Laika

Baseball free agency moves very slowly

In this market I'm thinking a bunch of veterans, including Archer, will end up signing one year deals for insignificant dollar amounts. $1M to $8M range and the decisions will mostly be about player preference (city, playing time, etc.)

https://www.mlb.com/news/2020-mlb-offseason-bold-predictions Bauer to Jays? J.T. to Mets? 7 bold predictions 1. The Blue Jays will blow your mind Hey, Blue Jays fans, how does adding Francisco Lindor sound? Or how about Trevor Bauer? Or in the immortal words of a little girl on an Old El Paso commercial that became a popular meme, “Why don’t we have both?” OK, so the "both" idea is crazy. But … not necessarily impossible? (Important legal notice: I am not responsible for the unmet expectations of Torontonians should any of the following not actually happen.) As of this writing, the Blue Jays’ payroll is projected to be under $80 million, well below what it would have been in 2020 had the virus not intervened. Bauer is one of the most fascinating free agents in history, given his past stated preference for only signing one-year deals (a stance from which he has already begun to backtrack), his outspoken social media presence and the simple fact that he’s the only free-agent starter coming off an elite season. Doing a one-year deal would be ridiculously risky for him, but I do think it’s possible that Bauer signs a shorter-term deal -- perhaps three or four years -- for max average annual value, and the Blue Jays are a team that could pull it off. And while Toronto fans despised him during the 2016 ALCS when he pitched for Cleveland, they’ll get over it if/when he’s grouped with Hyun Jin Ryu and Nate Pearson atop the rotation. 2020 Free Agent: Trevor Bauer Oct 24, 2020 · 0:29 2020 Free Agent: Trevor Bauer Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins have a history with Bauer from their Cleveland days, and they have a history with Lindor, too. Yes, they already have a fantastic young shortstop in Bo Bichette, but they recognize the need for an established presence in the lineup and their need to improve defensively. They also have the farm-system depth (MLB Pipeline ranked them seventh in the sport) and, again, the financial room to get a Lindor deal done, with Bichette shifting to third. The cost for Lindor will likely not be as punitive in these circumstances as it would normally be. Put Bauer and Lindor on a team with a bunch of burgeoning stars, and you’d have to talk about the Blue Jays as a serious threat to win the World Series next season. I don’t know that even one of these things will happen, let alone both. But I do know a big move is well within the realm of possibility for Toronto, and that makes it an interesting club this winter.

I'm thinking about it, or something similar.

How old do you think Mr Clean is? What race do you think Mr Clean is? You’re probably a shorter, uglier Mr Clean who smells like Axe instead of lemons

lol, man, there are a lot more fish in the sea than the ones who were on your tv last year

I didn’t say that, I just said I’d rather pick up Anderson’s option than give Walker whatever he gets

JBJ complements the current OF extremely well since he is a great CF and a LHB. I think it would be wrong to think of any of the four as a 4th OF. They'd all play a lot and Buntoyo could do lots of cool stuff playing matchups and making defensive replacements etc.

Not clear the Rays even tried to give him away. Morton destroyed his own leverage by admitting that he really only wants to play for Tampa and might retire if they don't pick up his option. He lives in Florida, is at the end of his career, etc. I think Tampa has decided to call his bluff. They'll probably just sign him back for less guaranteed money.

Fangraphs contract estimates are up: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/2021-top-50-free-agents/ Honestly, give me basically everybody at these numbers except for Realmuto and the other handful of players who Toronto just doesn't need. I don't see many bad contracts. Not sure I would target Gausman, Hendriks, Walker, Bradley Jr., Melancon, or Colome at these figures but if that's what Toronto ended up with I would not be unhappy. I just really hope there is a legitimate investment in the team this offseason. They need to do it based on the developmental stage of the roster. It would be such a shame if they got shy because of MLB's economics. It does not need to be Trevor Bauer or George Springer either - it could be a handful of smaller deals. Just add talent, anywhere. Even if the bat isn't an obvious fit, if the player is good bring him in. Sign some solid relievers if the FA starters are being pen-shy.

Probably tougher to move him in this economic climate but I agree and think if the team was motivated they would end up finding some sort of contract swap. Grichuk for a SP or RP who is making a bit too much money.

Hard to think of a worse manager for that team. Hahahahaha this is hilarious.

2021 Steamer Hyun-Jin Ryu: 3.1 fWAR The rest of Toronto's pitching staff combined: 3.0 fWAR (part of this is Steamer incorrectly projecting everyone outside of Ryu/Roark as pure relievers, but the point stands. the pitching side needs a lot of help)

Makes all the sense in the world for the Toronto Blue Jays but I wonder if they'll even get the chance to claim him The economics in MLB are going to lead to a lot of reasonable options getting declined. Sergio Romo yesterday

Kevin Cash messed up, at some point, no matter how you slice it. Maybe it was pulling Snell too early in game 6. Maybe it was going to Nick Anderson in game 6. Maybe it was leaving Glasnow in way too long in game 1. With the Snell/Anderson decision his brain is probably thinking - "It's Mookie Betts. With a man on I'd prefer a RHRP in this spot, especially considering this is Snell's third time through the order. I know Snell is dealing but I think whether or not a SP is dealing can be a mirage. I know Anderson has been bad this postseason but the sample size is small and he is our best projected RHRP." With the Glasnow decision he admitted to leaving him in because he thought, despite the pitch count, that Glasnow was their best chance to get some specific key strikeouts. He might have also been thinking about the series as a whole and acting on a desire to not burn through his pen in game 1. It's tough to see how the Glasnow and Snell decisions make sense together and they probably don't. BUT it's easy to appreciate how hard it is for a manager to make these decisions. All the data in the world can actually make managerial decisions even harder and we can probably appreciate this from the above. A human being still needs to make the call, in a pretty short decision window, of what to do. Cash needs to wrap his head around Snell's talent going forward in that situation, Anderson's projected talent, etc. Things develop quickly. If Barnes doesn't single to CF maybe Snell pitches two more complete innings.

Anderson's sudden decline in the playoffs was so bizarre. Cash might have just assumed, to the bitter end, that it was nothing but randomness.

King's post is allowable despite the flavour (and his opinions showing through) because it was directly related to baseball. It's a baseball + Covid story. L54's replies were not fine. They were basically name calling with a little bit of fair opinion hidden underneath the flaming. Stupid posts! The floor is open for someone to respond rationally to King's post, if they are capable. Any response should stick to Turner and MLB's actions though. This isn't the place to just argue about Covid death rates etc.

You might like the post but it is a summary of what the poster heard on the radio. How can that be the post of the year? The standards for our BJMB Awards are really slipping.

Wednesday, October 28, 2020 Maybe taking out Snell was a bit too early? By Tangotiger 07:23 PM I’ve posted on Twitter some data. I wrote a chapter in The Book on the topic. Plenty of others have chimed in, all concluding the same thing. Times Thru Order effect is real, and it does not take a backseat to a pitcher that is mowing down his opponents. I’m here to offer a possibility that under a specific situation, maybe there is an overriding concern. We’ll get there in a sec. Here’s a data chart, and I’ll explain what it is. (Click to embiggen) http://tangotiger.com/images/uploads/snell_thruOrder.png All the data is from 2010-2019, courtesy of Retrosheet. Chart on the left is regular season and chart on the right is the post-season. The columns from -1 to 9 refers to the strikeout - walk differential for the first 18 batters faced. -1 means more walks than strikeouts. 9 means 9 or more strikeouts than walks. All the others are exact counts. Walk is really walks + hit batters, with IBB removed. Snell was a “9”, meaning the best. The columns “1” and “2” means 1st time and 2nd time through the order. The data is wOBA. Now, don’t pay too much (or any) attention to those two columns. Those are selection biases and we’ll learn nothing from them. The column we care about is “3” meaning the performance 3rd time through the order. Since we selected our strikeout-walk differential based on the first 18 batters faced (in-sample), we are interested in what happens after that (out-of-sample). And that is the third time thru the order. Now, let’s start with the regular season. We notice that the wOBA gets progressively lower, the more the strikeout-walk differential. That’s really an issue of bias, because the better pitchers will be part of the higher differential groups disproportionately. So, we expect that value to behave as it does based strictly on the quality of the pitchers in each of those groups. Now, the right thing for me to do is to look at the actual quality of pitchers in there. I will leave that to the Aspiring Saberist. What we can do instead is use this as a baseline of sorts as we now turn our attention to the post-season chart. First, we’ll notice that in the post-season, third time through, with the strikeout-walk differential at 5 or less, the performance is roughly the same. Since the post-season is made up of good pitchers to begin with, we don’t expect the progressive drop we saw from the regular season. That said, then the fun happens. We see a big drop at a strikeout-walk differential of 6. Then a huge drop at 7. And all by its lonesome is a .214 wOBA with a strikeout-walk differential of 9+. Now, we are only talking about 9 pitchers (all huge names, as you’d expect: Cole and Kershaw twice each, Kluber, CC, Max, Stras, Verlander). And they totalled just 49 plate appearances. One standard deviation is 71 wOBA points. If we assume a .300 level talent, that’s only 1.2 standard deviations. But, 49 sounds like a lot, and if the non-data folks want to hang their hats on something, it’s that one. That in the post-season, when a superstar pitcher is mowing down batters, they went out to pitch at a better-than-Mariano level. And to give them more ammunition, we can combine the strikeout-walk differential at 7+ (so those last three lines). That’s 341 batters faced at a wOBA of .259 (meaning Mariano level). And one standard deviation is now down to 27 points. Which is actually 1.5 standard deviations. Therefore, I will give them that as a reasonable possibility. Just like we DID find evidence that a pitcher’s talent level does improve in the 9th inning when he’s going for a perfect game, maybe there is a brief change in talent level for a pitcher, who is at the highest level, pitching at an even higher level, and on the greatest stage, the post-season. That said, these star pitchers did not pitch at the level that their first 18 batters suggested, that they were “unhittable”. The best you can see is that they pitched like an average Mariano Rivera. Which is of course great. And naturally, you don’t pull Mariano Rivera from a game. But everything I’ve said comes with a degree of uncertainty. You can make the argument that Blake Snell third time through drop in performance gets cancelled out by what we saw, and so we had an average Blake Snell. And you don’t pull an average Blake Snell. Or, all of this is really grasping at straws, that the regular season provides so much data that we can conclude that Snell was losing effectiveness all the while our eyes were lying to us. Anyway, the floor is open to the Aspiring Saberists.

There really are a lot of options for Toronto if they will consider any 2B or 3B or SS. Stars like Turner and DJLM and Semien. Solid second tier players like Simmons and Gregorius. Some harder to evaluate second tier players like Wong and La Stella. Younger guys with upside like Lamb, Profar, Schoop. Veteran bounce-back candidates like Marwin or Asdrubal. Other semi-interesting vets like Kipnis, Brad Miller. Cesar Hernandez is very interesting to me.

If we need one more owner I have someone who I could probably ask

How about this guy for 3B?

This is a lazy and stupid criticism. Toronto is just a normal, holistic organization. They make rational decisions informed by data and all relevant information. They actually do not care about PR, at least not before other factors, in a lot of ways... see some of the constant criticism of the team for lineup decisions, pitching decisions etc. The team really does not give a s*** what a huge section of their fanbase thinks. I think it's also irrelevant. Most people are going to see what happened with JT as a failure of MLB and the organization. The player was put into an impossible situation. This isn't even close to Clevinger/Plesac hitting the town, not telling their team, and lying about it.

Prize reminder. I am amending the prize with a stipulation that you can only ban someone who is part of our fantasy league culture Too bad Boxy quit the board and banning him would be pointless

Is there a cutdown or anything or is this just a dynasty league now that it's on Fantrax with no cutdown? What even is the waiver draft in this league? Can prospects be demoted at will now? Are the entry picks for the NHL draft that just occurred? Are goalies good in this league?