Jackie Bradley, Jr. - Help
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Rasputin said:
Seems like it. Over has last 7 days (5 games) he has a .666 OPS, but over his last 14 days (8 games) he has an .880. His last month is at .695, which is about where he needs to keep it to be an above average player overall considering his defense.
I doubt it, so long as DH3 is on this board.DavidTai said:
Whenever Bradley goes into a slump.... he'll be there.
Whenever an outfielder gets caught stealing.... he'll be there.
Whenever the 8th guy on the depth chart is forced to play because of injuries... he'll be there.
You realize this is basically saying, "he had 3 good games like a week ago," right?Snodgrass'Muff said:
A lot of that is a lucky BABIP streak - he's at .345 over that span. But he is striking out a ton less - 10 times in 68 AB (15%) versus 72 in 205 (35%) before that span. Cutting down on the strikeouts is key because the power is still MIA (just 4 XBH during his "hot streak," all doubles). He's not going to be a huge power guy, but if he could re-discover the 10-15 HR a season he had in the minors, I'd be more optimistic about his future offensively.Snodgrass'Muff said:
Yup, the perfectly foreseeable struggles of Bradley for the first more than 1/2 season was only 1/2 or less of the argument I was making for resigning Ellsbury. The other parts were the fragility of Victorino and the overall lack of players in the organization who had demostrated the ability to play quality defense in CF or RF while hitting at replacement level or better.CaptainLaddie said:
But people should continue to charicature that reasoning as being an Ellsbury fanboy if it makes them feel better about themselves.
His LD% since the beginning of June is somewhere between 25-30%. He's not getting on with a lot of seeing-eye grounders.Super Nomario said:
Interesting how much JBJ's struggles have caused people to redefine downwards what success for him might look like. Now we're supposed to be content if he manages to approach a 700 OPS?
Well, his defense is even better than advertised. Despite his dreadful first half at the plate, his fWAR at the break is still +1.3 because he plays all-universe CF.Philip Jeff Frye said:
He's looking more and more like the guy in Pawtucket.
Philip Jeff Frye said:
No, what's being said is that a .700 OPS is enough to make him a very useful player, considering his stellar defense.
Philip Jeff Frye said:
In a world where everyone in the AL who plays a defensive position hits for a .698 OPS, yes, a gold glove caliber fielder at an important defensive position is totally fine if their OPS approaches .700.
P'tucket said:
Also, considering that his minor league BABIP was .356, .345 is not exactly off the charts. Yes, you'd expect that minor league number to go down in the majors, because both the pitching and the defense are better, but you wouldn't necessarily expect it to go down so far that a .345 streak becomes an anomaly.
Im on a phone, so sorry for just spamming a link, but his batted ball trends make it pretty clear that this is more than a change in luck.
http://www.fangraphs.com/graphs.aspx?playerid=12984&position=OF&page=9&type=full
http://www.fangraphs.com/graphs.aspx?playerid=12984&position=OF&page=9&type=full
You're right; "lucky" was a poor choice of words on my part.P'tucket said:
Maybe not "anomaly," but it's still an unsustainable figure. His BABIPs in AAA and AA were .331 and .316, respectively, in leagues that average about .315 (that is, ~15 points higher than the AL). I don't see strong evidence that he's actually a player with an above-average BABIP skill, but even if we give him credit for being a "true" .315 BABIP player (for reference, Pedroia's is .313 for his career), I'm seeing very little improvement that I'd expect to continue - except in the K department.Savin Hillbilly said:
Rudy Pemberton said:
Or play in a park where the shallow LF tempts managers to play substandard OFers, and the RF has a lot of additional territory to cover.
Isn't the appropriate standard, "the average among starting position players on playoff teams," or "the average among starting position players on teams that are among the top (3, 5, or half) in runs scored"? Is seems to me the Red Sox should not be targeting an "average offense" but a playoff caliber one.Rasputin said:
You forgot, guys: Plympie wants the Sox to live in Lake Wobegon, where all the Sox players are above average hitters and fielders.
Plympton91 said:
That's an appropriate standard for the offense as a whole, but demanding that each individual player meet or exceed that standard may be neither necessary nor realistic.
Haven't we had this conversation before recently?
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2eUopy9sd8&feature=kp[/media]
Plympton91 said:
Sure, I mean, if they want a good offense, the Red Sox should be targeting the best possible player for every position, given their resources. Really it seems like you'd want the collection of guys gets you the most wins. Sometimes that could include guys whose value comes more from defense. Most playoff teams have a below average hitter or two (or more) on their roster.
Plympton91 said:
I think a more reasonable standard would be the average among up-the-middle defensive position players (C, SS, 2B, CF) of teams that win more often than they lose. The team's target for lineup performance, however, should be cumulative skill on offense and defense, not offense or defense in isolation. Run prevention is as or more important than run production.
It's absolutely amazing that JBJ currently stands at a 1.5 WAR from BBref. He's played an absolutely terrific center field this year, he has a lot of personality and his bat is starting to come around. Am I grasping at straws because I'm really excited about the future of Bradley Jr? He's slashed .297/.370/.438/.807 with RISP and has been hitting well over his last ten games.
Stitch01 said:
Are we sure Plympton91's not Brian Cashman?
... and in a world where you're ignoring that talent can improve or depreciate over time, too. I'd still not want Ellsbury over JBJ for the next year, let alone the next seven.
And -especially- not at what, 23 million, over JBJ at 490,000 at for the next year, let alone the next seven years.
If they have the same WAR, then Boston is saving over 22.5 million that could be spent on other positions to, you know, 'be above average'. How about, like, saving up that money and using it to either pay Lester, or, I dunno, acquire AND sign Mike Stanton?
(And Ellsbury is -not- worth that money to play LF or RF, at all.)
I don't understand this criticism. The average playoff team did not have unlimited assets to spend on talent, nor did the teams that had top 5 (the number of playoff teams) or top half offenses. Moreover, how is that targeting "the overall average OPS," which is what others were citing as their objective standard, so fundamentally different from targeting the "average of the top half of offensive teams," that the latter is clearly unachievable without "an unlimited budget" while the former is accepted wholly uncritically?Stitch01 said:
This is a complete strawman. Signing Ellsbury would not have required that the Red Sox grant Jackie Bradley his unconditional release. Moreover, I'd be hard pressed to name a single game in which the Red Sox have had their projected starting outfield on the field. Thus, with the way the season has played out, signing Ellsbury would not even have affected Bradley's developmental time in the major leagues during this season at all. He'd have been doing in RF what he has been doing in CF, which for the 1/2 season played at Fenway Park, isn't even a clear misuse of Bradley's defensive talents.DavidTai said:
Further, this was knowable, given that they should have been well aware of Victorino's health at the end of last season. Thus, the odds of a scenario in which the Red Sox faced a choice between signing Jacoby Ellsbury and developing Jackie Bradley were miniscule. If Bradley performed well in 2014, then you let Gomes leave and move Nava to 4th outfielder, hoping Victorino can perform in 2015, moving Ellsbury to LF for a season (something they already voluntarily did once in his career, were they stupid that year too?). Then Victorino's contract expires, and they have their choice of acquiring the best available LF or RF in 2016, provided the farm system hadn't provided a clear replacement by that time.
I'm still waiting for people to explain how this organization is going to both have a team full of the 30 or so prospects everyone is in love with and still spend near the $189 luxury cap. I hear pipedreams of someday acquiring G. Stanton, but that requires outbidding everyone else in prospects AND paying $30 million a year for a boatload of years AND Miami even being willing to trade him in the first place, which I don't see as a foregone conclusion. What I fear is a whole lot of payroll flexibility that is going to be about as useful (since I actually am one of the people that loves the prospects coming soon and hates the free agent market over the next 2 to 3 years) as a dry-docked aircraft carrier.
I'll make that my last word on Ellsbury as long as everyone else does too. I will not allow my arguments last winter to be strawman'ed though, so if you want the topic to die, stop bringing it up.
Plympton91 said:
See, the thing is, if signing Ellsbury were doable for one or two years, I'd be in complete agreement with you that they -should- have signed him for that, because it -would- have been perfectly reasonable, especially for what you propose.
Signing him for SEVEN YEARS, on the other hand, was not going to happen. As pointed out elsewhere, there's no sense in signing someone for that kind of contract JUST because you want to cover the position for the first year or two. You'd have to be sure he could perform more than reasonably for the next five years at the least, to be worth it... and a large chunk of why he's valuable in the first place would be because he was playing CF, not LF. If you're moving him to LF in year two, WTF?!
Signing him for one or two years was NEVER an option, not with that 7 years on the table.
Explain to me what we would have done with Ellsbury for the other five years if we -had- signed him for that contract.
Did a single Major League team go into the season projecting an above playoff team average (and Im assuming you mean playoff team smoothed over a number of years so that a dearth of 1B on playoff teams one season or w/e didn't skew the numbers) OPS at every offensive position? SInce the answer is no, why do you think that is?
Yeah, if he refuses to read the argument the first seventy times, he probably won't read it the seventy-first time either. At least there are no gross mischaracterizations of my opinion in that post, so we'll hope that will be end of it.MyDaughterLovesTomGordon said:
Studying more about the lack of offense around the league, it appears that if they can get a 700 OPS Jackie Bradley that is reasonably OBP heavy, they're in good shape for the final stretch of this season. That's the key thing right now. He's ceased to be a black hole, and if that remains true after the league adjusts to his adjustments, then they'll only have sacrificed one season as a result.
AJP is a function of the same misguided philosophy last offseason, Gomes and Victorino's struggles would have been mitigated significantly, and the pitching has overall been fine regardless of individual underperformance. So, no.Sprowl said:
Edit: If you want to stop discussing Ellsbury, stop discussing Ellsbury.
But you are the one who keeps making ridiculous blanket statements.Plympton91 said:
You just implied that the Red Sox sacrificed a season for JBJ to adjust to the majors.
Actually, you didn't imply it, you flat out said it. On a list of things that have gone wrong for the 2014 Red Sox, JBJ's struggles rank way way down the list.
You can't just non chalantly say something that ridiculous and then follow it up with "if you want to stop talking about Ellsbury, then stop talking aBout Ellsbury"
If you want stop being called out on your bullshit then stop posting bullshit. It's exhausting for people who are trying to clean it up.
I am locking this thread temporarily while I do a little housekeeping and move some of these Ellsbury posts to a new thread.
Plympton91 said:
Not having Bradley in centerfield would have prevented Victorino from wrenching his back and pulling his hamstring? Fabulous!
Gomes and Nava have performed poorly at bat, but more or less as expected in the field. Bradley certainly hasn't harmed either one of them in the field.
AJP was the result of a very different misguided philosophy which called for signing one-year stopgap replacements rather than putting up with the growing pains of youth. In fact, signing an AJP-equivalent to cover for CF was precisely what you called for, over and over again, in so many threads that I have lost count.
I didn't discuss Ellsbury. That's one of your broken records.
I changed my mind about starting a new thread, so please take the Ellsbury/OF depth talk to another thread if you are so inclined. There should be enough things JBJ to talk about in here.
The decision to hand Bradley the CF job with only a guy who had been out of baseball for 2 years as the "competition" was part of a broader strategy to transition to the group of prospects they have coming through AA and AAA. His very predictable offensive struggles were thus magnified by the lack of depth in CF and RF, forcing the team to keep running him out there despite the inability to make consistent contact in order to avoid a revolt by the pitching staff were any of the other statues used to "play" CF. Moreover, other decisions, such as the one to forgo a commitment longer than one-year for a veteran catcher in order to be free to hand the job to Vazquez in 2015 or to hand the 3B job to Middlebrooks despite his consistent inconsistency, created a lack of support in the lineup when Bradley struggled, Middlebrooks remained inconsistent, and Victorino, who was apparently hurt all offseason, couldn't answer the bell (a fact the Red Sox had to have known, thus making the decision to go into the season with no one but Sizemore in reserve even more inexcusable).SouthernBoSox said:
But, yeah, I'm guilty of not spelling it out for you all in that post, which would have been the seventy-first time since last August, so sorry.
Bradley is playing sterling defense and starting to hit now. That's wonderful. Doesn't make anything I've said in the past any less valid. This is a big market team with big market payroll flexibility that will only increase in years to come as more prospects fill roles for the major league minimum. Let's hope that as Bradley and Vazquez and Bogaerts blossom, they choose to use that flexibility as they did in 2004, 2007, and 2013 as a means to build an even better team, rather than as an end to itself as they did in 2014. (Though to be completely fair, I'm guessing that the spending spree on international talent this signing period has something to do with how far under budget the major league team was this season. That's a very nice consolation prize.)
SouthernBoSox said:
Um, no.
I know Plympie says a lot of ridiculous things but that doesn't mean everything he says is ridiculous.
Why are the Red Sox in this position? Bogaerts' terrible slump, JBJ's terrible slump, the failure of Nava early, the failure of Sizemore after Nava went down, the failure of Buchholz early on, the failure of Doubront, Pedroia's lack of power, Papi's lack of production.
Maybe there's more, but when you rank them by impact, JBJ's two month black hole is one of the biggest reasons and that may mean the Sox miss out on the post season this year because of--in part--JBJ's lack of offense, and that's completely fine.
If leaving spring training one had ranked the probability of each of the things in that list... JBJ's struggles offensively while taking over the CF position would be highest. You could make an argument that Sizemore's failure was expected prior to the season - but not after the spring training he had. But everything else on that list given prior performances was less expected than JBJ's offensive struggle. So if you asked Cherington when the season started if they were 'depending' on JBJ in order to be successful this season I have a hard time believing he would say it was a cornerstone of team success this year. Would it have had great impact if he had been merely average? Sure. But to say it is the highest impact when his offensive struggles were the most reasonably expected just seems to be a flawed way of seeing the situation.Rasputin said:
But Bradley's racking up a starter's workload despite sucking badly at the plate is directly tied to Sizemore's inability to play CF and their misread of Victorino's health in the offseason. With little depth in the outfield at upper levels of the organization, they were forced to hold onto Sizemore in the nearly baseless hope that he would be productive. But, with Victorino not healthy and Sizemore demonstrating an inability to cover the ground necessary to play CF, they had to keep Bradley in the lineup everyday. And, the dependence on Sizemore for any semblance of depth combined with the complete absence of credible CF options other than Bradley led to the quick demotion of Nava, wasting his easily predictable recovery that occurred within a week of his demotion (he had a high OBP 800 OPS in AAA). If they'd had a CF option rather than Sizemore, then Bradley could have been optioned to work out his problems in AAA rather than Nava, and Nava would have been back in the lineup getting on base against RH much more quickly than he was. And, then when Victorino went down for the second time, Bradley could have come up again -- like Nava did -- continuing his development.RetractableRoof said:
So you quote my post to agree that I am correct? Because everything you cited goes further to show that all of those things snowballed to create season long problems... which caused a player who might have had a reasonable expectation to struggle to be in the lineup more often. If Jon Lester gets blownup in the first inning for 15 runs and they ask Brock Holt to pitch the 2nd through 9th and he gives up 45 runs, we wouldn't say that Holt was the main reason they lost the game. It would be reasonable to expect that Holt would struggle.Plympton91 said:
If you want to say the Sox manager/FO blew it by bailing on Nava and causing a ripple effect, I'd not have posted. If you want to say that Pedroia and Ortiz not performing meant they had to gamble on Sizemore in the lineup and squeeze Nava out and that caused your ripple, I'd not have posted. If you want to say the failures/under performing of 10 different players led to his offensive struggles being "more visible", then I sign on to that thought.
But to state that the one of the biggest reasons for the team missing the playoffs is the rookie center fielder under-performing offensively for 2 months is simply wrong. You can't depend on a rookie performing offensively when building a team. It is why Cherington sites internal studies of how many rookies can be successfully integrated into the next years roster of a defending champion. Because he didn't and wouldn't bank on the offensive output of a rookie in that position. If you don't plan on the offensive results from that position, it can not be the most important factor of your failure.
The answer is, the lack of Victorino health. His absence is Stonehenge falling on all of the other little pieces.
I also light candles of thanks that Ellsbury is a Yankee... Pinstriped suckers!
If only 2011 wasn't a mirage, his $21-million noodle arm ass would/should be playing in a game like this All-Star thing.
I also light candles of thanks that Ellsbury is a Yankee... Pinstriped suckers!
If only 2011 wasn't a mirage, his $21-million noodle arm ass would/should be playing in a game like this All-Star thing.
I agree with the facts you stated and draw a different conclusion. They built a roster that required Jackie Bradley to play CF in Boston regardless of whether he hit .150 or .350. That's the fundamental, foreseeable, fixable flaw in the roster construction. That's what you hold people accountable for. Everything else to do with the outfield is bad luck or random variation in players they had a right to expect decent performance from, with the possible exception of asking why they seemed to be so blindsided by the extent and length of Victorino's injuries. I'd like to know more about that miscalculation as well.
You can say they didn't plan on JBJ contributing offensively, but a) they didn't add any realistic alternatives to him in the OF, and b) they didn't improve the lineup anywhere else to compensate for the expected dropoff in CF production (as well as likely regression in other spots).RetractableRoof said: