squally1313

Speaking of taking things from the boards/twitter, I was at Wrigley on Saturday for reasons I don't really want to talk about and the people outside selling the t-shirts had one that looked a ton like someone's old (maybe still current?) signature. It was just a list of the key names vertically, with the "&" sign next to all of them, so like... Bryant& Rizzo& Arrieta& Lester& Russell& Heyward... There might have been first names for some of those, can't really remember. Was that an original idea from here or did that come from somewhere else?

After the way this season has gone, I'm going to be incredibly depressed if we lose to anyone in the playoffs (which statistically has about an 80% chance of happening, YAY BASEBALL). I'm not going to be sitting there watching the Nationals celebrating thinking 'thank god it wasn't the Cardinals'. If they somehow define all odds and end up winning it all, it'll just be a little salt in a gaping wound. I'm hoping they make the playoffs because I'm confident they're the second worst team still in contention (besides the Marlins), and I'm hoping for any small advantage to up our odds. They team suck, and we're better in pretty much every aspect of the game (and we even hold our own in neck tattoos). Edit: It was like the 9th best dong of our October, but I'll forever have a soft spot for Wainwright's washed up fake-hardass shell coming into the game in relief and having Soler immediately put one out at like 140 MPH.

incessant giggling

An offensive juggernaut for sure, but I'm not sure if I like that OF defense. Schwarber and Soler are both at best average, most towards below average, while Heyward loses some of his defensive value going to CF where he's going to have to cover a whole lot of ground. Bryant in right, Baez at third, either to start the game or in the late innings.

Even us playing luck-neutral so far (I get that pythag probably falls apart at the extremes, but still), has us at 87-38 so far this year, for a .696 winning percentage (nice). The pace works out to 113 wins. It's amazing we're currently 16-17 in one run games. I wonder how common it is for a 100+ win team to be under .500 in that situation. Edit: The Cardinals in 2005 were the last 100+ win team (100-62) to be under .500 in one run games (21-25).

Agreed. If Jake gets to 20, that number plus the streak of good pitching it would likely take to get him there would probably push him over the top. Which is incredible considering how frustrating he's somehow been to me over the last couple months. Last year's Cy Young race was pretty unprecedented.

I think they only have to be something like 5 games over .500 the rest of the way to get 102 wins. Yep, 22-17 I really want 100 wins, but beyond that I would love to finish 103-59 or better. 103-59 looks disproportionately more awesome than 102-60 Agreed, just to completely rise above the whole 'every team wins 60 games and loses 60 games, it's what you do in the other 42 that make all the difference'.

A small part of me hopes he blows this just to revisit what a dumb trade this was. My friends I was with this weekend said he changed our World Series odds from 25% to 50%

That was funnier when it looked like he totally blew the call, but it's still pretty funny that Pena's attempt to back up the throw put him between contreras and the ump as the tag was being made, on the first base side for a throw from right field.

This is like B- Jake and he's faced 21 hitters through 7.

Nice

Jesse needs 3 AM to come kiss it and make it feel better.

Assuming this holds, we just need to go 20-17 the rest of the year to get to 100. Which is ridiculous.

Jake is going to have at least one huge hit in October. It may not be Kerry in game 7, but he's coming up big at some point.

Did you hit against him too? Absolutely not, I was an awful hitter (and really only a slightly better pitcher). Anecdotally, I heard he was the second best guy we went up against, after this guy: http://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.cgi?id=denneh001tim

I pitched against this dork in high school and he beat me 6-0. Payback please, Jake.

Kinda straddling the middle here, but I think the 2015 version of Bryant was an excellent player, just not quite in the ways people expected him to be. While he was 8th in the league in offensive WAR, he was 'only' 19th in wOBA for the year, with the remaining value coming from him being the fourth best baserunner in the league and the 38th best defensive player, neither of which were really expected, and as such expected to regress a little bit going forward. With him being 3rd in the league in K% (a mixed bag of 2016 success in Chris Davis, Michael Taylor, Ian Desmond, and Joc Pederson joining him in the top 5), it wasn't unwarranted to worry about his minor flaws going forward. ZIPs had him projected as a 5.3 win player, due to similar offensive production and decreased baserunning/defensive contributions. Still an excellent player, but somewhere in the Matt Carpenter range as opposed to future MVP. To Tim's point, yes there are players that show improvement, but there have been a few articles that have come out recently showing the amount of improvement once players reach the big leagues has gone down dramatically, due to improved minor league preparation, service time considerations, etc. Here's the first link that shows aging curves for wOBA, albeit coming up on three years old. http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/hitters-no-longer-peak-only-decline/ A more recent article, linked below, breaks it down into different types of players, of which I'd say Bryant falls comfortable into the 'young old guy' category. That category shows improvement in the 22 to 25 age range, which makes sense for the 2015 to 2016 Bryant progression, but actually shows them aging worse than other types of players. http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/are-player-types-aging-differently-now/ All in all, I never really doubted that he'd be a 4-5 win guy for the first ten years or so of his career. But there was at least some risk of the swing and miss issue never going away, and if the defense and baserunning value disappeared quickly (which for a 6'5" third baseman, isn't an outrageous predictionn), then his ceiling would have gone down significantly. Obviously in hindsight, he fixed his biggest issue, and is now 7th in wOBA while providing a lot of value everywhere else. Dropping your K rate by 8% is really tough, especially when it's now a lower rate than anything he put up since low A. But he did it, he's turned into the dong monster we always dreamed he could be, and he'll be the MVP of the World Series favorites in about 5 weeks.

I know judging a curveball based on watching like 6 pitches and seeing terrible hitters flail at it is not smart. I don't care. Grimm looks nasty.

I'd like to think I could do better, but if I was 24 or 25 and played professional baseball in San Diego I'd probably look like this idiot too.

At this point, what's your prediction for his slash line next year? Are his ROS numbers (.257/.335/.390) about the median? For what it's worth, that plus his baserunning and defense gives him 0.6 WAR the rest of the year, or about 2.6 WAR over a full season.

Oh my god does he really have 25 home run power

I love rizzo and I love the 'thanks for the RBI' hug he just got from Georgie.

So is most of the $7.55m not guaranteed then? Part of the reason the Hawks are so tight against the cap is because Panarin hit incentive markers that I don't think anyone expected him to hit (top 10 in scoring, etc). I wouldn't expect those types of things to be included in the reported contract offered. That's what makes me wonder if this is a different type of contract. Most of it is not guaranteed. Really its a non-story that the Hawks offered the max contract mostly because every team vying for Vesey offered the same max deal. Makes sense, and that's good news. I had always thought most of his value was tied to his low cap hit unless he blows up like Panarin did (which would be just fine with me). I've read elsewhere that the chance to line up next to 19 would be one of the main selling points, so I'll assume that he'd at least start up there. I don't really think Panik is a top 6 guy, but putting Hossa with Kruger on the third line is intriguing given how good it looked down the stretch last year. After that, it's anyone's best guess, and probably going to be based on fitting under the cap as much as anything else.

Thanks guys....I knew it didn't incorporate pitch framing (which explains why Montero is so low), but completely forgot about his LF time (which also probably adds to why Gattis is so low).

I obviously have no idea how these contracts work, but I figured it'd be similar to Panarin's deal. I didn't think we had room to add something this big? Not sure how the max ELC looked last year but this year the max you can offer in base salary is 925k per, the other 2.875m coming in bonus/incentive money. Panarin signed for 2/6.775m that was roughly an average base of 700k with 2.7m each year in bonus/incentives. So is most of the $7.55m not guaranteed then? Part of the reason the Hawks are so tight against the cap is because Panarin hit incentive markers that I don't think anyone expected him to hit (top 10 in scoring, etc). I wouldn't expect those types of things to be included in the reported contract offered. That's what makes me wonder if this is a different type of contract.