Hank Chinaski

That’s fine, but I’m of the opinion that there’s never a bad time to shine a light on this insanity. Hell, @Wulaw Horn and his podcast co-host have been banging this drum since April. As an aside, that’s a great podcast and that “Andrew” guy seems smart as hell.

Bullshit. This message needs to be relentlessly shouted. The asinine allocation of playing time is the reason the Astros are up by a game instead of five.

Chas: .289/.371/.527; 147 wRC+ Julio: .282/.340/.490; 130 wRC+ Both grade as plus defenders. Dusty, it’s easy if you got a Chas McCormick, you just put him out in center field.

He’s been better offensively than Juan Soto, Kyle Tucker, Bryce Harper, and Julio Rodriguez in 2023. It is insane to play him as infrequently as the Astros do. Absolutely nuts. It is a legit fireable offense by the manager.

allocating PT for Chas and Diaz the way Dusty does would be like: 1. the Rangers making Garcia and Heim part time players 2. the Mariners making Julio and Raleigh part time players. The difference is that Chas has been better offensively than Julio or Garcia and Diaz has been better offensively than Heim or Raleigh. And they are both good defensively. Somehow the Rangers and Mariners understand that playing your good players is conducive to winning. The Astros should have at least a 5 game lead right now.

Chas has been as good as Tucker offensively this year. Diaz hits as well as the best offensive catchers in MLB - Will Smith, Sean Murphy, etc. We sit them routinely in the middle of a pennant chase. Our manager treats them like spare parts. It’s insane.

I think it’s the other way around - career stats are the sundae (foundation), the other things are the nuts. Seems like voters need to see a baseline of career stats. I’m not saying that’s how it should be necessarily, but that’s my perception of how candidates are evaluated. I think he’s close but not quite there yet.

He almost certainly will not approach Bagwell in career WAR. If that’s not how you would define “greatest,” that’s fine, but there will likely end up being about a 10-15 WAR gap between he and Bagwell. Disagree that he’d get into the HOF if he retired after this season. Not arguing that he shouldn’t, mind you - just that he wouldn’t. The Hall favors big counting numbers, and the more contemporary voters who are less concerned about them place extra emphasis on high WAR/value peak numbers. There just aren’t that many short career guys in the Hall. Puckett is a good example, but I seriously doubt he’d get in had his career ended recently (I don’t think modern voters would vote him in). The exciting part is that last season was maybe his best (along with 2017) and he’s actually been better this year, albeit in limited time. The last two years, his walk have increased, moving his OBP up; it looks like it may be the next phase of his continued evolution as a hitter. If he has a couple more healthy seasons in which he performs at the level of 2022-23, he will be just about there. There is of course the asinine sign stealing bullshit, but I think as more time passes and more people objectively acknowledge that the entire thing was less a “scandal” than it was a sensationalized story about what amounts to a baseball tradition, as more evidence mounts that it made absolutely zero detectable difference in his performance, as evidence that he didn’t even really participate anyway is reinforced, I doubt it keeps him out of the Hall.

Well yeah.

I mean, he hit 22 HR, won the gold glove at SS and was 95th percentile in sprint speed among MLBers in 2022. His “hit” tool probably wouldn’t count here, but Gunnar hasn’t exactly been Tony Gwynn either.

But yeah, I’m inclined to think that his overall offensive numbers are likely the closest to what he really is as a hitter (regardless of position) and those numbers are right there with the 3-4 best offensive catchers in MLB. A catcher that is good defensively and can hit like that is a huge advantage because most catcher can’t hit. We just inexplicably opt not to take that advantage.

As a catcher (entering today): 155 PAs; .324/.355/.634; 11 HR As a DH: 134 PAs; .214/.239/.349; 5 HR He also has a handful of PAs at 1B and as a PH, but not enough to glean anything. So yeah, he has performed much better offensively when playing catcher rather than DHing. It’s still small samples for each, though, so I don’t think we can conclusively say that it’s a real thing or just statistical noise. This is where “significance” comes in - basically we need big enough samples to be able to reasonably conclude that there’s a real difference between samples of different conditions, usually such that the probability that the samples do not represent a real difference is very small (usually less than 5%).

If he played as frequently as he should, he’s a rookie catcher with 30+ HR. That hasn’t happened since Mike Piazza 30 years ago. He’s in the Hall of Fame. But…Dusty.

Dusty’s lineups reduce the Astros’ chances of winning games. The front office allows it. It appears that this is not going to change despite being in a fight to even qualify for the postseason. The only logical conclusion one can draw from this is that the club isn’t all that serious about winning in 2023, for whatever reason. Too much winning is bad for the kids?

It’s almost like you should start your good players when you’re in a pennant/playoff race. They deserve to lose every time Dusty does this.

Yeah. Less invested by the day.

No.

This team deserves to miss the playoffs. We don’t play our best players. It’s fucking absurd. Makes it difficult to care when the club acts like it actively prefers not to win games.

Framber.

You don’t really believe this.

Reminder that Dusty has said that once a guy is fully ready, he likes to give him another day off. So…yeah.

Sure, no need to play Chas. No urgency. Makes total sense.

“Analytics” in this case is about describing probabilities. “it isn’t always right” doesn’t really mean anything at all. The most elite hitters in baseball make outs 60% of the time. But the odds of scoring more runs are enhanced by giving your best hitters - those with the best odds of not making an out/hitting the ball hard - more opportunities in situations that are more conducive to scoring. It’s really not that complicated. Increasing your odds of scoring increases your odds of winning. Even increasing the odds by what may seem like tiny amounts makes actual differences over a large enough sample. (Like the scheme in Office Space where they take fractions of pennies off of every transaction.) So yeah, you can agree with Jeff Bagwell when he makes fun of of exit velo - because anecdotally someone hits the ball hard and it’s an out - but to do so obviously misses the entire point, which is that the harder a guy consistently hits the ball, the better he is likely to produce. It doesn’t mean the hardest hit balls always have the best results. It doesn’t seem like it should be necessary to even have to explain that.