MuzzyField said:Was Drew too tired to DH for the PawSox on Friday night? It doesn't matter, I don't really care.
The Sox are winning games, after losing a bunch, and this signing remains an exercise in futility. Something that always was can't become an exercise in futility.
The best prospect, (FYI, this guy is the closest thing to a Trout we have) that EARNED his World Series ring by playing a learn as you go 3B in the post-season and is currently the best hitter (maybe player) on the team at 21, is going to have to move to another position because WMB sucks and the team spent $10-million on a can't play anywhere but SS Stephen Drew for a 4-month rental to "save the season."
Where in the $100-million player development manual does this move equate to smart? If X can't play SS I think they'd have made a note of that during his accension through the system. Was X kept at SS because WMB was blocking him at 3B? I sure hope not.
Also, has anyone looked at the starting pitching (pre-DL stints) and LF for hot spots of despair for the FO to fix? If the Cardinals would trade for the Sox current minor league AAA pitching talent, problem solved! If not, bend over.
The signing of Drew smells too much like a Lucky Valentine move.
In general, if this is REALLY a top-5 minor league system dominated by arms, opportunity is knocking!
As for Drew, guess what, nobody in MLB wanted him and he didn't want $14-million dollars to stick around for another season (I'm a huge fan of this decision). Meanwhile, he's been honing his skills at Camp Boras for free.
Now let's make the 21-year-old, already better than you've ever been at baseball player move to 3B to make "it work."
In order for the return of Drew to make sense to me, I guess my head just going to have to explode from the amount of baseball clarity I'm about to gain from taking Sabermetrics 101.
Was Drew too tired to DH for the PawSox on Friday night? It doesn't matter, I don't really care.
Yep, because moving him to 3B for the last 2/3rds of his rookie season means he's never going back to SS, right?MuzzyField said:Where in the $100-million player development manual does this move equate to smart? If X can't play SS I think they'd have made a note of that during his accension through the system.
They've DLed two starters this week and brought up two starters from AAA to replace them. They've also recalled Nava and now have Hassan up as additional LF/RF candidates. They're making use of the farm because they aren't going to spend prospects to improve the rotation or LF short term when they're 4th in the division right now.Also, has anyone looked at the starting pitching (pre-DL stints) and LF for hot spots of despair for the FO to fix? If the Cardinals would trade for the Sox current minor league AAA pitching talent, problem solved! If not, bend over.
No, it smells like a team with free cash on hand looking for a way to improve that doesn't cost them prospects. Dempster's retirement freed up all the money they needed to sign Drew. They obviously would have preferred the draft pick but that wasn't happening and WMB couldn't stay healthy. So for nothing other than cash they got a pretty nice 25 man roster upgrade (replacing Herrara with Drew).The signing of Drew smells too much like a Lucky Valentine move.
And that opportunity is best presented to all those young arms with capable defense at two of the most important positions on the field. Bogaerts has improved a lot at SS in the last few weeks but he's still not as good as Drew. Holt is a passable 3B stop gap but his arm and speed of reaction just aren't up to the job full time. How bad will the Drew signing look if RDLR is rolling until all of a sudden Holt two hops a throw on a routine grounder, followed by Bogaerts rifling an attempt to turn two into the seats behind first?In general, if this is REALLY a top-5 minor league system dominated by arms, opportunity is knocking!
As for Drew, guess what, nobody in MLB wanted him and he didn't want $14-million dollars to stick around for another season (I'm a huge fan of this decision). Meanwhile, he's been honing his skills at Camp Boras for free.
Now let's make the 21-year-old, already better than you've ever been at baseball player move to 3B to make "it work."
In order for the return of Drew to make sense to me, I guess my head just going to have to explode from the amount of baseball clarity I'm about to gain from taking Sabermetrics 101.
Question: If the Red Sox need to make a mid-season move that they think will put them over the top, but also put them over the luxury tax, do you think that the Red Sox make that move? If the answer is yes (which I think it is), why is there hand-wringing over this 10M dollars?Toe Nash said:I'm not s huge fan of the Drew signing -- I think it was simply unnecessary, and I would have rather saved the money given their slim chances even if there was nothing else to spend it on, but moving X is not in my mind as a reason to not sign Drew.
TheShynessClinic said:
Eh. 90% of X's value will be tied in to his offensive production for his position. A high percentage of Trout's value comes from his defense, which isn't as easy to quantify for the old school MVP voters.
X would have a much easier path to an MVP than Trout (Triple Crowns aside).
rodderick said:
Sure, but we aren't talking about Manny Machado here. Trout has OPS'ed close to 1.000 every year he's been in the league. If Xander ever came close to matching that kind of offensive output, we'd all be doing cartwheels.
I wrote I would rather save the money even if there was nothing else to spend it on (meaning no other payroll). So yes, I believe they would make this potential move either way. But if they saved the $10m I figure they would re-invest it in Fenway or use it to go over the tax another year, or hire some analysts, or something that is probably better than the marginal impact of Drew over Holt / waiver pickup in a season in which you're not going to compete anyway.HillysLastWalk said:Question: If the Red Sox need to make a mid-season move that they think will put them over the top, but also put them over the luxury tax, do you think that the Red Sox make that move? If the answer is yes (which I think it is), why is there hand-wringing over this 10M dollars?
Agree with the rest of your post about X. Its not a problem.
None of those young players have been taken out of the lineup though, so are they really getting antsy? Or does the FO realize that Xander will still mature defensively while playing 3B this season, improving his play at SS next season, meanwhile they get to add a nice upgrade to the 25 man roster in Drew for the cost of simply money.LondonSox said:Yet the team and fan base gets antsy about young players a quarter of the way into the season THE YEAR AFTER a totally shocking world series win!
Thanks Drek. I appreciate the reply and do see much value in what you're saying. It's why I love reading the content on this site so much. Please note, living in Florida, I have to endure the Rays telecasts when they play the Sox and may have needed to be shot with a tranquilizer gun after the game.Drek717 said:Yep, because moving him to 3B for the last 2/3rds of his rookie season means he's never going back to SS, right?
They've DLed two starters this week and brought up two starters from AAA to replace them. They've also recalled Nava and now have Hassan up as additional LF/RF candidates. They're making use of the farm because they aren't going to spend prospects to improve the rotation or LF short term when they're 4th in the division right now.
No, it smells like a team with free cash on hand looking for a way to improve that doesn't cost them prospects. Dempster's retirement freed up all the money they needed to sign Drew. They obviously would have preferred the draft pick but that wasn't happening and WMB couldn't stay healthy. So for nothing other than cash they got a pretty nice 25 man roster upgrade (replacing Herrara with Drew).
And that opportunity is best presented to all those young arms with capable defense at two of the most important positions on the field. Bogaerts has improved a lot at SS in the last few weeks but he's still not as good as Drew. Holt is a passable 3B stop gap but his arm and speed of reaction just aren't up to the job full time. How bad will the Drew signing look if RDLR is rolling until all of a sudden Holt two hops a throw on a routine grounder, followed by Bogaerts rifling an attempt to turn two into the seats behind first?
Pitchers benefit from good defense. Young pitchers especially. Getting Drew back and moving Xander over will make life easier on the pitching staff. That's a good thing.
It makes sense because they weren't getting a draft pick, had the extra money going unused, haven't done well enough so far to consider moving prospects to fill short term needs, and didn't have a real 3B on any roster from AA to MLB. This is Sabermetrics from a resource management standpoint 101. Drew costs Cherrington nothing. He costs Henry/Werner/Lucchino ~$10M, sure, but Cherrington will have all the same resources and tools at his disposal this winter in exactly the same condition with or without Drew. So the 2014 team gets better with literally zero impact on the future, unless you think there is some nebulous "development loss" for Bogaerts in only playing SS against lefties (assuming Farrell is smart enough to use Bogaerts' positional versatility to platoon Drew with basically any Red Sox player not named Daniel Nava). This protects the farm from being sold out if they make a solid push the next few weeks and get within a few games of first. That is when the Lucchino "make a splash" move would be pushed. A big deal at the deadline in hopes that the new piece slingshots them past the competition into first, giving up some top 10 farm talent in the process. This preempts that with a cash only acquisition.
Cherrington has made a decent number of moves that I didn't care for. Trading both Lowrie and Reddick in seperate deals for dubious relief pitching for example. This isn't one of them however as it costs the Red Sox nothing long term.
MuzzyField said:I'm not anti-Drew, but even before the 10-game slide, I felt this team's mounting health issues in the field, defense and pitcher comfort with the starting catcher, and poor starting pitching in general were much bigger concerns than the problem Drew solves. If WMB doesn't get hurt and just kept sucking, does this move get made?
Correct.Al Zarilla said:Did I hear on NESN that Drew will be with the team on Monday?
Al Zarilla said:Did I hear on NESN that Drew will be with the team on Monday?
soxhop411 said:Correct.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlT1gM04uHwRed(s)HawksFan said:
That's the first day he's eligible to be recalled, so it makes sense.
Corsi said:
See, this is where you lose me. Drew is much better than WMB, both offensively and defensively. There's nothing marginal about it.
Savin Hillbilly said:Does WMB appear to have stalled? Sure, and because of that I think the Sox did what they needed to do here. But he has also shown an offensive ceiling higher than anything Drew has ever achieved at any level. Calling Drew the better hitter of the two and saying "there's nothing marginal about it" is at least a couple of bridges too far.
Savin Hillbilly said:
Ponder this: WMB's career major league wRC+ is one point higher than Drew's (97 to 96). Sure, there are all kinds of ways you can dissect that to make it look fluky, but I don't think you can dismiss it. Another data point: Drew's wRC+ as a 23-year-old in AAA was 108. WMB's was 193. OK, there's a sample size issue there, because WMB only spent about a third of his age-23 season in AAA; he spent the rest of it in the majors racking up a wRC+ of 122 -- a number that Drew has yet to match in any major league season, whole or partial.
Adrian's Dome said:
Consistency matters, and Drew has quite a bit more of it over a larger sample size than WMB. I don't think you're going to find anybody that disagrees on WMB's ceiling as a hitter, but his pitch recognition skills and plate discipline haven't improved much, and unless they do, all that natural power is useless. Let us never forget the Wily Mo experiment when it comes to addressing "what could be" versus "what is."
Because the sample sizes are insanely different, and Middlebrooks has been the kind of player that goes from looking otherworldly in short bursts to completely lost in larger ones, so to use one stat to compare his entire body of work versus the same stat to look at Drew's is...missing a bit of the picture.Unbearable Lightness said:
Didn't his post address both? It feels like in the face of what is (WMB has higher or comparable wRC+), you look very hard to trying to contradict that. Can you quantify "consistency matters"? How does that favor one player over another of same wRC+?
I trust I am not the only one who hopes they use Bogaerts at short against lefties with Wombat at third. I don't know how the utility situation would work out and how the backup of and 1b would work out but I want X and Wombat to get some time at their preferred positions.Plympton91 said:Middlebrooks had 3 or 4 great weeks to start his career and since then has been a sub 700 OPS 3rd baseman with average at best defense. Middlebrooks is also not going to be on a major league diamond for at least another month, by which time someone else will be hurt making the depth more important.
Nonetheless, The Red Sox are a better team with Steven Drew, especially against righthanded starters. Any attempt to prove otherwise is data mining and not watching baseball as it is played on the field.
This was the setup I was championing all off-season. Platoon Drew by having Bogaerts move over and WMB at 3B. Make up the rest of WMB's plate appearances by being #2 on the depth chart at 1B, 2B, and DH.Rasputin said:I trust I am not the only one who hopes they use Bogaerts at short against lefties with Wombat at third. I don't know how the utility situation would work out and how the backup of and 1b would work out but I want X and Wombat to get some time at their preferred positions.
Adrian's Dome said:Because the sample sizes are insanely different, and Middlebrooks has been the kind of player that goes from looking otherworldly in short bursts to completely lost in larger ones, so to use one stat to compare his entire body of work versus the same stat to look at Drew's is...missing a bit of the picture.
Adrian's Dome said:Because the sample sizes are insanely different, and Middlebrooks has been the kind of player that goes from looking otherworldly in short bursts to completely lost in larger ones, so to use one stat to compare his entire body of work versus the same stat to look at Drew's is...missing a bit of the picture.
Savin Hillbilly said:
That's fair. So, OK, let's do something a little more apples-to-apples. Will Middlebrooks is 25 and a half years old, has 742 major league PA and a career wRC+ of 97. At the end of 2008, Stephen Drew was 25 and a half years old, had 1508 PA and a career wRC+ of about 94 (averaging 2006/07/08 figures, pro-rated by PA).
And they had kind of similar entries to the bigs--both of them had a very promising partial first season (Drew: 226 PA, 114 wRC+; WMB: 286 PA, 122 wRC+), then fell off a cliff in the following year (Drew 619/70, WMB 374/83). The difference is that Drew succeeded in coming back in his third year with a solid offensive performance, while WMB hasn't--yet. Then again, the D'backs committed to Drew and let him take the job and run with it despite the struggles, while the Sox have not done that with WMB.
Understand, I'm not saying that Drew isn't a better player than Middlebrooks, because of the excellent defense at the game's toughest position. I just think claims that he's a better hitter than Middlebrooks need all kinds of qualification.
nvalvo said:
It's worth pointing out that Drew's defense wasn't always excellent. He's had ups and downs in the field just as much as at the plate. In particular, his first three seasons were quite rough by UZR, while his next three were excellent. Recovery from the ankle injury sapped his range for 2012; in 2013, as we all saw, he was again great in the field.
I seem to recall that Drew didn't have a very good reputation defensively when he first broke in based on scouting/observation, not UZR, but that UZR then confirmed it. Also, while I'm not a big UZR fan myself he had about 3000 innings at short through his first three years with a pretty consistent strongly negative value. UZR isn't perfect but I don't think that given the sample size and how strongly negative they ranked him it's still making an at least somewhat valid statement.Plympton91 said:
Or maybe his defense was always excellent, except for the ankle recovery, and the standard error on UZR is just so huge as to make it largely meaningless. To me, it is no more reliable a stat than plus/minus in hockey, certainly a less informative statistic than, say, batting average. Maybe about as useful as wins for a starting pitcher.
Plympton91 said:According to FanGraphs, from 2002-2004, Derek Jeter averaged a -1.5 WAR, then from 2005 to 2007 he averaged -13.1, and from 2008 to 2010 he averaged +0.6. So, according to UZR, he went from average to terrible and then back to average, even as he was aging though his late 30s. That simply does not pass the laugh test as a reliable stat, regardless of the sample size.
Plympton91 said:According to FanGraphs, from 2002-2004, Derek Jeter averaged a -1.5 WAR, then from 2005 to 2007 he averaged -13.1, and from 2008 to 2010 he averaged +0.6. So, according to UZR, he went from average to terrible and then back to average, even as he was aging though his late 30s. That simply does not pass the laugh test as a reliable stat, regardless of the sample size.
Smiling Joe Hesketh said:
What, it's not possible for players to go into fielding slumps, just like they do hitting slumps?
From 2005-2007 David Ortiz had a 1.038 OPS.
From 2008-2010 David Ortiz had a .854 OPS.
From 2011-2013 David Ortiz had a .972 OPS.
Yet no one doubts these numbers are legit indicators of Papi's offensive performance, despite increasing age. Why on earth should fielding be any different? Perhaps Jeter was positioned differently starting in 2008. Perhaps he started "cheating" more in terms of leaning one way or another depending on the pitch. Perhaps he finally had surgery for an annoying physical ailment.
Point being, there's nothing that fails the laugh test in those numbers regarding Jeter, and there's certainly nothing that fails the laugh test in terms of the numbers showing that Drew started off his career defensively suspect and then improved as the years went on.
Red(s)HawksFan said:
Perhaps the addition of a rangy, Gold Glove 1B allowed for a somewhat rangy 2B to shade more up the middle which in turn allowed Jeter to shade more toward and focus more on balls to his right where he's generally been stronger over his career.
Brian Cashman told Jeter to that they believed his defense was hurting the team after 2007, and Jeter reacted by working on his lateral range and positioning (source). Given that information, both UZR and DRS would seem to tell the story of a player who finally started to focus on and improve the problems with his defense just as his body started to break down. This article breaks down some plays by Brendan Ryan and Derek Jeter from the 2011 and 2012 seasons and compares the results to a similar study Bill James did in 2006. The author finds, among other things, that Jeter now positions himself much further back than he did when he was younger.Plympton91 said:
BINGO!
UZR is very dependent on the quality of the rest of the defense and, as Jolmy noted, positioning. Thus, the acquisition of a gold glover at an adjacent position, or a better coaching staff with improved use of technology can improve a player's UZR. Just like the acquisition of a high OBP #2 hitter can increase the number of RBIs for the #3 hitter, or the addition of a couple good hitters can increase the number of Wins for a starting pitcher. Hence, that's what I said earlier about how good a stat UZR is -- it's equivalent to using RBIs to judge a hitter or wins to judge a starting pitcher.
Plympton91 said:That's a nice narrative to go along with mystique and aura.
But if "better positioning" can improve UZR then it's measuring the quality of a team's advance scouts, not the range of the player at the position.
UZR completely ignores plays where a shift is on.Plympton91 said:
Separately, how does UZR score the shortstop when he's playing behind 2B in a shift, but the batter goes against the shit and hits the ball right through the shortstop hole for a hit. If it's scored as anything other than "unplayable" then UZR is fatally flawed.
williams_482 said:UZR completely ignores plays where a shift is on.
Plympton91 said:But if "better positioning" can improve UZR then it's measuring the quality of a team's advance scouts, not the range of the player at the position.
glennhoffmania said:
This is pretty much nonsense. Scouting is a part of the game. Hitters watch film on pitchers to try to get an edge. If a player can better position himself to improve his chances of getting to balls then why shouldn't that count in his favor? The point is to measure how effective a fielder was at getting to balls. The fact that one player may have a quicker first step while another player is better prepared doesn't make one better than the other if the results are the same.
Plympton91 said:
Right, and so a player on a team with good advanced scouts and a big video budget will then grade out better, ceteris paribus, than a player on a team with poorer advance scouts and a small video budget.
That's an interesting exercise in statistical gymnastics, it isn't "range."
joe dokes said:
Does it? I thought that shifting was one of the reasons that Brett Lawrie somehow graded out as the best third basemen in history last year. (maybe it was another metric?)
RBI and Wins judge results, too. They just aren't as predictive of who will hit well next year or on a different team as stats that are purer measures of skill.glennhoffmania said:
We're judging results, not just skill. How is this different from a player with access to better scouting of pitchers so he has gets on base more often than a player with shitty scouting who goes up to the plate guessing? Or to put it this way, would you rather have a SS with average quickness but who is very well prepared and gets to more balls, or a player with very good quickness and no preparation who gets to fewer balls?
williams_482 said:
That was DRS, which had him at +20 in 2012 (UZR of +4.5). I don't know how DRS handles shifts.
Plympton91 said:RBI and Wins judge results, too. They just aren't as predictive of who will hit well next year or on a different team as stats that are purer measures of skill.
I don't believe that in the winter between his 3rd and 4th seasons in the big leagues Steven Drew all of a sudden figured out how to be a better shortstop. Sorry.
Plympton91 said:I don't believe that in the winter between his 3rd and 4th seasons in the big leagues Steven Drew all of a sudden figured out how to be a better shortstop. Sorry.
And, basically neither do people who understand UZR, because they say you have to "regress individual saasons heavily". That's a fancy way of saying, "our metric really isn't very accurate."