Eminor3rd

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 23, 2018 -> 05:30 PM) Again you are the throwing out 5 years $60 million. I think 4/48 would be closer to reality. But present day value of having to pay someone even 60 million over the next 5 years is nowhere close to 50% more than having to pay someone 43 million over he next 2. Moustakas becomes an asset that can play a couple o other AL positions, and can also be traded. Something you purposely ignored. Machado wanted to move to SS. How do you even know he would play 3b for the White Sox? Oh so you're operating on an entirely different assumption of his "likely" contract than anyone else involved in the conversation has been using, but haven't found the time to mention that until now. And your assumption has him, for some unknown reason, agreeing to be paid like a bench player for FOUR YEARS. And I'm the one being purposely deceptive with my numbers.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 23, 2018 -> 04:08 PM) Your arguments in this thread have been so purposely misleading just because you don't like Moustakas. Don't worry the Sox aren't going to sign him, but paying someone $60 million over 5 years, and I doubt the Sox would give him 5 years, probably 4 at most, (considering Heyman said all he has is several one year offers) and paying someone $43 million this year and next, is, in reality, a lot closer than the 50% difference you are exaggerating again. Lol, so you're going to stick with the argument that the years don't matter at all, and that 60 million dollars isn't meaningfully more than 43 million dollars? And that absorbing Kemp to get a prospect is the same deterrent to Machado as signing Moustakas to be our third basemen?

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 23, 2018 -> 01:33 PM) Yes. There is always DH, 1B for Moustakas. SS for Machado. You could even trade Moustakas. The money between taking Kemp and signing Moustakas, is probably very similar. 1) It's not similar at all -- Kemp is owed $43m over two years. And more specifically, two years where the payroll will be very low. Even if Moustakas signs for 5yr at $12mm, (which is the most optimistic guess people have been making on this thread, and almost certainly too low if he signs that long of a deal) that's $60mm, which is just shy of 50% more money. And remember, that's a LOW estimate. Also, 60% of that money is distributed after Kemp;s money would be off the books, which just happens to correspond most directly with our projected contention window. 2) Any argument of Moustakas being good enough to build around 2-5 years from now goes completely out the window if he isn't a viable third baseman. You can quibble with PA cutoffs on a list of third basemen last year all you want, but his current level of production is flat-out not acceptable at 1B/DH, and ESPECIALLY not as he moves into his 30's and declines.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 23, 2018 -> 10:14 AM) Theoretically. But if you're paying Matt Kemp $23 million this year and next, do you really think Manny Machado is a possiblity? The facts are, it doesn't add up. Kemp alone will be paid not too much less than Moustakas will ultimately sign for. So if trading for Matt Kemp wasn't going to prevent the White Sox from spending a ton in free agency, neither will signing Moustakas, and you have a back up plan already in place, just in case the $300 million + man, and the $150 million + middle 30s man somehow defy all logic and odds and don't choose the White Sox. What? Matt Kemp's deal is two years, and he is an OF who won't even necessarily demand playing time. The hypothetical being used through this entire thread is that Moustakas would come on a 4-5 year deal, and he plays the SAME POSITION as Machado. How can you possibly think that has the same effect? You seriously think the White Sox wouldn't give Machado a ten year deal because they'd have to carry Kemp's dead money in year one? You seriously think the White Sox having $12-15mm committed to third base already for 5 years WOULDN'T affect their willingness to get Machado?

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 23, 2018 -> 12:06 PM) using eminors round down the WAR system, CarGo hasn't been above average since 2013. lol you are an absolute treat.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Feb 23, 2018 -> 10:10 AM) [/b] This is a couple of years out of date...at that point we were 12th in MLB. https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/estimated-t...l-30-mlb-teams/ We keep talking about low ratings (see Astros 2012-14), but we share significant revenues due to the Cubs, Bulls, Blackhawks...so we need to do whatever is possible between now and mid 2019 to push that $50 million up to $100 million. These new deals have all been 20+ years, so it’s the single most critical factor for long term franchise stability/viability. Mariners, no playoffs, $2 billion, 20 years (signed Cano, Cruz, Hernandez extension) Rangers, $1.6 billion, 20 years Phillies, 25-year deal and the Philadelphia Inquirer reported it is worth more than $2.5 billion, with the Phillies also acquiring an equity stake in the network, plus receiving advertising revenue. The Mariners New TV Deal Gives Added Flexibility, But Will They Use It? The Mariners get a new lucrative TV deal before the bubble bursts. The question is, with no stadium/corporate franchise debt, how will they use it? https://www.lookoutlanding.com/2013/4/19/42...ctv-maury-brown It doesn't matter how much the Sox are ultimately willing to spend -- the point is that there's a limit. And if there's a limit, then it behooves us to spend our resources wisely.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 23, 2018 -> 09:59 AM) RE: Money. Why, as I have read on these boards, do the Sox have money to trade for Matt Kemp if a prospect comes along, have money to trade for Corey Dickerson to DH, have money to sign Manny Machado or Josh Donaldson. But if they sign Mike Moustakas to a team friendly contract, they have pretty much used all of their capital, and are screwed moving forward? The difference is that Matt Kemp's money only covers two years and would purchase a sub-market asset with 6 years of control. It would be spending money now to save money in the future.

QUOTE (bmags @ Feb 23, 2018 -> 09:37 AM) What do you mean by Rosenthals on the DL? He's behind a paywall at the moment.

QUOTE (Lillian @ Feb 23, 2018 -> 09:09 AM) To be more precise; I would prefer the left handed bat at $12 Million, for 5 years, to the Super Star right handed hitter, at $35 Million, for 10 years. That preference stems from the fact that we already have several potential Super Stars, and all but one of them, hit right handed. If you take the money out of the equation, of course I would prefer Machado, to Moustakas. I think one of the under-posted arguments to NOT settling for a guy like Moustakas is in the bolded of your post above. A bunch of these guys ARE going to flame out. More than likely, when we find ourselves on the fringes of contention, we will have a couple big holes to fill, and the math that you just described may very well apply. It may make a ton of sense to fill those holes with "just solid" players if we already have superstars elsewhere. The problem with doing that NOW is that we don't know which guys are going to be the busts and thus which spots we need to fill, so we'd be forced to guess. There is value in the flexibility of holding our money back until we can spend it in the most optimal way.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 07:35 PM) All the guys who were not full time players. You ignored if they played 15 games or 150.you ignored if they sat vs. LHP or RHP. You ignored if they were September call ups, or just some player that had a hot week. And you took these guys and made a blanket statement that they were better hitters. These are things you wouldn’t ingnore nomally. Dude, that is NOT related to the conversation I'm having with Lillian. It's just not. I have already agreed that the sample on my table ten pages ago should have been higher. I don't know what you're arguing. I have agreed with you on that point. EDIT: Also, I'm saying we SHOULD include September call-ups. Like, for example, would you agree that Rhys Hoskins should be on that table? My error was that I wasn't thinking about the right number of PA. Hoskins had like 200 PA or something, for whatever reason I was thinking of one month of PA as much smaller than that. I wasn't willfully hiding information, I just made a bad estimate. And I stated in every post about it what my minimum was. And even if I WAS trying to be deceptive, it still wouldn't be the same thing as Jose Abreu was suggesting in the Lillian conversation, which was the whole point originally.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 07:20 PM) It you did ignore playing time. By definition you used part time players to make is performance less impressive. The White Sox aren’t going to sign the guy unless it’s for dirt cheap anyway. But he is a pretty good player. Whose playing time did I ignore?

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 06:59 PM) But they are because you were using players that didn’t play a whole season, and platoon guys whose numbers would certainly go down if they played every day. Yet you claimed they were better than Moustakas. Trance Thompson put up a 146wRC+ in 2015. Was he really better than big Papi, Rizzo, Bryant , McCutchen, Machado..... If you use those guys, it could only make Moustakas look worse because you were just looking for guys that did better. Far more did worse. Again, that's not at all related to the post we're talking about, which is based on ignoring certain portions of a sample. I didn't ignore any part of any sample. So Jose Abreu's claim that it was ironic makes no sense. Regarding what you're talking about: I think you're right that 50 is far too low. I didn't put a lot of thought into it. The correct number is probably more like 100-150 PA. It's important to include mid and late season callups/breakouts. That probably bring Moustakas just into the top 100. Generally, I think my point still stands: I don't think he is (or has recently been) as good a hitter as people think, because while hits hits homeruns, he does everything else poorly. So his overall production last year really wasn't high enough to (IMO) justify the risk against his aging curve to sign him.

QUOTE (Chicago White Sox @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 06:31 PM) I’ve got great respect for you Lillian so please don’t take this the wrong way, but do you realize how variable & random baseball actually is? Every player is going to have good months & bad months. Occasionally a bad month could indicate an injury or something, but 95% of the time it’s just normal variation. You are really overthinking it here or are simply looking for a reason to justify a move you want to happen. In Lillian's defense here, I think it certainly IS possible for Moustakas' performance variance to have been a result of an injury. And IF that's true, Lillian is probably onto something. However, in order to make that case, Lillian would have to provide evidence for that injury and show that his numbers were more consistent in non-injured years. Lillian, in case you're reading this: it's not that what you're observing COULDN'T be something predictive, it's just that its existence alone isn't enough to make the case that it's predictive. If you look at a lot of random players' month-by-month splits, you'll find a lot of instances of notable inconsistency, of which the vast majority cannot be explained by injury. It just turns out that players' performance over the course of a season happens to be more consistent than it seems to us fans.

QUOTE (Lillian @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 06:04 PM) Regarding this argument that it is not meaningful to evaluate stats, if any portion is excluded: When you have consistent statistical data, with a short period, which is significantly divergent, I think that it's fair to consider that data as an aberration. It's a long season. If a hitter hit .300 every month, but one, in which he hit .200, what would you conclude? Going forward, would you anticipate that he would hit around .300 .200, or the average of his entire season? I would interpret that data as indicative of a .300 hitter, who had a really bad month. The question then becomes, what caused that aberration? Was he hurt, or was it attributed to something else? To put it another way, I would take that good production in 5 of the 6 months, and hope that the rest of the team could pick up the slack, during that one bad month, if it should recur. The more consistent the production, and the greater the divergence of the one exception, the less significance one could reasonably attach to that aberration. Just to add to Tony's reply, which I agree with completely -- the bad month is naturally proportionately included in the full season total. So if the question is: "what is a guy who hits .300 for five months of every season and hits .200 one month of every season?" The most accurate and useful answer would be "he is a .283 hitter." If you answered, "He is a .300 hitter who has one bad month every year," you'd also be correct in a sense, but that answer is less precise and would distort the perception of his overall value, relative to the answer above. Because at the end of the day, the value you receive from the guy for a season is .283 production.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 03:57 PM) The point being 50 PA is not something you would use to conclude like you did with Moustakas. 10 or 12 bad or unlucky PA would drop those numbers quickly. That's not what I did with Moustakas, though. It's fair to say that 50 PA is too low a cutoff for that list (and after thinking about it a bit, I think I agree that I probably should have used something closer to 100 or even 150), but that's not even related to the idea of arbitrarily lopping off parts of a given sample based on time. That would be like if I chose Moustakas' 50 worst plate appearances to judge him. That's not at all the same thing as setting 50 PA as a cut off to make an ordinal ranking of hitters in 2017 by wRC+.

QUOTE (Jose Abreu @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 12:30 PM) While I agree with this post, I do find it ironic that you say this, yet have been using 50 plate appearances as a minimum for stats throughout this thread. Those 50 PA are even less significant than month to month, half to half, etc. I'm not following you here -- the post you just quoted is implying absolutely nothing related to the significance of a sample size.

QUOTE (Lillian @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 09:27 AM) Try doing that with Todd Frazier, since coming to the A. L. Last year's monthly batting averages: .183 .185 .261 .192 .221 .225. Which month would you like to take out? His one month of statistical aberration is the .261, not the 5 other months, hovering around the "Mendoza line". QUOTE (Tony @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 09:42 AM) The answer is: You would take out no months, because they all actually happened and you need to use as much information as possible to evaluate a player. Right, this ^ What's the magic in month to month? Why not week to week? Half to half? Moving the endpoints around may make the numbers different, but they all add up to the same thing in the end. All that tells us is that Frazier's performance is more evenly distributed than Moustakas', but the whole performance still happened and still affected wins and losses the same way. The answer is to look at the whole season. and judge accordingly.

QUOTE (Lillian @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 09:27 AM) Try doing that with Todd Frazier, since coming to the A. L. What am I looking for?

QUOTE (JUSTgottaBELIEVE @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 07:40 AM) Actually that’s a great point about Dyson. If WAR was the end all, be all, he would have signed for a lot more than 2 years $7.5M It's been well established that the free agent market doesn't pay the same rates for defensive production as it does for offensive production. Whether that's evidence that the way we measure defense is wrong, evidence that front offices aren't valuing defense properly, or more evidence that agents are behind the curve when selling their clients depends upon your personal perspective.

QUOTE (Lillian @ Feb 22, 2018 -> 08:22 AM) I have always found it useful to look at each month's production, in order to attempt to better assess a player's performance. For example; a hitter might be very productive, with the exception of one very bad month. Whether due to injury, extremely tough pitching, bad luck, or just a plain old slump, that month could significantly affect his overall season stats. Looking at Moustakas' month by month production, over the last 3 seasons, will reveal a pretty consistently good hitter, with power and a relatively low strike out rate. Take 2015, for example; Here are his month, by month AVG's: .356 .282 .299 .188 .281 .291. If you throw out that .188 in July, he was a pretty solid hitter. 2016 was a lost season, due to injury. However, he was fine, for the brief time that he played. So, looking at all of 2015 and last year, and taking out his worst month, in each of those years, his stats are generally pretty good. They aren't overwhelming, but they are good enough to represent a left handed presence, sandwiched somewhere between the heavily weighted right handed, middle of the order hitters. I hope that clarifies my point. Every player looks good if you remove all the times when they are bad.

QUOTE (JUSTgottaBELIEVE @ Feb 21, 2018 -> 03:20 PM) They aren’t “scrambling to sign” him. The whole premise of this debate is that he is available at a discounted rate. And by discounted, I mean 5 years/$60MM. In that case, yes, I would consider signing him now at age 29 even if he doesn’t perfectly align with the Sox forecasted competitive window. I just don't see any reason for him to sign for that low AND that long. If it's that much of a steal, I could be comfortable with it, there's just no reason for him to do it. If he ends up having to settle for $12mm/yr, it'll be for 1-2 years. But yeah man, I don't even know if we're really on other sides of this fence if that's the price you have in mind.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 21, 2018 -> 02:58 PM) That's where I am getting it. Steamer actually has him at 2.6 not that it matters much, but he played in 27 games in 2016 and put up a 0.7. So if he played a full season, he was well on his way to well above average then. Was well above average in 2015, and after missing a lot time he came back last year and was above average. In fact, only 9 MLB 3B had a higher wRC+ than he did. I believe defensively he can bounce back. He wasn't horrible, but wasn't great. Many think another year away from his surgery will improve his defense, which will only make his WAR rise. If you have reason to believe his defense will improve, it could certainly change the math substantially. In terms of the numbers, his defensive decline looks really natural, so without any outside info (like an injury) it looks like normal decline. But if it's true that he was working back from a non-chronic injury and he will be an above average defender going forward, it's much easier to argue for acquiring him.

QUOTE (JUSTgottaBELIEVE @ Feb 21, 2018 -> 04:16 PM) And yet many want to sign guys like Donaldson (who is 3 years older and not a FA until next offseason) or Harper/Machado to a 10 year contract? I'm not advocating for signing Donaldson, but all of the players you mentioned are WAY better than Moustakas, so they have much more room to get worse before they get to be a problem.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 21, 2018 -> 03:49 PM) Aging curves aren't always accurate. I bet you wouldn't have had Jose Abreu putting up the numbers he put up and a 4.1 WAR last year. He was a below average player. Now people want him to sign an extension. Correct, but they ARE accurate most of the time. They are the most likely thing to occur. Even if you acknowledge the possibility that he could buck the trend (I do), it can't be EXPECTED.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 21, 2018 -> 03:45 PM) That is still top 3 on average per team. Ok, now apply aging curves for two to four seasons in the future.