Dan Szymborski: And so starts the show!

Daryl: Who do you have the Reds taking with their first pick?

Dan Szymborski: Eric’s the mock draft guy!

Dan Szymborski: It’s hard to say depending on who goes there, but I expect the team to take a pitcher

Dan Szymborski: Or at least prioritize a pitcher

Dan Szymborski: Maybe if someone like Bailey drops to them?

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and welcome to the second edition of my chat in this Tuesday time slot, which thankfully is working better than Monday did in these pandemic-ridden times.

Jay Jaffe: Before I dive in, a bit of housekeeping: I’ve been very focussed on the Korea Baseball Organization lately, and at the end of today’s piece on Doosan Bears hitting machine Jose Miguel Fernandez (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/doosan-bears-fernandez-is-tearing-up-the-k…) I noted that I’ll be a guest on tomorrow’s ESPB KBO broadcast. I’ll be joining a Bears-SK Wyverns game, talking with hots Jon Sciambi and Eduardo Perez at around 7:30 AM ET. It’s my first time being part of a game broadcast, even under theses strange conditions, and it should be a lot of fun. I’ll have an Instagraphs post with further details including re-airing times.

Magic Kingdome: What is your best interaction with a Hall of Fame candidate?

Jay Jaffe: Hmmmm. I haven’t had a ton of them that particularly stand out. The first, though, was when I got Willie Mays’ autograph, which might have been 1981 or ’82. He was appearing at some grocery store expo at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, one of several players (Don Sutton was also on the list) but the one that I somehow convinced my mom to take me to. I had a 1973 Topps card of Mays as a Met, a hand-me-down from my cousin Allan. We stood in line, and he autographed the card without even making eye contact; he was bored as hell and didn’t care who knew it.

Jay Jaffe: More fun was my Vin Scully interaction, from 1989 at Vero Beach, which I wrote about as part of a 2016 Sports Illustrated piece (https://www.si.com/mlb/2016/09/30/vin-scully-tribute-dodgers-jay-jaffe). When I was a college freshman, my parents took my brother and me to Dodgertown during my spring break, and I had a chance encounter with the great announcer himself. From the piece

Jay Jaffe: En route to the concession stand before one ballgame, I crossed paths with Scully himself, decked out in a cream-colored golf sweater. I asked for an autograph, then realized I had just a scrap of paper and no pen. Seeing how flustered I was, he agreed to wait while I fetched one from my mother, who was on her way to the restroom. Somehow, I not only got the pen, but Vin waited in place, and signed what might have been a golf scorecard or a ticket stub. I’ve long since lost that piece of paper—inevitable while moving half a dozen times in four years—and I’ve never gotten to meet Scully again despite being now being armed with a credential. But I’ve never forgotten the man’s small gesture of patience and humanity toward a star-struck 19-year-old.

Eric A Longenhagen: Howdy, letting the coffee drip a few moments more and I’ll be right with you…

Eric A Longenhagen: Okay

Eric A Longenhagen: thanks for stopping by, let’s do the thing

Mike: Is draft intel starting to flow or is it still pretty sparse given all the question marks leading up to the draft?

Eric A Longenhagen: It’s starting and you’ll get a mock when we’re back from Memorial Day, though it’s a lot of potential strategy stuff now and less about players tied to teams. It’s clear teams just don’t have some guys on their board competitively because they didn’t see them this spring, which I don’t like.

Pete: If Carlos Colmenarez and Cristian Hernandez we’re available for the draft where would they likely go? Would this demographic be considered as risky as HS Pitching?

Dan Szymborski: And the chat has begun, sayeth the clock.

Dan Szymborski: And as powerful as I like to imagine I am — though I am not — I cannot stop time.

Dan Szymborski: And it’s really hard to even break a watch!

Carl: Do you happen to know what Eric means when he projects a player as a “second division regular”? I keep missing his chats to ask. Who is a current MLB player that would constitute a “second division regular”?

Dan Szymborski: I don’t have the context, but before divisions, contenders and non-contenders were widely called first division and second division in the vernacular

Dan Szymborski: so a second division regular, if Eric is using it as I would expect him to, is a starter on a bad team who wouldn’t really push a contender towards the playoffs.

Meg Rowley: Hi all, and welcome to the chat.

Meg Rowley: Hope that everyone is doing as well as can be expected.

Meg Rowley: Let us chat!

Cat Latos:

How do you think one might counter the general sentiment that baseballers are greedy and make too much? It's annoying to hear my coworkers side with ownership.

Meg Rowley: I actually think there is a really good conversation to be had as a society about how we value and compensate different kinds of work, and whether that aligns with the value it brings to society. But if we have that convo, there’s no way that say, how we value Manny Machado’s work takes a hit but Ron Fowler’s fortunate remains intact. And since that isn’t what we’re really doing when we have these conversations, the way I’ve been talking about it with family is that these guys are assuming risk for themselves and their families, aren’t asking for hazard pay, and would simply like their bosses to do what they agreed to. There are a lot more zeroes at the end of the check, but the dynamic isn’t that different from the companies that are scaling back “hero pay.”

Josh: Do you have any advice on getting into the baseball analysis industry?

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to the first edition of my Tuesday FanGraphs chat, not to be confused with the Monday chats that weren’t working, schedule-wise, or the Thursday chats that prevailed before my daughter started preschool. Anyway, I’m here, wiping the sweat from my face after quickly slurping down a spicy bowl of Shin Ramyun, and it’s no coincidence that I just turned on the ESPN KBO replay of the NC Dinos and Doosan Bears. Let’s talk some baseball!

David: What are the chances we get mlb baseball in 2020?

Jay Jaffe: I think it’s more likely than not – maybe 2-to-1 in favor — but it’s not going to be ideal, and it will be controversial with regards to the risk factors, the level of testing relative to the population at large, and the protocols with regards to a player testing positive. Buckle up.

C M Keller: I was looking at JAWS for relievers and was surprised to see that Rollie Fingers – a second-ballot Hall of Famer and universally acknowledged top closer of his era – was so low in the rankings. Was he overrated, or is current WAR rating of modern one-inning closers not well-suited for evaluating relievers of, say, 1990 and earlier?

Jay Jaffe: WAR doesn’t work tremendously well for relievers in the first place, and Fingers wasn’t elite at run prevention (120 ERA+, compared to 126 for Gossage, 132 for Smith, 136 for Sutter, 141 for Hoffman, 147 for Wilhelm, and 205 for Rivera). He had a distinctive mustache and played a prominent role on some playoff and championship teams (oh, what might have been had he been healthy enough for the 1982 World Series), so he did have the Fame going for him, but he just wasn’t as dominant as some of his HOF peers.

Sonny: Really appreciate you making this time to chat. Working from home with a toddler these days is no joke. It reminds me of…wait, hold on…Get down from there! How did you get on top of the Fridge!?!…sorry I’m gonna have to call you back.

Eric A Longenhagen: Good day to you, chat.

Eric A Longenhagen: Hope everyone’s as well as can be, let’s dive right in because the first question requires a sizeable answer.

Other Eric: please explain these draft models we hear about

Eric A Longenhagen: So yeah, I can’t recall ever explicitly talking about this, so while I assume a lot of our readers know, I’m gonna give a crude overview right now…

Eric A Longenhagen: If you were to take a ton of data inputs from years and years of draft prospects (this can be anything, like their stats, TrackMan data, size, run times, tool grades, anything) and run a regression to determine which of those inputs correlated with their big league success (or failure) and *how much* they drive it, you’re building a crude model. You can then put this year’s class’ inputs into the model to help line up your board.

Eric A Longenhagen: You can do this across all sports. https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2020/sackseer-2020