e16bball

In all candor, I’m not sure what this means — and the answer is probably “not much” — but I found it interesting. Since April 10, the day Jackson Holliday debuted, the top 4 most valuable position players in all of MLB (per fWAR) have been: 1. Gunnar Henderson (1.5 WAR) 2. Daulton Varsho (1.4 WAR) 3. Jordan Westburg (1.2 WAR) 4. Colton Cowser (1.1 WAR)

It was absolutely tongue in cheek. He laughed in the midst of saying it. He didn’t even know where Kimbrel sat in the all-time rankings. Just busting the kid’s stones. Cowser’s that kind of goofball that folks mess with sometimes.

Another pretty strong outing tonight. 4 IP, 2 H, 2 BB, 4 Ks. The two hits were singles, and not a man made it to second base alive against him.

A “bit better”? One run comes in from first base on what could (generously to our fielders) be called a Bermuda Triangle popup. And then a totally missed strike 3 on a full count extends the inning to allow a can of corn Fenway homer to score two other runs. Yeah, there was a little hard luck out there.

I know that I, for one, look forward to some new and novel complaints about the idiocy of the management/lineups of this 101-win team that’s now scored 20 runs through the first 13 innings. EDIT: 23 runs* through the first 13 innings.

Not sure if this was rhetorical or not, but the answer is that we’ve had two games with 12 Ks (John Means x2) and three games with 11 Ks (Kyle Gibson x2 and Kyle Bradish) in the last 5 years. Sort of wild seeing Kyle Gibson on that list twice. Not at the top of many “Corbin Burnes comps” lists…

At the beginning of his outing though, back-to-back Ks of Olson and Ozuna were pretty eye-catching.

I have to say, if we’re still at a point where signing some SP5 has to be contingent in any way on dumping $3.5M of Ryan O’Hearn — that would be so very disheartening. I get why folks want to see Kjerstad over O’Hearn. We all want to see Kjerstad. We all want to see the very exciting all-homegrown-prospect lineups we’ve been pontificating about ad nauseum for years now. But we’re trying to win it all this season, and O’Hearn had a higher wRC+ in the bigs last year than Kjerstad did in AAA. Just dumping a guy who was a critical part of the lineup last year on blind faith seems a bit rash. And unnecessary. Maybe O’Hearn regresses to his pre-2023 form. Maybe Kjerstad absolutely rakes. The nice thing is, we have the luxury of letting it all play out. It’s a very long season. If O’Hearn hits his way off the team — or Kjerstad hits his way onto it — then great. That’s a miscalculation we can easily (and happily) correct. But if you ship O’Hearn out and then Kjerstad can’t hack it (or gets hurt, that’s much tougher to un-do.

Yeah, Siri is a legit big leaguer and Palacios is sort of a fringy AAAA guy (McKenna type maybe). But Caminero is their Holliday, Mead is kind of their Westburg, and Carson Williams is sort of poor man’s 20-year-old Gunnar — so there was a lot of talent in the batter’s box, just not many seasoned pros.

Adley heard people talking about how it's Gunnar's team now...

I guess that explains a lot of the news of the last few days. Once Trevor Bauer is interested in you, injuries are sure to follow.

Have also had one. One of the more minor surgeries I’ve had — the only real long term “arm” effect has been that my actual elbow feels somewhat numb (I assume because one of the primary nerves is no longer there). I don’t feel as though I’ve lost any strength or dexterity in my arm. I do have a bit more feeling in my hand, which was the point of doing the surgery because the nerve was impinged. I don’t think that would be a bad thing for Felix, but I guess any change could be an obstacle for someone who makes his living gripping and manipulating a ball with that hand?

For my money, the problem with the pen is the quality, moreso than the quantity. I have full faith that Elias/Sig will be able to fill out a perfectly workable full-season bullpen with what they’ve got — particularly given that there will likely be a surprisingly effective addition or two to the personnel between now and summertime. But my concern is the top 3-4 guys that will carry most of the weight in October. I’m not sure we have the high-end arms to lean on in those postseason matchups — in much the same way that our 2023 starting rotation seemed to have been built more for the long haul than for the short sprint. Bit of a bummer that our one Burnes year happens to be our one Bautista-less year. Would really love to add one more power arm to the back-end of the pen. Maybe that’s more of a trade deadline move for Elias/Sig, though.

I know that when I look at the Dodgers, I think “gosh, if they could just add a little salary, they might really have something there”…

I think that’s definitely the risk on their end. I suspect they may not care about getting Stanton regular at-bats any longer, so I’m betting they will acquire some sort of CF-capable 4th OF like Michael A. Taylor and sprinkle him into the rotation liberally to allow Judge and Soto frequent opportunities to slide a notch down the defensive strenuousness scale.

Presumably Judge will play CF. He’s been above-average there in 750+ innings over the last two seasons. Obviously, the clock is ticking on how long he’ll be viable there. But for now, he’s probably okay. On the thread topic, I think “awesome, I really love being the underdog” is a fantastic way to spin some degree of positivity into several of the very best players on earth coming to stand in our annual path to the playoffs.

Juan Soto Since The Nationals Won the World Series 20.6 rWAR (4th in MLB) 166 OPS+ (2nd in MLB) 19.0 fWAR (6th in MLB) 159 wRC+ (4th in MLB) I really wish we had anyone “not that good” like him.

One interesting note with Kimbrel is that he was absolutely spectacular when throwing to JT Realmuto (1.86 ERA, .535 OPSA) and absolutely awful when throwing to Garrett Stubbs (8.04 ERA, .838 OPSA). He pitched 17 times with Stubbs behind the plate, so it’s not as though that was just one or two bad days inflating the numbers. Kimbrel had 5 outings where he gave up multiple ERs, and Stubbs was the catcher on 3 of those 5 occasions (60%). He gave up any runs at all in 16 outings, and Stubbs was the catcher on 7 of those 16 occasions (44%). That seems pretty noteworthy when you consider that Stubbs only caught him in 17 of his 71 outings (24%). Stubbs really only started catching full-time (well, as a full-time backup) in 2022. He certainly does not have the background to match guys like Realmuto, Rutschman, and McCann. Perhaps Elias and his crew think there’s something to exploit in that data.

In all fairness, MLB players were 12/12 in stealing bases off him last year. With two catchers who combined to catch 23.3% of base stealers with all other pitchers, so holding runners was definitely a bit of an issue for him.

How many available relievers do you consider “reasonably likely” to produce an ERA south of 3.25 over a full season?

Absolutely. The comp between Hays and Verdugo jumps off the page looking at his OPS+ and WAR numbers. If that all Hays can bring back, you really might as well just keep him. But I also think it does speak to the desirability of exploring these contender-contender trades of surplus hitting for surplus pitching with teams like CLE, SEA, MIA, etc.

Not a very substantial return for Verdugo. Greg Weissert is a 29-year-old reliever who has been good in AAA, but not in MLB. Nicholas Judice is a 6’8 recently drafted (8th round) reliever who has never thrown a professional pitch. And Richard Fitts seems to be the big prize here, both for his genuinely solid performance at age 23 as a starter at AA and for the numerous potential dirty puns you can make with his name.

Yeah, this is the problem. They were 4th in the AL in runs, but they were 8th in wRC+. That gulf is (largely) explained by their BA with RISP, which ranked 1st in all of MLB and (along with TB) was way ahead of anyone else. If they finish 4th in the AL in runs again, that’s probably just fine — especially given that OPACY is no longer a hitter’s park. But the likelihood is, unless they repeat that elite clutch/timely hitting performance, they’re going to need to improve the overall offense a bit to reach that status again. Hopefully the kids are ready to do that.

They were also 8th in the AL in wRC+, behind each of the other playoff teams and also the Mariners. They scored a good amount of runs, but that’s pretty closely tied to the high average with RISP. Unless they’re going to continue to be the most “clutch” team in the league, the overall offense still needs to improve — and it seems a whole lot like they’re going to hope that all of that improvement will come from inside the organization. Hopefully their apparent faith in the prospects to be ready next season will pay off.

I haven’t found anything specific on it, save for a FG community post that sort of got halfway there — reaching the conclusion that while numerous short pitchers had been successful in the early 2000s, signing them as FAs had really not worked out. Which I think is sort of a proxy for the idea that they can be just as good when they’re young, but they hit the wall sooner (and harder). Here’s the link to the B-R search results for anyone who is interested. I think it’s relatively powerful evidence of what I’m suggesting — but perhaps there are just so few SPs under 6 feet tall that the failure rate at advanced ages is similar to taller pitchers, the sample is just tremendously smaller (no pun intended). I don’t think so, though. It’s pretty remarkable that not one guy shorter than 6 feet has put up even 5 WAR as a SP between the ages of 34-36 in almost 40 years.