I don't understand why everyone is giving up on Colon so quickly. Last season was his first full pro season and first exposure to the high minors and he exhibited excellent, Arenado-like plate discipline, a little power, and some speed on the basepaths. You'd like to see more power, especially given where he was drafted, but why he couldn't turn into a decent starting infielder given some more development time?
I agree that one can't assume that Ackley is as good of a hitter as Span or Figgins. But it doesn't make sense to me that such a horribly low singles average on balls in play would be skill-related (or predominantly skill-related). My understanding has been that if a player is hacking at stuff outside the zone, the result is a high strikeout/walk ratio and low power, not a good strikeout/walk ratio and an obscenely low BABIP. Even if all he is hitting is ground balls I think he would end up with a significantly higher batting average over time. It would be helpful to know his line drive rate, pop-up rate, swing percentage at pitches outside the zone, etc, but as far as I know that data isn't publicly available.
For instance, Denard Span and Chone Figgins (the first two active players that came to mind as comps in the sense that they are fast, have good control of the strike zone, and don't have much power) have each had almost exactly 28% of their balls in play fall for singles. And that's at the major league level, where defenses are better. If we adjust Ackley's stats to give him what I'll call a "normal" singles rate of 28%, that would put his stat line at .291/.415/.367. Still not fantastic, but much less scary.
Ackley's lack of power concerns me much more than his lack of BA. If you're a relatively fast, athletic player, I don't think it's possible to have only 10% of your balls in play fall for singles over a large sample size.
Any news on Logan Morrison? He's been out over two weeks with a bone bruise in his left shoulder, and I haven't seen anything indicating a timetable for his return.
Harden struck out about 11 per inning last year, so I don't think you can call him mediocre. His RA was much worse in 2009 than 2008, but that was driven almost entirely by big spikes in BABIP and HR/F.
Fair point - maybe the A's offered Harden more and he refused (why he would rather pitch in Arlington I have no idea). But even then why would the A's have given Sheets so much money? If Harden only signed for $6.5m it seems unlikely other teams were offering Sheets in the range of $10m. This feels like the A's bidding against themselves.
How in the world did Sheets get more money than Harden? Or, maybe more to the point - why would the A's give Sheets $10m if they weren't willing to give Harden $7m?
What performance metric is this based on (WARP/VORP/EQA/etc)? It doesn't look to me like fielding or baserunning are accounted for. I assume that would skew the results towards an older peak since those tend to be "young" skills.
Upton has hit 16 home runs over his last 1000+ plate appearances. I know he has had some health issues, but I think it's a leap to say he's going to be a premium bat in the immediate future.
If you're going to crunch those numbers, don't you need to take into account Halladay's salary over the remaining life of his contract and Halladay and Wells's value during the postseason (or is the latter already incorporated in MORP)?
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