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Scrat1

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Posts posted by Scrat1

  1. I know this will get little, if any, traction here, but I think the poll numbers reflect this a lot better than the post-trade hand-wringing: Parra had every expectation of being an average MLB outfielder filling a sub-replacement hole, while Davies was in a fairly tight grouping with Wright and Wilson as potential future backend starters. I thought it was justifiable, the Orioles were in a spot where a win or two was conceivably the difference between the playoffs and not. Much of the hate and discontent* comes from the fact that Parra had a near .900 OPS in Milwaukee, but a .625 for the Orioles.

    * Exempting Can_of_corn, who had an intense fear and loathing of the trade from day one for mostly ideological reasons.

    I was and am in this camp as well. Note my comment on page 2 or 3: "I hate it." I hated the Ed Rod trade as well. Each one of these moves is kinda sorta justifiable, but taken in aggregate they're idiotic and a big reason why we're in the position we're in today. DD mostly lost me after the Davies trade. I no longer have faith in his process.

  2. 9 games for a position player is ALWAYS way too early. Let's not go nuts on how good he would have to be to get to a .750 OPS. There are 51 games left and he has played in 9 games. In order to finish at .750 at the same rate he has been playing, he would need to OPS .779. Hell, if he led off tonight's game with a home run his OPS would jump from .584 to .696. The eyeball test isn't great but I think it has as much if not more value than 41 plate appearances worth of stats.

    1/6 is not that small of a sample. Obviously those nine games mean absolutely nothing in terms of the type of player Parra is, but they do matter in the sense that the already very thin marginal gain from Snider to Parra is that much thinner. Parra is pretty clearly a better player than Snider, but he's not so much better that he's guaranteed to outplay Snider over the course of two months. In fact, there is a chance that Snider would outplay Parra, even if Parra is the better player.

    I'm pulling these numbers out of my netherregions, but let's just say 75/25 that Parra outplays Snider to Snider outplays Parra over the period of two months. That's probably pretty generous to Parra, but whatever. Now, what about the odds that they play similar enough to eachother that there is no effect on the Orioles win/loss record. I'd put that at at least 40%, considering how close their career numbers are. That leaves only 35% chance that Parra makes any sort of difference. That's a pretty narrow margin, a margin we paid Davies for, and with 1/6 of his games already played for the Orioles, that margin has become even more narrow. We can quibble about all of those percentages--obviously they are not dead on--but I'm just using them to roughly illustrate how those 9 games of terrible numbers do matter in terms of the odds that Parra showing he was an improvement over Snider, let alone enough of an improvement to make any difference/justify the cost of Davies.

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  3. Too soon to tell what contribution Parra will make to the O's. I was against the deal, in part because I thought Parra would produce closer to his .737 OPS career numbers than to the .886 he ran this year in Milwaukee. So far it is trending that way, but it is way too early to judge.

    Is it? It's early, yes, but as I said earlier, there isn't all that much of the season left. He's been bad and even if he hits .800 the rest of the season, which isn't likely, he'll still end the season at around .750. And that's pretty optimistic.

    You may be right that it's too early. But it's definitely not "way" too early.

  4. I didn't like the trade but Parra passes the eyeball test so far. He looks good to me. His numbers might not be any better than Snider's but he looks a whole lot better.

    Well, like with many eyeball tests, the numbers don't bear this out. I don't necessarily believe Snider is a better player, but the gap between the two certainly wasn't worth Davies.

  5. Career numbers aren't what we traded for. We traded for this year numbers. This year numbers are the numbers that are happening this year, in the current season. Like right now, as in what he's been able to do this current season.
    So then we should expect Snider to jump about 40 points in the OPS department in the final 2 months. Or Paredes to tank about 100 points.

    The guy's on fire this year and the year is almost over. He's going to remain relatively on fire for the rest of the year because he's having a good year. He's better than Snider.

    Parra, since joining the Orioles: .211/.268/.316. He's actually been worth negative WAR. We gave up one of our top prospects for the privilege of hurting our team, both in the future and the present.

    Small sample size, sure, but we're at the point of the season where there are only small samples left. It was pretty much a coin toss on who would perform better between Snider and Davies with only a couple months to play. Just a terrible trade.

    This is not just hindsight either. The indicators were there: career year inflated with an unsustainable BABIP. It's surprising that he has been this bad, but not that he's regressed significantly.

  6. Be careful what you wish for. And remember, your new GM almost certainly won't come with a much bigger budget so he'll have to be more successful at exactly the things Duquette has been doing, and did quite well from '12-14.

    Yeah, no GM is perfect. I've been disappointed with nearly all of DD's trades and his practice of "selling" draft picks, but he's certainly got strengths, including restraint in free agency, which is a big one. At this point, I hope he sticks around, but if he goes to Toronto this offseason it won't bother me as much as would have last offseason.

  7. I'd rather watch Gausman, Ubaldo, Gonzo, Tillman, and a sweet free agent starter that we sign in the offseason. We'll see about Davies.
    I don't even view Davies as a viable member of the rotation. I just see him as a guy that can pitch at AAA and if the O's need a sport starter for a day or a month they can bring him up.

    Right. He's your sixth guy, so you don't have to tear your hair out when one of your starters inevitably goes down with an injury. And that's more or less what he already is. It's quite possible he becomes a legitimate back end starter, but he doesn't have to be that in order to be more valuable than a marginal upgrade of Parra over Snider.

  8. Maybe not. But wouldn't you rather watch Parra? Lol. He's at least less of a square blob than Snider, more of a sure thing than Alvarez, and obviously better than Lough (offensively) and Parmelee, and maybe Reimold, too, depending.

    Maybe so, if this were all in a vacuum. But it's not, because we had to trade Davies for him. I'd rather watch Davies.

  9. I don't like to use WAR as an estimate of what a player is going to do for 60 games. If you want to use it to compare players over a much larger length of time in a much more general sense, fine. But you can't just be like "he's only going to contribute 1 win". That's a meaningless way to use that statistic.

    Yet you were using OPS to compare him and Snider. WAR is just doing the same thing, only with slightly more sophistication. Obviously there is no way to know exactly how many wins one player is going to contribute. It's a projection, but it's a way to measure one player's contribution relative to another. As you mentioned, there are only 60 games left, just not that much time to make an impact. Is Parra such an improvement over Snider that he can truly make a difference in just 60 days? I suspect not.

  10. So then we should expect Snider to jump about 40 points in the OPS department in the final 2 months. Or Paredes to tank about 100 points.

    The guy's on fire this year and the year is almost over. He's going to remain relatively on fire for the rest of the year because he's having a good year. He's better than Snider.

    You can't say this with any degree of confidence. Players are hot and cold throughout the season all the time.

  11. I think all you're being asked to believe is that this is an upgrade over Travis Snider and Nolan Reimold for a middling pitching prospect.

    Well yeah, but in terms of marginal gain (~1 Win), vs. marginal loss (who knows? Maybe Mike Leake, maybe Miguel Gonzalez, maybe nothing), it's a terrible trade. The whole point of hording those guys is that some are going to hit and some are not. You know this.

  12. Career numbers aren't what we traded for. We traded for this year numbers. This year numbers are the numbers that are happening this year, in the current season. Like right now, as in what he's been able to do this current season.

    Note the projected rest-of-season projection. They tend to put more weight on a player's body of work than four months of unusually high numbers inflated by BABIP. If you expect Parra to keep hitting at .886, prepare to be disappointed. See: de Aza, just in reverse. Rarely are players dominant for an entire season, particularly ones who have no track record of doing so.

  13. Player A

    Career wOBA: .320; ROS projected (ZIPS): .334

    Player B

    Career wOBA: .323; ROS projected (ZIPS): .322

    Player A: Gerardo Parra

    Player B: Alejandro de Aza

    Remember how excited we were when we got Joe Gunkel for da Aza? Just traded one of our top pitching prospects for a guy marginally better. Duquette is playing a very expensive game of musical chairs.

  14. Just wondering if I have this right - We're supposed to believe that his dramatic improvement in offense is for real, and we're supposed to believe that his dramatic decline in defense is a fluke? I'd be okay with this trade if I thought we had excellent organizational pitching depth, but we don't - not even close.

    Right. And we know he's running an unsustainably high BABIP. His OPS is inflated and also out of line with career numbers. There's no reason at all to believe he'll hit .850+ the rest of the season. Expect numbers close to his career AKA not that much better than Snider.

  15. It's strikes me as funny how we hear all this whining about how we never go for it, we don't want to win blah, blah, and then when they take a shot, and go for it, we hear all this whining about how we have mortgaged the future, blah, blah.

    Maybe because the board is made up of different people with different organizational philosophies? I don't know why it would strike you as funny that people have different opinions on a baseball message board.

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