Not every FJM post is worthy of its own diary... but this one made me throw up a little bit in my mouth, from laughter.


A random section of their fisking of a Phil Rogers article:

Doesn't this sort of sound like the 24-year-old who comes back to his old high school and brags about how crazy it used to be at Eisenhower High when him and Mikey Rags and Paul Shutson used to drink beer while doing the rope climb and remember that one time when Mikey took a shit inside the guidance counselor's file cabinet? That was awesome!!!

Aside from the snark in the title, the article is very positive on the return for the two big fish at the deadline:

The question is whether the package adds up. The best young catcher in the game, two hard-throwing lefties, an even harder-throwing righty, a toolsy shortstop, an equally toolsy pair of center fielders, and a guy who can step into the back end of a big league rotation right now... for a quality first baseman and perhaps two months from a fragile sometime star-quality reliever? It may not knock your socks off, but in this market, with prospects at a premium, it seems to me that Daniels did exceptionally well.

Doesn't mention the Lofton trade, or say too much we haven't heard before, but it's the most detailed account of the Rangers' return in the two big trades that I've seen outside of LSB (and one of the most positive).

One line that particularly interested me:

That Feliz rated so high might surprise some, but Kevin's an admitted velocity whore, and Feliz throws freely and easily into the upper 90s, and supports it with a nasty slider that needs work, and his change is even more notional; if he were only going to be a reliever, it wouldn't be hard to envision Feliz becoming some sort of latter-day blend of Jeff Nelson and Joel Zumaya, but seeing as he won't be 20 until next spring and is still starting in the short-season complex leagues, we shouldn't get too far ahead of ourselves.

Tasty.

The All-Star Game needs more stooped-over, arms flying submariners! Vote Pat Neshek! Evidently the Final Vote race is close and he's in third, behind Jeremy Bonderman and Hideki Okajima.

Statistically, it's difficult to say that he's more deserving than his competition. But he's a middle reliever who pitches like this.

Neshek needs this. We need this. The world needs this.

EDIT: I guess you can vote for Chris Young, too, if you want. I'm voting against him to piss off hurlerhurley.

Masset got his first start of the season today, getting a win against the Chicago Cubs. Solid but not spectacular performance: 5.2 IP, 3 hits, 2 ER, 3 BBs, 3 Ks.

He's been having a pretty mediocre-to-terrible season for the White Sox (this outing lowered his ERA to 5.73). The early returns say we didn't give up too much in this guy. Hopefully that continues to be the case.

The Hardball Times has an article up on a simple way to look at infield defense: taking the play-by-play data from mlb.com, seeing how many ground balls are fielded on each slice of the field, and then comparing this to each team's actual number of ground balls fielded.

For the Rangers, there is an interesting result.  Overall, we were 12 plays below average on the year, which is poor but not terrible.  However, Young and Kinsler fielded almost exactly the number of balls you'd expect them to.  Blalock and Teixeira were both below average in their areas.

Obviously, this isn't what we expect, given specifically what we know of Teixeira and Young's respective range.

Two things which could have caused this: the data is not adjusted for handedness of pitchers or batters, or the ground-ball tendencies of the staffs.  Are the Rangers unusual in either of these departments?  Or are there other reasons why the data would give this result?

Here's is a pdf with all of the infield defense graphs on it, which is where you can see the Rangers' data.

Here's the link.

This ranking is purely statistical and very shallow. It's based on 2006 stats so (for instance) Danks is still included in the Rangers ranking. The only stats used are OPS for batters and OPS-against for pitchers, and they only considered players at Low-A or higher. To rank systems, he attempts to quantify "studs" and "depth" by seeing where each player performed compared to other players in his age group.

One thing that stands out to me is that the Devil Rays are ranked 14th -- does this show some of the disconnect between performance and athleticism, or is this primarily because the D-Rays have a lot of high school picks?

Obviously, there is a lot of sentiment around here to stick Botts in the DH hole for the 2007 season, and I wouldn't be against that necessarily, but this article at mlbtraderumors.com makes a few good points re: Alou moving to a DH job somewhere for next year.

From the article:

Despite making only 378 PAs this year, Alou was the 9th best RF in the game according to VORP. He played left field in '05, and his offensive output ranked 6th at the position.

The Fielding Bible described Alou's work in left as adequate, as his speed, range, and arm do not impress. I can only imagine what they'd say about his work in right field, a tougher position.

It seems clear that Alou would benefit from designated hitting. It'd be his first time with an AL team. Alou's .571 slugging percentage in 2006 was best among all free agent hitters with 300 PAs, Aramis Ramirez and Alfonso Soriano included. The beauty of Alou is that his deal would probably be for just one year. Low risk, high reward, just like Frank Thomas was entering this season.

The Frank Thomas comparison was the first thing that jumped into my mind when I saw the headline, and I'd be in favor of a one-year, $8-10 million deal. (Or maybe a $4 or 5-mil type deal, with a lot of backloaded incentives. I'm not sure which would be more realistic.)

Whatever happened to him?  I remember Steve Busby and whoever was with him on the KRLD post-game show back a few years ago being really excited about him and then I stopped following the game quite so closely for a while.  When I came back, he had disappeared.  Looking at his stats, it looks like injuries did it, but what exactly was so severe that he was never able to come back after a few innings 2003?  It doesn't appear that he had any minor league stop that was less than stellar, although he only had a couple of years with decent sample sizes.