makoman

There plenty of human element in the game—the players. I can’t understand why someone would prefer to have bad calls.

The #1 pick has produced 29 ten career rWAR players. #2 gave 24, #3 gave 20, #4 15. It goes slowly down with a few anomalies. Picks 21-30 average 7 per spot. So given around 50 drafts, as no one recent could be expected to have 10 WAR yet, you got almost a 60% chance of a pretty successful pick at #1, down to around a 14% chance at the back end of the first round. One can define successful how they want but Wieters doesn’t even have 20 WAR and he’s fine, so 10 seemed a good enough place.

That’s fine. I don’t think we’re signing him to an extension.

Momentum is the next day's starting pitcher...here comes our OD starter, Tomaso Anthony Milone.

I'd prefer Mountcastle prove he can't play LF before he goes to 1B. Diaz I hope has an opportunity to play his way on the team next year, realistically it's probably not happening this year. I'm fine getting more data on whether Santander, Hays, and Nunez can hit enough to be regulars.

If there's anything a rebuilding team needs it's an over 30 lefty reliever. Have we already forgotten the Jamie Walker era?

I'm not 100% convinced that getting 3 ABs and 4 chances in the field is necessarily that much better for development than a few hours of intense practice. But I don't know. ETA: as long as they are facing appropriate competition. If Mountcastle is killing it vs Brian Gonzalez and Eric Hanhold that may not be doing a ton for him, but Gunnar getting swings against Cody Carroll and Dillon Tate might work for him.

Brian Gonzalez, I honestly didn't know he was still in the org. Good thing Means came out of nowhere or 2014 would be a negative WAR draft, with Hess and Wilkerson bringing down anything Scott accomplishes. I bet there were some mistakes in there, including Bud Norris and Ubaldo.

Iglesias? For 5M less? In their careers they have almost the same PAs. Iglesias has 11.4 rWAR to Villar's 11.0 (Iglesias 11.9 fWAR, Villar 8.5). Villar has much more offensive upside but all the metrics hate his defense.

Cashner was over a run under his FIP in Texas. And he did in fact implode after going to Boston. I can’t believe anyone would argue we didn’t get enough for him given we got more than nothing, I’d have assumed he’d have no excess value at all. Bundy was pretty much a league average pitcher. Which is fine and has some value, but you’re only getting so much back for that. You’re definitely underrating the return since Tony and Luke both liked Peek the best yet you called him filler. Villar. He was fine and he did have a good year last year but it seemed like a career year and you couldn’t really expect much excess value over what he was making. I would have preferred to keep him over what we got though simply just for the enjoyment of watching games.

The #1 pick has had a 20 rWAR career 23 times. For #2-5 it’s 14, 8, 10, 8. #1 improves your odds quite a bit. I imagine it’s similar if you look for like 10 WAR guys. Not sure about, say, picks 6 vs 10 or something, don’t feel like doing it.

He did the equation right though, except he used 0.7 pg and the tweet said 7. I’ll admit I never expected to see Avogadro’s number on OH.

That's fair, but webbrick was acting like he should have been out of baseball before he got to Frederick. Other than Aberdeen, places where he had 240+ PAs were: 2016 Delmarva 114 2016 Frederick 135 2017 Bowie 137 2018 Norfolk 101 2019 Norfolk 139 That's adequate enough for an averageish LF.

He's been above average by wRC+ at every stop except Aberdeen right after being drafted and the past two seasons in the majors. He's just lost right now and clearly isn't this bad, but I agree it's probably not likely he'll ever be a major contributor.

Dansby Swanson, the last college bat that went #1, was drafted in 2015 and debuted August 2016. Atlanta was 44-75 when he was brought up so it's not like they were contending. He started at low A after being drafted, then went through hi A and AA in 2016.

Actually, it’s Bleier that has been used primarily in low leverage situations in his career. 465 career PAs at low, 144 medium, 127 high. He has been excellent at high leverage however, 567 OPS against (vs 652 medium, 744 low). Fry has a similar career amount in high leverage, 116 PAs. But just 94 at medium and 216 low, so a much higher proportion at high leverage. But while Bleier did his best work at high leverage, Fry was the opposite: 754 OPS against high, 748 medium, 668 low. So Bleier has stepped it up in more important situations, if that's a thing, or maybe over time it will even out. edit: all from BR, I don't know if that's the best place to measure leverage.

Fry has reverse platoon splits. .233/.324/.305 vs. righties, .263/.369/.444 vs lefties. Bleier is a more normal .304/.333/.453 vs righties and .226/.272/.312 vs lefties. Both have faced a lot more righties than lefties in their career, so they were not really being hidden before the 3 batter rule. Fry is actually much better than Bleier against righties. Bleier is more of a loogy that would probably not take as well to the 3 batter rule since there are likely more righties in any given lineup. Even if you want to ignore Bleier's bad year last year, in none of his good years was he better than Fry's career 628 OPS against righties. Obviously both are small samples, 97 and 177 career innings, but we were using 3 innings as a trend above so... I'm not saying Fry is all that great, he needs to do better for sure, but if he's not great against lefties I'm not sure his handedness is what's keeping him around. If they really want a loogy they should call up Zastryzny.

Like the guys he got for Cashner?

He did have mono, that could have changed their plans. I agree Elias has been very conservative. I wish Kjerstad would have been put on the 60 man, wouldn't have hurt anything to have him working with the development guys every day.

You're right, I just read that incentives are being prorated too. $4.5M will be deferred regardless.

Also, since I doubt he pitches 130 innings this year, it looks like $10M of the $15M owed next year will be deferred to the 30s. So the actual present cost is quite a bit less than $15M.

It's 3 innings in 2 games. Last June he had a stretch where he allowed 1 run in 6.1 innings. One might have said that he certainly looked like he was back to his old form at that point. Then he had a 4.58 ERA the rest of the year. Then in August he had a 2 game period with 2.2 innings, no runs, 1 hit, 4 Ks. Back to his old form right? But then he had a 4.60 ERA the rest of the way.

It's pointless to argue with Mr. Hyperbole about Sisco. His pop times are terrible. Fortunately this is probably the best time in baseball history to be bad at stopping stolen bases. Last year teams tried to steal on him once every 15 2/3 innings or so. The AL overall tried to steal once every 13 2/3 innings, so teams didn't run crazy on him. Last year his SB% was 10% worse than average. So if he was average that would mean like one extra out every 15 games? Passed balls? He's had 3 in 840 career innings. Last year the AL had 180 in 21690 innings, or almost 7 per 840 innings. Are wild pitches relevant? Maybe a good catcher can prevent some. Sisco's pitchers had one every 19.7 innings. O's pitchers with other catchers had one every 19.0 innings. Shrug. I have no idea how to judge framing. Baseball savant had him ranked 52 of 64 qualifiers last year, better than Wieters and basically tied with Severino. The year before he was ranked 32, better than Severino and Wynns. Pretty bad, but better than "not a catcher." Yeah, he made a stupid play that one time that cost us a game. So what, not the first time that's ever happened. His defense is below average but not "laughable," it's playable if he can hit. Same with Severino. Same with most people. Hopefully they both prove they can be major leaguers and we can trade one for value and keep the other as a backup (or trade both and keep somebody else).

Yes, probably a little early to think that we will have 3 guys with over 200 OPS+. Or we can assume that Iglesias will double his career SLG and have an OPS+ that Bonds never reached. No one has 40 PAs yet, comparing OPS to the full years in 2014 is just crazy at this point.

I'm sure he doesn't want to waste payroll on a bad season, but trading Bleier's pro-rated $915k to bring up a guy making pro-rated $563k doesn't really move the needle. If this was that important then surely someone would take Givens for nothing and Iglesias would be somewhere else.