but I don’t think PED’s have anything to do with some of the critics points about Sweeny. He needs to hit more to be a corner outfielder especially since the A’s don’t get much power from 1B or 3B.

He seems to be a solid player but I don’t see him ever becoming a star. I hope I’m wrong of course and the good news is I often am so maybe Sweeny will get better next season.

I was probably pretty naive about what was happening in the PED era. For a long time – I didn’t want to think that players were using PEDs as a rule – more as the exception. I was not paying super close attention to the stats and the changes that were taking place in baseball. The way power was becoming baseball’s holy grail. As I listen more closely, I hear (not necessarily from ANers) EVERYBODY was juicing. Now – of necessity – we will need to readjust our thinking because players will not have those advantages (unless they are using the new and improved and not-detectable PEDs). Power may no longer be tantamount to winning – coincidence that our recent games have been won less on power and more on basehits and the running game? If it bears out, this is a huge paradigm shift.

In our world of instant gratification – it will be oh-so-difficult for us to be patient while our youngsters develop. This past few weeks has really given us a glimpse of our future even more so because some of the position players and not just pitchers are up with us. This is the future we all wish was our today!! In a year where we have had not so many bright spots, we want the team of the future – so badly we can taste it.

Professional athletes have a much shorter professional career than most of the rest of us and have to compete at the highest level much more quickly. How one tells when one is ready is somewhat of a mystery to me. The intangibles that influence success are very hard to quantify (motivation, desire, the speed at which one acquires skills). I think the info you have posted about the prime age for a player and how it has shifted over time is eye-opening and one which we should all think about!

I have always been a Sweeney fan since we acquired him, but his lack of hustle concerns me.

His wOBA: .308
His OPS: .705
His OPS+: 91

Great numbers for a shortstop.

His fielding is good, and therefore he is not without value, but criticism of him has nothing to do with PEDs, it’s with the fact that his bad is 9% below average (measured by adjusted OPS). And he plays outfield.

I agree, Ryan has much promise and should be allowed to get some experience under his belt before everyone starts condemning him. A lot of good hitters aren’t specifically home run hitters-and I think Ryan gets on base at a decent rate. His batting average has this season been one of the more respectable ones on a team needing hits. He also is very good in the OF and I believe he can be even better with time.
The A’s have a history of not giving people a chance, but expecting instant results, as is evidenced by recent call ups of pitchers who immediately were sent back down after one poor outing.
By the way, I’m not related to Ryan, though I am a Sweeney. I’m just a fan.
Give the poor kid a chance, will ya?

OF assists are a very poor way to judge an OFer’s defense. Not that they’re bad, mind you, but the guys who are going to have the most assists are guys who have good enough arms to throw runners out but bad enough arms that runners will test them repeatedly.

Of course, Sweeney missed a cutoff man today, so…more fodders for the haters! I’m actually not one, I’m just in the camp that believes he’ll never hit 20 HRs a year and that he is a platoon player or 4th OFer, i.e., a “tweener.”

“Based on the data from players that have hit 500 or more career home runs without the assistance of steroids, it is apparent that most major league players peak in their home run production between their sixth and tenth seasons.”

http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog/a_numbers_game_gustavus_students_study_steroids_impact_on_h

debate on this subject….

Hilarious!

I think I would disagree with 0akFoSho on several of the peripheral arguments, and ultimately I don’t share his enthusiasm for Sweeney, but I’m less interested in that and more interested in the question of projecting a player in the post-PED era. Although a couple of the responses here have addressed that, I feel most of the discussion here has been sidetracked, so I want to get back to what I feel is the real point here.

We’re all interested in projecting players to try to guess how good they’ll be in the near future. To do that, our main resource is to look at how they’ve done so far in their career, mostly in the minors. Based on our observations of hundreds of other players, we can recognize patterns that tell us, essentially, that if a player profiles as X at certain stages in his development, we can predict that he’ll likely turn out to be Y once he matures.

0akFoSho is suggesting that because our observations of hundreds of other players are mostly from the PED era, we can’t rely on those patterns to hold true in the future. If this is true, this is a very big deal. Everyone out there is projecting players and they’re all using pretty much the same standard assumptions. If we can accurately identify a way in which the conventional wisdom is wrong in saying minor-league profile X projects to major-league profile Y, then we have a way of identifying undervalued and overvalued prospects and we can use that information to our advantage in developing a team.

Now it seems that 0akFoSho is further proposing that one formula of conventional wisdom which cannot be relied upon in the post-PED era is the belief that if a guy hasn’t shown significant power by the time he’s 24 he’s just not going to develop it. Since that belief is one of the major knocks against Sweeney, 0FS is suggesting that Sweeney is actually better than conventional wisdom would judge him to be.

Now I’m not completely convinced by the argument that without benefit of PEDs players who will develop power at 26 will not necessarily show it by age 24. I don’t feel that 0FS has really presented much evidence for that. But neither do I think his detractors have rebutted the claim. Most of the rebuttals have simply said things like, “Sweeney didn’t show any power in the minors, so that means he’s not going to develop power. (Duh, everyone knows that.)” In other words, they are simply regurgitating the conventional wisdom rather than addressing the question of whether it remains sound in the post-PED era.

I think that’s a mistake. Even if this particular theory about the pace at which post-PED power reveals itself proves wrong, we still should be very interested in the question of what standard patterns of projection no longer apply in the post-PED era. In spite of how it began as rebellion against conventional wisdom, I find that the sabermetric community today features a great deal of groupthink. Sabermetric thought today is less about investigation and more about reading all the lore and knowing it better than the next guy. Once something has been postulated, most saber-minded fans are so pleased to have another theorem to play with that they never stop to look at how it is grounded and when it will no longer apply. The sabermetric axioms that fans have so proudly grasped are now little more than the new conventional wisdom.

The way to beat the market is not to apply the conventional wisdom better than everyone else does, it’s to identify where the conventional wisdom is wrong.

I go away and come back to 200 posts.

I get it. you are encouraging Sweeney to use PEDs!
totally agree. great post.

I feel like I just lost a year of my life wading through all this muck.

peaked a long time ago…..when he was with Kansas City! O.o

:X

You make a compelling argument.

(read: someone who enjoys watching baseball more than statistical analysis….)

OFS’ post-PED argument makes intuitive sense, were we really in a post-PED era. That is debatable, but I suspect that until we have more stringent testing protocols we can assume the system is still tainted.

Power-hitting has been generally accepted as an “old player” skill, hence the plethora of Papi-types — DH/1B sluggers whose primary contribution is the long-ball. It’d be interesting for an analytical type to look at the average age of a DH and how that correlates to their power numbers through their career.

I enjoy watching the young guys play and generally think Oakland needs to show more patience with their prospects. There are times when I feel like we’re a AAAA team that finds these great prospects, gets them 75% developed and then trades them away for more talent to develop.

To wit, I am sick of hearing my Dodgers-fan BF taunt us about the Either trade. We traded him for Nutjob Boardgame and in the long run we suffered. Yes, Milton did help us with our post-season run, but such an injury-prone hothead for a future plus-player…..ugh While I don’t wish Cargon any ill-will, I’m somewhat pleased that he hasn’t turned into another Either…

Sweeney (and Buck and Rajai) are fun to watch. I can only hope that we are in the post-PED era and that we do see more smallball/hustleball. It has been invigorating to watch the guys play this month. I love a homerun as much as the next person, but this has been fun. Speed and defense may just be “young player” skills, but I’m going to enjoy them while I can.