Earlier today, the author published a post regarding rather young Mets shortstop Wilmer Flores and how — somewhat surprisingly, given basically every scouting report about him — Flores had played a mostly average shortstop over 400-plus innings.
Said post included select footage — both of Flores misplaying relatively harmless ground balls and also Flores recording outs on batted balls that are converted less than 50% of the time. What it lacked, however, was any footage of Flores making actual, normal shortstop plays. The purpose of this current post is to address that pressing issue.
Here, for example, is Flores cleanly fielding and throwing to first a ground ball by Miami third baseman Casey McGehee in the fourth inning of the Mets game last night:
And here’s Flores doing basically the exact same thing two innings later:
You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.
Finally, here’s Flores backhanding a Donovan Solano grounder in the ninth and, once again, making an entirely acceptable throw to first:
And because it exists, here’s a final GIF of that last play, except from a different angle:
Weird. The second-to-last and last gif are the same, yet the latter looks like the throw was in the dirt while the former looks like it was on the fly.
Shame to see what’s happened here with the site. No more Notgraphs, more ads than Yahoo, not the same level of content relative to other sites…
The iconoclast spirit is gone. What a shame.
And, pray tell, what sites are these?
I clicked on this post hoping it would be Carson with something Notgraphical, and it is.
Inquisitors question elides the point, which is that the site is asking more from us, i.e., banner blindness or, at least, astigmatism, while providing less enjoyable content. Notgraphs is to be removed without a clearly articulated reason and new sections open – one with a tweety, simplified theme and, the other, some sort of techy hodgepodge that may generate ad revenue similar to those sponsored Rotographs posts from Fanduel, etc.
This is, to some mild degree, shameful.
Why are you looking at ads? There are several free adblockers that are both good and free. If you’re worried about the site not making money, you can buy the t-shirt, mobile app, and/or premium subscription.
I use NoScript on my laptop so do not, but the premise that one must be technical to withhold consent does not justify the act. But this was not central to Flat Time’s comment, if I understood it correctly. Also, concern was_not expressed for Notgraphs finances, rather the statement was made about how revenue generating practices decrease perceived quality.
I’ve been feeling this more and more recently. I remember a few years ago the articles being more or less split between topical analysis and broader-ranging investigations, stuff that didn’t always yield results or readability but was frequently interesting and sometimes shone through with a kind of Herzogian ecstatic truth. It seems like it’s pretty much all the former these days, and for whatever reason the HBT hasn’t been a very good replacement for the latter (maybe because of an a priori spirit of Serious Writing instead of looser experimentation?)
but I also understand that this is the natural progression of things, and while sad to me subjectively, not worthy of blame or anything.
and Carson still frequently expresses the ecstatic truth, so that’s good.
Well, he’s not a disaster.
This was definitely needed.. The earlier article, only showing Wilmer’s bad plays made him look god awful.
He looks better here. He actually generally has soft hands and a decent arm. He’d be a good fit for a team that could play him all over. He’d be good in a platoon with Didi G, getting at bats against lefties at ss, then filling in at 3rd, 2nd and first, maybe a little left field. Get him 450 plate appearances. Super utility.
We could send him and an arm for Owings.
Or, since he’s 23 and smacking the hell out of the ball, you can just LEAVE HIM ALONE AT SHORTSTOP.
He may not hit like Hanley forever, but a 274/311/548 line over the last month will play.
Yes, his offense is clearly a true talent level equal to the last month. We should ignore all other data, as sample size is something that shouldn’t be considered.
A troll in the FanGraphs comments section? What is the world coming to.
I never said that was his true talent level. He needs to play.
so, is he the SS of 2015? Were does Tejada go?
1. Yes he is.
2. I don’t care.
Are you getting paid by the Mets to speak up Wilmer Flores? Perhaps you are getting paid by Wilmer himself.
I just love Wilmer. I think he’s going to be good. You can read about it in these two places:
1. http://www.amazinavenue.com/2014/7/25/5937319/new-york-mets-ruben-tejada-wilmer-flores-shortstop
2. http://thereadzone.com/2014/07/30/the-ruben-tejada-experiment-is-over-its-time-to-freewilmer-part-iii/
It would’ve been better if this was all one article, instead of two. Many people will have just read the first one, and not see this later one with GIFs of his better plays at SS. Any player can look terrible or great if we only look at a handful of plays that illustrate that point. If you give me people both the good and bad, well then you can at least can a more honest tally of opinion.
*If you give people both the good and bad, well then you can at least have a more honest tally of opinion.*