6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

More On The Green Non-Trade

Of course, if you haven't read it already, Tom has a whole mess of analysis, which boils down to

1. Green is not a good value for the money, offensively or defensively.
2. Green will never play another day in the Los Angeles of Southern California Marketplex ever, ever again after the expiration of his current contract, unless Arte Moreno manages to hide Garret Anderson under the Angels Stadium sofa cushions for the rest of the season, thus voiding his contract for non-performance.
3. All this interferes with Choi's development.

As usual, worth reading, though Tom and I disagree on how much of a "fleecing" this would have amounted to for the Snakes. Ultimately, when Green demanded more than $9M per year, they understandably balked, and no fleecing occurred. It does mean the Snakes are double-plus deep in catchers, though, so more trades a-poppin', for sure.

A. J. Pierzynski Signs With Chisox

A. J. Pierzynski signed with the Chisox, for one year and $2.5M; Batgirl has an exclusive interview with the former Twins catcher.

Caple: Koufax Or Blyleven?

Jim Caple asks the question, "Koufax or Blyleven?" Well, I'd have to say Koufax.

Dayn Perry: Top 100 Prospects, 91-100

• About #93, Greg Miller: "It's troubling when such a young pitcher loses so much time to shoulder injuries. He has tremendous potential, but his future is very much in doubt at this point."
• About #98, Willy Aybar: "He needs to find a more consistent power stroke if he's to be a premium prospect."
• About #100, James Loney: "He's had a run of injuries that have no doubt dampened his performance, but at some point we must regard him as being too injury-prone. He hasn't hit above rookie-level Pioneer League, and unless he does this season he'll no longer be a prospect worth mentioning."

Huh? I distinctly recall that Loney's big injury this season was an infected finger, not even remotely like a hamstring pull or some such. Seems awfully early to be throwing the lad to the sharks.

Vinaigrette, Part 2

Baseball America has done the nearest thing to throwing cats and dogs into a locked raquetball court and put two scouting-and-tools guys (Angels scouting director Eddie Bane and Cubs assistant general manager Gary Hughes) together with a pair of sabermetrics whizzes (Baseball Prospectus writer and A's consultant Gary Huckabay and Red Sox consultant Voros McCracken), and then transcribed the results. Some sampling:

ALAN SCHWARZ: To start out, Gary Hughes, how would you characterize the relationship between the scouting community and the statistics community?

GARY HUGHES: I think the longtime scouting guys, probably the initial reaction is to get their back up and try to defend their position. They feel somewhat threatened by it because of all the publicity that’s come out. It’s probably become somewhat of an adversarial thing for maybe not a lot of well thought-out reasons.

...

EDDIE BANE: It is adversarial right now. Our guys, the so-called old-school guys, the thought is out there that we don’t know how to handle a computer and we wouldn’t know how to use that stuff. I’m very comfortable with a computer. Our people are very comfortable with a computer. We do have to drag some of our old-time guys through it. But the main adversarial thing is that some of our old-time guys are losing jobs that we didn’t feel they should be losing. It was due to cutbacks. Maybe the cutbacks were due to money or whatever. But we correlate it to the fact that some of the computer stuff is causing that. And we resent it.

VOROS McCRACKEN: I think part of the reason for the cutbacks in scouting is the emergence of college players. I think there’s as much scouting that you need to do on the college level. Colleges are bigger, the players are older. Whereas back when almost every player that was drafted was a high school player, back before I was around, you needed a lot of scouts because you needed to cover every corner of the country to do it. With all these college players playing at a fairly high level of competition, you can, to a certain extent, evaluate many of these college players based on their stats. So I think part of the reason for the cutbacks in scouting is that they’re probably not as necessary if you’re drafting college players.

GARY HUGHES: All your statistics are going to tell you is what a guy has done. Somebody has got to make the decision on what the guy’s going to do.

VOROS McCRACKEN: I have no idea what the guy’s going to do. But my point would be, the scouts also have only a limited idea of what the guy’s going to do.

GARY HUCKABAY: I think it’s important to understand that a lot of people have overclaimed what you can do by statistical analysis. It’s a tool. A car is a tool as well—you can use it to drive to the store, or you can use it to drive into a tree. ... What I don’t want is someone going, “I want this guy because he had 120 RBIs.”

VOROS McCRACKEN: ... A lot of “Moneyball” is a certain amount of exaggeration because Michael Lewis is telling a story. There are plenty of facts involved in all of these stories in “Moneyball” that did not make the book because they didn’t quite fit the story as well as the facts that were included. So a lot of it was exaggeration designed to sell books.

Good stuff. Bane gives up a little of the stuff he's looking for in high-value, high-draft-position pitching prospects (three pitches already, good command, ignore velocity).