Moose Milligan

What you think you’re special or something

Great lineup, no issues. I hope they tee off on Marsh.

ROY STARTED A THREAD IN THE MINORS FORUM WHAT IS GOING ON

Ugh.

Won't be interesting with O'Hearn on the bench and Hays in the lineup to face the lefty.

Gunnar, Adley, Holliday. 50/50 on Burnes. Gunnar because he's the best player, probably the most valuable. Adley #2 because things turned around here when he came up, he's probably the face of the franchise, and is growing into the undisputed leader of the team. I don't know if he has another level to unlock yet, but I also believe his importance to the team over the past two years can't be simply calculated in WAR and it won't be measurable moving forward by advanced stats. Holliday 3rd, and that's just because he's the newest. Arguably the most talented of the group. Burnes, like I said in the other thread, it just depends.

Obviously, the years/dollars matter in regard to Burnes. I can see where Burnes might be the next in line to lay claim to the Verlander/Scherzer crown as one of the preeminent power pitchers of his time...that is to say he goes through his 30s and comes out the other side as one of the top 5 pitchers in baseball for a decade or longer. He's been durable, he seems to prepare himself in the way that those guys do and I think he will last. Of course, it's not my money. I don't know how the new ownership group will approach free agency and quite frankly, I'm not sure if I really care at the moment. I'm sure I'll care in the offseason, though. I will say, I'd really like to see the new ownership spend to lock up the talent we already have before spending on free agency.

Yeah, but that's baseball. Sometimes you steal a game, sometimes a game gets stolen from you.

Yeah, Witt is great. He and Gunnar will be going head to head for AL SS supremacy for years with Volpe being a try-hard ankle biter along the way. Those others would start for us if we had availability. I like our guys though.

I'd of course prefer to see Means have good starts before getting promoted. But really, I just want to make sure the dude is healthy and ready to go and hopefully can last the rest of the season. I think he'll be solid if he can. That seems to be a big question and a lot to ask for, though. Means is a big wildcard for me right now, I can see his season going either way. But I'm not really reading too much into what stats he puts up in his rehab efforts.

Probably took a chunk out of Jeffrey Hammonds leg that year, no wonder JH couldn't stay healthy.

The Grienke start last year was excruciating. I agree, something needs to give here between our hot hitting and their good pitching. Marsh looks like that dude who can give us fits no matter how he's rolling. Ragans is a good pitcher no matter what. The Burnes/Ragans matchup looks to be a great duel. As annoying as KC can be, I am really looking forward to this series kicking off tonight because it's good competition.

I called them the Fighting Bob Hamelins, and I always think about Bob Hamelin for some reason when we play the Royals. You probably won't be interested to know that Hamelin won the 1994 AL ROY award during the strike shortened season. He then went on to have a pretty unremarkable career. But then I wondered what notables he beat for that award and the biggest one was Manny Ramirez. Jeffrey Hammonds got 3% of the vote, Jim Edmonds got 1%. It's also a vote that the writers got correct, since everything is a WAR race these days @FrobbyHamelin put up 2.6, which was slightly beat Jose Valentin of the Brewers at 2.5. I hope that Holliday can surpass the mighty Bob Hamelin before the season is over.

Yes. It's his starting pitcher rankings.

https://theathletic.com/5426812/2024/04/19/mlb-starting-pitcher-fantasy-baseball-ranking/ Speed is the name of the game. Just as major-league teams are working on models that can help them make decisions faster, so do public analysts trying to help people beat the line, win that overall prize, or at least beat their college friends in that fantasy league. In the effort to make better decisions faster, we have a few statistics that can aid our efforts: • Fastball velocity stabilizes quickly — three starts should reliably predict the rest of the season. • Relatedly, Stuff+ becomes meaningful after as little as one start, at least when it comes to fastballs and sliders. • Strikeout-minus-walk rate is one of the most powerful small-sample tools. —————- Burnes: Stuff+ told us before the season that Burnes had a great curveball that he could feature more, so it shouldn't be a surprise that he's done exactly that in Baltimore. He's also seen his fastball velocity return to 2022 levels. The result has been vintage Burnes, at a time when it seems like all the aces are falling around him. Long-term park factors are funky in Baltimore — with the new dimensions, Burnes should easily put up a low-threes ERA with plenty of strikeouts. —————— G-Rod: Like with this teammate Burnes, you can expect Rodriguez to beat this ERA projection. He now has two fastballs and two secondaries that are elite in terms of physical characteristics, so it's a full arsenal. Even using last year's data to improve the sample size, he's shown above-average command of four pitches, too. The only question mark is the fact that he lacks a slider. The cutter isn't great — overuse of that pitch early last season is what got him in trouble — and he hasn't consistently thrown a hard breaking ball. Otherwise, he's golden Grayson.