AMS528

So I'm not a fan of Panik at all, but people definitely get too up in arms about a guy like him. He could have played a little less for sure, but lots of teams in baseball have one or two players you could point to who should play less. The Rays have Mike Brosseau who's played even more than Panik. You try to improve that spot, but it's not exactly unique. This is a good upgrade at the margins though.

If they haven't moved Moreno or Samad up yet, I can't imagine they'll move up Orelvis when he's hitting well but not tearing the league up.

I feel like they're letting him play 3B to maximize his potential playing time down the line, but from the prospects chats it seems like the consensus is he does not need to be and should not be moved from catcher. Seems likely that if he keeps performing we wind up with Moreno/Kirk at C. Moreno can play 120 games back there with Kirk getting most of the DH time.

I just don't think it's particularly likely to be maintained. Vlad and Bo were our two best hitting prospects in forever. Both of strikeout more than they did in the minors. It's pretty common that making contact gets harder when you get to this level.

Ray with his HR rate makes some sense cause he's been a weird outlier. Even compared to Matz though it's odd. fWAR has Harvey at 0.7 and Matz at 1. Which given each of the FIP (3.8 vs 4.69) you wouldn't think would line up.

It's at 19% this year. That's fine but not elite or very good especially given his power. Higher than his prior years but he's also playing at a higher level. Madrigal was between 2-4% during his time in the minors. Which is absurd. He's now at 8% so it's up 5%. That's pretty normal to happen, and his walk rate is down a bit as well. If you apply that to Otto he's striking out 22-24% of the time and walking like 6% of the time. With no power and a BABIP that is not .439 his numbers would not be good and would not be similar to Madrigal.

Sometimes I look at FIP and fWAR for pitchers and it's pretty intuitive why a guys numbers are the way they are. And then I'll look and see that Matt Harvey is worth similar fWAR to Robbie Ray and only a bit lower than Steven Matz and be very f***ing confused as to how that's happening.

I tried to be helpful.

You should set up a website to let people subscribe to it. More funds that way. Could have a snappy name too, like tradevaluesbaseball.com or valuestradebaseball.com or valuesbaseballtrade.com. There might be a more intuitive website title there but it's not coming to me right now.

That's a pretty reasonable looking deal if we keep winning games and look like we're in it. Our lineup would be an absurd murderers row at that point. Springer/Bichette/Vlad/Cruz/Semien/Teo/Kirk/Biggio with one of Grichuk or Gurriel is a nightmare.

I just wrote this in another thread, but it is pretty interesting how some of the best drafted pitchers during the AA era were non-heralded secondary guys that were traded away. Kendall Graveman falls into that too since he wound up being the best piece for Oakland in the Donaldson deal.

So many high draft picks busted. Or were never signed. McGuire, Harris, Smoral, Hoffman. Some of the guys who were less heralded and got traded away panned out much better. Musgrove, Desclafani, Boyd are out there having great seasons.

His age vs level was definitely excellent no doubt about that. A 127 wRC+ at age 21 in AA is pretty good. But it wasn't like he was tearing apart the league. I don't know the context, but it does seem weird Cleveland elected to call him up at that point. Bichette hit similarly in AA and no one was clamoring for him to come up immediately then. Austin Martin is putting that up right now. And he's definitely not getting called up. And his AAA numbers were definitely very different when he was still with Cleveland and in the IL and when he was in the PCL. It was always hard to gauge those PCL numbers when we had guys in Vegas. He had a .755 OPS in 79 games in AAA outside of the PCL. In that context his numbers in the majors don't seem super surprising. His numbers in 2019 weren't far from that. To be clear I'm looking at all of this with hindsight where I'm able to cherry pick at these numbers. His prospect rankings obviously indicate he was showing more potential in the minors than he's displayed so far. He'd also have better numbers if his defensive numbers didn't grade out so badly. He's not terrible offensively. Nearly league average.

I got mildly excited at Samad Taylor's numbers and then saw he's striking out 36% of the time.

I think I've been conditioned now. When the Jays says someone has a mild injury and could return in a week or two, I assume it's possible they'll have lost an entire arm once the week is up.

Pretty obvious I suppose, but this is absolutely a season where the team needs to spend some prospect capital to shore up the pitching. There are just not that many times where you can be fairly confident that your team probably has 5 of the top 50 position players in the game (Vlad, Semien, Bichette, Teo, healthy Springer). Maybe Semien isn't back next year, maybe Teo doesn't hit like this forever etc. Don't need to wipe out the prospers or anything either, a couple of reliable relievers and a starter to never have to consider Zeuch pitching again.