Orgfiller

I mean it's still early for them/Tork so you can't throw the book out yet. It could be worse, they could be Mark Appel or Mickey Moniak. Casey Mize who has sucked or been injured. Royce Lewis who can't stay healthy. Dansby Swanson was pretty mediocre over his years of control. Sometimes even getting a 2 WAR guy is a plus.

Tork's xWOBA is the same as Vaughn's so they're not as far apart as you'd think. If anything Tork is further ahead in development/value given he's 1.5 years younger and with similar performance. Both are butchers though, and already awful runners, a 120 wRC+ isn't gonna cut it for either of them.

Don't forget Andrew Vaughn! 1-3 the draft prior to Torkelson's.

It's honestly not even May, it's literally the last 1.5 weeks or so. From May 1-19 he had a 5 wRC+, with zero walks, a 35% K rate, 3 hits and a double in 17 PAs. From May 20th onwards (19 PAs) he has a 236 wRC+ with a .375 ISO and walk rate above 10%. Maybe the increased consistent PT is helping him out, and he's been working on his swing with the coaching staff, leading to a positive feedback loop.

Yeah probably just simulating being in a real start. Throw 10-20 pitches, take a break to simulate waiting between innings, thrown another 10-20. Chad Green probably doesn't even need to practice this until very late in his recovery and even then if he's essential and you want to rush him then only limit him to 1 inning stints which is already reasonable injury or not.

The Cubs have held to Rays to 1 run over 2 games. Win both, although barely both times.

Disgusting stuff from Nate.

Pearson just undressed Rowdy there, nasty breaking balls.

Pitchers love throwing to Kirk.

Belt is such a vetrin hitter. Those might be his first couple of 3-0 swings this whole season.

Vlad wtf man, it's like he has the yips with a runner on 3rd and 1 out. Consistently god awful ABs in those spots recently.

Man, if the Biggio from the past week is the one we could get consistently, that's the guy the team needs as a super utility guy.

That was an excellent 3-2 pitch.

Yelich might as well have a 20 arm lol.

Good swing, would've preferred it in the air but beggars can't be choosers.

Kikuchi isn't walking as many as last year but he's been getting thoroughly destroyed. More strikes but easier to hit as a result.

You’re doing god’s work pointing out these intriguing relief arms in the minors.

The team must be enamoured with his stuff and command/composure to be promoting him this aggressively with just a 9 inning look. Great stuff, we could use another homegrown power arm knocking at the door.

Bang on. It's kind of unfathomable how he's improved significantly in some of his biggest weak points (at least among publicly available stats), and yet he's still a relative disappointment because he somehow can't seem to sustain even a .200 BABIP. How is that even possible? How is someone with this much power, who has improved on swing decisions at the surface level, not just absolutely dominating with the results to show. Him having more homeruns than every other type of hit is mindblowing. Even a Joey Gallo-esque BABIP would make him into a top 50 prospect by age-relative performance.

This is the opposite of how casuals act. Casuals want to be acquiring big names. If you trade your franchise cornerstone (Chapman, Olson, Sean Murphy) for a package deal, then you're getting "4 nobodies" in return for a star. At the very least if you trade them for one or two very good prospects, you can half justify it by saying "okay we traded our best player away but at least we got the #X and Y prospects in the game". In the A's case they quite literally traded their stars for nobodies, not even a single guy with high upside. Just boring near-MLB players with a 2-3 WAR ceiling and as we see, a much lower floor.

Davis Schneider is single handedly turning himself into a centrepiece for a deal with the A’s.

You're not wrong, but a team like the Rays very much does this kind of thing. Fairbanks, Nick Anderson, Jalen Beeks (part of their current pen) were all traded for very tangible assets. They traded Willy Adames, the centerpiece of the Price deal, for J.P. Feyereisen (sucked, now good with the Dodgers), Drew Rasmussen - originally a reliever, good but broke under a starter's workload, and our very own Trevor Richards went to the Brewers, acquired via previous trade. It's just really f***ing hard to build a good bullpen, the elite arms are worth a fortune, the half capable ones cost real players (Teoscar, Groshans), and the rest of them are a bunch of gas cans.

Yeah, sometimes relievers gonna reliever. Steve Delabar was an all-star reliever in 2013, unplayable the rest of his career. Dominic Leone was acquired and had a career year in 2017 and then has bounced around as a replacement level reliever all over the league. The O's took Yennier Cano who was a complete nobody with good stuff and bad command, AKA every other reliever ever, and now he's walked 1 in 27 innings. Credit to them for targeting an arm like that and turning his career around, but if he then went to walk 30 the rest of the season it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Clay Holmes went from journeyman to unhittable to pumpkin in the span of a calendar year. The Rays are seemingly the experts of getting career years out of relievers before shipping them out just before they combust, although their bullpen this year has been garbage so it's not always a foolproof strategy. Relievers are volatile. Target the good arms and try to make them all not look exactly the same (the Rays strategy) and some years your bullpen will just be unhittable, others they'll be unplayable.

I guess it's just more frustrating that the share of the bad luck is all coming against the good bats - Vlad, Chapman, Springer, even Varsho is vastly underperforming. Like nobody would care as much if Merrifield and his bloops got a few more outs in return for some of the rockets the aforementioned players hit not being caught.

Yeah I'm pretty sure it's just EV and LA. A counterpoint to that though, the Braves have the highest pull rate in the league (and highest xWOBA to go along with it as well) and as a team are underperforming by even more than the Jays. So I feel like it's really just luck all things considered.