I agree wholeheartedly with all of the comments made about Ski and Tellez.
One led the Pirates in HR last year and is making near minimum, and one is supposedly a power hitting veteran making $3.2 mil. Sometimes BC tries too hard to be too smart. On the positive side, Jack has cut his K rate from last year's 32.3% down to 23.2%.
We cannot afford to be without Jack Suwinski. We cannot afford to keep trotting Tellez out to 1B or call anybody up when Connor Joe is off to an excellent start (1.1 fWAR) and hitting LH (306) and RH (284) equally well, and fielding above league average at .995.
Try another direction. I think nearly everyone including strong supporters of him would agree that Suwinski has been terrible so far this year and a drain on an already anemic offense. My question is why he’s given so much leeway to be awful when guys like Gonzales and Davis along with others in the past have been sent to Indy try to figure it out. Meanwhile he stays in Pittsburgh dragging the offense down even further while waiting and hoping he might improve? We can not only afford to be without THIS Jack Suwinski but unfortunately would be a better team with both him and Tellez off of the team regardless of who replaced them.
Why does Suwinski get special and in my opinion misguided treatment? Because he hit 26 home runs last year? That was last year. Tellez hit 35 a couple of years ago. Does that mean he gets to hang around indefinitely in the so far false hope of some magical breakout? I would love for Suwinski to “breakout” just as I’d like to see Tellez go an a tear and hit 30 home runs but it’s not happening and it’s hard to see how letting them continue to be this bad is helping anyone.
Went over this with you already....Jack is 25. Jack has 2 good MLB seasons under his belt. 99 OPS+ and 115 OPS+. Davis nor Nick have had any success yet. Nick is now getting the chance. You just want to look the other way at 26 Hrs as if it means nothing? Over 700 OPS seasons mean nothing? Tough crowd.
Last year does mean nothing if it doesn’t translate to the present or future. Clearly you and I see him differently and that’s fine. Believe it or not, I hope you’re right. You appear to believe he’s on the verge of breaking out but he, as well as some other lineup regulars, continue to not only fail to pull their own weight but pull the whole team down with them. For how long is that okay?
How does it make fans feel to realize that Rowdy Tellez is #1055 and Jack Suwinski is #1038 out of 1062 MLB players in fWAR? To put it a different way, the negative contributions of those two exactly cancel out the positive contributions of Cruz and Reynolds who have the same positive WARs as they do negative. Maybe not an exactly equal or fair comparison but in these days of analytics it must say something.
To get an idea just how bad these guys have been: They're the same degree worse than a replacement level player -- that is, a random guy brought up from AAA -- as a replacement level player is worse than Carlos Correa or Yordan Alvarez. Just replacing them with crappy players would be a significant improvement.
Anybody worrying about whether Jake Lamb would be an upgrade over Tellez isn't grasping how bad Tellez is. It's almost impossible for Lamb NOT to be an upgrade. It'd be one of the lowest-risk moves ever.
If Ben signed Lamb as a plan b to Tellez not working out, I give him a little bit of credit. If he now implements that plan b, I'll give him a lot more credit. But based on his and Shelton's comments to the PG over the weekend, I don't see anything changing with Tellez for the next month or two.
Didn't get to see the game. Try to check in a few times on MLB Network. I was worried that priester would get shelled. Great to see that he had a solid outing.
Lot of groundball singles, but also too much hard contact: groundball or no. Left too many pitches over the middle in the first two innings. Much better after the 2nd. He seemed to have found something with his changeup. I'm not sure what. It still looked meh... without great movement and much too close in velocity to his fastball. but he was fooling guys with it and throwing it a lot.
He's always been a groundball pitcher. Barring a major pitching adjustment, this is who Priester is. The upside is that he's still young, especially given that SP tends to take longer to develop.
He has had groundball tendencies always and been a pitch-to-contact groundballer at times going sinker/slider heavy against righties. He is still feeling his way toward a strategy with lefties. I think he might have hit on something with his changeup tonight. Since it doesn't vary in velocity much from his fastball, he was using it as a substitute for his sinker, rather than a change-of-pace pitch, tonight against lefties, and it was pretty effective. He tried this against righties too a couple of times. Be interesting to see if anything comes of this.
I like Priester to stick in the majors. If not this year, then soon. With a pitcher his age, you figure there are at least a couple of noticeable adjustments in his future. I don't get down on pitchers completely until age 27. Long leash in my imaginary world where I'm the GM.
I forgot about the sunflower seeds and had to look it up. I remember it now and it made me laugh. That could be our site's new saying when we see a lack of awareness moment. "sunflower seeds".
The main rationalization for anything Hayes does is that he's good.
Forget the culture. They need more guys who can hit. Just eliminating the black hole that always seems to be 1B would be addition by subtraction. [No need to insert Tellez joke here; he is a joke.]
I've never gotten the logic of your best defensive player being at 3B rather than SS. In the few times he's appeared at SS or shifted to an effectively SS position, he has been fine.
On balance, I like Hayes as a hitter. According to Savant, he has the 18th most compact swing in the majors (6.8' length) and a slightly above average bat speed (71.8 mph).
There is room for Hayes to become a more complete hitter if he can square up the ball better. One thing that hurts him is he doesn't swing hard on enough swings. 16.6% of his swings are classified as hard. Just raising that to 20% would make him nearly a Bryan Reynolds clone. Simply put, he's not being aggressive enough with his power.
Admittedly, swinging harder isn't magical. Tellez swings hard *A LOT*. But it's where there's room for improvement in Hayes' game. Also, his barrel rate is downright trash. Getting even a little better contact would go a long way for him.
See... Cherington is an idiot. There was method to Huntington's madness. He groomed Hayes in a 3Bman because on shifts vs. lefties, Hayes had to cover the whole left side of the IF. On shifts vs. righties, the SS played shallow LF when the 2Bman moved over, so Hayes was covering a lot of the left side. When they banned shifts, all that went out the window, and Hayes should have moved to SS, but Cherington is too stupid to understand what Huntington was doing. Huntington was something of a wizard with defensive alignments.
GMNH's big mistake was expecting his edge to last longer than it did. The Pirates thought a combination of pitching to contact and the defensive shift would anchor them for a while. Arguably, it did. Three years of highly competitive baseball isn't nothing. Where GMNH went wrong was not having another trick once the rest of the league caught up.
As for GMBC . . . the current track record with hitting prospects is getting disconcerting. I've long thought he'll be gone by the time anything comes to fruition, and this season just makes me feel more so. If someone like NickGon or Davis doesn't pay off soon, GMBC's best hitting prospects might not contribute to the MLB team until Termarr gets there. That would be a horrendous record.
I don't get it at all. Joe is literally better against righties than Tellez. Seems like if Guy B is better at a job than Guy A, then Guy B is the starter.
Don't get my hopes up. Until Tellez hits the 60-day IL or the trade news, this sort of talk is not allowable. Seriously, can't he experience some of that patented discomfort already?
this umpire was unbearable for the pirates. so many out of the zone and then some in the zone not called for Priester. Plus calling check swings when that is easily the 1b ump's call to make. Was making the game about him which should never be allowed.
When Keller was 23 y/o as Priester is now his ERA was over 7 and opponent BA was .348. Nearly everyone was ready to give up on him three years ago when his ERA was 6.17 with opponent BA .322, but as I recall last year everyone was happy when he signed to a long term contract. Priester deserves some space.
Seriously? You want names? That was on a completely different sight that went belly up quite a while ago so you’re not gonna get names. There were not infrequent comments made on that sight during those times that Keller was a bust and would never amount to anything, but I sure didn’t memorize the identities of who. If you were on that sight, and I think you were, I’m frankly surprised you don’t remember, but whatever. My point was, in case you didn’t get it, that Priester is still young and needs to be given the chance to develop in the same way Keller did.
I agree wholeheartedly with all of the comments made about Ski and Tellez.
One led the Pirates in HR last year and is making near minimum, and one is supposedly a power hitting veteran making $3.2 mil. Sometimes BC tries too hard to be too smart. On the positive side, Jack has cut his K rate from last year's 32.3% down to 23.2%.
We cannot afford to be without Jack Suwinski. We cannot afford to keep trotting Tellez out to 1B or call anybody up when Connor Joe is off to an excellent start (1.1 fWAR) and hitting LH (306) and RH (284) equally well, and fielding above league average at .995.
Try another direction. I think nearly everyone including strong supporters of him would agree that Suwinski has been terrible so far this year and a drain on an already anemic offense. My question is why he’s given so much leeway to be awful when guys like Gonzales and Davis along with others in the past have been sent to Indy try to figure it out. Meanwhile he stays in Pittsburgh dragging the offense down even further while waiting and hoping he might improve? We can not only afford to be without THIS Jack Suwinski but unfortunately would be a better team with both him and Tellez off of the team regardless of who replaced them.
Why does Suwinski get special and in my opinion misguided treatment? Because he hit 26 home runs last year? That was last year. Tellez hit 35 a couple of years ago. Does that mean he gets to hang around indefinitely in the so far false hope of some magical breakout? I would love for Suwinski to “breakout” just as I’d like to see Tellez go an a tear and hit 30 home runs but it’s not happening and it’s hard to see how letting them continue to be this bad is helping anyone.
Went over this with you already....Jack is 25. Jack has 2 good MLB seasons under his belt. 99 OPS+ and 115 OPS+. Davis nor Nick have had any success yet. Nick is now getting the chance. You just want to look the other way at 26 Hrs as if it means nothing? Over 700 OPS seasons mean nothing? Tough crowd.
Last year does mean nothing if it doesn’t translate to the present or future. Clearly you and I see him differently and that’s fine. Believe it or not, I hope you’re right. You appear to believe he’s on the verge of breaking out but he, as well as some other lineup regulars, continue to not only fail to pull their own weight but pull the whole team down with them. For how long is that okay?
press conference:
Reporter: "Derek, how do you eliminate the opponent from the big inning?"
Derek: "It's execution. We need to execute."
How does it make fans feel to realize that Rowdy Tellez is #1055 and Jack Suwinski is #1038 out of 1062 MLB players in fWAR? To put it a different way, the negative contributions of those two exactly cancel out the positive contributions of Cruz and Reynolds who have the same positive WARs as they do negative. Maybe not an exactly equal or fair comparison but in these days of analytics it must say something.
To get an idea just how bad these guys have been: They're the same degree worse than a replacement level player -- that is, a random guy brought up from AAA -- as a replacement level player is worse than Carlos Correa or Yordan Alvarez. Just replacing them with crappy players would be a significant improvement.
Anybody worrying about whether Jake Lamb would be an upgrade over Tellez isn't grasping how bad Tellez is. It's almost impossible for Lamb NOT to be an upgrade. It'd be one of the lowest-risk moves ever.
If Ben signed Lamb as a plan b to Tellez not working out, I give him a little bit of credit. If he now implements that plan b, I'll give him a lot more credit. But based on his and Shelton's comments to the PG over the weekend, I don't see anything changing with Tellez for the next month or two.
Worse with Tellez. If nothing else, there's a thesis for Suwinski. His career play indicates he's a better player than his current numbers.
Tellez? Oof. The demand for players must be high because that dude should be in the KBO by this point in his career.
Didn't get to see the game. Try to check in a few times on MLB Network. I was worried that priester would get shelled. Great to see that he had a solid outing.
I dunno that 6ip 4ER is solid but i guess wasnt shelled
WHIP of nearly 2, I didn’t watch the game but feels like it could have been worse.
Lot of groundball singles, but also too much hard contact: groundball or no. Left too many pitches over the middle in the first two innings. Much better after the 2nd. He seemed to have found something with his changeup. I'm not sure what. It still looked meh... without great movement and much too close in velocity to his fastball. but he was fooling guys with it and throwing it a lot.
He's always been a groundball pitcher. Barring a major pitching adjustment, this is who Priester is. The upside is that he's still young, especially given that SP tends to take longer to develop.
He has had groundball tendencies always and been a pitch-to-contact groundballer at times going sinker/slider heavy against righties. He is still feeling his way toward a strategy with lefties. I think he might have hit on something with his changeup tonight. Since it doesn't vary in velocity much from his fastball, he was using it as a substitute for his sinker, rather than a change-of-pace pitch, tonight against lefties, and it was pretty effective. He tried this against righties too a couple of times. Be interesting to see if anything comes of this.
I like Priester to stick in the majors. If not this year, then soon. With a pitcher his age, you figure there are at least a couple of noticeable adjustments in his future. I don't get down on pitchers completely until age 27. Long leash in my imaginary world where I'm the GM.
Would it be fair to say some of our better players sometimes lack awareness or focus?
There's an old saying that a team can take on the personality of their manager...does Shelton ever seem to lack awareness or focus?
I still laugh at the lengths certain writers went to rationalize the Kebryan Hayes sunflower seed incident.
As if that wasn’t emblematic of the shithole culture that envelops this club.
I forgot about the sunflower seeds and had to look it up. I remember it now and it made me laugh. That could be our site's new saying when we see a lack of awareness moment. "sunflower seeds".
The main rationalization for anything Hayes does is that he's good.
Forget the culture. They need more guys who can hit. Just eliminating the black hole that always seems to be 1B would be addition by subtraction. [No need to insert Tellez joke here; he is a joke.]
Hayes hits groundballs. He is not that good, especially as a 3Bman. Would look a lot better at SS with Cruz at 3B... but reasons.
I've never gotten the logic of your best defensive player being at 3B rather than SS. In the few times he's appeared at SS or shifted to an effectively SS position, he has been fine.
On balance, I like Hayes as a hitter. According to Savant, he has the 18th most compact swing in the majors (6.8' length) and a slightly above average bat speed (71.8 mph).
There is room for Hayes to become a more complete hitter if he can square up the ball better. One thing that hurts him is he doesn't swing hard on enough swings. 16.6% of his swings are classified as hard. Just raising that to 20% would make him nearly a Bryan Reynolds clone. Simply put, he's not being aggressive enough with his power.
Admittedly, swinging harder isn't magical. Tellez swings hard *A LOT*. But it's where there's room for improvement in Hayes' game. Also, his barrel rate is downright trash. Getting even a little better contact would go a long way for him.
See... Cherington is an idiot. There was method to Huntington's madness. He groomed Hayes in a 3Bman because on shifts vs. lefties, Hayes had to cover the whole left side of the IF. On shifts vs. righties, the SS played shallow LF when the 2Bman moved over, so Hayes was covering a lot of the left side. When they banned shifts, all that went out the window, and Hayes should have moved to SS, but Cherington is too stupid to understand what Huntington was doing. Huntington was something of a wizard with defensive alignments.
GMNH's big mistake was expecting his edge to last longer than it did. The Pirates thought a combination of pitching to contact and the defensive shift would anchor them for a while. Arguably, it did. Three years of highly competitive baseball isn't nothing. Where GMNH went wrong was not having another trick once the rest of the league caught up.
As for GMBC . . . the current track record with hitting prospects is getting disconcerting. I've long thought he'll be gone by the time anything comes to fruition, and this season just makes me feel more so. If someone like NickGon or Davis doesn't pay off soon, GMBC's best hitting prospects might not contribute to the MLB team until Termarr gets there. That would be a horrendous record.
Losing is a habit.
Better players?
players with more talent?
Long time between hits, but they were both good ones.
Connor Joe! Against a righty. Rehearsing for the role of full-time 1Bman.
I don't get it at all. Joe is literally better against righties than Tellez. Seems like if Guy B is better at a job than Guy A, then Guy B is the starter.
Ugh . . . Sheltieball.
joe joe joe joe joe
tellez just got knocked off the team
Don't get my hopes up. Until Tellez hits the 60-day IL or the trade news, this sort of talk is not allowable. Seriously, can't he experience some of that patented discomfort already?
off a right handed pitcher
They have some pen arms, that explains being 8 games over.
Jack was totally overmatched.
we all knew the result before the first pitch of that at bat
How many strike threes have they called now out of the strike zone?
this umpire was unbearable for the pirates. so many out of the zone and then some in the zone not called for Priester. Plus calling check swings when that is easily the 1b ump's call to make. Was making the game about him which should never be allowed.
Very resilient display by Priester. Good for the young fellow.
And the Pirates (well Nick Gonzales really) actually scored 2 runs for him, which is double the number they scored in his first four outings combined.
2 hits. That's all we had was 2 lousy hits.
Up to 3, at least they were all extra base hits. Hopefully enough from Joe that we don't see Tellez for a bit.
Damn weather.
Apparently, Tellez is not the only problem with the offense.
Cherington is the problem. Everything else is just a symptom.
QP innings 1-2. 8 hits, 4 runs
Innings 3-4, 0 hits, 0 runs
Enigma. Eerily similar to early Keller.
When Keller was 23 y/o as Priester is now his ERA was over 7 and opponent BA was .348. Nearly everyone was ready to give up on him three years ago when his ERA was 6.17 with opponent BA .322, but as I recall last year everyone was happy when he signed to a long term contract. Priester deserves some space.
Who? Name one person who was ready to give up on Keller, ONE!
Seriously? You want names? That was on a completely different sight that went belly up quite a while ago so you’re not gonna get names. There were not infrequent comments made on that sight during those times that Keller was a bust and would never amount to anything, but I sure didn’t memorize the identities of who. If you were on that sight, and I think you were, I’m frankly surprised you don’t remember, but whatever. My point was, in case you didn’t get it, that Priester is still young and needs to be given the chance to develop in the same way Keller did.
I was just messing with you, I was one of the loudest voices against Keller….
Really good to see from Nick.
That was a big league homer for Nick. Cut the lead in half.
NickGon do good baseball?