gehringer_2

I think it could be fine. It gets rid of the brutal wall on Atwater that has almost no set back from the sidewalk. It may be less symmetrical in aerial shots but could be a lot nicer at ground level - of course assuming they do a better job than Portman did in the 1st place.

what does his age have to do with it? The point is that Briceno demonstrates that the AFL is an easier league than AA - much easier. I'm not knocking Briceno - just using him as a yardstick

She was also into policy by Astrology. Which is sort of a good match for the level of expertise that the Trump Admin applies to policy.

Not at all. The take away was to remember that just because a player tears up the AFL is no particular indicator of whether they are close to an MLB call-up the following season -- or not. As you posted, Briceno followed a great AFL with a strong performance at......AA.

Jose Briceno. Just for a little perspective.

'Clips' and 'Magazines' redux.

the rise and fall of the shift would seem to be reason to re-evaluate everything regarding fielding. Ironically, even with the modified shift, good fielding corner IF's may have had their value rise since they are often left with a lot more ground to cover than back in the day.

I really hate that kind of crap. You almost wish as soon as he got on the ice, a wing had just taken his skates out from under him and sent him flying. AFAIAC, that's all guys like that should get in the NHL

I guess this was Pete just finding out about it.

yup. That comparison sounds easier to describe than it might actually be to do. 🤔

LOL - that reminds me that Carlos Guillen had been a shortstop but was a disaster at 1b - couldn't manage the footwork at all. Of course he was playing 1b mostly after he was already shot as a fielder anywhere. But that raises a more serious question, did Tango normalize for age comparing guys who changed positions? Or only compare data in single seasons? He may have the same name, but a SS that goes to 1st at age 35 is not the same fielder that played SS at 24. And nobody goes from 1st to SS so there's going to be a lack of reciprocity in a data set like that.

I don't there are many players who don't have at least some reluctance to leave their first team, esp when it's the team that drafted them and brought them all the way to the majors. The question is always how 'some reluctance' does or doesn't translate into actually being willing to take any less than the highest bidder's offer!

Sense, yes. But does that work in terms of getting to the right totals? I've always assumed -and I'm sure you will correct me if not () that the whole system is normalized so that a teams total WAR connects to their win differential. If you only make fieldling adjustment positive, would the system then need to be normalized somewhere else to come out right?

IDK, I'm not that good an observer, He does still seem to spend a fair amount of time sort of in between deciding what he's supposed to defend, but OTOH, I have seen him do nice job bodying up a guy at least a couple times recently which I thought was a good sign. Maybe he's taking some lessons from Stew.

like many of the 2nd Tuesday's in November.

but when only 45% of the people vote, 33% might still et you pretty close to a majority of an election.

I don't know his personal story, maybe he'd just spent too much time with the grandchildren and was in 4 yr old overload? 🙃

to be fair, the use of 'my friend' in a construction like that is an old English (and Spanish for that matter) trope that doesn't necessarily imply any actual relationship - cf the tag line of the "World's most interesting Man" (Dos Equis) "Stay thirsty. my friend." - a statement to a general audience. OTOH, the fawining "steadfast", "you deserve" is another matter. 🙄

I've certainly never heard Boras be that incoherent.

Only 6 assists. Slacker....

Stat of the day: 8 of the last 15 AL CY's have been won by either current or former Tiger pitchers.

I think what seems weak to me, is that it is easy enough to define an average, or alternately a replacement level (the difference is just a matter of picking a baseline) hitter because fundamentally every player is the is in the same situation when he steps in the batter's and every PA by every player has the same potential to influence the game in the same ways. But this isn't true on the defensive side, so I guess I might argue that there really isn't such thing a replacement level defensive player *in general* as there is for hitters, there is only replacement level defense at a given position. When your 1st baseman goes out on the field, he does not have the potential to influence the game the same way SS does no matter what he does. So there is fundamental difference to conceptualizing a replacement hitter vs a replacement defender. That's what produces the strangeness for me. And maybe the other aspect is as you note, the positional adjustment are correct (assumedly -) for looking a players total contribution value. But adding WAR totals is also a way to look at teams, and again, I think there is an oddness there which comes back to my point that you can't play nine SSs in the field. The win contribution to the team makes more sense to me in terms of the total differential value from replacement taken position by position. Now maybe that all comes out in wash as a matter of non-linearly independent sets/redundant differentials, but if so the way it works still seems intuitively awkward for defense.

I think a lot of guys who wash out early in a career probably do it because of unhealed/unfixable physical deficits that don't get talked about a lot because it's just accepted that's the way it is. It's not like they forget how to do the things that got them to the big leagues, but wear and tear (or worse) happen to where they just can't get back to where they were.

guess the docs didn't manage to fix him

well, it's not like Harris has made a secret of the things he says he look for in a player, so it's not that much of jump to say a certain guy fits the profile he professes to prefer more than another guy. But issue is that all that idealized preference stuff has a tendency to get pushed to the side when faced with what you actually need vs who you can actually get. Or it's 50/50 at best. Gleyber is the kind of hitter Harris says he likes, though he did not have any rep as a good fielder (another supposed Harris priority) when he signed him.