Mitch White impresses Keith Law
A couple of notes on Mitch White and Julio Urias. Typically the Dodgers do poorly with second round picks but they may have gotten a gem this time. Keith Law chimed in on what he saw this week:
White went with the 65th overall pick in that draft, but if teams redrafted today, he might go in the top five overall.
Did that get your attention? How about this?
White threw two innings in the Dodgers’ first Double-A game of the spring on Monday and was 95-97 with above-average fastball life and a plus slider at 88-90 mph. The slider has hard, big downward break, and he also shows a true curveball at 81-83 that has some power to it, although I think the slider is the better pitch.
Julio Urias is no longer a prospect but he is just 20. Doug Thorburn of Rotowire had this say about him.
I have seen Urias morph his delivery twice in two years, add five mph to his fastball in the course of a single season and show off the best quick pick-off move in baseball, in which the southpaw steps off the rubber with his back foot and makes a snap-throw to first base. His developmental acumen is off the charts, his right-now talent is good enough to carve hitters in the bigs
Dodgers renew Seager
According to Jon Heyman the LAD renewed their superstar shorstop for $575,000. They had an opportunity to reward Seager with the largest second-year renewal in baseball but decided to give Seager a modest raise. For some context, the Cubs gave Kris Bryant $625,000 after his 2015 season. Byrant had a great rookie season but he wasn’t a top three MVP player, only 11th:) I guess the Cubs felt the larger than normal raise for a ROY was a down payment on the fact they screwed him out of millions by letting him have only 171 service days in 2015 instead of 172.
For whatever reason, I can’t really explain I had been hoping that Seager would top that $625,000 and get rewarded for having one of the greatest rookie seasons in Dodger history. As it is, he’s already arguably the best 22-year-old in Dodger history and easily the best LAD 22-year-old position player. Well not easily. Adrian Beltre has his own argument and would win if you were using bWAR to the bar.
Player OPS+ PA From To Age OPS Pos Jimmy Sheckard 169 609 1901 1901 22-22 .944 *7/58 Pete Reiser 145 843 1940 1941 21-22 .903 *8/59H6 Corey Seager 142 800 2015 2016 21-22 .892 *6/H5 Zack Wheat 123 783 1909 1910 21-22 .748 *7/8 Casey Stengel 115 577 1912 1913 21-22 .762 *8/9 Willie Crawford 111 689 1964 1969 17-22 .716 H7/98 Ed Stevens 111 591 1945 1947 20-22 .754 *3/H Duke Snider 110 876 1947 1949 20-22 .804 *8/H97 Willie Davis 109 1140 1960 1962 20-22 .784 *8/H Ron Fairly 106 690 1958 1961 19-22 .796 9/H837 Red Smith 105 679 1911 1912 21-22 .733 *5 Adrian Beltre 100 1918 1998 2001 19-22 .765 *5/H6 Bill Buckner 100 860 1969 1972 19-22 .697 *9/3H7
Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Play Index Tool Used
Generated 3/14/2017.
Doing some extra research it is well known that Mike Trout was renewed at the minimum. How about Albert Pujols? In 2001 he exploded on baseball and was ROY along with a top 4 MVP vote receiver. In 2002 his page shows he earned $600,000 which was a lot more than the minimum in 2002. I keep hearing about precedent, I’ve found Kris Bryant and Albert Pujols.
Just saying
The Giving Tree
The children’s classic book “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein was probably a mainstay in every parent’s library/kindle or elementary school library for the past fifty years even though the meaning of the book has been hotly debated.
I personally always thought the kid was a selfish prick who didn’t deserve the stump to sit on, but as I’ve aged I had to cut down many a tree. Right now I have a massive old Pine Tree that looms over my house with some fairly large cracks. In the last ten years, two huge limbs have sunk down to quietly rest on the driveway doing as little damage as possible waiting to be set free from the main trunk as their weight eventually proved untenable. With the recent rains and winds, I crossed my fingers that he would continue to adorn my front yard and unlike many others trees in the valley he continued to stand guard.
Soon I’m going to have to cut that tree down and when I do I’ll leave a stump much like the photo you see at the top. I’ve grown several pine trees from little seedlings from that tree. I let one grow about 10 yards from the original knowing that one day he would take the place of the original.
Pappa
and Junior
Junior
That photo at the top came to me from the NY Times with this story:
And Finally … Seeing a stump where a tree once stood in Oakland, a passer-by was apparently reminded of the children’s book “The Giving Tree.” With the stump as a canvas, the person wrote a quote from the Shel Silverstein classic about a tree that gives everything — its apples, branches, and trunk — for the love of a boy.
After a tree was cut down in Oakland, someone wrote lines from Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree” on the stump.
Phoebe Calef
Scoresheet LAD style
One of my favorite games during the summer is playing Scoresheet baseball. It is something akin to the old Strata-Matic game except an algorithm uses the actual stats for the week to determine how you did against your opponent. It only uses the raw data, so we are talking at-bats. hits, type of hits. No RBI stat no run stat, those are game dependent so if your player hit a grand slam against the Giants, all you know is that your player will hit a home run but it will be game dependent on how many base runners are on when he does. For pitchers, it is innings, strikeouts, walks, and most importantly how many actual runs they gave up that week. Not xFIP or any other variety of earned runs but actual honest to god runs given up. Defense matters, but not enough to make Matt Kemp worthless. You can decide if your players bunt in key situations, bring in defensive replacements, and when you replace a pitcher.
I have several Scoresheet teams but I’ll only bore/enlighten you about one of them. That is my Dodger Scoresheet Root team. The concept of a Scoresheet root league is each owner picks a franchise they want to represent. When the league is first formed you pick seven players from that team’s roster and ten minor leaguers from that team’s farm. My original draft was over ten years ago but the team below is what I currently have.
I won the league in 2015 but the normal winner has been the owner of the Rockies franchise. For a while, I thought I was going to be like the actual Dodgers and never win a championship with Kershaw but after three losses in the Championship series I finally broke through in 2015.
This is what a championship series looks like when you lose a seven game series.
This is what it looks like when you win a championship.
The Kershaw/Grienke duo was dynamite. I traded Grienke in the winter of 2015 after he left the Dodgers for the Diamondbacks. I made a horribly great trade. The main focus of the trade was Jordan Zimmerman but I needed more and wanted a minor leaguer. I asked for JP Crawford, they offered me Trevor Story instead. Boom. I’ll be using Story as my 2nd baseman since I have Seager, I’ll take a defensive hit since he doesn’t qualify at 2nd, but the booming bat should make up for it, and I’ll simply replace him with a light hitting defensive wizard ala Ivan DeJesus Junior. Yup, ole DeJesus has a nice defensive ranking at 2nd base.
Anyway, you keep 14 players from the team from last year, as many minor leaguers as you want from other teams, and ten LAD minor leaguers. Each minor leaguer you keep that is not a LAD it reduces one draft pick. Last year I had Cotton and Montas as part of my LAD 10, but with the trade, they are now simply minor league players.
The table below is my team as we start the draft tonight. You don’t always get your players, when Ryu came over from Korea he becomes eligible in the draft and someone took him before I could. Eventually, I traded for him just before he blew out his shoulder, but luckily for me, it was Matt Cain who I traded so we both ended up with zilch.
This is an NL only league, with ten franchises. We had 12, but 2 dropped out. The Giants don’t have a franchise owner so all their players were available in the original draft as are all their minor leaguers.
I tend to use the BaseballHQ Runs Above Replacement to help me draft but sometimes you just have to zig or zag. They don’t like Brandon Finnegan but I do so he’ll be my first pick in this draft. I actually traded for him this winter but when it came time to create my 14 player keeper list I couldn’t find the space for him. This will also allow me to have Finnegan on every single type of team I playing with this year. Which means he should be blowing out his elbow in about two weeks time.
| Batting Statistics | |||||||
| PLAYER | Pos | Th | OPS | RAR | |||
| Seager Corey | SSS | R | 844 | 31.5 | |||
| Puig Yasiel | SRF | R | 790 | 5.6 | |||
| Kemp Matt | SLF | R | 807 | 16.3 | |||
| Pederson Joc | SCF | L | 827 | 11.9 | |||
| Grandal Yasmani | SC | R | 815 | 14.1 | |||
| Turner Justin | S3B | R | 817 | 13.2 | |||
| Story Trevor | S2B | R | 853 | 19 | |||
| Gonzalez Adrian | S1B | L | 801 | 5.8 | |||
| Verdugo Alex | MCF | L | 718 | -0.3 | |||
| Bellinger Cody | M1B | L | 809 | 0.8 | |||
| Toles Andrew | BLF | R | 748 | 0.3 | |||
| Barnes Austin | BC | R | 665 | -1.5 | |||
| Will Smith | MC | ||||||
| Willie Calhoun | M2B | ||||||
| Yusniel Diaz | MOF | ||||||
| Pitching Statistics | |||||||
| PLAYER | Pos | ERA | Ctl | Dom | Cmd | RAR | BPV |
| Kershaw Clayton | SP5 | 2 | 1.4 | 10.2 | 7.2 | 32.4 | 173 |
| Hamels Cole | SP4 | 3.55 | 3.2 | 9 | 2.8 | 8.7 | 101 |
| Lackey John | SP3 | 3.58 | 2.3 | 7.8 | 3.4 | 5.1 | 100 |
| Urias Julio | SP2 | 3.34 | 2.6 | 9.2 | 3.5 | 9.1 | 116 |
| Cotton Jharel | SP1 | 3.94 | 2.5 | 8.2 | 3.2 | -2.8 | 95 |
| Jansen Kenley | RP | 2.49 | 1.8 | 13.6 | 7.5 | 11.8 | 206 |
| Melancon Mark | RP | 1.97 | 1.5 | 8.3 | 5.6 | 10.7 | 143 |
| De Leon Jose | MSP | 4.06 | 2.8 | 8.5 | 3 | 0.3 | 94 |
| Stewart Brock | MSP | 3.58 | 2 | 7.5 | 3.8 | -1.6 | 101 |
| Montas Frankie | MRP | 4.09 | 3.7 | 9.4 | 2.6 | 0.2 | 90 |
| Wade Buehler | MSP | ||||||
| Yadier Alvarez | MSP |
ha ha ha
If you are going to give up fourteen runs in a game, the best possible time to do it is in the 9th inning of a cactus league game when many of the sold out crowd were already heading home and with names like Istler, Griggs, Paredes, and Hooper. What a hitting parade by the White Sox kids.
Night Game Notes:
- Until the nonroster folk showed up the real Dodger pitching staff pitched a gem of a game on Sunday night with Alex Wood leading the charge. This was the 3rd straight good start by pitchers trying to crack the season-opening rotation led by McCarthy on Friday, Ryu on Saturday, and Wood on Sunday. Wood got into trouble in the first but escaped with only having given up only one run and was smooth as silk the rest of his outing.
- Ross Stripling followed Wood and struck out the first two batters. He ran into a little trouble in his second inning but got out unscathed.
- Chris Hatcher did his best to get back in the bullpen game with a perfect inning that included two punchouts. Liberatore is looking like the guy who was dominant in the first half last year.
- I’m not sure if Bobby Wilson has a chance to usurp Austin Barnes as the backup catcher but he had a big day last night crushing a home run to left and followed that with a sharp single to left.
- Puig made a throw in the first that got Rick Monday complaining because he missed the cut off man, but I tell you what, the throw was on the money to 3rd, and he just missed nailing him. Sure the result was 2nd/3rd no outs but……..man that was a great throw.
- Forsythe sure looks great on the defensive side at 2nd base making a great play on the shortstop side going against his body to throw a slow moving Soto. His turns at 2nd have looked quick and clean.
Treasonist?
I’m enjoying the WBC but some of my fellow Americans might think I’m a tad unpatriotic because I simply can’t find it in me to root for the US team. Watching little countries bring down big countries has always made my heart smile. Of course, when a country like the DR has a lineup that looks like an all-star game with some future HOF talent in it, it isn’t exactly David versus Goliath, but it still tickled my fancy when Cruz crushed Miller in the 8th tonight.
Venditte doesn’t appear to be very good no matter which arm he uses.
Only in the WBC can the backup catcher on a major league team knock out the starting catcher on the same major league team. Rough way to get the starting gig.
Eric Gagne actually pitched well getting six outs. He was brought into a tough situation with the bases loaded and walked the first hitter but escaped with allowing only one runner to score. Could be a kick in the pants if Gagne really could hook up with a major league team after not pitching in the majors since 2008. Normally I’d laugh/scoff at his chances but after watching Rich Hill come back anything is possible.
Lindor hit two home runs for Puerto Rico tonight and the first was a monster shot
McCarthy stamps while regulars rake
Last night Brandon McCarthy and the Dodgers expected to be part of the opening day lineup laid waste to the Rangers. McCarthy pitched the best three innings of the spring among those battling for a spot in the rotation. Granted he did it against an AAA Texas Ranger lineup but it still had encouraging signs. Six groundouts and three strikeouts for all nine outs. Zero walks for a pitcher who couldn’t find the plate last summer.
Other Pitching Highlights:
- Brandow Morrow struck out the side in his bid to make the bullpen
- Julio Urias threw two shutout innings.
- Jacob Rhame did his best to separate himself from Josh Ravin by pitching a scoreless 9th, while Josh Ravin was the only blemish on the night giving up four hits and two runs in his one inning of work.
Hitting Highlights:
- The regulars Forsythe, Puig, Turner, Grandal, and Pederson went a combined 9 for 11.
- Puig hit two home runs and walked in his three plate appearances
- Forsythe was also perfect with three singles from the lead off spot
- Turner could only manage to get on base twice in his three at-bats
- Grandal was given four at-bats and got on base in three of them. Surprisingly two of them were singles.
- Gutierrez finally got on the spring board by hitting a home run in the 1st inning. That was however his only hit as he continues to struggle this spring.
Petty grievances
I once heard/read that only petty people have petty grievances. Petty be me
I find it amusing the things that somewhat intelligent people get their knickers in a twist about until I remember how twisted my knickers are.
I almost never forgave Sandy Koufax when I was seven when my brother told me Koufax loved basketball more than baseball. In my defense, I was seven.
I thought Robin Yount was a chump for 20 years because he wanted to be a pro golfer instead of a baseball player.
I could never root for Gary Sheffield for two reasons. Purposely making errors at 19 because they wouldn’t let him be the worst SS in the history of baseball. And for extorting the Dodgers in the Piazza deal.
Broxton for Matt Stairs
Moe Drabowsky for making the Dodgers look silly in the first World Series I ever listened to on the radio
George Sherrill for Ryan Howard. You had one job. One job only.
Davey Lopes for mocking Jim Bouton when he hit a home run off of him
Charley Steiner and Rick Monday because they don’t allow me to enjoy the one thing I used to enjoy the most, listening to a Dodger game on the radio.
Comments in blogs that accuse everyone of something when in fact it might have been one, it might have been two, it might have been the majority, but it was never ever “everyone”.
Bill Russell for hitting Reggie Jackson in the hip instead of the head
Pitchers who get upset at bat flips.
Hitters who bat flip on a home run and are still losing
AL pitchers who intentionally throw at hitters knowing how safe they are from retribution and that only their teammates will pay the price.
Fans in the first row who don’t defend the home turf against the visitors
Ryan Howard, Matt Stairs, Jimmy Rollins, Matt Adams, and Matt Carpenter. LHH who have sent the Dodgers home in October in the 21st century. It is getting beyond annoying.
To be honest, those are just a few, and if I dug deep they stop being petty and you’d wonder why Phil isn’t on some type of medication.
Upper cut
Travis Sawchik at Fangraphs recently put up an interview with JD Martinez that might change how you view baseball this year. Martinez was once a slap hitting outfielder who had failed to establish himself as a bonafide major league baseball player. He revamped his swing and has become one of the most potent hitters in baseball. He did this by eschewing the ground ball and trying to hit every ball into the air.
“People talk to me and I tell them straight up. I don’t bullshit,” Martinez said. “In the cage, I talk about it all the time. I’m not trying to hit a fucking line drive or a freaking ground ball. I’m trying to hit the ball in the air. I feel like the ball in the air is my strength and has a chance to go anywhere in the park. So why am I trying to hit a ground ball? That’s what I believe in.”
With his hands now free, Martinez demonstrates how he’s in search of a bat plane angle that will produce more balls in flight. He notes that statistics prove the value of a fly ball over a ground ball. In 2016, batters hit .241 with a .715 slugging mark and a wRC+ of 139 on fly balls versus a .238 average, .258 slugging mark and of wRC+ of 27 on ground balls.
Justin Turner is the Dodger version of J.D. Martinez. He revamped his swing to put emphasis on getting the ball in the air and pitchers have paid the price.
Right now the phrase “swing plane” is the 2017 mantra as more players are buying into changing their swing to produce more fly balls. Pitchers might be fighting back by elevating fastballs to counter the “uppercut”.
How this plays out will just be another reason to watch baseball in 2017.
Dodgers, Yesterday and Today 