Eminor3rd

Time will tell. Alen Hansen has hit better this season. The point is that the Braves are in a pennant race, have been getting ~100 wRC+ out of a bench OF bat, felt like they needed an upgrade, and traded that bench bat plus two pitching prospects for a bat that's hitting significantly worse. And it's not a prospect, it's a 30 year old dude who hasn't hit well for a couple years. It's a strange move in context.

Hang in there, Brad. It'll get better.

It just seems like a steep price to pay for a marginal (if any) upgrade. I wonder if it was as much about a 40-man crunch as anything else, as both pitchers have been around a while.

WAR is a counting stat, and Duvall has more playing time. It's the reason I chose a rate stat to use. Good attempt at sarcasm, but you should probably learn more about what you're talking about first.

Duvall has an 82 wRC+. Tucker has a 101 wRC+.

From a game theory perspective, the answer is yes. From a morality perspective, it's different for everyone. I would never try to acquire someone assuming I could extend him, however.

You use subjectivity when you have no choice -- when the data available is incomplete or insufficient. Unfortuntaly, ithe data with prospects is frequently incomplete or insufficient.

Randoms for randoms

The confusion comes from the fact that, like many things, the argument has been taken out of the proper context more often than not. Back in the early 2000's there was a lot of "you can't hang in the majors if you strike out x much." Then, the counter-argument appeared from your saber-forward teams, which was "if you get on base enough and hit for enough power, we don't care how much you strike out." As they do, mainstream media then stripped all nuance from the conversation and boiled it down to a ridiculous polar stance that is uttered most often. "K is just another out" never made any sense without the qualifiers that were originally attached to it. But, as is often the case, no one in the game was actually ever arguing for it that way.

Torres is already producing at the major league level. There's no argument at all that Jimenez is an equivalent asset.

These are high-variance guys, but this is an absolute fantastic outcome to the Soria signing. This went about as well as it could have gone.

Medeiros is a very interesting post-hype sleeper.

I bet it'll be Shields. I imagine he goes during August.

Yeah guys, I'm with ss2k5 on this one -- you guys are expecting a lot for Soria. I hope you're right, but front offices know just as well as we do that relievers can look fantastic over 30 inning stints and completely fall of a cliff at any moment.

I got to see a lot of both Perez and Acevedo when I worked for Staten Island. Acevedo as long been a favorite of mine -- three pitches, upper-90's gas, and while he has always been said to have some control problems, they never really led to too many walks until recently. Never really struggled at all, really, until he got to AAA last year, and that was only a 12 inning sample. He's been pegged as a reliever since day one, but I don't know why.

No fit, unfortunately.

Yes, the author of that paragraph does not know what a slider is.

Agreed -- all these sound steeper than what I'd think was reasonable. I guess that's the beauty of a bidding war.

Ben Lively looks much better, at least against IL hitters. I don't know if it's a deception thing, but he seems to keep hitters consistently off balance with his fastball. Jake Thompson nibbles a lot, walks guys, and then gets lit up when he has to come back to the zone. Mark Appel was the same way.

I work for the Philles' AAA affiliate. I've seen a lot of Jake Thompson. We don't want Jake Thompson.

We know

Right -- I agree with all of that. The point is just that the fact alone that you see guys who can't learn to recognize pitches is not sufficient evidence that the coaches aren't telling those guys how to see pitches. All the stuff you mentioned, while critically important, isn't exactly rocket science -- any hitting coach at any professional level should teaching that kind of stuff. If they are doing so, and the hitter either won't listen or still can't do it, then no coach is going to be able to help. I think it's safer to assume that Steverson knows to teach players tricks for recognizing pitches than it is to assume he can't or won't. For guys who we see just continue to fail at it, I think it's tough to argue that a different coach would make the difference. There are exceptions, of course.

The ability for your brain to process visual information quickly enough to be an effective hitter is NOT coachable. You can tell a player what to look for, and you can help him improve his load and swing mechanics to give him the most time to get it done, but if he can't do it, he just can't do it. And any coach that isn't telling guys how to do those two things wouldn't make it to the MLB in the first place.

Also, while plate discipline CAN be a product of patience and approach, it can also simply be an inability to recognize pitches quickly enough, which no amounting of coaching can fix.

Are you a real person