Laika

Acuna is a different type of hitter than Bo. More swing and miss with some contact vulnerability in one quadrant, but huge power in all quadrants (and more walks).

If you want to see something that is simultaneously amazing and depressing, compare Vlad and Bo's isolated slugging per balls in play heat maps. Vlad has a cavernous hole up and in. He appears to this point to be physically incapable of driving a pitch up and in. He also has not learned to at least hit pitches on the outer half or pitches that are generally up with regular authority either. Bo on the other hand murders pitches that he should, pitches up, even pitches out of the zone, and he has the elite contact skills to put the ball in play for hits even in areas where he doesn't drive it. Think about the above Vlad contact heat map in relation to the ISO/BIP heat map. He makes contact with pitches up and in 90+% of the time, almost every time he swings, but he never hits them for power. It's an automatic groundout. He's a f***ing soft groundout machine when you put the ball there. A double play God.

He swings a lot and doesn't walk much but I haven't seen any real holes yet. He can barrel pitches anywhere. I'm not sure how he could be exploited - he does seem to have a decent eye so he doesn't often swing at complete trash. Even if you compare to Vladdy who in theory should be just as good at making contact, Bo looks far superior at putting the bat on borderline pitches everywhere; Vlad has a soft spot low and away and gets cold on borderline pitches low. BO VLAD

Man, I just gave you a warning for openly criticizing a mod. Careful what you wish for.

Yeah, one draft every year. A New Player Draft in Feb/March. Any signed player without MLB experience is eligible so it covers rule 4 draftees from the prior year, July international free agent babies, and even bigger offseason IFAs. The NPD in 2021 will be super weak and weird as the 2020 MLB draft has already been picked over AND we haven't had a 2020 MiLB season to get data on prospect risers/fallers. Full dynasty so you can add/drop eligible players freely all 12 months of the year. No more cut-down deadlines. There are some mandatory promotions out of the minor leagues at the time of the NPD if a player on a minor league roster has a lot of MLB experience (higher thresholds than we used before, check the new Rules section). Some minor roster rules are a little bit in flux. We might do something like limit the IL during the offseason so teams don't hoard a gross amount of IL players all winter. We might expand MiLB rosters a bit before the 2021 NPD.

Deleted all of that trash. It's the f***ing Miami Marlins - no need to get heated. Open insults directed at the mods can result in swift bans. Public warning.

This is all baked into the projections though, and they’re pretty damn close

Is Acuna better? Career fWAR per 150 games: Bo = 6.47 Acuna = 5.21 Projected fWAR per 150 games (Depth Charts, i.e. Steamer + ZiPS): Bo = 4.02 Acuna = 4.29 Kind of just comes down to how much you believe in Bo's small sample size MLB career. Projections are so close. Bo is already a top 20 projected position player in baseball. Anyone who feels sad about Vladdy right now should just think of Bo!

Fangraphs has a live updates line. MLB Gameday updates stats including OPS during games. Just saying, if you glanced at the lineup on Gameday during the game but before the home run by Vlad, his OPS might have been the worst in the lineup.

The guy's post might have been pre-homer, at which point Vlad's OPS may have been the lowest of every starter on the team.

Jonathan Singleton without the weed

that's weird. i guess we'll just do the 8 team playoffs since that's a slightly quicker fix than manually entering matchups for the final regular season week

The "savage takedown" words were sarcasm. It doesn't matter much either way. "The play you are so up in arms is probably taking things to the 5th decimal point." that's just... how many decimal points were produced by the basic multiplication. truncate it at round percentages and it doesn't change the point. not sure why people are getting offended at the number of digits. 89438594375894375894375893758943758937458975439 spooky!! I'm comfortable assuming Jansen is not an above average bunter. There are lots of little considerations that it was impossible to work into the simple mathematical example. Most of those other hypothetical scenarios would have little influence next to the broad, prevailing scenarios used in the comparison because they are just very rare. Jansen's chance of bunting for a hit or forced error would be incredibly small. He's slow as s***. You could include something like that with the other bullet points of possible outside considerations but I don't think it changed the point.

he does look like a skinny scumbag steve

weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

The Charlie Buntoyo experience continues. Here is my savage take down of the decision to have Jansen bunt last night: https://www.radioscouts.com/danny-jansen-should-not-have-bunted/

I don't feel like Bass. When is the Trout auction?

Yeah, I think we might see a lot of one year pillow contracts.

I don't even know how to fathom a guess at this in a post-Covid offseason. Teams will use "losses" from 2020 to negotiate against free agents. In Stroman's case his opting out won't help him.

Yeah the angle was not great but I could probably live with it for ~25 games (or whatever they have there). It did not help that the ump last night had a very tight strike zone. Screwed over both pitchers multiple times.

Rowdy Tellez is a weird hill to die on. I hope he turns into a useful player too but the objective evaluation would be that he is probably a replacement level baseball player.

Better, obviously, but power for strikeouts is a logical tradeoff so it's not like you can just accept the low K rate is a positive development and expect the power to return in a nutshell.

Yes, but they need to obviously be an above average bunter. I expanded on the math above.

Tellez' average exit velocity is in the 18th percentile this year. His xwOBA is .298 (31st percentile). Not good signs.

This is true, but you also need to factor in the chance that the bunt does not succeed. I assume that chance would drag the 66% down to the 61% range, if not worse. There is a non-zero chance that Jansen pops it up, right. So it's not just 61% vs 66%. There is say a ~5% chance (pop up, etc.) that the 61% chance to score a run becomes a 40% chance (runner on 2nd, one out). I'm sure the complete math has been done somewhere online. If Jansen has only a 5% chance to fail their "one run expectancy" is 64.685% 10% chance to fail it is 63.37% 20% chance to fail it is 60.74% I think. And, per this: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-truth-about-bunting/ MLB hitters only succeed at getting a committed bunt down fair 50% of the time. That means given two chances a typical player would get it down in play 75% of the time and fail 25% of the time. That's not good enough to bunt by the numbers!!! Also, fair does not necessarily mean it's even good enough. Fair could mean a missile straight at the pitcher that doesn't allow the runner to advance. Also, Danny Jansen is not even a practiced bunter. I think we have the answer. Don't bunt in that situation unless the hitter is a good bunter.