Bertz

Plus 22 receiving yards and a Touchdown

You know what needs to be done and you're the best one to do it

I'll say I do really want Stanek if he's not the top guy they add. Stanek seems like he has a decent chance to make a few changes and become fun as hell. And if you do something like Fairbanks and Stanek he would start out in low pressure as the 6th inning guy.

Is he reported to have signed somewhere? None of the big names have said anything.

I take it as they have an AL East-centric view of the world. But yeah to me Michael King is in this awkward spot of being the least exciting of the fun arms but the best of the consolation prizes. So hopefully this is a sign we're locked into something on the higher end and we'll get some resolution soon. FWIW Jesse Rogers at the meetings said something like "gun to my head they end up with King."

Carrabis works for NESN and I don't know the other guy but he's listed as being in Massachusetts.

Good call. Assuming he makes similar money to Kim who the Dodgers signed last year I'd be really in on him

I was reminded this AM that Murakami's posting was earlier than the two other big time NPB guys. Murakami's posting window closes next Monday the 22nd. So realistically he probably needs to agree with a team by next Friday/Saturday? Kind of wild how quiet it's been with him given how that deadline is coming up.

Mostly convinced the Cubs are either only in on FA starters to try and hold leverage in trade or they're okay spending a little more than we're used to. You pretty much can't get a decent FA starter for less than $20M, and while you can *technically* square that with treating the LT as a red line Occam's Razor is clearly indicating the opposite.

Yankees are interesting because they probably have enough room for one more move of substance, and you could argue in a couple directions what that ought to be. I suspect they bring Bellinger back as their big move but we'll see.

I like Zerpa and assume the Brewers have a plan of attack to make him significantly better, but yeah still hard to not like this for the Royals. One thing I noticed is that Collins barely played in the playoffs. I wonder if the Brewers felt his September was not just a modest slump but being figured out.

I remember last summer wanting another '22 style draft explicitly to lean on Zombro’s expertise. Now that he's actually focused on the draft hopefully we actually get it in '26. And yeah his whole deal is supposed to be about properly accentuating what a guy naturally does (e.g. low slot supinators get a very different reco than high slot pronators), but when the world is his oyster who does he stock up on? Gonna be fun to find out. Also hopefully we get A LOT more breakouts on the farm. Last year was basically Wiggins, Gallagher, and Florentino as guys who look like they might have some impact? (and of course Gallagher is gone)

. I didn't realize he hadn't even really done anything with the minor leagues yet.

[Sic] Funny what happens when you have to write about a subject that ChatGPT doesn't have purview into

I shouldn't make the easy joke about the former but regarding the latter I do find it interesting how much you posted during the day this week.

People who actually write their own posts sometimes have typos

A lot to unpack here but two things broadly Re: your main question about Hoerner, he's a great well rounded player and quietly a star. Additionally, most research says that these kinds of players tend to age more gracefully than TTO-heavy types already on the wrong end of the defensive spectrum. HOWEVER, given that Nico even here at his peak is basically a league average hitter, I'm not super interested in paying him $25M a year. I suspect that "aging gracefully" in his sense will mean being a solid major leaguer until he's like 38. I think the margins between him being the impact guy he is right now and being more of a premium utility player are pretty thin. Think like an Elvis Andrus or Andrelton Simmons type of trajectory. As for the rest. This post is REALLY not going to help with the AI allegations. Off the bat, notice how most of the quoted text above has a white background? That means you copy/pasted from somewhere else and didn't write it here. Not totally damning in isolation, but given that it came with a ham fisted regression line that you were comfortable admitting came from Chat GPT along with everything else from the past few days there's certainly an implication. Beyond that, AO/GO is a *weird* stat to form an argument around. I honestly don't think I've seen it used to reference a major leaguer since before you were born. Humans who actually analyze baseball use groundball rate. AO/GO's only utility is that it's available in situations where we have not always historically had groundball rate available such as spring training or the low minor leauges. Also, beyond the weirdness of using AO/GO for any sort of analysis when much better and much more common alternatives are easily available, it's certainly not an indication of "explosiveness." Very broadly flyballs are good and groundballs are bad, but there is no athletic component to it at all. I would expect a person who actually watches baseball to clearly understand that, while an algorithm probablistically linking words together probably wouldn't catch it. Last thing: Stop asking ChatGPT to do math for you. Even beyond a broad "stop using AI" point, ChatGPT specifically is the worst of the commonly used models at math (god I hate that I have to know this stuff for work now).

"You got a 35 on your ACT AND a 5 on AP English Lit?!? I'm sorry sir, forgive my insolence, I only wish you had said something sooner!"

I'm sorry but I legitimately laughed out loud at this part

While there are some repertoire things to clean up, Snider seems to primarily be a question of velocity. Does he come to camp next year still throwing 92-93, or can he get back up to 94-95 with an offseason of velo training? That makes him a particularly nice lottery ticket as there's frankly not a lot of judgment required.

He's really good so I'm not going to say this is dumb, but man that's aggressive for a 35 year old with the slowest fastball in the league. Also he probably doesn't make sense after adding Milner but I think Taylor Rogers is probably gonna end up being a bargain for somebody.

I mean at this point they're pretty much optimized. You see a long term contract for like $300M and the ZiPS projection comes out and it's a trivial difference like "the model had him worth $293M." There are exceptions, the model HATED the Schwarber deal for example, but mostly the market is stable. Ultimately it's just about timeliness. When you sign a long term contract for $30M a year you're expecting to get like $50-60M worth of production each of the first few years and like replacement level production by the very end. So it's not "is this a good idea or a bad idea" it's moreso "is *now* the right time for this sort of contract?" For example there's this perception of like "WTF the Dodgers sign everyone!!" And the last two offseasons that absolutely happened. But look back the ten years prior to that and it wasn't true at all.