| 11:59 |
: Live from Szymborskiville, SZ, it’s the Dan Szymborski News Hour! Sitting in for Dan Szymborski is Dan Szymborski, featuring Dan Szymborski and on sports, Dan Szymborski. Also maybe a cat.
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| 11:59 |
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| 12:00 |
: But first off, we start off with an unrelated brawl between presidents.
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| 12:01 |
6’4″ 210 vs. 5’10” 172, how is that even a contest |
Some news-that-isn’t-really-news came out yesterday: Troy Tulowitzki will not demand a trade from the Rockies. After meeting with his agent, he decided against trying to force their hand, and will continue to play with the Rockies until they decide to trade him on their own timeline. But that is why this news isn’t really news, because Tulowitzki is headed out of Colorado at some point in the not too distant future whether he asked for a trade or not. The Rockies aren’t contenders, and it’s beyond time for them to admit this and divest themselves of expensive aging players who would offer more present value to a team that can win this year.
By not demanding a trade, Tulo takes the pressure off the Rockies to make a deal at a time when buyers aren’t really looking to buy, and allows them to let the market develop a little more naturally. With teams spending a significant portion of their time on the draft over the next three weeks, the Rockies will likely get more attentive bidders if they wait a month or so to aggressively market Tulowitzki as a trade chip. And, from their perspective, waiting another month gives Tulo a chance to stop swinging at everything and remind everyone that he is still an elite hitter; it’s probably best to trade him when he’s not running a .297 OBP.
Despite his mediocre start to the year, it’s probably fair to assume that he is still an elite player; our depth chart Projections have him producing another +3.4 WAR over 408 plate appearances through the remainder of the season, so even though we’re expecting him to miss some time — he is still Troy Tulowitzki, after all — he still forecasts to be one of the two dozen or so most valuable position players in the game. The Rockies will absorb some of that value by keeping him through the draft, but if we assume they’ll start really trying to trade him in a month, he should still have roughly a 300 PA/+2.5 WAR projection left when interested buyers start seriously trying to acquire him.
So that brings up the obvious question; at that point, what is Tulowitzki worth in trade?
| 11:42 |
: It’s Wednesday, and somewhere the Dodgers just scored 15 more runs, so let’s chat before they run up the score anymore than they already have.
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| 11:43 |
: The queue is open, and we’ll start in 15 minutes.
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| 12:02 |
: Let’s do this.
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| 12:02 |
it seems crazy but I feel like Harper’s .308/.442/.675 is actually a realistic full season ceiling. disavow me of this |
| 12:03 |
: A .360 ISO isn’t really something that he can keep up, so ratchet down the power some, and the average will fall as some of those HRs get caught at the wall. But .280/.420/.580 or something? Sure.
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| 12:04 |
what do you make of a pitcher whose current xFIP, FIP, and ERA are wildly variant? |
Billy Hamilton is the fastest player in baseball. He’s done some remarkable things on the field with his legs, including scoring on a pop-up that barely left the infield. He currently leads the majors in stolen bases with 17 thefts, and only 12 teams have stolen more bases this year than Hamilton has himself. His speed is a weapon, and when he gets on base, good things happen for the Cincinnati Reds.
But he isn’t getting on base very often. He’s currently hitting just .202 with a .259 on base percentage. That Hamilton has stolen 17 bases while only reaching via a hit or walk 35 times is a testament to just how fast he is, but while the Reds will take the stolen bases, what they really need is for Hamilton to simply reach first base more often. And there’s one very clear way for that to happen: he needs to get better at bunting.
From a quantity perspective, no one tries more often than Hamilton, as he put down his 10th bunt of the season in the first inning of last night’s contest with the Braves. However, it took him until that 10th attempt to get his first bunt hit of the year, and a less generous official scorer might have ruled it an E-5 after Alberto Callaspo mishandled his attempt to scoop it off the grass. Before last night, Hamilton both led the league in bunt attempts while also last in the league in bunt hits, which is not a combination you’d expect from the fastest guy in baseball.
On the one hand, you’d think that maybe Hamilton is just having trouble bunting his way on board because defenses expect him to try and are aggressively positioning their defense to defend against it, but the evidence suggests that this is just good old-fashioned lousy execution. For example, here are three of his previous attempts earlier this season.
Things are not going particular well in Colorado, and I’m not just talking about the fact that it snowed in May. The state’s baseball team has lost nine straight games, and new GM Jeff Bridich isn’t particularly pleased with the results he’s seen as of late.
“We have a good collection of players,” said Bridich, the first-year GM whose team is 11-17 and last in the National League West. “And at this point, meaning the last two weeks of the season, they’ve added up to a bad team. I don’t think there’s any other way you can look at it. That’s not saying anything shocking. The players know that.
“There are bad stretches that befall every team in a season, or most every team in a season. This is where we see what type of resolve our players have — if they take a look around that clubhouse and deal with reality as adults and say, ‘We’re going to make some changes and do things necessary to start winning games.
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“I continue to believe in our guys, but when you have to make changes like we did with Tyler Matzek [who was sent down to Triple-A Albuquerque over the weekend], when it’s in the best interest of the team and the player, you go ahead and give somebody else an opportunity,” Bridich said.
Unfortunately for Bridich and the Rockies, swapping out every underperforming player is logistically impossible. They’re not going to bench Carlos Gonzalez, but he’s been their worst player this season, putting up -0.6 WAR in his first 101 plate appearances. They could start taking some playing time from Justin Morneau and give it to Wilin Rosario, but that doesn’t seem like an obvious upgrade, and Morneau was pretty good for the Rockies last year, so that would seem like an overreaction to a slow start. And if the team had better pitchers than Jorge de la Rosa or Kyle Kendrick hanging around, they wouldn’t have spent some of their free agent money to sign those guys in the first place; this is not an organization overflowing with quality arms.
So yes, the Rockies can do things like demote Tyler Matzek or swap out Daniel Descalso for a different utility infielder, but moving the deck chairs around isn’t going to stop the ship from sinking. While Bridich is right that the team does have some good players, they just don’t have enough of them, and when the team’s two highest profile players aren’t performing like superstars, the rest of the roster gets exposed. And that’s what has happened early on; Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez have been mediocre and terrible respectively, and there just isn’t enough around them to pick up the slack.
| 12:03 |
: It’s war on the east coast? It’s war out west? I don’t care, it’s the Dan Szymborski Cavalcade of Sadness!
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| 12:03 |
The event is now live. Waiting for the writer to provide content… |
| 12:03 |
: Shoot, it might be waiting for awhile if it requires actualy content.
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| 12:03 |
How long to options last? Like if Albert Pujols didnt use up his 6 or whatever amount of options each player gets, can he be sent to the minors? |
| 12:04 |
: No, because there are service time limits to demote a player without his permission aside from the option years.
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| 12:04 |
Hey Dan – what’s wrong with Kershaw so far? Cause for alarm? |
At the very bottom of the 2015 standings, you’ll find two unsurprising teams tied for the worst record in baseball: the Phillies and the Brewers. The Brewers have been a disaster, already firing their manager, and the Phillies are paying the piper for years of making moves to maximize short-term returns. But do you know which team is only a half game ahead of that pair of disasters? Well, you probably do if you clicked on this post, given that I put them in the subject, but yes, it’s the Oakland A’s, who currently stand at 12-21 after getting swept in Seattle over the weekend.
The A’s were expected to take a step back this year after trading away Josh Donaldson and a bunch of his friends, but while they spent the first half of the winter getting younger, they also went out and landed Ben Zobrist, Billy Butler, and Tyler Clippard, showing that they weren’t just punting on 2015. While they churned half the roster in an effort to set themselves up better for the future, this was supposed to be a team that could at least hang around the Wild Card race and maybe make another run at a division title if things broke right. Instead, after weeks of baseball, the A’s are 8.5 games behind the Astros, and their playoff odds have shrunk from 33% on Opening Day to 15% today.
While it’s still early enough to turn things around, there is a point at which the hole gets too big to dig out of, especially because other teams will likely start calling about impending free agents like Zobrist, Clippard, and Scott Kazmir in the next month or so. If they don’t start winning pretty soon, you can bet that Billy Beane won’t hesitate to make another flurry of trades to bring in even more young talent, so the A’s clock is ticking, and it won’t be too long before they have to decide if they’re in it for 2015 or not. Despite their miserable start to the season, I wouldn’t suggest giving up on this A’s team just quite yet.
Commissioner Manfred’s ballpark tour took him to Texas yesterday, where he got to witness one potential solution to baseball’s run scoring problem: clone Samuel Deduno. I’m guessing that probably won’t be on the table when the next CBA negotiations come around, but it would bring offense roaring back to life, probably.
My mediocre attempt at humor aside, Manfred did talk about another issue that might become a discussion point in the next CBA, however; the length of the Major League season.
Manfred said reducing the number of games in a season would have economic and competitive ramifications, but the idea of giving players more off days is receiving more attention than ever.
“One hundred and sixty-two games in 183 days, and a lot of those 21 days consumed by travel, is a pretty demanding schedule,” he said. “By reputation I work pretty hard, and I don’t think I work 162 days out of 183. It’s a tough schedule.”
| 11:26 |
: It’s Wednesday, so let’s do this.
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| 12:02 |
Is it possible speedy guys benefit more from soft contact vs. hard? |
| 12:03 |
: Yeah, one of the fun things about batted ball data is that you can actually see that production relative to how hard you hit the ball is almost like a U. There’s a big area in the middle where production is extremely low, because you hit it hard enough to go right at a defender, but if you hit it weaker than that, you might bloop one in or get an infield hit. Hitting the ball harder isn’t better at every velocity point.
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| 12:04 |
How many NL players would you pick ahead of Matt Carpenter for the next 2-3 years? |
| 12:04 |
Is Matt Carpenter literally the greatest baseball player in history? |
| 12:04 |
: Matt Carpenter, getting attention.
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If you sort the Major League leaderboards by runs scored for each team, you’ll find the Toronto Blue Jays at the top of the list. That’s probably no big surprise, given that they feature prodigious sluggers like Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion, and Josh Donaldson; the Blue Jays have some serious thump in the middle of their order.
But you might be surprised to see that the Oakland A’s are not too terribly far behind the Blue Jays, with their 140 runs scored putting them in second place among all big league clubs. The A’s had a pretty good offense last year, but that was a very different line-up, including a half-season of production from Yoenis Cespedes, plus full years from the aforementioned Donaldson, the also-traded Brandon Moss and Derek Norris, and some good hitting from free agent departee Jed Lowrie. After the A’s second half fade and Wild Card loss to Kansas City, Billy Beane spent the off-season shipping out most of his good hitters, putting together a younger roster that leaned more towards contact hitters than the homers-or-strikeout types that they featured a year ago.
But it isn’t really the new guys leading the offensive charge for the A’s so far this year. Ben Zobrist is on the DL, and wasn’t great even before he had to start sitting out a good chunk of the season. After a hot start, Billy Butler has remembered that he’s Billy Butler and come back down to earth. Ike Davis has one home run, only one fewer than Lawrie. Instead, the line-up has been led by a couple of holdovers: Stephen Vogt and Josh Reddick.
Vogt has been a monster for the A’s, and has been perhaps the best player in baseball so far; his +1.8 WAR leads all big leaguers. Eno Sarris tackled Vogt’s improvement, noting that while he won’t keep this up, there are reasons for optimism, who might be the latest in a long list of guys that just needed a chance to play before finding their first opportunity in Oakland.
But that’s not Reddick’s story at all. He came up through the Red Sox system with plenty of hype, as Baseball America had him among the team’s top five prospects in 2008, 2009, and 2010. On their 2010 Top 100 prospect list, Reddick ranked 75th overall, 10 spots ahead of some guy named Mike Trout. Reddick made it to the big leagues in Boston, and was only traded to Oakland when the Red Sox wanted to acquire All-Star closer Andrew Bailey from the A’s.
Reddick took over as the A’s everyday right fielder immediately after joining the organization, and had a breakout year in 2012, finishing 16th in the MVP voting thanks to a strong performance both on offense (32 home runs) and on defense (+17 UZR and a Gold Glove). But the injury problems that caused the Red Sox to trade Reddick sidelined him for significant parts of the last two seasons, and his power regressed even when he was healthy enough to play. He was still a solid enough player, but mostly contributed with average-ish offense and plus defense, and he appeared to be settling in as as a solid role player rather than any kind of star.
But to start 2015, Reddick has not only looked like the star of his 2012 season, but actually something even better than he’s ever shown before. With the big caveat that it’s only 86 plate appearances, Reddick is flashing the combination of skills that could allow him to develop into an elite right fielder. Those skills? Simultaneous power and contact. Most players in baseball — the ones who aren’t just backup catchers or utility infielders, anyway — can call one of those two things something of a strength. Guys either major in hitting the ball hard or hitting the ball often, but very few can do both at the same time.