2019 Phillies Season Discussion (part 2)

allentown 2019-09-29 23:19:20 UTC #785

This season can only be regarded as a failure. In addition to not making playoffs since 2011, after today we can add that the Phillies have gone 8 years without a winning season For a large market team, that is absolutely pathetic. I saw the article yesterday or day before that Eflin came on stronger at the end of season, after he stopped listening to Young's demand that he throw more high FB. His sinker works better for him. Just another square peg/round hole and the Phillies likely wrongly dumping their pitching coach, so as not to lose the assistant, who belatedly recognizes that he should have put the analytics aside for a minute until he developed a relationship with and trust of his pitchers.

zambonir 2019-09-30 00:40:26 UTC #786

Should this thread be locked as we move into off-season discussion?

But Eflin seemed to be doing fine under Young's tutelage for the first three months. Then he started to struggle, and physically labored, even, from throwing the FBs, and went back to what worked. It's not like he was actually good last year under Kranitz in the second half of the season last year so who's to blame for that?

Not that the Young stuff was good in any way, but I think the jury is still out on whether Efin's style of pitching will make him a long-term, higher-end piece. They wanted him to miss more bats and that was indeed square peg/round hole, the question in the long run is, which thing needs to change?

allentown 2019-09-30 01:49:46 UTC #788

I don't think it should be locked yet. It is for discussion of the 2019 season. That season just ended today. The post-mortems of 2019 fit here. Let's give at least a week for that discussion. The off-season isn't really going to begin until after the WS. It's possible there will be more firings as a result of 2019 performances, but I don't expect we'll see new hires for 2020 until after WS. I see merit to letting this and off-season thread run in tandem for a week or two.

zambonir 2019-09-30 02:02:21 UTC #789

Oh I think we'll get a new manager before the WS this time. Kapler was actually hired before the 2017 WS ended. Cora was hired after the 2016 ALCS, and he was employed by a team that was about to go play in the World Series too.

And sure, fair enough on post-mortems vs. look-aheads but obviously there's gonna be major overlap.

Philsmania 2019-09-30 02:08:16 UTC #790

I don't know. Crawford's production since Reading leads me to believe that what you see is probably what you get with him.

zambonir 2019-09-30 02:40:15 UTC #791

I would take his career AAA numbers in MLB (which would also equal Segura's career MLB numbers). But of course it doesn't usually work that way.

He's still pretty young though. He was anywhere from 3-5 years younger than the average AAA player during his stints in LV and still young in the PCL this year. Of course that's due to AAAA players, but nevertheless.

Freddy Galvis at 24 had a .51 OPS+ and -0.3 WAR. So Crawford is already ahead of him. Segura at 24 was 70, 0.7. Neither of those guys were much better at 25 either.

julio 2019-09-30 14:09:21 UTC #792

Final 2019 WAR data for all Phillies players and pitchers whose WAR (either bWAR or fWAR) exceeded 1.0. These players are ranked by bWAR. In the case of starting pitchers (Nola, Eflin, Arrieta), I've added their pitching WAR and any non-zero batting WAR:

Player	bWAR	fWAR
Realmuto	4.4	5.7
Harper	4.2	4.6
Kingery	3.0	2.7
Hernandez	2.5	1.7
Haseley	1.7	0.9
Hoskins	1.5	2.1
McCutchen	1.4	1.5
Segura	1.3	2.4
Miller	1.2	1.1

Pitcher	bWAR	fWAR
Nola	4.0	3.5
Neris	1.8	1.0
Eflin	1.6	1.5
Arrieta	0.9	1.1

Ric20 2019-09-30 14:32:15 UTC #793

No all Haseley will ever be is a good 4th OFer !

andyb 2019-09-30 14:33:03 UTC #794

Next 2 most valuable pitchers were Suarez and Alvarez. Next most valuable offensive player was Vince Velasquez (0.6).

This is a pretty depressing list overall. Not a whole lot of younger keepers identified beyond Kingery.

julio 2019-09-30 14:39:18 UTC #795

Define "younger keeper."

Bryce Harper is about 18 months older than Scott Kingery, and might qualify as "younger."

Adam Haseley is two full years younger than Kingery. Notwithstanding Ric20 (above), 1.7 bWAR at age 23, in a season when the conventional wisdom is that he shouldn't have seen the majors, is not too shabby.

tom81 2019-09-30 15:07:52 UTC #796

Julio you have Eflin with the position players.

andyb 2019-09-30 15:12:25 UTC #797

Defined as younger players that we would want to keep in the future. We already know Harper has a long term contract. We already know that Realmuto and Nola are very good. Neris is probably pitching well enough to merit an extension potentially.

Beyond that, which younger player would you sign to a long term deal? Eflin might be the safest if you think he could be much better, but I am not sure offering Eflin a contract for his 3 arbitration years for $15 million would be wise. We did not learn enough about Haseley this year either. His value is all defense (and Fangraphs is much lower at 0.9) and that defense is a pretty small sample. They should clearly keep him, but I am not betting the future on him. VV and Pivetta are year to year even if they get offered deals. Who really cares about any of the other relievers?

For better or worse there is not much of a young core here.

2019-2020 Phillies Offseason News and Speculation

el-pietro 2019-09-30 16:39:33 UTC #798

A few things stand out to me in this list.
First is another solid but unspectacular season from Hernandez. I know hes getting expensive but hes never really let us down. If you are confident you can replace his ~2 wins, or you feel he is due for a decline then sure let him go, but his floor has been pretty high over the past 4 seasons since he became the every day second baseman, and given that he has been among our 4 or 5 highest ranking players by either WAR each season I would suggest that finding a solid 2 win player is harder than it sounds.

Realmuto is a genuine super star. Maybe not an MVP candidate but hes in the next tier below Trout, Bellinger, Bregman, Betts, Yelich etc. We need to lock him up.

Hoskins had a poor year, driven by his late season swoon. I've never been convinced he would get a long term deal here, but I don't think he needs to be replaced either. Hes a streaky hitter, we just need to hope his hot streaks carry us to wins and his cold streaks can be offset by other players.

McCutchen was incredible, far better than I ever anticipated, and its a real pity injury robbed us of a full season of him. Hopefully he can rebound and be something like the player we saw in 2019 but he will be a year older and coming off a serious injury so its hard to know what kind of player he will be.

zambonir 2019-09-30 17:28:03 UTC #799

What is it about the FG vs. BBR formula that views Hernandez and Segura differently? Defense? Positional value? With pitchers i know it's usually that BBR weights IPs more.

julio 2019-09-30 17:46:25 UTC #800

Two comments on this:

Aaaaaarrrrrrrggggggghhhh!
Fixed. Thanks for proofing it for me. (Second pair of eyes...)

mdougherty12 2019-09-30 17:54:52 UTC #801

It's defense; B-R uses DRS & Fangraphs uses UZR. The two sites started using the same positional adjustments a few years ago, and I don't think the offensive ratings are meaningfully different, but defense is still different.

For pitchers, the big difference is that B-R uses actual runs allowed as the starting point, while Fangraphs uses FIP as the starting point. The team defense adjustments can lead to differences, too (Nola in 2018).

bkeich 2019-09-30 17:58:37 UTC #802

'
What i was refering to here is we need more backup starters in AAA. Assuming we cannot stash Vargas/Smyly or they are in the majors in some role, we dont really have the backup starters in AAA to come up when there is an injury. Maybe EDLS, but I think he might be a FA, we need to add a couple 5th starter types in AAA that can come up when there is an injury. It is just one of the many needs we have for this pitching staff.

zambonir 2019-09-30 18:04:40 UTC #803

Ah, gotcha. Those guys aren't hard to come by though. And EDLS isn't going anywhere unless he's traded. Plus I'm not sure there's room for Irvin (along with Alvarez Morgan and Suarez) to be fully converted to relief yet. Then you've still got Howard, Romero, Medina. And who knows what VV and Pivetta will be doing. If you get two new starters or one new starter and one of Vargas/Smyly, they are still around if not traded.

If you're AAA rotation is halfway good you don't want to have room for AAAA starters. We didn't even have room for Eshelman this year.

They could also keep Eickhoff, but I don't think he's worth the 40-man spot. You can just sign someone else's Eickhoff to a minor league deal later.

andyb 2019-09-30 18:07:25 UTC #804

I think I prefer the BR method for pitching. FIP is useful in the same way BABIP is useful but at some point I think you need to measure actual performance (modified by park and opposition) as opposed to synthetic performance. The synthetic might be better for projections, but actual is better to measure how good they were the previous season.

On the fielding side I am not sure I know enough to discern what I would trust more. UZR might minimize the team aspects like shifts because it is measuring whether one catches the ball based on where they started.

The team adjustments also seem misguided as Nola was probably weighted way too high by BR last year because of it.

So I guess the ideal calc might be either for offense, BR for pitching (without the team adjustments) and FG for fielding. Or just look at both of them as giving us a range for player value.

julio 2019-09-30 18:12:46 UTC #805

I've taken my reply to andyb to the 2019-20 Offseason Thread, since it's all about next year. I suggest y'all do the same...

[How-to: Start a reply here, pulling in what you want to quote. Copy it to your clipboard (duh). Cancel the reply here. Open a post in the new thread. Paste. Ta-da! Write your response.

If you don't want to quote - just reply on the assumption that the rest of us will figure out what you're replying to... well, you shouldn't, really... but I know that some of you will want to go that route - just add a couple of words telling what you're up to?]

At some point, this thread will be locked. If you choose to carry on forward-looking discussions here, they'll get locked, and I'm not going to kill myself trying to move things/clean it up. Think before you post.