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Hairyducked Idiot

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Everything posted by Hairyducked Idiot

  1. Hairyducked Idiot
    And strikeouts are *obviously* way worse than other outs. Strikeouts can't advance a runner!
  2. Hairyducked Idiot
    Really? I mean, you don't understand the answer to this? I don't think there is an answer to it other than "well, it kind of seems like it makes sense." It's an intuitive idea that may or may not hold up under examination. Baseball is a notoriously counterintuitive game. LaHair's inconsistent performance still allowed him a +1.94 WPA on 6.1 BRAA in 380 PAs. By contrast, Rizzo's 9.0 BRAA in 365 PAs translated to +0.91 WPA. That's obviously not any sort of actual study, but I'm not at all convinced that a real study would show that steady performances are more valuable than hot/cold performances if the total production is the same.
  3. Hairyducked Idiot
    Yes, it sucks to have 22 year olds that put up a .859 OPS in AAA. At a position that half the league is scrambling to fill.
  4. Hairyducked Idiot
    Why is consistency more valuable than awesomeness that averages out to the same production?
  5. Hairyducked Idiot
    Lake Szczur Cabrera Lake's proximity to the majors is being quite underrated here. I could easily be convinced to dump Szczur another 10 spots or so. Cabrera's got the arm and started to put it together last year in AAA. I just hope that if the starting experiment fails as badly as I expect, they put him back in the pen quickly.
  6. Hairyducked Idiot
    Pitchers get hurt, a lot, and more than position players. That can't be ignored when projecting them when they are that far away from the majors.
  7. Hairyducked Idiot
    An A-ball pitcher with injury problems and you are talking about floor?
  8. Hairyducked Idiot
    C should be better, but I don't think you can ignore that Castillo got a lot of BABIP luck at the end of the season to improve its standing last year. Barney is definitely capable of worse offensive seasons at 2b than what he did last year. The longer Ian Stewart stays "healthy," the better the chance 3b is worse. LF is probably going to be worse.
  9. Hairyducked Idiot
    This is a tough question to answer. If I thought that the front office was committed to winning as many games as possible (without doing anything crazy like trading a bunch of prospects for veterans), then I think this roster should be expected to win about 76 games. But if this is all they have going into the season, then by August 1st I expect the roster to be a shell of its Opening Day self with lots of sell-off trading. Not to mention I expect little effort to replace any holes that pop up during the season. So if we open with this roster, I'd expect to win like 68 games.
  10. Hairyducked Idiot
    Shiny new toy syndrome is showing. Third base is a smoking empty crater all across the league, and a 23-year-old with AAA success at the position is having trouble breaking into the top 10.
  11. Hairyducked Idiot
    I'm not going to be happy, but I've resigned myself that we're going to have someone pretty awful in the "right-handed infield depth" role. The field of interesting free agents that fit our needs has really, really thinned in the last week or so.
  12. Hairyducked Idiot
    He'd cost us a pick, right? I suspect that was a big different on Sanchez.
  13. Hairyducked Idiot
    I don't know if I'd expect a Schierholtz/Sappelt platoon to "easily" pass .719. .718 and lower is definitely inside the fat part of their range of expected outcomes.
  14. Hairyducked Idiot
    Ian Stewart formally added to the 40-man to replace Beliveau. TCR speculates he could be outrighted if we wanted to to try and save his spot, risking him to waivers or electing free agency, neither of which seems likely.
  15. Hairyducked Idiot
    2005 Tigers finished 71-91. They probably should have dismantled the team and hibernated for three or four years.
  16. Hairyducked Idiot
    Well, the Cubs front office has said the trade front is quieter for them than last year, and the trade rumors we are involved in have us sending offense away. The offense is so very, very far from good that it would take a monumental shift to make it anything less than bad. It's really not too early to see that. The pitching staff has a lot of potential to be not just average but good.
  17. Hairyducked Idiot
    Those undervalued players they were picking up on the cheap back then were being signed to play for a team that at that time was a perennial playoff caliber team. The difference between signing a deal on the cheap for a team like that and signing the same deal for a rebuilding team like the Cubs is night and day. Some of them were waiver pickups, some of them were nearly minimum free agents who had no other options, one was a purchased contract from another team. They were the equivalent of Camp, LaHair, Stewart, Valbuena, Cardenas, etc. last season. We tried the same thing. We just got much different results. I'm genuinely not seeing the difference you are seeing in terms of why the Cubs not being a contender would mean their waiver-wire and cheap pickups should be different.
  18. Hairyducked Idiot
    Unless you like Bourn, who's value is just as much defensive as offensive, there aren't any bats left. The offense for 2013 is pretty much doomed.
  19. Hairyducked Idiot
    Hell if I know. I was scanning the remaining FA list and it's brutal. I really want a right-handed utility guy who isn't a risk to drop a .550 OPS turd on your season, but those guys are all getting starting SS jobs because there aren't enough to go around.
  20. Hairyducked Idiot
    You missed the part about the team's chances of contending. The Cubs are NOWHERE near where Boston was in 2003. Boston had Pedro Martinez and Derek Lowe anchoring their rotation and Nomar, Manny, Damon, Trot Nixon and Jason Varitek as key components on their offense coming back from the 2002 season. Plugging Millar, Mueller, Todd Walker and David Ortiz into that line up just made a solid offense that much better. Who are these Pedro, Lowe, Manny, Damon and Nomar players that the Cubs are returning from the previous year? I'm genuinely not following you at all. Those players I listed were players they got for virtually nothing because the market undervalued them. When a team is further from contending, they don't need to try to find good, undervalued players on the waiver wire?
  21. Hairyducked Idiot
    Did he? I was a little preoccupied yesterday. @%@#$%, I really wanted him.
  22. Hairyducked Idiot
    "Appease" is such a difficult standard. There's a whole continuum of things I'd like to see happen. The more they do well, the happier I am. Our priorities should be, in order: 1) Edwin Jackson (or I guess Marcum, though I'm not a huge fan) 2) The best relief pitcher we can find still out there (Mike Adams?) 3) Figuring out the awkward OF situation, either by getting DeJesus a platoon partner or getting a real starting CFer (Andres Torres?) 4) Filling the infield depth out without resorting to Joe Mather (Good freaking luck. It's awful out there) 5) Getting a second lefty for the bullpen (Howell? Gorzelanny?)
  23. Hairyducked Idiot
    Of course it is. Kyle is our resident drama queen. It's his role. We're having a baseball discussion here. Keep the 7th-grade-female levels of obsession with other people's popularity and personalities elsewhere.
  24. Hairyducked Idiot
    Two completely different climates in regards to the team's chances of contending, money available to spend and a player pool that no one else was evaluating as potential key pieces to a regime change. The climate the Cubs were in should have been more conducive to finding cheap players, money doesn't matter in this context, and the third part is exactly what we were agreeing on: A major part of Epstein's success in Boston is no longer available to him (the cheap pool of really good, overlooked players).
  25. Hairyducked Idiot
    I don't think that's what we are seeing here. Players will go where the money is. However, when the money isn't much different between offers, most are going to go where there is a better chance to contend. A few will remain loyal to the team they play for or go where they would rather live and play. This particular deal reeks of squeezing as much as possible out of Detroit and using a team that clearly has big dollars available to spend as their leverage against them. That wasn't about the Sanchez deal. It was in reference to the tangent of why Epstein's first year of cheap pickups in Boston was so awesome and his first year of cheap pickups in Chicago was so lackluster.
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