S5Dewey

And probably 2019 too, unless DD gets an offer that blows him away.

Wow. Who compiles this stuff? And I thought I had no life! LOL

In his start at Portland he went out and destroyed the Y's AAA team in what he knew was going to be his last inning on the mound. 3 overpowering K's sandwiched around a 2-strike opposite field hit. As I was thinking about it later it became obvious that he was nibbling, seeing what he had and what he could do during the early part of the game but wanted to make a statement in his last inning.

I'll drink to that. In fact, IMO it never should have been started, for the same reason you stated.

Exactly right. There's a reason JBJ is 4th on the team in Runs Scored, behind only Betts JDM & Benintendi - the top 3 in the order - and ahead of Bogaerts & Moreland. He's also 6th in RBI, ahead of Moreland, Nunez & Holt. I love this guy hitting 9th.

My opinion (with absolutely NOTHING statistical to back it up ) is that JBJ was always getting good pitches to hit. He just wasn't hitting them. Now that he's changed his approach and is hitting more the opp way pitchers are faced with the dilemma of whether to give him good pitches to hit or taking their chances with Mookie. Since a pitcher can only avoid so many hitters they're still taking their chances with JBJ by continuing to give him pitches to hit. So it's both.

Both.

LOL Are you sure you want to go there??

Thank you. You apparently think I need your help in cultivating my people skills. I'll give that the weight I think it deserves. What I have said repeatedly is that I think WAR is useful but it's flawed, which is exactly what most people here (including you) seem to think. That's a problem...how? I'll say this again. I think WAR is flawed and here's what I believe is an incorrect conclusion drawn from WAR. Every years since 2015 B-R has given JBJ a higher oWAR than dWAR. I think most people would disagree with that but I doubt it since virtually every poster here thinks JBJ is one of the best defensive CF'ers in the league. However, that's what WAR says so... it must be true? You may say that this doesn't agree with my personal opinion but IMO it also doesn't agree with the personal opinion of most posters here. I didn't create those two (IMO) ridiculous values, WAR did, so your gripe should be with WAR and not me. I just reported it.

I don't know how many times I have to say this: I don't "dislike" WAR. I just think it's overused and not as valuable as most people think it is. I challenge things. I'm not one to believe something just because so-and-so says it's right. IMO there are enough flaws in WAR to make it worth challenging and it appears to me that there are others here who are coming to believe that too. So...you may have to consider that when I see something that IMO is inherently wrong with the conclusions one would draw from WAR I'm going to post about it. When I do that I'm going to piss off those people who have a different opinion. I can live with that. Can you?

It wasn't my intention for this to be "another anti- WAR diatribe". What I'd heard here is that any discussion of WAR is a jumping off point and people would be willing to listen to a differing viewpoint as long as it was based in reasonableness. As I said in the OP, color me optimistic if you like, but I do think that JBJ has solved enough of his problems to warrant being given a pass on the trading block. As far as Baez goes, I think he may have solved all of his problems (whatever they may have been) and I think he may be a fine 2B but I don't see the solution to our problems as being trading away one outstanding up-the-middle ballplayer for another. And I agree. I'd much rather see Bradley extended. My fear is that with this season - and if he does have his problems solved - his price may go up to the point where we lose him. That's why I would have extended him when he was hitting .200 and we probably could have extended him cheaper. Because I've always believed in him.

Again we're taking WAR, with all it's accepted flaws and using it as a benchmark. We say that we accept the fact that WAR is flawed and yet here we have an entire argument as to who he should be traded for based on.... WAR. As for me me. I wouldn't trade him for any one of those guys. Since we're using WAR as a measure of value, and for the sake of this I'll assume it has more value than I believe it does.... WAR takes all the historical value, the good and the bad, and tries to compile it into one value. In the case of JBJ it considers all the bad months evenly with all the good months and it's MY OPINION that he's solved many of his problems that caused the bad months. I've always believed that what a player has done recently ("recently" being a matter of opinion) has more bearing on who a player is that what he did in the past. Therefore - again, my opinion - is that his true worth now is more than his WAR reflects. What I see us having right now, today, is two of the best outfielders in baseball with one being slightly better than the other. However, B-R WAR says it's not that close. It says JBJ is worth 1.8 wins above a AAAA player while Mookie is 8.9 wins above that same player. That may (or may not) be true if one includes the first two months of the season but it certainly doesn't reflect the JBJ that's been playing for the past couple of months. You can say what you want about his being streaky but (IIRC) JBJ's problems were identified here as his approach at the plate and the fact that he was pulling the ball too much, both of which have greatly improved over the past couple of months. Color me unduly optimistic if you like but IMO the days of the extended slumps are over. I believe that what the receiving team would be getting if we trade him is the JBJ who's playing today and his overall WAR doesn't reflect who he is now. Therefore if we trade him for any of those players with a WAR of about 10 we'd be selling low on him.

This whole idea of trading JBJ reminds me of what I once heard someone say about his son. "This kid of mine, he's a nice kid but once he gets a bad idea in his head there's no talking him out of it. Everyone gets ideas and most of them say, 'Bad idea, throw it out, Bad idea, throw it out, Bad idea, throw it out' but once my son gets a bad idea he muckles right onto it an nothing will make him let go of it!" Trading JBJ is a bad idea. (And please don't come back at me with some idea like, "But what about if we could work a trade where we get Scherzer and Kershaw straight-up for JBJ? /s/ Every player is available if the price is right but in reality the asking price for JBJ should be so high that no GM would go for it. )

"Enhancing his market value?" Sure, and so is Mookie, and Beni, too. In fact, if I were forced to trade any one of the three at this time it would be Beni. This is an outfield you build around, not trade away.

I'm not convinced he was bunting to sacrifice. IMO he was bunting for a hit (surprise! LOL) and instead bunted it back to the pitcher.

Yes. I can distinctly remember a stretch near the start of 2016 when he was 'yanking' his pitches. He couldn't find the plate with both hands and a flashlight. Fortunately his reputation preceded him and batters were swinging at a lot of pitches off the plate. That was his worst season since his rookie year. The good news is that he did straighten it out.

That's the kind of thing I was referring to when I used Scherzer as an example - a guy who has all the planets and stars aligned so that he has Scherzer-like stuff. As I said originally, everything being somewhere near equal I believe momentum exists. Can I prove it statistically? No. But by the same token the doubters can't prove it doesn't exist because of those variables. Baseball is a random game!

Obviously momentum doesn't accurately predict wins. If it did once a team wins a few games in a row the roll would go on and on and on building on itself. And that doesn't happen. That's because baseball is dependent on pitching. Unless there are some statistics someplace to disprove it I think we still agree that good pitching beats good hitting. A team can have a lot of momentum going on but facing Max Scherzer will deflate that momentum in a hurry. However, I will stand by that, all things being somewhere near equal, momentum is valuable. It won't accurately predict wins but it will predict the likelihood of wins.

We will differ on that.

There are too many variables for anything to be 100% predictable in baseball but if the Sox were on a winning streak and playing a team on a losing streak I'd bet on the Sox. I'd lose my bet occasionally but IMO I'd win more than I'd lose.

The thing I've noticed is that when some folks start defending WAR (and dWAR in particular) there's a lot of "if'", "could be", "may be" "might be", "I suspect", "I presume" and "not sure" involved in the defense. I've gotta stay that if I'm on a jury statements like that don't prove much to me. I'd think it would be more candid to just step up and say, "I don't know what's going on in the calculations, but I believe it", rather than try to defend something they don't know enough about to defend. The thing I will say about WAR is what Notin said earlier... "No one has said the system is perfect. In fact, everyone admits it is not. But that doesn't mean it is useless, either." Slash does raise a really good point though about WAR vs. WAA. I never understood why they would try to compare a player against a fictitious "replacement level player" rather than an average player whose value can be determined.

Ya think?

The thing I find "interesting" about that is that up here in my little corner of the country many more tourists (and people in general) have French as their first language than Spanish, and yet I'm seeing more and more signs with Spanish translations. Probably because most of the French speaking people have also learned English so they don't have to have French translations available.

IIRC some of those have been auctioned off. Maybe it's being done as a money-maker?

A bigger question might be how badly would having a ML team in the area affect the attendance at the MiL games.