Balta1701

Contrast what is being said now about Anderson with what was being said about him at this point last year.

I enjoyed this read from a couple days ago on this subject:

Well, Lebron opting out basically takes the Houston superteam out of the picture.

How about you just stop and think about what you're leaving out next time you say a post praising how we respond to hurricanes? Because it's really, really easy to make the case that you accidentally forget about Puerto Rico because they don't look the right way. You keep doing it. Literally no one is making you say that we did a great job of coming together after hurricanes last year, but you keep saying that.

We can wait until he inspires one, if there's one thing we have in excess it's mass shootings. For now, how about we deal with the fact that so many responsible gun owners also have a domestic abuse history, and there is a disturbing agreement between the "responsible gun owner, domestic abuse, mass shooting" triad?

Yeah Caulfield that was totally unnecessary trolling.

There's a f***ing mass shooting 1.25x a day in this country of course there was going to be one after that, there probably have been 8. And Puerto Rico just spat in your face for thinking that you treated them nicely while they were literally watching people die. You couldn't possibly have cared less. It's even been pointed out to you before that you didn't care one iota about Puerto Rico and you glossed over it.

If AAA wasn't challenging him, it would have been darn nice if he had put up numbers to show that. Yeah he was dealing with a wrist? injury for about 2 months, but that .824 OPS and falling after a grand total of 358 plate appearances didn't make the case that he was ready to be called up and had nothing more to learn at AAA to me. Just to stress - it still wasn't nearly the insanely aggressive callups we saw the 2016 and 2015 White Sox doing with their top prospects, but I certainly didn't look at his numbers and think "AAA wasn't challenging him".

Calling him up last July was also aggressive. It wasn't "Carson Fulmer called up from AA to save the bullpen after less than a year in the minors when he hasn't pitched in the bullpen and has an ERA of 5", which was a thing that happened, but it was absolutely aggressive. In his career he got 177 at bats in AA and 309 at bats in AAA, total, with a quick callup to Boston in-between also. Hell, he also only had 534 at bats at the A-ball levels.

As with almost all of them, history of domestic abuse. And associated with that, I'll go ahead now and guess that this was another abuser who legally owned his gun.

FWIW, I'll go in on this and say that I don't have really any urge to pay Zach Lavine a market value contract. I think that's likely to be a deal that any team signing him will regret.

You're dancing around the data to avoid the obvious - that his decline is in fact real. However, let's take your hypothesis on its face - that the reason he is performing worse against fastballs is that pitchers are attacking him differently. This is, once again, a 5 year trend line. If his decline against fastballs is due to pitchers working him a different way, then is there any reason to assume he will pop back from his decline? No, pitchers will continue attacking a weakness that he has failed to adapt to over a multi-year period, and will continue to be more effective in the attack as they have been through his career. Furthermore, I did not ignore the other pitch data in the process, I noted it. Last year, in 2017, he did what he had to do to be a good hitter while becoming progressively worse against fastballs. However, as we've seen, that improved performance against sliders and other offspeed pitches has not continued in 2018, which is strong evidence that the 2017 performance was a one year blip upwards that made his data look better than it otherwise would have been. To continue the case, over his career, his OPS is .807 against what B-R counts as "power pitchers" - pitchers in the top 1/3 of the league in strikeouts + walks. This is somewhat lower than his career OPS of .874, but the important thing is that it's once again trending down. Started at .924 his first year, was at .818 in year 2, .751 in year 3, .809 in year 4, and .615 this year. In his first 2 seasons there was no obvious bias towards him struggling against power pitchers, but in the past 3 seasons a strong bias has emerged where he hits guys with low strikeout totals far worse than he hits guys with high strikeout totals.

Link

His stats have had a progressive drop. He did what he needed to do last year to offset it, which was be excessively good on every offspeed pitch, but he hasn't continued that this year so the interruption in the progressive dropoff that was 2017 has continued in 2018, and the dropoff against fastballs has continued as well.

Because for that to be the case and for that to be why his numbers are going down, he'd have to be swinging at more balls outside the strike zone, which is also not the case. He's simply doing less damage against the standard fastball. Perhaps he did not have a slider speed bat when he came in, but he's no longer hitting fastballs as anything other than a replacement level player. Perhaps a swing overhaul could delay this. This might be one of those cases where a guy could substantially extend his career by changing his stance and opening up, so that his body is moving more towards the pitch as part of the trigger mechanism. But as of right now, this is why his numbers have gone progressively down; he's slowing down progressively as he ages and can't catch up with the fastball any more.

This is simply "statcast recognizes this pitch as a fastball/slider/etc., what is the end result". There's about 8 different versions of it on Fangraphs and all of them show the same thing; he's getting progressively weaker against fastballs every single year. You can see the end result of this in the numbers overall too; he's gradually seeing fewer and fewer changeups and more fastballs as pitchers are exploiting this developing weakness, 10% of the pitches thrown to him his first year were changeups, now only 6% are. The average velocity of fastball he's seeing has not changed, from 93.6 in 2014 to 93.5 this year, he's just gotten worse against them. To say it a different way, this is the equivalent of him having a 131 RC+ against fastballs in 2014 and a 101 RC+ against them now. This stands out enough that it's made me change my mind. Last offseason after his performance I was willing to extend him for several years, but seeing these numbers yesterday - he's gradually dropped from a great hitter to a replacement level hitter against fastballs. If I would have extended him, that would have been a $50 million+ mistake. The only way he can stay a good hitter if he can't catch up to the fastball is to get gradually better against every other pitch, and there's no sign he can do that. Unless this career long trend is turned around, and as of 2018 it has not, in a year or two he will no longer be a useful big league hitter, and choosing not to offer him a contract extension was a good move.

As long as you never, ever, ever say again that "Maybe this guy not named Frank Thomas had the best hitting stretch in White Sox history" we will have accomplished something today. (Shoeless joe was also better).

So, interestingly, I did find one thing in Abreu's stats that has clearly trended down year after year and is consistent with him actually showing an age-related decline. Here's his runs above average against 4 seam fastballs year after year: 2014: 21.6 2015: 18.4 2016: 12.4 2017: 6.2 2018: 0.4 His other performance, outside of that consistent decline, has been up and down on various pitches. In 2016 he struggled against Sliders, in 2017 he was the best in his career against sliders and changeups and splitfinger pitches, against those offspeed pitches he's gone back to doing things within the range of what he's done every other year. He's a little weak on sliders, but was worse against them in 2016. Basically though, the reason he's struggling abnormally so far is that he's getting worse against fastballs year by year.

And then you said maybe the best, which tells me that you never watched Frank Thomas, because no one who watched Frank Thomas would ever say that even with a maybe.

LOL of course he's running he's already declared himself to be a candidate and he has an entire country willing to commit crimes on US Soil to support him, and they've used the Supreme Court and state governments to make it extremely difficult for people who might vote against him to actually do so.

No I don't particularly want another depression, the last one was not particularly fun. However, a recently passed law once again deregulating the banking industry should help make sure we have another collapse soon enough.

Dude, you never watched Frank Thomas did you? Seriously.

At everything he cares about, yes, because everything he cares about makes this country a worse place.