sk7326

Vasquez is a bad hitter - but probably good enough to let the rest of his virtues play. It's a bad you can live with. Hanley and the LF pu pu platter is more problematic.

No, no, no - they are not ignoring the strike zone - they flat out cannot see it. It's like a blind person driving. He's going to probably hit a mailbox or seven - it's not someone blithely ignoring Garmin - it is a guy doing something that is way way way over his head.

The strawman is strong in this one. The Roberts steal was exciting - and it was a call at 2nd base which the human ump is best equipped to do in 2016 with 2016 tools. There are all sorts of those calls each game - and the umps do a marvelous job with it. Ball and strikes - the umps cannot do it well. Every game, there are pitches right down the middle called balls, and pitches at the shoetops called strikes. The umps try, but they have to use lazy crutches, like relying on the catcher's position, to even get it to "consistently wrong". Giving them some meaningful help in the 12.5% of their job (since an ump works the plate 25% of the time) part of their job that is the most difficult and most frequently botched. I see you are making a bit of a slippery slope argument - where does this end? And this is true - since if technology allowed plays at the plate to be called correctly then hey, whaddya know. But that stuff is cost prohibitive, and has not been proven. The Pitch F/X technology is actually far enough along to use in real life.

Benintendi is .350/.400/.675 in his last 10 games (small sample, but effectively the second half of his month there. Obviously prospects take time and such, but if he puts something good out in the next month or so, moving him into Holt's position is still very much on the table. They are being slower with Moncada just because of the comparative lack of experience. But yes, 3B or an outfield corner start to look likely for him.

In RC+, 2nd place is closer to 29th than to 1st ... 1st is Ortiz

well, by the definition you imply, most valuable becomes a commentary on your teammates. I think value creation in baseball is appreciably more straightforward. Wright has been an enormous surprise.

Papi is a fair choice. He has been the best offensive player in baseball by a mile. The gap between him and #2 is bigger than the gap between #2 and #29. Bogaerts moves a little above once you consider position and the total package. But Papi is surely on the podium. Definitely in contention for a podium spot with Betts, Bradley and Wright. Price, Pedroia, Kimbrel all get honorable mentions.

Ah, the appeal to the mob. There are lots of problems which are not popular causes - so that does not address the issue one way or the other. The umps are the best at what they do. The subtask that is calling balls and strikes - a crucial but hardly only thing an umpire does, they are destined to do it poorly. I, as a civilian am destined to do it worse. We know Pitch F/X does it better. I don't mind umpires making calls - but that the umpires do it is not an important driver to baseball being what it is. Sports are very human endeavors, and that is why 2004's Game 4 would not have been the same with the PapiBot 3000 hitting that homerun. The homerun would not have lost much of anything if the ump at the plate was sent the ball-strike signal automatically.

It is - I think you have to thank the SABR movement for much of this ... MLB has been very free with their data. This is the flipside of it.

Bogaerts leads the majors among position players in fWAR at 4.1 - so either cut he's an elite MVP candidate so far. Kershaw has led everybody with a Pedro-esque 4.9 so far.

I think right now - the Sox with their rotation are in an interesting place. Farrell has two luxuries - mainly that Price and Wright have been good bets to go deep into games. Additionally Porcello largely has as well. Until Dombrowski solves the rest of it, I do think Farrell needs to be particularly vigilant with the other two starters. 18 batters tops for the starters - doesn't matter score. Turn the lineup over twice and then hand it off to Hembree or Barnes. I would be tempted to think of a quasi-tandem approach there. Use the cover which Price and Wright offer to be flexible with those last two guys. Right now, E-Rod's feel is not there, and while he needs big league reps to learn his thing, the Sox need to treat him like a 4-6 inning pitcher and let him figure it out.

Wright has been outstanding - probably #3 on my ballot. Fortunately baseball's individual contributions to the team are easier to glean than others. Bogaerts has been arguably the league's best player - and that trumps the rest for me.

Dead - because they'd be completely unable to score

Here is what I don't understand about the "part of the enjoyment" argument ... It seems to me that "we like the imperfections" is the same sort of macro hand wave, placing a quaint notion of big picture poetry above a game played by extremely well trained adults, and something which means way too much to a lot of people. Now, while flawed umps might - for some - improve the show (and I acknowledge that is important), it seems unfair to the men on the field who have worked awfully hard at this. When Livan Hernandez struck out McGriff to end a CG in the 1997 NLCS, I remember thinking "it would have been nice if McGriff had a fair shot" when a pitch at this mid-shin was called a strike. Furthermore, as the live tracking on TV continues to proliferate, the yawning gap between visual evidence and what the ump is doing is a real credibility gap. I am impressed by the restraint shown by TV networks - I would have used a laugh track to go with particularly awful calls.

Has not been difficult - Xander has not just been the MVP of the Sox, but he has probably been the MVP of the American League Last year he figured out how to spoil pitchers pitches by spraying singles - which is great, but it kept the power down He has figured out now how to not just handle the pitches they are trying to get him out with, but to force them to give him ones to drive and then not missing.

All of the top choices will sign - yes there might be one that doesn't, but guys walking away from 7 figure checks is generally not smart. For most guys, this is the largest check they will get from baseball.

The thing I think with #3 is not that it is a hot button issue, but that it could be quickly. Baseball has blessedly been very liberal in letting the Pitch/FX data be disseminated to the public - both via the gameday stuff as well as just for analytics. The league knows how important that stuff is to a lot of people (baseball is uniquely built for that - big part of its tradition). But you disseminate that and you are also sharing just how dreadfully, blatantly wrong the umpires are, every single night. I am not sure how long they can pretend the state of calling balls and strikes is okay when there is so much damning visual evidence. Now the task is impossible. Between issues of tracking the ball flight of an 80 mph pitch (to say nothing of a 95 mph one), watching the swing of the bat, and general depth perception ... the best umps in the world can only get to (collectively) about a 6/7 level. When one sees how important the count is to the success of an at-bat, mistakes change things, all the time. Now - I understand this sort of large error margin is there in other sports - offensive line infractions in football, off-ball fouls in basketball, almost every minute of a hockey game - but there is existing, mature technology that would bring the error rate down a lot, and it could be implemented within a week.

I wished Mo Vaughn a happy thanksgiving at a Celtics game. I also had a chance to talk to and meet Jay Williams (who went to Duke, drafted #2 and is a college basketball talking head on ESPN) after a game at the Boston Shootout when he was in high school. There are a lot of other athletes I saw at autograph sessions and stuff (Aramark Wear Guard in Rockland, MA had guys down regularly) - but I don't think that is what you had in mind.

If the system went down, you'd have human umps again. I'd actually advocate for human umpiring through other levels of baseball because you don't want the skill - such as it is - to completely atrophy.

I do understand the quirks - baseball fans are funny. An entire half of them want to watch pitchers hit after all. (a professional athlete doing something which is impossible for him to do well while working on his primary craft) I respect your view - I am all about the human element ... but I'm not there to watch the umpshows.

A lot are. A lot are also pitches right down the middle which the ump misses because the catcher was positioned outside and the pitcher missed over the plate. A lot are balls called above the belt which are statutorily strikes ... or strikes at the knees which are more or less made up at random.

There are enough judgment calls out there - and the strike zone is objective, not a blank canvas for Joe West's artistic sensibility.

What I find interesting about the debate is a level of willing flat-eartherism at work. It is rare that there is a clear, mature technology that beats the humans (without causing crippling mass unemployment or whatever) that is voluntarily set aside. Certainly in the longer run - having good pitch F/X technology in the hands of viewers and not the umpires provides a major, major credibility gap. The call which comes up most frequently is the one they have proven they simply cannot do.

To be fair, Bogaerts' power is arriving ...

The existence of the rule is ...