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Forsch, Bader is elite in CF, and he should play every day because of that. He’s far more valuable an overall player than Fowler or Martinez, even with his inability to hit his way out of a wet paper sack this year (and his inability to use his speed to be positive as a baserunner). Let the guy play and see if he figures it out. You aren’t losing value by playing him over Fowler/JMart.
Goldschmidt is a good, not great, defensive 1B. He’s definitely not part of the problem.
Wong is not having his typically elite year with the glove, but I still have strong faith in his ability to be elite with the glove going forward.
DeJong is the opposite of Wong this year. He has been elite this year, but I do not have faith that he will be elite going forward. But he has at least shown that his floor can be a good glove, with great sprinkled in.
Carpenter isn’t a good 3B, and wouldn’t be even if he had a cannon for an arm. Unfortunately, he looks like a lefty when he throws with his right hand.
Edman doesn’t appear to be very good at 3B, but he looks a lot better at 2B. I think maybe it is a comfort thing, at this point.
Munoz isn’t very good anywhere with the glove, but he is dreadful in the OF. I don’t understand the fascination with putting him in the OF.
People vary on defensive metrics, but Fangraphs has the ones that I trust. And they show us as a well below average defensive team this year. That matches up with what I see on the field. But I guess opinions are like buttholes…
Mea culpa on the bullpen. Digging deeper, the core of this bullpen has been pretty darn good. The poor saps they throw in there to cover for the 3 inning starters have had to take one for the team here and there, making their raw numbers worse. Gallegos has been a real find, and Miller is coming around. CMart is an adventure, but has mostly gotten the job done. Brebbia is Brebbia. All he seems to do is pitch well, and still had to right the Memphis shuttle the last couple of years. The bullpen would be better still if it still had Hicks, but you could see that TJ coming from a mile away. Gant was brilliant early, but has slowed, possibly due to overuse. I like the two kids they have recently called up, too.
The question is, are we going to give them a chance to shine. Not if we keep facing starting pitchers will less than 50 innings of MLB experience.
In fairness, though, hard to blame our bullpen for pop flies with 5 second hang times dropping in the OF for doubles. So, maybe you are correct on the bullpen.
Fangraphs has always been better for defense, and it has us ranked 19th in team defense. I watch the circus that is our outfield and 3B every night cost us runs. And our catchers have been bad this year, too, even if they are throwing well.
As for our bullpen, I guess we’re all set. No need to make 3 moves per week or anything.
Using the prior year as a baseline is not a good way to forecast the future. It is the most common way, because it takes very little research, but that doesn’t make it the right way.
You are looking at everything with rose-tinted glasses. You focus on all the things that have gone wrong this year to explain “under-achieving.” Maybe we just had a lot of things go right last year that made us look better than what we were.
I guess we’ve just been the victim of bad luck for the last few years. I look forward to things regressing to the mean next season and us getting back to 100 wins.
Incremental improvements were not going to push this team to a division championship. This team isn’t good at anything, and “incremental” improvements aren’t going to change that. Just look at the specifics I posted.
The team was in 1st place, but it isn’t a playoff team.
How would you feel about our rotation with Roark instead of Wacha? Better, of course. But would you feel good about it? I certainly wouldn’t.
Could we have acquired a couple of middle relievers to take the current place of Junior Fernandez and Ryan Helsey? Sure, but what’s our record on trade deadline relievers? I’d rather see the kids throwing.
What bats would have made this team a contender? Our lineup is mostly hot garbage. Sure, we get hot and throw up double digits from time to time, but then we get shut out by nobodies just as often.
And you know Mo would pick up some hot turds and then lock them up into ludicrous contracts. Better off just accepting reality and looking to the future.
Agree about the poor construction of this team. Then again, I remember hearing on here how this team, after adding Goldschmidt, was a 90 win team and a favorite to make the playoffs, if not win the division. I never saw it. This just isn’t a good team, and thinking that Goldschmidt would be the cog that would make us contenders was just another in a whole series of missteps. This is a team that, at best, could sneak into the playoffs. But once there, it doesn’t have anything close to a team that could win playoff series. We do not have good starters. We do not have good relievers. We do not have good defense (at least with how we manage the lineup), and we can’t hit.
As for trading Fowler and/or Carpenter – that probably isn’t happening. We’d have to send prospects the other way just to get another team to take half of their money owed. And I’m not sure even that gets it done.
The team does have a decent chunk of money coming off the books in 2021, but I have no faith in the men that shop for the groceries anyway. They need to rebuild the front office so that they can finally start rebuilding the roster. And, for as much as our prospects get hyped on this site, we haven’t been all that good at producing lasting major league value out of our farm system. We graduate a ton of 1 WAR players that make us look okay in the aggregate, but the only guy who likes anything close to a difference maker in the last many years is DeJong, and the jury is still out on him.
This team is going to take patience. And I don’t see a ton of that here.
I didn’t say Roark would shut the Dodgers down. I am saying he would better than our current number 5 options who have mostly sucked all year.
We’d just be giving up prospects to get marginally better for 10 games. Roark is a mediocre rental, and, even if he pitched great, would only have the lasting effect of making our draft pick worse. It would have taken far more than Tanner Roark to get this team into the playoffs.
While agree that Mo didn’t sit on his hands because he understood that this team wasn’t savable, at least this time his incompetence saved us from wasting resources.
He’s been awful in 2019, no doubt about that. I definitely wish he wouldn’t have been extended. But, we are stuck with him, and we don’t have anyone to bench him for. So I’m hoping things pick up for him.
Looking forward to Gorman.
But I am also realistic. This team, as constructed, isn’t very close to contending. So might as well ride it out with guys we have fond memories of (Carp, Wainwright, Yadi), and then build around Goldschmidt when we come out of bad-contract purgatory.
Do we think Tanner Roark, or anyone else, could have held the Dodgers to negative one run last night? This team wasn’t a couple of pieces away. No need to start putting Band-aids on gashes.
keep insulting people and sure you will be loved around here…
Why Onyxgem, are we cross? What an ugly thing to say… does this mean we’re not friends anymore? You know, Onyx, if I thought you weren’t my friend, I just don’t think I could bear it.
The first 7 days of May, May 1st through May 7th (2018), Carpenter played in 6 games, started 5, the team went 5-1, he had 22 plate appearances, 17 at bats, 1 run, 3 hits, two doubles, one homer, 3 RBI, 4 walks, one hit by pitch. That comes out to a slash line of .176/.364/.471 – and an OPS of .834. If you need proof, click this link:
Even with that, how you can go from 16.43 weeks to 14 weeks after subtracting one week is beyond me. Math truly isn’t that difficult.
Reading comprehension. I never said that minor league stats don’t correlate to how a player will do upon arrival back on the MLB roster. I said they don’t matter as to whether or not the vet gets called up.
Every starting position player in the Dodgers lineup last night was either right at or well above an .800 OPS.
Goldy and Ozuna are, but not by much. ALSO, the highest Cards BA for a Cards position player is .269 (Jose Martinez).
AND the Cardinals added Mejia at the deadline?
This all seems like a good argument to be sellers at the deadline, honestly. We could have sold out our future and still not been able to get enough to be as good as the Dodgers (on paper). Long term, this team is best off with a late season collapse and the rational front office and managerial fallout that should ensue. Being just good enough to barely miss the playoffs puts the team in purgatory, and I’m tired of being there.
Also, he wasn’t great the entire month of May or August, and it was probably more like 12 weeks but it was nowhere near the 17 weeks you claim. Now that’s a fact.
Let me lay it out for you.
The first 7 days of May last year, Carp’s OPS was .835. So it isn’t like he started the month poorly. He finished the month with a .961 OPS, so I think we can give him credit for hitting well for the whole month.
You’d have a hard time claiming that he wasn’t red hot throughout June and July (1.040 and 1.222 OPS).
In August, his OPS was .984, and in the last week, from the 25th to the 31st, his OPS was 1.342. Hard to not give him the whole month of August, too.
So, May 1 to August 31 covers 123 days, or about 17 and half weeks. Now, I want to be fair. He had an 8 day period in middle of May (from the 8th to the 15th) where he was dinged up, started 3 games and pinch hit in another, where he was not good. So, to be fair to you, I will subtract those 8 days out. So he hit really well (almost a 1.100 OPS) for 115 days, or 16 weeks and 3 days.
So, you are right. I was way off of the 17 weeks. It was really 16.43 weeks. My bad.
I can prove the fact that rehab stats have nothing to do with when a veteran comes off of rehab assigment. It’s the rules.
You still can’t comprehend that? Really?
And I love all of you running down Carpenter. One person says he only hit for one month last year. Another says 10 weeks. His OPS last year, by month, from May through August, were .961, 1.040, 1.222, and .984. That is four months of mashing. That is over 17 weeks of numbers that would lead our current team by more than 100 points.
But, yeah, you guys aren’t biased or anything.
For everyone’s belly-aching about Carpenter hitting leadoff, I am glad I am not the manager having to find a leadoff hitter and 3B. Carpenter has been bad this year, but the two guys people think should be in there (Edman and Munoz) are OPSing .574 and .604, respectively, over the last 28 days. They both play better defense than Carp, but neither are top defenders at 3B.
I agree with everyone saying that Thomas should be getting playing time. Jose Martinez has not been much of a hitter lately, and he hasn’t hit righties very well this season. Same for Fowler and lefties. They should probably be platooning with Thomas starting everyday.
This lineup’s only chance down the stretch is to get the real Matt Carpenter, the real Goldschmidt, and top Ozuna all together the next two months. What are the odds of that? Probably not great, but it’s greater than zero.
I was made an analogy about Mark Mulder and how his rehab stats were indicator that he wasn’t ready for the MLB, which is what people are saying about Carp and you have people saying rehab stats are meaningless. Its tiring making analogies on this site only to be told they’re irrelevant. Whatever.
You so want to disagree with me that you fail to comprehend what I said. I never said that rehab stats are meaningless to how a player would perform. I never said Carpenter was proven ready to come back and hit MLB pitching. I never said I would hit him leadoff. I said that a veteran player’ rehab stats have nothing to do with when they return to the Majors. And that is a fact.
I also insinuated that anyone who said that a ball hit over 103 MPH off the bat was a “seeing-eye” single is a fool or ignorant to what that phrase means. That is also a fact.
Let’s at least have some reading comprehension before we so blindly go into a rage about a player who replaced a guy who is hitting just as poorly. And you guys also are picking a fine time to rip on Carp after a game where he had two very-hard hit balls in the game. But hey, don’t let me get in the way of your blind rage. Just don’t misquote me or pretend I said something that I didn’t.
The ball was hit at over 103 MPH. If you think that qualifies for a seeing-eye anything, then you just don’t know what that phrase means. There were 11 (fair) balls hit in yesterday’s game with over 100 MPH exit velocity, Carpenter had two of them (he was the only player with more than one). If hitting the ball hard isn’t what you want from hitters, then I suppose you have a real gripe.
But again, you guys are just being objective, I’m sure.
