Casper Wells' SLG = .527. That's lifetime

 92 mph on the black.  (Note catcher's mitt.)  In the next shot, Shields receives positive feedback and displays his pleasure in having executed a perfect pitch

........

Wells' SLG sits at .527 ... and granted, his life has only spanned about 300 plate appearances, but still.  Any other ML-ready bats you want to give me, who will slug .525 in the AL, their first half-seasons?

It's one thing to be on a hot streak, sure.  Dr. D likes hot streaks.  Dr. D would have given his cyber-kingdom, or at least his taco stand, for a hot streak in June.  

But when you start talking about a rookie who has never had anything BUT a hot streak, that's another conversation entirely.

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=== In Jack We Trust ... Our ML-Ready Player Assessment, At Least ===

When Casper got here, we sez that he's got something like a 50-50 Pokemon coin toss at being an ML regular.  And that was an assessment heavily laced with respect for Jack Zduriencik's specialty -- looking at a corral full of ML-ready colts, pointing his finger, and grumbling "THAT one."

For that specific task, we know of nobody in baseball with a better track record than Z has.

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Which of these plusses and minuses will take control of the career arc?  It is a grandmaster's task to judge which features of a chess position matter.  

Without going into a long chess diatribe, believe us on this one:  Grandmasters beat amateurs precisely by accepting positions which look dubious, but which turn out not to be.  As Ludek Pachman put it, "at grandmaster level, one is no longer occupied with rules, but with their exceptions."

SSI is thoroughly convinced that the Jack Zduriencik way -- Wells, Fister, Treyvon, Ackley-at-2B, etc etc -- is the very cutting edge of baseball.

Who knows whether Casper Wells will OPS+ 120 in the American League.  But Jack Zduriencik thinks he's found a Moneyball hitter -- a good one, that is, camoflaged by late development and K rate.

None of this is good news for the dogmatic sabermetrician, who makes his money with rules and who is thoroughly confused by their exceptions.  Zduriencik is not.  In ML-ready player evaluation, Z is two sigmas beyond the Fangraphs sabermetrician.  Casper Wells may be another example.

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