Monday, October 6, 2008

Gone to Seed

They aren't kidding with this offseason stuff, are they? Jays news has completely dried up, sham postseason awards are being handed out (not to Rocco, which just ain't right) in celebration of players going from just okay to really good. Cliff Lee is determined to haunt my dreams.

What is left in Blue Jay land? Postmortems! Fangraphs Blue Jays season in review finds disparity between the Jays excellent run differential and their team balance. In other words, rather than being a balanced attack of offense and defense, the Jays underwhelming offense was covered up by their overwhelming run prevention. Fangraphs uses a figure called BaseRuns, a modified version of Runs Created. Using the Baseruns model, Fangraphs suggests that the Jays should have expected to win just under 92 games this year, down from their 93 win Pythagorean record. What does that mean? The Jays lack of situational hitting during the first half really hurt them. They scored and prevented enough runs to be right in the mix. Moral victories etc.

The CBC kicked it old school on their website; old school and arbitrary! Wanna do a season in review? Wanna keep your editors at bay? Nobody cares about stats or numbers or any of the real talk under the surface. Bust out the letter grades Sally, we're mass-communicating here!! I'll give the author of this piece credit, he slid some run differential in there, praised Roy Halladay's secondary numbers and quality of opponents. Seems like a guy that knows what's up. As for the letter grades, I'm sure the suits forced your hand.

Unsurprisingly, this brave scribe goes out on a limb and gives the Jays pitchers an A+. Cool man, I'm with you so far. What's next? Defense? Word. The Jays are a great defensive team, and you even used a sweet picture of Scott Rolen droppin' fundamentals in Spring Training. Right on Jesse Campigotto, you and I are boys. Yeah, Alex Rios is great, Dr. Hale agrees. Wait, what is this? Adam Lind is a solid young left-fielder? Adam Lind is a solid young left-fielder??

Oh Jesse, you had me. I was right there with you, and now you've gone and ruined it. Adam Lind is a lot of things; excellent to above-average hitter, Indiana finest, and a mediocre (at best) left fielder. He's the second-best up & coming left fielder of the two up & coming left fielders at the Jays disposal. According to the numbers, he isn't even as good as Shannon Stewart.
Stewart - 48 balls in zone, 43 plays, 14 out of zone plays, .896 RZR
Lind - 108 balls in zone, 96 plays, 17 out of zone plays, .889 RZR
Ugh. It's cool though, I'll let the overall A grade for the defense slide. D for the hitting, B+ for the coaching? The classic vote split, I assume. Good marks for the pitching coach, bad marks for the hitting coach? Nobody likes the good cop/bad cop routine, sir. B for the management? Alright, I'm sure you'll get some flack for that but whatever. Full marks to the guy in the comment section that announced JP should get an O because he's just going around and around in a circle. Gold.

1 comment:

  1. I laughed at the O for J.P. line.

    You know how it seemed like there might be a small possibility that A.J. would take the Jays offer because the last images we had of him was him saluting the fans and then making out with Roy?

    Now that a week has gone by reality has set in.

    ReplyDelete

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