Interesting Pham fact I'd have never guessed.

Tommy Pham had the lowest rate of swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone of any OFer in major league baseball with more than 500 PAs. 3rd lowest overall. If you threw him a ball, he spit on hit better than 80% of the time. That's damn impressive and puts him in Votto territory.

Pham's biggest problem prior to last season (apart from health) was a tendency to get himself out on bad pitches. The scuttle was it was because his eye issues were keeping him from seeing it, but the bottom line is he occasionally looked completely lost for long stretches prior to 2017.
Last year, however, he demonstrated pretty spectacular strike-zone judgment.

Next step would be moderate improvement on his inside the zone rates; he swings at about 60% of the pitches he sees in the zone and makes contact on about 87% of those. So we know that he has a really good feel for what he should lay off of, but if he gets a similarly strong feel for what he should be swinging at, there's no reason his overall production should decline significantly.

That's how he'd need to make up for an inevitable decline in batted ball luck and a reduced HR/FB ratio. If he swings at, say, 66% of the strikes he sees rather than 60%, he's gonna put a shitload more balls in play. It would reduce his BB rates but his K rates would improve and his number of base-hits would likely offset the number of walks due to a higher N on his BABIP figures. It would also likely help keep him from falling behind in counts by taking strikes and could see that ISO stay elevated.

Seems to be the next obvious and reasonable area of improvement for him.
[Reply]

I'm just busting balls. Lighten up fancis.
[Reply]

I want no part of Moustakas, I'm just fine with Greicko, or Gekko or however BRC spells it.
[Reply]

Also just busting balls, I life effing with you
[Reply]

:-)
[Reply]

Heyman says this and then doesnt say what moves is likely to happen. :-)

cardinals made 1 huge move already. do they have another move (or two) left in them? here are some thoughts. https://t.co/nDjl0yhJ50

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) December 21, 2017

[Reply]

Orioles say they're going to take Machado off the market if the deals don't improve. Some guys with 'inside sources' said a couple days ago that the Orioles front office realized that Angelos wouldn't approve anything so they're going to take the bullet for him and say that no deals were sufficient to take to him for consideration.

So this would seem to align with that report. You float that the deals haven't been good enough, then you close the bidding.
[Reply]

I would love to see us make some more moves but I don't see the Cards FO trading any of our prized assets.
[Reply]

Gotta make sure they have plenty of backfill when they want to keep that .500 squad humming along in the bottom 1/2 of major league payrolls going forward.

If every one of those 'prized assets' hits, that should still be just enough to make sure we struggle every year to win a wild-card and have a shot at a 1-game playoff so we can get strafed by the Cubs or Dodgers.
[Reply]

we are not doing shit in 2018. I don't have a problem with them selling out the farm for the 2018 season.

Maybe these assets improve their value and we get a better haul in the 2018 off season. We have already saw they were willing to put $250+ million on the table to acquire another player. Now come 2019 we had better have a club that can realistically compete in a playoff against the Cubs and Dodgers.
[Reply]

The 2018 FA class is going to alter the landscape of baseball for quite awhile. And if the Cardinals don't so something to get their foot in the door, they're going to get left in the damn dust.

If they don't do anything in December of '17, they ain't gonna do much in '18 either. The former will be absolutely necessary to re-establish this franchise as a destination during the latter.

Another year of spinning their wheels with meathead at the helm will get you another year of second tier acquisitions and second tier outcomes.
[Reply]

If they can't establish themselves as at least a competitive team in their own division, no free agents will want to play here next year. They're setting themselves up to be the 90's Royals
[Reply]

Woah. Slow down now.

The late 90s/early 2000's Royals put together quite possibly the worst 16-year stretch of baseball ever.

From 1997 to 2012 they lost an average of 94 games. ON AVERAGE!

There were 5 teams in all of MLB that lost more than 94 games this year and that was their average season over 16 years. That's astonishingly awful. And they lost in such hapless fashion more often than not.

No, they're not approaching that territory. But they're looking to be a lot like the Baltimore Orioles in/around that same period of time - just absolutely completely forgettable. Never very good, never very bad. Maybe a playoff run here and there and maybe a 95 loss season here and there. But mostly just wildly irrelevant and banking on history to keep the fans interested.
[Reply]

with the addition of Ozuna, I don't think you can label this off season as "doing nothing".
[Reply]

Heyman says Cards looking at Wade Davis. Love Wader but that arm scares me.
[Reply]