Bertz

Yeah, I don't like him because he doesn't actually do anything particularly well. No huge platoon split that can be leverage, not a great defender, etc. That being said he seems like he might be the most likely to bounce all the way back of these third tier 2B options. The difference between Kipnis in 2017-2019 and 2014-2016 appears to basically just be BABIP. He was a .324 guy earlier in his career and a .260 guy the last three years. It doesn't look like luck, as he's popping the ball up basically twice as much, but maybe there is some fairly black and white mechanical thing that can flip the switch back?

If it's your work comp it's likely because you're sharing an IP with folks who actually are being targeted. That, or you're flagged as interested in politics, and the Trump people are content spraying ads at politically motivated people even knowing full well that they're wasting half of them. Many display ads are based on the content on the page. This board can’t go like 3 pages without mentioning Trump so that’s probably impacting it. True. Especially with the new California privacy law I'd guess that's becoming even more of a thing than it already was.

I always figured it was because of the politics thread. HuffPo and CNN are really the only other politically related things I go to on my work comp. If it's your work comp it's likely because you're sharing an IP with folks who actually are being targeted. That, or you're flagged as interested in politics, and the Trump people are content spraying ads at politically motivated people even knowing full well that they're wasting half of them.

FWIW PECOTA released their standings today and have the Cubs winning WC2 at 85 wins. They've also added some fun features like this for win distribution: Ultimately I still think PECOTA is broken, for instance they have Richard Gallardo projected for more WAR than Jon Lester this year, but Jonathan Judge took it over and is a really smart guy. They made a number of under the hood changes that should start bringing it more in line quality wise with what's on FG, but with a completely different methodology. That will be a valuable extra perspective.

I need to sit on it more, but I think I dislike this but don't totally hate it. For positives, I like encouraging a team to be the best in its league above and beyond winning its division. I also like giving teams a little more incentive to fight for a wildcard. On the negative end, the biggie is that we're removing two guaranteed winner-take-all games. I also don't like going from 10 to 14 teams, we're diluting the talent pool too much there IMO. I'd probably be okay doing 12 (give the 2nd best division winner a bye too)? I also wonder what the plan would be for this new format after expansion, since we're probably looking at that during the CBA after this next one.

Is there a strong R/L correlation w/r/t lucky/unlucky? Off the top of my head, it would make sense to me for the lefties to lag , because even if they're fast, if they're hitting it hard they're hitting it to the pull side where there's a shorter throw. Looking at this data, the guys this analysis are adjusting in a positive direction compared to MLB.com's raw xwOBA are primarily lefties or switch hitters (7 of the top 10) while the guys it's dinging are righties (7 of the bottom 10). I would have agreed with you and expected the opposite. What's even more interesting is that the extremes in both directions are slow guys, catchers and sluggers. I'm not sure what to make of that.

It's wild the parallels between him and Harper

I thought this was interesting: Basically, the idea is that xwOBA via statcast can routinely over/underrate certain guys A) because they're notably fast or slow or B) because their lateral launch angle is bad (e.g. you hit the ball really yard but are very easy to shift against), and this is an attempt in correcting for the latter. The rightmost column is essentially how lucky guys were based on launch angle (vertical and lateral) and exit velo. I threw this table into excel and calculated standard deviations, and found that of the 337 guys on the list 17 of them were more than 2 standard deviations from the mean. That's a good rule of thumb for what is sufficiently outlier-y. Of the 17, 3 will be in the NL Central next year: Keston Hiura and Phil Ervin on the lucky end, and Justin Smoak on the unlucky end. Hiura in particular stands out, as he was the second luckiest guy on the list, and as an average runner you can't just chalk the delta up to his ability as a runner. If you lower the bar to 1.5 standard deviations, Yelich, Kolten Wong, and Kevin Newman get added on the lucky side. That being said, unlike Hiura all three guys are pretty fast, so you expect that they should overperform this metric by a decent bit. For the Cubs, nothing stood out too much. Contreras and Bote were both at 1.3, but as above average runners that's not super alarming. Bryant and Baez were at 1, but again given their speed that's about expected. Schwarber was the biggest laggard on the team at -1, and he's an average runner. So maybe bake in a little bit of extra good fortune for him going forward.

From Sharma's piece in The Athletic this morning: If the team can not only dump Chatwood's whole salary this spring, but get a little value for him, that would be phenomenal.

Weird. Well LAA goes back to being the most logical landing spot for Q.

I think I like this deal a little more than the previous deal. We have to see how good the 3rd piece is before we judge it. I think both Verdugo and Downs can be solid players for the Red Sox. Probably not superstar talents, but Verdugo was on pace for a 4-5 WAR season before he got hurt I believe. Graterol could be a good high-leverage reliever, but I have zero confidence he could hold up as a starter. You don't accrue a ton of WAR as a reliever, but they do have a ton of value in the playoffs and at the trade deadline. I think I'd rather have Downs over Graterol, but it's close. Yeah, this seems like a pretty clear upgrade for Boston. I wonder if Boston was kicking in less money in the original deal? Or maybe they just valued Graterol that much more than the industry (possibly because he's ready to contribute immediately)?

The Padres are likely more pretty good than great, but man having probably the best bullpen in baseball and a Pham-Tatis-Machado middle of the order is good way to put yourself in the best position to receive some Brewers devil magic and win a bunch of really close games.

Fell down a Yu Darvish rabbit hole this morning. Looking at the 2nd half league wide, here are Yu's ranks among starters with at least 50 IP (109 pitchers): K% - 3rd (37.8%) BB% - 1st (2.2%) ERA - 10th (2.76) FIP - 7th (2.83) xFIP - 2nd (2.37) GB% - 51st (43.1%) HR/FB% - 104th (19.7%) % of Balls in the Zone - 26th (50.2%) Opponent chase rate - 3rd (40.4%) Contact % - 11th (70.2%) Those are legit, true ace numbers. Basically Cole and Verlander are the only guys who were consistently above him. I'm a bit torn. Historically 1st Half/2nd Half splits are meaningless. For every guy who makes a permanent change that carries forward there's three for whom it was just a hot streak. However, Yu made a number of significant changes over the course of the season, so I want to believe they're real and permanent. It's also possible he was just knocking the rust off for the first month after missing so much time in 2018. On the other hand, it's somewhat rare for extreme HR/FB numbers in either direction to be more than dumb luck. And Yu's full season numbers still have him as the 15th best starter in the league by xFIP. So as much as regression might take away K and BB wise from him it's likely to give back dong-wise.

I don't think this changes anything, but still interesting

From an Eno Sarris article in The Athletic about pitchers who changed in September:

The Cubs' system has a really strong 10-20. Much better than you'd expect given their modest farm system ranking. I think the issues are A) How much of the fun stuff is still in A Ball and B) that there's not really an all-world type of guy unless/until we see a longer track record of dominance from Brennen Davis or Brailyn Marquez.

My understanding, and I don't think I've seen a refreshed study on it so it could be a weird steroid era anachronism, is that super athletic players age far more gracefully. The idea being that these guys have multiple way of contributing, so if one area falls off they still provide value in others. When Miguel Cabrera dropped to being a league average hitter last year, he was completely unplayable. When Javy is 35, he'll probably still be solid defensive 2B/3B who mashes lefties. This could be out of date though, for the same reasons that aging curves have started skewing younger and younger. I’m more worried about Javy’s offensive profile eroding long term (high Ks, low BB, low Contact%, quick twitch bat speed, base running, etc) than I am about defense. I have faith he can be fine and even plus defensively somewhere well in to his 30s (2B/3B/LF). It’s an extreme but look how quickly Carlos Gomez fell off. Surprisingly, it's not a thing (again with the very large caveat about how the steroid-era affects these sorts of studies) https://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2011/5/31/2199146/hitter-aging-curves

My understanding, and I don't think I've seen a refreshed study on it so it could be a weird steroid era anachronism, is that super athletic players age far more gracefully. The idea being that these guys have multiple way of contributing, so if one area falls off they still provide value in others. When Miguel Cabrera dropped to being a league average hitter last year, he was completely unplayable. When Javy is 35, he'll probably still be solid defensive 2B/3B who mashes lefties. This could be out of date though, for the same reasons that aging curves have started skewing younger and younger.

Eyeballing it, it looks like on the main guys other than Contreras and Hendricks it's pretty in line with the current projections on FG. It's a little higher on the depth guys like Bote and Vic as well. The system does not like the middle of our rotation, but it's very generous to the depth. For the pen, Kimbrel Jeffress Sadler Wieck Wick Morrow Maples Tepera Megill All project to have league average or better ERAs next year. Kimbrel, Jeffress, Wieck, and Morrow (I know) all project to be quite good. On the rotation, Cory Abbott already projects as a solid #5 starter right now, which is great, though not enough to make up for the tepid projections for Q and Lester.

I think given the group of guys currently in the upper minors, that by next offseason we will feel good about filling one spot internally. Of course that leaves at least one more, probably two left to fill. My guess is next offseason the team will fill one rotation spot via money (either FA or Lester's option), one spot via the farm, and one spot via trade.