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If pitcher A is giving up line drives all over the field and allowing a run to score every inning while pitcher B is suppressing hard contact effectively while only allowing a single run to score every 9 innings, is there even any reason to debate which one has been more effective? I can see the small sample size of innings regressing in opposite directions for each pitcher, but it's silly to shrug our shoulders and completely assign random luck to the end results.

I definitely think there is a skill element involved in contact suppression rather than fully assigning it to random chance. Ryu is one of the best examples of this. Besides, Hatch has an upper echelon spin rate that would very likely make his fastball hard to square up.

These two pitchers are a great example of the intrinsic flaw of the FIP/xFIP systems, in that other than home runs surrendered they do not sufficiently account for quality of contact in their formulations. Hatch has limited hard contact much more successfully than Font has so far. By Fangraphs Font has allowed 55% hard contact vs 38% for Hatch. Font has surrendered a 31% line drive rate vs 11% for Hatch. It's no surprise that Hatch has allowed fewer runs to score than Font.

I'm in the same boat as you, the idea of posting copyrighted paywall content makes me personally uncomfortable, but I certainly appreciate those that are willing to do so.

Irrelevant, our players aren't allowed to try to lay down bunts for hits, only to perform the noble deed of sacrificing one's at bat for the betterment of the team.

The key question we need to ask ourselves is if he's able to bunt, since you just know he's going to be asked to do so several times a week by our dumbass manager.

Whether you want to give Font the benefit of the doubt for not having control over the quality of contact allowed the fact remains that he's getting torched up to this point. He's fine as a low leverage arm but our feckless manager keeps insisting putting our lowest quality relievers into high leverage situations despite having superior options available.

Statcast page looks pretty ugly for Font though, hit opponents hard hit rate is 47.4%, he has a high opponents launch angle, high barrels allowed etc. so that high BABIP likely isn't a fluke.

I've noticed Stripling has been generating far fewer groundballs compared to usual, and a crazy amount of the extra ensuing flyballs he's allowing are leaving the park as home runs. For some reason his 4 seamer is getting absolutely torched this year, the movement profile looks to be a bit different with less pitches on the edges of the plate. The slider has also been hit pretty hard as well, the heat maps show him leaving a lot of sliders in the middle of the zone so no surprise there. I wonder if he's been battling through some sort of injury affecting his command, he's just far more hittable than usual with less swings and misses and weak contact generated.

When checking out Villar's numbers for the season it makes me wonder if some improved performance can be unlocked with some swing/approach tweaks. His plate discipline numbers are a career worst, and he's hitting a lot fewer flyballs than last year with the Orioles. Unfortunately he's lost over a foot/second in foot speed compared to 2019 so he might not be much of a threat on the bases at this point of his career.

Nobody here is acting like Ray is the second coming of Randy Johnson just waiting to be unleashed, but this is a very low risk high reward kind of move. They can hide him in the bullpen and have him throw side sessions to see if they can get him sorted out mechanically, and if he manages to smooth out his command issues he has potential to be a nice addition to the bullpen or rotation. It cost all of a reliever that wasn't good enough to make it on a terrible Giants squad so there's zero reason to get so worked up about this.

I don't think McGuire has necessarily proven anything at the major league level yet with so few plate appearances. When you start digging deeper into his numbers it becomes readily apparent that his success was somewhat of an unrepeatable mirage as his .woba exceeded his xwoba by a large margin in both of his first few stints with the major league club. There still might be something in there with the bat if he can actually make some solid contact, same for Jansen.

Hopefully the down year for Stripling reduced the outgoing prospect a little bit. If he continues with the 3 hr/9 it's going to be hard for him to provide any value.

It's too bad the Jays didn't pick up Villar on waivers last year for free, wouldn't have had to send a prospect out that way.

Nothing wrong with moving out a few prospects to make a run, but I'd like the front office to operate similar to the Dodgers, in that they have untouchable prospects that they won't move out no matter what.

Nice complete team win; great first start for Walker, some timely situational hitting and great at bats throughout the lineup, and very nice bullpen work as well. Feeling really good about the team right now with the way they are going about their business.

It's amazing how good this offense has been without Bichette in the lineup, and receiving next to no offensive contributions from catcher and third base. Add in somebody like Seager for third base and this lineup is going to be pretty damn scary when Bo returns.

My stats are taken from fangraphs and statcast. I don't think comparing a 6 year veteran players career average against his current o-swing is a very reasonable way to compare his current statistics for what it's worth. You seemed to have cherry picked the worst plate discipline numbers for Grichuk of the multiple available metrics to make your case, but by all of pitch f/x, pitch info and statcast Grichuk has set a career best marker. Perhaps a more telling stat is his o-contact percentage, this is a much more sizable increase of up to 15%, that could be behind a lot of his increased success, with less swing and miss/more foul offs etc. Grichuk hasn't lucked his way into his current numbers, he is being rewarded with results consistent with his quality of contact. His .395 woba is consistent with a .391 xwoba. He isn't simply fluking his way into a bunch of wall scraper home runs, he is making consistent hard contact and reaping the just rewards. Check out his statcast page, Grichuk ranks: 78th percentile in hard hit% 81st percentile in xwoba 90th percentile in xba 87th percentile in xslg 89th percentile in barrel %

Barrel percentage is way up, line drive percentage is up significantly, k rate is down 5% which is a big drop compared to his career norms, and he's swinging at a career best 29% of pitches out of the strike zone, and his swinging strike rate is a career best as well. His success is not simply due to home run luck, he's made some impressive changes right across the board after 6 full seasons in the big leagues, give the guy some credit where credit is due.

I just don't really get the feeling that this team is quite ready to actually compete in the playoffs, a huge chunk of their best players are still basically rookies, and prone to rookie style mistakes a good chunk of the time. If they manage to squeak into the playoffs due to the expanded format that will be awesome, but I just find it really short sighted to send out high potential prospects for rentals in this point of their rebuild.

Trading a good long term asset for a .500 team to gain 6 starts is absolute insanity. If Bauer had control beyond this year I could see building a package including Kloff for sure, but I just can't see the Jays are close enough to actually competing in the playoffs for that to be a wise move.

Just imagine the shitstorm that will ensue if any NFL games end up being cancelled because of police shootings in the future.

I'd hope you aren't remotely serious about a barely 20 year old pitcher being washed up because he struggled a bit in the independent leagues against players who are likely 5-10 years older than he is.

Damn looks like top of the rotation stuff so far, maybe all the gushing Atkins did upon acquiring the guy was actually warranted.

Only other guy I can think of off the top of my head with this kind of separation is prime Fernando Rodney.