keggy

Didi has a true shortstop's arm, possibly the best arm strength on the team if he signed.

Nothing against Fisher personally but he seems like a lost cause headcase. Guy has 70-grade speed but doesn't know how steal a base. Lets routine popups hit him in the face more than once. If Yasiel Puig and Guerrero Jr. had a love-child, he might be as baseball IQ stupid as Fisher.

Talent wise we're roughly at the level of 2006 (the one good year under Ricciardi) or 2014 (the year before we went on our run). Those years we had some really valuable young talent mixed with serious flaws that championship teams don't have. We still needed to acquire guys like Donaldson and Martin to become a legit championship contender. With the new format playoffs are well within reach though. This all assumes we don't add any more star level talent this offseason.

Quintana's projections are depressed by missed time due to an absolutely freak injury washing dishes, and he pitched well in a small sample post-injury. If he's recovered this and the Charlie Morton signing are the finest moves of the offseason.

Keep him. Grichuk is a solid 4th OF who can play center or platoon with Tellez if needed. The contract was a mistake but what's done is done. The elephant in the room is that Grichuk, Gurriel, and Hernandez all have somewhat risky batting profiles. If one or two of them takes a step back you won't regret having that depth. Grabbing Brantley and dumping Grichuk also makes sense if you want to mitigate some of that risk.

The inaccuracies with WAR accumulate over the course of a career, especially for pitchers. Jack Morris was a league average pitcher over a very large number of career innings. This is a very valuable pitcher but he doesn't deserve to be discussed for the Hall of Fame. The bigger problem is that pitcher WAR is broken for career comparisons. Morris has a similar career WAR as Jim Palmer, who was a >90% first ballot Hall of Famer and was like 20% better at run prevention over a similar number of innings. Andy Pettitte has a higher career WAR than Tom Glavine despite being worse at run prevention with > 1000 fewer career innings.

The amount of blind faith casual fans put into defensive metrics, especially for historical players, is why the old school guys hate analytics so much. Look up how Total Zone is calculated.

Rookies always get hosed by umps, he'll likely get more calls as his reputation spreads around the league. If he reaches Bautista level respect for his eye he might even start stealing close calls, which is a scary thought given how many walks he draws already.

Kid has terrible baserunning and statcast numbers, but he can clearly run. Losing weight and gaining some baseball IQ will pay dividends in so many ways.

I was only referring to their profiles, since the purpose of the original post seemed to be projecting future value. Alomar was a career .300 hitter and at the height of his powers had gap power to all fields and strong control of the strike zone. Because of his swing and profile, Biggio may hit .300 in individual seasons, but he will never consistently hit for average like Alomar. Conversely, Biggio's patience is elite and he has more power than Alomar, again due to his fundamentally different approach. On the bases, Alomar was a high-volume burner while Biggio is a highly efficient baserunner with solid average footspeed. I can envision Biggio providing similar value with his legs as Alomar without the benefit of 50 SB. Again, completely different tools/profiles. With the glove the two aren't comparable. Alomar was an all-time great with lateral range in both directions and the arm of a shortstop. He was basically Robinson Cano without the steroids and more acrobatics. Biggio is fringe average and just doesn't have that physical firepower. With his baseball IQ I wouldn't be surprised if he continues to improve his D, depending on how much autonomy he has with positioning. Biggio and Alomar have very little in common other than they both played 2B for the Blue Jays. I'm not saying Biggio isn't capable of putting up 6 win seasons (he can but probably won't). But if he does, it will be with a drastically different offensive profile. Like I said, a Biggio career year probably looks more similar to Chase Utley (later career start, great power, eye-popping value on the bases without being a burner, etc.), but even then the comp isn't great.

They are very different players. Biggio would have to become a batting title level hitter to become Alomar. With his strikeout rates and batted ball profile that will never, ever happen. Chase Utley is a better comparison but even that's a stretch.

If we can't identify the problem, we are guaranteed to fail. The question isn't whether Guerrero is entitled a starting position at 3B, the question is whether he is even salvageable at 1B. Scouts have been projecting Guerrero to move off of 3B since he was a 16 year old kid. In 2019 he accumulated the most negative defensive value at 3B in the league despite playing a partial season. The eye test, numbers and basically common sense tell us that he shouldn't be out there. Somehow he managed to play even worse at 1B. Just by memory, he dropped at least one chest-level throw from the infield and overran MULTIPLE routine popups. These are among the highest percentage plays in baseball, I'm talking little league stuff here. I'm not even going to touch his journeys into 2B. I'm fine with using Guerrero as a third string/emergency 3B for roster flexibility, but indulging him with a shot at the starting 3B job that he hasn't earned won't help at all with his maturity/baseball IQ issues. He's basically Ryan Braun/Gary Sheffield out there, and the coaching staff/management should be threatening to make him a full time DH if he plays even remotely as bad as he did last year. This will probably raise a lot of eyebrows, but from a pure baseball standpoint I would really have liked if they moved Vlad to RF earlier in his development. He has a good arm and he can run after the ball all he wants out there. His footspeed is actually playable in right, especially if he loses weight. When it comes to the weight, fielding, etc. management needs to communicate a clear plan with expectations and stick with it. Teasing fans by having him take grounders at 3B in the middle of the season when he was drowning at 1B was silly. Vlad has clearly been confused over the past couple of years and that's mostly on management. He seems to be taking his weight more seriously which is a great first step.

It's pretty interesting that the Cubs went from the exemplar of tanking to build a dynasty to what amounted to a pretty standard window of competitiveness. After 2016 people were seriously debating how many consecutive World Series they might make. Looking back, their rebuild and playoff run was less impressive than the Phillies teams of the late 2000s.

Anibal Sanchez put up 2.5 wins in 2018 for $1 million as well. Anthopoulos has somehow grinded out like 15 wins on the open market for $50-60 million. The rates go down if you count stinkers like the Hamels contract, but he doesn't have many of those.

The Dodgers, Braves, and probably two thirds of the front offices in baseball would disagree with that assessment.

That's a pretty hot take outside of Toronto. Anthopoulos was recruited by two of the best run organizations in baseball and has seen nothing but success since leaving.

He doesn't have a classic shortstop's arm and he knows it, leading him to rush plays deep in the hole or with fast runners. I think he's fine at SS but could be a great 2B.

The left is Cabrera at 20 years of age as the best young player in baseball. On the right is Cabrera at 37 years of age, playing at replacement level and arguably the biggest albatross in baseball. Guerrero is 21, which one does he look closer to?

Gurriel for Clevinger would be a bigger fleecing than Lawrie+ for Donaldson.

None of these things are true. Norris was top 10-20, Hoffman was in the 20-30s, and Barreto was in the 50s. Also Syndergaard was not a top 50 prospect when he was traded. You guys are completely misrepresenting the value and variability around top prospects.

Agreed, and there's a lot of 20/20 hindsight over process being used to evaluate this particular trade. Just to add some unbiased historical perspective here: 1) Reyes was considered a borderline superstar at the time. After being traded his value cratered by getting hurt, forgetting how to throw, and beating up his wife, in that order 2) Johnson was considered a legit ace when healthy. His arm predictably fell off. He was damaged goods before the trade but so was Alvarez, who was a key young piece going back 3) Buerhle was reliable but added entirely to make the deal more financially palatable for Miami 4) Bonifacio was fast and exciting and occasionally good. He was horrible for Toronto 5) Hechavarria was a glove first Cuban SS prospect. He value was somewhere along the lines of Gurriel before he started hitting 6) Yunel Escobar had value but wrote offensive stuff about gays like 3 weeks before being traded 7) You guys are talking like Nicolino versus Syndergaard was like comparing Josh Towers to Pedro Martinez. At the time Syndergaard was a generic huge arm with good success in Low A. Many, many people argued that Nicolino was better than Syndergaard, and even more people thought Sanchez was going to be better than them both. Offering Syndergaard at the time would have been somewhere along the lines of offering Simeon Woods Richardson today. I just wanted to present these facts before the historical misinformation got out of control.

Rogers understands the commercial value in winning as much as anyone. Ownership saw firsthand the franchise value and attendance soar from our playoff run. According to hearsay Rogers also allegedly delayed the rebuild because they preferred the commercial value of a competitive product over an accelerated rebuild.

Fair enough. Agreed 100% Tellez should earn a spot.

Tellez is like 5 years younger and projected to outhit Shaw next year so I'm not entirely clear on why one needs to be banished over the other. Where Shaw's true value comes is in his positional flexibility. Dump Drury finally, let Tellez fight for a 1B/DH position, and NRI some players who can hit LHP. Also now Edwin makes no sense for this team at all. Guerrero is the worst defensive third baseman in baseball and takes days off on a regular basis. Unless we're serious about contending next year the roster spot and positional flexibility is more valuable than Edwin's bat.

I'm thinking something like Gurriel and Kay.