Meg Rowley: Good morning and welcome to the chat!

BFreeman123: How does the Boston rotation shake out when Pomeranz back? Thanks

Meg Rowley: Without any special knowledge, I wouldn’t be surprised if the less effective of him or Steven Wright ended up throwing some relief innings.

Rockie Dangerfield: Lemme tell you a joke.
“The Rockies’ bullpen.”
Get it?

Meg Rowley: We can tell the truth about things, be funny, and resist the temptation to be mean for no reason. It just requires us to embrace a higher degree of difficulty in our humor.

Outta my way, Gyorkass: Why do I feel like the Brewers are headed for a complete dogshit 1-15 type stretch where they completely blow their playoff chances? That offense is either scoring in double digits or 0/1.

Dan Szymborski: And awaaaay we go!

John: Are the Yankees the worst team at breaking ball recognition?

Dan Szymborski: Don’t have the hit/miss numbers in front o fme (I’m outside), but last I checked, the Yankees were actually in the top part of the league in curves overall

Bo: What would it take from the Braves to get Machado? Worth it for a run this year, or should they wait?

Dan Szymborski: The O’s would probably insist on one of the young pitchers and probably Riley.

Dan Szymborski: It’s tricky, I think this is a situation where it pays the Braves to postpone as long as possible any kind of decision,.

Travis Sawchik: Howdy

Travis Sawchik: I hope all the fathers in the audience enjoyed their day

Travis Sawchik: Let’s get started, shall we?

Paul: If you were in Alex Anthopoulous’ position, how would you handle the deadline?

Travis Sawchik: I wouldn’t trade away too much of tomorrow, too much future surplus value … but I’d try and make some marginal improvements

Bernie: I saw your article on the attendance numbers, specifically AL, trending down. Any word on the NL attendance numbers?

Jeff Sullivan: Hello friends

Jeff Sullivan: Welcome to Friday baseball chat

James: The Astros seem to have their offensive mojo back. How scared should the league be?

Jeff Sullivan: I was just looking at something yesterday

Jeff Sullivan: I calculated every team’s total negative WAR

Jeff Sullivan: The Astros are at -0.1 — just Jake Marisnick

Eric A Longenhagen: Hey, everyone. Good morning from Tempe.

Eric A Longenhagen: Here’s our recently updated top overall prospects list: https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-updated-top-131-prospect-rankings/

Eric A Longenhagen: Not much else to link to as everything had been building up to the draft and that update, so now we have more irons in the fire than we do stuff to plug.

Eric A Longenhagen: I’m gonna chat longer than usual this week because I bailed on last week’s chat, so without further adieu..

Joe: Thoughts on the Brewers draft haul?

Eric A Longenhagen: I liked it. I’m not the biggest Joe Gray fan because I saw him swing and miss against good pitching a lot throughout his amateur career, but he’s been a known guy for a long time and you could argue we nitpitcked him to death. At worst he has a traditional power/projection right field profile, which is a fine thing to draft in the second round, and Gray has a better chance to stay in CF than most prospects like that because his feel out there is good and might enable him to stay there even if he slows down.

Jay Jaffe: Hello and welcome to the almost-on-vacation edition of my Thursday chat. I’m writing this from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where I’ll be spending the next week before heading to Denver for our FanGraphs staff trip and reader meetup. Let’s see if the wifi can hold out for another 90 minutes

Ray Liotta as Shoeless Joe: If the Orioles and Mets combined into a single team, would that team be good enough to get to the playoffs in the NL East? AL East?

Jay Jaffe: Without thinking too hard about it, I’ll go ahead and say no. Other than Machado, Britton and maybe Chase Sisco, what from the Orioles would even be usesful to the Mets right now?

Steve: Sounds like expansion is inevitable. If MLB does go to 32, would you prefer 4 8-team divisions or 8 4-team divisions? Do you want an expanded playoff format?

Jay Jaffe: I think I prefer 4 x 8 teams to 8 x 4 but either way, there would probably be 8 teams in each league making the playoffs, which I don’t love. But it gets so messy if you don’t do it as a function of 4.

CamdenWarehouse: How much input do teams have on how their games are broadcast? I find it interesting that the Orioles appear to have one of the least advanced approaches and also have broadcasts that favor stats like pitcher Wins, Quality Starts and BA w/ RISP while mostly ignoring sabermetrics.

Kiley McDaniel: Hello from a McDonald’s in Tampa where I’m setting up shop for a bit before I hit a few games today, then hit PG National starting tomorrow, which is the first stop on HS showcase season for the 2019 Draft

Anonymous : When evaluating college players, what specific stats, if any, do you look at when trying to figure out if the player will be a productive player at a higher level?

Kiley McDaniel: BB/K ratio and ISO for hitters are both big. BB/K for pitchers too also tells a lot of what you need to know. If you’re bad at controlling the strike zone at the amateur level, it’s an uphill climb

Kiley McDaniel: Also, this chat will run a little shorter than usual, but I usually go over the alotted hour so I feel like we’re all okay with this every now and then

Teddy: Hey Kiley, can you expand on the Brett Cumberland just to the top 100? Is it about the defense taking a step forward? The offense doesn’t look very impressive this year on paper.

Kiley McDaniel: It’s a 120 wRC+ in basically a full year in Hi-A at age 21/22 with plus raw power, a late-count, lofted power approach and the frame/defense have improved this year. He was also in the top of the 45 tier, so he was around 150-200 already and like 20 guys graduated, so he would’ve been right around 130-150 if he hadn’t improved at all.

Meg Rowley: Good morning, and welcome to the chat!

Meg Rowley: There are a lot of Mariners questions in the queue, but I will do my best to pepper in others!

Luke Basewalker: Who’s the next big prospect to get the call now that Adames is up?

Meg Rowley: Apart from A Pitcher Needed for injury, I’d think probably Senzel if he’s healthy

Brendon: How has Edwin Diaz been this season?

Meg Rowley: Brendon, he’s been very good!

Dan Szymborski: And awaaaay we go!

Dan Szymborski: Sorry, I had been on the phone and then I had to go to the bathroom.

Dan Szymborski: And I don’t want to chat from the bathroom, lest someone figure it out somehow and then giving everyone an unpleasant vision.

Preller: What is the prospect i should be targeting when trading Tyson ross

Dan Szymborski: A good one?  I think it depends on the team really.  The fact that he’s a free agent is going to keep the price down, I think I’d gear more towards a number of interesting lottery tickets than trying to get one specific guy.

Dan Szymborski: Let’s not forget, it was obvious to trade him in 2015 and htey didn’t.

Travis Sawchik: Happy Monday

Travis Sawchik: Let’s mourn together Ohtani’s right UCL

Travis Sawchik: Baseball cannot have nice things. We are reminded of this often. On that somber note, let’s get started…

GY: Do you think the indians could acquire Hand & Yates without including Mejia/McKenzie/Chang or Bieber?

Travis Sawchik: Indians-Padres seem like an obvious match

Travis Sawchik: Indians would have to give up a premium prospect