BA 2011 Top 20 PCL

but mostly I was just inundated with them by a friend who was combating another friend’s Operation Mindcrime obsession. Oy.

plus the guy never strikes out… hes basically juan pierre at shortstop..

You realize he had a .381 BABIP in AAA right? And you’re going to complain about Gordon’s .345 BABIP in the majors? And as I mentioned earlier, even looking at their AAA numbers, Belt only has a little more than a 25 run advantage with his bat.

Getting back to Gordon, it really doesn’t matter if he has a track record of patience or power in the minors, because his bat doesn’t have to be anywhere near as good as Belt’s for him to be a similarly valuable player. And in no way is a .290-.300 BABIP about right for a player with Gordon’s speed. There’s a reason he never posted a BABIP under .323 at any point in his professional career. Lefties with his speed don’t need to put the ball in play with authority to put up a high BABIP because they can rack up infield hits and bunt hits. Chone Figgins for example never put the ball in play with authority, but he still managed a .341 BABIP from 2002 to 2009.

There is definitely a broad range of opinions out there about any given player. Why certain ones come up to the surface, I couldn’t tell you. Is it because certain opinions get repeated the most? Is it because those are the opinions that provide the most continuity with previously known information? Is it because they’re the opinions that make the secondary source look best? I don’t know.

I see the range of opinions about an individual player as being best understood as a constantly evolving continuum. I don’t believe there is any value in throwing out “good” or “bad” opinions about a player merely because we disagree with them, or because they do not agree with what we ourselves have personally seen. I’ve seen plenty of players in person and while I have found that at times I disagree with what major publications are reporting about these players, it’d be silly for me to act like I am infallible and the only person who can come up with a well-reasoned and thoughtful analysis. I’m a big believer in “the truth lies somewhere in the middle”.

Goldschmidt is a good example of this. Clearly his bat speed is not a plus, and it’s worth watching. At the same time, that’s only part of the story. He’s clearly able to compensate for that lack of bat speed in other ways, to some extent. In other words, believe it or not, sometimes everybody can be right.

there wasn’t much there statistically — I guess in hindsight you could see the Sally League season as fairly promising — and he was getting poor grades on his speed and defense, which was probably weight more heavily againts him as MIF than it would have been at another position.