First, the Brewers:
21-10, are you serious? Everyone else .500 or below. I will take it. I am already beginning the process of figuring out how I am going to drive from Madison to Milwaukee for all of those playoff games.
A couple of thoughts
-JJ Hardy was never predicted to have this much pop. His ceiling as a players was thought to be great defender, .300 hitter, 20 HR's. It looks like he is going to have to have a rough go of the last 4/5 of the season to cap out at 20 HR's.
-Rickie Weeks continues his mysterious play at 2B. It can be a bit weird watching him play 2nd because he, as demonstrated on Saturday night, can make ridiculous plays with his glove. Don't be fooled by his low error total though, he still suffers abnormal lapses on plays that don't end up as errors. His current level of defense is passable enough that it looks like the Crew made the right decision to leave him at 2nd and not think about him in center as opposed to Hall.
-Their pitching is quite a strength, but I think that it is due for a rough patch. Suppan will not pitch this well throughout the season. Vargas is going to allow some of those many base runners he allows to score. Bush's ability to keep guys from getting on base seems to have disappeared (his WHIP is waaaay up). Sheets is a mystery and still an unknown quantity relating to injuries and now his inability to miss bats as much as he is used to.
-Finally, it will be interesting to see what happens with Mench, Hart and Jenkins when they cool down or the Brewers have an inevitable 3-7 streak. Will they keep their mouths shut then?
NFL draft:
I was having this conversation with a friend the other day: Are draft grades actual grades of this draft picks made by a team relative to those players ability and their value, or are draft grades evaluations of how well a team did relative to mock drafts? I would tend to say it is the latter. When a person fills out a mock draft, they are putting themselves inside the head of 32 different GM's and trying to figure out what they would do. Without the benefit of actual player evaluation, they take the general idea that player X is the best player at a position and then determine that team Y needs that player. This is totally fine as a fun little exercise, but using it as an evaluation tool for a teams draft is asinine.
Another point I wanted to make in extention of the last one is that each team is not a comparable unit to each other team. So if I watch tape and determine that a player is the 20th best player in the draft, that does not by any means say that the team that picks 20th needs to take that guy. That label "20th best player" is really, at best, an average of that players ability across 32 different teams. That player might be awful in a cover-2 scheme and excellent in a press coverage scheme. Or that player might not have the right locker room attitude that the team is looking for.
Essentially, who do you trust more? Person A reads the newspapers, looks up 40 yard dash times, keeps his ear to the ground about where prospects may be ranked by teams and watches a lot of college football to determine his draft board. Person B employs a scouting team who watches hours of tape on all of the players in the draft and uses considerable feedback from those people to create a draft board.
As consumers of the media, we get confused sometimes when a pick fails. Matt Millen, for example, is a terrible GM, right? Well, yes, but...remember, a lot of draft picks that get taken high fail. Imagine a hypothetical team that picks 10 picks after the lions each year. Instead of the Lions picking Mike Williams and Joey Harrington, etc. they took someone else. This team would have regularly gotten amazing draft grades because they would have gotten good values. Joey Harrington was widely considered a top prospect and people cringed when they saw that Mike Williams might be standing 8 inches over their nickel cornerbacks. Yet this hypothetical team would have people banging down the door to fire their GM.
The fallacy lies in the fact that every player is drafted not as a point estimate, but as a distribution. Let me explain. When a player is drafted by a team, we consider him to be 20th pick good. A specific level of ability that player has that is his ability level all the way through his career. Instead, there are many factors from the time a player is drafted until the time that he is evaluated 3-4 years later that determine his level of success: Quality of players around him, work ethic, team system, coaching, family issues, money, injuries, etc. Some of these factors are outside of the players control and some outside of the teams control. Back to Harrington. He was consider a very good QB prospect. He went to a team with a suspect offensive line and running game and what appears to be a poorly run organization. If that is the case, the coaching may have been subpar and the team attitude may have been cancerous. So based on his poor performance, we determine that we had it wrong and that Harrington sucks and we should fire Millen. I don't think that we can evaluate his true ability level without considering the factors around his, though. Had he been taken by the Steelers and allowed to sit for a few years before taking over the year that Roethlisburger wound up taking over, how do you think he would have done? My guess is that with good coaching, good players around him, time to sit and learn, he might have been Roethlisburger good.
So I think we can consider a players performance in the 3-4 years following the draft as being taken from a distribution with the mean being that players true ability and some amount of variability affected by different characteristics of the player and the team he is going to.
Packer draft:
The WR situation seemed curious to me. The team will keep 5-6 players, of which Driver and Jennings are 2. Supposedly they are high on something in the Shaun Bodiford, Carlyle Holliday, Ruvell Martin powerhouse trio. They have a returning Koren Robinson. They have Robert Fergueson, special teams gunner. Then they draft James Jones and David Clowney. So I have Driver, Jennings, Jones, Clowney, Fergueson, Bodiford? Does that mean they flat cut Koren Robinson, Holiday and Martin? Personally, I cut Fergueson, Holiday and Ruvell Martin.
I am excited about VT S Aaron Rouse. In college, a player with ideal measureables who has a ridiculous junior year and a bad senior year is an excellent mid-round gamble. There are many non-permanent reasons why you could see that pattern happen to a player.
I'm not sold that they're going to bite on this one. Wasn't it Cliff who questioned the wisdom of bringing in a declining veteran to take time away from developing players? As Chris wrote previously, the Packers are overstuffed with young WRs. Okay, if they get Keyshawn and cut Ferguson I'll be happy, but this doesn't seem to be Thompson's style.
