Angel Berroa. His candle burned out long before, um, well, let's just say he sux.

It's funny when I play the Royals in MVP 2005
Blanco and Berroa have mediocre to awful ratings, and yet they always out-hit any all-star I bring over to the team.

That's a lot of 1b/dh types

I see a 15% chance the Royals have a guy who deserves to be at the ASG for once (at least for a position player). And I agree Greinke definitely beats that (I'd say this anyways since I'm a Gerinke fanboy deep down). Bannister's regression seems fair, since he is such a strange pitcher peripherally. You have wonder what he does right to make it work for him. Somehow this pitching staff has managed to go from absurdly terrible to relatively promising in 2 years.

Godspeed, Dayton.

Last year Gordon was compared to David Wright (I don't know if Dan did, but a lot of people did). Now he's got Eric Hinske for a comp.

Ouch.

But Moore's done a good job so far cleaning out the Augean stables
Edith Hamilton would be pleased.

Dan,

Just thought you would like to know that in trying to access 'past' zips posts, I was unable to get the Los Angeles Angels page, as there seems to be an extra 'http' in the web address.

Also, the Pittsburgh Pirates page is showing as page not found.

Also, the Pittsburgh Pirates page is showing as page not found.

Even the servers can't handle that anymore

Those hitters numbers look about right, but I have to be honest that the pitching numbers look much higher than I was expecting. I am expecting Meche and Bannister to regress quite a bit, but I didn't think Greinke's numbers would project that badly. Buckner and Nunez pitched better than I thought their projects merited. Ah well, I think they can outdo a lot of those projections, but they also have a lot of wild cards that could go either way - Meche, Bannister, Greinke, Hochevar. Could be a really fun season or another really awful season.

How is Odalis Perez only 31?

Lest AG#1F think about jumping from a bridge at the Hinske-Gordon comparison, it should be noted that Mike Schmidt's projection after his age 23 season in the major leagues would have been none too pretty. Hinske had his RoY campaign at age 24, but turned 25 in August that year. I still like Gordon much more than Delmon Young.

Richard Lewis 2b 28 .209 .258 .277

Truly the second baseman from hell.

Hey, Hinske was at least ROY! I think Gordo found a tough adjustment to the MLB, and he will always have high strikeout numbers, but he really turned it on the last three months and I expect a good career going forward.

Player Spotlight - Gilgamesh

He of the almost-perfect, perfect game? Damn that Mike the Mouth!!!

Will Kyle Davies live up to former expectations. Does he still have the potential to be a decent #3/#4 starter?

Last year Gordon was compared to David Wright (I don't know if Dan did, but a lot of people did). Now he's got Eric Hinske for a comp.

Ouch.

I think this is one player where the scouts will blow away the stats. Gordon is the read deal, stats have a real problem projecting a guy that skipped a level with little else to project from.

Gordon will be way over.

Dan, if you threw out April and May for Gordon what would his projection be?

Without April and May, Gordon goes up to 279/356/475. I wouldn't do that, because as humans we too often throw out data when it seems to fit with a narrative. When fixing up translations a few years ago, I found no initial month translation penalty - minor leaguers play just as well in month 1 in the majors as they have in later months.

I think you're right Dan, its easy to throw out what you don't want to admit to, like I was pretty good on my diet at Thanksgiving other than that second helping of stuffing and that 2nd 1/2 slice of pie.

In this case however there was something with his swing that they were definitely they were working hard on at the end of the spring training and through April, so I think the odds he beats the projections are pretty good. Even still it just goes to show you throw out a .173 April and .195 May the projection only gains about 40 points of OPS.

I don't know if you do this Dan, but could you project Soria as a starter? There are rumblings some want to make him a starter. I wasn't sure if that would change his projections, or if that's too difficult to project or what. I know he doesn't have much of a minor league track record to go on.

But he threw a perfect game in the Mexican League! Use that as a data point!

I found no initial month translation penalty - minor leaguers play just as well in month 1 in the majors as they have in later months.

really?
Even with guys like Gordon and Kouzmanoff???
BUt then again guys who aren't rookies sometimes have absurdly bad months- like Dioner Navvarro and Lugo in 2007....

I have a sneaking suspicion that soemtimes when a player's stats are being warped by an absurdly BAD stretch- Like Navarro's May or Lugo's June and such player has shown himself to be an MLB player and later his bat recovers- projections may be more accurate if that absurd stretch is thrown out-

I don't mean a garden variety slump- I mean when a batter hits like a pitcher or worse for 100-150 ABs- when I see that I tend to assume that something was going on, maybe an injury or other issue and absent a lingering injury issue- that skunk stretch should be ignored

Its worth looking at what Gordon did again last year, month by month. He struggled a lot in April and May, as has been said. What has been implied by a lot of the comments was that he was solid the rest of the year, so we should throw out the first two months.

But what really happened is that he had a really good June, and then was very mediocre the second half of the season. Specifically, he became much more aggressive, and almost completely stopped drawing walks. This helped him raise his slugging percentage pretty dramatically, but didn't actually make him a good hitter. I don't think this a real good sign for the future. He may turn into a good player, but I don't think you can project stardom at this point. Dan's projection seems pretty reasonable to me.

Request for Paul Mildren, please.

Mildren: 5-12, 6.13, 144 IP, 169 H, 22 HR, 73 BB, 79 K.

Hope you don't mind me not updating the preformatted text above, it's really a pain doing that since expression engine editing screen isn't a fixed-width font! He'll appear in all future spreadsheets and such, though.

What's the ZIPs outlook for Chin-Hui Tsao? any chance of being healthy?