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Meg Rowley FanGraphs Chat - 9/4/18
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Meg Rowley
3:05
Depends on the fan. I want to watch baseball, and professionally god help us if there is a stoppage, but I find the current revenue split, the underpaying of young players, and the almost not-paying of minor leaguers to be awful and damaging to the sport long term. The union needs a better negotiator. I'm glad they got one.
3:07
As for the other thing, I guess it could factor some, but I think their reps will urge them to get what they're worth.
tb.25
3:07
How's the smoke up north? It's cleared out really well in NorCal, though still lingering
Meg Rowley
3:07
Much, much better. The fall crisp has set in. It is lovely.
That said, it is supposed to maybe get bad again.
3:08
Dreading smoke is now part of life here. Killing the planet was dumb it turns out.
Phil
3:08
Excepts Mookie hasn't played any more games than Trout this year, also missing time earlier in the season, and has a fractional WAR lead. So Betts winning is because he has actually been the best player this year.
Meg Rowley
3:10
No totally, and I don't mean to take anything away from Betts' season. He's been amazing. I mostly mean a full season of Trout is my default MVP until he's not Mike Trout. Which, look, that's obvious, sure.
cm
3:10
How come no one seems to talk about the Blue Jays making a mistake in not trading Donaldson a year earlier?
Meg Rowley
3:10
I think they probably do.
Airport Banana
3:10
How hard is it to reconcile baseball fandom with your worldview? The more I follow baseball, the more it eats at me that wanting my small-market team to win means wanting them to make smart business decisions, which means compensating their employees as little as possible.
Meg Rowley
3:12
At times very hard! I can get worked up on behalf of the young guys in the majors who aren't making what they should, and then general revenue share getting out of whack, but the minor leaguers are the real killers.
3:13
I want players to make more generally, but JD Martinez is mostly fine even if he made $10 million less than he maybe should have. What minor leaguers make should be illegal. It is shocking it isn't.
Guest
3:13
Can Yankees fans dream on a Marcus Semien level turn around for Andujar defensively?
Meg Rowley
3:14
You should dream on whatever you want. I think we are probably overstating how much of a turnaround Semien has had (he is undeniably better but I think there is some fuzziness in his defensive WAR), but that would be terrific. Andujar is also, what, 23? He has time.
Phil Rott
3:15
fWAR currently has 13 position players with 5+ WAR. Which of these names is most surprising to you?
Meg Rowley
3:15
Let's take a look here.
3:16
Mookie Betts 8.6
Jose Ramirez 8
Mike Trout 8
Francisco Lindor 6.8
Alex Bregman 6.7
Matt Chapman 6.4
Manny Machado 5.7
J.D. Martinez 5.4
Matt Carpenter 5.4
Paul Goldschmidt 5.2
Javier Baez 5.1
Lorenzo Cain 5
Aaron Judge 5
3:17
Probably Baez just because I had been so skeptical of that profile working and it not being a blip. I was wrong about that.
Julian
3:17
Madison Bumgarner is a soft tossing lefty, right?
Meg Rowley
3:18
(worried face emoji)
I don't know what he is right now and that is both wild and concerning.
Norm
3:18
Christian Yelich's play over the last couple of months has obviously gotten him into the MVP discussion, but where does he currently stand in the race? For some reason it doesn't feel like he's a serious contender but his numbers stack up well against everyone else in the conversation.
Meg Rowley
3:19
If I had a vote, I'd pick deGrom because screw it, he's been amazing.
3:20
I think Yelich will get a fair amount of down ballot support but I think it'll probably be Carpenter.
German dude
3:20
How much of the Hosmer contract would the Padres have to eat if they wanted to trade him after the season for a lottery ticket?
Meg Rowley
3:20
Many much most?
3:21
He's been real not good.
It's a very weird, throwback sort of bad signing.
(sorry, Dave)
Tyler Glasnow
3:21
I alone have made the Archer trade worth it. How come no one is noticing the way I've pitched since coming to Tampa?
Meg Rowley
3:22
We've noticed!
PD
3:22
It seems like some (many?) of these really early deals - Kingery, Singleton, Longoria - work out for the player (e.g. bad for the team). Is this true or cognitive bias?
Meg Rowley
3:23
First, I wouldn't put the Longoria deal in with the other two, and I think you're remembering the ones that didn't.
Guest
3:24
So, what's more Mariners - that the three decent players they acquired at the trade deadline (Duke, Warren, Maybin) have all seriously underperformed their projections, or that among their designees for the prestigious Arizona Fall League showcase is Ian Miller, a 26 year old outfielder who just finished up his AAA season with a whopping 78 wRC+?
Meg Rowley
3:25
The first thing is a baseball thing. The second thing is a baseball teams with bad farm systems thing.
Both might be things you associate with the Mariners, but neither is unique to them.
Lunar verLander
3:26
Suppose this offseason, the Yankees make the best offer to Dallas Keuchel, but demand that he shave his beard. Would Keuchel sign with the Yankees? Basically, it seems like the Yankees rule about facial hair may come back to bite them sometime in the future; will it be this offseason (with such glorious facial hair adorners as Keuchel & Harper), or further down the line (or possibly never)?
Meg Rowley
3:26
So I think the place where the rubber meets the road on this is likely if and when a player has facial hair for religious reasons.
3:27
But the thing is, while the policy bugs the crap out of me, put it a different way. Would you shave your beard for (pick a number) $75 million?
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