With this roster it never hurts to ask around and get your bearings.

by his power.

they can just wait for him to screw up on the basepath?

or they are just fans of hustle and like to watch him sprint?

maybe

Tyler Greene looked like a AAAA player- that’s the place where people who can’t figure out the strike zone and who are unable to make contact go. While he has upside, I’m also pointing out that he has the potential to be a nightmarish black hole in the lineup and mediocre on the field.

I hope neither of them is a starter in 2011 without some major, major improvements.

leads the team in errors

…and in any case my comment was designed to point out that Luke should not simply dismiss Thurston’s walks because his BA is low. This is a remarkably unsophisticated interpretation of Thurston’s season to this point. Furthermore, Thurston has been the victim of some bad luck (note .262 babip) and as such his BA should be better than it is now. He’s not a good player, but he’s not nearly as bad as he appears right now either.

It has very little correlation to runs scored, and is very dependent on luck.

But ANYONE hitting .218 with no power is not very good. I’m not sure how that can even be debated.

It certainly can be debated when you consider that for the season he’s hit a normal number of line drives and yet has a below-average BABIP. That’s being unlucky. If you take issue with the data, than it should be taken up with those who record what constitutes a line-drive for record keeping purposes. Now, I’m not going to suggest that Thurston would turn into Ichiro given better luck…nothing of the sort…but merely that his .218 BA shouldn’t be that low and as such shouldn’t be a starting point for an attack on his qualities as a player. This is and always will be a fundametally flawed argument because it begins and ends with the assumption that BA is a good tool for measuring a baseball player. It isn’t. You’re building a mansion on a beach here.

If you want to blame his errors on playing 3rd, then I can make the same senseless argument in the other direction. Skip has fewer errors than any of the every day infielders, so does that make him a good second basemen?

Bill James has been arguing since his first Baseball Abstracts that the error is a fundamentally flawed statistic. This is hardly a new concept. Again, you are using severely flawed evidence to support your argument. Skip is a bad 2nd baseman not because he makes few errors…he is a bad 2nd baseman because he doesn’t get to many balls and convert them into outs. Due to the fact that he gets to a smaller number of balls than a normal 2nd baseman should, he will by default make fewer errors. Fewer opportunities=fewer errors. As for Thurston…well he’s still a bad 3rd baseman but his inequities result in errors, whereas Skip’s tend to result in a ball rolling slowly into center, right-center, or right field. If you don’t agree with these arguments, I suggest you head over to fangraphs and check out THIS page. You will see that Skip Schumaker, the 2nd base version, is the team’s worst fielder using UZR (Admittedly, it’s not perfect, but also is 35,000x more sophisticated than errors) and Joe Thurston, the 3rd baseman, is also one of the worst. It’s no surprise to me that an outfielder and a 2nd baseman don’t convert well to 2nd and 3rd base. You should note that Thurston, in a tiny tiny sample, has actually done well at 2nd.

Here’s my larger point. Joe Thurston is a mediocre at best player. However he’s become the victim of a level of scorn that he does not deserve. The fact of the matter is that he’s a career AAAA 2nd baseman who has been asked in his rookie season to switch spots. Sure, he’s done poorly as a 3rd baseman, but he’s arguably been Tony La Russa’s 7th or 8th choice at that spot (Glaus, Mather, Freese,K and T Greene, Barden, DeRosa). He’s not hit well, but you also have to note he’s one of the few players on the team who can actually take a walk and has also been the victim of bad luck. He’s certainly not a good player…but he’s better than he’s been made out to be.

But ANYONE hitting .218 with no power is not very good.

Batting average doesn’t tell you how much power they have, though ;)

BBs don’t count as ABs

and i don’t know off hand what haren’s contract is

i was saying no way to halladay. dude is as close to an undisputed best in baseball as it gets and he will not come cheap

on my iphone (actually made it a home screen icon) and it automatically takes me to the mobile site. Now SB Nation just needs to add an edit function so I can go back and make my first comment a little more memorable. I admit, it was pretty weak for being as far as I know the first ever mobile post on VEB. I had my shot at glory and I blew it.

I dated one that worked there a while…allegedly some big names go there (she named dropped Jed and Johnny Damon).

The two way mirror in the bathroom his hilarious. There is this meat cart at the entrance…I don’t know if it has anything to do with Al’s but it’s the best beef briscuit EVAR.

teams would love to have him

Just expanding on how crazy “Rasmus+” projections could cost in estimated USD.

I can’t imagine ANYTHING that would be funnier to the GOB than to see us trade our young future-ace SP for an injured ex-ace SP, and then turn around and trade our future MVP-caliber CF for our own ex-future-ace SP, who is about to become injured (because that’s what pitchers do).

Please, Mo, for both our sake AND Dan Haren’s, please don’t do this. It’s the GM equivalent of stepping on a crack, scuffing the first base line, spitting into the wind, bragging about your no-hitter in the 6th inning, etc.