Life In The Cell

John Sickels White Sox Prospect List

Huzzah! Sickels has done his prospect list for the Sox! Check it out here. I’ll pipe in with my own commentary in a few hours; I have some errands to run at the moment.

1) Gordon Beckham, SS, Grade B+: Very advanced prospect with across-the-board skills. Could get to A- next year.
2) Aaron Poreda, LHP, Grade B+: Power lefty was a bit more polished than anticipated. Does he start or relieve?
3) Tyler Flowers, C, Grade B: Impressive power bat acquired in Vasquez deal.
4) Brandon Allen, 1B, Grade C+: Enormous raw power, but high strikeout rate is concerning.
5) Clayton Richard, LHP, Grade C+: Throws strikes, nice sinker, not a big margin for error.
6) Jordan Danks, OF, Grade C+: Excellent tools, played well in pro debut, and I still think he can show some power eventually.
7) Chris Getz, 2B, Grade C+: Nice contact hitter, should be useful but not a star.
John Shelby, OF, Grade C+: Good tools, has speed and power, but strike zone judgment may hold him back.
9) Jose Martinez, OF, Grade C+: Good tools, season cut short by knee injury. Will power come?
10) Dayan Viciendo, 3B, Grade C+: Wild guess on grade and rating. Scouting reports indicate Angel Villalona type, but who knows?
11) Brent Morel, 3B, Grade C+: Nice debut. Joe Randa type?
12) Dan Hudson, RHP, Grade C+: I think he is a major sleeper.
13) Dexter Carter, RHP, Grade C: Excellent pro debut following horrible college season. Which is the real Carter?
14) Jeff Marquez, RHP, Grade C: Sinkerball guy acquired in Swisher deal.
15) Jon Link, RHP, Grade C: Another guy with a power sinker, good Double-A season, could slot into pen.
16) Cole Armstrong, Grade C: White Sox seem to like him but I have big doubts about his bat.
17) Justin Cassel, RHP, Grade C: Another guy who could be a nice solid utility pitcher.
18) Jack Egbert, RHP, Grade C: Another guy who could be a nice solid utility pitcher.
19) John Ely, RHP, Grade C: Another guy who could be a nice solid utility pitcher.
20) Jon Gilmore, 3B, Grade C: Young 3B acquired in Vasquez deal. Changing grade from C+ to C due to rawness but I still think he could develop.

Lookin’ at Chone

No, I’m not referring to Chone Figgins, the subject of never ending White Sox’ trade rumors; I’m talking about Chone Smith’s projection system. If you want to get a little bit of background on it, take a peek here. His projection system is pretty damn good, I would say just a notch below BP’s and significantly better than Marcel. With that in mind, I figured it would be useful to take a peek at a few of his projections for some White Sox’ hitters (only the hitters are out right now).

Paul Konerko 142 G, 25 2B, 28 HR, .263/.359/.478

I’m really only going to look at these stats when doing analysis, because, to be frank, the rate stats are the most important and the most reliable. The counting stats are subject to a lot more guess work and can be influenced greatly by luck.

By a way of comparison, last year Paulie’s line looked like this: 122 G, 19 2B, 22 HR, .240/.344/.438

So by this projection, Chone is predicting that Paulie will rebound a bit from last season. The counting stats look nice, but notice that that production is predicted in 20 extra games of play when compared to his actual production last year. It’s encouraging to see that all his rate stats are up. Chone takes into 4 year’s worth of data, which for Paulie is pretty discouraging. In the last 4 years, he’s seen his OPS+ reach a career high 136 and subsequently fall each following year (134 to 116 to 102). Yes Paulie will be a year older, and probably a little worse due to that year, but Chone is predicting that last year’s mediocre performance wasn’t due solely to the aging process and he will therefore hit better this coming season. We can only hope so considering the Sox look to have potential offensive black holes at 2nd Base, 3rd Base, and CF.

Alexei Ramirez 118 G, 22 2B, 17 HR, .286/.324/.473

As we all know, Alexei is a complete wild card. We don’t know if last season represents peak performance, a point upon which to improve upon or what. There is such little data to go off of, that it would seem that a projection is useless. I’m more interested in this projection to see what unbiased systems think of the Missile. I think he will improve last year due to greater familiarity with the league and playing in America, as well as a more concerted effort to take walks. Considering his stats last year:

136 G, 22 2B, 21 HR, .290/.317/.475

It seems that Chone believes that last season represents his peak performance or at least a baseline for him moving forward. Either that, or the projection system has been completely thrown off by the fact there is only 1 season of data. PECOTA’s projection of Alexei will be more interesting to us since they employ player similarity scores to model their projections. I just wanted to draw attention to Alexei since he represents a rather rare case in carrying out projections.

Brian Anderson .237/.297/.396

Jerry Owens .259/.324/.331

Shockingly enough, Chone predicts Jerry Owens to be a much better hitter than Brian Anderson. Yes, BA is well ahead in slugging, but the most important rate stat, by far, is OBP; some say it’s 3 times as important as Slg. Looking at the stats, more closely, Owens does hold a significant advantage in OBP in the majors. In ‘07 when Owens played in 93 games, he had an OBP of .324 which isn’t good by any means, but is better than the .290 OBP Anderson posted in ‘06. I thought the projection systems would be a bit more favorable to BA since he’s only 26 and presumable still has time to grow, but these numbers insist that Owens will be a significantly better offensive threat. This doesn’t mean that he should definitely be the CF, though. Anderson is still a much, much better fielder, so Ozzie will have to weight the value of BA’s defense vs. Jerry’s offense.

Finally, I want to look at Carlos Quentin, because is a god amongst mere mortals. Also, I’m curious to see how optimistic the projection systems are of him. Without looking, I think they are going to temper enthusiasm and look at his last season as a bit of a fluke. So I’m expecting the numbers to drop a little bit.

Carlos Quentin 130 G, 26 2B, 23 HR, .268/.367/.487

Compare those numbers to last year: 130 G, 26 2B, 36 HR, .288/.394/.571

Chone has tempered the results by quite a bit. It’s convenient for the sake of comparison that he played as many games as Chone has him pegged for next season. To be honest, I think Quentin will put up similar (but a little bit better) numbers to last year. Nothing about his performance seemed flukish to me. Had he gotten out to a great start and progressively gotten worse, the I would think perhaps he’s in store for a regression next year, but that isn’t quite what happened. He did start out on fire, but then he had his worst month of the season in June, hitting .266/.381/.468. Then in July, he hit .275/.345/.608 followed by .322/.464/.667 in August. He had nearly identical amounts of plate appearances in each three of those months. Yes, his August numbers seem a little absurd, but they seem to show that after struggling, Quentin was able to adjust and dial it back in, which gives me hope that he can recreate a season equal to or greater than last season.

Down the line, probably after the PECOTA numbers come out, I’ll post my predictions for each Sox’ player in terms of numbers. This, though, was a small exercise to just take stock of what some of the projection systems are predicting for the White Sox.

A Walk Around the Bases - Dec 18

Big Bad Bobby talks about his diminishing heat [Sox Machine]

Rebuilding…or something else? [The 35th Street Review]

A look at what’s going on with Reinsdorf’s other team [Tremendous Upside Potential]

—————————————-

That’s really all from me today. I have a bunch of errands to run, so enjoy the links. Tomorrow, I’ll take a look at the CHONE projections for the White Sox.

Love the Glove and Free Agents, the Lack Thereof

Two things to tackle for now.

Orlando Cabrera just received the TYIB (This Year In Baseball) Defensive Player of the Year. The award is decided via online voting by the fans. Over 12 millions votes were cast, with OC receiving 36% of the votes (or around 4.32 million votes). Unfortunately, there is no break down given of regional voting so it’s impossible to say if OC won because Chicago fans rocked the vote, much as Redskins’ fans tried with the Pro Bowl voting. Runner up with about 25% of the vote was Dustin Pedroia; Albert Pujols, Joe Mauer, Grady Sizemore’s, and Torii Hunter round out the top 6.

So congrats to OC on receiving an award you probably didn’t deserve. I don’t know how he pulled it off, because no matter how many times you call the scorer’s booth, that isn’t going to earn you 4 million+ votes. OC is a really good defender I’d say for sure in the top 10; I would maybe even assure the top 15, but he really isn’t the top defensive player in the league. I can think of a handful of players off the top of my head, but why rely on that? Even though defensive stats aren’t quite exact, I figure we should take a look at FRAR (Fielding Runs Above Replacement), which is Baseball Prospectus’s tool for measuring defensive awesomeness and takes into accoun position and league difficulty.

According to BP, OC ranks 7th in all of baseball. By comparison, Pedroia ranked 29th, Pujols ranked 91st, Mauer ranked 5th, Sizemore ranked 128th, and Hunter ranked 6th. I’ll give you guys free reign to check out other defensive stats, but at least by looking at FRAR we can see that OC was good, but not the best. If you were wondering, the top 4 defenders were Jason Kendall, Dioner Navarro, Micahel Young, and Kurt Suzuki.

———————————-

In Scott Merkin’s latest mailbag, this question came up “I’m a little concerned that the White Sox seem to be completely dormant on the free-agent front. This is the best free-agent pitching class in 10 years and we can’t even give Ben Sheets or A.J. Burnett an offer?” which I would like to address.

Thanks to Kenny’s many quotes to the media, it’s pretty safe to infer that the White Sox are scaling back the payroll a bit this year. They’ve already dropped the contracts of Javier Vazquez and Nick Swisher and have spoken about trading Jermaine Dye which would free up a further $11.5 million in payroll. The thing to keep in mind, is that as things stand (having not traded Dye yet), KW says the Sox are close to their payroll threshold, which means even if the Sox trade Dye, there won’t be a lot of extra money to make a splash in the free agent market. That means someone like Ben Sheets probably isn’t in the cards. I’m thinking the Sox, if they do sign a free agent pitcher rather than go into the spring with Clayton Richard and Jeff Marquez penciled in at the 4 and 5 spots in the rotation, they’ll seek a lower end free agent more along the lines of an El Duque. They’ll probably look for a pitcher with a good upside, but still a cheaper contract. Browsing the list of free agent pitchers, I’ve come up with Daniel Cabrera, Jon Garland, Pedro Martinez, and Mark Prior as potential pitchers that fit the highish upside, lowish cost model. Even in that narrowed down list, I don’t see a lot of potential there to fit in with this year’s team. Daniel Cabrera makes the most sense, but by all accounts, he seems to be in high demand which will only drive up his price. Jon Garland didn’t leave on the best terms, and will probably be looking for a similar contract to the one he just completed, which means he’ll probably be too expensive, though I would love to have someone like him eating innings in the 4th or 5th spot in the rotation. Pedro Martinez and Mark Prior just seem like big injury risks that the Sox wouldn’t want to take. Yes, there’s the possibility of hoping they hold up for half a season until Jose Contreras gets back, but there’s no guarantee that he’ll even be effective upon his return. So unless the Sox pull a 180 and decide to spend some coin, it doesn’t look like the rotation is going to receive that much help unless it’s via trade (ie the Dye for Homer Bailey trade). Unless the Sox can pull two rabbits out of the hat like they did with Floyd and Danks last year, we all may be doomed to 5th starter hell which plagued the Sox in the earlier part of the decade.

Rickey, Rickey, Rickey

We stand (at least those on the West Coast, as I’m writing this) exactly one month away from when the BBWAA ballots are due for the Hall of Fame (January 15). I figured this was as good of a time as any to write about one of the candidates for election, Rickey Henderson.

I have a special attachment to Rickey Henderson; he was my first favorite player. I’d say in probably 1st grade he became my favorite player. Through the years a player may have momentarily jumped ahead of Rickey in my books, but he was always firmly planted in the top-3. Now as an adult I am able to look back at things without such a fickle mind, and it’s obvious to me that he is in fact my favorite player of all time. My like for Rickey probably sprung out of the fact that my first little league team was the Oakland A’s and the fact that I, like Rickey, was far faster than the competition. I’m not trying to boast, but I was a pretty good hitter, not out of this world, but All-Star level. On the basepaths, though, I was unstoppable. A single generally would result in me standing on third at some point during the inning and straight steals of home weren’t out of the question. To me, as a first grader, it was cool that Rickey was on the same team I was, and played the same type of game that I did. As I got older, I began to appreciate him for more than just his blazing speed. I marveled at his batting eye, I was amazed by his strength, and as I reached my teen years and adulthood I was awed by the seemingly mythical character of Rickey Henderson. I don’t need to go over his on the field exploits, those have been hashed out many times and will many more times in the coming month. I also don’t need to recap all those crazy Rickey moments and stories as I think everyone familiar with the Internet has read something like this before. What I do want to bring to everyone’s attention (and I’m making it its own paragraph because it’s so important)

is the fact that Cooperstown will bear witness to the greatest induction speech of all-time. Rickey’s speech will be so jam packed with awesome I bet stuff will just start exploding all across the country because this world cannot handle that much concentrated awesome. I am taking it upon myself to try to prepare you for this monumental occasion, for going into it unprepared would be a kin to hearing the voice of God.

For the speech check below the jump!
Read the rest of this entry »

Announcements

Sorry folks, my internet has been shoddy (at best) since I’ve been back home, so unfortunately Friday and Monday became Tuesday at midnight and Tuesday.

Anyway, I’m back and geared up to start writing again. Since I skipped last off-season, this will be the first time in a while that I’m covering a White Sox off-season. Since the day to day minutia doesn’t terribly interest me, I won’t be writing a post everyday centered around some obscure quote by a White Sox coach. Instead, I will be writing about whatever pleases me. If I do come across a good quote or something worth opining about, then I definitely will cover it. I have a feeling there will be a bunch of smaller posts of that sort rather than the typical long narratives that you have come to expect from me.

You may be wondering, then, how often I will write. I’m going to do my best to write everyday. I can’t promise I will, considering I will have numerous guests coming to stay with me, but on average I will probably write on 5 out of 7 days a week. The days where there isn’t something newsworthy concerning the Sox will be filled with posts about anything else going on in the sports world. Hell, some days I’ll write about the Sox AND something else going on in the sports world.

The one thing I will guarantee, though, is every Monday, for all you working folk, I will post a longer, editorial-ish post or a post postponing said post til Tuesday The first of which, will be seen at say around 10 AM Central time today (Tuesday)

-Jeeves

Hello Strangers

You may have noticed I disappeared once again, as I’m apt to do. Moving back out to California and then getting into the swing of things took me away from writing for a few weeks. Throw in the Sox crashing and burning in the playoffs and me getting a girlfriend, and well, my desire to write waned, though it did start peaking it’s head up again in November. Unfortunately that was midterm time so that left me no spare time. I’m wrapping up finals, and will be back home in Chicago on Friday morning, so, what that means, is I will begin writing again on Monday, woohoo! I have a lot to catch up on and a lot to opine on, so look forward to that. Also, check back Friday, I’m going to be doing things a bit different around here, so I’ll make a small post about how I’m going to proceed.

So until Friday and Monday, take it easy everyone,
Jeeves