Is this the worst Phillies team of our lifetime? I think Klentak is to blame

[Omar 382]

I heard the teams back in the late '90s were this bad, but I never saw them (though I do remember hearing Whitey talking about Doug Glanville hitting a couple of home runs off some Met bozo back in '97 while in my crib).

But this has to be the worst team of the last 15 years. I guess 2015 could compete, but I think we're worse now. Basically everyone that was supposed to be good have just been decent/average/bad (Herrera, Altherr, Hail Cesar, Velasquez), while everyone that was supposed to be mediocre or just suck has really sucked (Rupp, Saunders (RIP), Franco).

I don't have much faith in Klentak, or our next couple of years. I mean, I know rumors are just rumors, and most of the time they don't even come from the FO, but if the Stanton/Yelich bullshit did, then that's just pathetic. Yes, let's trade for an aging power hitter who's often injured and is signed to the largest contract in baseball, despite not nearly being the best player.

But that's not even the worst of it. I heard Klentak give a statement about a week ago that I'm too lazy to look up, but basically was talking about how you don't want to bring rookies up because when you send them down, they get disappointed. Not only is that appealing to emotion and not objectivity and reason, but it's not even true. You're telling me that Rhys Hoskins, a guy who is 24 and is putting up a 166 wRC+ at AAA right now is not looking at Tommy Joseph's 94 wRC+, or his .310 OBP, or, how about, his -0.3 fucking WAR? The only thing that would discourage the guy is to keep letting him get older in the minors while he continues to hit the cover off the baseball.

How about Dylan Cozens? We had a perfect chance to promote the guy when we DFA'd Saunders, but instead they promoted Perkins. It's not even like a guy went on the 10-Day DL; a guy got fucking DFA'd and isn't coming back, and you can't promote the face of your minor league system after he's put up a pretty damn good season after a monster season last year?

And look, I've never been huge on Jorge Alfaro, even when he's had decent numbers. But the guy is fucking 24, and Rupp sucks. Much like they did with Rupp when Ruiz was here, just promote him again and see what he does. He is reported to have a great arm and be great defensively behind the plate. I'd honestly rather see a platoon of Alfaro/Knapp at this point than fucking Rupp/Knapp (how's that 30 home run prediction going, @jvett77?)

After Kendrick is traded (for scraps, if I'm guessing right), Kingery better be promoted. He's killing the ball and is fucking 23. That's my biggest complaint with not calling these guys up now. I could see not calling them up if we were A.) looking at and/or surveying other players on our major league roster, or B.) they were younger. Neither are true. We know what our talent level is with this roster, and these guys are getting old. Kingery is 23. Hoskins is 24. Alfaro is 24. Cozens is 23. Nick Williams is 23. It's not like these guys are some 19 year old prospects hitting well in low A ball. They're getting old and need to be promoted.

I'm not saying we should promote them because I think they will save our season or bring us back to respectability. They won't. Most of them will likely struggle, and even if they were great, the rest of our team would still suck ass. But at least they would have exposure to MLB pitching, and, given enough time and a large enough sample size, we could evaluate whether or not they are actual MLB players or not.

I've called Maikel Franco a bust, and now I'm calling Matt Klentak a bust. He doesn't know how to rebuild a team- and rebuilding a team is the relatively easy part; it's fielding a contender that's difficult. I doubt he would be capable of that considering he can't even rebuild correctly. I hope he is fired by the end of the 2018 or 2019 season when we're still in last place with no progress made for a winning team in the '20s.

 

[Omar 382]

Also, goodness gracious, Franco sucks. It's kind of like saying that we'll get fucked over by global warming for 20 years, and all the Trumper's laughing at you, and then our planet disintegrates (or whatever the fuck is supposed to happen with global warming).

I've been calling Franco a bust since June/July of last year, but does anyone fucking listen? No they don't, and now we're still trotting him out every night because "he could turn it around- sluggers can always get hot!" or "He's a 30/100 candidate!"

What's amazing is that he's increased his walks, decreased his strikeouts, and is running out a BABIP in line with his career numbers, and is still putting up a 70 wRC+. This is what he's going to do, and the sooner we accept that, the sooner we can move on from the bum.

 

[Omar 382]

“We are committed to giving Maikel more time to get out of this. We believe in him. We have confidence that he will (break out). There are a lot of indicators, whether you’re looking at his exit velocities and launch angles — again, I don’t want to say he’s been a victim of bad luck by itself; it’s not the only thing, but there are reasons to believe he can get out this.”

-Matt Klentak

Let's break this down. First, Exit Velocity and launch angle have no known predictive values. Sure, guys who hit the ball hard sometimes hit home runs, but that is just one component of one aspect of playing baseball. Furthermore, we do not know if it is a repeatable statistic. It's like using the popular vote of counties in America to predict who will become President- it's somewhat related to what actually determines the outcome, but there are far better predictors (in our case, wOBA, wRC+, OPS+, UZR/150, Def, Baserunning, etc. where Franco unanimously sucks ass). But I'll humor you Klentak.

(Just for reference, Mike Trout has a 89.1 MPH AEV. Tommy Joseph is at 89.2. Cameron Rupp is at 89.3. I guess they're better hitters than Trout?)

Aaron Judge, the best player in baseball right now, has a 95.9 MPH Average EV. Franco is at 88 MPH. While Baseball Savant doesn't release an official leaderboard so I could see what number that ranks him out of all hitters in baseball, he is clumped right in between Jean Segura, Yan Gomes, and Michael Taylor. Not exactly prolific hitters, though, as I've said, this methodology completely sucks.

As for launch angles (also completely irrelevant in determining the future success of a hitter), I am not overly familiar, as even between EV and LA, EV is a far more respected stat in sabermetrics. So I researched it some, and these are the general guidelines:

• Ground ball: Less than 10 degrees
• Line drive: 10-25 degrees
• Fly ball: 25-50 degrees
• Pop up: Greater than 50 degrees

There is no available leaderboard (at least not one I could find after looking for a while) for Average Launch Angles, so I guess Klentak looked at Franco's individual launch angle, and then everyone else's in MLB, to know how he stands relative to his peers. This year, Franco has this Launch Angle Breakdown:

The red graphic is all of his hits, which is the only thing we need to look at for now. It looks like he has an equal proportion of hits at 20 degrees, 10 degrees, and 0 degrees; slightly descending in that order. As noted, that means he gets most of his hits from line drives and ground balls (riveting and revelatory news). Of more important note are his outs. As you can see, he makes most of them on the ground (-25 degree angle) while much fewer in the air. For a "power" hitter, this is alarming. Still, none of this is amazing or unknown news. Hell, just looking at his GB%, FB%, and LD% over on Fangraphs' leaderboard page (where you can actually compare him to every other player in MLB) would have sufficed.

But maybe Klentak isn't as dumb as I had thought. You have a player who flat-out sucks, but if you have some "indicators" of his "future success" and you can use esoteric statistics like Launch Angle and Exit Velocity that the average fan doesn't understand, I guess you can pull the wool over the fan's eyes. Of course, the sad part is that Klentak doesn't even understand how these metrics wok. If he did, he would know that they show no signs of Franco breaking out of his slump. Motherfuck, man.

 

[Cedrique]

Holy shit. I probably have some opinions on this but it will probably be a couple days before I respond. I'll have to take 3 days off of work just to read all this stuff. (or it would if I actually had a real job.....)

 

[Cedrique]

I will say that as boring as this team is it doesn't seem quite as boring as the years of Rick Schu starting at third base, Steve Jeltz at short . I think Altherr and Herrera at least have potential, Nola is a good pitcher with a ceiling of very good but probably never great. Yeah, maybe you're right-I'm having trouble thinking of more positives except for some guys in the minors.....

 

[Cedrique]

oh yeah, bonus Altherr is already like 26 or 27 so by the time the Phillies are good he will be at the end of or past his prime years

 

[Cedrique]

"But that's not even the worst of it. I heard Klentak give a statement about a week ago that I'm too lazy to look up, but basically was talking about how you don't want to bring rookies up because when you send them down, they get disappointed."
I didn't see that statement but if he said that, that is CLASSIC Phillies (and I don't mean that in a good way). They seem to be constantly living in fear of "ruining" their prospects by actually letting them play. So when a spot clearly opens up they bring up some guy that is lesser known that they don't care about ruining. (that tells you what the Phillies think of you Cam Perkins, I hope you can prove them wrong. Don't get me wrong, the Phils front office would love it if you did well so they can look like geniuses but the main reason they brought you up is that if you fail they and the fans won't be disappointed that one of their top prospects didn't make it ). That's right, the Phillies couldn't care less if they disappoint a player, they just don't want the fans to be disappointed in their ineptitude. The Phillies management has been doing this shit for years.

 

[Omar 382]

"But that's not even the worst of it. I heard Klentak give a statement about a week ago that I'm too lazy to look up, but basically was talking about how you don't want to bring rookies up because when you send them down, they get disappointed."
I didn't see that statement but if he said that, that is CLASSIC Phillies (and I don't mean that in a good way). They seem to be constantly living in fear of "ruining" their prospects by actually letting them play. So when a spot clearly opens up they bring up some guy that is lesser known that they don't care about ruining. (that tells you what the Phillies think of you Cam Perkins, I hope you can prove them wrong. Don't get me wrong, the Phils front office would love it if you did well so they can look like geniuses but the main reason they brought you up is that if you fail they and the fans won't be disappointed that one of their top prospects didn't make it ). That's right, the Phillies couldn't care less if they disappoint a player, they just don't want the fans to be disappointed in their ineptitude. The Phillies management has been doing this shit for years.

"For others ... a lot of the best minor-league players have not faced failure in their entire lives. They were the best player on their Little League teams, their high school team, their college team and in the minor leagues. So if they come up to the big leagues and that's the first time they taste failure, for some players it can have a negative effect. That's not true of everybody. Part of player development is understanding those players and who's better equipped to handle things than others.

"I think the human emotion of it — once anybody reaches a certain level, they don't want to be sent back. Nobody wants to be demoted in our jobs. No player wants to come to the major leagues and then be sent back. Obviously we've sent players back before and you can hear the emotion in their voices and how disappointed they are. If you can avoid that, we'd love to avoid that."

 

[Omar 382]

"But that's not even the worst of it. I heard Klentak give a statement about a week ago that I'm too lazy to look up, but basically was talking about how you don't want to bring rookies up because when you send them down, they get disappointed."
I didn't see that statement but if he said that, that is CLASSIC Phillies (and I don't mean that in a good way). They seem to be constantly living in fear of "ruining" their prospects by actually letting them play. So when a spot clearly opens up they bring up some guy that is lesser known that they don't care about ruining. (that tells you what the Phillies think of you Cam Perkins, I hope you can prove them wrong. Don't get me wrong, the Phils front office would love it if you did well so they can look like geniuses but the main reason they brought you up is that if you fail they and the fans won't be disappointed that one of their top prospects didn't make it ). That's right, the Phillies couldn't care less if they disappoint a player, they just don't want the fans to be disappointed in their ineptitude. The Phillies management has been doing this shit for years.

Also, I have been receiving visions from God, and I received a vision depicting @Retroram52's death.

It all will start when @fordman84 realizes the grave injustice that has been done by putting an asshat retard like Retro in charge of being the moderator for the Phillies' board, and makes me the moderator.

Retro will be promptly banned by me (in addition to @northeastphillyguy and @jvett77).

Upon seeing himself banned, and I, his arch-nemesis intellectual counterpart being made moderator, the scene will play out like in the Season 3 Finale of Better Call Saul (which you haven't seen, because you haven't seen its sequel, Breaking Bad, because you're a virgin), in which Hector "Tio" Salamanca learns that Gus Fring, his arch-nemesis, will be taking over the methamphetamine smuggling into Albuquerque from him. He then proceeds to have a stroke, where Gus saves him with CPR and calls an ambulance because he believes that dying from a stroke is too humane a death for Hector Salamanca. This is what Retro will end up looking like after I save him

 

[Omar 382]

Did I get all that right, @calsnowskier, @broncosmitty, @AnyBetterCallSaulFansOnT'Hoop?

 

[calsnowskier]

Tl/dr

Why is this thread on the Padre board?

 

[Omar 382]

Tl/dr

Why is this thread on the Padre board?

I was just wondering about the BCS part.

And because Retro's a huge faggot. By the way, halfway through S2 of The Leftovers. I am loving it so far. Did you finish it? I don't want to click on the thread on the Entertainment forum for obvious spoiler reasons.

 

[calsnowskier]

I was just wondering about the BCS part.

And because Retro's a huge faggot. By the way, halfway through S2 of The Leftovers. I am loving it so far. Did you finish it? I don't want to click on the thread on the Entertainment forum for obvious spoiler reasons.

Yea, I finished it. A bit too slow for my tastes, but it was engrossing.

And yes, avoid the thread. I was open with my episode-episode spoilers, and basically explained the finale to someone who missed it. Stay away until you finish the finale.

 

[Cedrique]

"For others ... a lot of the best minor-league players have not faced failure in their entire lives. They were the best player on their Little League teams, their high school team, their college team and in the minor leagues. So if they come up to the big leagues and that's the first time they taste failure, for some players it can have a negative effect. That's not true of everybody. Part of player development is understanding those players and who's better equipped to handle things than others.

"I think the human emotion of it — once anybody reaches a certain level, they don't want to be sent back. Nobody wants to be demoted in our jobs. No player wants to come to the major leagues and then be sent back. Obviously we've sent players back before and you can hear the emotion in their voices and how disappointed they are. If you can avoid that, we'd love to avoid that."

holy shit, this guy is from the "Let's give everyone a trophy" camp.

 

[Cedrique]

Tl/dr

Why is this thread on the Padre board?

This is the most excitement the Padres board has seen since Mike Ivie was traded

 

[Omar 382]

holy shit, this guy is from the "Let's give everyone a trophy" camp.

I know. I've been saying it for a while now (not that my opinion will change anything). Klentak was supposed to be the sabermetric messiah. Just like Barack Obama was supposed to be the liberal messiah (I actually like that guy though). And I guess we'll have to wait and see whether or not that Jesus guy is the actual messiah

 

[Omar 382]

This is the most excitement the Padres board has seen since Mike Ivie was traded

Does anybody miss the good 'ole non-PC days when you could hang a huge ass banner for Marlboro Red's at a baseball game?

 

[Cedrique]

yes

Does anybody miss the good 'ole non-PC days when you could hang a huge ass banner for Marlboro Red's at a baseball game?

, the good old days

 

[broncosmitty]

Did I get all that right, @calsnowskier, @broncosmitty, @AnyBetterCallSaulFansOnT'Hoop?

I think you nailed it pretty well. Have you read The Prince before?


And should I let myself cut Maikel Franco? I'd convinced myself he's was gonna be a big deal.

 

[Cedrique]