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smg58

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Everything posted by smg58

  1. smg58
    The .185 BABIP and 0 HR/FB rate are obviously unsustainable, but Lavender still looks like a very viable option moving forward. It's one less item on the offseason shopping list.
  2. smg58
    The Fielding Bible has Semien at exactly average, which is noteworthy since he was at -4 about a month ago when I last checked. That being said, their defensive numbers for him were already declining sharply since 2023 when the trade happened and have continued to do so. Stearns had reasonable concerns about paying for Nimmo's decline, but he addressed them by trading him for a player whose decline is already here. The more important question now is what to do with Semien. Do we simply eat the contract? Do we hope somebody is willing take on a portion of it? Or do we think he'll provide enough value as a bench player? Because second base strikes me as the easiest position for us to upgrade this offseason.
  3. smg58
    Teams (other than the Brewers) seem to have forgotten that OBP is more important than slugging. Any player can become more selective at swinging, and it will help them. That was always the basic rule. There is a tendency in baseball right now to take a one-size-fits-all approach with hitters, but that does more harm than good with a lot of them. As a Mets-related example, Jeff McNeil has actually hit over .300 since July started. His power isn't where it was in his best seasons, but it's almost like somebody finally told him, "Just do what got you here." With Kristian Campbell, I think the bigger issue is that he hurt himself. If it were as simple as him not swinging at sinkers that drop out of the strike zone, that wouldn't be Driveline's problem. Just like it's not a tech guru's problem if AJ Ewing can't stop chasing curve balls down and away. But I think the big problem -- and it's far worse with pitchers -- is that people have all these data now but don't know how to use them, Geeks are crunching out the numbers, but they're still being interpreted by dumb jocks.
  4. smg58
    A big part of the problem is that it is common knowledge what players get paid -- and oh boy, do they get paid -- but what the teams take in is not common knowledge. So if the last agreement expires, and the owners impose a work stoppage, at what point is the non-disclosure agreement for the teams' books no longer in effect? That would be a ticking time bomb that gives the players some leverage. That, and nobody likes billionaires right now. And while the Angels are a big-market team, the fact that a perennial non-contender just got purchased for $4 billion should tell people something about the value that teams have.
  5. smg58
    I'm not sure that the Dodgers have been any more dominant than the Chiefs in the 2020s. And the Jeter/Rivera-era Yankees were not nearly as dominant as the Brady-era Patriots.
  6. smg58
    I've been to a couple of Long Island Ducks games this year, and when a batter or new pitcher gets introduced I like to search for them on Fangraphs to see how far they got. Basically, the profile of a typical Independent League player is somebody in his late twenties who either got a brief visit to the show, or aged out at AA or AAA. People like Dylan Ross, basically. There was one guy who was 1 for 9 in the majors, and I can only imagine how much that one means to him. So if a reasonable opportunity presents itself to give somebody like that a game or two before I clear space for younger guys in the offseason, I'm doing it.
  7. smg58
    What I get out of this is that any of the offers on the table for Robert required the Mets to eat most of the salary and still not get a prospect the other team thought it might miss. So the Mets figured they might as well use the player they already paid for, and see if a couple of good weeks at least frees them of the remaining salary plus buyout. I was just about to say I doubt it will, but the Orioles (one game out of the last AL wildcard spot, which looks completely up for grabs) have apparently claimed him.
  8. smg58
    You can be an effective pitcher without a high K rate as long as you're not walking anybody (2.05 walks per 9 IP is very good) and you're keeping the ball in the yard (1.03 HR/9 IP is OK but not great). Thornton has had some luck -- his 82% strand rate is unsustainably high -- but a 3.88 FIP suggests that he is holding his own regardless. For a rookie who wasn't really on the radar coming into the season, he's doing super. Moving forward, I think you try to find the balance on getting more ground balls without adding to the free passes.
  9. smg58
    He wasn't, up until this season. I'm not really sure what happened, but obviously the talent is still there. Hopefully he's turned a corner.
  10. smg58
    I've never seen Misiorowski pitch, so I'm looking forward to this one.
  11. smg58
    Not that the bit about making HS players ineligible portrays the owners in any more of a sympathetic light. Is minor league baseball really a financial drain?
  12. smg58
    I read the original headline and think "MLB wants work stoppage to last until 2032."
  13. smg58
    You have to be in on Skubal. Otherwise, one of Arozarena/Suzuki and one of Arraez/Lowe would be nice. Ty France is a relatively under-the-radar play that would help out a lot as well. As for third base? The options are painfully limited, but I wouldn't assume out of hand that a Mauricio/Vientos platoon wouldn't work. I certainly wouldn't pay more for Bichette than any of the free agents I mentioned above.
  14. smg58
    What I get from 1969 and 2015 (twice!) being on this list is that getting no-hit is in no way the mark of a bad team.
  15. smg58
    For all the ink that's been spent discussing personnel decisions, it needs to be said that at no point this season have we had both Lindor and Soto fully healthy at the same time. Lindor very clearly benefited from the time off. Hopefully Soto will as well.
  16. smg58
    A fully healthy Bichette is a good player, but he's not worth remotely close to $42M a year. And the fact that he's struggled in two of the past three seasons would make a longer deal at a somewhat lower salary a bad gamble. If he opts out, spend the money elsewhere.
  17. smg58
    I would argue that the way pitchers are presently handled borders on abuse. But Skenes would have more sympathy if he simply blew his arm out entirely, which suggests that fans don't seem to care.
  18. smg58
    To be fair, I'd have a different attitude toward the situation if the Mets were fighting for a playoff spot. As it stands, I'm not worried about him killing what's already dead, and I think he and the Mets would be better served by him working through this up here.
  19. smg58
    I will go on record as saying that I really enjoy discussing the Mets with all of you here, even when we disagree, and none of you suck. Benge didn't have a whole lot of AAA experience, either, and his season has been one of adjustment and counter-adjustment as well. Hopefully he's cleared his biggest obstacles.
  20. smg58
    This ties in with the discussion we've been having about Ewing in a couple of threads. Even the most promising looking prospects arrive in the majors as works in progress. Kelenic had some exploitable weaknesses when he came up. Again, this is hardly unusual. What makes it so surprising is that somebody with a high level of raw talent who bashed his way through the minors has been so completely unable to adjust, even a little bit. PCA also struggled his first couple of years too. Part of that is because his glove got him to the big leagues before his bat was fully ready. But even last year, he was frigid for most of the second half of the season. There was no guarantee he'd be a sustainably good player, much less MVP caliber within a year. But the talent was always there.
  21. smg58
    One thing that never seems to get addressed when the CBA expires is that the public has no real idea what the books look like for the individual teams. Which teams are genuinely treading water, and which teams could spend a lot more than they are doing? I've always worked under the assumption that the Dodgers were spending sustainably, but do we really know that?
  22. smg58
    From what I'm gathering, what Ewing most needs to do is avoid chasing the breaking pitches down and away. He's hardly unique in that regard, and it's certainly not a shocking issue for somebody who wasn't expected to be here yet. His talent and his rapid advance through the system suggest that he can make the adjustments when he needs to. It's not a guarantee, of course.
  23. smg58
    This ties in well with a thread that was started yesterday. In oldpeoplespeak, pitchers have enough of a book on Ewing to adjust to his weaknesses. This is basically a variant of the "sophomore jinx." Nobody in March was expecting Ewing to contribute meaningfully this season at the top level, and it's forgivable if he's rawer than most rookies. The good news is the holes in Ewing's game look easy to fix, and for better or worse the Mets can afford to give him plenty of time.
  24. smg58
    My impression is that Walter is in a fair amount of trouble, but it's too early to speculate on what it means for the Dodgers. I don't get the sense that the team's finances are on anything less than a solid footing. Ohtani actually has the ability to opt out if Walter is no longer affiliated with the Dodgers -- which is a really odd thing to put in a contract -- but I'm not sure what would stop the Dodgers from simply negotiating a new deal that pays him more money if it comes to that.
  25. smg58
    I'm annoyed by this, because it was clear enough for more than long enough that something was getting in the way of Polanco doing, well, pretty much anything on a baseball field. The guy was in chronic pain and couldn't play through it. But at least the team is acknowledging the obvious and acting in his, and their own, best interests.
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