Balta1701

I don’t believe at all that if Jose Abreu wanted in the lineup at 1b 155 games this year and Rick Hahn disagreed that anything would happen other than Abreu at 1b everyday, with his manager’s strong support.

I need more on the bench than that. Romy taking over 2nd with no utility player/no backup option - I hope I've made it clear that I have a problem with that. You at least have to give me a utility guy or two in that format. Add in that, and I can't really be that angry.

This is from a 1998 paper. There are lots of versions of it in various formats. The upper chart is "as if you were looking down on the pitch", the lower chart is "watching the pitch from the side". 16 meters is just over 48 feet, so the pitch would be thrown about 12 feet off to the right of this chart. To get the late break on a curveball you need 2 things. You need the ball to have a spin on it that interacts with the wind - that is what deflects the pitch gradually to the side. You also need the pitch to hit the "peak" of its trajectory at the right point - if the peak comes too late, the pitch won't break enough and it will become a hanger. If you have the peak at the right spot, then the pitch will be accelerating downwards as it approaches the batter and that will give you the impression of a late break downwards, because it has been moving down but because the speed increases enough for your eyes to see it just as it passes the plate. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/1-Simulated-curve-ball-trajectory-The-solid-line-represents-the-normal-gravitational_fig25_241376252

I am not sure the "Front Office" has any say in that matter.

The Detroit Lions will not let a little thing like a 17 game season stop them from going 0-16.

Would that mean no bullpen and bench help or minor help to both?

Obviously the “hole at 2b” problem was a different scouting issue. I will say that a dominant bullpen able to cover the 8th and 9th would have solved a lot of the White Sox regular season issues, but clearly that didn’t go as I expected either.

Yes. They gambled and lost on the trade deadline deal. The previous deal cannot and does not affect how you value him now. They bet they could move him without having to include a ton of money. We will see if they read the market and CBA correctly.

If the salary relief is the full $16 million then they did ok.

I think quite literally the argument against all of that is "The 2021 playoffs". Outfield defense? Here's WS MVP Jorge Soler. Good pitching beats good hitting - who had the best pitching coming into the playoffs? Rank the ten teams - Braves had the 8th best regular season ERA out of the 10 playoff teams.

One obvious candidate is Reynaldo Lopez. However, I fully agree they need an option beyond that, basically everyone in the final 2 rounds of the playoffs was onto their 7th starter, and if they didn't have one it was a complete bullpen game. It is possible they could use Crochet to do some of that if they actually pushed him to become a starter and tried to get him 100+ innings this year, if they were looking at solely internal options - but that could also mean they need an extra LHP in the bullpen.

This'll get way more fun after December 1. Might be only my definition of fun though.

While I agree in part, didn’t you point out correctly yesterday that defensive metrics over that short of a timespan aren’t likely to be predictive of future performance?

I’d say that this year Engel proved The opposite, that it is dangerous to count on him as a frequent player without an alternate option. If the injuries don’t recur then yes he performed well enough to be a frequent player, but that was a lot of injury problems.

I mean he had other issues but Engel?

So seriously, we had this defense discussion a few pages ago and it seemed like UZR and DRS liked Conforto far less than OAA/Statcast did. Has this latter stat just completely overwhelmed the older ones and rendered them useless, or are the different ones telling us different things?

You see the part where I said "Without COVID"? You realize that 2020 was "COVID" right? I wasn't exactly unclear about this, I was drawing an imaginary "Non-COVID" trendline following revenue growth over the last decade and saying where contracts would be if they had kept up. Which could actually be quite relevant if COVID was an isolated blip and revenues return to the long-term trend line next year, which is a decent assumption.

Just remember that if MLB’s market is functioning, deals should seem insane. Without COVID, revenue was going up 7-8% a year. If you took Machado’s deal and increased it by 8% a year, it’s $375 million now.

I’d guess the contracts have to be enormous for this to go down like that.

The most famous example of Boras successfully using the “imaginary team bid this” strategy to get a team to bid up was ARod’s first $250 million deal with Texas.

Whether this is serious or not, this is exactly what you should bleeping do if someone points a gun at you in any situation. Stay as calm as you can and give them basically anything they want. Don’t do anything to escalate. If you try to fight or make a sudden movement or try to pull a weapon, you have a decent chance of your life ending. My auto insurance will help pay for a replacement car. My life insurance won’t pay for a replacement me. Get out of the situation, survive it, deal with the police and insurance later.

There was a study a couple weeks ago on vaccinated health care workers showing that if they got the virus, tested positive, and showed no symptoms, the body would basically clear the virus in 2 days. If they actually showed symptoms, then it took 11 days to clear the virus on average (more scatter though). Overall, the two negative tests standard is therefore quite well supported as a dividing line.

While I do buy that Boras will shop around any offer before signing it unless it’s simply unbeatable, Scott Boras doesn’t work this way. He doesn’t play favorites and agree that he will give a specific team a last shot at something for a favor, he will only do things like that if it benefits his clients. If someone offered Rodon a really good contract today it would be signed today and the White Sox wouldn’t know anything about it until it was all over. If he gave the White Sox a chance to match an offer and they did, he would still take that White Sox offer over to 4 other teams and ask if they will beat it. He’d then come back to the White Sox and say that an imaginary team offered an extra $5 million and ask the White Sox to beat it again.

I'm struggling a lot with the concept of "has a full year like 2020."

They could get enough positive press that people would defend them years later using it as an example.