KingKat

f***, do I ever love that movie.

Chris has Garza to the Twins in his latest rotational rankings. Could someone who isn't at work make the fix? Thanks,

I will trade you an OF for Dempster. I have too many as it is.

The Rays are a great organization but their draft record tends to get overrated. They built a lot of their depth the same way the Jays did by gaming the compensation system. Now that they just have the normal amount of picks, they have been exposed a bit.

A big season from Tellez would help a lot. He's practically the only position prospect with power.

The tie with the Mets surprises me. Even with the omission of D'Arnaud, the Mets seem poised to get a lot more near-term contribution from their farm.

Here's the thing I wonder with Stroman... Is there much of a precedent of pitchers of his height acomplishing what he has accomplished so far in college and in the prose? Is there much of a history of guys with his success and his height like him flaming out or are we in essence in virgin or nearly virgin territory? If it's the later than we came really come to any conclusions from a sample size that doesn't really exist? Or to put it another way... if Stroman were to become a viable Major League starter at his height would be exceptional but hasn't he already established that he's somewhat exceptional for someone his height? The Mets once traded Scott Kazmir to the Rays because they thought he was too short and the Rays got three seasons of roughly 4WAR pitching out of that (And yes I realize that Kazmir's generous height listing of 6'0" is a lot more than Stroman but my point isn't that Kazmir is a direct precedent for Stroman, my point is just that making assumptions based on heights when you're dealing with a pitcher that's already established a certain leve of ability may be flawed reasoning).

What stat are you using to determine who is the best hitter?

The funny thing is that Mike Stanton is one prospect that I really badly underrated when he was a prospect and I was well on my way to doing the same with Sano. It would be foolish to just assume that Sano will be Stanton but I guess it's equally foolish to just ignore that kind of raw power. There's massive upside in power like that.

This prompted me to compare Sano's stats to Mike Stanton's. Eerily similar numbers from the two hitters. Makes me worried that Sano may be legit.

You're not so important that everyone remembers what you write. Saying that this list is wrong without further explanation because you assume that everyone will instantly recall which prospects you think are overrated and underrated and why is pretty douchy.

Sano has less real life value than potential fantasy value. Complaining that the rankings are dumb because they don't match your fantasy cheat sheet makes no sense whent that isn't the purpose of the list in the first place. Using that difference to posture about your intelectual superiority to someone like Jason Parks makes even less sense.

That's not what he said. He said you should have one of your two best hitters hitting 2nd. That and the fourth spot are where you should put your two best hitters and there's nothing wrong with putting the one with more power in the 4th spot just like there's nothing wrong with the traditional practice of putting a more one dimensional power hitter 5th. The only significant difference between a tradional and an optimized lineup is essentially flipping the 2 and the 3. You should put one of your best hitters (not necessarily a power hitter) in the 2 rather than the 3. That's it.

Are there not different tax rates from state to state? Isn't New York one of the highest?

Well there goes my whole argument. The LD% and the high rate of bunt hits are literally the only improvements he made in 2012. I still think it's wrong to just look at hitter's BABIP and assume luck but there's not necessarily much else here. Seitzer may be right about the quality of contact or he and the stringers may just be victims of confirmation bias. I guess it's not as conclusive as I thought. It would be interesting to do a BB piece on Seitzer and break down the batted ball numbers for all the KC hitters he supposedly fixed.

Not saying his true talent BABIP is 0.344. What I am saying is that Seitzer is not out to lunch. The quality of contact improvement he speaks of is right there in the stats.

He was coming off a career worst season last year. He'll probably get a bit of a dead cat's bounce but he's clearly on the decline and he can't seem to play on turf at all. He's probably still pretty bad.

That's the biggest diffence between 12 and 13. The biggest difference between 11 and 12 was the line drive increase.

But the quality of contact argument still holds for the following year. His line drive percentage stayed the same but his fly balls went way up, 7% (at the cost of his ground balls). Players with lots of speed and no power are obviously going to lose BABIP if they do that. If we want to analyze this, let's do it right. Let's not do fall in to the hitter's BABIP = luck fallacy.

Slow down there... That's not an entirely fair analysis. You have dismissed the possibility of an improvement in quality of contact and just assumed luck. He had a 5% increase in line drive percentage and a correspoing 5$ drop in fly ball percentage. That has to account for some of it and on the surface, it's consistent with what Seitzer is saying.

Not necessarily an overpayment when you consider differences in taxes. In terms of what the player takes home, their probably isn't a big difference between the Yankees offer and the Diamondbacks, assuming of course that these are accurate.

The fact that they rank that high in ERA while only 12th in WAR suggests that they are getting a huge boost from the defense. That was his whole point.

ban

Now I can't get in. Edit: that was a little weird but I finally was able to log in after first login in to BBDL where I am a lurker.

Uh-hum...