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Jeff Sullivan FanGraphs Chat -- 9/2/16
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Jeff Sullivan
10:30
Left fielders got a 43 rating for arm strength. 46 for center fielders. 57 for right fielders
Murphy
10:31
i believe in Spring Training i asked your opinion on the 4th best position player on the Astros, assuming 1-3 were in some order Altuve/Springer/Correa, i opined Rasmus and you came back wtih Gomez, boy were we wrong! #4 is....
Jeff Sullivan
10:31
Bregman
Jake
10:32
What are your thoughts on Abre?. He's had a weird yr, 97 wRC+ first half, 149 the second. Just a meh first baseman going forward?
Jeff Sullivan
10:33
I like him overall as a hitter, but he's too over-aggressive to be a consistent threat. And because he's not an asset in the field or on the bases, you're left with a player who needs to maximize his power in order to be above-average. That power hasn't been around on a regular basis since he was a rookie
Roger
10:34
The Royals have been disappointing this year. Are they in for similar disappointment next year?
Jeff Sullivan
10:34
The Royals had the best record in the American League in August, and they've had to fight through a bunch of injuries
Roger
10:34
Which team do you think spends the most in free agency this off-season?
Jeff Sullivan
10:34
This offseason's free agency sucks
10:35
I guess the answer might be whichever team signs Aroldis Chapman
j6takish
10:35
Which team is next in line to go against common sense and bring in some "old school" GM to fuck everything up?
Jeff Sullivan
10:35
Diamondbacks might keep theirs
Tom A.
10:37
JBJ can't hit right now. Seems like it would be a bigger story if he didn't spike his line so high in the early months.
Jeff Sullivan
10:38
Jackie Bradley Jr has had one month this season out of five with a sub-100 wRC+. That was, of course, August, and a slump is always worth a certain amount of attention, but if I've learned anything from our rolling-average plots, it's that every season for every player, no matter how good or how bad, includes a bunch of hot runs and cold runs. Every single player slumps
There's really no such thing as consistency, at least not in terms of box-score results
doubletap
10:38
In the long run, would an automated strike zone tilt the advantage toward the pitchers, hitters, or not change things very much?
Jeff Sullivan
10:39
Entirely depends on the boundaries. If they automated the rule-book strike zone, that would be good for hitters, since the lower boundary would be raised, and the horizontal boundaries would be constricted
Dorn
10:39
Jameson Taillon's upside: An excellent #2 or a back end #1?
Jeff Sullivan
10:39
Those might as well be the same thing
Rick
10:39
Whose trade value has most eroded since Dave Cameron published his trade value rankings?
Jeff Sullivan
10:39
Let me pull that up real quick...
10:40
Right. Probably Salazar or McCullers
Injuries can ruin a pitcher quick
Dock Ellis
10:41
Pitch sequencing question: do you know of any team has completely randomized in advance of a game so that the hitter can't pick up on any patterns?
Jeff Sullivan
10:42
No, pitchers and catchers still work it all out, and there's no such thing as a dugout randomizer (or whatever you'd want to call it). A big part of catching is trying to read the hitters and make pitch calls in part dependent on what you see. No catcher is going to want to give that up for a theory
Of course there are suggestions made, when patterns are recognized, but that's always happened
Outta my way, Gyorkass
10:43
How do you find stuff to write about 2x a day during the offseason? I would have to imagine the few month period between winter meetings and the start of spring training has to be an awfully difficult time to draw writing inspiration.
Jeff Sullivan
10:43
It blows, but it also allows for some creativity, and the pressure is reduced since fewer people are reading in the first place. Times get pretty desperate. But I like that that also makes it easy for me to take a two-week vacation
Lord above
10:44
How valuable are high floor center field prospects? Seems like those guys are projected to be minimum 2 win players because of their speed and higher if they can hit, but the austin jackson's of the world aren't highly valued.
Jeff Sullivan
10:45
Austin Jackson would have more value if he were a 22-year-old with upside making the minimum. As the Brewers have demonstrated, those are valuable prospects, because even in some of the worse-case scenarios, you get an athletic major-league player
Brett W
10:45
2016 Cubs fan asking a 2001 Mariners fan if there's anything I can do to better prepare for the worst.
Jeff Sullivan
10:46
Make sure you have other things you enjoy just in case baseball goes down the shitter
Guest
10:46
What's a realistic k rate for Moncada right now, 35%?
Jeff Sullivan
10:47
I think 25-30%. I'm open to the idea that rookies can be of short-term value because opponents don't know how to pitch to them yet. Moncada will have some holes exposed eventually, but maybe not in the first month
Andy
10:47
Looking far in the future, do you think we will ever be able to evaluate defense as accurately as we can evaluate offense right now? The major sites agree pretty closely on individual player's offense, there are still major discrepancies in defense in some individual cases.
Jeff Sullivan
10:47
Nothing will ever be as easy to evaluate as offense.
Rick
10:48
Yesterday was a baseball wasteland, with only four games going on. What sport do you prefer fill the void with in such circumstances? Yesterday, for instance, we had college FB, US Open Tennis, and NFL Pre-Season football....
Jeff Sullivan
10:48
The only other sport I care about is hockey. I personally don't mind when baseball takes a night off, because then it means I get a night off from furiously checking my phone to see if I'm missing anything
CapnZippers
10:49
More on Lugo: He's only throwing his Curve 17.4% of the time, but the opposition is hitting only .174 and slugging .261 against it. He could probably benefit from throwing more of them a la August's article earlier in the week about improving existing arsenals
Jeff Sullivan
10:50
My sense is you're right, but then it also depends on Lugo's confidence in throwing the pitch for a strike. It's easy to keep average and slugging down if you mostly just throw a pitch out of the zone in two-strike counts.
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