max silver

There are far too many variables that are impossible to account for to make this particular statistic of any use. For instance, did the pitcher shake off the catcher to get the pitch he wanted to throw? Does the catcher still get credited for this if the pitcher has success? Did the pitcher miss his spot and give up hard contact? Does the catcher get penalized for this? Does this statistic account for quality of opposition? Does this statistic compare Moreno to other catchers around baseball, or is it essentially only comparing him against other catchers on his team only?

The return on that investment wasn't exactly stellar to say the least. If I recall correctly the Astros missed the playoffs completely and Clemens was torched in the post season in his final season with the Yankees. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for this strategy.

That would be a little tricky to sign a guy based on what you thought he might be able to do in the playoffs vs the likely expected projections you would receive in a full 162 game season. Prior to signing with the Phillies he mashed in two of his extended playoff outings, was mediocre in 2 others and downright awful in the last remaining post season.

I understand the various defensive metrics just fine thank you very much. On the other hand I can't help it if you are not smart enough to understand my previous post. Baseball Reference's defensive system is so slanted in Moreno's favor that it may as well have been set up by Gabriel Moreno himself. That particular system has massive flaws in that become glaringly apparent as soon as you start to break down their methodology. It's entirely possible to quantify the value of catcher framing in this day and age, and there are multiple systems which do so. These are all in agreement that Moreno is a substandard framer, ranging from nearly worst in baseball from Baseball Prospectus (2nd worst framing rate among regular catchers) , to really bad by DRS (27th out of 38 catchers with minimum 500 innings caught) and bad by Statcast (26th out of 41 catchers with minimum 500 innings caught). At the same time more than half of Moreno's accumulated DRS is due to their catchers ERA adjustment. This is because pitchers on his team had a lower ERA with him behind the plate vs the other catchers that were employed by the Diamondbacks. Moreno caught approximately 60% of the innings for the Diamondbacks. I'm calling straight up ******** to assign 11 DRS to Moreno because his pitchers had a higher ERA in the 40% of the team's innings that other catchers caught. I went back 6 years in Fangraphs to check the leaders in this stat over this time frame. Moreno ranks 4th among catchers with a minimum of 1000 innings caught based on a single season of play. This is a statistic that may as well be random as that would have just as much actual meaning.

Baseball Reference's numbers for Moreno in particular need to be taken with a massive grain of salt. It doesn't include framing but instead directly incorporates catchers ERA into it's calculations. I have a very hard time believing that it is possible in any fashion to break down a catchers ERA component into some sort of meaningful run saving component. There's simply no way to quantify pitch calling without being able to know what the result would have been if a different pitch had been called. By simultaneously ignoring Moreno's framing deficiencies and assigning Moreno the highest catcher ERA component in all of MLB it paints a much different picture than would otherwise be presented. If I am understanding this correctly, Moreno is essentially being credited with 24 DRS by Baseball Prospectus because he isn't penalized for substandard framing. If you add framing back into the equation, he still has an MLB leading 20 DRS behind the plate. Take away the bogus catcher ERA adjustment and this drops by over 50% to 9 DRS. This has a dramatic effect on his overall rWAR for the season, as by adding back in the DRS framing component and removing the voodoo catcher ERA adjustment you are left with about 1.16 DWAR vs the 3.1 he was credited with. This drops the overall season bWAR value from the impressive 4.3 to a much more pedestrian 2.36.

This post is best when imagining it read out loud in Ralph Wiggum's voice.

Kirk and Moreno's seasons largely mirrored each other to a remarkable degree. Each guy had a pretty disappointing start to the season and produced much better at the plate as the season went on. Kirk never really looked fully locked in at the plate all season compared to previous seasons so hopefully he can rediscover his previous form in seasons to come. First Half Kirk 77 WRC+ 0.4 FWAR Moreno 78 WRC+ 0.4 FWAR Second Half Kirk 118 WRC+ 1.3 FWAR Moreno 131 WRC+ 1.3 FWAR

Automated strike zone is likely years away from the sounds of things as Manfred has strongly intimated that a challenge system will likely be implemented at first to avoid making framing irrelevant.

And I hate whiney ****s that do nothing but bitch and whine at every single opportunity. Kirk murdered the minor leagues on his short stint down there and produced one of the finer halves of baseball by a catcher in the organization's history. He's shown the ability to be one of MLB's best hitters (not just for catchers) over several months when he's fully locked in at the plate, and earned himself a gold glove nomination as one of baseball's best overall defenders behind the plate. He produced xWOBa's of .344 in his short stint in 2020, and .373 in 2021. The guy has shown he has tons of ability with the stick at every step along the way, but of course you are going to act like he's baseball's worst player because he had a down year with the bat for the first time since he debuted in rookie ball.

It seems like there's a very good chance that Arenado bounces back with better health next season as he reportedly suffered from several injury related issues this past season. https://theathletic.com/4974733/2023/10/18/mlb-gold-glove-finalists-list/

I'm not overly worried yet with Barriera as he's naturally a super skinny dude, so he is far less likely to be caught in a constant battle against fatness like all of the other dudes you've mentioned. Those guys are all naturally "big boned" and as such are going to need to really work at keeping themselves in shape. It's like the Jays have invented a modern baseball trend that others are soon to emulate and is sure to take over from Moneyball as the next big thing. The Blue Jays are employing the FatBall plan where you target as many overly chunky players as possible. No other MLB organization has as many of these guys permeating their systems, the minors for the team feature dad bod prospects like Rainer Nunez and Peyton Williams. It was a real shocker a few seasons ago when the team pivoted away from fat guy extraordinaire Rowdy Tellez. That guy was so rambunctious as a toddler that his grandmother gave him a nickname that became the thing of legends many years later.

I don't think there were nearly 30-40 pounds of pure fat, it looks like there was plenty of muscle gain as well as his lower half in particular thickened up a lot. I recall reading an interview where his offseason plan was to bulk up/gain strength as the guy was a beanpole coming out of high school. It's all too easy to pack on fat pounds when trying to gain good weight, but he's young enough it should be pretty easy to lose the extra pounds without too much difficulty.

I don't think his gaining a few too many offseason pounds directly correlates to him suffering from a shoulder injury.

The Jays have been fishing in the deep waters of free agency in years past as they were reportedly in on the bidding for the likes of Gerrit Cole, Corey Seager, Boegarts etc. I have a hard time seeing this organization ponying up the $400/500+ million required for the likes of Ohtani though as they have yet to pay truly top dollar for a free agent, settling in more in the slightly lower tier for players like Springer and Gausman.

Barriera and Barger both dealt with injuries this season so I'd give them each a pass for their underwhelming performance. I recall it was mentioned that Barger may require offseason elbow surgery. Macko certainly disappointed early on but he seemed like he put things together over the last few months and should be in line for a 2024 promotion, so overall I'd call his season a success.

The team had similar health in 2016 in their rotation. So this "100 year health" was more like once every decade. The lineup mostly avoided major injury for sure but were still hampered by a lot of shorter term stuff in the second half not to mention losing Jansen to end the season as well.

I think this is just such a key point in this whole debacle. MLBPA had a representative sitting on this arbitration panel so it's not like Rob Manfred has the unilateral power to run roughshod and suspend Bauer indefinitely on his own. But at the same time Bauer has largely made his own bed here. Even though he was fully in the right, embarking upon a quest to expose spin rate doctoring squarely placed in the sights of Rob Manfred as Bauer was all over Manfred's case about how MLB was ignoring the rapidly escalating spin rate cheating scandal. The dude has a bit of dark history online in social media as he set him army of twitter trolls after a college girl after she dared to mention online about how she didn't like Trevor him. Then there have various other on and off the field instances of bad behavior so this is far from a guy with a sterling reputation to start with, even before these allegations came out. Whether or not the initial accusations were fabricated there still remained several other alleged victims who came forward to testify against Bauer in the arbitration hearing. I simply have to think if none of these allegations were credible that Bauer would have had his suspension completely quashed rather than simply being reduced, but only to a point that it remained the single largest ever domestic violence related suspension.

So the front office got lucky that Belt and KK performed well offensively, but they should have their feet held to the fire for the underperformance of much of the roster holdovers from previous seasons Come on man, if the front office is to blame for the players they already have performing badly how in the world don't they get credit for the newly acquired players who did perform well? Some consistency would be nice.

Moreno was a fine prospect, but I feel that people get a little hung up on the number 1 prospect rating. He just wasn't in the same class as other recent top prospects, as he's a step below the truly elite prospects the likes of Corbin Carroll, Adley Rutschman etc. I hope Varsho can end up being a little more consistent at the plate. He endured a really bad slump this season in July, but towards the end of the month/early August re-employed a toe tap at the plate and his results took off after that.

Varsho already has a 5 win season under his belt by BWAR (just under by FWAR), do you really think Moreno has a higher ceiling than this? That seems like a more optimistic view of Moreno's realistic ceiling in my view, and that's contingent upon his recent power surge being something that he can repeat.

First half of 2022 Kirk hit 11 home runs in 267 AB, so his power outage started second half of last season.

I didn't think that was necessarily that bad of a bad pitch as it was 97 in on the inner black, but this is Royce Lewis's most dangerous zone by far so it was a bad spot for that particular hitter. The broadcast did mention it was supposed to be on the outer part of the plate so it was definitely a missed spot.

Kirk looked a lot better in the second half thankfully. I just hope that he can shrink the belly down a fair bit in the offseason as it actually might get in the way of his swing.

I'd be fine with an actual opposite field approach vs the rash of flyballs to center field and the center field alleys. I've just had enough of the 390+ foot fly ball outs this team constantly hits. I think this is the biggest thing killing all of Springer, Vlad and Chapman's power numbers this season.

This team's approach seems to be completely f***ed up. They don't seem to be ready to hit the fastball as they are constantly fouling off if not completely missing fastballs in the heart of the plate. And far too much of the team seems to employ an up the middle type of approach which is just asinine as flyballs to center field are by the far the most likely type of fly balls to end up as outs. The best outfielders tend to play center field and thus have the best range/highest likelihood to catch these types of batted balls and this is also the deepest part of the park. Yesterday was a perfect display of the stupidity of this approach as the Jays hit the deepest fly balls of the game to center field which ended up as outs, vs Lewis who pulled one fly ball home run and went the other way with his second.