North

If not, then you may be right about it being a red flag.His babip is very high, so that has to fall but he also could adjust some of his misses with seeing pitchers more often and having more scouting on what they may be doing to him out there. It would certainly be helpful if he's able to be decent/solid There are cases where players have improved wRC+s and declined in their wRC+; but, the average of negatives and positives seem to be close to zero on charts like that. If we were to use this chart in the literal sense, then, every player aged in their low to mid 20s would have static wOBA's every single year. Obviously, that's not the case. Take for example Rizzo: .350 wOBA 2012 to the .325 wOBA we saw this year. It's not out of the question to attain higher run value or lower run value (probably because of variance, regressed numbers, improvements in small subsets) during this time. Data like this is insightful, but should be contextualized with the rest and taken for what it is- an average of every single professional baseball player. It more points to the fact most MLB players don't improve on their surface, created runs stats. Minor league baseball isn't Major League Baseball and we don't have the luxury of exact data like we do in MLB. Lake received 6% less FBs than league average right out of the gate, which is odd for a rookie. They threw the guy 48% fast balls out of the gate. That sucks for him. Bless his heart. I'd be scared shitless out there. Teams picked up on Lake fast that he has piss poor pitch recognition and threw him junk. Pitch recognition tends to be an inherent skill. I mean, the Cubs are trying to implement some type of neurological training for pitch recognition in the lower levels. It's that important. Trout, for example, received 61% fastballs his rookie year. People didn't know how to pitch to Trout and still don't. I did a correlation to BABIP and contact % btw (it was pitcher data but whatever) and found a correlation to be proportional. Higher contact % usually results in a higher BABIP. It was a correlation of .4.

Seems like he makes the team if Olt doesn't win the starting job no? That's what I was thinking too. This is this years "Lillibridge" move, just much, much better. I'll be surprised if he doesn't make the team honestly. Guess it could allow Barney to be dealt too, especially with Valbuena only takin reps at 2B this winter. Very true. Stacking infielders here. I can't see Darwin on this team after 2014. If Baez progresses and sniffs the Majors this year, Barney is as good as gone by July.

2010-2012. But, Castro was god awful in 2013. Sad :(

This is also some scary [expletive]: http://cdn.fangraphs.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/aging_curve_wrcp.jpg Look at that. In today's baseball world, large samples indicate the majority of baseball players coming up and producing will not get much better. Counter-intuitive, right? We want an idealsitic change in Junior Lake. I want Junior Lake to be someone else too, believe me. I do.

We could just look at a player's batting average and guess what that player will hit the next year. But instead we look at BABIP, park factors, GB%, LD%, FB%, IFFB%, HR/FB, baserunning and aging curves. There's even some work done trying to adjust for players against whom other teams will employ severe defensive shifts. The minor little peripherals can sometimes signal when there's a fundamental disconnect between what a player showed in a given year and what they can be expected to do going forward. Ok, HR/FB tells you everything that average distance a ball flies tells you and more. Information is important and looking at things in a different way can be usefull, but sometimes it's informational minutiae. You can certainly tell how little or great power a guy has, but what's the point? A guy who hits line drives is likely to hit more doubles and triples than a guy who doesn't. But if his average distance on a fly ball is 270 feet, he's not going to hit many HR. that information will show up in many different stats both traditional and advanced. Exactly. We want players to hit the ball more so the variance of XBH's with line drives don't have to be relied upon. Flyballs are the hit type that see the most extra base hits. When we look at HR/FB% and we see a sudden drop in that %, compare it to a constant park factor like xFIP does, and take into account a drop or rise in batted ball distance, it's more insightful to whether or not the lack of homers was his lack of skill.

Rizzo was impressive. We can get into it, but he's a lot better than Lake for a variety of reasons. Using small samples as the prerogative for improvement holds ground only if the numbers regressed show improvement in production. Unfortunately, that's the opposite for Lake.

It plays into his potential to hit the baseball for extra bases. There's a correlation between distance and XBH's. If one were to look at the decline of players, each player sees a proportional relationship to the amount of homers lost with distance lost. We want baseball players to hit the ball further because it means they are squaring up on the ball better, or are getting stronger when compared to past years. It goes without an explanation, really. But, the less you hit the ball, the less value you could potentially bring. Contact % needs to be included with the rest of the peripherals to explain his production. We want Lake to hit the ball more in order to get on base more, thereby using his speed on the base-paths as an advantage too. But, he's not doing this. No it's not. SLG, .ISO, and K% sometimes aren't a result of the raw data. Remember, XBH's take about 1650 batted balls to stabilize (which means where variance can be ruled out of the equation). By looking at distance, contact %, etc., we can see if a players production is largely attributed to a talent change. After all, that's what we want to know with Lake; does he have hitting talent? . There's been murmurings of the potential for Lake to have power. There's also been arguments made that he already has power. The batted ball in play distance shows how much further he needs to go to get the dreamy power. Even then, it needs to be included with the rest to be good at baseball. To find the answer of "to what extent," we need to see how often he misses a pitch. Sort of, yeah. But, again: context. How bad was Lake? To what extent was he bad? Was his production a result of his skill set? If not, then, what does his current skill set tell us? Why should we believe he significant gets better? He needs to get A LOT better. Not just a tiny bit. I'm talking changing his approach, changing his mechanics, hoping for a large increase in power, hoping he hits the ball even at a below league average rate. I'm not making definitive statements about his future. Rather, showing just how bad he really was when he came up with the Cubs. Lake has been playing baseball for a while now. His current skill set is what got him to the Major Leagues. They aren't little nuances that need to be tweaked. These are large, gaping levels in talent. Levels that need to be had to be good at baseball, and largely inherent for players at this level.

I like to use batted ball distance to contextualize .ISO. XBH's take a while to stabilize because of all the variables that go into doubles and triples. If I see a jump in .ISO , I'll quickly go to batted ball distance to see if it's a result of just good ball placement, luckiness, etc. Like, Coco Crisp last year had an insane jump in .ISO for the first month or two of the season. I forgot what it was, but I feel like it was 100 points higher than his norm. Granted, he actually did hit more homers overall this year. But, his distance for those first 2 months didn't really change. Funny enough, FanGraphs put together all these gifs of his XBHs and they were popups down the line, slow grounders, etc. Really it's not too complicated looking at some trends in players. All you guys can do it too. Just got to find the resources. I use baseballheatmaps.com religiously. Jeff Sullivan basically uses it like water. I'll also use Brooksbaseball for spray charts and zone profiles. Texasleaguers.com uses spray charts and the actual stadium graphic the players play in, which is cool.

No way, thats incredible.

Acquiring a center fielder to be flipped at the deadline is fine. But, it shouldn't involve a cost-controlled pitcher with an RA/9 potential near 3. Adding in Rasmus with Stroman/Sanchez? I wouldn't mind it. But, Rasmus would have to be a throw in piece, where many people don't view Rasmus as a throw in piece (which he really shouldn't).

The difference between Lake and Starling Marte this year is basically 20 feet of batted ball distance and a contact advantage in Marte's favor. Of course, Lake is two years younger and despite scouts not caring for the swing their reports have been unanimous in his power potential, so the a 20 foot current gap is not an insurmountable number. Don't get me wrong, I don't love Lake as a difference maker (or Marte for that matter). But he's got plenty going for him -- some of the best raw tools in the game, age relative to league, etc... If he can take a step forward with his contact he can be great. Failing at that, if he can just string together a couple lucky BABIP years we can trade him to Kevin Towers for half his farm system. 20 feet is a HUGE number. I can't stress how big of a difference 20 feet is. Prince Fielder's distance dropped from 311 to 291 in the last 4 years and saw his HR total almost drop down by 20. Marte and Lake don't have much in common, other than poor plate discipline. The 9% contact difference is huge too. They aren't marginal differences. Hopefully we catch KT on one of his panic attack days.

I don't know how accurate those #'s are but lets say they are for sake of discussion. You don't offer full value 2 years years prior to FA. If that truly was the contract being demanded by Samardzija, which it probably isn't, we would be holding the presser for Samardzija today. The reason to offer this is to avoid any potential rise in the cost of free agent players. It rises every year. With inflation, probably more. His price could be much more in two years. And, if the team were to lose him, the availability of players of his caliber is slim to none.

Sounds like he has some bad autoimmune issues. IBS = autoimmune potential. Genetic disorder causing inflammation in joints = autoimmune potential. Could be Chron's. i have UC that i'm on low-dose chemo for, and yeah, once you have one auto-immune disorder, you're like 50% more likely to get another one. i'm totally petrified of MS. That sucks my man. Immune issues are a hell of a complexity. I'm not sure about the 50% tag, though. The etiology of MS is far more complex than anyone can imagine. Genetics, environmental, behavioral, etc. All of it. MS isn't necessarily an auto-immune disease. There's conflicting evidence for it and against it being labeled "autoimmune." Fear no more.

Sounds like he has some bad autoimmune issues. IBS = autoimmune potential. Genetic disorder causing inflammation in joints = autoimmune potential. Could be Chron's.

That would almost HAVE to mean Bradley is at least up for consideration, right? They can't possibly dream of putting together a package without him now, can they? I'm not even going to try and figure out what Towers is thinking in a Samardzija trade and how he values what pieces going in/out. He's still probably looking at MLB the show ratings to see which guys he should trade, to be honest. I don't expect the Samardzija situation to be settled until Tanaka is posted. Not because of other teams' interest, but because of our own. The price is probably so so so high, as it should. I expect the Cubs to keep Samardzija if Tanaka is signed, taking the gamble Samardzija will continue to perform, and shelling out money when extra revenue comes in the near future if he is worth it. I could be wrong. But if Tanaka is actually signed, I see the asking price for Samardzija to potentially be higher (if it not already is crazy high). It's clear the market hasn't developed yet. Until other variables are limited, the Samardzija talks are going to be slow.

Not sure if you're serious. Well, I want to like this guy, but Jesus Christ; NCCF's sarcasm detector caught that one You got some nerve, buddy...

Yeah, the market is so scarce Billy Beane is spending on Jim Johnson while Andrew Friedman is spending on Heath Bell.

It's a rule that makes sense for everyone involved. It limits the risk of injury of popular players, both the ones kamakazeing it into the catcher and and the actual catcher. Keeps the guys healthy, keeps better players on the field, better players mean more money.

Not sure if you're serious. Reading text can leave others open to their own imaginative paralinguistic cues. But, I'm not trying to be smug at all. I know I'm this new guys coming in throwing stuff around. Believe me, I'm not that intelligent when it comes to this stuff compared to a lot of people. I'm not the one actually formulating some of the advanced metrics like many do. Yeah, the thing is though, line drives are an odd little hit type. It's really unexplainable what leads to a line drive. What I mean by this is that while groundballs and flyballs tend to take 80 BBIPs to be "stabilize," line drives take 600 BBIPs. I took the 250 PA qualifying number to see the highest LD%'s this year, and I got some surprising numbers. Leading the way was Nick Punto at 29%, followed by Avila at 28%, and Gregor Blanco at 27.7%. Not too far below we have Skip Schumaker at 27.2%.

The thing is though, he didn't have a good year with the Cubs. He has a swinging strike percentage of 16.3%. It qualifies for .8% behind Tyler Flowers as the worst in MLB with 250+ PAs. It's okay to swing and miss the baseball often if there are other attributes that go along with the trait (e.g., swing % and hitting the ball far), however. He exhibited a 65% contact rate too. Again, only Ryan Howard is .7% worse. He also doesn't hit the ball that far either. His batted ball distance on flyballs and homers was 270 feet. The equivalent of this are players like: Jayson Nix, Jed Lowrie, Brandon Crawford, Josh Phegley, David DeJesus, Matt Carpenter, etc. The lists, as you can imagine is quite long because 270 is pretty standard. These guys don't hit many homers. I'm not sure where the optimism is grounded in. He is a big, strong looking guy. But, he doesn't really have good hitting skills. On top of it, just by qualitative assessment, many scouts are turned off by his little hitch-like maneuver when the pitcher is at his release point. It points to the potential volatility he has in his approach.

Is the consensus here basically the same I've seen it in other places? Bradley-type pitcher or nothing?

Jackass reporting in. PSD is good stuff. David, Kyle, Gato, etc. have fun over there. Maybe we can have some good discussions here too. But, just like the rest of you, I hope Lake becomes good. But, for the reasons David said, it seems to just be an irrational optimism (which is fine, we are all fans and want something to cheer about). How come Junior Lake is good? Or, rather, what have we seen to think Junior Lake will be good?

Yeah because we don't have any other "generational" players that struck out like 33% of the time in their first taste of the big leagues. At least he's not hitting .141. he just started playing outfield, missed a lot of the early season with injury and has done very well in his debut. He can only get better with more work on the defense. Right now we wish Rizzo had his offensive stats. He has better stats than Rizzo, Valbeuena even Schierholtz. Basically every regular on the team(although on a smaller sample size) Only Scheirholtz has a better slugging percentage among starters As for war, Rizzo is 2.2, Scheirholtz is 1.7, Lake is 1.1 and Valbuena is 0.4. I am not saying sign him up for the next long term contract, but he should be one of the spots we can at least have hope for in the future. It's certainly better than watching jackson and vitters last year and seeing how far they were away from helping. I'd be scared shitless if Rizzo and Lake shared similar peripherals.

The only thing that Marte and Lake have in common is their heritage. Lake isn't good at hitting baseballs. He's in the bottom echelon of contact %, his swinging strike percentage is double league average, and posses the unique- yet frustrating- ability of not working counts (65% first pitch strike with pitches 41% in the zone). On top of all of this- he does not hit for power. I'd be happy with an outcome of a 4th OFer with adequate defense. I expect nothing, not even remotely close to league average production.

So are you trying to make a joke about the missing A in BBIP, which I assume is BABIP, which does include the word average? Or is that just batted balls in play? I've never heard of the distance stat either, how is that measured? Would a liner caught by a 1B be measured at 90 ft with a shallow fly be measured where it's caught? BBIP is just a lazy way for me to say batted balls in play. The distance measures are all means. I use baseball heat maps. It's a really easy, user-friendly tool.