witesoxfan

I'm glad you brought this up, and I will comment seriously on this later, but initially, I just want to add YEAH JEETS YEAH JEETS

QUOTE (raBBit @ Feb 18, 2014 -> 03:59 PM) DFA Dunn. De Aza DH and clean up hitter. Haters gonna hate.

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Feb 18, 2014 -> 03:56 PM) I'm not sure Gillaspie is much better than Ishikawa or Lambo. I wouldn't give up anything of value for Gillaspie if I'm the Pirates. I don't know why they wouldn't just try Lambo in the first place. He was a pretty damn good power hitter the past couple years in the minors.

It's a tidbit worth mentioning though. Discussion around here is still down because it's like the 4th day of Spring Training. Even if it's Phil, who I think is full of crap 99% of the time, it's worth asking - is there going to be a catcher who will become available that the Sox can trade for this spring? They certainly aren't going to sign one of the remaining players and make them an every day starter, but none of Flowers, Phegley, nor Nieto inspire a lot of confidence. I'd personally go with what they have, but if they can find someone available that's worth it for a guy like De Aza or Gillaspie, I have no problem with said move.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 18, 2014 -> 02:44 PM) Phil Rogers speculated the White Sox primary catcher in 2014 is not yet with the team. While I think this is a distinct possibility, I would say that the best odds lay in the Sox 2014 starting catcher already being with the team. It's a very fluid situation at this point in time.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Feb 18, 2014 -> 02:12 PM) Sort of surprised Castro hasn't signed anywhere yet. Thought the Sox would pick him up. Given the rapid loss of velocity, I'm very curious to know if he wasn't dealing with shoulder injuries.

The point is that saying that Piazza was nothing without steroids because he was a 62nd round pick with nothing else to back it is is absolutely absurd, naive, and misinformed. It assumes far too much about Mike Piazza as a baseball player before using steroids. It does not happen as often, but guys come from all sorts of different backgrounds, and some of them are as undrafted free agents. I don't know what to think of Piazza as a player. I don't know how much of an impact steroids and other assorted PEDs had on his career. I do know that assuming the greatest hitting catcher of all time is absolutely nothing without steroids is wrong, as is assuming Canseco is nothing without steroids, even if it came from the horse's mouth himself.

Still, I think that point is valid. You can probably shift guys to the left side a bit with Cabrera because he does pull a few more balls, but he generally puts balls all over the field. Mauer sprays it even better. Without looking at relevant data (thus, going off what I've seen of Mauer), you may be able to play the shortstop straight up the middle with the 3B playing in the hole a bit where the SS normally plays, but then you're asking him to hit a gimme double down the line.

The stories behind Pizza indicate that he was a burly, slow kid who did not look the part of a big league player. Even looking back, you would just think that he was too big to play the game. For all we know, he may have continued working hard and put together a career as a big leaguer. I'm guessing the Tigers didn't draft Alex Avila totally based on his baseball experience but also because his father worked in the front office. Nepotism has always existed in baseball and, now and then, guys make it through. (this may not be directly nepotism, but the move was made based on the same exact sentimentality) My main problem with that logic is that it thus suggests that no undrafted player who was eligible for the draft should ever make it to the majors.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Feb 18, 2014 -> 12:10 PM) Jose Canseco said that himself in his book. Mike Piazza was drafted (in the 62nd round) because of his father. Canseco is probably using a bit of hyperbole there. Mark Buehrle was drafted in the 38th round, I don't see the point in that. Fact is, you can't say they would be nothing without steroids. All you can do is make a basic speculation, say they would probably be worse without, say we don't know how much worse, and leave it at that.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Feb 18, 2014 -> 11:07 AM) How good would Canseco and Mike Piazza be without steroids? Probably barely MLB caliber players if that. There is absolutely no way of knowing this.

QUOTE (Stan Bahnsen @ Feb 18, 2014 -> 10:51 AM) I've maintained that defense will be much better evaluated when all players' positions are accurately GPS'ed. Featherweight sensors that could be put in the belt area of the pants could easily be done with present technology, I believe. Would players' union have a beef with this? I would hope not. That type of information would be so helpful in determining a ton of things - how fast a player is, how well they takes routes to the ball, how well they run the bases. Seems like it would be a bit spendy, but nothing MLB couldn't handle.

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Feb 18, 2014 -> 10:16 AM) This is the most salient point. Thanks for giving me the chance to say "salient." Not a problem duderino! (that's a colloquialism I use for people, typically males, who I expect to be my age that I also share common beliefs with and generally have strong, positive feelings towards said person)

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 18, 2014 -> 09:18 AM) Not to mention NOT signing guys that don't really fit what you are trying to do. Every guy they targeted this off season fit an obvious need. If they missed, they didn't target a lesser guy in an attempt to make him fit somewhere he didn't What's going to be the most frustrating is when Santana and Jimenez inevitably have good seasons and the people in this thread point to that. That's never been the point. Curtis Granderson could have a good season and anybody pointing that out would get the same response from me - would it have been enough production over the player the Sox used instead to win a division title? If that answer is no, then the Sox made the right call both from the developmental standpoint, from the financial standpoint, and from a draft position standpoint. Considering most have the Sox pegged anywhere from 75-78 wins, odds are going to be very, very good that guys who have been 2-4 WAR pitchers for the majority of their careers aren't suddenly going to boost the Sox into the 90 win range, which is very likely what it's going to take to win the division. No, the most important years of those deals are going to be in 2015 and 2016 or so.

I stand by the idea that the White Sox had the best offseason of any team in the majors. I have some bias, but there are many others who believe they had a top 3 offseason. I wish the roster situation weren't so convoluted right now, but to that I actually credit Hahn for sticking to his guns rather than dealing guys just to get *something* for them.

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Feb 17, 2014 -> 03:50 PM) This is a good topic, because getting to the bottom of it underscores the effect of a strong or weak "start" to a season, which is something that we always end up discussing at some point in May. There are two components of this: 1. Circumstance. How does cold weather/death of a family member/fatigue/etc. modify the expected performance 2. Mathematical regression As far as I can tell, number 1 is a very real but very unmeasurable factor. We will just have to live with guessing it. The second point is, I think, what you're getting at. The fallacy of this concept is that people expect extremes to balance one another. So, the answer to your initial question about Jake Drake is the latter, that he'll end up somewhere in between. The simple way to look at it is this: If we know that a player's true talent is x, then the most likely output to expect at any given time is x. Jake is a true talent 125 wRC+ hitter. He starts cold though, and is only putting out 100 wRC+ throughout the first couple months. While it is definitely possible that he will swing back and hit at 150 wRC+ for a while to match his true talent, it is not the most likely outcome. The most likely outcome is that he regresses to his normal 125 wRC+ self and ends the season at 115 wRC+ or whatever. This is the value of stuff being "in the bank." You can apply the same principles to team wins. What is the true cost of a slow start? Team X is a true-talent 90 win team, and the look like they will need about 90 wins to get to the postseason. Team X starts slow though, going 10-20 over their first 30 games. From then on, it is reasonable to expect the 90 win team to regress to its true talent, which is a .555 winning percentage (90-72). Apply that percentage to the remaining 132 games, and you end up with an 83 win team instead. So the cost of that hole that Team X dug for themselves in April is that they now need to play 7 games BETTER than their true talent to reach their playoff goal of 90 wins. The fun in being a fan is, of course, hoping that your team gets hot and does something unlikely, defying the odds in your favor. This is always within the realm of possibility, but it's much less likely than it seems. Which is why we end up missing the playoffs more often than not, even when the team seems "better on paper" than it has played to a given point in the season. I can't disagree with any of this, and at some point, sample sizes make the idea of making up for what is essentially lost numbers either improbable or impossible. What I am kind of getting at is that, in the above scenario with Jake Drake, there are only 3 options: 1) Revert towards career norms for the rest of the season 2) Hit above so that the end result is similar to his career norms 3) Remain below career norms Dependent upon career tendencies and potential talent shifts (previous injuries, widened strike zone, better information on the player - again, pretty much anything can affect the talent of a player), #1 is to be expected, but, personally, I would say #2 is likelier to happen before #3. Again, this is all dependent upon any number of factors. If there's anything you want to add, I will let you, otherwise I'll hit on something this afternoon that I wanted to bring up following this discussion that people view here as meaningless. QUOTE (SI1020 @ Feb 17, 2014 -> 08:43 PM) Oh I have many questions but I'm down to my last baseball message board and would like to stay on this one. I have a long love affair with data going back to early childhood. I've read Bill James since before the Total Baseball Days. I have so many problems with sabermetrics I'd hardly know where to begin. You know if you are good at arithmetic it is relatively easy to compute BA, FA, ERA, winning Pct. etc and etc. You can argue what it means or how valid each stat is but there is no alchemic formula to it. Not so with WAR and all the variations that are constantly readjusted according to I'm just not sure what. It's not going to go away. I expect that someday in the maybe not too distant future baseball awards will be given on the basis of the latest computation of WAR. I wouldn't even be surprised if the standings are adjusted to be in perfect harmony with Pythagorean wins. The Indians are 2005 world champs. It's not that I'm a hidebound old fart who resists every change in life. I am alive to today because of a surgery first initiated in the 1970s and perfected when I needed it 14 years ago this month. So no, I'm hardly against change and innovation. I even would have voted for King Felix the year he won his Cy Young Award, and probably would have voted for Mike Trout for MVP this past season. I know its not good enough. Like religion you're either a believer or a blashphemer. I was going to leave this alone but I've read and reread the thread and like I said I've actually studied this. The idea of sabermetrics is not to create an end all, be all. It's primarily there to help us better understand the game and what makes a player good. The concept of WAR is not new or all that crazy. It's merely trying to put a numeric value on the contributions of a player compared to his peers. We've been doing that for 150 years, but we now have more complete information about what makes a player good compared to what we had in 1930 or 1960 or 1990. The data is incomplete and it's still flawed, as there are conflicting opinions on how to value both pitching contributions - baseball-reference uses what a player does on the field, which includes both luck and fielding contributions, which may ultimately be out of the pitcher's control, while FanGraphs uses fielding independent statistics, which does not account for all of the runs a pitcher gives up but just the runs a pitcher should have given up in a neutral context - as well as fielding contributions, which are flawed to begin with because it takes 3 years to establish a significant sample size, and by that time the player's fielding talent has likely changed. Neither bWAR or fWAR is wrong to use, but "junkies" will typically relate to fWAR on a much more consistent basis because it better represents the talent of a player and is a better predictor of production moving forward. At the end of the day, games will not be decided by Pyth W-L. It will ALWAYS be about the number of games you win on the field. Games aren't played on paper, but the inferences we can make from the information provided by the play on the field will help us to better understand both the value and significance of plays on the field. I look back to a game back in 2010 between the Padres and the Cubs in which Chris Young was starting. He was credited with the winning percentage added (wPA) of two plays that, in the box score, look very unimportant but which in reality were incredible plays made by Will Venable to save at least one home run and maybe two. Here is the link to the article. Shouldn't Venable be credited with plays towards the win there? And if a player makes an error in a crucial spot, shouldn't that be deducted from their total winning percentage added? It's something that, like I said, I'm sure they either have and/or continue to work towards implementing, but it takes time to determine this information. Just as the rules of sports are constantly evolving to adapt to current societal standards, so are the numbers we use to interpret the game we love.

An important topic of discussion that I don't think was brought up here as much as it should have was regression. I briefly mentioned the concept of regression earlier in the thread, but ultimately what does it mean? I think people get confused about the term regression because they assume it means "getting worse." That's not the case at all. Players regress toward their expected means all the time - Adam Dunn is a perfect example of that over the past 2 years. In 2011, he had one of the worst seasons of all time but people didn't worry because they expected him to regress in 2012, and he did just that. His overall numbers were a little worse last year, but I still expect him to be around a .775-800 OPS overall, and perhaps better than that if he is used exclusively against right handed pitching. What always confused me when I was initially learning about sabermetrics was the concept of this. Jake Drake is a .320/.380/.520 hitter in a neutral playing field, which is an incredibly good hitter, better than a 150+ wRC+. However, after May 31st, Jake is hitting only .280/.340/.460, still good overall but maybe closer to a 120-130 wRC+ hitter, a good player but not nearly as good. The question remains: what should we expect from him the rest of the way, for him to work towards his overall career averages of .320/.380/.520 or to hit closer towards his career averages of .320/.380/.520, thus perhaps nearing him towards some kind of middle ground (say a final line of .300/.360/.490)? And simply, the answer is: both. The point of regression is that there is some central production patterns that you've put up over the course of your career that we should expect out of you. At the same time, because of this production pattern Drake has established, we should also expect that he work back towards that overall line, so seeing him hit .340/.400/.550 the rest of the way will not be surprising either. The only thing theory dictates that we should not expect is for him to hit worse. Now, given other circumstances and the volatility of human nature, it's also perfectly reasonable for him to underperform. That .280/.340/.460 may ultimately represent his final line for the season. Depending upon other factors - age, development of bad habits, bad luck on the field, or anything else you can think of - it may be possible that we have a new expected overall talent for Jake Drake, or it may be that we expect him to hit closer to his previous career averages of .320/.380/.520, or perhaps it's somewhere in between at this point in time. The only thing that regression suggests is getting worse over time is the overall line, because conventional wisdom dictates that talent grows lesser over time. I want to see what you have to add to it, but the ultimate reason I wanted to go over this was to show the importance of what I'd like to talk about next, and that's projection based systems, how they come up with their numbers, and why they are NOT meaningless.

QUOTE (Marty34 @ Feb 17, 2014 -> 10:31 AM) I've found that when posters on Soxtalk think an idea is bad it's usually not. You're a running joke among soxtalk posters at this point, so typically, anything you think is a good idea is usually a bad idea.

Honestly, I would prefer the Sox sign Jimenez or Santana over this, and I've argued extensively against signing them.

QUOTE (Marty34 @ Feb 14, 2014 -> 05:59 PM) If he turns into the pitching version of Dunn he does little harm to the rebuild. Is Adam Dunn hurting the rebuild right now? I know a certain someone that would say "Yes, yes, a thousand times yes."

QUOTE (Marty34 @ Feb 14, 2014 -> 05:45 PM) So what. You're a great soldier for this outfit. You believe them when they tell you they can't afford a $36M player if they turn out awful. No one has ever said they can't afford it, just that they don't need it and that they aren't giving up a draft pick to sign a player and that he's a bad fit on this team and that people are talking about Ervin Santana in a best case scenario kind of way as a trade chip two years from now. If they said they couldn't afford him, you're right, I wouldn't believe them. I believe they are being cost conscious with their money.

Enough.

That almost happened with them and Chris Paul.

Bucket mentioned Ackley for Viciedo was being offered by Jack Z this offseason, and Hahn countered with Franklin for Viciedo. Nothing came of either.

That is like my favorite picture of me ever.