GDT: 1/3 Chicago White Sox @ Toronto Blue Jays (3:07pm et)

[BigCecil]

All the same caveats still applied after Moreno was dealt in that there was simply no way to know what the future held for Jansen. He would be taking a massive risk signing a team friendly deal if he were to finally stay healthy and put up a monster season so an overly team friendly deal was likely not in the cards. Given his extensive injury history it's just as likely as not he suffers some sort of soft tissue injury that causes him to miss several months of the season, so paying him starter type money would have been a big risk for a team that's already reached the upper limits of it's payroll availability.

 

Risks in any extension or FA deal bud. We watch Springer every day. Ryu lost 1.5 of 4 years. This FO extended Grichuk 5/52 back in 2019.

 

Given Jano's positional value and floor I'd say he is a less risky bet than that deal.

 

If he does stay healthy this year his value on the market will ensure we have to overpay or he walks. Already 1.4 WAR even though he lost 2/3 weeks on IL. That will cool off some as he is red hot.

[glory]

Risks in any extension or FA deal bud. We watch Springer every day. Ryu lost 1.5 of 4 years. This FO extended Grichuk 5/52 back in 2019.

 

Given Jano's positional value and floor I'd say he is a less risky bet than that deal.

 

If he does stay healthy this year his value on the market will ensure we have to overpay or he walks. Already 1.4 WAR even though he lost 2/3 weeks on IL. That will cool off some as he is red hot.

 

Yeah Jansen was basically a 2 WAR player in half a season worth of PA's from 2021-23. If you signed him to a reasonable extension with an AAV around $10-12m, then the floor was basically that (~2 WAR/80 games) and the ceiling is probably what we will see this season if he stays healthy. It was definitely worth pursuing, but it takes two to tango, and we don't know what either side was thinking.

[BigCecil]

Yeah Jansen was basically a 2 WAR player in half a season worth of PA's from 2021-23. If you signed him to a reasonable extension with an AAV around $10-12m, then the floor was basically that (~2 WAR/80 games) and the ceiling is probably what we will see this season if he stays healthy. It was definitely worth pursuing, but it takes two to tango, and we don't know what either side was thinking.

 

2 WAR floor even with IL stints. Free Agent cost/WAR came down but it was still median $4.4 in '23 off season.

[max silver]

Nah he had terrible babip luck down that stretch too. (I haven’t looked, but im assuming)

I specifically remember several games in a row during his “slump” where he was smoking 2-3 line drives for outs each night.

 

Sure the K rate went up but its not like he was a complete disaster like Bo was through April

 

There was a bit of a bad luck element to the slump but his expected numbers were still pretty bad. I looked up his numbers during the 0 for slump he experienced and his xwOBA was only .185 vs the .063 actual value.

[Terminator]

I don’t completely discard xStats, just understand they are flawed. xStats don’t take direction into account (pulling the ball vs hitting to dead center) which is why guys like Chapman and Vlad “underperformed” last year.

 

I think we can all agree a 400ft flyball to left is better than a 400ft flyball to center.

 

If anything I said was wrong there please check me

 

No I believe that is basically right sir.

 

[Terminator]

However, Ben Clemens and Tom Tango wrote about pulled balls a fair amount this past offseason in relation to xStats and they found that pulling the ball doesn't really have that much of an effect on your xStats. http://tangotiger.com/index.php/site/comments/pull-rate-and-xwoba?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

 

For balls in the air, it does make a difference.

And, you can see a bias here. The pull hitters, when we look at their Air balls, have a .487 wOBA, while the xwOBA was only .473. That's a 15 point shortfall. And we see a larger effect for spray hitters, who, on air balls have a .474 wOBA, while their xwOBA was .492.

 

 

But when you factor in ALL batted balls that difference disappears.

I asked Ben for a chart for ALL batted balls as well. Well, here you go (looks like this is all their plate appearances, but no matter, since the K and BB values are equal in both). That bias shrinks all the way down to 2 or 3 points of wOBA, which is 1 or 2 runs.

 

They conclude:

the spray direction has far more noise than signal, and so, you do not want to use it to evaluate players.

 

Also, Vlad's only underperformed his xwOBA for 1 and 1/3 seasons. 38 points last year and 33 points this year. The previous 4 seasons his xwOBA was almost perfectly in line with his wOBA. So I think there is probably more noise regarding his pull rate issues then there is signal, as Tom Tango puts it.