It feels like we’ve entirely talked this whole damn thing out by now, but there’s still so much Dickey reaction floating around out there in the ephemera that I’m thinking I might as well try and scoop up as much as possible. I mean, it’s not like there’s going to be anything so compelling to talk about for a while– y’know, until they sign Rafael Soriano…
At Getting Blanked, Parkes goes through an A to Z guide to RA Dickey, in which… holy shit, he actually full-on writes something for each letter. Alex Ballingall of the Toronto Star goes with 50 things you need to know. Trust me, this is like easily ten times more than is possibly interesting about 95% of ballplayers.
“Flags fly forever, and the Jays are facing an unusual opportunity — the two traditional AL East powers, the Yankees and Red Sox, are weaker than they’ve been in some time, and the most popular sports team in Toronto, the Maple Leafs, is busy watching its commissioner try to drive the sport into oblivion,” writes Keith Law in his analysis for ESPN.com. “If the Jays start strong in April with no Leafs and the NBA’s Raptors in the tank, there’s a very good chance they’ll see their 2013 attendance catch up to their performance (something that often lags for teams having their first good season in a while, like Baltimore saw in 2012), leading to a revenue boost before the season is out, to say nothing of the substantial revenue boost all teams see when they reach the postseason. It’s an unusual confluence of factors that makes the Jays’ sudden shift to go for it in 2013 more logical than it would be for other sub-.500 teams.”
Once his post was filed, Law also took to Twitter to talk about the trade, making clear that while he agrees with the whole world that it’s a staggering amount of talent that the Jays have given up, he at least thinks they held the right one of the “Lansing 3.” Adding Aaron Sanchez he tweets, would have been a “deal breaker,” adding that “There’s no comparison. He’s among the best SP prospects in baseball.” Later, he scoffs at the fanciful Roy Halladay comps people have been occasionally putting on Syndergaard.
Of course, if that’s not reason enough why he was in the deal, maybe the Jays chose to keep Sanchez because of this story from the New York Daily News, which tells us about Noah Syndergaard and the gay slur he tweeted out less than a couple weeks ago.
Important stuff from Dave Cameron of FanGraphs: “Dickey’s RA9-wins (which is just WAR based on runs allowed instead of on FIP) over the last three years are significantly higher than his FIP-wins, which is what we call WAR for pitchers here on FanGraphs. By FIP, Dickey has been worth +10 WAR over the last three years. By runs allowed, he’s been worth +15 WAR,” he writes. “Because Dickey throws the knuckleball, and we already know that knuckleball pitchers outperform their FIP, you should lean more towards RA9-wins for Dickey than FIP-wins.” So my cherry picking rWAR was for a reason!
Read the rest of this entry »
