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Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat - 2/21/23
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AvatarJay Jaffe
3:00
I try to avoid making moral judgments about a problem that was unfortunately rather ubiquitous within the game. Particularly when there was no mechanism of enforcement, players had incentives (or a lack of disincentives) to use PEDs, and we are very far from a full accounting of who did what; there are users from that period already in the Hall, and there are players who experimented and stopped before they got caught up in the whole mess. Once we have a means of enforcement we at least have much less ambiguity: this guy got caught and got suspended.
Your mileage my vary, of course.
John Olerud’s Helmet
3:00
Mr Jay! Just curious your take on Jason Kendall’s HOF credentials. Not saying he is a HOFer, but as a Catcher over 2k hits, 360 OBP and a very good defender. Seems like he deserved more than the .5% vote total he received.
AvatarJay Jaffe
3:04
Kendall was a very good hitter for the position for awhile but finished with a 95 OPS+, and his case unfortunately looks a whole lot weaker once you incorporate pitch framing via BP's retroframing methodology, with numerous seasons of double-digit-negative runs.
Dan
3:05
Is Burnes for Torres and German the start of a trade that makes both teams better?
AvatarJay Jaffe
3:06
Doubt it. Have to think that if and when the Brewers trade Burnes it's for  players whom they'll have control of for their pre-arbitration years as well as their arb ones.

Remember, Burnes made just $608K during his Cy Young season and by our measure produced 98 times that value for the Brewers.
Chi Fan
3:06
Is Yasmani Grandel done, or is there something still in the tank?  Could he become the come back player of the year?
AvatarJay Jaffe
3:08
Grandal's numbers crashed through the floor last year and he didn't hit the ball very hard. If he's healthy enough to hit the ball hard again, he should be a valuable player but Comeback Player of the Year might be a stretch.
Farhandrew Zaidman
3:09
If Mookie finishes his career at 2B (per the recent reports and his public declaration that he's still a second baseman) how does that affect things like his JAWS, comparisons to other HOFers, etc?
AvatarJay Jaffe
3:12
I measure a player's JAWS based upon the position where he had the most value, and Mookie already exceeds the peak standard for right fielders, and not by a little (50.5 to 42.4). In fact, he's maybe two seasons away from surpassing the JAWS standard in RF:
Guest
3:12
McGriff is in. Andruw Jones will be in sooner or later. Will we ever get the last key piece of the 90s Braves dynasty into the Hall of Fame... the GOAT pitching coach Leo Mazzone??
AvatarJay Jaffe
3:14
Maybe someday there will be a Frick or BBWAA Career Excellence award to recognize coaches but there's not really much momentum to start electing them to the Hall proper when so much of what goes into their evaluations are subjective.
Guest
3:14
Do you think with Fred McGriff making it into the Hall of Fame that a day will come when Carlos Delgado is reconsidered?
AvatarJay Jaffe
3:17
By now it should be abundantly clear that particularly with the recent Era Committee reorg, the deck is EXTREMELY stacked against one-and-done players, especially so long as some of the same people who failed to recognize them on the writers' ballot are the ones charged with assembling the committee ballots. Grich, Whitaker, Lofton, Freehan... there are 1/D players at premium defensive positions who can't get on the ballot, and a large pile of first basemen vaguely similar to Delgado (Olerud, Clark, Giambi, Teixeira) who outrank him in JAWS and are getting nowhere either.
Guest
3:19
Which of the most well-known shortstops (Correa, Bogaerts, Turner, Seager, Swanson) do you think has the most realistic Hall of Fame shot?
AvatarJay Jaffe
3:21
Age is everything here, and Correa having the highest ranking in JAWS of the group while being the youngest means he's got the best chance by far. I'd say Correa, Lindor, and maaaaybe Bogaerts if he ages particularly well.
Chris
3:22
Will Felix make it past the first ballot?
AvatarJay Jaffe
3:24
Maybe, if only because the debut of Sabathia on the same ballot will provoke discussion of how few strong pitching candidates there are coming down the road. For more see https://blogs.fangraphs.com/big-comebacks-and-easy-calls-the-next-five...
Nolan Ryan’s hair line
3:25
What do the rangers need to be in the same talking space as the Astros? One more rotation piece? Bullpen ace?
AvatarJay Jaffe
3:27
The Rangers need a better bullpen but one big separator right now is the productivity of the two outfields; the Astros total 12.6 WAR from their three spots via our Depth Charts, the Rangers just 5.3 WAR.
kfish
3:27
Do you think Kiki at SS will work for the Sox?
AvatarJay Jaffe
3:28
For a full season? Color me skeptical, especially given how little he's played the position in the majors and how erratic he is at the plate.
Dan the Man
3:28
Can Sandy Alcantara repeat his performance from last year? Really hoping all those innings and complete games start a trend in the workhorse direction.
AvatarJay Jaffe
3:31
if we're not seeing many pitchers top 220 innings it stands to reason we're seeing even fewer who can string two such seasons back-to-back. it's all well and good to want more length out of starters but they have to hold up under the stress.
Morbo
3:31
I'm going to die on this hill but if Andruw Jones belongs in the a HOF so does Jim Edmonds. Edmonds was a FAR better hitter than Jones and frankly Edmonds gets hosed by the defensive metrics of the time because he intentionally played shallow to rob bloop hits because he was great running back. The error bars on defensive metrics from the time are more than enough to account for the 2.5 fwar difference across their careers. Additionally Baseball Prospectus has Edmonds worth 67.1 warp vs 60.8 for Jones and has them at 121.5 vs 176.2 Defensive Runs prevented respectively.
AvatarJay Jaffe
3:38
Morbo, Jones was notorious for how shallow he positioned himself in center field. He ran up big defensive numbers by doing what you're telling me Edmonds did as well; to some extent, the same metrics should be capturing the value of both if that's the way they did it. Yet the two have a gap of nearly 200 defensive runs (B-Ref) that can't just be chalked up to error bars. I can't vouch for BP's defensive system (I know they've started rolling out new metrics) — but B-Ref and FanGraphs both show wide gaps in Jones' favor on the glove side.
Ok folks, many good q in the queue but It's time for me to roll. Thanks for stopping by in my new chat slot. We'll do this again next week!
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