Laika

Nicky Pivetta is even more sensational

Seranthony Dominguez appears to be sensational - a welcome development!

Gleyber Torres is on fire.

Maybe the worst pitch Chris Sale has ever thrown?

Wow. Projected to be the 41st best hitter in baseball.

Guys, lay off Tellez. He's a big sensitive guy and baseball is hard.

There are so many considerations now when it comes to elite prospects like this. Control - this is a technical consideration. You want to maximize your allotted control over a player like this and get nearly 7 years from him, if he goes through the normal control timeline. Competing - if the team can win then you want a player like this up as soon as they can help you. Even if you lose that "seventh" year of control, what good would it be to control him if the team that year isn't competitive? We don't know if Toronto will be any good in 7 years, but we do have an idea of how good or bad they will probably be in the short term. They should also consider the potential "shot in the arm" effect that promoting Vlad could have, it would be like a steroid injection for the roster. Obviously control and competing have some relationship. i.e., you want to align the control of elite players to your competitive window(s). Affinity - this is a personal/personnel consideration. You want your players to like you, and you want players to like your organization. If a promotion will improve Vlad's affinity for the team that may pay all kinds of dividends down the road. Would he be more likely to sign an extension? On the flip-side, if they game his clock transparently will he lose affinity for the org? What about players and prospects outside the org - what will they think about Toronto's decisions with respect to Vlad? Optics / PR - this is probably the least important consideration but it might matter a little bit

I think someone will draft him. We've seen all kinds of criminals in the league. Josh Lueke was charged with rape AND butt-rape. He then lied to police about ever having contact with the person (proven by DNA). He ended up pleading guilty to kidnapping or something like that and he got like a month in jail and a few years of probation. Two different MLB teams traded for him after this happened. On the other hand, Tampa Bay got continuously roasted for rostering him and they are like, the least popular team in the league, so maybe this precedent works against my point. Hmmm.

Bob, this is painful

Yikes, f*** making him a September call up.

I’m considering it truly

This Sergio Romo / Rays thing deserves more attention. My favourite baseball development in a while. Forget Closers - we need more Openers. Just neuter the top of the other team's order right out of the gate.

It would probably be a good idea to start a new blog with a better title (same as the podcast). At the very least it would be a place to dump written content related to the podcast.

The tone of this article is bizarre. The pervasive "gotcha" cynicism is a huge turn off and it's misapplied. I don't think people have really ever been claiming that statcast-based "expected" stats are any type of net improvement or holy grail for measuring skill or predicting performance. I actually think it's pretty fascinating that you can approach the question of skill / future performance from different angles which have relatively equal validity, on the aggregate. We've seen this in the past with just the DIPS assay that has existed for years --- some pitchers' specific skill-set is just more accurately measured/predicted by FIP, or xFIP, or whatever (sometimes even ERA). Now we have metrics that roll in information like exit velocity and launch angles. Surely there are player skill-sets the evaluation/prediction of which will be benefited by the new metrics. The exciting thing to me, that's continuously revealed with statistical developments in player analysis, is the continued role for the human. As has always been the case, the correct contextual application of the right information or metric to the right player is a riddle that you need to solve with the human brain. Anyone or anything can pull data and sort a list by xwOBA or barrels per PA or FIP or whatever - but it seems to take someone with a human understanding to make the correct decision and figure out that, say, a player like Kendrys Morales probably shouldn't be evaluated with xwOBA. It's just a shame that the article writers seemed bent on applying some sort of weird negative slant to presenting their results. A bizarre little bubble of old-school conservatism, happening WITHIN the saber community? Odd.

Well putting together something of worthwhile quality would take significantly longer, presumably. Research, prep, editing, etc.

Don't sleep on Borucki! Zeuch also isn't that far off.

Wish I had the time. I probably have the most charisma and brains and the least audible lisp of anyone on this board. I've always thought a simulcast with the games would be a good idea. Just let people mute their TV and listen to actual decent commentary. Could do it through Twitch or something and pull up Fangraphs etc. during the games for viewers.

Part of the reason to have him play 3B might have just been the easy public relations excuse for not calling him up at a suboptimal time. Hard to say he’s working on his D if he’s playing 1B/DH. Best case scenario Vlad is probably something like Pedro Alvarez on D, so a -7 defender at 3B. That’s about an extra half win vs him playing 1B, full win vs him at DH.

lmao, so out of touch just by AVG he's 208 out of 613 qualified hitters since he entered the league, which is like 66th percentile so that's a firm 55, fringe 60 and of course he's 69/613 in overall hitting, wRC+, since he came into the league I guess Evan Longoria is also a 40 hitter

Braves say no

Kevin Pillar's SLG is higher than Kendrys Morales' OPS $33 million for -1.4 WAR and counting down extremely quickly cut cut cut cut cut

Tee Oscar's ranks, out of all qualified hitters: K% (lowest to highest; good to bad) 123/168 BB% (highest to lowest; good to bad) 121/168 SwStr% (lowest to highest; good to bad) 161/168 How much do these things matter? I summed z-scored for those three stats for all qualified hitters, with the bigger positive sum meaning that the player has a worse cumulative z-score. Here is the top 30 (the worst 30 at these things). Obviously this is stupid because using SwStr and K% mostly just double counts the one skill.... 5.58 Lewis Brinson 5.12 Joey Gallo 4.71 Carlos Gomez 4.48 Javier Baez 4.04 Ian Desmond 3.98 Rafael Devers 3.97 Michael A. Taylor 3.86 JaCoby Jones 3.68 Chris Davis 3.65 Yoenis Cespedes 3.64 Kole Calhoun 3.53 Matt Olson 3.43 Scott Kingery 3.41 Giancarlo Stanton 3.30 Amed Rosario 3.23 Brandon Crawford 3.11 Matt Kemp 3.03 Khris Davis 2.90 Teoscar Hernandez (19th) 2.79 Adam Jones 2.75 J.D. Martinez 2.67 Domingo Santana 2.66 Yoan Moncada 2.62 Marcell Ozuna 2.59 Eddie Rosario 2.53 Nicholas Castellanos 2.44 Derek Dietrich 2.43 Cody Bellinger 2.17 Paul DeJong 2.12 Justin Upton It's hard to really glean much from the list and Teoscar's placement on it. Some of the players are good most years because they simply crush baseballs. Some or good but not consistently, because of whiff issues and lack of walks. Some just are not good. I think the context is worth noting though. Guys like Castellanos and Eddie Rosario are decent players but really just average(ish) regulars, not stars. Teoscar needs to continue hitting the ball really hard to be a good regular, because the defense doesn't seem like an asset and it's hard to imagine the K and BB skills really improving significantly. The good news is that his hard hit rates have been elite in 2017 and 2018 so the JD Martinez ceiling is definitely achievable. For fun, here are the "best" 20 from the z-scores, in reverse order. Most of these players are good or great, but a few of them aren't. The holy trinity of hitting really is Walks, Whiffs, and Barrels. Some day Vlad Jr. will be the kind of that game. -2.70 Bryce Harper -2.75 Buster Posey -2.86 Freddie Freeman -2.86 Justin Bour -2.89 Ketel Marte -2.99 DJ LeMahieu -3.14 Carlos Santana -3.20 Michael Brantley -3.25 Brett Gardner -3.27 Jose Martinez -3.46 Mookie Betts -3.68 Joey Votto -3.93 Jesse Winker -4.18 Nick Markakis -4.35 Mike Trout -4.39 Andrelton Simmons -4.47 Denard Span -4.66 Alex Bregman -4.75 Jose Ramirez -4.82 Joe Mauer

Joey Votto never needs to apologize for anything. Also, f*** Joey Votto.

I'm an Indigenous woman...

The fun thing about Biggio is the unknown. I found this report from baseballdraftreport.com, written by a big fan who had been following him a while. The comps, range of outcomes, and discussion of the tools is kind of informative. I like how he mentions in context that it's almost up to Biggio whether he wants to be a Billy McKinney type bat, or sell out for more pop and by something more like Tyler O'Neill. That kind of seems a bit explanatory now.