max silver

With effective use of matchups and platooning I think the club can extract 2 wins if not more out of the third base position. If IKF can carry forward any of the improvements he showed for much of the season he may actually surprise us with a league average bat as he somehow managed to post a .750 OPS over a nearly 4 month stretch last season. The minor league invitations simply aren't worth getting worked up about. If Escobar shows he has something left in the tank he can start against left handed pitching and add a touch of offense to the lineup. He's a low risk short term option that can be discarded at a moments notice. If Escobar makes the team then the small army of potential third base options in the minors (Martinez/Barger/Palmegiani/Lantigua etc.) can continue to hone their craft to prepare for their initial callups. If Vogelbach sticks then Horwitz simply shifts back to AAA to bide his time waiting for a callup. These are veteran players who have experienced success in the past and if they have good springs and end up helping the club that's a plus. It's more than likely each of them is released by the end of spring and given an attempt to catch on with another team.

Go sit in the corner where you belong and eat crayons. You're like the Ralph Wiggum of this message board but too dense to realize it. You failed to realize that you just totally self owned yourself in that I actually have a wife in the first place.

Given your posting history that's about the best you can expect to receive.

Seems like you are barking up the wrong tree here. You're the person getting his knickers all twisted over the team bringing in some veterans on minor league deals to see if they have anything left in the tank.

I came across a Twitter post outlining how Escobar revamped his offseason training routine so at best he proves he has something left in the tank and can start against LHP, and at worst he starts the season with the team and shows he's washed up and the team eventually moves on.

A quick glance at Fangraphs actually shows he's historically been a stronger second half player. Career 1st Half 92 wRC+ 2nd Half 108 wRC+ His numbers took a bit of a tumble after the midseason trade, but he still managed a 97 wRC+ in the second half so it's not a terribly apt comparison to the nearly league worst struggles of no hit Whit.

White has no options and barring a completely disastrous spring somebody would almost assuredly pick him up if the club were to attempt to sneak him through waivers.

That's really rich of an obese dude to infer that he could be anywhere close to as good at baseball as Vogelbach.

Merrifield had a really rough second half to the point where he appears as though he might be cooked. His final two months of the season in particular were awful as he was literally one of the worst qualified hitters in all of MLB. (46 wRC+ over 201 PA)

I would have been cool with Grichuk as 4th outfielder for this type of coin.

I looked up Vogelbach's splits and was amazed at how poorly he's hit left handed pitching for his career. I don't recall coming across splits quite this extreme as most guys who have lefty/righty splits can at least occasionally produce vs same handed pitching. Vs LHP 2023 -81 wRC+ 2022 29 wRC+ 2021 2 wRC+ 2020 24 wRC+ Career 35 wRC+

From a glance it appears as though a Dexa scan measures lean tissue. If I recall correctly each pound of muscle also holds 2-3 pounds of water and glycogen, so it's not outside the realm of possibility he added something like 5 pounds of actual muscle and the corresponding 13-14 pounds of water+glycogen.

This isn't the reporter making things up as Tiedemann himself stated that he was tested using a DEXA scan and it showed that he had gained 19 pounds of muscle. It seems that lean body mass and muscle mass are often used interchangeably, but I don't think it's out of the question for a young elite athlete to add 19 lean pounds (muscle/glycogen/water) over a 6 month offseason.

But why? The team already has Vlad and Turner as two right handed defensively limited options who will be sharing DH/1B duties. Maybe the club intends to use Turner at third base a little more frequently than the Red Sox did but it's hard to see much of a fit for Vogelbach.

That's a tricky scenario. It seems like these conservative treatment options almost never work, but at the same time not everyone fully recovers from Tommy John surgery either. Look at a guy like Syndergaard who simply wasn't the same after his own surgical procedure.

I don't recall him ever looking like the recent photos. Hopefully it helps prevent recurrence of the wrist and knee issues and allows him to return to peak production.

I'd say it's more like the jacked version of Vlad vs the skinny version of Vlad.

A good chunk of that pouch could very well be loose skin due to the year's of featuring an oversized belly.

I'm fine with IKF if he's more of a Merrifield replacement/Espinal upgrade, but as a primary starter I dislike this signing as much as everyone else. I surmise that other front offices were also intrigued by his offensive improvements as there actually seemed to be a bit of a bidding war for his services.

He'll more than likely settle into the same offensive output as prior careers but he did manage to produce the best quality of contact metrics of his career. This includes an increase of 1.6 MPH over his previous best exit velocity, a career best hard hit rate, career best barrel rate, and career best xwOBACON. A lot of this was undone by the spike in his strikeout rate, but at least there is a bit of a silver lining in that he managed to produce at a pretty decent rate for much of the season vs simply being bad right throughout as has generally been the case.

I was looking at Kiner Falefa's splits from 2023 and comparing to his previous seasons and he actually had the best 3 month stretch of his major league career up to this point. May 119 wRC+ June 98 wRC+ July 127 wRC+ Digging into the game logs shows a sustained run of success where he produced better than league average offense. Over a nearly 4 month stretch from about April 20 until August 9 Kiner Falefa managed to produce a 111 wRC+ so he's not completely hopeless with the stick. His splits were perfectly acceptable at .271/.347/.404 .750 OPS 10.0% BB rate 16.9% K rate In mid August the wheels completely fell off as Kiner Falefa went into a deep funk at the plate. The strikeout rate skyrocketed up to 29.1% for the rest of the season. From August 21 until the end of the season IFK only appeared in 15 games, and I'm not sure if he was completely benched with spot duty only or if he was dealing with some sort of physical ailment that limited his availability.

Those developments must have played a part in the Orioles pulling the trigger on the Burnes acquisition.

So you want to see the likes of Francis or Parsons getting starts to begin the season? That sounds awesome.

I'd be thrilled about 20 pounds of weight loss in a single off season personally, the key would be keeping the excess weight off and improving further in subsequent offseasons. The last thing I want to see a major league player is crash dieting and losing a bunch of lean muscle tissue and strength as a result. A loss of around a pound per week is sustainable and would allow Kirk to continue to get stronger in his lifts.

I see very little chance that Kikuchi returns to the 2022 scattershot control. He spent last year's offseason working at Driveline and I think the type of command he displayed for last season is more likely what can be expected of him moving forward.