Hairyducked Idiot
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BA & BP's Cubs Top Prospect Lists
Hairyducked Idiot replied to CaliforniaRaisin's topic in Cubs Minor League Talk
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Oooh. I vaguely recall Tim arguing with me on that point at sometime in the past. But I may have said something stupider and not be remembering.
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CAREFUL ON THAT LEDGE KYLE Huh? It's a good thing to be in the weaker league.
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So Pujols and Fielder both go NL to AL. Darvish goes to the AL. The NL got Buehrle and Papelbon. I maintain my theory that the AL is a significantly better league.
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Umm. @#%#@!% Boras. How does he do it?
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I'd always rather give money than prospects, I guess. Especially near-ready elite prospects. Boras wins again. Yahoo is usually pretty good. If they report it, I believe it.
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I didn't.
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"Darwin Barney's entire career says he can't consistently put up a .660 OPS in the majors" is a very different argument from "If you take out his best month, he's bad, so he's bad." I can buy the former, but not the latter.
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His second best month was July. Ranking them by OPS, it was April, July, May, August, September, June. I don't see a clear pattern there of declining as he kept playing. Like any hitter, he had some hot times and some slow times. His hottest time coming in April doesn't mean it should be disregarded, any more than a hot September means a guy has "figured it out."
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I don't see why we have to keep parsing out April vs. the rest of the season. The entire season counted, as far as I know, and it was all MLB competition. How does he look if we just decide to not count June?
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Ignore that entire line of thought. I misread "raw stats" for "adjusted stats" on his MLE. Anyway, I don't see why April doesn't count or why we shouldn't project Barney to hit pretty similarly to what he did last season, which wasn't nearly as bad as people seem to think.
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Edit: Never mind, I'm an idiot who can't read a simple graph.
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So Hendry is told to win in the short-term at all costs, and he produces a 71-win team. Epstein is told to build long-term and for the future, and while punting on 2012 he still looks like he'll have an team that is Hendry's equal in the short-term. And that's supposed to reflect well on Hendry and poorly on Epstein?
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Which is true, a little bit. Hendry probably shouldn't be blamed for building an aging, very expensive 71-win team with a bottom tier farm system. If some breaks had gone their way last year, they probably would have had an aging, very expensive 81-win team with a bottom tier farm system.
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Well, yes. I expect the Cubs outfield to be better than last year's, and that includes a small BABIP bounceback from Soriano (or better yet, just using Sappelt instead). But the emphasis is on "small" bounceback. He's got a career .302 BABIP, and that's including a lot of his earlier years before his legs started to go. At this point, something like .290 is more likely. If we add the difference between that and his .266 last year to his slash line, it'd be .270/315/495. That'd definitely be an improvement, but age is going to give some of that back. But for 2012, he's going to be a year older and his bat a year slower. He's at the age where there is severe risk of collapse. And his defense and baserunning keep getting a little worse each year. Last year he gave the Cubs 1.3 WAR in 137 games. I'd expect something between 1.5 and 2.0 this year, without much upside beyond that.
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Which you then bizarrely tried to turn into whether the 2012 team will win more games than the 2011 team was projected to win. Because using how many games they actually won would be "hindsight," and that would be bad for some reason.
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So as compared with one year ago, we project to about the same number of wins. Meanwhile, we're $25 million cheaper, have more upside, many more players under long-term team control, fewer future years on bad contracts, and a better minor league system.
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Okay, so your point was that sometimes there's variance in baseball. Kind of a pointless point, but noted.
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Well, yes I'm using hindsight to evaluate what happened. What else would you use to project whether this year's Cubs will be as good or better than last? I guess we could compare this year's Cubs with how last year's Cubs projected at the same time last year. That'd be an interesting, but different, discussion.
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It wasn't just, or even primarily, big-market teams that were spending big in the draft. The Pirates were one of the top spenders in recent years. About a dozen teams who were overslotting lose out on the new CBA, but they lose an advantage that was already shrinking as more teams joined the party. The Cubs were very late to that market inefficiency. There will be others.
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You've repeatedly downplayed the savvy moves they've made because the players are "question marks." If you don't get why Wood, Maholm and Volstad represent a rather significant upgrade over last year's rotation, then I can see why you would be missing out on the euphoria.
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No, it hasn't. The Red Sox did enjoy using overslots profusely, but that's not the only reason they drafted so well.
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Well, they robbed the Reds blind for Sean Marshall. That was a good start. But mostly through good drafting. All the other stuff is great, but this front office was brought in for their supposedly superior ability to find and develop amateur talent.
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I would remember the 2008 playoff team a lot more fondly if they had won a single playoff game. There's nothing I hate more in sports than when your team bows out the exact same way after a whole year of hoping to make up for the previous season.
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Second Base in 2012
Hairyducked Idiot replied to davell's topic in MLB Draft, International Signings, Amateur Baseball
Brignac hasn't had a minor league season that projects to anything worthwhile since 2007, and that's if you feel very generous about his 2006. A guy's prospect status really has to expire at some point, and Brignac is way, way past that. Between AAA and the majors, he has 1500 PAs of pure suck over the last four seasons. If we didn't have anyone else available at AAA to fill 2b, it might be intriguing to give him some Iowa playing time. But in the majors? Absolutely not.