Reveille1984

The Anti-Reagins strikes again!

He was rated in the 20's in BA's top 100 prospect list for 2014, and we currently have zero players that are even in the top 100 I believe. Maybe Newcomb will crack the list in 2015, but Heaney is by far our best prospect.

We have just replenished our system with more Rondons, obviously

Who knew we had a guy named Raywilly Gomez, neat

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/2015-zips-projections-los-angeles-angels/

Good post. It doesn't help that we're handcuffed by the contracts of guys like Hamilton, Wilson and Pujols for a while as well. Like you iterated, at a certain point you start hitting diminishing returns and the risk/reward of adding more and more $20M+ a year players just isn't advisable. Especially with how few of them provide commesurate value.

Lester is the only high profile FA I see being remotely worth what they'll get, which is why the competition for him is so high.

Only five teams in baseball had a winning record against >.500 teams, and two of them were Seattle and Oakland. This stat literally means nothing.

Every player has different needs and different things they are driven by in free agency. But with that said, I'm sure 99% of the time guys sign with whoever will give them the most cash and/or who will be seen as more competitive in the next few years. MLB players have games basically every day during the season and half the time they're on an airplane anyways. I don't think lounging on the beach is high up there on the wants list, unless you already live here in the offseason.

As a side note, I can't believe that Hamilton will make $32.4M in 2016 and 2017, my god.

Pretty great deal for the M's. They'll have him for his prime years and at way under market value. 3B is probably the thinnest position in baseball right now as well.

If we're talking the hypothetical of them being FA's this offseason, Kendrick has averaged about 4 WAR over the past four seasons and is solid on both sides of the game. I'd guess more around 4/60 or 5/70 if someone was desperate. Aybar is a year younger than Peralta when he signed, and with how thin the SS market is (pretty much Hanley and a bunch of bums) I could see him getting up to 5/70 as well.

Like the article stated, it seems he's already moving towards the "old guy" skillset - OBP, power and K's over speed and defense. And guys that get to that point rarely just do a complete 180 back towards their original playstyles. I doubt we'll ever see Trout get near 50 steals again or hit for .330-.340 on a consistent basis. He'll probably settle in somewhere between his rookie season and his past season in the coming years as he makes whatever adjustment he can to the high heat and ups his discipline a little more. Something like .300/.390./.550 with 20-30 SB's and 30-35 HR's. When you come into the league as a 10 WAR player, it's pretty much impossible not to regress.

I think if he can put up 2-3 WAR a season over the next few years it would be considered a success by most. The guy seems to have a new nagging issue every time things get going.

Even with the framing of Conger, the Fangraphs article estimated that Hank only adds around one strike per game on average. Which further averages out to about .13 runs saved per game if you trust Baseball Prospectus and their analytics regarding the subject. So with him catching about 80-90 games, that adds 1 WAR over the course of a season due to framing. Which would be great if he was tacking on that skillset to an already strong base of other skills, but that isn't really the case here. As long as Iannetta can continue to provide surplus offensive value, he is by far more valuable overall.

He'll be the next Napoli and hit .400/.500/.650 against us 18x a year.

Not a bad deal, kind of a weird move for the Astros though. They have a lot of catching depth in their system and they moved a cost-controlled back end starter for a backup catcher.... yeah. Maybe they're higher on Hank coming around than we are.

I guess winning 98 games with guys that "swing at crap and get themselves out" while also scoring the most runs in baseball was just luck then. We were streaky durning the season as well and had multiple hot and cold streaks on offense. Our bats got ice cold at a pretty terrible time, get over it already.

Yeah, they should have found more clutch players that have "a killer instinct"

Your posts still shows no reasoning as to why postseason stats are different than the regular season. Howie had a .826 OPS in the 2009 postseason, but you choose to ignore that for some reason even though that's well above his career average. Hamilton had nearly an .800 OPS with 5 HR's in the 2010 postseason (nearly 70 AB's), again not that bad. What a coincidence that players known for being extremely streaky (Hamilton and Kendrick) have huge variations in their small sample size of postseason at bats! What about teams that dominate the ALDS and get crushed in the ALCS? Same with teams that lose in the World Series? Did their clutchness suddenly fade from one series to the next? It just makes no logical sense. I'm sorry that you're "sick of this crapshoot BS", but if you believe any team has a massive advantage over any other in a five game series in baseball, especially amongst evenly matchted playoff teams, you are delusional.

Over the past 25 years, 15 different teams have won a world series and 23 teams have been to the world series. There isn't some magical formula of finding "winning players" to make it to the big dance. We lost because our hitting was cold and streaky, which it has been all year despite the amount of runs we've created. To criticize a player for 20 PA's during the season is asinine due to sample size, but the same amount of PA's during the playoffs is a telling signal of a weak-minded player? I just don't buy it. It is the same as every other cliche people make about players and teams they know nothing about: "They just didn't want it as much! They look like they don't even care! That guy just knows how to win! They were lazy once they clinched and couldn't live up to the occasion!" There's a lot of parity in baseball and anyone can win once they get to the playoffs. Get over it. People who say a team just has players that "can't get it done" when only one of 30 teams wins the championship every year is a weak argument.

Month High FA% MLB Rank April 29.6% 118 May 34.7% 11 June 34.9% 10 July 39.2% 3 August 43.3% 1 September 41.1% 2 Yeah.. time to to make the adjustment.

We've scored three runs in two games. Even with Richards we were pretty much guaranteed to lose both those games.

This game does not seem to amaze me

And he decides to start being aggressive on the bases against a guy throwing nothing but 100mph fastballs