I remember a time, many years ago, when the word value wasn't used in what seems like every other sentence in a conversation about baseball- be it on radio or message boards.

Contracts to star players have been skyrocketing it seems, and so this stuff becomes even more important.

 

It's almost like you have 2 payrolls, a $$$ payroll and an on-field player performance value or payroll. I'm not all waist deep in the stats but I bet if you took the combined fWAR or bWAR (I don't even know what those things are or which one is better) of the players on every team and ranked those teams 1-30 and then put a $$$ figure on that WAR figure that would representative of the FA value of a 'win' then I bet you'd have a lot of low $$$ payroll teams with high talent payrolls and a lot of high dollar payroll teams with lesser talent payrolls.

 

I don't know if that makes any sense but it does to me. We have whatever $$$ payroll figure our ownership is going to give us and we need to win with it no matter what. But let's say we want to be a contender and we want to build a team with a total player performance value roughly akin to the FA market value of a $140M payroll, then the gap between that $140M talent payroll and the $90-100M or whatever we're going to get has to be bridged somehow and really the best way to do that is in pre-arb guys, extensions that are team friendly, etc. and so that's why all this stuff matters.

blah blah blah, it's annoying to have a great pitcher that your team never wins when he pitches for some bizarre and sustained reason. It be nice to be like "oh, Q's pitching, automatic win". Instead it's "oh, Q's pitching, we'll lose 2-1".

This is what happened to Buehrle over and over again, especially against Oakland it seems. So often he'd go up against that 3-headed monster & the Sox would just tuck on him. Ugh.

 

 

Maybe not but when league average is 10.6% and his first two years were 10.5% and 10.2% I think it's probably safe to say 5.4% is the outlier.

 

Same with Chris Sale, his HR/FB has been 11.1%, 10.9%, 11.6%, 12.5% and this year it's 6.2%. That should rise.

 

xFIP uses normalized HR/FB rates and his xFIP is 3.29, good for #23rd in MLB. No matter how you slice it, Q is one of the best pitchers in the game, a guy you could squint hard enough and see as an ace but that slots perfectly in as your #2 in a tough playoff series.

 

The Sox could very well have the best 1,2,3 punch in MLB rotation wise in 2016.

xFIP uses normalized HR/FB rates and his xFIP is 3.29, good for #23rd in MLB. No matter how you slice it, Q is one of the best pitchers in the game, a guy you could squint hard enough and see as an ace but that slots perfectly in as your #2 in a tough playoff series.

 

The Sox could very well have the best 1,2,3 punch in MLB rotation wise in 2016.

I think I like SIERA the most and his is 3.48, but yeah, Q is great whatever you look at.