Carlos Danger

Martin!

I think everyone knew this was coming once the other SS went off market. Phillies were scared if they didn't act fast the music would stop and they would be left without a chair.

Ohhh you have him in BBDL then and not here? My bad..

Spanky will trade you Tanaka for him and maybe throw in an RP also

Dude, I never said or insinuated in any manner or form that was from me.. I even wrote I couldn't put/ size the graphs properly. Anyone who really thinks I wrote that is a moron. It is pretty obvious which are my comments and which are cut and paste. Your post is ridiculous.

I am ALL for more pitching and agree 110%.. I just think we need to concentrate on SPs more than RPs.. Assuming they are not doing both concurrently.

I said it was interesting to look back on this thread and the year prior. I believe Biggio was a Bust in year prior. I wrote my 3 picks just like anyone else and when I put SRF as a bust, it generated no less than 4 posts criticizing my selection. I feel great, thanks for asking. It feels good to have my predictions validated. How are you doing buddy? Ready for the weekend!?

If we based lineups on projections then SRF should have been our #2 SP to start the season a few years ago. That concept is not accurate nor smart on rookies or guys who have barley had 162 games under their belt. What were the projections on Vlad coming out of AAA..? You need to set your lineup based on projections and major league track record if there is one. Put Vlad in a spot where he has performed for, IF his "projections" kick in, then you move him up. But putting him as clean up with other better proven options is stupid, and is very hard for me to understand.

Springer on MLB radio at 9:30 AM ET Unfortunately that tool Bowden is guest hosting with Philips instead of Eduardo Perez or CJ Nitkowski which are both great. EDIT: 9:30 AM ET

Why do people keep putting Vlad 4th when Teo and Gurriel both outperformed Vlad. Until Vlad stops massacring insects and worms, he needs to hit back further and earn his way into the clean up spot. What he did in the minors and name means jack s*** to me until he starts doing it in the majors...

3rd in defensive OFs????

Ha! LOL probably true!

When he comes out of the pen since they went with a 4 man rotation not including HDMH... LOL

The issue with Kulh is his pitch usage. He also had a one blowout against the Marlins that jacked up a lot of bad numbers. He was also coming back from basically two years off. He finished strong and is the exact type of SP the Jays appear to be targeting with the thought they can fix or see some solid underlying metrics.. He is a low cost with upside potential pitcher which the Matz trade shows they are willing to take fliers on. The Jays were mentioned with him at the deadline which probably means they were at least looking at him. Many other SPs you have to pay a high asset price for and apart from Bauer and one or two others, there is not much in FA.. Kulh is a cost vs reward target to buy low instead of waiting until he breaks out and becomes very expensive. From Fangraphs: The Pittsburgh Pirates don’t have much going for them this year. One bright spot who has shown potential is pitcher Chad Kuhl. Kuhl is an interesting case and I am somewhat surprised people haven’t run to add him. Kuhl started the year piggybacking for Steven Brault but that ended quickly and he has moved into the starting rotation after only doing it twice. In four starts this year he possesses a 2.70 ERA and has only allowed more than one run once in those four starts. Now the 6.10 FIP, .128 BABIP, and near 100% LOB% screams massive regression. But he might not regress as much as one would think. Kuhl actually has two above-average breaking balls in his slider and curveball. Both produce a ton of whiffs, and while he could locate the curveball a little better his slider is located very well. The main crutch for Mr. Kuhl is his sinker. With a .399 wOBA against, I wonder why this is his featured pitch. Hopefully, the Pirates and their new “philosophy” can fix this. For all of Chad Kuhl’s positives and negatives, overall he’s a solid streaming option. He pitches very well at home, and can handle both right and left-handed hitters. In the right matchups, he makes a ton of sense and with those two plus breaking balls in his back pocket he should be able to eliminate potential blowups. Another from Fangraphs: Chad Kuhl eventually moved into the rotation for the Pirates last season. As a starter, he pitched 41.1 innings with a 4.57 ERA, 5.78 FIP, and 4.90 xFIP. What’s so interesting about Kuhl is his stuff is really good. In fact, if you use Ethan Moore’s Quality of Pitch (QOP) metric he is ranked up there with Mike Soroka and Kenta Maeda. Kuhl can take a step forward if he caters more towards his breaking stuff, especially the slider. He mainly throws a sinker (42.1% usage) but it just flat out isn’t a good pitch. His command on it is terrible and it gets crushed. Actually crushed might be an understatement. Opposing hitters had a 186 wRC+, .309 ISO, and .448 wOBA against it. Those are some of the worst numbers I have ever seen for someone’s number one pitch. When you move on to the slider that he throws 34.5% of the time the numbers look much better. Opposing hitters only had a 52 wRC+, .244 wOBA, and .058 ISO against it. He also was able to induce whiffs as it posted a 20.1 SwStr%, well above the league average of 17.1%. While he should probably throw it out of the zone more his slider doesn’t possess any flaws, so why not throw it 40% of the time? Kuhl needs to dump the sinker or at least drop the usage to 30%. Relying on his slider and curveball could work wonders.

lmao:d

They should bump Stroman back to # 5, because if all those guys are healthy, he is the #5, and also because I know it would f*** with his ego.

Epa!!

Kuhl’s below-average secondaries kept him from prospect relevance. Well, does a .216 xwOBA slider and a .197 xwOBA curveball sound below-average to you? If you’re not sure, from 2017-2018 Kuhl’s curveball ranked 11th best in xwOBA among starters, and his slider ranked 9th, sandwiched right between Sonny Gray and Luis Severino. This graph depicts every pitcher who threw at least 1,000 breaking balls from 2017 to 2018, with xwOBA of said pitches in the x-axis and pitch usage on the y-axis. As you can see from the other names I highlighted, Kuhl’s breaking balls measure up to some of the best pitchers in all of baseball, as he posted a better xwOBA on his slider/curveball than guys like Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole, and Jacob deGrom. This isn’t a coincidence or luck either; both of Kuhl’s breaking balls grew into elite pitches. His curveball has elite spin-rate, averaging the 16th highest mark in 2018, as well as above-average movement in both directions. His slider also possesses above-average spin and movement, which while not as high as his curveball, are very impressive for its 88.3 MPH average velocity. Eye test will also confirm that both of these pitches are truly above-average pitches, despite what scouts and the Pirates’ themselves thought about him as a prospect. Kuhl had a curveball coming out of college, but the Pirates pushed him to drop it in favor of a slider when he was in the minors. He didn’t pick it back up again until 2017. The reason I used pitch usage as my y-axis is to show what the big issue with Chad Kuhl is. Despite having a combined xwOBA of .211, Kuhl only threw his breaking balls for 29.5% of his pitches. Of the pitchers with better breaking balls than Kuhl, only Charlie Morton, Corey Kluber, Blake Snell, and Ivan Nova used them less than him. This is especially concerning when you consider the fact that Kuhl throws both a slider and a curveball, while a large percentage of the pitchers on this chart mainly throw one or the other. It’s worth noting that a few guys in a similar position on the chart to Kuhl, such as Paxton, Morton, and Kluber, have a low percentage of breaking balls because they have a pitch which statcast identifies as a cutter, even though it acts more like a slider (although Paxton and Morton didn’t have significant usage on this pitch). If you include his Cutter, Kluber’s percentage of breaking balls would jump to 51.6%. That just leaves the other three. Morton and Snell can be explained fairly simply by the fact that they all have plus fastballs, as do most guys with elite breaking balls but low usage, so they don’t need to rely on their breaking balls as much. It’s also worth noting that, like almost every pitcher close in proximity on the chart to Kuhl, Morton increased his percentage significantly in 2019. From 2017-2018, Morton used his curveball and cutter for 37.7% of his pitches. In 2019, that number rose from 47.7%, as he used his curveball especially significantly more, and he had the best season of his career by far. That just leaves Ivan Nova, and to explain that one, all I need to do is tell you to check what team Nova played for from 2017-2018, and the issue starts to become pretty clear. Going back to the fact that most guys with elite breaking balls and low usage have elite fastballs, or at the very least above-average, let’s talk about Chad Kuhl’s fastball. So the first thing that stands out (other than the mess in this middle of the graph. That’s Snell, Clevinger, and Strasburg by the way) is just how bad Chad Kuhl’s fastballs were over this period. Despite elite velocity, Kuhl’s .404 xwOBA on these pitches was 3rd worst in the majors over this period, ahead of only Matt Moore and James Shields. The other obvious thing about this graph is that good pitchers tend to have good fastballs. The only highlighted pitcher with an xwOBA on fastballs over .350 was Patrick Corbin, which is easily explained by his breaking ball percentage of 44.1%. (39.5% slider). This is a pretty simple concept that seems to elude many MLB organizations; pitchers should throw their best pitches more often. I personally think pitchers could throw secondary pitches 100% of the time if their secondaries are good enough and their fastball is that bad, but I won’t try to push those radical beliefs on you guys. The reason that even guys with fastballs this bad throw them a lot comes down to being able to throw strikes. The concern when raising secondaries is always that BB% will rise, which is true, but if K% rises enough as well, then it’s a worthwhile move because strikeouts are worth much more in the positive direction than walks are in the negative direction. Contrary to popular belief, adding 10 points to your K%+ while also adding 10 points to your BB%+ would actually be a huge improvement for a pitcher. The key here is finding a balance, which Chad Kuhl clearly hasn’t done, and something that the Pirates barely tried to do under Ray Searage. The natural question here would be “how good can a pitcher be with a really bad fastball?”. Well in this sample size alone, there’s a pretty good answer, and his name is Carlos Carrasco. Of all pitchers who threw 2,500 fastballs from 2017 to 2018, Carrasco ranked sixth-worst in xwOBA at .393, just three spots ahead of Kuhl himself. Over the same time period, Carrasco posted 10.4 fWAR (7th highest in baseball) to go along with a 3.04 FIP across 386.2 IP. In the same sample, Patrick Corbin ranked 25th worst in fastball xwOBA at .364, and it got even worse in 2019. That didn’t keep Corbin from accumulating 13.9 fWAR over the last three years (7th highest in baseball). Marcus Stroman and Luis Castillo ranked 20th and 16th worst in fastball xwOBA over the same period, but still managed to put up 4.8 fWAR and 4.0 fWAR respectively. I think you get the point. Do I think Chad Kuhl can be as good as these guys? Actually, yes. Yes I do. * I can't figure out how to make the graphs larger on this board... Someone able to help?

The Pirates made it known that Chad Kuhl is officially available. We should be in on him as a relatively cheap acquisition with high upside. IMO he has higher upside then Matz and we just went and got him. He had TJ the previous season and 2020 was getting back in form. There are some good underlying metrics and he is young and controllable..

This thread is interesting to look back on as is the year prior. Guys hobbing SRF’s knob and calling Bichette and Biggio busts.

I don't get what other teams see in Loup...??

Yup, Semien had something like a plus 1100 OPS the last week of the season and playoffs.. So, if you take his 2019 season plus in my mind when he just started getting warmed up in aggregate, he is the clearly superior offensive player of the three. I thought Semien and Bradley jr would make this team better. That was when I thought Springer would go to the Mets and I thought I was being realistic. Now Semien and Springer, fnnn great!! Still need Pitching or all moot.

Spanky's fantasy teams just dropped 15 spots in the Power rankings..

Guilty! Probably head of that Fan club.

Exactly what I stated.. It was PR, of course he is not going to say anything negative and not denigrate his performance... The inflation of his performance was what made me chuckle... Your point was my point.. It was PR/BS.