Laika

Unless the cat has an actual injury that mommy did not mention then this is demonstrably false OR we can conclude that Samuel Dyson did not actually throw the cat across the room. It's not clear at all from mommy's post that the thing was thrown at her. For all we know, Samuel Dyson got frustrated and tried to lob the cat-in-a-box onto the sofa, and it bounced off and broke on the floor. I will submit that most normal human beings after having been physically assaulted do not take to social media and make cute anthropomorphic posts pretending to be their kitty. It seems like a dumb as s*** social media post after a dumb as s*** argument to me. Married couples get into heated arguments all the time, sometimes they get divorced - it's not always because someone is an abuser. Granted I could be wrong. Perhaps Sam Dyson went full wind up and smashed the cat-in-a-box off his wife's head, injuring both of them. I don't see the need to jump to this conclusion like everyone else seems to, based on the evidence at hand. If Sam Dyson did hurl the cat then he's a piece of s***. Maybe he did abuse his wife, but I'm not going to assume he's a criminal and this isn't evidence of that.

I have issues with this being called domestic violence. Sounds like Dyson threw a cardboard box with a cat in it. You can throw a cat across a room and it will land on its feet and not get hurt, depending on how you throw it. Based on that post, I would imagine that the cat's "mommy" was being an idiot in some way. Its not illegal to break a box. #MeowToo

Not surprising but you've missed the point entirely.

Trade you to some other team’s fanbase

Okay, this is the dumbest f***ing thread ever then. Bob wants to "supplement the core" and Jim wants to target free agent SPs this offseason BUT BUT BUT both of them want to play the semantics of opinion game to somehow position themselves as having unique or more enlightened stances than the rest. In other words, nobody really disagrees but everybody wants to pretend that they are smarter than everyone else. Supplement the core but don't say that you're trying to fix the team!!! Sign Wheeler but don't say that you want to win in 2020!!! Delete this thread and Jim and Bob's accounts. f*** you all.

Uh, not really. A good number of people are advocating making a number of short and mid-term financial investments (some even argue for bigger long-term) in the team this offseason in order to accelerate the (hopefully) pending competitive window and begin the creating of a winning environment. That's wildly different than "we suck and we have to spend right now to fix it" It's also different than "signing a bunch of free agents in an effort to contend in 2020." Nobody really thinks that bringing in a bunch of free agents, even really good ones, would do much more than give the team a remote playoff chance in 2020. The effort is not to contend in 2020, it's more specifically to do the first thing I said and "accelerate the (hopefully) pending competitive window and begin the creating of a winning environment."

Said nobody on here, ever.

- ERA and FIP do not adjust for those things - ERA and FIP minus (ERA- or FIP-) do adjust for league and park factors. These are scaled to 100, so 90 is good, 125, is awful, etc. So, for example if a 4.40 ERA in the AL East equals a 4.00 in the NL East, two pitchers with those ERAs will have the same ERA-. Chase Anderson career ERA- 94; FIP- 110 Kyle Gibson 106; 102 - fWAR and bWAR do adjust for league and park (but differently, I think). - The new DRA on BP adjusts for a lot of things, I think. WHIP is interesting historically because it's kind of like the first talent descriptor outside of ERA. People used to realize that ERA was wildly random and they thought WHIP was more stable and therefore more indicative of true talent or future ERA. It's pretty crude though and there are better tools to use than WHIP in any instance. It's pretty mean to groundball pitchers who can give up lots of singles and sometimes walks but can still be good, get a lot of double plays and avoid home runs, etc.

E. Coli in the spring but then ulcerative colitis later in the year. The latter can be a chronic issue and teams might actually factor it into his projected long term value!

Kyle Gibson, Chase Anderson, and FIP Dogmatism Long gone is the initial, romantic promise of defense independent pitching statistics (DIPS); the notion that we can cleanly separate pitcher skill from the messy results on the field is dead. Sure, FIP correlates better to future ERA than ERA does, and every subsequent evolution of DIPS (xFIP, SIERA, DRA, and whatever comes next) purports to offer additional accuracy or applications, but by now we have seen enough pitchers for which DIPS is more misleading than helpful that it makes sense within any individual pitcher analysis to at least turn our minds to whether or not the truth lies within the DIPS. Blue Jays fans will always fondly remember Marco Estrada’s prime, when his unique pitching style lead to such an inordinate number of easy flyouts and made it really seem that he was controlling batter contact quality in a way that FIP could not appreciate. Ask Baseball Reference, which uses runs surrendered in its pitcher WAR calculation, how many wins Estrada was worth in 2015 and 2016 and it will say 7.5. Ask Fangraphs the same question and the answer is 4.5. The price of a win in baseball has been estimated at close to $10M; the disagreement over Marco Estrada’s true talent in 2015 and 2016 was a $30M question. Kyle Gibson was another $30M question. He’s a Ranger now for that amount of guaranteed money and if the baseball media is real news Toronto was interested and could probably have had him for a little bit more than that. Gibson is an interesting projection. His career ERA is 0.23 runs higher than his FIP. He was not all that good by any measure in 2016 and 2017, with ERAs over 5.00 and FIPs of 4.70 and 4.85. Then in 2018 a slight uptick in velocity helped him drop the ERA all the way down to 3.62 and the FIP sank with it to 4.13. 2019 was a puzzler: his strikeout rate and velocity stayed up, his FIP stayed near his 2018 mark, but his ERA shot back up to nearly 5.00 again. The 2020 Steamer projection for Gibson is 3.0 fWAR. Ask Fangraphs how good he has been in the last two years and it says 2.6 wins in each season. Ask about his career and it says 13 WAR. Baseball Reference thinks Gibson has been much worse - a 9.6 WAR pitcher in his career, and it thinks three of his six full season have been so bad that he was not worth even one WAR. With 1087 career innings pitched, at what point do we start looking at ERA and not FIP? Someone knows this answer. Do we take the increased strikeout rate as a new beginning and throw everything before 2018 out the window? The pitcher that the Blue Jays did land this offseason has essentially the opposite trend. Chase Anderson, a flyball pitcher, has a 3.94 ERA in his career but a 4.54 FIP. Ask Fangraphs and he’s been worth 7.5 WAR in his 857 career innings; ask Baseball Reference and the answer is 9.9 wins. The third big baseball site, Baseball Prospectus, has the most modern and advanced ERA estimator in its newfangled DRA. BP says Chase Anderson was worth 1.4 WARP in 2019 with a 4.84 DRA, while Gibson was worth 0.3 WARP with a chunky 5.60 DRA. In 2018 DRA thinks Gibson was worth 2.5 WARP with a 4.21 skill level and Anderson was worth negative 0.4 WARP with a 5.52 DRA (Chase Anderson had a 3.93 ERA in 158 innings that year so this disparity is immense). Steamer thinks Chase Anderson will have an ERA and FIP of 5.49 in 2020 – a seemingly absurd position for the stupid computer to take, given Anderson’s career marks. All of this is supposed to confuse you. Pitcher value analysis and projection using publicly available statistics and ERA estimators is more confusing than ever. Don’t make the mistake of eyeballing Kyle Gibson’s FIP or his Steamer projection and thinking that his talent level is easily ascertainable. The teams aren’t doing that because they certainly have more sophisticated information at their disposal. The popularity of Fangraphs (which is great) and their decision to use FIP as the single input for pitching WAR should not give us tunnel vision. As simple-minded members of the public we are forced to concede that we can really have no idea how good players like this are; we have no idea how Anderson or Gibson will perform in 2020 because we don’t even have much of a clue how good they actually were in 2019! Kyle Gibson’s realistic outcome range goes from a productive and resurgent veteran who will fit in great with Lance Lynn and Mike Minor to the frustratingly ineffective and hittable Kyle from 2016, 2017, and 2019. It’s fair to find it a bit more likely that he will fall towards the positive end of that range given the increase in velocity and strikeouts (keep in mind however that the strikeout rate league-wide has gone up in this timeframe.) Chase Anderson’s realistic outcome range is just as wide. Based on runs prevented Chase has had the best single season and the best career between the two of them and it’s not even close. He has exhibited a positive velocity trend too. The Anderson acquisition inspired little fanfare while Kyle Gibson was a common free agent target for Blue Jays fans. I’ll be watching these two enigmatic pitchers closely in 2020. This article was meant to meander and reach no conclusion, just like my mind when I try to figure out how good these two will be.

They waived him, you big idiot.

Imagine even thinking about tendering guys like Brandon Drury and Derek Law when some of these other players will be available? https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2019/11/2019-non-tender-candidates-mlb-2019.html

I don't know if it's true either, but the old way of "making the big leagues" seems to be more of an illusion than ever. Days gone: Players prove themselves in the upper minors, get a chance in the MLB, and if they stick they are big leaguers. New era: MLB teams will use options liberally and most bench or platoon quality players are up and down for several years. Even when they are out of options teams have a strong preference for MiLB deals and are very shy about giving 25 man roster spots at guaranteed money to even big league veterans who are bench-level talents. Just so much uncertainty for these kinds of dudes on the North American side. That's not even to mention the increased $$ across the Pacific for some, and how it is increasingly normal to go over there.

Man, Aguilar looks worse than Rowdy at a glance. Not really interested.

He’s worth 3/30 anyway but give me the under on his projections.

I understand the narrative but it's only a 1 tick bump in velocity, he has always given up a lot of hits, and the increased HR rate paralleled what happened league wide (to some extent) as did the K rate (to some extent). I didn't even think of the medical thing but IIRC it is a chronic issue. I'd just much rather have several other options at his level of the SP market. I would have thought 3/30 was fine but I don't think Toronto missed out at all. I legit think Chase Anderson might be better and it might not be close?

Yeah I don't get it. I mean I understand that people don't just look at ERA anymore but sometimes you need to just look at how many f***ing runs a guy gives up. Kyle Gibson has three seasons in the last five with ERAs near 5. Two good years in the last five and three nearly replacement level years. Chase Anderson is better (quote this). I'll admit that earlier this offseason I thought Gibson had a better 2019 based on how people were talking about him.

but but but but Rowdy Tellez!

imagine drafting a player in a league where only ~200 prospects are owned and having that s***** f***ing player not even be anywhere in the entire Fantrax database, which has like 9999 prospects you must be the one dynasty baseball owner in the entire world who owns this piece of trash

I doubt he can start in CF. He's a bit like Emilio Bonificacio in that he can play all over but he doesn't seem particularly good anywhere.

This is a level of incompetence that would be shocking if it was any organization other than Baltimore. It's like they did not even try to trade him until just now and ran out of time.

Guys this baseball offseason is not terrible!

Huge f***ing win for Milwaukee. Lauer is worth a boatload more than Davies, is he not? Urias was a top 20 or 30 prospect.

Weird scouting profile for Joey Bart on Fangraphs. This is 23 year old guy, picked out of college in 2018. They give him present hit and game power grades of 35 and 50. Speed 35, arm 55, fielding 65. Overall future value of 60 as a defense + power guy. I'm just surprised the hit tool is that low, I thought he was supposed to be a better all around prospect. I mean Reese McGuire is probably a 35 hit, 65 defense guy right?

Okay, I made all of the posted changed to the league rules but I realized we should probably still have a promotion threshold at the February deadline. It will probably never matter. The only time mandatory promotion thresholds will apply is at the February cut deadline. The thresholds have been increased to 1000 PA and 50 (GS + half of relief appearances). The point of this is to eliminate owners using the MiLB roster as a loophole to keep an additional MLB player, if that player happened to have a green flag near the end of the season and was therefore able to be demoted.