Dick_Pole

Francisco - 104 G, 319 PA, 0.6 WAR Kawasaki - 77 G, 257 PA, 0.4 WAR Tolleson - 105 G, 184 PA, 0.8 WAR Goins - 61 G, 175 PA, 0.2 WAR Diaz - 23 G, 45 PA, -0.2 WAR Izturis - 11 G, 38 PA, 0.2 WAR Combined total: 381G, 1018 PA, 2 WAR So nearly two full infield positions were given to a bunch of also-rans that combined for 2 WAR. Nearly half of that was from the effective use of Tolleson as a defensive replacement. Two guys traded during the year, Headley and Prado have 3+ WAR each. To be fair, two guys available through FA Drew and Infante wouldn't have been much better than the guys above. But if AA had just taken more care in shoring up the thin and injury-prone infield and not get complacent and cocky when the patchwork of Francisco and Tolleson worked in May there's a good chance the Jays are tied for that WC right now. Sad.

lol...nice.

...and there you have it...a Blue Jay first. I wonder if our brilliant media or broadcasting team is going to pick up on this fact.

Relative to DJ Davis...and 20 other guys

Oh man, those mother f***ing baseball gods again. The Jays have had a pitcher go from an undersized relative unknown to a top prospect to a guy who could have won the ROY in any normal year in the span of 2 years. They had another young controllable pitcher come back from TJS to throw 180 IP of sometimes outstanding pitching. They have another two SP prospects progressing ahead of schedule who could be impact players in 2015. Seems to me like the baseball gods have been smiling quite a bit on this team this year. What we need to focus on is the years of incompetent drafting gods from the previous regime and the questionable roster management gods and poor planning gods currently plaguing this team.

haha people thinking changes are coming because the team goes 78-84 versus 84-78 or something. If changes are due, those decisions have already been written in stone. My bet is that they are not. In the meantime as a fan I want the team to win as many games as possible NOW, not lose as many as possible for a slightly greater chance of this hypothetical change that may or may not lead to a better future for the team.

And an 80+ win season is very meaningful to those who purchased an over 79.5 season win total bet on the Jays during spring training.

Shut up Beeston.

Come on you bastards...3-5 or better is all I'm asking for. 7 of 8 games at home. 3 against a team comfortably preparing for the playoffs. You can do it! With all the times Hurl has brought that 80 win prediction up I'm sure he will smugly point it out many more times in the chance it's actually right. That will make this board intolerable to read, especially after I mocked his prediction saying a playoff spot was much more likely right before that well-timed 6 game losing streak.

https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=X-gZVMLRIaeV8QeHsoHYDQ&gws_rd=ssl#q=2003+detroit+tigers+record+in+one+run+games

The 2003 Detroit Tigers had a winning record in one-run games. Clutch that!

The difference with Manning is that rushing is not imperative to QB success. He has found ways around it. A QB who can rush is a nice thing to have but if he can't throw, his success will be limited. Under this pitch framing scenario, it is possible for a catcher that is mediocre or average at hitting and at all other aspects of his defensive game except pitch framing to collect a bunch of theoretical WAR points off of that then get into discussion as one of the best players in the game. If you're a GM constructing a team, sure you look at this type of stuff because you need every advantage you can get. But as a fan, I am allowed to use discretion as to what baseball skills are most valuable. I would say the same goes for sports writers who vote on these things. Erik Kratz is not a MLB-talent player. Jose Molina is not an all-star. My opinion and those of many others aren't going to change just because they can rack up 4 WAR with 3.5 of that being due to pitch framing. Mike Trout earning a 10 WAR season through speed, hitting ability and defense is a truly remarkable talent. He is hard to replace, a rare commodity and is therefore valuable. If your catcher is a top pitch framer, but if this skill can be taught or is a skill held by 50 Erik Kratzes in the minor leagues, even if it is a useful skill, it is not hard to replace, is not a rare commodity and does not make you valuable.

Except a QB that's worth anything has to be good at all aspects of his game. A QB who can scramble and rush but who can't throw has limited value. Valuing the MVP award based on WAR and assigning a large value to a catcher who can pitch frame based on it means every year there are going to be candidates who OPS 700 or under in contention for the MVP. It may make sense to a computer or to people who want to live their life like one but conceptually to a baseball fan it doesn't work and will never gain any traction. Ozzie Smith never won an MVP award and the one year he came close was the year he put up his best offensive numbers. The award may be biased to offense-only types but it will never be biased to defense-only types. My preference is that it goes to those who are strong at multiple aspects of their game.

I made no reference to "the hive" unless you're assuming all these mysterious individuals that belong to it are the knob goblins I'm referring to. And the term knob goblins is not exactly a serious term that's meant to get one's panties in a bunch either. Pitch framing is not a hard concept to understand, of course I get it. I disagree with it being part of the determinant of the MVP award, or the determinant of salary. And since no one is giving MVP awards or 5 year $50 million contracts to 625 OPS catchers because they can put up 3 points of WAR on pitch framing (if/when such calculation happens), baseball seems to agree with me. If some smart GM wants to use these numbers to determine which catcher to use or to try to pry someone off the FA list with a few extra grand, that's a smart idea. But there's no way someone like Erik Kratz is going to be in contention for the MVP award or get bid up to a $70 million contract because he can pitch frame 130 games a year. Now imagine if baseball decided to go with robotic umpires behind the plate. Pitch framing becomes valueless overnight and it's not equivalent to a good defensive play anymore. Pitch framing's closest comparable isn't a good defensive play, its closest comparable is being able to throw a spitball and get away with it, or steal signs, or cozy up to the umpire and get favourable calls during your career. When's the WAR measurement going to come out for all those?

Yes I don't disagree to that statement. I made a mention of it at the end of my rant.

And giving catchers an exclusive additional advantage in comparative stats for the election of MVP, over and above the positional advantage that already gives them a 0.5 or 1 WAR advantage over their peers is an equally awful idea to me. You want to use pitch framing data to compare among different catchers, that's fine. That makes a lot of sense. Putting all that data through a computer and comparing catchers versus the rest of the baseball population would suggest that each team should hold several catchers to maximize WAR which is an absurd result because it's an absurd idea. Even if your computer program is smart enough to limit the catching positions to 2 or 3, it's still going to come up with a result that you should spend a disproportionately high amount of your budget on catcher salaries because of pitch framing, another absurd result. There's no real point in further arguing this point. We sit on opposite sides of the fence, plus there's absolutely no way catcher pitch framing WAR is going to garner any sort of mainstream popularity in things like sports writers deciding who to pick for MVP.

f*** this pitch framing ********. If everyone wanted it to be included in WAR and wanted the MVP to be the "most WAR" award then you might as well give it to a catcher every year forever. Catchers have a lot of influence on the game. They touch almost every pitch on the defensive end of the game. Don't you think if Mike Trout could earn 10,000 WAR points by pitch framing from the OF he would? It's not a fair comparison if you're going to base the MVP all on WAR and include pitch framing data because the catcher is the only one who can take advantage of it. But of course all the knob goblins are drooling over the latest baseball nerd stat fad instead of taking a step back and thinking of the implications of what they are suggesting. At a minimum if pitch framing is going to be considered a legitimate countable stat, then there has to be some kind of adjustment for catchers to minimize its impact on WAR when comparing to other players. Catchers already have a huge advantage when it comes to collecting WAR points because the "replacement level" for them is down at Buck Martinez levels of offense. A lot of that defensive impact is baked in because, believe it or not, people involved in baseball for the past 150 years actually recognized the importance of the defensive impact catchers have on baseball and have been willing to look the other way on offense for years. However, my rant doesn't take away from the fact that Lucroy has done exceedingly well in the aspects of the game where he can be fairly compared to his peers in other positions on the field so he should be considered a legit candidate in the MVP discussion.

There are three locks for the rotation barring injury or trade or Romero (using his name as a verb in this instance) of Dickey, MB, Stroman. Hutch and Happ are the incumbents with Sanchez and Norris to challenge and Jenkins, Redmond and Drabek filling out AAAA back up starters and long relief roles. If Cecil is the closer and Sanchez gets in the rotation with Happ being the odd man out, what about turning Happ into the short man, taking over Cecil's role? It seems weird to me that with Happ there's only two options ever presented - back end starter or long relief. Happ has performed better this year than anything Cecil has done as a starter and has slightly superior stuff so it wouldn't be a jump to say he can be great in a short relief role too. Trading Happ for Wade Davis goes against AA's mantra of being lazy and not getting deals done. It may make sense but there's no real salary benefit and you would be buying sky high on Davis and selling medium on Happ. Davis is essentially Happ prior to this season with Happ having the LHP premium. Let Sanchez do what he can do and let the chips fall where they may on Happ. The BP would consist of Cecil, Loup, Sanchez/Happ with one or two of Jenkins, Redmond and Drabek not stinking it up in long relief hopefully. Delabar, Santos and potentially Morrow are thrown in as high upside wild cards (they can't get any more useless than this year so things can only look up for them). I think McGowan will be back (hopefully at a reduced salary) and Janssen looks very unlikely to be returning. We're already looking at 4-10 plausible options there. There's a decent chance at least 5 of those guys would come out as viable MLB bullpen contributors. I don't share the pessimism that others share on the BP. Maybe one veteran guy can be added like a Darren Oliver type of signing. But that needs to be the 4th or 5th priority on this team, not the main one.

http://lonelyvirgil.net/

My picks are: NL MVP: Who cares AL MVP: Jose Bautista NL Cy Young: who cares AL Cy Young: Mark Buehrle NL ROY: who cares AL ROY: Marcus Stroman NL MOY: who cares AL MOY: John Gibbons Comeback player of the year: JA Happ

The irony is that this thread has been derailed with people discussing his banning, when he was actually contributing useful data to this particular conversation.

You could ask WTF happened between 1992 and 1994 where the BABIP increase was drastic and permanent. Coors didn't have that much of an impact on offense! Maybe the expansion effect didn't have impact on pitching or hitting but on fielding.

He's got 4 more starts though to change things. Awww f*** it...baseball reference says Buehrle has a 3.6 WAR in 2014 and Guzman 3.4 in 1993. I'm sure you'll say back to me that some other dipshit site has some other numbers and that Guzman is higher. I'll tell you what...these new stats will not gain prominence among mainstream and casual fans until they are consistent among all these sources. You don't see Baseball Reference saying Joe Carter has 121 RBI in 1993 then Fangraphs says he had 115. Some people might have enough time and care enough to look up the "right" WAR stat. I am not one of them.

Pitchers throw a lot harder that's for sure. Whether they are better is another debate. You could say the league is a lot less diluted now than back then. 1993 was an expansion year which meant 22-25 pitchers who would not normally have jobs in 1992 had them. Same goes for position players though. It's been 16 seasons since any expansion so teams have had a lot of time to restock top talent from a growing local population and expanded international pool.

Using what metric? WAR, FIP, ERA+, K/BB all come in Buehrle's favour, albeit most of it just marginally.