Tyrant

There's been some evidence to support this in the past, depending on whichever fielding metric you choose to believe in.

The statue should be Pippen being awesome at basketball.

I'm not sure why people aren't discussing this angle more, but thanks for an interesting post. Do you think Colvin can leverage his quality mechanics into becoming a smarter, more patient hitter?

Yep, that's pretty much how I feel. Lou made some dumb decisions, but I think he was the best manager the Cubs have had in a long, long time. And I think he'll probably be the best manager they have for a while too. People will eventually get tired of any manager. There are Braves fans who are tired of Bobby Cox. Even success doesn't insulate a manager against eventual criticism - it's just the way the job (and fandom) works.

I'm almost certain the next Cubs manager will be worse than Lou.

No way, we have Colvin. Even in a thread about Derrek Lee being traded to Atlanta, there has to be a random, out of nowhere shot at Tyler Colvin.

You've packed so much into so few words.

Craig Krenzel. He's so smart.

I don't think you love either of these things.

GREAT start from Wells today.

I guess I don't understand what is confusing. I don't WANT to trade Starlin Castro, but I'd rather have the package he would net than an .800 OPS 2nd baseman. 1. You have absolutely no idea what sort of return Castro would net. 2. Castro looks like he's going to be better than an .800 OPS player. 3. Even if he's not, what's wrong with an .800 OPS second baseman?

If you're being picky... He's pitched great. He just hasn't gotten great results. Eh, even if you go purely by FIP and nothing else, he's 29th in the league. That's good. Great would be a stretch.

It's not about maximizing an individual's value. If the Cubs are better off with Lee (or whomever) at SS and Castro at 2B rather than vice-versa, you go with it. I disagree. I think trading Castro for a king's ransom is better than making him a slightly above average 2nd baseman. Can we stop talking about trading Castro after he's played 80 games for the Cubs? It sounds completely ridiculous.

His FIP this year is 3.56, just ahead of names like Sabathia and Cain, and just behind names like Greinke, Santana, and Price. I get that FIP measures all sorts of things that ERA doesn't reflect, but it's still weird to me to say that Wells has been "great." It's mostly semantics, I understand. I'd be fine with saying his peripherals are good, but the results have been mediocre. His WHIP is 1.40. That's not great. Yeah, it sounds weird, but the way I see it is that if he were to continue to pitch exactly the way he's been pitching in the future, we should expect the actual results (ERA, WHIP, etc) to be much better. His BABIP against is .336 right now, 42 points higher than last season, and way above the average pitching BABIP of .290-.300. Yes, his line drive rate is up (from 18.8 to 22.6), but so is his strikeout rate per 9 (5.66 to 7.08), while his walk rate his stayed consistent. Calculating FIP only takes into account walks, strikeouts, and homeruns (http://www.ehow.com/how_2288361_calculate-fip-statistic.html), so I assume it normalizes everything else like line drive rate, strand rate, etc. With Wells' LD% just a bit above league average, you'd expect his ERA to be a little higher than his FIP in terms out he could control (that is, eliminating strand rate and others), but not .81 higher. I agree with all of this. It was more the issue of saying he's BEEN great. He's hasn't been great, but he projects to have better results in the future. I was being picky, that's all.

Lee makes an an error almost every day now, it seems.

His FIP this year is 3.56, just ahead of names like Sabathia and Cain, and just behind names like Greinke, Santana, and Price. I get that FIP measures all sorts of things that ERA doesn't reflect, but it's still weird to me to say that Wells has been "great." It's mostly semantics, I understand. I'd be fine with saying his peripherals are good, but the results have been mediocre. His WHIP is 1.40. That's not great.

I don't think we've hit the "peak" of its usefulness, but there may be a plateau of some sorts at the moment. I do think we're seeing a lot more noise and new stats coming out that may not be great measures. With that, it's sometimes hard to separate what's good and what's either inaccurate/redundant. But on the flip side, I think there's still a ton left to be discovered. For example (and related to this article), people are tracking LD%, BABIP, HR/FB% and all that, but no one has the full picture right now of how those correlate to one another. Lots of ideas, but plenty left to know.

I don't know if it would look great for Hendrys future if he came out and said that the team he put together needs a massive rebuilding job. No way he's going say that.

This could just be my perception, but it seems like Fangraphs has been posting a lot of articles lately where they point out a few trends and then eventually conclude with "Hmm, this is odd and I don't really know what it means." Some of the writers are better than others, but a lot of recent work has seemed a little half assed.

Is this your homework, Larry?

Or, it could just be that Milton Bradley's issues are far different than Greinke's social anxiety.

Agreed. After these recent blowouts, I can't even say we're playing for pride anymore. Let's just get ready for next year/the future. But they're gonna be nice and give Piniella what he asked for (to leave on his own terms). Hendry's just a stand-up guy. :roll: I think Hendry is a lousy GM, but I do think he's mostly a stand-up guy (which isn't a bad thing). And since it won't make any difference in the season, I think Lou does deserve to go out on his own terms. He's had a long, mostly successful career in baseball and it's a nice gesture to let him "retire" rather than end his career by getting fired. Lou's definitely not a perfect manager by any means, but he's pretty far down the list of why the Cubs have been so terrible this year. I don't see what firing Lou in August is going to accomplish in preparing for the future, other than giving angry fans some feeling of vindication.

That can only mean you are predicting 9-7 or 10-6. I hope this turns into a multi-page picking of nits.

I'd give him 4 years, $38 million or so. Those 400 or so at bats back in 2007 were REALLY decent.

Hendry seems to hate the arbitration process in general, even when it's guys who are staying on the team. That's why he's so proud of their record of avoiding hearings, at least until former Cub Ryan Theriot broke that string. I guarantee that's why Hendry suddenly stopped liking the guy so much.