Olerud363

Vlad is the same in some ways. Bad swings at pitches low and away that he can't do anything with other than ground out to the left side (or occasionally get it through for a couple of RBIs). One reason I could end up looking like a fool on the Nimalla thing is that his k-rate may be really high because he takes a lot of pitches and he will take the strikeouts, but won't popup or ground out early in the at bat. Nimalla will become the first player to win MVP and have 10 WAR with a batting average under .200 when he hits .197 with 24 doubles 11 triples 39 homers, 139 walks, 250 strike outs, 2.5 WAR defense, 1 WAR base running in some year in the late 2020s when the league average line is down to .229 .280 .350.

His infield fly rate and launch angle are at career highs. Kind of funny how both Vlad and Varsho deviate from the optimal launch angle by about the same amount. I wonder what they would be like if you reversed their launch angles. Would Varsho beat out grounders and low line drives towards the gap would be doubles? Or would his lower exit velocity just mean everything is an out. Would Vlad hit .240 with 50 homers? Or are pop-ups pop-ups and no one can do good with a 20% infield fly rate.

So what I am saying (and I had to reply to myself just to add a couple of thoughts) is that the points this morning about Vlad's potential hand issue wasn't really that over the top, and the kind of thing that would have been fine 20 years ago. However the problem is that in 2024 all communication needs to be shorter because of phone culture, and because of the struggles we face with inflation (ie cheapest house in Ontario is like 750,000k even for a crack-den in the bad part of Sudbury, where you have a 3.5 hour commute to work in Toronto) so it means we can't really communicate in an unpolished way at all, as you risk getting canned and then would be homeless maybe living in a park on the escarpment in Hamilton (saw a bunch of guys live up there in tents now).

My lifetime post count is way lower than most long time posters (your an exception) many have 5 to 10 times as many posts as I do. Usual situation is I write down a few short thoughts in the morning. I'm not replying to myself, just the quickest way to add to previous posts. Problem is mostly the phones have screwed up everyone's mind... long term change in communication patterns and inability to digest any length or complexity. I joke about the 'yo bro' culture but mostly true. Also most of the people here are millionaire's who make a lot of money trading NVIDIA. However with inflation they still need to also get money from the corporate jobs to survive in Canada. So need to really go with the 'corporate bro' personality, and hard to turn that off. Like this morning the issue of Jays and hand injuries isn't verbal diarrhea. It's something that could be a serious issue and has been talked about before.

2009 was also the mutiny. The players hated Cito. Ricciardi or someone linked to the press that Cito was a nut-job hated by the players. Riccardi ended up getting fired like a day or two later, with AA named as GM right away. That whole thing was weird and you have to think Beeston needed to protect Cito so didn't want to hire an experienced GM who new the real story behind Cito.

This is one of the most insane things that happened in Blue Jays history and probably could not happen in the fangraphs era. Rios was coming off of two 5 WAR seasons, and had 1.5 WAR in early August, and they let Chicago claim him off waivers for nothing. He was signed to a long term deal, but I don't think it was at outrageous terms for a 4 WAR player. Now Rios was an odd duck, and there was that incident where he yelled at a fan and it turned out he'd be wildly inconstent the rest of his career (alternating 4 WAR seasons with 0 WAR ones)... but still a guy who went 2, 1, 4, 5, 5, 1.5 (as of August) getting let go on waivers for nothing? Crazy. Either he was really a f***ing psycho or Jays (as has been the case since 94) were behind the times in analytics and didn't quite realize Rios's value (maybe viewed him as a 15 homer guy and weren't looking at the total picture).

1998, 1999, and 2000 were all pretty fun and the Jays were actually within 3 games of the wild card or division lead (in 2000) most of the time from about Sep 1st 1998 to the end of 2000. (1998 was brutal most of the year, they sold at the deadline, played the young guys and somehow found themselves back in the race in September).

2004 there was 1 million times more happiness and hope Alex Rios - weird 'no power bro' season .283 with 1 hr... but a no power bro can be good hitting .280 with good defense and he put up 2 fWAR or so Vernon Wells - bit of a down year compared to 2003 but at the time just seemed batting average randomness and seemed set for super stardom still Delgado - didn't know it was the end. They'd resign him right? Josh Phelps - failure. OK that was depressing. Erik Hinske - Obesity. Failure. Sadness. That was depressing too. Though Hinske overall would have a very interesting journey and hit the playoffs regularly after being let go by Blue Jays. ORLANDO HUDSON - The O-Dog = what a guy. Did not really have the WAR so didn't know exactly how good he was. Chris Woodward. Failure, sadness. Yeah kind of a bad year. Russ Adams and Aaron Hill were in the minors, and Gabe Gross too. Kind of thought they would be money ball college on base machines 2004 there was way more hope and joy. This is like... terrible. Total failure of every part of the organization without even a bit of happiness in any corner.

Aaron Judge stubs his toe in Dodger Stadium - immediately rested for 2 months and given nano-bot toe repair ointment, and sent to 7 specialist. Has to rest for a bit but continues as a .300 .400 .650 super star. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. gets fingure crushed into 32 pieces by Garrett Cole - Blue Jays "Great stuff, he's a .250 .290 .300 hitter now but need him in the lineup"

A good organization would DL the guy, keep the finger immobilized, and inject HGH, Stem cells and bone repair gel into the finger for 3 weeks... I don't know. I have no idea. These players can have 40 million excess value, so I assume a good organization would consult with the most advanced finger repair specialist at the slightest hint of damage (and 98 mph fastball to the finger is a pretty good hint). (At the very least Red Sox should intervene to protect their future asset. Send their specialist to Toronto immediately and get Vlad some rest).

Garrett Cole - baseball is a game of joy, a game of generations, a game for the fans, but one fan base will have no Joy. Here you go Vlad! The small bit of Joy that was Vlaimir Guerrero Jr. returning to 2021 form has ended and will not return until he is a Boston Red Sox. A small bone in Vlad's finger is damaged by the Cole 98 mph fastball. I suspect all his bat speed metrics and such are the same but there is a non-measurable effect because a small bone and joint is damaged and it is harder to make subtle adjustments when swinging. Small sample size but slugging .304 with no homers since Cole pegged him... previously was hitting a homer everyday for the week before that. We will see. I suspect for a team with no Joy Vlad ends up .275 18 homers 1 WAR because of the subtle hand injury.

If Kirk could land somewhere between his 2022 and 2023 performance it would be fine. If Jansen could have maintained his .247 average he had as a rookie it would have been fine. If Bo Bichette could have hit .285 this year things would be fine. If Cavan Biggio could have hit .250 he would have been fine. I don't think there is an issue sacrificing some power for average if it worked. Sacrificing average and power for nothing is dumb though.

One possibility is that Mattingly and Jays did think they could help guys with launch angle, but just failed spectacularly at it.... It is almost hilarious that we have a 5 degree launch angle guy and a 25 degree launch angle guy and no one can fix them. (25 degree launch angle would be awesome with low standard deviation, but I guess with normal standard deviation 25 is not good because too many popups and not enough sweet spot)

True. However it would be weird to have a bimodal distribution like that. I assume that the standard deviation of launch angle is similar for most players. However maybe that is not true. If you have launch angle of 14 with very high standard deviation than you are hitting a tonne of popups and ground balls anyway. If you had some weird guy that had super low standard deviation maybe the defense could play him... lol. In the extreme if some guy always hit at 14 degrees you'd just play everyone in the outfield.

If your name is not Albert Pujols (with reported age = twenty something) then even if everything isn't optimized you can do OK a) If your launch angle is messed up you can be a good (but not legendary) hitter if exit velocity is elite. If your exit velocity is not elite you can be a good (but not Pujols like) hitter if launch angle is optimized.

Do you mean if you hit the ball at 12 degrees or something there is point where if you hit it too hard the expected average goes down? Is that because it goes far enough to the outfield that they catch it? I would think there is just as much chance it gets in the gap in that case. I would assume that for an average launch angle a with standard deviation s that expected xwObA would go up as a function of exit velocity. For an average exit velocity v with a launch angle a with standard deviation s expected xwOba would go up the closer a is to 14 (or something). I think I learned this from George Constanza. So for Vlad his performance would go up the closer his average launch angle got to 14. For Varsho his performance would go up the closer his average launch angle got to 14. For Kwan/Spencer their performance would go up if their exit velocity got higher (and everything was the same). Those two would become Pujols if they had higher exit velocity. Vlad would become Pujols if he had launch angle = 14.

Some players to discuss. Kwan - doesn't seem like he's hitting the ball harder this year. Just a slightly better launch angle. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/savant-player/steven-kwan-680757?stats=statcast-r-hitting-mlb Vlad - hits the ball as hard as anyone but 5 degree launch angle is the long known problem - https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/savant-player/vladimir-guerrero-jr-665489?stats=statcast-r-hitting-mlb Spencer - hits ball harder than Kwan. Swings harder than Kwan. Doesn't swing hard. (small sample size) xObA .389 higher than Vlad's .384. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/savant-player/spencer-horwitz-687462?stats=statcast-r-hitting-mlb Varsho - hits ball harder than Kwan or Spencer, but not that hard. Has a 27 degree launch angle. Apparently this is a problem as his expected stats are obscene. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/savant-player/daulton-varsho-662139?stats=statcast-r-bat_tracking-mlb 14 degree launch good even if you don't hit ball hard If Vlad had 14 degree launch angle he'd win multiple triple crowns. It's easy to see how a team like the blue Jays could have looked at the data and thought that if they got everyone with a nice launch angle they didn't have to hit the ball too hard.... Fixing launch seems to be really hard. If Vlad and Varsho had 14 degree launch angles they'd be combined 20 WAR or something.

That's about the right number of PAs for what he is right now. That is also enough PAs that he has a chance to show he is better.

Both of them. They are young and we don't have much data on them, but my point was the high k rates and struggle to stay (or even reach in Bonilla's case) Dunnedin were already meaningful data (even with low sample size). Since I started posting about this we have another 6 weeks or so of data. Nimalla was a much different player in Rookie ball than Bonilla (way higher walk rate) and is back in Dunnedin hitting better. Bonilla is hitting pretty bad. Down to .194. They are teenagers, but it's like we don't already have data on hundreds of teenage players and their outcomes. Just look at the current team. Vlad, Bo, Jansen, Kirk, Schneider all played as teenagers and all had decent k/bb. The guys with bad k/bb didn't make it. Fans know this intuitively How many fans already started hating Anthony Gose or Alex De Jesus because of high k rate even while they were hitting OK as teenagers? Always exceptions. And like I said with another 6 weeks of data Nimalla is atleast is headed in the right direction.

I'm sure in a couple of posts I claimed he was done, but mostly I agreed with the guy who posted he might be Paul De Jong. Vlad and Bo were 6 months younger and older respectively than Nimalla in 2017 and they already were in high A+ hitting very well. So nice to see him playing better and he is showing great raw power (and I've posted about that). Still a long road ahead. Not sure I said he would never have a hot week, just that guys with his k-rate don't have the greatest track record. Let's see what happens when he gets to high A, which still might be a year away. Bonilla on the other hand.... Anyway give LTBF the poster of the year award now that Vlad is back as a top 3 hitter and Nimalla is on track to be Aaron Judge at short stop (but don't too long or they might go into slumps again).

They have some bat speed stats that apparently correlate well with awesome hitting. However Steven Kwan might suck at bat speed... not sure exactly what the explanation is there. He is only one data point. Spencer Horwitz might also suck at bat speed but is so far a line drive machine. maybe once he goes on a popup streak he will be more like Biggio (who also sucks at bat speed).

https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/NYY/1984.shtml When Don Mattingly won the batting title in 84 his team hit .279 with 134 homers and scored 758 runs. The nerds that run the blue jays probable have a spread sheet that showed what would happen under different offenses philosophies IF team swing hard AND hit .237 with 241 homers TEAM run = 757 IF team swing soft AND hit .271 with 156 homers TEAM run = 761 OK. All these guys don't need to be swinging like maniacs. Teams historically can score 750, 800, 850 runs with 150 homers. But... in 2024 most guys can't hit 280 with 10 homers I guess, so should try for .240 with 20? Not really buying that line drive rate is that more variant than homerun per fly ball rate and stuff. Just that in 2024 can't build a team that hits .273 (but if you could it would score lots of runs).

Mattingly hit .350 with 256 hits or something, and drove in 145 when the next best guy drove in 102. And he would hit 35 homers with 20 strike-outs. And 50 doubles. And was Donny Baseball. And would have won many batting titles except for Wade Boggs. And hit 11 grand slams one summer (it was actually 6) and homered in 11 straight games (actually 8). Probably Mattingly thought he could at least get Varsho to hit .250, and with Bo's talent get Bo putting up Mattingly 1980s style numbers... But he can't.

Steven Kwan has like the lowest bad speed in the world at 64 mph or something. I don't know maybe he was at 55 mph before. Josh Naylor was in a slightly better configuration as a .300 .360 .470 last year then a .250 .310 .470 guy with more homers this year. Not really convinced by those 2 examples. Though overall Cleveland is scoring more runs. And they have a higher batting average than last year too (more power too of course). I think people are just having trouble here with a multi-variate problem... If runs are a*hrs + b*avg there are many a and b that for which runs = 800

On the same note! I was looking for matched sets like one guy hit's 40 homers one guy 10 they play similar spots on the defensive spectrum and have about the same WAR. 2017 Joe Mauer vs. 2018 Kris Davis One hit 7 homers, one hit 48 One played first one played left One hit .300 one hit .247 One had 2.9 WAR one had 2.8 WAR What is better the 48 homer left fielder or the 7 homer 1st basemen? It's pretty close "no power bro!" "hitting for power is always better than hitting for power bro!" (Kris Davis actually won 2.8 WAR to 2.7 WAR, but they are basically even and a good example of two configurations of guys on low end of D-spectrum position wise, one extreme low power and one extreme high power which are suprisingly equal in WAR).