See what I meant the other night by sayin’ that he’s not that good? I just hope that the Padres FO is stupid enough to be fooled by his BA, SBs and highlight reel defense to pull the trigger on a deal for AG but that’s a crapshoot.
As for Reddick as a replacement, I say no….not yet! As much as I love Josh game I still think that he needs an other year in AAA to work on 2 things:
plate discipline (which is improving at a good clip)
hitin’ to the opposite field.
He’s still young (22 years old) and has time: Let’s not rush him.
I think I need to write a piece to explain how Ellsbury sucks with the bat too. Stay tooned!

unhittable over the last two years (0-20). Pretty remarkable.

Hopefully he gets another opportunity to pitch against the pinstripes this season (with lively redsox bats to back him up).

First off, I’m going to eliminate Reddick. If Ellsbury is made to look like a hugely negative defender by the current crop of CF in the league, Reddick will look worse. He doesn’t make horrible reads, but his range isn’t nearly as good as Ellsbury’s and he’s also inexperienced enough to make a fair few mistakes out there, I expect. He also doesn’t fit the offensive bill, as even at his best in the minors, his numbers came from pop and not OBP.

If you want a leadoff hitter to come from the current Sox crop, you’ve got quite a few problems. The obvious go-to would be Pedroia, but since being moved to the #2 slot in 2008, Pedroia has been God awful leading off. He’s actually come right out and said he feels uncomfortable doing so now, too, so I wouldn’t chalk it up to sample sizes either. The next option is, I guess, JD Drew, but if you slot him in there it seems like you’re wasting a lot of that power. And no options at SS offer better OBP than Ells.

The only other option is to trade, and I’d love to hear some names here, but from what I could see the list is filled with ungettables, uncertains, and offensive black holes. Better to face the devil we know than hope Rajai Davis keeps up a .375 BABIP.

I was ashamed when in Friday’s game there were runners on 2nd and 3rd, 0 outs and no runs were scores. Thats fucking pathetic and there is no excuse for it in my opinion.

At the beginning of the year, Els had a problems with his on-base percentage…which is why they moved him down to #7 or something. He has since worked on these issues somewhat, which is why they popped him back up at #1.

So would his “mediocre” on base % merely be a factor of a bad OBP averaged with a greatly improved (to the point of being decent) OBP?

Just a question…

This 2 losses and the way we lost are disturbing. No doubt the Yankees are the favorites in the Post Season. Our Ace Lester had a poor start and the Yankees just had good at bats on Friday, while our offense didnt shine against a mediocre Joba. On Saturday CC was able to completely shut down our offense. The only positive was Dice-K’s start, getting the old I-give-up-hits-and-walks-but-no-runs-magic flowing. Today is almost a certain loss with Byrd pitching.

I really disagree with you. Ellsbury is a 2.2 WAR Player right now, while losing around 1.2 WAR because of UZR. So assuming he would be an average CF he would be a 3.4 WAR player which is not to shabby.
And there comes my biggest problem: UZR, such a flawed metric. Today i just read some stuff about how UZR is calculated here: http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/primate_studies/discussion/lichtman_2003-03-14_0/.

For each zone, the computer keeps track of the following on a league-wide (for a particular year) basis:
         1. The number of hits in that zone.
         2. The average run value of a hit in that zone (using traditional lwts hit values).
         3. The number of outs recorded in that zone for each fielding position.

So UZR totally ignores the speed and trajectory of the ball hit. So assume Zone X is somewhere between CF and RF. A high Flyball in that Zone X is counted like a lineshot into that Zone X. One is a very sure out and the other is normally a double. UZR treats both exactly the same. You now could assume over a 150 Game playing time in CF it will eventually even out for all CF, but its like BABIP there is variance and some players will be on the “good” side of it and some on the wrong side. That also explains the massive swings in UZR. When you look at some OF UZR you realize that quite a few go from -10 to +6 or the other way around from one year to the next. Unless you believe its because of a significant drop or gain in skill its very clear that UZR doesn’t really work as a predictor of future defense value.
Just some examples:
UZR/150:
Ellsbury: 08 (66 Games): 6.9; 09: -11.0
Mike Cameron: 06: -0.6, 07: -10.4, 08: 15.6, 09: 8.2
Josh Hamilton (CF): 08 (117 Games): -17.7; 09 (56 Games): 13.1

A personal question to bs.uf:
bq. He makes horrible reads quite often, doesn’t go after balls that he should, appears to be developing an Abreu-like fear of walls at times, and has a noodle arm.

I know you generally follow the games via gameday. So is that really your personal observation? I watched around 55-60 games live this season and i’m willing to agree on his poor arm, but the other stuff sounds to me like you’re trying to interpret his bad UZR.

To sum it up: I’m not a believer in UZR (flaws in the calculation, really extreme swings for OF) and because of that i believe what i see and that is Ellsbury is atleast an average defensive CF if not better.

PS: Anybody has Bill James plus/minus Numbers for Ells? (They take trajectory and speed into account afaik)