F-Lew is now Jay-Blue

Adam Lind plz

all his relatives here are gonna be so sad

Removes a distraction.

What is it with the Blue Jays and ex-Giants?

sad

Never understood this particular strain of group think. My vote would have been: “There are zero fucks I give about this move.”

i wonder if that means travis snider’s time as a starter is almost at a close. As far as a player maybe the Giants could get fallen 3B prospect Kevin Ahrens.

I only hope we get a useful piece in return. Maybe not to the current roster, but adding some more depth to the farm system would always be welcome.

Am I, as an old coot, missing some darkly satiric allusion in “I has a sad,” or should I continue to be reminded, as I am when presumed adults slump into baby talk, of Dorothy Parker’s New Yorker review (as “Constant Reader”) of an A. A. Milne book: “Tonstant weader fwowed up”?
     As to FLew’s above averageness, I imagine that MLB must be like Lake Wobegon in having all its players above average, since no one save the Jays apparently wanted Lewis at all. The Toronto GM radiated pretty dim enthusiasm, explaining that he wanted Lewis because of L’s being an experienced bench player, whom “we felt … was an upgrade maybe over what we have currently.” I particularly like the “maybe” here.

Edgar: Frandsen FLew got traded for cash? That must mean he sucks!

LOL Fred

Freddie Lewis was the ultimate love him or hate him guy. Some fans loved him for his ability to draw walks, while his detractors pointed out that he was among the league leaders in taking called strike threes. Was he a patient hitter or was he just not aggressive? Some fans loved him for his defensive range, while others said the range meant nothing because he dropped the ball once he got there. He was great for me though. Whenever I made a fan post or fan shot and got little reaction, I always made a mental note to make the next one about Freddie Lewis, and sure enough, you would see 500 comments, with nobody even changing the subject to pies or Pokemons or what they had for dinner.
    I usually root for players to do badly when the Giants trade them away, because I don’t want my favorite team to look stupid, but players like Frandsen or Lewis, who came up through the system and never really had a fair shot here, deserve long successful major league careers. I don’t see it happening for either, but I will be happy if it does.

I think Brian Sabean hated the nickname F-Lew so much, that he traded Lewis just to get rid of it. In reality, he likes the guy and admires him as a player. He just really hates that fucking nickname.

…when you demand a trade, you don’t get more playing time but rather get traded. Who’da thunk? I wish I’d thought of this before I demanded to be either promoted or else transferred to the Boise office. Potato-y.

how else can they afford the extension for Molina?

I was really bummed by this yesterday, and thinking about it, I realized a couple things.

First, I’m more bummed by it then I should be – Lewis is a good player, could have been really helpful to the Giants if used correctly, but he’s not so good that I should be this upset. I mean, .350-.360 obp with some doubles power is very nice, but he wasn’t going to hit many homeruns or anything. Good, but not great, defense.

However, this bummedness I think comes from the front office’s inability to understand talent. I get it that fans see Lewis drop a couple fly balls and decide his defense is terrible. Fine, fans are often that way. However, the front office seemed to think that too. The front office should (no offense) be much smarter than the typical fan. They should understand defensive metrics. Lewis struck out a lot. Fine, many fans hate that. The front office should understand that maybe that’s not that bad when he also takes pitches and gets on base better than everyone (but Pablo) on the team. But they don’t. I’m bummed because the front office apparently can’t understand talent. They’ll give Aubrey Huff $3 million because he hit 32 homeruns two years ago, but they won’t give Lewis playing time.

Anyway, overall, part of me is glad the uncertainty is over. I hope Lewis tears it up in the AL.

FRED LEWIS
He was not that good, but better than most of the available options

…but yet I’m not quite “meh”.

I think this is case of failed opportunity on both sides. Did the FO dick him? Perhaps, and that point has been argued a lot here.

That said, I also think Fred could have made more of his opportunity:

• Saying he didn’t want to lead off probably didn’t endear him to management when most ballplayers are hungry to be in the lineup, wherever that may be.
• Saying things like “I didn’t” drop it and refusing to achknowlede that he dropped that one ball last year
• I wish he could/would have improved his defense. Yeah, I know his UZR is great for a LFer, but he would have been oodles more valuable to the team if he could have played all three OF spots well.

He could have been the F bomb

First point: current defensive metrics are mostly bosh. It is now over 30 years since I first wrote that defense is wildly over-rated and that offense should control player selection—but there are limits and Lewis exceeded them. He was a decent to good offensive player, nothing really remarkable, but as good as or better than what the Giants had. But he was a virtual lock to muff at least a play a game.

But the issue here is not whether the Giants should have moved him, as I think they should and as they, in any event, had decided they would: it’s the way they went about it. In essence, they did everything they could to run his trade value down to zero. And lo! they got about zero back for him. That is the crime here. Had they cut a deal mid-season last year, they might well have gotten something of at least some use in return, but that’s not The Giants’ Way.

Meanwhile, off on a tangent, can someone remind me what Aubrey Huff brings to the table that Ryan Garko didn’t? Oh, wait, I just remembered: five years more of age.

It is now well accepted that BABIP for pitchers tends to normalize at something like .302, and any material deviations from that (or whatever exactly it is) are regarded as transient flukes. I agree thoroughly: Some 30 years ago I published a defensive metric very similar to what James later popularized as the Defensive Efficiency Rating (DER), and it showed clearly that the variation in balls in play converted to outs was almost trivial from team to team; the constancy of BABIP is just that sort of metric looked at from the other side of the plate.

If one plugs through the consequent numbers, it turns out—depending in only a small way on what assumptions one makes about the distribution of hits above or below average as to singles, doubles, and triples—that the spread between best-fielding team in the game and worst-fielding team in the game from fielding alone is maybe three games, maybe even less.

It should be painfully obvious that there is a radical disconnect between those relatively uncontroversial numbers and the claims that some one fielder’s abilities can swing the outcome of several games for his team, yet we see claims that so-and-so’s fielding saves his team 5.3 games a year, or costs 6.2 games, and suchlike. While one could, as a last fallback, argue that there is necessarily an averaging of better and poorer fielders, so that the net is close to zero, it seriously—very, very seriously—strains credulity that not one team in all of baseball in any season can assemble a team that is as much better (or worse) than average as, again supposedly, some one player’s skills can manage. For pity’s sake, an average team would only need to add one good fielder (according to the modern-metrics movement) to win several more games than by average fielding. Bujt we never, ever see such swings from any one team.

Even the most ardent advocates of “the new OBP” have to admit that there is something a bit, um, rough about ratings for particular men swinging from terrffic one year to awful the next, as is fairly common with these metrics. But despite all this common sense, we keep hearing these definitive claims about how fielding was long under-rated, but now we have so much better a handle on it. Bosh, say I.

(And whether Lewis factually muffed an average of a play a game is hard to say, but we watch pretty much every Giants game and I don’t think I can recall one in which Lewis started and didn’t blow one; that may be selective memory, but you see now what I think these UZRs and suchlike are worth, and why.)

Sad.