Laika

Must be a hidden ball thing like Yusmeiro Petit I bet he gets hammered third time through the order

Ignore xwOBA right now - it has not been rebalanced for the reduced run environment. They do that mid-year. It could be off by as many as 20 points right now. Or just mentally adjust it down I guess. Everyone's xwOBA is too high. It's probably assuming league average hitter = .325 wOBA when it is .310 wOBA (I don't know actual numbers).

Terminator risked it all with an AIDS joke It did not land lmao

DeGrom isn't coming back. Even if he does he won't be DeGrom

LMAO you have legit the scariest rotation.

When The Rocket hits a barrel right at you and starts sprinting out of the box with his dreads flying everywhere, all you can do is fall to your knees.

Hit the ball so hard Steven Kwan was STUNNED

Tapiaaaaaaaaaa Our contact hitter Speed speed fast swing swing balls in play

Oh yes

Yeah the change in approaches by hitters definitely also had a lot to do with the rapid increases in stuff and changes in pitching practices. Definitely. You can see this with guys like Kevin Pillar who are bad hitters with good hit tools - they make too much contact and the stuff is too good now that more often than not that means terrible/weak contact. Imagine if Kevin Pillar had the discipline to swing way less. He probably would have been Alex Bregman. He has as much or more raw power than Bregman, that's not a joke, look at max EV for both of them. So if Kevin Pillar simply swinging less would = him being a way better hitter, that helps illustrate the idea that in general swinging less = better results for hitters if we are in a league where pitchers have great stuff and when you happen to square up a ball it tends to go over the wall.

So from what I understand, baseball wants there to be more than one way to assemble a winning team. In 2014 swinging wasn't a bad idea but there were other ways to win. You could still slug to win. After 2015 the only really valid way to build a good offense was the stack patient hitters who didn't swing a lot. I just pulled the data. From 2015-2021 (ignoring 2020) the negative relationship between swinging and team runs is clear. R2 is about .1...... that's pretty high for one variable, in theory 10% of the difference in run production comes from team swing rate with swinging less being better. In 2014 the relationship is slightly positive. But essentially flat. So swinging more was better, or at least not worse. If you look at 2010 to 2014 the relationship is negative (like 2015 to 2021) but with less magnitude. The R2 is .034

You SHOULD be smart enough to answer this but do you think something would be correlated with winning, at the team level, across an entire season, if it was NOT correlated with runs?

Berrios haters should just say "Berrios is not an SP1 and does not have 6 WAR+ upside" and leave it at that. That's fair and true. The Mark Buehrle comparison is weird but kind of great if you just focus on WAR and ignore K numbers. Can even argue (convincingly) that Buehrle is better haha.

I think I finally figured out the WHY TAPIA question with inspiration from the Athletic article today from Eno Sarris about the value of swinging. Basically: - Swinging has negative value in most run environments. The teams that swing less, win more. - Players demonstrate this with their actions but the best example is Alex Bregman saying "I only swing at pitches I think I can homer on" - The only exception is in very low home run environments where teams that swing more start to win more. 2014 Royals an example, and apparently in 2014 the general trend of "swing less = win more" was reversed. Remember in 2014 MLB had the lowest HR numbers in like, 20 years, and that prompted them to probably juice the baseballs. When it is very hard to hit home runs, singles become relatively more valuable so swinging more starts to have value and teams start to value high contact swingers as opposed to patient sluggers. I think perhaps Toronto knew about the ball and humidor changes in 2022 and thought they needed to diversify and bring in some higher contact swingers with speed, etc. Like 2014 Royals type of s***. Note that the Yankees did the same s***, arguably, in bringing in Kiner-Kalefa. I think this is the major premise under which ROCKET RAIMEL TAPIA was brought in. The team thought he would be a good hedge against a massive scoring environment change. RESULTS TO BE DETERMINED IT IS STILL EARLY. But yeah the HR rate is the lowest since 2014!

And Berrios is on a 7 year contract, not a 1 year deal. lols

you won, lol never start mitch keller though

check out the statcast leaderboards https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/statcast?type=batter&year=2022&position=&team=&min=q&sort=5&sortDir=asc sort by average EV and max EV that will give you an idea of what is good, in MLB terms max EV is a good measurement of raw power average EV isn't as good but can still matter. barrel rate is more important than average EV though. "Barrels" are a stat that uses EV and launch angle. hard hit balls straight into the ground aren't ideal, right. but yeah for prospects you mostly care about max EV. 106 isn't super notable - that's Espinal pop. 110+ is definitely notable as that starts to approach average or better MLB raw power. Well, maybe 106 is fairly notable for a prospect like Pinto. 106 mph max EV with a really good barrel rate can = great MLB hitter. Alex Bregman's max EV is like 107.5 for example.

definitely way better player than Cody Bellinger

Sooo hunter greene gave up 5 bombs today

It was a changeup. Gets rolled over most of the time

Worst game of year to watch

Jim only has one dick?

Yeah he hasn't found his swing at all. I don't think he's turned on a baseball once. Shame... I think he hit a few homers in spring and looked locked in.

mfers really be like "canada is a joke" and then just... continue to live in canada

"pressing" is a real thing some players do, you can see it in the numbers when you look at players who are traded or sign with new teams. they often do things like increase their o-swing% for a period of time. I think some teams actually factor this into their analysis - like if trading for Nick Castellanos on paper might by a 1 win upgrade you might assume he will underperform projections a bit because he is likely to press a bit in his new uniform. I could see why a middle of the order hitter might start "pressing" a bit if the guy hitting behind them is RAIMEL f***ING TAPIA WHICH HAS LITERALLY HAPPENED WHAT THE f***ING f***!!!!!!!!!!!