I'm not sure what Abreu's underlying metrics looked like for all of his slow starts in Chicago, but he's definitely trending the wrong way.

You'd think a team like Houston would get him to stop swinging at garbage and increase his power, not the other way around. 

17 minutes ago, chw42 said:

I'm not sure what Abreu's underlying metrics looked like for all of his slow starts in Chicago, but he's definitely trending the wrong way.

You'd think a team like Houston would get him to stop swinging at garbage and increase his power, not the other way around. 

Yet some here still think Sox should have handed him 3/$60M.  Woof

30 minutes ago, chw42 said:

I'm not sure what Abreu's underlying metrics looked like for all of his slow starts in Chicago, but he's definitely trending the wrong way.

You'd think a team like Houston would get him to stop swinging at garbage and increase his power, not the other way around. 

Now we learn if April Abreu was a weather thing or not.

2 hours ago, ChiSox59 said:

Yet some here still think Sox should have handed him 3/$60M.  Woof

I think it was time to move on, but coming to conclusions hes done after 30 or 40 ABs is crazy. 

2 hours ago, ChiSox59 said:

Yet some here still think Sox should have handed him 3/$60M.  Woof

Only dingbats

6 minutes ago, Dick Allen said:

I think it was time to move on, but coming to conclusions hes done after 30 or 40 ABs is crazy. 

I don't think he's done.  I don't think he is worth 3/$60M, nor would that have been anything close to a wise use of resources for a team with plenty of 1B/DH types. 

Abreu always had stretches where he looked very bad at the plate. 

" The numbers that stabilize quickly" is doing an unacceptable amount of work in this tweet. Rather than asserting that, we can readily look at his historic monthly numbers. All of these will be month by month, combining his performance against all pitches - he's had basically 1/2 of a month this year, and that shows up as a point at the end. Showing monthly performance is important because it lets us see the scatter in his historic performance. 

This is a good one to start with, because we see that his barrel rate is quite low right now, although not the true lowest of his career. However, we also see that he commonly bounces between 5 and 15%, with a high of 20%, so a single 2 week period at 2.5% is low, but the range is so large that the difference between 2.5% and 5% isn't certainly predictive.

Here is the next one, Exit Velocity. Obviously this is actually down, again it's the second lowest of his career. But, monthly totals varied last year by almost 6 mph, and his best highest exit velocity was associated with his slow start. This is concerning but there's a lot of variation again.

Is Jose Abreu suddenly failing to swing at pitches in the zone? It's slightly low, but it's not unreasonably low compared to his career.

Is he chasing more than normal?  His chase rate is higher than his career average, but it's no higher than in any random month throughout his career. Thus, is the phrase "He's swinging at a lot more junk" accurate and well supported, on the grounds that his numbers these first 2 weeks are higher than his career mark? It may be true that it has ticked up relative to his career mark, but it's totally within the realm of monthly performance in recent years.

Here is something that is abnormal. When he is swinging outside the zone, he is making less contact. This is about the only one where I would say his performance is extreme relative to any other month of his career. But, again, the variation helps here - remember this is 2 weeks of performance, so you'd expect that the variance over 2 weeks would be larger than the monthly variance. 

Abreu is making less contact than last year on average, but he's making more contact than May of 2021, for example. Here's another case where comparing his 1 month performance to the average over last year is missing the variation he showed last year.

There might be something to him making a little less contact, and perhaps some of the other things such as his low exit velocity stay put and wind up mattering to him. But given the monthly variance, the claim made in that tweet is stretching the data beyond the breaking point, it isn't fair to draw that conclusion from the measurements we have so far. 

 

On 11/30/2022 at 2:38 PM, ShoeLessRob said:

It was unfortunately the right decision with the way this terrible roster is constructed IF they address the OF. But the fact that they DID make an offer to him already knowing how strapped for cash and the roster construction makes me believe the FO still doesn’t know what the f*** They are doing. 

They let our best hitter and clubhouse leader and possibly (?) the cog that drives the Cuban Pipeline to Chicago go to a team that has absolutely crushed us in recent years

yes he's older, he's slower, and based on fWAR (especially last year) not worth 20/yr but imo he's gonna bounce back and have a great year in Houston, his early numbers aren't concerning at all to me.  I'd rather have Abreu at DH than a guy who plays 100 games a year.