He’s the same age or even younger than players about to be drafted. All the signs are good: he’s hitting for average and power and he’s controlling the strike zone while playing in full season ball at age 18. He doesn’t turn 19 until after the season is over.
These are all markers for stardom. Will he get there? Obviously there are no guarantees, but what he’s doing is rare.
Rizzo and Martinez brought DC a Championship. Rizzo texted tonite: "The sun will come up tomorrow. That's the job. I had a great run. Navigated that ownership group for almost 20 years."
Love that last sentence, but when is Huntington, Hurdle, Shelton or BC going to speak up about the cheapest owner in the game??
Never is my guess. Serves no purpose for them to confirm suspicions. Only draws negative attention to them from people on the inside. Us on the outside are irrelevant.
Rizzo is 64 and probably isn't concerned about another job with another team. But even a small dose of accountability towards Nutting would be welcome from somebody....anybody.
Too bad Nutting went to some nerd glorification factory college in the northeast (Williams College). He's always going to be a dupe for these poindexters and their slide rules.
A notable point, though, is the pirates have employed some of the worst nerds in the business. The fact that their decisions are frequently in line with Fangraphs or what you'd see in a game of Out of the Park Baseball tells me they don't really employ actual nerds.
Why do I say that?
The first rule of analytics is that you don't have an edge if you're using the same data and models as everyone else. Which is why most people -- hell, most analytic trading firms -- don't beat the market's trend ($SPY 9% annual return is the usual standard).
That doesn't mean analytics is fundamentally flawed. It means they need better nerds. Jim Simons beat the stock market with something like a 60% annual return for decades. Simons also had a signals intelligence background from his military service. [EDIT: the NSA.]
The problems is that everyone knows they need analytics. Most people don't have a very good shopping list in terms of stats, modeling, data sources, signals, etc.
The fact that the Pirates analytics wing looks like their using baby stuff is more evidence that Bob wasn't given a nerdy enough education. (U.S. military or intelligence is the best place to get one.)
This is a major problem with having jocks and businessmen picking nerds. They don't know what a nerd really is so they fall for any jackass with a spreadsheet or chart.
Or that Bob cares or knows so little about baseball that he can be duped by the worst nerds like Cherington and Huntington, sure. Moron hasn't even ventured outside of his own little northeastern academic hamlet for front office talent. Just a couple of *tons from Amherst. Bob knows the sort. They're good, smart guys who understand the constraints.
I think that's a little unfair to Huntington. GMNH did have an analytic edge for a little while, particularly with the Pirates being early adopters on extreme defensive shifts. They lost that edge quickly, though, because sports teams are nothing if not copycats.
The big thing I fault GMNH for is that the entire system was built around pitch-to-contact with the goal of maximizing the shift. They wasted the talents of dudes like Charlie Morton who could've been bigger strikeout pitchers.
As for Cherington . . . I mean, he has one impressive thing on his resume and that's the one year the Red Sox had their shit together. I mean, he comes from the Theo Epstein FO tree, if you're the type who like pedigrees. There is an argument that the core he left behind was also pretty damned solid and fed another WS win after he was gone.
And of course, Bob will always be Bob. We all know Scrooge McDuck owns the team.
None of that particularly invalidates analytics -- which are here to stay. You're welcome to try to punch the nerds, but they will have large men escort you out of PNC before you ever succeed.
I'm not the only fan who hates nerdball. Many do. League batting averages are, what, .245 and lower than they've been since 1971 over the last few seasons. Homers are down to 1.11 per game from nearly 1.4 per in 2019. Strikeouts are down a bit per game. Runs scored are down. I can't find it but I bet groundouts into shifts are up. Great. Very exciting stuff.
Bear in mind pitchers have been winning the battle definitively for decades -- well before nerdball hit. They didn't lower the mound in the age of Bob Gibson based on nerd stats.
That's right, they did. Now we have these really bad baseball IQ players like Cruz who stick in the sport because of statcast data. Franchy Cordero got 800 useless PAs in MLB thanks to nerds.
What did I say about that (Endy's elbow)? I have been right about many things Pirates related over the years. I will start to care about Endy if and when he ever hits well at the major leagues and stays healthy for 100+ games.
In solidarity, I dislike watching Holderman pitch too. Good arm, bad head.
Cruz's wRC+ today -100. That's one of _7_ games he's put up -100 wRC+ the last 20 games. In that span of play he's put up better than 100 wRC+ games 4 times. The guy is either winning you 4 games a month or losing 10 of them for you. Very little in between. He's a platoon player at best with a 28 wRC+ against LHP. He had a 62 wRC+ June and now a -22 wRC+ start to July that's beginning to put his 99 wRC+ first half way in the rearview mirror. He's got a terrible grasp of the game, a bad hitters approach and he thinks his tools mean he doesn't have to figure any of that stuff out, clearly.
Dude has run a .163 .267 .279 line with a 52 wRC+ in his last 120 PAs! I challenge any Cruz fans here or elsewhere to find 10 players who are in their fifth MLB season (ok, I'll be generous even 4th) who've run a worse 100 PA line this year than that who also don't have positive DEF. You can't: it's literally two Rockies in Brenton Doyle and Michael Toglia and Luis Renfigo and a bunch of guys making their debut. Cruz is a 5th season rookie.
So many complain about Henry Davis but he's only gotten 130 PAs this season total and has put up +11 wRC+ on Cruz's sample mentioned above _and_ provides good defense. Cruz is only getting all those reps because of nerds and their love of toolz.
He came up through a system that had no idea what they were doing developing hitters. When he came up, his entire approach was to try to hit the ball as hard as he could every swing. He literally said that. This is a system that has developed exactly 0 major-league hitters in 6 years, aside from Nick Gonzalez. They had (and may still have- I don't know) a ballerina as one of their primary hitting instructors for minor-league players.
He is obviously working on his swing. The only thing that he could hit prior to this year were high fastballs. He is trying to, what they call "keep the bat in the zone longer" which involves some changes to his hand and arm motions and more incline on his swing that better matches pitch movement. Melkel could explain better. He started to hit low pitches much better, but he was still struggling with everything middle of the zone.
There is no evidence to suggest that he is not working on his swing and just relying on his tools. Quite the opposite. All the evidence indicates that he is trying to improve his swing and is just now, at long last, trying to learn how to hit. That is not prepared to compete against major-league pitchers and does not understand how to best use his tools is not his fault. It is the fault of an incompetent GM and a bunch of charlatans milking jobs at "hitting coaches" in the minors under a GM who can't distinguish Mickey Mantle from Mickey Mouse.
Jazz day to day with shoulder. You know you want Key, Cashman. You know you need a legacy on the team. I remember his Pops catching the last out of a World Series for ya. Overpay my man. Just do it.
IMO this is the crucial stat: The Pirates have scored 2 or less runs in 42 games this season. They have a record of 8-34 in those games. In the other games they have a record of 30-19. Their pitching is so good that if they get 3 or more they have a win pct that gives them 99 wins prorated over 162 games.
Which makes the lack of effort to bring in hitting in the offseason more unforgivable. Other than Horwirtz, there was no good-faith effort to improve the hitting.
The best chance this team has at improving is rushing Konnor Griffin, Wyatt Sanford, and Edward Florentino to the majors.
There was a good faith effort to improve the hitting. They are just incompetent. Whatever model and algorithms they are using to project results for major-league players is worse than useless. It is downright wrong, and their evaluations of major-league players are way off base... way off. The whole group of upper management needs to go... not just Cherington.
Their terrible modeling and algorithms are why they keep claiming that they are unlucky, why they traded for AAAA players like BDLC, Yorke, and Cook, why they sign garbage hitters in free agency when there are obviously better players for the same price available. But... like all charlatans, when reality does not conform to their models, they claim the problem is reality, not the models... i.e. "we are so unlucky."
However bad their modeling is, it's hard to assume they can't see what's available on every Fangraphs page. In fact, I'm pretty certain they're using something close to the ZIPS system you see on fangraphs to project player performance.
$7m for Pham and Frazier seems pretty good evidence of bad faith. There are just better ways to spend even that limited amount of money.
TBH, it doesn't matter much either way. Good or bad faith efforts, everything other than pitching development has been nothing but firing offenses.
Well at least there is one guy smiling on the team and that is Skenes. No, not because he was named to the Allstar game but because he knows he is one day closer to being a former Pirate. What a shame they can't build a winner around him.
Per my comment in the morning rundown....This series clearly demonstrated why you so not let position players eat sushi on the road or go to a grunge band reunion festival. Killed our bats.
It could have been just the grunge band reunion festival but even in Seattle, you have to know where to go to get good sushi, and you need an owner will to pay for high quality seafood. 😐
https://www.mlb.com/video/edward-florentino-swats-two-homers-in-the-same-game?partnerId=web_video-playback-page_video-share
Hate getting excited about low level guys, but Florentino, KG, Valdez and company are making it difficult.
Florentino has such a beautiful swing. Long way to go, yes, but also he’s 18 facing pitchers sometimes 4 years older than him and doing well.
That’s got to count for something
Stop it Murphy, you too JRC21, I’m trying not to get excited. 😆
He’s the same age or even younger than players about to be drafted. All the signs are good: he’s hitting for average and power and he’s controlling the strike zone while playing in full season ball at age 18. He doesn’t turn 19 until after the season is over.
These are all markers for stardom. Will he get there? Obviously there are no guarantees, but what he’s doing is rare.
Rizzo and Martinez brought DC a Championship. Rizzo texted tonite: "The sun will come up tomorrow. That's the job. I had a great run. Navigated that ownership group for almost 20 years."
Love that last sentence, but when is Huntington, Hurdle, Shelton or BC going to speak up about the cheapest owner in the game??
Never is my guess. Serves no purpose for them to confirm suspicions. Only draws negative attention to them from people on the inside. Us on the outside are irrelevant.
Rizzo is 64 and probably isn't concerned about another job with another team. But even a small dose of accountability towards Nutting would be welcome from somebody....anybody.
Too bad Nutting went to some nerd glorification factory college in the northeast (Williams College). He's always going to be a dupe for these poindexters and their slide rules.
A notable point, though, is the pirates have employed some of the worst nerds in the business. The fact that their decisions are frequently in line with Fangraphs or what you'd see in a game of Out of the Park Baseball tells me they don't really employ actual nerds.
Why do I say that?
The first rule of analytics is that you don't have an edge if you're using the same data and models as everyone else. Which is why most people -- hell, most analytic trading firms -- don't beat the market's trend ($SPY 9% annual return is the usual standard).
That doesn't mean analytics is fundamentally flawed. It means they need better nerds. Jim Simons beat the stock market with something like a 60% annual return for decades. Simons also had a signals intelligence background from his military service. [EDIT: the NSA.]
The problems is that everyone knows they need analytics. Most people don't have a very good shopping list in terms of stats, modeling, data sources, signals, etc.
The fact that the Pirates analytics wing looks like their using baby stuff is more evidence that Bob wasn't given a nerdy enough education. (U.S. military or intelligence is the best place to get one.)
This is a major problem with having jocks and businessmen picking nerds. They don't know what a nerd really is so they fall for any jackass with a spreadsheet or chart.
Or that Bob cares or knows so little about baseball that he can be duped by the worst nerds like Cherington and Huntington, sure. Moron hasn't even ventured outside of his own little northeastern academic hamlet for front office talent. Just a couple of *tons from Amherst. Bob knows the sort. They're good, smart guys who understand the constraints.
I think that's a little unfair to Huntington. GMNH did have an analytic edge for a little while, particularly with the Pirates being early adopters on extreme defensive shifts. They lost that edge quickly, though, because sports teams are nothing if not copycats.
The big thing I fault GMNH for is that the entire system was built around pitch-to-contact with the goal of maximizing the shift. They wasted the talents of dudes like Charlie Morton who could've been bigger strikeout pitchers.
As for Cherington . . . I mean, he has one impressive thing on his resume and that's the one year the Red Sox had their shit together. I mean, he comes from the Theo Epstein FO tree, if you're the type who like pedigrees. There is an argument that the core he left behind was also pretty damned solid and fed another WS win after he was gone.
And of course, Bob will always be Bob. We all know Scrooge McDuck owns the team.
None of that particularly invalidates analytics -- which are here to stay. You're welcome to try to punch the nerds, but they will have large men escort you out of PNC before you ever succeed.
I'm not the only fan who hates nerdball. Many do. League batting averages are, what, .245 and lower than they've been since 1971 over the last few seasons. Homers are down to 1.11 per game from nearly 1.4 per in 2019. Strikeouts are down a bit per game. Runs scored are down. I can't find it but I bet groundouts into shifts are up. Great. Very exciting stuff.
Bear in mind pitchers have been winning the battle definitively for decades -- well before nerdball hit. They didn't lower the mound in the age of Bob Gibson based on nerd stats.
Sure but three true outcomes baseball _is_ nerdball. And it sucks.
We get it man. You don't like nerds cuz they ruined the sport.
That's right, they did. Now we have these really bad baseball IQ players like Cruz who stick in the sport because of statcast data. Franchy Cordero got 800 useless PAs in MLB thanks to nerds.
The name change but the Cruz hatred stayed the same!
I’m getting real Bill JLo Clinton vibes here. 😩
The artist formerly known as
What’s not to hate? One of the worst regulars in MLB over the last 2 months.
Honestly, I don't _hate_ Cruz. I just hate watching him play baseball.
I know what you mean, I have the same feelings for Holderman. Btw seems that you were right about Endy’s elbow….
What did I say about that (Endy's elbow)? I have been right about many things Pirates related over the years. I will start to care about Endy if and when he ever hits well at the major leagues and stays healthy for 100+ games.
In solidarity, I dislike watching Holderman pitch too. Good arm, bad head.
Dead giveaway, even if I didn't already know lol
I don't get it.
Cruz's wRC+ today -100. That's one of _7_ games he's put up -100 wRC+ the last 20 games. In that span of play he's put up better than 100 wRC+ games 4 times. The guy is either winning you 4 games a month or losing 10 of them for you. Very little in between. He's a platoon player at best with a 28 wRC+ against LHP. He had a 62 wRC+ June and now a -22 wRC+ start to July that's beginning to put his 99 wRC+ first half way in the rearview mirror. He's got a terrible grasp of the game, a bad hitters approach and he thinks his tools mean he doesn't have to figure any of that stuff out, clearly.
Dude has run a .163 .267 .279 line with a 52 wRC+ in his last 120 PAs! I challenge any Cruz fans here or elsewhere to find 10 players who are in their fifth MLB season (ok, I'll be generous even 4th) who've run a worse 100 PA line this year than that who also don't have positive DEF. You can't: it's literally two Rockies in Brenton Doyle and Michael Toglia and Luis Renfigo and a bunch of guys making their debut. Cruz is a 5th season rookie.
So many complain about Henry Davis but he's only gotten 130 PAs this season total and has put up +11 wRC+ on Cruz's sample mentioned above _and_ provides good defense. Cruz is only getting all those reps because of nerds and their love of toolz.
He came up through a system that had no idea what they were doing developing hitters. When he came up, his entire approach was to try to hit the ball as hard as he could every swing. He literally said that. This is a system that has developed exactly 0 major-league hitters in 6 years, aside from Nick Gonzalez. They had (and may still have- I don't know) a ballerina as one of their primary hitting instructors for minor-league players.
He is obviously working on his swing. The only thing that he could hit prior to this year were high fastballs. He is trying to, what they call "keep the bat in the zone longer" which involves some changes to his hand and arm motions and more incline on his swing that better matches pitch movement. Melkel could explain better. He started to hit low pitches much better, but he was still struggling with everything middle of the zone.
There is no evidence to suggest that he is not working on his swing and just relying on his tools. Quite the opposite. All the evidence indicates that he is trying to improve his swing and is just now, at long last, trying to learn how to hit. That is not prepared to compete against major-league pitchers and does not understand how to best use his tools is not his fault. It is the fault of an incompetent GM and a bunch of charlatans milking jobs at "hitting coaches" in the minors under a GM who can't distinguish Mickey Mantle from Mickey Mouse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTDENzpW7tw
Jazz day to day with shoulder. You know you want Key, Cashman. You know you need a legacy on the team. I remember his Pops catching the last out of a World Series for ya. Overpay my man. Just do it.
Pirates really know how to ruin a good week.
Keller and Hayes for Dominguez and Jones.
What a disgrace. Getting shut out three games in a row. Great pitching and what do you get? Loss after loss after loss. Just pitiful.
Home: 26-21
Road: 12-32
That is quite the difference
Symptom of a bad team. The good stuff is pretty good. The bad stuff is epic-level horrific.
BC would say bad luck team.
Bad luck to have BC as GM.
So depressing.
IMO this is the crucial stat: The Pirates have scored 2 or less runs in 42 games this season. They have a record of 8-34 in those games. In the other games they have a record of 30-19. Their pitching is so good that if they get 3 or more they have a win pct that gives them 99 wins prorated over 162 games.
Which makes the lack of effort to bring in hitting in the offseason more unforgivable. Other than Horwirtz, there was no good-faith effort to improve the hitting.
The best chance this team has at improving is rushing Konnor Griffin, Wyatt Sanford, and Edward Florentino to the majors.
There was a good faith effort to improve the hitting. They are just incompetent. Whatever model and algorithms they are using to project results for major-league players is worse than useless. It is downright wrong, and their evaluations of major-league players are way off base... way off. The whole group of upper management needs to go... not just Cherington.
Their terrible modeling and algorithms are why they keep claiming that they are unlucky, why they traded for AAAA players like BDLC, Yorke, and Cook, why they sign garbage hitters in free agency when there are obviously better players for the same price available. But... like all charlatans, when reality does not conform to their models, they claim the problem is reality, not the models... i.e. "we are so unlucky."
However bad their modeling is, it's hard to assume they can't see what's available on every Fangraphs page. In fact, I'm pretty certain they're using something close to the ZIPS system you see on fangraphs to project player performance.
$7m for Pham and Frazier seems pretty good evidence of bad faith. There are just better ways to spend even that limited amount of money.
TBH, it doesn't matter much either way. Good or bad faith efforts, everything other than pitching development has been nothing but firing offenses.
Not one damn run in 27 innings.
So it probably means that KC is gonna score 30 against us
Mirror image
I'm surprised it hasn't happened before.
Well at least there is one guy smiling on the team and that is Skenes. No, not because he was named to the Allstar game but because he knows he is one day closer to being a former Pirate. What a shame they can't build a winner around him.
Not "can't", but "won't" build a winner around him. Maybe BC can't, but organizationally, it's more a matter of will which is most painful.
Skenes has to be fairly disgusted being surrounded by a roster and coaching staff and front office made up of losers.
Per my comment in the morning rundown....This series clearly demonstrated why you so not let position players eat sushi on the road or go to a grunge band reunion festival. Killed our bats.
So that’s why they hit like dead fish?
🤣
But Sushi at home is good though, right?
It could have been just the grunge band reunion festival but even in Seattle, you have to know where to go to get good sushi, and you need an owner will to pay for high quality seafood. 😐
I'm 10000% sure Seattle has better sushi than Pittsburgh
I am going to 100000000% agree with u there
I vote the Pirates hire you for team dietician. Any suggestions what they should eat while they are in Kansas City?
Thank you for your vote! Definitely need to load up on Fairlife protein shakes for snack time, but not sure BN would be willing to pay for them!
BBQ ribs
Only for dinner, not lunch, they can make you sleepy.
Shutting out an opponent for 3 straight games and then getting shut out for 3 straight is the ultimate Piratey thing.
I’m back to not liking my team.
You have a great reason for that. THEY SUCK!!!
What an embarrassment of a team.
Tell that to BN and he'd say not to my pocket book.
Mariners are well-constructed team for $122M active roster, 14th in baseball. Can someone tell Nutting? He has to spend just a little bit more.
And hire someone who knows hot to spend it!
I think Cruz needs to be in the HR Derby to fix his swing.
AAA derby or KBO. Go play with Mel Rojas Jr.