There is only so much you can defend when talking about a player who has played valiantly to his replacement level tagline, but, despite being on a smaller level when compared to players like Burrell, its confused me how the general consensus is that Navi's struggles are so irrecoverable that its time to give up.  While I wouldn't mind seeing a trade (not for overly priced and defensively challenged Victor Martinez, mind you), I don't necessarily think its time to give up on our 25 year old catcher, even for this year.

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Same disclaimer as before, there aren't going to be any graphs, I'm just no good at them.  Just some good clean information this time around:

In this segment I'm going to talk about Gabe Kapler:

Many wondered why we signed Gabe Kapler (or many people wonder now, after Zobrist seemingly ingests every performancing enhancing drug in the western hemisphere, why we signed him).  The point is he was brought in to complete a platoon, and contrary to most (if not all people) I think thats how it should stay.  In this piece I'm going to talk about Kapler, as I said, in the next I will talk about Gabe Gross (who sadly started his progression before I got a chance to officially call it), and then I'll talk about Ben Zobrist (who hopefully for the team doesn't start regressing until later).  Enough with the rambling; I'll continue.

Ok, so Kapler's slash line looks like so .197/.275/.311/.587 with a wOBA of .272, and an ISO of .115.  Not to pretty?  Well, there are alot of signs pointing up that people just don't want to seem to acknowledge.

First things first is the BABIP.  It currently stands at an ugly .240 which would be 12th among qualified players (for obvious playing time reasons he doesn't qualify).  Thats a far cry from his .300 career BABIP (even though BABIP isn't so repeatable I felt I'd bring it up).  Given the fact that he isn't so slow hes a hindrance (he is a hindrance because he has mental lapses, however), I would expect that to regress naturally.  In case it wasn't obvious (it wasn't obvious to me until I did the math), if his BABIP was at career levels right now his batting average would be a .300 and his OBP would be a .414 and his slugging would be probably be in the mid-high .300s.  I guess we have some looking forward to do in that department.

The next aspect I want to talk about is flyball rate.  Right now he is hitting fly balls out of the infield at a 53% pace (and a 26% popup rate just adds to the ridiculousness).  Just a note, the majority of these added fly balls are coming (mostly) at the expense of ground balls, which normally would bode well.  Why hasn't it for Gabe yet?  Well, obvious as it may seem, he has hit none of these fly balls out of the ballpark (yet).  For all the years we have batted ball data he has a 5.9 HR/FB% (whenever I say FB I mean outfield fly, just for reference).  Last year with the Brewers it was 11.6%.  This year... as I said before: none.  Quite obviously this is going to change.

I forgot to point out that he wasn't always platooned as he will/has been this year.  I think its safe to go for 6.5% HR/FB rate as our "conservative" baseline for this analysis and last years 11.5% HR/FB rate as our "exceeded expectations".  By the way, about 9% is the league average.  Now, I'm going to run some quick numbers and to all of them I'm going to put a big neon sign saying small sample size, because yes the sample is incredibly small:

Ok, so what I'll do is I'll use his current batted ball rates of 15.7% line drives, 31.4% ground balls, and 52.9% fly balls.  To get a shorthand version of expected BABIP I'll do the old .157 + .120 shtick.  Then regress it down 10 points for the far-sub league average GB rate (more ground balls generally means higher BABIP).  That puts his xBABIP at .267, obviously low, but still passable for what we're going to do here.  Now we'll take 26.7% of his 61 AB to get 16.3 expected non-home run hits.  Just for reference that is already 4 more hits than he has had so far this season.  So far 7/12 or 58.3% of his non-HR hits have been doubles and 0% have been triples, and as we're not trying to predict quite yet, merely evaluate his performace so far, I'm not going to regress that down to normal levels.

Now we factor in the home runs.  We'll do this by taking his strikeouts away from his AB leaving us with 50 batted balls.  At a 53% out field fly rate this has amounted to 27 balls hit into the outfield (I'm sorry I don't know the average distance on these balls).  Now we'l ltake the low end of our projection, 6.5% of these 27 batted balls to give us 1.75 home runs (given that we had 16.3 hits I'll just make it 18 hits with 2 HR), and the high end of our projection gives us 3.1 HR (I'll just say 19.5 hits with 3 home runs). 

This means that to this point he has actually performed somewhere between these two levels ((Also remember that there are 7 doubles factored into each the high)):

Low: .295/.410/.508/.918

High: .320/.434/.582/1.015

Now that is a little unrealistic as the doubles are sure to regress, so I'll do a quick regression on that by using a 25% doubles/hit ratio which is much more in line with his career numbers.  When I do that 4 doubles come up for the low end sample and 4.875 come up for the high (I'll just say 5).  When I redo the numbers they come out as such

Low: .246/.361/.410/.771

High: .287/.402/.516/.918.

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Personally, I like those numbers, and I fully expect them to be achieved from this point forward if he begins to be given an opportuniry, and if that opportunity comes solely against lefties.  I don't think any of us would be dissapointed with even the low end of that projection coming through.

Just a note for those of you who want to get nitpicky; currently Kapler's BB% is at 10.3%, 2% above his career norms, while his K% is 3% above his career norms.  If the K rate were to drop to career norms more batted balls would occur.  The regression of walk rate would probably depress these numbers to look more like .735 OPS on the low end and .850 OPS on the high end, but I don't want people who are going to criticize me for that to blindly forget about the K rate.  I would also like to point out that his K rate has been better against lefties for his career (so that 18% K rate probably has more like 5% to regress than 3%) and the BB rate has fluctuated but is probably about the same against righties as it is against lefties.

 EDIT:

I felt bad not mentioning that the last set of lines is the range I expect him to hit from this point forward on the year.  In truth I probably should've factored in the K% and the BB% and I should have made a caveat saying that this is from this point forward.

SECOND EDIT:

I just re-did the projection a bit to factor in the walk rate.  It takes away 1.5 walks out of the total 68 plate appearances.  5 more batted balls with the current type would mean 2.5 more flyballs, 1 more infield fly, 1 more groundout, and .5 more line drives.  with a .267 BABIP onto those 5 batted balls turns out to 1.3 hits added to both the low and high projections instead of 1.5 walks.  Given that over a large sample size the weights of 1.3 hits should be about equal to 1.5 walks I'm not going to redo the projection.  It might actually be more of a help to Kapler (as those hits might even be worth more than those walks by a slight slight margin) to do the projections, but I wont.

Just wanted to make sure that everyone knows that the OBP is inflated while the BA/SLG is probably a little on the low side.  Overall the OPS should come out around equal regardless.  Sorry for not factoring this in already.

THIRD EDIT:

God damnit I cocked this one up more than I thought.  I just inferred that I'm using a completley insustainable FB rate to predict future performance.  Expect that the FB rate goes down, the GB/LD go up so the BA/OBP rises a bit.  To be more specific if we use a 38% FB rate, a 15% popup rate it should result in a 3-5% jump in LD% to around 17-20%, and a 12-17% jump in groundball rate to around 43-48%.  His BABIP would probably be around .285 in that case so more hits, a few less home runs and an obviously stagnant walk rate.

I'm sorry for fucking up so many times.  I think I finally have it right, although I'm mad for not having the final numbers.  Just use your imagination on tweaking those last numbers, but if I were to take a stab in the dark I'd say something like

LOW: .270/.340/.400/.740

HIGH: .295/.375/.455/.830

 

Just a disclaimer: You aren't going to get any fancy graphs with my posts, I'm just not that skilled.  Yes, I understand it doesn't take much skill.  No, I'm not ignorant to learn, just more incapable and admittedly lazy.  With that being said..

(I'm assuming throughout this entire post that I'm not going to have to defend stats like FIP, and other slightly sabermetric methods of valuing players.)

Maybe its just me and my defiance to believe anything that has happened thus far is real, but why are people allowing simply understood details to slip right under their noses.  I'll start with what I believe is the more obvious of the oversights: Andy Sonnanstine. (Probably going to be the least controversial as well)...

2-4, 7.38 ERA, 40.1 IP, 24 K, 14 BB, 5 HRA

Oh Boy! Thats bad! I knew we should've traded Sonny instead of Jackson, just look at how good he is in Detroit.  Well. not so fast.

Firstly, Sonny's FIP is at 4.72, a touch below league average, but not as horrible as most people want to make out (or as bad as a 7.38 ERA indicates).  That being said, there are issues with a 4.72 FIP, as that makes him Edwin Jackson, and we didn't trade Edwin Jackson to be blessed with another (although we do have the little Niemann problem, but I'm not getting into that now).

While the League Average Strand Rate is closer to the mid 70s than to the mid 60s we're accustomed to with Sonny, he has consistently posted strand rates in the low-mid 60s.  He has performed well, obviously, despite this, but it could be a reason for his tendancy to give up more runs than his FIP/tRA would suggest.  More alarming is a 59% strand rate this year.  This is bound to progress as the lowest strand rates in the league over the past few years have been as follows: Brian Bannister, 64%, 2008 - Jose Contreras, 62.5%, 2007 - Randy Johnson, 61.8% - 2006, etc. etc. (I do notice that it seems to be rising every year, maybe someone should look into that).  Point is, he is due for some progression in this area even if he is bound to finish subpar in this category for a third straight year.

Another thing bound for progression is at .371 which would be 6th among qualifying starters (yes, he has been bad enough to not qualify...).  Even with a disturbing spike in Line Drive Rate to 23.8%, his BABIP shouldn't be much higher than .350 (and I expect the line drive rate falls back around his career average of 18% the rest of the way, which would reduce this even more).  This should progress, his .371 BABIP hasn't been matched over a full season in over a decade and even .350 was only broken twice over the past decade by Glendon Rusch in 2001 and Kevin Milwood last year.  Just for reference, Kevin Milwood's LD% last year was 25.3%, and we don't have batted ball data for 2001, but Glendon Rusch's career LD% was 23.5% and his career BABIP was .334.  Its not great, but a full .40 points of BABIP can and does mean alot (and this implies absolutley no progression to Sonny's past performance).

Lastly is some basic look at Sonny through Pitch F/x where I'm pretty much going to rehash things already said.  First off, his curve has gotten better (most likely as a result of a slightly new release point).  He is throwing more over the top, as his release point is about 1/2 a foot more towards being directly over-the-top as opposed to his more three quarters delivery of old.  Despite the positive effect it has had on the curveball, it has seemed to affect the slider which has lost a bit of the vertical movement it never really had.  The change-up has gained some drop which was to be expected with a more over-the-top delivery, but it lost a few inches horizontally.  Anecdotally, the change in stuff seems foreign to Sonny, as his trademark low BB rates have been abnormally high.  I'll chalk it up to changed pitch usage (his cutter was good in small doses last year, I don't think I'll ever know what has possessed him to start throwing it even more now (up about 20% from last year when he was already using it 30% of the time... ugh.).  That being said, the velocities and breaks themselves seem to be stagnant (if you factor in the better curveball and tthe loss of slider/change-up decency), so despite my negativity I don't see why these pitches aren't going to start working for him.

I understand I could've been a little contradictory at times, as I wanted to throw out both sides of the argument, but don't be confused, Sonny needs to and has deserved to be in this starting rotation.  At this point he is the third best starter in the rotation, and while slight things have changed there aren't any glaring issues as there are with say... I don't know... Scott Kazmir (I like Niemann too much to throw him under the bus).

 

Well, I'm relatively new to the site and I'm not incredibly well-versed with prospects, but I thought I'd give a Top-100 a shot.  I was originally going to have a paragraph write-up with each prospect, but it took me a few hours to get through Bowden and I was fed up with doing it (so much respect to John for being able to release such a detailed book every year, I would never have the patience for it). This is slightly edited from the list I submitted to the Synthesis (Forgot Arencibia as an example).  Without further adieu here it is, and I'm posting it to see what people think so if you see an issue please post about it, discussion is encouraged.

1)      Matt Wieters

2)      David Price

3)      Jason Heyward

4)      Travis Snider

5)      Madison Bumgarner

6)      Cameron Maybin

7)      Dexter Fowler

8)      Tim Alderson

9)      Trevor Cahill

10)  Andrew McCutchen

11)  Rick Porcello

12)  Jhoulys Chacin

13)  Neftali Feliz

14)  Brett Anderson

15)  Mike Moustakas

16)  Matt LaPorta

17)  Colby Rasmus

18)  Pedro Alvarez

19)  Justin Smoak

20)  Brian Matusz

21)  Derek Holland

22)  Tim Beckham

23)  Lars Anderson

24)  Logan Morrison

25)  Thomas Hanson

26)  Mat Gamel

27)  Freddie Freeman

28)  Jarrod Parker

29)  Michael Stanton

30)  Carlos Santana

31)  Eric Hosmer

32)  Gordon Beckham

33)  Brett Wallace

34)  Josh Vitters

35)  Yonder Alonso

36)  Buster Posey

37)  Wade Davis

38)  Brett Cecil

39)  Chris Tillman

40)  Michael Bowden

41)  Alcides Escobar

42)  Jeremy Hellickson

43)  Jordan Schafer

44)  Fernando Martinez

45)  Taylor Teagarden

46)  Jesus Montero

47)  Phillippe Aumont

48)  Elvis Andrus

49)  Jordan Zimmerman

50)  Austin Jackson

51)  Reid Brignac

52)  Ben Revere

53)  Carlos Carrasco

54)  Michael Main

55)  Aaron Cunningham

56)  Carlos Triunfel

57)  Adrian Cardenas

58)  Michael Saunders

59)  Tyler Flowers

60)  Desmond Jennings

61)  Aaron Hicks

62)  Aaron Poreda

63)  Kyle Blanks

64)  Wilmer Flores

65)  Jordan Walden

66)  Greg Halman

67)  Max Ramirez

68)  Angel Villalona

69)  Angel Salome

70)  James McDonald

71)  Matt Dominguez

72)  Jake Arietta

73)  Ivan Dejesus

74)  Todd Frazier

75)  Chris Carter

76)  Neftali Soto

77)  Jason Donald

78)  Michael Burgess

79)  Kila Kaaihue

80)  Chris Coghlan

81)  Daryl Jones

82)  Beau Mills

83) J.P. Arencibia

84)  Jose Tabata

85)  Adam Miller

86)  Ethan Martin

87)  Jeff Niemann

88)  Matt Moore

89)  Nick Weglarz

90)  Michael Taylor

91)  Jemile Weeks

92)  Brad Holt

93)  Vincent Mazzarro

94)  James Simmons

95)  Gorkys Hernandez

96)  Jake McGee

97)  Scott Elbert

98)  Chris Perez

99)  Jonathan Niese

100) Nick Barnese