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Me neither. If players cannot handle better competition, then MLB was never a big part of their future...

Plus the double standard of counting seats when we like the player. Santana had a 1.372 OPS in Worcester. DFA him!! Cordero has a 1.172 OPS in Worcester. He was no good in Boston!! Duran has a 1.006 OPS in Worcester. Future star!!!

To me, the Rays are still the team to beat. They fly the American League flag for 2020. And they're the only team I have ever seen that gets better when they shed their star players. Some teams rebuild. Some teams reload. The Rays molt; they shed some older deadweight, and come out better than before...

I think it's a given this team is playing above expectations. They're on a pace to win 98 games. Before the season started, even the most optimistic people had them in the 85-90 range. Most people were below that, and some as much as 25 wins below their current pace. Of course, if they keep this current pace and win 98 games, then they are legitimate contenders for the WSC. Sometimes when reality conflicts with our expectations, reality isn't the one that's wrong...

Oh young Padawan, you let the ways of the ancients deceive you. See, the trick here is to put the two lefties atop the lineup so as to encourage the opposing team to bring in their LHRP. But the new rule says the pitcher must face three hitters, not two. And Duran plus Verdugo is only two. So you put Renfroe and his LHRP-crushing abilities behind Duran and Verdugo in the third spot so as to discourage this behavior from opposing managers or to pay for it if they so choose...

It’s possible he has always cheated, but it’s also possible he never has. It is amazing the way fans leap to the “cheater until proven innocent” logic with baseball…

I like the idea of Verdugo at leadoff, but if he prefers batting second and getting a better look at the pitcher, why not leave him there?

I think the bottom 4 should be: Arroyo Dalbec Hernandez Vazquez Modern analytics, in what is undoubtedly a conspiracy, ignore the obvious benefits of Alphabetical Order…

I do like the idea of Dalbec as a corner OF…

Michael Crichton’s exact point in “Jurassic Park”…

Much like with the steroid issues, teams have hired chemists to develop newer, better, stickier substances…

In a perfect world, Devers to 1b, Bogaerts to 3b and get a good defensive SS. But our world just refuses to be perfect…

Somehow they will find some 28yo career minor leaguer to pick up the slack...

Richards does rank in the top 100%ile for spin rate, but he has for his entire career. If he is cheating now, then he always has been. One thing about him though, is that he already has 74 IP this year. This is the most he has thrown since 2018 and after 6 or so more IP, he will have his highest total since 2016....

The Rays also signed Longoria to a massive contract before dealing him. In fact, they extended him twice...

The QB rating in football is the worst stat ever. Ever seen the formula?

At least he is hitting better on the road now. Road OPS is up to .840. He’s still benefit heavily from Polar Park, but improving…

There was also a stat called Total Average that’s rarely used but incorporated SB and CS, but it never caught on…

I don’t think it’s fair for sacrifices. But sac flies not being at bats will never make sense to me. And really, the entire name of “sacrifice fly” feels inaccurate. It makes it sound like the hitter is willingly hitting a fly ball deep enough to drive in a runner but not too deep so as to land for a hit. Is the hitter really sacrifice himself here. I’d bet more sac flies are the product of happenstance than attempts to purposefully fly out deep enough to drive in a run. (And why only on a run-scoring play? It is too ponder. Fly out and a runner scores from third? No at bat. Fly out and the runner advances from 2nd to 3b? You’re 0 for 1…

OPS doesn’t treat hit and walks equally. OBP does but SLG doesn’t. I think my conceptual stat would but it’s a fixable flaw…

I've see proposals like that for new statistics. My main flaw with OPS is that it is not quantifiable. Like, if one player has an OPS of .700 and one has an OPS of .900, what does that mean, bedsides the .900 is better? Re-arranging the ratio of OBP to SLG does not fix this flaw. Really, one thing that might help is a new statistic calculated by Total Bases/PA. Or better yet, (Total Bases + Walks + HBP)/PA. Sort of like OPS, but without the lack of a common denominator. I think I will call it HE, or Hitter Efficiency. Although I am open to better names

I’d rather see Devers at 1b than Casas. If one of those two had to be traded (which isn’t the case), I’d prefer it be Casas…

At least the range comes close to doubling and there’s a greater difference between success and failure. No stat really separates hitters like OPS when it comes to range between bad and good.. But as OPS is not quantifiable, then SLG is an underrated stat IMO…

But the point is they also do not differ by all that much. That was always the point here, that we take miniscule ranges we would ignore in many other facets of life and blow them up like they are enourmous. Even you spent the last few days arguing from a perspective of total hits and trying to install the greater numbers. Why? I find it hard to believe you did not see the initial point and struggled with the concept that 28% - 22% = 6%. And if I started to get into how every team in baseball wins between 40% and 60% of their games (or falls slightly outside that range), where would you take it? The point is we watch a game where every hitter is successful between 20% and 30% of the time, and we trat the high end like it is massively different than the low end. Even you yourself just said "much more valuable". Heck, you even said "it takes a lot of skill" to hit .300. Know what else takes a lot of skill? Hitting .200. Sure, it's not as impressive, but it's not some throw-away either. I know all this and see all this and don't try to artificially inflate differences between hitters, and even I value the .300 hitter more than the .200. Even though the difference is not great. I know how significantly each run affects ERA, but I still value the lower ERA. Although a lot of these miniscule differecens are actually why I have turned to other stats, too...

No, the delta shows how we magnify small differences in baseball. The difference between a .220 hitter and a .320 really is only 10 hits in 100 at bats (and 10 hits in 100 at bats is 10 percent!!!!). The difference between a 3.50 ERA and a 4.50 ERA is 17 earned runs over 150 innings. But we lol at the lower players like they’re incapable and the treat the better ones like stars. And there is a huge irony in you accusing me of being incapable of admitting I’m wrong (mvp called me out on things like 3 times yesterday. Maybe more. I made comical excuses but that’s a form of copping to them. The relative difference is meaningless. A .280 hitter named Player A might be 27% better than a .220 hitter named Player B, if you like. But what does that mean? The likelihood of Player A getting a hit is still only 6% greater than Player B getting one (assuming batting averages are accurate predictors). Spin how you want and sell it to who believes you, but that’s not going to make Player A’s average 0.27 better than Player B’s…