Slops first, but don't take 'em too hard ... the props volume is also cranked up to 11 :- )
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Q. Wow. The Mariners are in on Aroldis Chapman. If they nab him, they'll have the left hand Stephen Strasburg AND Dustin Ackley!
A. To which we can confidently respond, "huh?"
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Q. Chapman isn't the LH Strasburg?
A. He is not, no.
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Q. I thought he threw 100 mph. You were all over Strasburg at DC Sports Insider.
A. Even if Chapman throws 100* -- which I highly doubt -- he's still not Stephen Strasburg. He's not even Tim Lincecum. Not by a long shot.
*more than occasionally
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Q. Based on what?
A. Based on the fact that Strasburg and Lincecum were sabermetric heroes as well as radar-gun celebs.
Look, college stats are tricky. But most ML orgs attempt to make sense of them. You can isolate a set of batters that a pitcher faced -- the best 50 in the conference, or the top-25 teams, or batters that were drafted, or whatever.
You can compare pitchers to each other, in the same conference. That's what D-O-V did to point out that Tim Lincecum was a far better prospect than Brandon Morrow -- Lincecum fanned twice as many hitters as Morrow in the same league.
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Q. Well, Strasburg's college stats weren't THAT good that you'd call him a once-in-a-lifetime guy based on nothing else. It was his fastball people loved.
A. Stephen Strasburg:
- Ran the 180/19 (!) control ratio in 102 innings, and ....
- He maintained the 15/1 type control ratios against the best teams, and
- We had a chance to watch him in his worst starts (which were the same as his best starts), and
- We had a chance to watch him sequentially.
In other words, we saw Strasburg fire his fraction-of-C-velocity beams past hitters in starts X, and X+1, and X+2, and X+3 -- so we knew what his "downside" was. It wasn't.
If Strasburg threw 74 mph, he'd have been my #1 overall. Actual results (saber) first, theory (tools scouting) second.
The results on Strasburg were surreal. Guys with metal pipes in their hands, taking pepper swings, couldn't make contact. Ever.
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That's not the same thing as having videos and flashes of Aroldis Chapman here and there. How do we know whether, once in three starts, he throws 89 mph?
And we don't have any meaningful stats on him to speak of -- those that we do, like from the WBC, ain't no blinkin' 180-19 scorched-mound policy. People make lots of contact off Chapman.
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Q. Leaving him where, from a saber standpoint?
A. From a strictly results standpoint, we would take one step back and let the tools scouts have the loudest voices in the conference room.
The good news is, he did conquer Cuba. Stats or no, he generally moved to the head of the pack of Cuban pitchers, right?
And although his WBC stats aren't anything that a lot of other pitchers didn't accomplish, they still notch a plus on his resume, if you view Chapman as a prospect. Not a lot of minors pitchers would rack up >9k a game in the WBC.
His sabermetrics don't make him Strasburg or Lincecum. But they also don't exactly leave him in class-A baseball, now do they. His track record leaves him at about the level of a very young pitcher who has had a nice year in AAA, high K, high BB, unpolished.
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