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Meg Rowley FanGraphs Chat - 5/8/18
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Meg Rowley
12:00
Good morning! Welcome to the chat.
12:01
Let's dive in with a bunch of sad Mariners questions! Yay!
Alex
12:01
How many starting pitchers on the Mariners end the year with a higher WAR than Edwin Diaz?
Meg Rowley
12:01
Well, Paxton...
12:02
mayyyyybe Marco Gonzales if he can ever figure out how to a third time through the order.
The pitching really isn't very good.
It's a problem. It's a bad problem.
Coz
12:02
Did Ohtani's start on Sunday sting...just a little?
Meg Rowley
12:03
It's amazing how your expectations can protect you from sadness. I didn't expect the Mariners to win that game, and so when they didn't, I wasn't terribly fussed about it.
It maybe helped that Kyle Seager managed a few hits against Ohtani. The baseball gods gave me a little something.
12:04
But life is better when you can really, truly enjoy the Ohtanis and Trouts of the world, even when it is as the expense of your favorite team.
Nelson Cruz
12:04
If Ichiro wanted to work for another MLB team this year would the Mariners need to trade him?
Meg Rowley
12:05
Hmmm I'm actually not sure how that works. He's indicated that he wants to be in Seattle, so I guess we'll never know.
Roman Numeral Three
12:05
Who wins the AL East this year? It seems more important than ever to avoid the WC play-in game.
Meg Rowley
12:07
I think I give the slightest of edges to the Red Sox because I like their rotation more, but it is going to be a lovely, awful fight right to the end, I expect.
Drew
12:07
Would you rather have Scherzer/Strasburg or DeGrom/Syndergaard at the top of your rotation?
Meg Rowley
12:08
Scherzer/Strasburg, but that's an aesthetic choice.
weezy
12:08
if you could have any job working for a baseball team, what job would that be?
Meg Rowley
12:09
Which job let's me write 2,000 words on a bunch of screenshots and GIFs while wistfully connecting those images to the lessons baseball teaches us about life, and ourselves, as we grapple with our mortality and disappointments?
12:15
We're back! Sorry about that, everyone.
The tech, it has betrayed us.
eg
12:15
do you wager on baseball?
Meg Rowley
12:15
There are literally thousands of other things to waste my money on.
Thierry Henry
12:15
Any thoughts on Gary Sánchez's defense? I haven't looked at any statistics, but man, I feel like he's allowed 1.9 million passed balls this season
Meg Rowley
12:16
Allow me a moment to look something up.
12:17
So Baseball Prospectus' catcher defensive metric breaks catcher defense down into three components: blocking, framing, and throwing runs.
12:20
You're not wrong that historically, that hasn't been a strong part of his game. Last year, by BP's metrics, he was worth -2.6 blocking runs. Not great!
So far this year, Sanchez has been worth 0 blocking runs, 0 throwing, and 1.3 framing runs, which has him tied for 9th among catchers with at least 1000 framing chances. So he's been marginally better. The good news for Yankees fans is that most of the research shows that framing is really the place catchers add value defensively.
12:21
Which makes sense, right? Think of how many pitches they frame, and how quickly value can accumulate there.
So Sanchez isn't a great blocker, but also, it doesn't matter a ton over the course of season. Which is good; the Yankees needed a break.
YOAT
12:21
Don't the Braves need to make some moves with the start they have had?
Meg Rowley
12:22
They might (will?) closer to the deadline, but this isn't really when moves happen, so I wouldn't be worried by their inactivity.
Dexy's Midnight Fowlers
12:22
Matt Chapman is a robust 1 for his last 27. He's not losing playing time thanks to the glove, but was his hot start this season a mirage?
Meg Rowley
12:23
I don't think so. I think he's a young player going through a rough patch. I don't love the uptick in strikeouts. When he struggled in the past it was often because he was swinging at nonsense. But I expect he'll adjust again.
12:24
And as an aside, the defense in unreal. Unreal! We should probably talk about the third base defense in the AL West. It's really very good.
Thomas
12:24
Any hope for Lewis Brinson at the major league level? Hasn't look good in his first taste of the bigs.
Meg Rowley
12:26
I think he'll be fine. You're right to say he's struggled, but he was dinged up last year, and this isn't enough to panic over. Brinson has a lot of plus tools, and I think he'll figure out something better than this.
Vslyke
12:26
What do the White Sox do with Lucas Giolito? He is walking more batters than he is striking out and getting shelled, but he has nothing left to prove in the minor leagues.
Meg Rowley
12:26
I think they'll just let him take his lumps up to a point. Nothing new to learn in Triple-A, and no real pressure to win in Chicago right now.
Alex
12:27
Has Marco Gonzales figured something out? I'm not sure whether I expect his ERA to regress towards his peripherals or to expect his strikeouts to decrease.  He hasn't really changed his swinging strike rate so I'm pretty skeptical so far.
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