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Transaction Oracle— A Timely Look at Transactions as They Happen
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Cardinals - Acquired the bad Weaver
St. Louis Cardinals - Acquired P Jeff Weaver from the Los Angeles Angels for OF Terry Evans
There’s also an unspecified amount of cash going to the Cardinals. I thought at the time that the Angels’ signing of Weaver was going to work out, that he’d eat some innings and it was only a one-year contract. A 6.29 ERA isn’t working out. With Mulder on the DL and the Cardinals realizing the 2006-model Sidney Ponson, while being a bit slimmer and a bit less drunk, still has a dead arm and no stuff. Kinda like the Pontiac Fiero, though Ponson never caught on fire, to the regret of the team. This has not been a sterling year for Dave Duncan’s reputation - the Cardinal rotation, quietly one of the best in the league the past few years, is now Chris Carpenter, a lot of underachieving established pitchers, and Anthony Reyes, a pitcher who the Cards have been reluctant to use until recently.
Terry Evans is hardly a top prospect - he had never hit at all before this season. I have Evans’ performance last year translated as 183/224/269 while this year, he’s hit (untranslated) 311/373/550 and 307/369/640. The catch (you know there had to be one) is that he’s 24-years-old and those numbers representing his 3rd stint at A-ball and his promotion to AA, a level most real prospects should have mastered by this age. Still a good pickup by the Angels as they would’ve gotten nothing for Weaver instead of something and the Angels outfield prospects are generally unimpressive - the Stingers have been fielding an outfield of Reggie Willits, Nick Gorneault, and Curtis Pride (Pride’s a good role player and a great story, but he’s also a billion years old).
Dan Szymborski
Posted: July 06, 2006 at 02:43 PM | 46 comment(s)
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1. CraigK Posted: July 06, 2006 at 03:10 PM (#2089213)Even more astonishing is that Pride was in the majors just last year, with LAAoA.
Fieros were such obnoxious little cars. This kinda sounds like Aaron Miles actually.
I had a college roommate who got together with a friend, and planned out specs for how to turn on of them in a helicopter. Turns out that the balance is perfect, with the mid-engine, and it generates enough horsepower to operate the rotors and get it into the air. The big problem was the lack of a counter-rotating set of blades; they had to go with a ramjet system, and you couldn't take off going any less than about 75 miles per hour.
Gross Production Average.
Criticizing Aaron for the name of the stat is pretty ludicrous. The guy who developed the math behind the stat (Tango Tiger) actually suggested that it be named after Aaron, and even started a thread to solicit potential names. I'm sure you didn't know that, Tony, but there's a lot of people who attacked Aaron for it that should have known better.
I don't recall that being the evolution of the "stat", but if you have a link to the thread, I'd love to see it.
OK, then here's what I don't get: what's silly about it? Regardless of whatever the hell it's called, why is normalizing and expressing OPS+ to a .260-ish midpoint, which is exactly the manner in which EqA is expressed, anything but a useful metric?
LOL. I figured the problem would be the "check engine" light kept coming on.
Regardless of whatever the hell it's called, why is normalizing and expressing OPS+ to a .260-ish midpoint, which is exactly the manner in which EqA is expressed, anything but a useful metric?
How is a lesser version of EqA useful?
Evans started the season at A+ and this was his fifth year as a pro. Is there any precedent for guys like that doing much in the majors?
Where the heck is the plus sign on a laptop?
How is it not?
EqA's better and it's available. Why would anyone use GPA?
More than that, there was a point to its working-out. They wanted to put together a version of OPS that better correlated to run scoring (or, rather, that reduced to a better approximation of linear weights.) That's really all GPA is - they re-weight OBP, then divide by a constant to make it look like batting average. I can see why they came up with it. It's no great shakes, but whatever.
More than anything, I feel I must be in the right if I disagree with that Toilet guy.
Of course that means the format is more of the appeal than the stat itself. Even then, if you need an individual number, then BPro's page works fine. If you need a dataset, then something more sophisticated can be built easily enough. GPA is a tweener stat, which undermines its usefulness.
That's my take. Why the need to get so discombobulated over it is what I've never figured out.
As a cards fan, this is punishment. Now, every fifth day in the second half, I'm going to be thinking of fine red snappers and Wheel of Fish.
It would appear that the Cardinals went for what was in the box, which was ... NOTHING! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!
Im sure there is some and for some reason i sort of want to thin kthat it would be more common back in the past when players didnt have structred year round organized travel teams.
Evans does come from bumfuck south georgia IIRC. While south Georgia certainly produces atheltes (their FB teams are always good..Thomas Co Central, Colquitt Co, Lowndes Co, Charlton ect) I doubt that he had the kind of East Cobb upbringing that allowed him to focus on refining his baseball skills heavily.
But then again the Drews were from Hahira, GA and played East Cobb travel ball...and theres always Legion ball
Its a bit of a crackpot theory but it basically boils down to "he might not have the same amatuer experience as some"
I think its just a contrived justification for my somewhat irrational liking of the guy.
But you mentioned the clubhouse, so I take it you'd like a small glass of VORP, or perhaps just some OPS if you're feeling less adventurous.
Damn hard to keep up. At least they're improving - the Salt Lake Buzz was a terrible name.
Anthony Reyes, Mark Mulder and Jeff Suppan aren't, or at least weren't, crap. They're doing a fine job of turning it into crap however.
Going back a bit...
Why the need to get so discombobulated over it is what I've never figured out.
I understand neither the need to attack it nor the need to defend it.
Jeff Suppan wasn't even on the Red Sox postseason roster the year before the Cardinals acquired him, so one could argue that he would definitely qualify as lower-level talent, at the very least.
I think the statement in #31 has a lot of merit. The Cardinals brought in Aaron Miles, Larry Bigbie, Deivi Cruz, Junior Spivey, Josh Hancock, Sidney Ponson, Scott Spiezio and fully expected most, if not all, of them to have an impact on the major league roster. Sure, some of them (Spiezio, Hancock) have worked out better than others (Spivey, Cruz, Bigbie), but the problem is that the Cardinals were relying upon that collection of low-key acquisitions to fill major holes in the roster, rather than simply supplementing the bench/bullpen.
The past few years seem to fall in line with that thinking as well, with a litany of MLCs and bargain pickups being counted on to make contributions (Womack, Grudzielanek, Al Reyes, Cal Eldred, Abraham Nunez, Hector Luna, Marlon Anderson, John Mabry, Jason Simontacchi). Once again, some of these pickups have worked out extremely well, but you're playing with fire if you're relying on freely available talent to bail you out year after year in crucial positions on the roster.
Now don't be bringing up Spivey. Nobody could have predicted that. Why, mgl himself declared Spivey a perfectly acceptable solution to second base. That was just bad luck.
(cough, cough)
Ego out of control:
Some controversy was caused by four edits (Adam) Curry made to Wikipedia's podcasting article during 2005, which appeared to boost his role in the creation of podcasting by removing mention of early work by others [4].
Curry later apologized, saying he had not understood how to use Wikipedia editing functions and had been unaware of some of the prior work done by Kevin Marks. [5] [6]
In late February 2006, Adam sued a Dutch tabloid magazine for reprinting photos from his Flickr page and publishing details about his daughter. The photos were released under a version of the Creative Commons license, which forbids commercial use and requires acknowledgement, but the tabloid printed a few of them without contacting Curry. The verdict of the lawsuit did not reward Curry, but required the tabloid to pay a fine for each photo used if they published the photos again.
Dave Winer, another controversial internet celebrity, has accused him of exaggerating his contributions to podcasting and claiming to invent things he had not.[7]
If one can prove that Aaron is responsible for this, I think we'd have a potential ego thing.
I'd say Weaver's resurgence down the stretch (once Duncan had a few weeks to work with him) does a lot for Duncan's reputation now.
Shame the Yankees didn't have a competent pitching coach when Weaver was there.
And Weaver's rapid resurgence probably doesn't help Bud Black's reputation. Of course, no pitching coach can fix every single pitcher, but Jeff Weaver is a glaring failure for him.
Weaver has been a mixed bag for the Cardinals, so I wouldn't credit Duncan just yet. That said, Weaver wouldn't be the first pitcher to fail under Duncan's tutelage, and of course, Duncan has a long track record of success and Weaver won't change that much, positively or negatively.
But the Mets probably think he "can't handle New York." For that matter, Weaver himself probably thinks that, too.
The free-agent prediction contest is going to be fun this year.
I don't think Weaver would be a good fit for the Mets. The Mets have several pitchers that could presumably be as effective as Jeff Weaver could reasonably be expect to be. Assuming that Weaver is a 95-110 ERA+ guy, is he really better than John Maine/Mike Pelfrey/Philip Humber/El Duque if he's re-signed?
The Mets already will have one project this offseason in Oliver Perez. That's enough for now. The Mets need pitchers that are relatively consistent more than they need "high-variance" guys.
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