Discussion

Austinfan 2018-02-11 02:43:21 UTC #782

Where do you make these numbers up?
According to BR, he's had one year of over 3 WAR
In the 5 years he pitched, he accumulated 11.8 WAR (FG has him at 19.0)
So if he gets 12 WAR from 31-36 that will be pretty darn good.
And with teams no longer overspending, even an overpriced FA WAR is only worth $8-9M at best.
So the odds are the last two years of his contract will be a complete waste.

Cubs are probably betting on two 3-4 WAR seasons to start the contract, and will live with any they get past that point, because they'll probably blow it up in 3-4 years. He'll be a value purchase on the front end, and a dead money contract on the back end of his deal. But they're in win now mode, much like the 2010 Phillies. Phillies problem was not blowing it up in 2013 and accelerating the rebuild.

zambonir 2018-02-11 03:22:48 UTC #783

Various reports on MLBTR say the Dodgers may or 'may not have matched or almost matched the Cubs' offer, and other teams were around five years, $100 million. I am not gonna fault the Phillies for not going $30 million AAV or six years, either of which would have been required to win this derby.

For sure, he would have made this team better and that would have helped for 2019 moves as well. But at the end of the day you are still selling a 66-win team with a black hole at 3B, a rookie SS and C (plus an entire catching corps that has no history of handling pitchers well), and unproven corner outfielders. If they were gonna go big with someone like Darvish - and convince him to come here - there probably needed to be other improvements. They are not signing anyone to "bargain" contracts because nobody wants to play for the Phillies at a bargain price, and that's going to be true of Lynn/Cobb or Cashner/Vargas/Garcia too.

And the Phillies' own analytics tells them, no matter what the GM or manager says, that the team isn't going to have a shot at 85 wins next season. They do if everyone has best-case scenario years, but you only get there by hoping, not from data.

julio 2018-02-11 04:30:08 UTC #784

You're reading the wrong column at BR, Austinfan. They show Darvish at 19.3 WAR over five years. The 11.8 you cite is WAA - Wins Above Average, not WAR - Wins Above Replacement. BR has Darvish over 3 WAR in four of his five seasons.

julio 2018-02-11 05:09:38 UTC #785

Geltz is now listed as on the Lehigh Valley Ironpigs Restricted List.

LoneStarPhan 2018-02-11 21:44:07 UTC #786

The harshest punishment went to Geltz, who will serve a 100-game ban without pay after testing positive for a drug of abuse for the third time in his career. The 30-year-old, who signed a minor league deal with the Phillies last month, previously sat 50 games in 2014 after testing positive for marijuana.

allentown 2018-02-11 22:33:37 UTC #787

He's a fool to destroy his livelihood like this, but baseball is silly in the way it treats marijuana.

zambonir 2018-02-11 22:47:04 UTC #788

Yeah you wonder what these guys are thinking. Or maybe they never stop smoking and it's just a crapshoot getting caught (I mean, what are the odds he didn't use for three years? Or the odds that he just smoked one time at a party at the exact wrong time?). Plus it's even harder to go w/o pay on a minor league salary (it not as punitive).

julio 2018-02-12 18:30:08 UTC #789

Fryer was signed to a minor-league deal and invited to spring training - so the Phils are down one catcher for ST.

zambonir 2018-02-12 18:57:45 UTC #790

The Athletic ran a story previewing all 62 players at spring training and they already had too change the headline (but not the URL) to 60.

I guess Geltz just lost his major league invite as a by-product of the suspension, but will still be in minor league camp? Because you're not suspended during spring training (for one thing, you don't get paid).

tom81 2018-02-18 14:46:03 UTC #791

Wrong again!

On the theory that a broken clock is right twice a day, 8 days later here I go again.

I now think the odds are about 70% the go with one of the kids as 5th starter with the best bet being Eflin, followed by Lively, then Thompson, then Leiter. I think there might be around a 20% chance they trade for a SP and a 10% or less chance of signing a FA.

With Hosmer getting 8 years I think Arrieta holds out for a longer term than we will give and I don't think we value Lynn or Cobb that much over the kids.

Squire 2018-02-18 15:01:33 UTC #792

Think we could interest the KC Royals in 1B Tommy Joseph? Wouldn't need much back.

phillychuck 2018-02-18 15:48:25 UTC #793

Send Joseph and maybe one of our surplus A-ball pitchers (Bailey Falter?) to the Royals for Emmanuel Rivera, an A-ball 3B who plays good D and started to hit last year.

Makes too much sense to happen...

zambonir 2018-02-18 17:56:44 UTC #794

There are just too many players who are better than Joseph available for nothing (or a modest FA contract), and there always have been. That's why he's still here.

andyb 2018-02-18 18:12:11 UTC #795

Article on the Athletic has Kapler talking about a 9-man bullpen at times. They also talk about how many relievers have options remaining. So the Phillies are all in on the use-and-abuse bullpen philosophy it seems. Only they are going to do it with 4-5 inning starts and 5 relievers a game.

How can they do this? They have both young starters and young relievers with options. I envision a scenario where the last 4 spots in the bullpen are constantly rotating. Send someone down for 10 days. Replace with a fresh arm, maybe giving them only one or two outings in the minors over 10 days to stay fresh.

We have already seen them abuse minor league rules to rotate extra starters on and off the active rosters. I assume they will do the same thing with the 10-day DL in the majors. Prepare for lots of "fatigue" related DL moves.

Would I do the same thing in their shoes? Probably. Is all this good for baseball? Probably not. Time to bring back the 15-day DL. Expand the rosters but tighten the call up rules (27 man ML roster, 42-man eligible roster). Send someone down and they can't come up for 20 days without another injury. This is a problem that needs to be fixed. We are going to be arguing about stupid 20-second pitch clocks (which will be meaningless since pitchers can call for time outs) instead of analytics ruining the game.

zambonir 2018-02-18 19:13:13 UTC #796

This feels a little overblown to me, like Gelb thought he had a fun idea for a column and Kapler is willing to consider anything. Maybe they'll carry nine relievers occasionally, but the shorter bench, and the machinations involved to shuttle guys back and forth (including a position player when you wanted four, or during interleague), would get a little out of hand.

Plus the key phrase is in the headline - "absent a rotation addition." The beat writers have chosen to take Klentak and MacPhail at face value, partly because if they don't, that means they are failing to get any information about what might really be going on.

I don't really mind the analytical approach or the ostensible plan to give all these young arms a shot, but not letting your starters go three times around an order only works if they are effective the first two times. If they're only going four innings in that scenario, a better bullpen's not the fix.

andyb 2018-02-18 19:38:38 UTC #797

The Dodgers were the single leading abuser of the 10-day DL rule. One of the things about the Phillies too is that we DO have lots of starters. Our issue is that we have one good one and seven who profile as mediocre at the moment. But mediocre starters might be good in 4-5 inning options.

Obviously the more they add to the rotation the less they have to do it. But the Dodgers did it with much better starters. There is nothing here about the health of the starters really. It is about optimizing the limited skills that they have.

As I said - good for the Phillies, bad for baseball.

bkeich 2018-02-18 19:43:58 UTC #798

The more you use 2 inning relievers the easier this gets. I don't really believe that getting 2 innings out of a guy (normally 35 or so pitches) tires them more than an inning at 18 pitches.

The other way to do this if you have young starters is have a 6th starter that can go 4 innings. You use him every 5-6 days to give the bullpen a day off (have the 4 inning starter pitch innings 6-9). This is actually to me a great way to run a pitching staff, it also gives you a stretched out 6th starter for when someone gets hurt (and then you just bring up a starter from the minors and have him fill that 4 inning role).

By mostly limiting your young starters for 4-5 innings you also avoid hitters getting a 3rd crack at them when traditionally the hitter has more of an advantage than before.

allentown 2018-02-18 20:00:30 UTC #799

And the big advantage of this for SP health is that you avoid the long, many-pitch innings, when the SP is already tiring and the fatique/abuse points pile up quickly for young pitchers. I think there is a lot less damage done in a 110-pitch, complete-game outing in which the innings are all relatively smooth sailing than in a 90-pitch, 5-6-inning outing, which culminates in a tough 25-30 pitch inning. The SP often piles up a lot of pitches in that inning and doesn't get through it anyway

tom81 2018-02-18 20:22:16 UTC #800

I really don't see any harm to baseball with aggressively using the 10-Day DL rule. Even if not strictly "injured" a tired arm is one that can more easily be injured. Don't we want to keep the players healthy? It is not abusing the rules if you use the rules to keep players healthy.

I would be very surprised it Kapler ever went with a 9 man bullpen but I would bet we are among the top 5 teams in use of the 10-day DL this year. Our roster lends itself to this approach and our manager is very familiar with it. He may even have been one of the voices pushing for it with the Dodgers. None of our pitchers may be able to go 200 innings next year and many of them will be major injury risks if they pitch over 180.

Here is the innings pitched last year, includes minor league innings. Lively - 185.2, Nola -178.1, Pivetta - 165, Thompson - 164.2, Eshelman - 150, Eickhoff - 133, Leiter - 120.2, Eflin - 115.2, Velasquez - 82

Lucky_Beagle 2018-02-18 20:53:37 UTC #801

Is the guess a 9 man bullpen at times means only 4 starters will be in the rotation at the time or does it mean only 3 bench players? I would be more likely to envision it being with a start sent down or placed on the DL and calling up another bullpen arm till the rotation spot is needed again. We also know there are times when a starter gets skipped due to off days which might allow one to be sent down and a bull pen arm to be recalled.