DrungoHazewood

He and Jones have had long careers. I've enjoyed watching them.

What I'm really interested in is the record for most sac hits in first 112 games as a Brewer. Not 113, not 109, but 112.

80 steals and 10 caught didn't hurt, but Rickey Henderson had a .419 OBP that year. He most often had a near-HOF (Willie Randolph) batting behind him, followed by an MVP and near-HOFer in Don Mattingly, a real HOFer in Dave Winfield, and another former MVP in Don Baylor. You'd have scored 80 runs in that place in that lineup. Vince Coleman, Ron LeFlore, Omar Moreno, and Maury Wills all had seasons where they stole 90+ bases and didn't even score 100 runs because they didn't get on base enough.

Maybe we can bring in Brian Matusz as a TTP consultant.

You could just split the difference between bb-ref's and Fangraphs' valuations. And make sure to look at Statcast to see if anything changes. And I doubt that the Braves signed Markakis on the assumption that he'd provide right around +0.8 wins for $6M, and are disappointed by 0.1. They signed him because they thought he'd probably give them mostly full time play, hit .275 and not embarrass himself on defense, which is what he did until he got hurt.

I don't think the difference between -0.3 and +0.7 wins is all that meaningful. That's a win. It's 10 runs. There are always going to be uncertainties. You have to assume any metric is going to have an implied error range. If we're talking MVP votes, and one player is +8 wins and other is +7.3, that's not definitive. If they're both corner outfielders in Milwaukee, maybe. If one's a shortstop in LA and the other is a pitcher in Washington there are a lot of layers you could peel back and discuss and still probably not come up with a definitive answer. In any case, Mike Trout is 61 runs above average with the bat. He's +0 with the glove according to bb-ref. He's a +3 baserunner, gets +2 for defensive position. If we're missing his total value, it's not predominantly because the defensive metrics stink. Even if he's really a +10 or a -10 CFer (and StatCast says he's a -2) his offensive and other contributions are vastly more important. Even if you're a @weams-level defensive metric skeptic Trout's WAR can't be off by more than 15%. At the edges it might turn him into a 7 or 9 win player instead of 8, and more likely 7.5 or 8.5. Defensive metrics aren't turning MVPs into bums or vice versa, they might turn a small handful of superstars into really good stars or average regulars into somewhat below-average players. And five runs of uncertainty on defense should have very little impact on the valuation of a long-term deal. Over five years that might make a $75M deal into a $65M or $85M deal.

I think you might be over emphasizing the defensive part of the package. Whether Jones was a -5 fielder or a 0 fielder is kind of down in the noise. We know he's a -5 bat, and close to average on baserunning and hitting into double plays. And we know about 15 runs separates replacement level from average in 123 games. So Jones is somewhere between replacement and +5 runs. I don't think any current MLB front office is going to swing a contract $millions of dollars based on five runs. They know as well as you and I do that five runs is a rounding error. They offered him $3M a year because that's a decent sum for a veteran player around his level of production.

bb-ref says that Jones has been a -1 fielder, primarily in RF, in 123 games. They say Nick is a -5 RFer in 104 games. Both of them get -4 runs of positional adjustment for being mostly RFers, since RF is easier than an average position, and you don't want a -4 RFer being valued equally with a -4 CFer or SS. bb-ref's defensive numbers are based on adjusted outs compared to average. Markakis' range factor (i.e. {PO+AST)/9 innings) is 1.81. Jones' is 1.86. The league's is 2.00. They adjust the range factor to account for opportunity context, which varies due to things like the handedness of their pitching staffs, or the GB/FB tendencies of their pitching staffs, and the strikeout rates of those pitchers. Then those adjusted outs per game are turned into run values per however many games they've played. They're figuring defensive run values by methods that are not the same accuracy as offensive stats. @weams is not wrong when he says defensive metrics aren't as reliable as offensive metrics. But to me that just means that we know Jones' -1 might be -6 or might be +1, which in the grand scheme of things doesn't amount to much. You don't need to throw it all out and make up stuff.

WAR's value isn't because it can finely differentiate tenths of a win. It can't. We don't have that level of information at the required accuracy. Its value is summing up a variety of contributions in a various contexts into a single number, vastly simplifying countless kinds of comparisons and analyses. If two players are separated by 0.2 wins your best way to interpret that is they're almost indistinguishable in overall value.

Statcast says Nick is a slightly below average RFer. That's the current gold standard, that seems to be pretty solid. It also says Jones is a -5 RFer this year, and a -18 CFer last year. All of that generally agrees with less sophisticated metrics. The cases where even the older metrics appear off by a mile are rare.

And at the fractions of a win level it just doesn't matter. It would be one thing if our eyes said Nick was Roberto Clemente and the metrics said Adam Dunn. But the metrics say he's a bit below average, and, well... he's a nearly 36-year-old who wasn't terribly fast at 26. The metrics agree with subjective observation a large majority of the time. They can't be as fantastically ridiculous as you claim.

It's entirely plausible that Nick is really a -4 RFer and Jones is a +2. Or -9 and -5. Which changes the overall analysis not at all.

I'd hope the voters might notice that 3 WAR in 67 games works out to MVP-level production in a full season. Comparing production across different positions and contexts is pretty much WAR's reason to exist. Systematically putting different contributions in context and assigning value is WAR, and it usually does it better than eyeballing and guessing whether 140 innings of a 3.50 in OPACY is better than a 1.000 OPS in Houston in 67 games.

I think it's possible he wins the award, but he would be one of the weaker starting pitcher ROYs ever. Michael Fulmer is pretty comparable (2016, 11-7, 3.06, 159 innings). It's not too unusual for a ROY to not qualify for the ERA title as a starter, but they usually have better W/L records and ERAs. Jacob DeGrom only pitched 140 innings but had a 2.69 ERA. Dontrelle Willis just missed the 162 inning threshold, but was 14-6 on the WS champs with a crazy delivery and personality. Dave Righetti only threw 105 innings, but it was the strike year and he had a 2.05 ERA. My bet is on Alvarez. He's on a very good team, he's 22, and he's hitting .310/.408/.657. It'll be a little like McCovey in '59. It'll be a split vote, and his high level of offensive production on a winning team will win out over lesser production from players with more games.

Wow. The FSL is a pitcher's league, and the kid is adjusting to pro ball. But eight extra base hits and 19 walks in more than half a season isn't good. And he's age-appropriate for A+.

In the 1890s the Louisville Colonels drew as many as 145,000 fans to see a National League team. And Louisville is three times bigger than it was back then, so they could draw nearly half a million. Coincidentally, that's almost exactly what their AAA team draws.

I think most Nats fans are from Northern Virginia. And I thought the beef was that from 1972 to 2004 the Orioles controlled more territory than the British Empire in 1877, but now are forced to share. Nova is a lot closer than North Carolina.

The Bay Area is quite a bit smaller than DC-Baltimore-Nova. And the whole area has about nine million people which is pretty close to Chicago. I think the longer-term solution is to add a lot more teams to existing areas instead of subtracting. We'd all be better off if NYC had the Yanks, Giants, Dodgers, and Mets, Boston still had the Braves, Philly still had the A's, St. Louis the Browns, and they'd added the PCL and about 12 expansion teams in the midwest and east. Houston, Dallas, Philly, Boston, and Atlanta all need two teams. Atlanta certainly has the stadiums for it.

It's going to take some kind of crazy multi-billion dollar Elon Musk hyperloop to make it convenient to get from Nats Park to OPACY in a reasonable amount of time in normal weekday traffic. And by your definition San Francisco and Oakland are one market, as are Anaheim and LA. Certainly the Bronx and Flushing Meadows. Not sure baseball really needs to kick out all the teams splitting huge markets. The Yanks don't need the help. Also, it'll be sad to see the Ravens go.

Those mostly seem to be the people who think the only correct outcome was the Orioles having 100% control of the entire area from Raleigh, NC to York and from Wilmington to Charleston, WV for all time, and that no team would ever encroach on that. In that context having the Orioles own 2/3rds of another team's RSN in a larger and richer market seems like a raw deal. In the context of one who believes that Baltimore and DC aren't the same city and one shouldn't control the other's destiny the O's current agreement seems fantastic for the Orioles and kind of ridiculous for the Nats.

My oblique reference to John Bale was because he was traded for Jayson Werth. O's first round pick in '97, was a top 50 prospect in all of baseball in 2000. The O's traded him for that mediocre LOOGY because his power was never going to develop and he wasn't a very good defensive catcher. His power developed about 15 minutes later.

I feel like we have this discussion about everyone taken in the first four or five rounds who doesn't end up with a 20-win career.

Maybe we can trade him for John Bale.

There have been 54 drafts. Sisco was the #61 overall pick. He's 13th in MLB games played among #61 overall picks. He's 18th in rWAR. Among players drafted #58-63 there have been 25 who've ended up with 10+ win careers. That's out of 324 picks, so that works out to 8%. Roughly 240 of the 324 had zero or fewer rWAR in their entire careers. And something approaching 50% of the 324 never appeared in the majors. The median player taken around Sisco's spot appears briefly in the majors and has a below-replacement career. So, as I've said before, to be an marginally acceptable draft pick you have to be way above average. Everyone is disappointed with 80+% of all picks.

That's a question we're all asking after four or five pages of banging our heads on a wall.