Jake

Where is Eloy?

I don't see any particular reason to keep Robbins. He may turn out to be a better AAA player than some guys kept ahead of him but I see little MLB upside in him.

There is a lot of evidence to suggest the "real" Eloy is much more like the one you've seen in his home games than the one you've seen in his road games. His lack of strikeouts thus far is another encouraging sign that he's not lucking out due to some massive ballpark effect. Oftentimes you see guys on short-term hot streaks and under the hood is a bunch of strikeouts and sky-high BABIP. Not here, he just looks like an improved version of the same guy we've seen for 12 months.

I don't recall the specifics but @ptatc made a post when this most recent injury was announced and it didn't leave me feeling optimistic about Nate in the long term. The thrust IIRC is that while this injury in isolation shouldn't be insurmountable, it suggests his throwing motion is just so tough on the elbow that after one thing is surgically repaired, that excess stress is just finding a new weakest link. Made me think that he'd either have to dial back the intensity quite a bit (would be hard for anyone to do) or rebuild his motion (also hard to do) if he wants to achieve lasting health.

As fathom alluded to, I do suspect there's a chance that he is so unique in his willingness to take pitches just outside the zone with 2 strikes that he may just be exposing how hard it is for umpires to call those pitches. While most of the calls in the Twitter thread are shown to be rarely called strikes in general, if you isolate every instance of a rare event it can look like the rare event happens constantly. The data necessary to see whether he does worse on two strikes than most batters exists but would be hard to wrangle. What you might want to see is something like whether his average strike zone is different than other players'.

Misjudged it by a foot and a half but was able to jump and reach enough to catch it anyway

Weak sauce, Ricky!

FWIW, that was a hell of a throw by Haniger

LOL Omar with the baserunning

Omar is really hitting. Here's hoping he remembers how to catch soon.

He has a shot at being a MLBer, in large part because he has shown he can catch the ball well enough out there. Note that I'm not saying he's some kind of plus defender, but he won't have to hit a bunch to make up for his defense like a Palka will.

The last thing you want to do is delay their development. If you're talking about a couple weeks like with Bryant, then who cares. But while you want to pay him less and keep him longer, you also want to compete sooner. You don't know how long he'll need to play in MLB before he's going to play good. Avisail Garcia needed about 300 games before he was ready. If Eloy posts something like an .800 OPS in AAA the rest of the year, we'll feel okay not promoting him yet. But it will also leave us in a situation where half the board wants to delay his call-up next year until the Super 2 deadline or maybe just punt the whole year.

Gotta say, at this fairly early date I'm not feeling great about the 2017 draft.

I was under the impression that this is what they do now.

Engel is at least a sensational defensive talent and not much worse than Tilson was at the plate. Tilson is also someone who might benefit from more time in the minors while I have doubts that Engel would get anything from it.

Oh boy is it great when Yoan is making contact.

The way I see it is that Narvaez still has some serious issues receiving the ball that weren't present last year and I just don't know why. I don't mean pitch framing per se (neither catcher is very good there) but just keeping low pitches in front of him and hanging onto borderline wild pitches. Neither Omar nor Kevan throws well so that won't help decisionmaking. That being said, I do think there's enough daylight between Omar and Kevan at the plate that I'd prefer Omar. The platoon issue with Castillo helps Omar's case as does Omar's age, which might give some more hope for projection.

Interesting looking at the OPS column in the live boxscore: Moncada – .735 Sanchez – .708 Abreu – .754 Palka – .751 Garcia – .732 Davidson – .771 Anderson – .719 Smith – .682 Engel – .579 Surprisingly little variance up and down the lineup. Engel is by far the worst in the 9 spot of course. Put Narvaez in at catcher and you have yet another guy in the .700s.

Yoan can play.

I of course don't mean anything specific by "blow out" but FWIW people with ACL tears often walk off the field. And it's not like he looked comfortable walking on it.

From the side view on the broadcast you could see that Yoan starts to wince before Orlando could have made contact with him. It seems to mostly coincide with the ball hitting or coming very close to hitting him. Hopefully it's that rather than just his knee blowing out as he planted that foot.

I agree that it looks like the ball hit his knee. Hopefully this will turn out like Yolmer's similarly bad looking knee injury that only cost him a game or two.

I don't love the fit, but one way to look at it is that he showed he's not going to be a star playing the 4 all the time, so it's worth taking a shot at developing him as a 3. In other words, the Bulls probably want him to be like Melo, only playing the 4 when you're playing small lineups. And with the Bulls personnel, you're not going to play small very often. You're going to have a really long starting lineup as far as wingspan is concerned: Dunn – 6'10" LaVine – 6'9" Jabari – 7'0" Lauri – 7'0" RoLo – 7'5" And the bench has length as well: WCJ – 7'5" Hutchison – 7'1" Portis – 7'2" Holiday – 7'0" Valentine – 6'11" Felicio – 7'0" Blakeney – 6'8" Payne – 6'7"

I think what I'd say is you're right that boredom can do that but also it's something that is speculated to be the cause of bad play much more often than it really is the cause of bad play.

This is based on basically nothing, but I always had the gut feeling that Rondon wasn't beloved by teammates