1. Please no. He's a piece of human garbage and I don't want my money going in his pockets.
2. Please no. He was bad in Japan last year.
3. Please no. He's 35 years old. There's not much reason to suspect he's going to get any better than he was last year.
4. Please no. He was never all that great to begin with. He had two great years - 2018 and 2020. For the rest of his career, he floated between a 1 - 3 fWAR guy.
5. Please no. He'd be a distraction for the clubhouse.
6. Please no. Only the chuds would be excited by that signing, and I hate chuds and want to deny them any happiness.
If that metric doesn't already exist, it should be pretty easy to manufacture. Compare baseline performance to monthly splits or preferably some sort of rolling 10 game average. Calculate who has the largest standard deviations. Compare.
I'm not a math guy or a programmer, so I'd love to be told how wrong I am.
Cubs hitters are currently leading the league in walk rate. PCA, Busch, Dansby, and Amaya are all sporting career best figures. I'd be curious as to the how/why so many guys are taking big steps forward.
I was just looking at this. He's still on pace for a 4fWAR year and tied with Busch for the second best position player on the Cubs. I guess defense is still important, eh?
Edit: I see he's also running a career-high walk rate.
Last year, I had a three week blowout where my team hit 71 bombs.
You probably don't have to get anywhere near that just to claw your way back up into contention.
Yeah, a good chunk of my cash is tied up in him. Ketel Marte and J-Rod aren't helping much either.
I'm just lucky my bench players have picked up the slack.
I can't see him keeping the BB% up that high when big leaguers realize he can't do any damage to them.
For some reason, I see the big league version of him looking like James Loney with more walks and strikeouts.
There have been more studies than I care to count about lineup construction. They've pretty much all found that conventional lineup construction wasn't optimal. Gone are the days of a speed guy first, a contact hitter next to move him over, and then power guys.
The general consensus now is just that you want your best hitters to have the most plate appearances.
There's still some tweaks to be made -- it can always make sense to break up lefties if they're vulnerable to lefty relievers. And we're thinking that speed now makes a bigger difference near the bottom of the lineup -- where getting yourself into scoring position matters more because those hitters are less likely to drive you in by hitting home runs. So I see where Counsell is going with this.