The correlation studies (the assumption is that, if a stat accurately reflects a skill, taking two adjacent samples and correlating them should produce a very high R^2) say that pitching stats are slightly less stable than hitting stats, depending on which ones you choose...so, in terms of making PROJECTIONS, pitching is a bit harder. But in terms of saying what already happened, a good pitching statistics panel will give you just as much as a good hitting stats panel. Baserunning is, IMHO, maybe even slightly more accurate than the other two, because it is a simpler thing to measure once you have play by play data. And fielding data is...struggling...as factions war over whether it's better to view fielders as independent or as team units, and whether it's better to anchor fielding evaluations in grouped numbers that are inherently more stable (DER, e.g.) or whether that obscures things like the random chance element. Not to mention trying to figure out how to do park factors for individual positions.
.
Moe Dawg (one cubicle to the right; got a parentheses in there real quick, didn't I?) gave us just the kind of "bulletin" our Hot Stove viewers crave. He reminds about Bergman:
.
1. Christian Bergman: He's back. 54 big league innings last season; 4 wins, 5 losses; 5.00 ERA; 1.41 Whip. You will remember that he did have three stellar outings: 7.1 innings of 2 hit, shutout ball vs. the Orcs, 7 innings of 4 hit, shutout ball vs. the BoSox, 4 innings of 1 hit, shutout relief vs. the Angels. In his other 40 innings he gave up 30 earned runs and 54 hits. Feast vs. famine. Bet the under on the feast line in '18.
.
Bergman came from the Rox with ML-dubious stuff, ML-crispy command, and 23 ML starts which is 23 more than you got, bub. Here is our MIN-MAX article during his little hot streak, which may or may not make for an interesting 10 minutes' January loitering. By my count, Bergman is tied for 9th-18th on the M's depth chart. Considering he's a Major League pitcher of 4 years' experience, is is fair to say that Jerry Dipoto has a gigantic flotilla of dubious #5 starters.
Seriously, if Dipoto's thing is a long string of +0.2 WAR players, you've got to admire the progress. Charitably you might say he's putting together an Always Compete theme. Is Dr. D feeling charitable? Not in the slightest. Give him a real starting pitcher and we'll talk.
.
Our man Diderot asked the Think Tank for a default 4 benchies, assuming Heredia. It responded:
.
MOE let's assume Gonzales, assuming we gave Tank and he's got no options. DR D is bullish on Gonzales and precisely as that change dips from 84 MPH towards 78-81, you may find his rotation slot heliuming from #7 up towards #2. The 'Frame sez this kid has big time upside. Very common to talk age arc. Think injury arc.
.
SABRMATT sez:
...and we have him as a Rule V guy...which means we can't just send him down to hold onto him. Either we need to trade them something to keep him or he needs to make the team...which is hard if we're carrying thirteen pitchers, because we need Heredia (or other OF4), Marjama, and an infielder. NOW...you COULD keep Ford and, when you need to rest/sub out an injured middle infielder, use Heredia in the OF and move Gordon back to 2B/SS. So there's that option.
DR D sez very true. Also, very odd that your platoon is always at 1B. Significant points against Dipoto that it be so.
.
DIDEROT sez: Andrew Romine looks unlikely on paper, but has "intangibles." Read that: he's a 25'er who has the manager's back to the 17's, 14's and 11's.
Yes, kiddies. If you have Vida Blue, Catfish, Holtzmann, Reggie, Bando, Fingers, and Rudi you can pick a manager out of the stands, go fishing, and hire Mick as your cut man in the locker room. But if you have less, you'd better take a few precautions against the Chone-Wakamatsu torpedoes. They'll blow a hole in your navigational course towards the playoffs.
.
GMONEY sez: Filia out 50 games for steriods. Some other esteemed Denizen sez, and what a waste, no power. Dr. D's long-held suspicion, however, is that PED's help eyesight more than they they do launch velocity. Wasn't Boog Powell recently deemed a roider? And then shortly thereafter deemed worthless?
.
UND TAKE ZIS MIT YOU, Dept.
Dave Cameron, formerly of USSM and recently of Fangraphs, was hired by a perennial loser with a promising future, the San Diego Padres. Here's an article. His nominal role is worth looking at. "Senior Analyst, Research and Development Dept." The Padres have a tremendous minor league system with 7 players in the minors' top-100 and Cameron believes that such players should almost never be traded, so it's a little like putting Dana Loesch in charge of your gun collection. An "analyst," in the F-500 companies I worked for, types up position papers and hands them to people like the assistant GM.
Of course from such a position one gets to know the senior execs, so if Mr. Cameron comports himself with deference he could find himself doing a Jonah Hill quickly. As the Padres go, it's hard to imagine what they do over the next few years other than let their star prospects jell. Thoughts?
.
Enjoy,
Dr D
Comments
The more I read and think and write about it, this "barrel" thing seems more and more interesting. And Valuable. If offensive baseball is a game about hitting the ball hard, nothing else (that I've seen and thought much about) seems to reflect correctly just who is launching the ball hard a lot.
Barrels aren't just a measure of how hard the ball is hit...they are looking for a type of contact that produces the launch angle and velocity most correlated with high OPS. So it's not measuring hard contact...it's measuring hard contact in the correct direction (namely...in the air, but not too high and not too low). It's measuring a player's ability to maximize the impact it has when he makes ideal contact with the baseball as dictated by his swing.
The difference, for example, between David Freese and Josh Donaldson has not been batted ball velocity or even GB/FB...Freese actually hits the ball pretty hard, on average, and is not an extreme groundball guy or anything. But, when David Freese gets ideal contact, timed perfectly, using his swing, the typical result tends to be a low line drive...something that would produce a line-out, single or double, whereas, when Donaldson gets ideal contact, the typical result is a deep fly ball, most likely to produce a home run or wall-banging double (or warning track flyout if he's been very unlucky).
Doc has been wise enough to bench most Konspiracy Korner posts relating to politics during these turbulent times.
On the other hand, I've been working with a couple friends on an online periodical called the Cascade Review, designed to cover this and many other issues in what we used to call 'current affiairs' during my schooldays. We'll publish approximately quarterly, and the first issue just launched.
If you're interested, the link is here:
It won't surprise you to learn that there's a leftward slant...but we also have gripes with myopic liberals, as suggested in the article The Red Cape.
We're not running comment threads for the obvious reasons...but we are interesed in more thoughtful content responses, which you can register using the Comment button at the top. (Also, there's another tab for any other kinds of feedback--"contact us").
Thanks,
diderot
Lots of passion present. You really, really need to open up comments on those articles, diderot. You've taken up a position in a war of ideas, and now you have to defend that position to the best of your ability.
What will happen as you debate the people who vehemently disagree with you is what happens to any hypothesis or position: it will flex, bow, occasionally snap, and occasionally harden and sink its roots even deeper than you had originally thought possible. The process will be painful--even soul-wrenching, but only if you're doing it right--and it's the only process worth undertaking.
Nobody starts with all the lightbulbs on. Nobody. You're walking around with your collection, I'm walking around with mine, and occasionally there's enough overlap between our collections of active lightbulbs that we can--even if but for a few minutes' time--come together and enhance each other's understanding of the world around us.
Is that not truth-seeking? And is there a more worthy endeavor to be had in this life than to expand our individual and collective understanding of things? Think on it this way: of what value would SSI be without its robust commenting community?
Love to see the passion. I seriously do. And I liked your breakdown of Plato vs. Aristotle. Pretty succinct and effective for the purposes of your article (and beyond).
There's a lot of good writing here that's based on false assumptions that can only survive in a leftist's worldview. I'd love the opportunity to challenge some of those assumptions, have some of my own challenged, and reach mutually beneficial new understandings in a new way.
First, thanks for taking the time to read and respond.
Second, to be sure, I DO NOT believe I have "all the lightbulbs"--far from it.
Third and most relevantly, I think you might agree that most comment threads are the equivalent of cage fighting. Once in a blue moon you wind up somewhere like SSI where the discourse (on KK topics) is more like a prize fight--participants throwing punches, to be sure, but playing by the rules, and overseen by a referee.
Even in that better case, I have never heard (and these words may never have been uttered in the history of the Internet), "yeah, you know what? You're right...and I was wrong. You've changed my mind." Our goal is to lay out thoughts for consideration, without the need to change anyone's mind.
BUT...we are interested in feedback on our thoughts, but we want to eliminate the most common bugaboos on comment threads: 1) trolls or the blatantly offensive (think Neo-Nazis); 2) positions based on demonstrated falsehoods (Trump's was the biggest electoral victory since Reagan); and 3) veering wildly off topic to an entirely different one (start out talking about gun control, somehow wind up talking about home schooling.)
So what we've adopted is the old line idea of letters to the editor. In other words, we, in effect, edit the comments. I know that's offensive to Internet sensitivities, but it seemed to work pretty well for a long time for newspapers and magazines. The one thing I will say is that we're MUCH more interested in excerpting from thoughtful responses that disagree with our positions than agree with them.
So, that's where I'm at now...doesn't mean I won't change my mind someday. But to repeat, thanks for taking the time to view and respond.
there wasn't really an option for immediate feedback/engagement. Letters To The Editor worked because they were, at the time, the fastest way for people to engage with the writing/editorial staff of a publication. These days, you get Twitter bombed within seconds of posting something that gets peoples' hackles up ;-)
I'm not saying your project is doomed to failure because of the model. I'm saying that I think it's worth the extra work to try to cultivate your own community of commenters, the way Jeff has cultivated this community over the course of decades. And I'm also saying that the project would be magnified by an order of magnitude or two if you could manage to do that. To me, that makes it worth the head-scratching and potentially extra work of cultivating a good community of commenters.
Honestly, politics is an eternal tug-of-war in a variety of directions. Sometimes it's Statism vs. Individualism, sometimes it's Church vs. State, sometimes it's Left vs. Right, sometimes it's Conservatism vs. Progressivism, and sometimes it's plain old Right vs. Wrong. The ideas which appear to be in ascent today might actually be in ascent, or they might just appear to be. One of the things that I think has actually changed in the last twenty years or so is the general public's willingness to be told what to think. Meme popularity is a great example in support of my thesis: with a meme, a person can point and say 'see? I'm not all alone in what I was thinking!' even more effectively than they can with, say, an elected official since that official likely holds views and values which the person doesn't.
I *think* the old model of media had too much 'we're telling you what to think' for today's audience, though I could obviously be mistaken. With the fracturing of media, starting with talk radio and cable news, and arcing toward low orbit with the internet and memers, people feel more empowered and emboldened to entrench themselves along with their currently held ideas. It's a problem from a variety of perspectives, but it's also a tremendous boon to truth-seekers since having everyone in their own foxholes rather than lined up to, say, Dan Rather's or Walter Kronkite's tune, they're practically more open to new information than they would have been fifty years ago. The trick is angling in on them, finding enough common room with them in their foxhole, and starting a conversation. Once you've done that, you've built a relationship that permits the exchange of potentially vital informaiton.
As a fiction writer, I don't try to please everyone all the time. I don't even try to please everyone occasionally, nor do I try to please a few people all the time. I try to please a few people some of the time, and I try to do it with the volume cranked up to 11 on the dial. I *think* that's the only way distrubuted media (the internet) will work in its current form when it comes to disseminating information to people.
Then again, I could be all wet. Anyways, again, love the passion and hope you project leads you on a bountiful journey of discovery and revelation :-)
I hope you'll consider using the "comments" template on the site.
Ford has to stay if he hits...