Hairyducked Idiot

Hey guys, remember how everyone was convinced the Cubs were due for a massive hot streak and I wasn't? Y'all were right.

Yes, he had to jump to catch it: Spoilered for those who don't want to relive.

If only Prior had 15-20 more good pitches left in his arm. I wonder if there was a chance earlier in the series to save his arm a little in a blowout...

According to fangraphs, he has allowed 138 groundballs and 100 fly balls. I'm not sure why anyone would round that to 1.39.

"Selling high" is such a nebulous concept. Everybody in the league has pretty much the same evaluation of Wells: Cautious optimism. Unless there's some team out there who is absolutely convinced he's going to be awesome, or we are absolutely convinced he's not, it's not really selling high. I consider myself to be extremely Wells-skeptical. He never posted anything like a .278 BABIP in the minors, and I suspect when the hits stop falling, his lack of K ability will be bring him back down to below-average. But I doubt we'd get enough value in a trade to pass on the chance that he's legit.

None of them. But it's a bit of a circlejerk to insist that stats are the only possible projection tool, and that anytime the stats are wrong it must be a fluke and there was no way anybody could have predicted it, and that anybody who did predict it wasn't really right.

You don't get credit for an I told you so, as there was nothing to say this was coming. That's kind of a silly attitude, imo. Obviously he thought there was something.

Eventually, they might get lucky and have a bunch of them have breakout years in the bigs at the same time and get one year of contention before they trade them all the next year. It's their best shot given payroll constraints.

Almost as if it doesn't make a difference where he bats at all :)

Run rate is everything in 20-20. The significance of wickets is greatly reduced, but if you can save four fours into twos in a match, you've shaved .4 per over off the rate, which is pretty significant. That format is still so new that the strategy is still evolving, but I can see a day where teams have a defensive specialist or two in the lineup for that reason.

Depends. By excellent CF defense, are you talking Grady Sizemore quality CF defense, or Andruw Jones in his prime caliber defense? And by bad LF defense, are you talking Adam Dunn bad, or Juan Pierre bad (when LA plays him in left instead of center)? You can't just attempt to put a value on the difference between "excellent" defense at one position and "bad" at another, because one excellent defendender can be worth alot more than another excellent defender at the same position (same with the bad defenders). You can't put a hard numerical value on some subjective concepts that aren't well defined. 85th percentile CF defense and 15th percentile LF defense.

To date? Maybe. I don't think they are going to be able to keep it up.

I'm sure it's not 200 either, I'm just curious as to how big the gap really is. Morgan is definitely not a crappy hitter. He's got a career OPS of .747, and it's very OBP-heavy. That's valuable. Dunn loses as much non-OPS related value as a player can possibly lose. He plays a high-offense position (although weirdly, CF is pretty much playing even with LF this year in the NL) and he plays absolutely awful defense. He even strikes out so much that you can shave a run or two off his value (at the stathead rate of about .02 runs per K). I'm guessing Morgan's steals aren't optimized to high-leverage situations, so his 30/14 is pretty close to breakeven. Going by VORP, the difference between Dunn and Morgan to date is 27 runs on offense, which I believe includes a positional adjustment and proper weight to the Ks. So how much of that 26-run gap can defense close? I don't have an answer, but I'd like something better than "MLB teams would be doing it if it were right," because it took those same teams decades to learn to properly weight OBP, which is pretty easy to measure, so I have little faith in them measuring the value of defense properly. And the Cubs' situation is slightly different, because they don't have anyone they are willing to replace in the OF. I'll settle for saying Nyjer Morgan and Adam Dunn are as close in value as two position players with 200 points of OPS separating them can be.

Not to defend the Cardinals fans, but is it really any different 'round these parts when the Cubs are floundering and/or the Cardinals look like world-beaters? No. But one of the many things sports fans share is the conviction that other sports fans are different.

If we start playing the "X just singled off Dempster" game in a few more hits, I call dibs on Glenn Davis.

That's bad. But it's not that bad. For a reliever thats pretty bad Relievers have a higher average WHIP than starters.

That was awesome. Len spends 30 seconds talking about how unlucky the Astros are to have this guy leadoff, then he grounds a single into left.

That's bad. But it's not that bad.

He should be right. No team should want that.

Hustle! Aggression!

Had him all the way.

The word you are looking for is "ballgame."

Out of curiosity, how many OPS points is excellent CF defense worth over bad LF defense?

One, most of those games weren't close. Two, I would have pulled him out of the superexpletive-ing game, just like most of us were screaming for at the time.

Sac bunting can occasionally result in a hit, whether you are trying or not. Point is, a successful sacrifice bunt slightly lowers the team's chance of winning. The chance that the bunt will be mishandled by the defense negates some of that. How do they determine if the guy was trying to sac bunt or for a hit? IIRC, they just used bunts in obvious sacrifice situations.