field, the Cubs could have had him AND Abreu. If Donaldson played first base, they don't get to play Brandon Moss. If Trout plays 1B, they don't get Pujols. If Trout plays corner OF full time, they might not be able to have Hamilton. When you build around a non-1B, that leaves the option open to you to bring in a 1B to put your offense over the hump. When you have a 1B and nothing else, you have to find guys that both excel defensively and hit. That's harder. And that doesn't mean your 1B is valueless or that we screwed up by getting an amazing 1B, but it means that he has to do with his bat what almost every other position does by combining their bat, glove, and legs.

Just wait for Theo to start handing out contracts.