May 18, 2024

53 thoughts on “Yankees.com: Soto the alpha ‘dawg’ again as Yankees stay perfect”

  1. Yankees get Jake Cousins for cash And weirdly Jake Cousins is actually Kirk Cousins cousin, not totally dissimilar from The Patty Duke show.

  2. I shouldn’t complain after a 4-0 start, but it’s going to suck when Holmes’ luck runs out and Boone keeps throwing him out there to blow like 5 games in a row.

    2. I duno about the bullpen being a weakness. underrated, high variance, sure, but it’s much deeper than the 25 man roster. ad evidenced by the better demotion / Tully call up. less we forgot about kahle and efforts coming back (hopefully)

    3. most importantly about the pen is it’s cheap. no such thing as a bad bullpen, just a bad price for the pen.

    4. The bullpen is also one of the easier things to improve during the season through trades, waiver wire, etc.

    5. exactly. you only need a guy who can throw 1-2 pitches well for 1 inning at a time for a “good” reliever

  8. so it looks like stroman threw more cutters (over sliders), more changeups, and fewer 4 seam/sinkers.

    this unsurprisingly did and likely will lead to more ks and fewer grounders.

    I like it

  11. So a guy who just got two game winning hits in the 8th and 9th inning and threw a guy out at the plate to save another game is worth 0.5 WAR so far? And now you know why people don’t think much of WAR.

    I assume that our great closer also has some WAR, after being bailed out one game by his RF and another game by his 3b.

    Stats are great but my lying eyes tell me something else.

    1. you shouldn’t have rushed WAR to the majors to succeed buster Posey. now look, you’ve dfad WAR

    2. He doesn’t! It’s undefined on BR. I don’t know why that should be, but–no WAR.

      Also I can’t tell what your beef is re Soto, .5 WAR in four games is astoundingly good

    3. A true story in that vein: an actuary asked his son’s oncologist, “what is the probability that my son will survive?” And the oncologist answered, “Statistics are for spectators. Participants care about outcomes.” The actuary was confused, so the oncologist added, “The probability is either zero or 100%; my goal is to make it 100%.”

      WAR gets a bad rap because folks (statheads included) often misapply it as a shortcut to account for prior value; it assumes that performance, as contribution to a win, is situation-independent, while in fact outcomes are quite situation-dependent. The real purpose of WAR isn’t to determine who was most valuable in a season, it’s to aid in predicting a player’s future value for front office / fantasy baseball.

      If you want a single number to quantify actual impact on prior games, consider WPA. Soto’s at 0.8 after just 4 games, which is absurd. If you kept that up for one whole season you’d exceed Derek Jeter’s whole career WPA. But really, we all agree that the number that matters most is Team W-L, and a good player’s goal is to help make that 1-0 every day.

      ETA: The kid and his oncology team went 1-0.

    4. Just a guess, but maybe there are no defensive metrics in for bWAR so they can’t do it yet?

    5. His beef is that it’s only 0.5 WAR.

      Which, is mostly a misunderstanding of what WAR is. It’s not a counting stat despite it looking like one and popularly treated as one.

    7. It definitely is a counting stat, it just counts a lot of very small numbers (run through a few moderately complex formulas). It’s also pretty imprecise with small sample sizes, especially when defensive value is included.

    9. Soto isn’t even the MLB WPA leader, because Mookie Betts is on a crazy heater.

    10. 1. WAR is an attempt to quantify prior value, and the writers who believe in it do use it that way.

      2. It is context-neutral. If you hit four solo home runs in a team win where your team is down 3-0, and hit 4 HR in a game where the other team comes back to win 5-4, WAR values those the same, but WPA doesn’t.

      3. It is a counting stat, but it’s one that can go down. You don’t ever lose RBI, but bad play can lose you WAR.

    3. She’s not interested in USC, art school is where she’s headed. Problem solved!

  13. in a classic scrub for scrub trade, I propose Stanton for yoshida. it’s like the older, fatter, balder, and less successful DiMaggio for Williams deal, but this time, it’s personal.

  14. Thanks for the WAR discussion but my point was that so far Soto has been worth a lot more than 1/2 win over a scrub (replacement level). Maybe over a season it all balances out, but maybe it doesn’t?

    I like WPA not as a predictor but as a great look back on “clutch”.

    2. 0.5 WAR in 4 games is a 20.25 WAR year, which would be the best season in MLB, narrowly edging out Tim Keefe’s 20.2 1883.

    3. Any stat other than WPA does not factor in the spot of the game. Soto is 9 for 17, 3 walks and 1 HR.
      What does a replacement level RFer hit? .225 with some pop, say 25 homers? So 4 for 17 with a walk, maybe 2 walks and basically half a homer? So Soto is an extra 5 hits, 1 or 2 walks and half a homer in 4 games. Factor in a few nice defensive plays, and that’s apparently worth half a win.

      Soto’s tremendous value in the 4 games has been the “clutch” aspect.

  17. Once we’re taking stats – I don’t like OPS either. Slugging is not as valuable as OBP.

    Aaron Gleeman once created a stat called GPA: OBP times 1.8 plus SLG. Then divide that by 4. You’ll get answers that usually fall between 250 and 300 except the stars do even better. And it’s a number we’re comfortable with growing up on BAs, that were is that range.

    1. what about ops+? that usually bridges the divide of ops and usefulness.

      Or wOBA for that matter

    2. OPS and OPS+ are fine for at a glance, but wOBA and wOBA+ are far superior. I believe they are normalized to OBP ranges.

  19. OPS+ just compares a players OPS to the average. But if you think that OPS is a bit meaningless then so is OPS+.

    OBP is as a stand along not great either. Walks are not as valuable as HRs.

    OPS tried to merge SLG with OBP; it was just done wrong.

    1. It was done “wrong” because it’s simple. It’s still a better overall look than AVG, OBP, or SLG on their own.

      Like mentioned above, you can use wOBA or wRC+, which is derived from wOBA.

  21. Big Fan, you’re right about OPS and OPS+, but at the same time I think they’re useful approximations and easy to understand. I get that wOBA is a better stat, but I don’t know how it’s calculated which makes it less intuitive to me.

    Few stats are completely useless, even RBI.

    1. Times had an article a few years ago called Gross Production Average which weighs OBP 80% more than Slg and then after adding you divide by 4 to get a number in the range of standard BAs.

  22. I fancy xwoba bc of exit velocity (or so the assumption that it is included in this stat). Either way, it gives me a way of babiping/fiping a players production

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