Aaron Kennelly

Grandpa!

There are three -- THREE! -- baseball players with that god awful walk-up song!?

I'm so happy that Zobrist is on the team instead of Starlin.

So far, Clifton is rolling again tonight. 3 IP 2 H 0 R 0 BB 6 K

Did Rondon Fan take over this account?

I bet you he goes 6.

Why?

He didn't go around.

A couple of last things and I'll quit rambling about balls-in-play data. So if you look at the xOBA and xBABIP heat maps in that fangraphs piece, you'll notice something: You are more likely to get a hit when you hit 'em where they ain't. So xBABIP is going to say that you are more likely to get a hit when you hit 'em where they ain't. But how much of this is luck? I don't think there is much luck in squaring a ball up and lining it into the outfield, but is there luck in where you place that liner? And how much luck? So do we really want to reward a guy for being fooled and hitting a blooper just over an infielder's head? And can we give a guy a little credit for hitting a liner, even though it was right to someone? This still isn't going to take luck out of the equation. It might be better than normal BABIP. But what if a guy hits 100-bloopers that xBABIP says should fall in for a hit, whereas another player hits 100 line drives right at the center fielder? Then, there is just weird stuff with certain players. This might help us out there. For instance, with Anthony Rizzo, if you look at his balls-in-play data, it's not really that impressive, on average. He doesn't hit the ball that hard on average. He's not up there with the Giancarlo Stantons or Chris Davises in exit velocity. And he hits a lot of fly balls, and he's not a big line drive guy, and he hits quite a few infield flys. But, damned if he isn't one of the best hitters in the league. What's the deal? Well, Rizzo is a weird guy. And he will go from month-to-month being a completely different player. Sometimes the power isn't there; sometimes he is hitting bombs every other day. Sometimes he will carry a really low BABIP for a month. Other times he is spraying base hits for a couple weeks. Then, you have him being the most patient hitter in baseball for a couple months, and then he'll become much more aggressive another month. And is there something in him, where he just has the perfect home run swing or something? Sure, he doesn't hit it as hard as Stanton, but he hits it plenty hard enough, and if you give it to him where he wants it, he will give it the perfect launch angle and knock it out of the yard. But, if he misses, it's gonna be weak contact. How do you quantify a player's ball-in-play data when he is such a weird player? So, yeah, on average, things don't look great. But he's mixing in some really bad with some really, really good. And even on the bad stuff, he'll get lucky and fall into a base hit every once in awhile. So it's not so bad. Maybe what's more important is all that really good stuff. This version of xBABIP might be able to account for that.

And, let me just say that I hope this makes BABIP go away. I hate the stat so much. I can't even begin to explain how much I hate the stat. For one, people misuse it, and people use it far too often. Secondly, it is just a stupid, horrible stat. It really tells us nothing. Not all batted balls are created equally. We've known that forever, and then DIPS and BABIP come along and everyone seemed to want to ignore that. It's slowly going out of favor -- thank god. It's going to take statcast for us to drift away from it piecemeal. So thank you for that, statcast. The general purpose behind DIPS is novel. Take luck and noise out of the equation. It can't do that, though. It is simply unable. But, then you hear people say, like, "Oh, Brendan Ryan has a .433 BABIP; he won't maintain that." No horsefeathers. And before BABIP existed, we could have said, "Oh, Brendan Ryan has a .411 batting average; he won't maintain that." It's not getting us any closer to where we need to be. This probably won't, either, because we can say, "Oh, Gordon Beckham has a .433 xBABIP; he won't maintain that." But hopefully people will learn to just shut the horsefeathers up about BABIP. The progression of BABIP and DIPS has been hilarious to me, though. At first, it was, "No that can't be right," which turns into, "Well, maybe." It just seemed right. So, then it was taken as gospel by some. And, then, "Well, it doesn't work for heavy ground ball pitchers or heavy fly ball pitchers. Oh and guys that pull the ball a lot don't work either. And it can't account for speed. And you need to adjust for line drives. And yada yada yada." You just aren't going to be able to completely isolate skill and luck in baseball numbers. It can't happen. It won't happen. There are things we can do to isolate it some. We are going to continue to have more data that we can use to interpret things. But, sometimes a guy is just playing over his head. And sometimes a guy is Mike Trout. And sometimes you have Addison Russell horsefeathering things up by making diving stops. And there are situations where you can use BABIP. Like, with Jorge Soler. Whether it is BABIP or xBABIP, he's not going to be this low forever. But, so what? Maybe a good tool would be to measure BABIP vs. xBABIP vs. a guy's career BABIP or league average BABIP. If something is out of whack, we might better be able to pinpoint why.

So, yeah, Fowler and Zobrist have been a little lucky according to this data -- which is to be expected, their performances have been unreal. But, Bryant and Russell could actually be doing better? Yes, please. As for just from the eye test, some of this makes sense. Like, yes, Soler and Rizzo have carried unnaturally low BABIPs, but I don't really recall too many instances where they've just been robbed. There's been some, sure, but not an inordinate amount, in my mind. But David Ross has been getting BABIP'd, through and through. His BABIP says so. This data says so. The line drives in gaps that have been tracked down that I've seen say so. I've seen it and been noting it internally. I haven't done the same with Soler and Rizzo. Now what does this tell us? Who knows? From a cursory look, I think it probably does a pretty good job of telling us what has happened. Can it foretell what will happen, though? Maybe some. But, in the same way that Jorge Soler isn't going to keep a .213 BABIP, he's probably not going to keep a .236 xBABIP.

Looking at the expected wOBA numbers: (wOBA listed first / xOBA second) Russell: .341 / .367 Bryant: .364 / .400 Rizzo: .411 / .406 Fowler: .417 / .363 Zobrist: .404 / .366 Heyward: .296 / .317 La Stella: .415 / .436 Ross: .333 / .379 Baez: .313 / .331 Soler: .242 / .251 Montero: .265 / .293 Szczur: .446 / .380

That's really interesting. I hadn't seen that article on fangraphs. This is what I've been waiting to see. This is what Statcast is meant to do. This isn't perfect, but it is a start. He's got batted balls defined in specific wedges of launch angle, 5 feet-by-5 feet. And it doesn't account for shifting. But it's close. It's much better than plain old BABIP already. It needs refined some. I am sure there will be others working on this stuff. More research will be done, and we could get a really good xBABIP that will allow us to throw BABIP by the wayside. Those stats North has aren't up-to-date, though. They are from when the guy at fangraphs compiled them for his article. But he is keeping them updated daily, which you can see in this google doc that he links in his article: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_bwfyWPDu20x5nXMXQGBuHiXqJoS9N4-xSlPqkwh8PA/pubhtml# It also has numbers for pitchers in there, too. And and expected wOBA number, and splits, and all sorts of other goodness. I'm going to be poring over this stuff tonight. From what I've seen, there's a lot of stuff that makes sense: Jorge hasn't been putting the ball in play in ways that are conducive to getting on base... duh. But, then there's also the low Rizzo xBABIP, too. One thing that looks great: Adam Wainwright fares very poorly according to this data, too. He is just getting squared up.

Yeah, he's hit quite well in the recent past, and at several places. Keep that approach and things will work out for him. I'm not too worried. I mean, it sucks and it isn't encouraging. But, at least he is still grinding out at bats. If it were someone like Almora that has a history of not hitting well, I'd be more worried.

I'm excited that Clifton is going tonight. Of the pitchers that are currently active, I look forward to his outings the most. That will change once Cease heads to Eugene. But, I'm hoping Clifton can put together a strong season.

also, i've said this before but i see it being a near-zero chance that Arte's willing to give him away to the Dodgers, which knocks out the biggest threat right away i'm not optimistic he ever gets traded, though I'm not optimistic of him getting traded either, mainly because of how unique this situation is. It will be hard to navigate those waters. But, holy horsefeathers, can you imagine how crazy the drama will be once we start seeing more smoke, and the rumors start flying around?

Man, I hope his contract does knock the asking price down. I mean, it will for sure. But maybe it knocks the asking price down more than it should. For one, it might knock some teams out of the bidding altogether. So now you are limited to trading with good teams (or teams trying to be good), but just the ones that have money. You also are limited to trading with the few in that group that have the resources to acquire him. And then you are limited further to the ones that still value him highly at that salary, and with the cost it would take to acquire him. So, the trade partners are going to set the market, like in any trade. But, in this trade, with all its nuances, it becomes even more critical how other teams value him. At some point, the Angels will just say, "horsefeathers you guys; we'll just keep him." So hopefully Theo can gauge the market properly. And basically I just want him on the phone with the Angels every single day for as long as Trout is on their roster.

I'm not trying to sell Cabrera short. I know he was/is awesome. But Trout has been averaging, what, 9-10 wins a season. I'm merely trying to show, yes, great players have been traded before. But Mike Trout has never been traded before. And, also, it was completely different context. Cabrera had two years left on his rookie deal. Trout has four years left at over $30 million. It's just not a good place to start. Like, we have a guy set to make over $30 million per season and it is still an incredibly team-friendly deal. It's just hard to use anything else as a barometer.

Javier Baez has a Contact% of 72.2%. It was 59.0% in 2014.

Albert Pujols was the best hitter in the NL. And Cabrera was also a horrible defender and base runner. A better present-day comp in value for Cabrera would be, like, Nolan Arenado -- one of the top, oh, 10-15 position players in the league, not one of the all-time greats. Trading for two years of Cabrera then would be like trading for two years of Arenado now, not four-and-a-half years of Mike Trout. Way different.

Yeah, there's never been a trade that would be comparable to a Trout trade. For one, there haven't been many players in the history of baseball that have been as good as Trout. Secondly, there haven't been many players that good who have been traded. And of the players that good who have been traded, they weren't traded when they were 24. And players that good definitely don't get traded when they have that many years of control left. Also, front offices are smarter now, and are better able to assign proper value to a player of Trout's caliber. It would be unprecedented. The only thing that would come close is the Babe Ruth trade, and he wasn't really Babe Ruth yet when he was traded. And it was 100 years ago. So there is really no trade ever that we could use as a measuring stick.

Yeah, trading Bryant and Rizzo and Russell just doesn't make sense. They are so cheap and so good. It's the reason we are as good as we are right now. Fill out a lineup full of young studs that cost no money and you can splurge on free agent pitchers to build a good rotation. I love Trout, but there is just so much surplus value there with those guys. And with Bryant and Russell, I don't know how good they could really be. Like, what if Bryant starts cranking out 40 homers? Or if Russell starts hitting 25 or so? I'm just not trading those two, especially when I have to throw in other guys. And if we do make that trade then we are riding Trout hard. If he goes down with an injury, that's a killer. The depth up and down the lineup allows us to keep rolling when a guy like Schwarber goes down. Next man up! It might be stupid and I might be overvaluing our own guys because I've become attached. But I just don't see why we would change course when we are so freaking good as is. I just think a Trout trade involving Bryant or Russell is unnecessary. That being said, I'm a big proponent of getting the best player in any deal. Give me one 10-win guy over two five-win guys everyday. We are already coming to a crossroads with some of these guys. What if Soler and Baez and Schwarber all beast out in the next two years and become good? Where are they all going to play? (Like this a bad thing... woe is me.) And, if not, how do you even get them all enough at bats to see who does stick? Schwarber going down alleviated that issue this year, and it also showed why depth is important. But, still, rather than waiting and hoping and being deliberate with a Soler or a Baez, just give me freaking Trout. Let them figure out the Soler and Baez and Schwarber issues themselves. I'm just gonna roll out Mike Trout everyday instead. And as for the prospects, yeah, just let them literally pick any that they want, and however many they want. We can just disband a minor league team or two for a year if need be. So count me in on the group of "trade literally anyone besides Russell and Bryant." That also probably puts me in the camp of "this is never going to happen."

At first glance, he's an injured 41-year-old who wasn't that good the last time he was healthy. But, relief pitchers are weird. Maybe the velo is there when he comes back or something and he can randomly give us one last good year before he rides off into the sunset. Most likely he pitches like a bad, injured 41-year-old, though.

Also, Tom I didn't flip out last summer during the Heyward/Price discussion. I think I was cordial and we engaged in forthright discourse. Also it wasn't just a question of Heyward vs. Price; there were other nuances, such as if we should re-sign Fowler. (And we got both, which has been pretty great.) I never had a problem with Heyward or thought it would be dumb to sign him, though. It was simply a preference for what I thought to be a better fit, due to team needs and my lack of understanding what our payroll would look like. Anyway, I just looked through that thread and I really love this part. We were discussing team needs and you mentioned some skills and tools that our lineup was missing. I said that we actually were good at a lot of them, except for outfield defense and contact ability. But, then I went into a thing about how I didn't care where our value came from as long as we were getting good value. Anyway, it was some good back-and-forth. But this part was prescient: Silly me, not recognizing that we actually would be good at literally every aspect of baseball.

Agreed. And if you look through the trade deadline thread and elsewhere, I've been clamoring for a trade for a stud, young pitcher. Obviously, that is gonna cost us. If we lost Contreras in a deal for Jose Fernandez, then sayonara, Willson. And if a team wants us to include Almora in a trade that can help us, I'll pack his bags for him. I really don't care too deeply for Almora. I like that he seems to have rejuvenated his career. And I am thrilled that we have a guy like that in Iowa, at a position that has a murky forecast in our future. But, I'm all aboard if we have to trade him to get a stud pitcher, or anything really. My problem with Tom on the issue of Contreras and Almora has nothing to do with me thinking they are untouchable, or anything like that. I am just tired of him flogging them as guys that have no future here. His continued disregard for them as irritating. They are good prospects and they are close to major league ready. And they definitely could fit in on this team. It's not a necessity that they do, but they can resolve some issues. Contreras, in particular, is a guy that I think is really good and could step right in and join in on the fun.