AMS528

The demise of the Braves offense was a little premature apparently. Riley has bounced back, Albies has as well, Murphy has started to come around. If Schwellenbach is decent, their rotation is still one of the best in the league even without Strider.

Yeah I think you're both right. Maybe I just recall the expectations being stratospheric when he came over and he was really electric his second season. On the whole it's not a career you can be disappointed in when you finish as a Cy Young runner up on more than one occasion.

Darvish is making a rehab start today. Padres definitely need him back to keep up in that 9 team race for two WC spots. Was looking at Darvish's career numbers, and I wonder if you guys would consider his career disappointing relative to his expectations/talent? He has 32 career WAR, which is a very good career, but I think I figured he'd had been elite for longer or more consistently than he wound up being.

Yeah just does not make much too much sense to hate on Atkins FA signings. Really the only one I think everyone can agree on disliking cause it just didn't make any sense is KK. When you luck into a 4 WAR season by a 33 year old, the thing to not do is see if you'll get lucky again. Especially when you already have an elite CF on your roster. That was 10 million that could have been used elsewhere.

Goldschmidt is at 61.8 bWAR, 7 more than his fWAR numbers and I think people tend to grant players after their career whichever number is higher. Once you're in the 60s these days I think you've got a real strong candidacy. He's got 4 GGs and 5 Silver Sluggers along with an MVP and three other top three MVP finishes. 45 bWAR for his 7 year peak, he was not an accumulator he was incredibly elite at peak. So I think he's going to get in eventually. Arenado is more borderline, he needs like two or three more decent seasons to hit 60 WAR. Harper has a surprisingly low peak, because he's had one true peak season two elite seasons, one injury shortened one that could have been great, and outside of that a bunch of very good but not great seasons. This one should add to his peak totals. But he may accumulate enough good seasons to add up. Judge is opposite of Harper, just an incredible peak at this point, it makes no difference how late he started his 7 year peak will better than most HOF players.

That's amazing and just hilariously transparent.

I think I've got a hard time believing that Kasevich who has shown less than 0.100 ISO every single year in the minors succeeding. He doesn't seem to have shown enough speed that he's going to extend singles into doubles either, his walk rate was decent but is lower this year. I don't know if a Nick Madrigal profile is going to make it. Jimenez I can actually see potentially succeeding. Roden has some really strong splits, so he's a platoon guy I think.

The MLB age curve after 32 or so is harsh enough that you really don't know when the bottom is suddenly going to completely drop out for a guys ability to swing the bat. I think maybe a bit less so for pitcher? But you lose your eye at the plate, or your swing speed etc. and suddenly its over. A decent number of guys still managing to hit at those ages, but for sure you don't know when it will crash. Goldschmidt isn't at Abreu levels but he's dropped off entirely now after a huge decline last year. Springer's had the two years of huge declines. Rizzo as well.

Man I wish being mediocre for us involved leading the wild card race. Be a lot more fun to be critical of the team not being good enough for the division, then not being good enough to even make the playoffs. It's honestly not even that massive of a difference games back wise, but the vibes would be very different.

It's less their performance (although Gausman has been ok and better recently), and more the knock on effects for the roster when you have to replace them.

I've gotta say though if you've lost both your ace pitcher and your best position player to injuries and are still for the moment holding onto the top wild card spot you're doing fairly well. Bo obviously sucks this year but if we had lost him and needed someone else at SS and lost Gausman right at the start of the year, we would be well past stick a fork in us at this point. We'd have kept Biggio, been playing KK even more, and been giving a decent number of starts to Mitch White or Paulo Espino or something.

Springer and KK are both 34, Turner is 39. There are only 28 guys in the league with are 34 or over with 100 PAs this year, we've got three of them (and we are the only team with three of them). Out of those 28, KK, is 23rd worst, Springer is 19th and Turner is 15th. You can say they've been disappointing, and maybe you hope one of them would have done a bit better. But they're old and sometimes old players will start sucking really badly suddenly. You shouldn't be relying on them, and you definitely shouldn't be relying on three of them.

He probably really only has a couple of years of positive value left, but it looks like that value and profile was appealing enough for the Dodgers.

Well I was looking at their trajectory and first two years of the majors so lets see. In AA Biggio had a 145 wRC+ at the age of 23 and 152 in 43 games the next year at AAA before being called up, which is higher than Schneider put up at any point in A, AA or AAA. He had a 149 wRC+ in Rookie ball. In his two first and best seasons, Biggio hit better against RHs in his rookie season and then hit better against lefties in his second year but was still decent enough against righties (above average overall). In their first two seasons, weirdly enough Schneider has the worst split overall, with his numbers against lefties this year, which I would imagine doesn't last. Biggio also spent a decent chunk of time in AAA in 2021 after struggling with the bat. So we was sent to AAA to work on things when that needed to happen. This is obviously a different point in time, with more seasons of service time accumulated so why would we be comparing that at all. Biggio obviously is capable of having his current utility role in the Majors, he was correct to decline it and will be going to the Dodgers in the same role. It is impressive to be factually wrong about everything you write in a post. I hope Schneider succeeds, I think he's a great dude, same way I though Biggio is as well. I wish Biggio had continued his solid start for us, and I hope Schneider avoids falling off the cliff. I'm just pointing out that his bat works on the margins just like Biggio's did, and we see that when he has rough stretches, like he is currently having. He's really good at barreling the ball and waiting for his pitch, but there may be a point where pitchers adapt to him in a way that he struggles to adjust to.

Which definitely does have value. He's been around 1 WAR over 100ish games a season the last couple of years. Solid for a utility player. Having a Biggio is how you don't wind up needing play Ryan Goins or Panik etc. Guys who put up -0.8 WAR in 50 games. You have to kind of view it as a potential 1.5-2 WAR difference when you have a genuinely solid utilityman from the trash you may otherwise wind up with at the end of your bench. If you look at the Jays the last two years with Biggio in that role, very few ABs were wasted on complete trash. Basically Bradley Zimmer who was an OF in 2022 and the 13 game disaster of Paul DeJong last year. Its an important role, especially if you're a team on the fringes of the playoff race, you can't afford to give wins away by playing complete trash. This year as well if you look at the worst value players, it's just Bargers 5 games. Bichette and Turner are otherwise the worst, there's no bench guys draining ABs.

It makes absolutely no sense that the position Vlad pays is somehow going to play no role in what he's signed for. There's a reason there are 7 SS's and 5 3B, making 200 million or over and 0 1B making that. It's a factor and he's not going to escape it because no one currently active in the league has. If you can establish the way in which Vlad is unique relative to other 1B allowing him to get a higher contract that would be one thing. The only two historical 1B to get contracts of that size were Pujols and Votto. Pujols was literally one of the best hitters of all time.

Probably was posted earlier but full TJ for Manoah. https://www.sportsnet.ca/mlb/article/inside-alek-manoahs-emotional-week-from-injury-to-surgery-date/ Does that mean he was right, and he had been dealing with injury issues that turned into this over the past year? I feel like there were several mentions of elbow concerns that the Jays felt weren't there late last year? Sucks though, he did work his ass off this year to be in shape, to try to get back to being a solid pitcher. Just hope he's got another comeback in him.

It's too bad cause of how good he genuinely was those first couple of years. Also it's interesting to see the number of people celebrating here, he was perfectly productive in the role he wound up having. And I think I would caution that we have a 2B/OF currently who everyone loves, with similar high strikeout numbers, a weakness for certain exploitable pitches, middling defensive numbers, a lack of prospect pedigree, who hits with margins that could lead to a precipitous drop in numbers right now. So we might be doing this again soon.

I guess. But except for one of the past five seasons Vogelbach has been worth a grand total of 0 WAR. Four of his last five seasons cancel out to nothing and the other one he was ok. The last two seasons combined they've even had the same value as batters. Vogelbachs expected numbers are a lot better though, although I wouldn't be surprised if he's a consistent underperformer there.

Goodbye to the second most productive position player ever drafted by Atkins.

It's not a very important move, and it's very marginal but I'm wondering why everyone is pleased it's Biggio and not Vogelbach when Biggio has at least consistently had positive value as a utility player and Vogelbach is pretty bad and provides nothing when he doesn't hit?

Vlad's wRC+ is up to 139. Managing to do that with a .131 ISO. Excellent walk to strikeout rate. Just so weird that he's having like a early Freddie Freeman, prime Mark Grace season at the plate.

His wRC+ is 83 this year, and I think he's likely to get to 90 by seasons end cause of his batted ball profile. Maybe he won't manage it because of his start. I can't find the article (think it was a fangraphs one from years ago) but I think on average there's something like a 9% drop in hitting performance (by wRC+) during this age range from 30-35 or so. He was at 104 last year, and he suffered a very major decline last year, but if you're just giving him a normal age related decline this year we are talking about like a wRC+ of 94. The other side of that is that he was a really good bat before last year so the projection systems give him a lot of leeway in assuming last year is an anomaly which is fair I suppose. But it wasn't like he massively underperformed his peripherals. His statcast went from solid reds to plenty of middling or below average data points. His exit velocity tanked, he wasn't barrelling it etc. I guess I don't think sub 100 wRC+ was unlikely. He's underperformed that and maybe I'm splitting hairs but that feels like a 35th percentile outcome and I think he's likely to end at like 90wRC+ which is like a 40th percentile outcome. I feel like Kirk and Bo are 15th percentile outcomes.

Absolutely. That never made sense, it would waste Varsho's potential value, and it saddled us with two outfielders who aren't hitting with Springer as well. And I mentioned it above, but Springer already had one major decline and it the front office really should have considered the possibility that he was going to decline again given that he was going to be 34 this year and how harsh the age curve can be. Springer probably isn't quite as bad as his numbers currently, but the old Springer is not coming back either.

It's definitely not his fault, but it isn't unreasonable for the front office to have the foresight to realize that Springer has been declining for three seasons in a row. His drop is actually relatively smaller than it was last year when he also dropped off, and he just turned 34 which is an age where very few hitters do much at all. Kirk didn't hit last year either though his dropoff is worse and I don't think you could have predicted that, but at least Danny is around to pick up the pieces. Vlad has been fine power aside. Bo is the biggest impact disappointment without a doubt. I think overall the front office was a bit unlucky with performances, but I think they should have seen the Springer dropoff coming. The back half of this contract was always going to be an issue, and the decline had already started last year. They needed an outfielder who could hit, and went back to KK instead.