max silver

Bats really need to figure s*** out sooner rather than later as the chances of the current pen holding small leads seems pretty slim.

Robberse was garnering a fair bit of attention heading into this season, some sites had predicted he would be the club's top starting prospect as soon as this season as he had a ton of remaining projection. Of course Tiedemann has blown by Robberse with the fast start but Robberse still could turn into a nice starter. The club raves about his intangibles, and the organization looks to be able to help coax extra velocity out of their young pitchers given the full on embrace of velocity programs and other advances in training techniques. Robberse was reportedly sitting 93-95 to end 2021 so it's not like his stuff is terrible by any means.

They mentioned in the post game breakdown that the Flames outshot the Stars by over 140 shots for the series, just insane goaltending performance, took a perfect snipe to finally beat him in overtime.

Nice to see Springer in the lineup, hopefully he can actually finish the game though as we've seen him attempt to grind his way through injury plenty of times.

There were a ton of encouraging signs tonight. Ryu looked like the good version of himself as he was effectively spotting his fastball to both sides of the plate, and save for the mistake he made leaving a changeup up to Diaz the pitch was very effective for him as he was keeping it down very nicely. I thought the hitters looked much better as well as the approaches were better with far fewer wild swings chasing out of the zone while also using the whole field nicely. Chapman hit a few balls hard which was nice to see and Jansen just continues mashing, while Teo also had a great game with an opposite field single and homerun to straightaway center field. Getting all three of Ryu, Jansen and Teo back just about at the same time is a huge boost to the lineup, and once Springer returns from the ankle injury the offence will hopefully start to live up to expectations.

I'd have an extremely difficult time moving any of Moreno, Martinez and Tiedemann after what they've shown this season. Moreno in particular has more to show as the power hasn't showed up yet, I can't help but wonder if he's back at full strength yet after the broken hand last season.

Awesome, had no idea this existed.

Zulueata looks poised to explode onto these lists in short order. He had a very good outing tonight for Dunedin, 4-2/3 innings, 10 strikeouts, no runs allowed, only 1 walk, 2 hit batters.

Batspeed for days with Orelvis. He appears to be adjusting to AA nicely and his recent numbers are very encouraging. For the month of May his strikeout and walk rates were 24.2%/9.1% vs 35.8%/1.5% for the month of April. In April he struggled a bit to the tune of a 102 WRC+ vs 180 WRC+ for May, hopefully he can keep it up.

Must be dipping into the Grand Marnier or something.

Do you happen to have a subscription?

Oettinger is the only reason this series has been close.

Flames with a great 3rd period to win the game after having nothing going the first two periods.

I think every male who grew up in the era before free internet porn existed has likely done the same.

This really isn't much of a denial you know....

I suspect xWOBA should still be useful as a tool for comparing relative performance (ie percentile rankings) as everybody in MLB is playing in the same offensive environment. It just won't be as useful for comparing expected performance vs actual results at this point.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news here but your football spikes tend to be of the variety that bounce up and hit you in the face.

That's not nearly salacious enough. I think he's likely on a massive cocaine bender right now. Or maybe he's joined a Satanic cult and is busy sacrificing goats. Or perhaps he was secretly whisked away to a secret underground terrorist prison because he was the leader of a terrorist organization. You're going more and more overboard with the Biggio hated lately. The poor bastard can't even potentially come down with a covid infection without drawing your ire. It's at the point where it's like you're being mind controlled by Keith Law or something.

If Biggio can find his stroke that will certainly help a great degree.

His expected stats are off the chart and very comparable to his stats when he killed it last year. He might be falling victim to the BABIP gods but this is strictly stat scouting and not having watched the games.

Collins is obviously the Rowdy replacement except he has the ability to catch (rather poorly I might add but at least it adds versatility). Zimmer is just a guy I think the front office decided to take a flyer on to see if they could coax something out of him. So far that's an abject failure though.

Yup better trade him for a bag of peanuts his career is done.

That's still a massive improvement compared to recent games where both Tapia and Zimmer are in the starting lineup so I'll take it.

I would complain far less if Gurriel or Chapman were to bat leadoff vs Tapia but neither of them is a very good choice for leadoff as they simply haven't been able to find their way onto base with any regularity. Perhaps over the course of an entire season Gurriel and Chapman will each have better numbers than Espinal but that's not the case for the season as a whole. If you go back over the last two seasons Espinal has the best WRC+ of the three at 114, Chapman is at 101, and Gurriel is 106. The numbers don't really back up either Chapman or Gurriel clearly better hitters although to be fair Espinal didn't necessarily earn his numbers last season and Gurriel is super streaky and hasn't hit his yearly hot streak yet. I tend to think lineup construction should be a bit dynamic based on who's hot and who's not. Guys like Springer, Teoscar, Vladdy etc. can be more or less locked into place based on the quality of at bats they tend to regularly have, but everybody else should be shifted up or down as needed. If you look at the last two weeks Chapman has an OBP of .218, Gurriel is at .259 and Espinal is at .347. One of these to my eyes is a far better leadoff choice than the other two for this reason alone. Espinal has outperformed each of these hitters by most objective measures and his expected stats back that up as well. Among the regular starters he's produced the 3rd best WRC+ on the team and to me it makes sense to get him more at bats and not bury him at the bottom of the lineup on days when Springer is unavailable. There's no way Tapia should ever be receiving more at bats given what we've seen offensively from each player so far this season.

I agree with most of this but I would absolutely hit Espinal in the leadoff spot on days when Springer is unavailable. The alternative seems to be Tapia up to this point so it should be an easy choice between the two.