Ace Rothstein wrote:

Bill McNeal wrote:Pretty crazy that there are only 28 players with a war of 4.0 or greater and that one of those players is Shane Victorino.

not really, he is pretty good, wish the phillies had a player like him

Shane was the perfect example of a player who caused fans to hyperfocus on his flaws while ignoring all of the really excellent things that he did. If anyone on he Phils was going to age well, Shane seemed like that guy. Glad he's doing well.

I want to scream and bang my head on the wall. I wanted Shane to stay, everyone else here it seemed wanted him gone. I never got it. AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

I like him a lot, but let's not get too carried away. He missed 30+ games (for the second time in three years) and has a 113 OPS+

Good move by them to put a good defender in their weird RF, but I'm not buying that WAR either

He's no Ben Revere

He's only been this good once in his career (2011).

The Sawx also owe him another $26MM in 2014-15, so the matter is still very much up for debate. Very few rational Phillies fans would've wanted him gone in 2013... we were worried about the additional years.

Joe Jordan discusses the AFL seven

http://www.thereporteronline.com/articl ... full_story

Should still probably trade Young for whatever possible at this point, no?

no way, man. we're making a run here

Rev_Beezer wrote:I want to scream and bang my head on the wall. I wanted Shane to stay, everyone else here it seemed wanted him gone. I never got it. AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

I don't think anyone would have minded having Shane around this year. Not too many were enthused about paying him $13 million (or more) when he was 34.

swishnicholson wrote:

Rev_Beezer wrote:I want to scream and bang my head on the wall. I wanted Shane to stay, everyone else here it seemed wanted him gone. I never got it. AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

I don't think anyone would have minded having Shane around this year. Not too many were enthused about paying him $13 million (or more) when he was 34.

Is there an echo in here?

RichmondPhilsFan wrote:The Sawx also owe him another $26MM in 2014-15, so the matter is still very much up for debate. Very few rational Phillies fans would've wanted him gone in 2013... we were worried about the additional years.

swishnicholson wrote:

Rev_Beezer wrote:I want to scream and bang my head on the wall. I wanted Shane to stay, everyone else here it seemed wanted him gone. I never got it. AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

I don't think anyone would have minded having Shane around this year. Not too many were enthused about paying him $13 million (or more) when he was 34.

I remember what you are talking about Rev. But only a couple of people here didn't think Victorino was a pretty good player.

Amazingly, at some point our bullpen leapt from worst in the NL (by a lot) to only second worst in the NL (by ERA).

Still have the worst ERA overall. That's bound to cause problems at some point for a team built on pitching.

Galvis just announced on Twitter that he's gonna be a dad (and he retweeted my congratulations)

swishnicholson wrote:Amazingly, at some point our bullpen leapt from worst in the NL (by a lot) to only second worst in the NL (by ERA).

.

Well, I sure managed to jinx that.

THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS AROUND HERE

Kendrick

"I want to be here. I feel like I haven't pitched horrible enough to be gone."

Adam Eaton-esque quote there.

Shore wrote:
REASONS SHORE HATES WAR #23:

Victorino, per fangraphs, has about 40% of his career defensive value in the first 98 games of this year. He's like +25 runs or something, after being +4 or +5 the last couple of years. Yes, I know he's playing RF instead of CF, and, yes, I still think the number is ridiculous.

Defensive stats are broken. They rely on interpretation. They rely on batted ball actually coming to you or near you. They rely on many things not yet captured, or not yet captured properly.

from the above, it looks like your argument against the latest generation of defensive value stats being of any use is that you can find many examples of such stats that you find extremely implausible. to that you add your suspicion that they are not yet able to include enough of the relevant information.

i would i agree that defensive stats are still poor enough that defensive value from a single season should not be folded into a player´s single season value without first being heavily regressed to a mean (league average for the position or the player´s age-adjusted career average). i honestly appreciate your criticism, because i too often forget about this, as i did in the case of revere. defensive runs saved rates for players without much of a track record should come in a distant second to a good survey of scouting reports.

that said, i disagree strongly with the conclusion that defensive stats are broken, if that implies that they should not play a significant role in estimating current and future player values. from the methodological details i have read about at b-r and fangraphs, they seem to be taking into account many of the things you claim they miss. from the beginning, ¨zones¨ have been meant to capture a player´s ability to get to balls not hit at or near them. the early versions already have been adjusted to account for positioning and hit/fx batted ball type. furthermore, while the noise left over from imperfect measurements of such things makes even a full season a smallish sample, and produces the wild year-to-year swings you like to point out, there seems to me to be plenty of evidence (compare 3-year averages to the fan scouting report tables, or independent three-year averages for a given player in and around his prime years) indicating that a consistent signal comes through the noise after two or three years. player skills generally are stable enough through the middle part of their careers that their past three years of defense should give you a good idea of how valuable their defense is this year and will be over the next few seasons. [confession: this just comes from a bunch of spot-checks over the years, not a systematic study].

also, i think you are exaggerating the unlikelihood of a big defensive value change resulting from a position change, even the cf-rf switch. it seems to me perfectly plausible that certain skill sets allow some players to take much more advantage of a position switch that the average defensive spectrum adjustment. victorino, for instance, may have been worse than most center fielders in reading balls of the bat from that position, and thus helped more than most by the change in viewing angle moving to a corner. revere, on the other hand, may have worked out positioning and batted ball reading in a way that he could use his speed to negate his rag arm in right. changing the angle and giving him more ground to cover means he needs to find new optimal positioning and time to get used to the reads so he can break in the right direction. a half-season is not an unreasonably long time for a young player to make such an adjustment... unfortunately, the injury kept us from finding out if he could start improving in the second half, and probably set the clock back.

Boston says they're no longer interested in MY

neither is anyone else except maybe his mom