squally1313

I guess I'm not sure what type of value you're assigning to Hoerner, but if we're comparing him to Ian Happ and Kyle Schwarber, both of whom were top 10 picks and in theory more valuable/better players, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement. And yes, I know, Kris Bryant, but he was in no way a reach. Basically I think people keep ignoring the Albert Almora sized elephant in the room when they look at Hoerner's (admittedly limited) numbers. I think Hoerner can be a poor mans version of a poor mans Zobrist, but I haven't really seen anything beyond that. Happ and Schwarber have combined for about 14 fWAR in just under 3000 PAs, that rate of production is more than fine with me as an outcome for Hoerner. Yes, there are some parallels to Almora, but 1) those are going to happen with any high contact player who isn't an Altuve-level talent, and that's where leaning on Hoerner's ability to adapt from being a high level college player plus ever-improving organizational instruction can give room for optimism. But there’s nothing to suggest Hoerner has the same level of talent. He was drafted later, his numbers aren’t nearly as good. He can play a very valuable position, but we already have a shortstop. Theo and Co get credit for him looking like a major leaguer, but he’s a clear step down from two guys who have been debated as future pieces of this team for the last year.

Not sure if this is supposed to be sarcastic. Not at all. It's not proof positive he's going to be a star, but their lack of misses at the top of drafts when drafting college hitters is a validation of their ability to get MLB caliber players from that cohort. I guess I'm not sure what type of value you're assigning to Hoerner, but if we're comparing him to Ian Happ and Kyle Schwarber, both of whom were top 10 picks and in theory more valuable/better players, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement. And yes, I know, Kris Bryant, but he was in no way a reach. Basically I think people keep ignoring the Albert Almora sized elephant in the room when they look at Hoerner's (admittedly limited) numbers. I think Hoerner can be a poor mans version of a poor mans Zobrist, but I haven't really seen anything beyond that.

Why is this a good outcome? He's generally considered a top 50 prospect in baseball right now and a positive outcome would be using him to save a few million off the back of the roster....Yippee skippee Trent Giambrone and Vimael Machin can probably do the same thing and it's a way less sinister act by the org

If you need a reason to believe, he is a college bat that this front office drafted in the first round even when that wasn't his consensus value. Not sure if this is supposed to be sarcastic.

Bold: Agreed! Not sure how employing one, one with a wide enough set of demonstrated tools and skills that he could easily pass that floor in his prime, at a bare minimum salary at a position of need actually gets in the way of getting one Not bold: Still not a thing! No one is talking about cutting Ian Happ. The discussion, at least the one I thought I was part of, is whether we need to bring in an outfielder to be a starter, and let Happ be the new Zobrist, or whether we should roll with Schwarber/Happ/Heyward for 130 games. He's cheap and definitely brings value. 2.5 wins is absolutely not his floor. His floor is what he did for 100 games in AAA just this past year, but then against major league pitching. I get that it's a bad faith argument to selectively cut out 9/22-9/30, because that definitely counts. But on September 20th, we were looking at a guy who went from 1.9 WAR to 1.5 WAR to being a below average AAA hitter and then putting up a .217/.295/.426 slash line in the majors. There is nothing in there that comes close to 'major league starter'.

I think the team needs more than an "easy to see a 2.5 win player". If there was any reasonable hope of expecting more than 3-3.5 wins out of each corner outfielder, then you slot Happ in there, take your 2-2.5, and hope he turns a corner. Basically it's just frustrating that you have three outfielders that would all make amazing third outfielders, and definitely serviceable second outfielders. Counting on Happ to be anything more than that is relying a hell of a lot on 8 games.

Was it tongue in cheek when you tried to post evidence about why you were right? Just making sure I know which parts you were kidding about. I mean, yeah, not a big deal. The whole 'like I've been saying for months/years now...' goes well beyond you around here. But it was a weird brag on liking a player that's pretty well liked around these parts.

No, no, keep going. The coolest people around here are the ones that remember every half assed prediction they made 12 months prior, and will continue to shoehorn it into their messages later on when one of them kinda comes true. Everyone loves those posts.

I'm probably going to quote myself here every time Kyle does even the slightest thing of note.... From Jun. 27th, when everyone was piling on him. *coughs loudly and pats self on back* It was some idiot named Rynomites with 27 total posts and then a bunch of us jumping in to defend Schwarber. But sure dude, here's some message board points.

The 100 mediocre AAA games came after two not unproductive ML seasons at 22 and 23 though so it's hard to put tons of value in that too. Not sure there's much of a relationship in year to year LD%, but that he kept hitting the ball hard is good stuff. Also also is a guy with 39 HRs the past two seasons who also hits the ball hard, far, and in the air really relying on the ball for power? He's surprisingly played more games in CF than any other position as a pro....Basically I don't think Happ being good is 100% certain but I do think there's so much more to be optimistic about than down over The two non unproductive MLB seasons, the second one worse than the first, basically get you a low 2 WAR player. He essentially went in the wrong direction for 1.9 years, and then went nuts for 8 games. They still count, but that’s really the only evidence we have that hes more than a 2.5 win player. Which has value, sure, butnext to the other two it starts to look a bit bland.

Yeah I mean, there's two options/conversations here: 1. You essentially throw out last year, take his MLB PAs from 2017 and 2018, slap it on 600 PAs, and he's a roughly 2-2.5 win player in center field. Not terrible, but it means you're looking at an outfield that's going to really struggle to top like, 10 WAR total if you lock in Schwarber and Heyward next to him. Only 5 teams put up more than 12 WAR with their OF last year and only 6 over 11. Is that really that bad or burdening to expect ~10 WAR? Sure we’d like more but with the IF we have, probably projects in the 18 range (5-6 KB, 3-4 Javy, 2-3 Nico/Bote 2B, 3-4 Rizzo 1B, 3-4 C Willy/Vic) I think we could be competitive with a ~10 WAR OF. I'm seeing different on FG, but I think their allocations are messed up when it comes to team production by position. No real problem with your infield numbers, and 28 oWAR would put us 6th in baseball for 2019, so all good. However, and I know I'm kinda changing the argument here, if you lock in a 2-2.5 WAR full time Ian Happ, you aren't getting to 10 wins with Heyward and Schwarber picking up the majority of the remaining PAs. KB might help push some value to the OF in total, but there's no way you can rely on those two for 7-8 wins...I think the over/under is about 5.

Well it ignores 100 games of mediocre at best AAA ABs, for one. Two, his LD% dropped significantly from 2017 and 2018, while his hard hit contact stayed about the same. He made contact more, and more of his fly balls left the park. The first is indisputably good, the second, given everything we know about the baseballs, is not something we necessarily want to rely on. He only played 126 innings in the outfield, and only about half of those in center, so not nearly enough to say anything about his defense.

That's a fair point, although I think it's also worth considering it an illustration of how few PA his MLB downturn was if 1 week essentially erased it. We do have ~900 PA before this year of him having an MLB quality bat(especially in CF), so I don't want us to overstate the risk. That is the risk though, Happ is a bit of a wild card, and he hasn't spent so much time in CF that we can be uber-confident in how to peg him defensively either. Yeah I mean, there's two options/conversations here: 1. You essentially throw out last year, take his MLB PAs from 2017 and 2018, slap it on 600 PAs, and he's a roughly 2-2.5 win player in center field. Not terrible, but it means you're looking at an outfield that's going to really struggle to top like, 10 WAR total if you lock in Schwarber and Heyward next to him. 2. You take last year as, if not close to the norm, a step forward. He's not going to OPS .897, but whatever he worked on eventually had a positive effect, and he can put up roughly a .250/.325/.500 slash line over the full year (admittedly a little optimistic, slugging wise). You basically have Brett Gardner, who put up a .251/.325/.503 slash line with slightly positive defensive value for 3.6 WAR. Awesome. The issue with someone like Happ, even if he ends up with these types of numbers, is that he seems the type to do it in streaks, and he's the kind of player that is the first to be blamed/turned on when things aren't going well. To put myself in David Ross' head, Happ hasn't "earned" the rope to ride out a few weeks for 40% K rates. So even if you're optimistic and think he can put up 3+ WAR in a full seasons worth of PAs, does he even get that chance?

Still a terrifyingly small sample size, but BR has him going HAM pretty much all of the last month: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=happia01&year=2019&t=b Or is that mostly masking that he sucked and that last week dragged up the previous 3-ish? To break it up even more, 9/01-9/21 was .216/.250/.405, so yes, pretty bad up until that last week.

Happ is such a weird dude to try and project. While the talking point was that he was sent to AAA to 'work on his swing', I don't think we can ignore the fact that he was down there for 99 games and essentially was really bad for pretty much all of it. And then after that, it took him going nuclear the last week of the year to get his 2019 MLB numbers looking pretty again...through 9/21, he had a .224/.300/.457 slash line. Obviously you can't ignore that last week, but we're basically talking about one week's worth of incredible baseball as the difference between a lost year and someone who should be our starting center fielder next year.

I was told to expect my renewal details in the mail at some point this week...interested to see what they do with the prices, if anything. I made sure to get my playoff money refunded rather than carried forward this time. Still leaning towards renewing, but...not a sure thing.

So it's not a gimme. who said it was? in the nfl, a fg kicker should be very reliable from 41 yards out, from the left, center and right. its a dumb argument and only makes sense since he sucked and missed the fg

So what happens when those 110 mph gappers turn into 90mph fly balls when the ball is de-juiced? Then everyone else's 110 mph gappers turn into 90 mph fly balls and his value remains the same? I don't think you're making as profound a point as you think you are here. You're better than me at this, but I immediately tune out almost every time someone brings up the new ball/old ball thing in terms of roster design. Everyone plays with the same ball. It's like arguing what would happen if they made it 4 outs per inning instead of 3. Good players will remain good players.

Citing OBP in a five game sample as the reason for anything seems incredibly dumb, especially when they were 5th in the league in OBP for the season, and second in the NL.

George Springer having 227 postseason PAs is about as old as I've felt in a while. For context, Rizzo has 154.

I would gladly switch Caratini with Contreras in the trade proposal, but I doubt the Pirates would be interested. Going by what Epstein said about making a big change and figuring in our budget / mediocre farm system, one of our core players looks to be on the block. I can't see Rizzo or Baez being traded, which pretty much leaves Contreras or Bryant. Depending on the return, we would have a big downgrade at 3B or a lesser downgrade at catcher. Without trading one of the "core four", the best trade assets have very limited value on the trading block. When did he say this in regards to the roster? I don’t think he’s spoken any absolutes about it, it’s all been GM speak. The big change stuff, that was stated clearly/imminent at least, was more FO and coaching directed with changing things (and they already are on their way to doing it). Yeah seriously, and even if he did say that, who cares. You think Jed is going to come rushing in next February with some transcript and be like "remember when you said this", and Theo is going to just open up the trading block like on the Show and add Contreras real quick? He can bring back good value, and if there's a deal that provides a clear upgrade elsewhere that outweighs losing him, go for it. But also, that applies to everyone on the team.

Going to be great when fall out of the race by early September as Lester goes 4-18 and then they spend the last couple weeks hyping up David Ross: Player-Manager Day. Mostly kidding, because managers don't matter, but you know they'll try to pull that if they can.

Have they put out who is going to be throwing out first pitches and doing the ceremonial stuff for the games in DC? Also, the Nats would be a real interesting team to deal with the whole visiting the White House thing.