Phillies Hot Stove Discussion 2021-22

[andyb]

The big argument against Buxton may be whether we believe in our CF pipeline (Muzziotti, Rojas, Yhoswar Garcia). If we do believe in that pipeline, maybe we only need a 1-2 year CF fix. I think I believe more in our CF pipeline than our LF pipeline. I just don't see Moniak and Haseley and Vierling producing league average offense in LF on a sustained basis and the biggest bat behind them (Ortiz) is very risky. Ortiz is worth keeping and maybe even putting on the 40-man roster. Just not counting on him with the certainty that I think one of those CFs will come through.

[Austinfan]

Vierling gives you a solid half of a platoon, so just need one LH OF.
And Bohm may move to LF in a year, depending on Stott, Garcia, Kingery and Torres.

As far as RPs, you either find a reliable closer and pay the price, or go with one year patches and hope the law of large numbers holds.

I can see going with patches in CF, LH LF, a couple veteran RPs.
Closers are usually home grown, when they hit the market they're often past their peak years and present the threat of breaking down.
Too bad SD blew out his arm, though by next season he may be far enough along to regain the rest of his velo.

[andyb]

Vierling gives you a solid half of a platoon, so just need one LH OF

I would say my certainty on that is about 50%. And if he is only a platoon OF it does nothing to answer the question of whether the team should invest big dollars in either LF or CF. I get that your philosophy is to cobble together platoons and not spend much money unnecessarily, but what if the platoons are not very good and not spending money is an opportunity cost that delays the team's return to contention?

I think Stott will be a decent starter. Just not sure anyone else on your list will be with any certainty required for longer term planning. Thinking Bohm could be a left-fielder too is not an ideal solution and frankly at the moment is just a fantasy because the team is not even contemplating it.

[Austinfan]

We've got close to $80M tied up in Harper, JT and Wheeler. So limited flexibility to add another big, long-term deal.
I think before they do so, be sure there isn't a cheaper alternative a year or two away, because one more deal would preclude a lot of future moves.

[zambonir]

Haseley and Moniak were supposed to be our CF pipeline. Kingery and Vierling both seem iffy there as well (Kingery because he may not even make the team, Vierling better suited elsewhere).

Still tricky to balance offense vs. defense, as well as cost, in LF and CF. Even if Vierling/Miller was a decent LF platoon, is actually a good one? Same goes for CF. They did in fact cobble together WAR at both spots, but the idea for 2022 is to get more WAR. Simply replacing Didi isn't going to do it, they need offensive and defensive upgrades in the OF too.

I certainly hope there are some smart cheap or mid-priced signings; they've been pretty hard to come by around here. It will be a long slow hot stove anyway I'm sure.

[bigegypt0417]

Think in terms of variance, if I put together an 85-90 win team, the odds of making the playoffs are what, 50%?
If I put together a 95 win team, those odds are close to what, 80-90%

Braves- 88 wins
Dodgers- 106 Wins

Astros-95 Wins
Red Sox- 92 Wins

Get to the playoffs and see what happens. Your desire to build to a certain numbers of wins really doesn't make a difference.

[andyb]

I think before they do so, be sure there isn't a cheaper alternative a year or two away, because one more deal would preclude a lot of future moves.

The flip side to that of course is that if there is not any sort of rebuild that the team starts (even a quick 1-2 year rebuild), you are likely dooming the team to another .500 finish. Sometimes spending money is justified if doing so let's you keep your prospects. The owner is wealthy enough and the market is big enough to survive a year or two of going over the luxury tax threshold with the goal being to get under it in 2-3 years with younger players contributing.

Just looking at those younger players on the depth chart and assuming they will contribute is something different though.

[bigegypt0417]

I think before they do so, be sure there isn't a cheaper alternative a year or two away, because one more deal would preclude a lot of future moves.

The flip side to that of course is that if there is not any sort of rebuild that the team starts (even a quick 1-2 year rebuild), you are likely dooming the team to another .500 finish. Sometimes spending money is justified if doing so let's you keep your prospects. The owner is wealthy enough and the market is big enough to survive a year or two of going over the luxury tax threshold with the goal being to get under it in 2-3 years with younger players contributing.

Just looking at those younger players on the depth chart and assuming they will contribute is something different though.

AF has been telling fans to wait for the young guys for years and years...I'm pretty sure we're on the 3rd or 4th crop of players we're waiting on.

82 wins is something to build on...not something to attempt to maintain or blow up.

Find 5 or 6 more wins and hope for the best.

[allentown]

Think in terms of variance, if I put together an 85-90 win team, the odds of making the playoffs are what, 50%?
If I put together a 95 win team, those odds are close to what, 80-90%

Okay, I don't know where you got your stats, but let's knock down this "need to have 95-100 wins BEFORE adding expensive FA to make it worthwhile"

I looked up all of the WS participants (excluding shortened 2020 season) since 2000. I think that represents modern baseball. That is 20 WS, so 40 WS teams.

For the AL, 15 of the WS teams met your criterion of 95 wins, but that was AFTER any big FA signs
For the NL only 5 of the 20 teams had at least 95 wins AFTER any FA additions

Of those 20 WS: 8 were won by the team with the poorer regular season record and in one series the participants had the same number of regular season wins.

Now, since you are saying the minimum number of wins to warrant adding a big FA is 95, we need to consider the impact of those FAs. Let's assume the FA signing adds 3 WAR. So we are only declaring a success on your strategy if the team won at least 98 games in its WS year. How many teams meet that criterion?
NL -- 3 teams
AL - 7 teams

It seems you need to adjust your criterion for how many games a team must win in a season to make it reasonable to add a big FA.

[Austinfan]

Actual wins vary from year to year. A 95 win team might win 90 one year, 100 the other.

Go back and look at those WS teams, I'll bet a lot of those "lesser win" teams either underachieved or were hobbled by injuries but got hot at the end of the year as players returned/regressed to their norms.

A 80-85 win team that wins 88 likely won a few games that it shouldn't have (that variance thing) but wasn't talented enough to go deep, a 95 win team that wins 88 is far more likely to be talented enough to have a hot post-season month.

Now there is one caveat, a team with 3 top starting pitchers and a couple top RPs can win short series even if the other starters suck (reducing wins over a regular season run) and it lacks RP depth (same effect). Unfortunately, I wouldn't trust Nola or Eflin in a short series anymore.

[andyb]

I agree with him that I am not sure signing a big ticket free agent is the right thing to do. Where I disagree is in thinking we can muddle through with the current young players playing more significant roles. I am not going to pencil Vierling in to a significant role if that affects other decisions that are more important (like getting a LF or CF and choosing which to do). Vierling is just not good enough for that even if he is good enough to compete for a role on the team.

Plug the big holes and have a 3-5 year plan. Then figure out where the younger role players fit in.

[allentown]

Plug the big holes and have a 3-5 year plan. Then figure out where the younger role players fit in.

That's the way to go. Don't delude ourselves that we are waiting on the arrival of a future star position player from our minors. The data says that we don't have one. We may have several average starters, perhaps one plus future starter. We have a bunch of guys who look like their ceiling is as a sub, platoon, or below-average starter player. That means in the short term we use our younger guys as cheap bench and platoon players and to man holes we can't afford to fill, likely as below average starters. Bohm, Kingery, and Hoskins should be given every opportunity to start this season. Haseley and Vierling should be bench/platoon guys. Marchan can be our backup catcher. If the Phillies don't see him as a future starter, no reason not to bring him up in backup role for 2021. I would bring back Herrera and push very hard to get him on ADD drugs. I think he'll be a 2 WAR player. We need a SS. That's the pressing need on the position-player side, and we have nobody who's going to come up from the farm to satisfactorily fill that need in 2022 and likely not in 2023 either. Stott can use another year in minors and we need him as an injury replacement cover for second half of season. We can sign a more advanced minor league FA or cheap MLB FA to a split contract with guaranteed release date in May. We can also keep Galvis.

[julio]

Seems to me consensus on this board is no Kimberll

The “consensus on this board”… basically a unicorn, if you know what I mean!

[zambonir]

Bohm, Kingery, and Hoskins should be given every opportunity to start this season.

Yeah, I think Rhys has earned it.

But Kingery simply isn't going to factor into this team's off-season plans. If he's lucky he can compete for a job in May spring training. And even then, what position would you let him start at? CF? He may not even be able to win a super-sub job if Didi and Galvis are on the team. More likely he needs a solid three months of uninterrupted AAA action to recover from two full seasons of COVID, multiple injuries, and shoulder surgery.

The rest of the above is fine, but you still need to "plug the big holes" as Andy said. SS is the biggest one even with all that money committed to its former occupant. But Herrera/Vierling and Brad Miller/Haseley as your CF and LF isn't gonna get this team closer to the playoffs, and if that isn't the goal they shouldn't be carrying all these vets (or trusting this manager to help develop young players).

Adderall isn't gonna fix Herrera. I mean, it might in the same way speed has helped a lot of players historically. It would help me at work right now! (Maybe I wouldn't be typing this message.) But if he was seriously a candidate for a clinical diagnosis it would have come up long ago, if not from the Phillies than from court-ordered therapy.

(Also, saying the Phillies should just tell a player to get on drugs when they can't even get them to be be vaccinated... )

[xogfog]

If there is a DH next year, then do you DH Hoskins or Bohm and get a better fielding 1B or 3B?

[andyb]

If there is a DH next year, then do you DH Hoskins or Bohm and get a better fielding 1B or 3B?

I think you still make the DH a shared position with players like Realmuto and Harper getting games there to keep their bat in the lineup as much as possible. It does provide more reasons for Bohm to make the team even if they carry another player with a better 3B glove than Bohm. In other words your bench players can be more offensively oriented (or at least one of them can) since there will be extra DH at bats available.

[allentown]

You make my argument for me. All the more reason not to wait for 95 wins to sign major FAs. The Cardinals went to a WS and won it, after winning only 83 games in the regular season. That's 5% of the WS winners in the past two decades. That's as well as the Phillies have done, so a 5% shot with an 83-win team isn't bad. I've shown that only 25% of NL teams that go to the WS won 95 or more games. Now, you agree that a '95-win' team may actually win 90 or 100 depending on how the season plays out, simply as normal variation. So, an 82-win team is, in the same variability range really anywhere from a 77-78 win team to an 85-86 win team. Add a FA who adds 4 wins and that team, that is us, could very well win 89-90 games in 2022. That would win the NLEast in 2021. Likely in 2022. This admittedly isn't all that high probability, but we certainly don't need to wait until we win 95 games to go for major FAs.

[zambonir]

If they keep him and he finds the bat, Didi probably DHs 20% of the time too (and perhaps plays 3B as well?)

[bigegypt0417]

Actual wins vary from year to year. A 95 win team might win 90 one year, 100 the other.

Go back and look at those WS teams, I'll bet a lot of those "lesser win" teams either underachieved or were hobbled by injuries but got hot at the end of the year as players returned/regressed to their norms.

So....you're using that logic with the 82 wins the phillies had after losing a starting pitcher, their starting 1st baseman and a few other players? I mean...since we should take that in to consideration...right?

[Austinfan]

Well, look at what Atlanta lost!@

If you can get a 27 year old FA with upside left at a reasonable price, sure.

The problem comes from either paying 30+ FAs for past performance or guys in their prime coming off their career season (how many sustain that peak season?) as if they'll repeat that year for a decade.

You need to come up with something on the order of 40 WAR to be a real competitor.

Now if you grossly overpay for 10 of them (say $10M a WAR, easily done, one $20M flop like Didi, one $30M contract for a guy you thought would give you 5 WAR but only gives 3 WAR, so say $50M for the other 7 which is good value), you have to find 30 WAR from the other $100M.

It's a matter of efficiency, if you have a great farm system you can afford to gamble on FAs because you can eat a big contract with only mild indigestion. If you don't have young cheap talent, you can't afford those mistakes.