Unless you know Baez timing and mechanics you will never know why things do what they do. You can get mad and I dont really care. I agree with some. Its life. The funny thing is you dont understand or see talent over other talent. Just looking at numbers does nothing for Baez. I have watched him in AAA. I have watched him the majors. I know when he is funky and I know when he is right. I am not saying I know if he will make it cause I dont. I am no better then you but I suggest you watch and study before you judge.
Who's mad? I'm certainly not. Also, when have I ever said Baez wasn't talented? Pretty sure in most of my talk about him I've said his natural talent is enough to be one of the best in the game. In fact, most of my statements probably said something to the effect that his problem is he is relying too much on talent and that he shows little polish. Also, did you even read what I said? I do watch him(and any other cub player) as much as I get the chance to.
I'll be honest here. Mechanics are something I'm not particularly interested in because I remember when Prior was coming up the talk was about his perfect mechanics and how he would stay away from injuries because of that. And I've also seen people with supposed funky mechanics succeed with no issues. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they are hogwash and have no value. As I said before, I really don't understand them on a deep enough level to talk intelligently on them. I understand some of the basic concepts but I'm not going to sit here and tell you why Baez needs to change his "hammer" because such and such will fix him.
I posted a quite detailed article talking about Baez's mechanics less than a week ago. So, I frankly find you're characterization of all stats and no knowledge on mechanics to be off. Just because I choose to avoid making a fool of myself talking about something I don't know as well doesn't mean I don't listen to others who do.
I also know perfectly well that players can make that sort of change and then suddenly become different players. I've mentioned Bautista a lot in talk about Baez. He'd be the very definition of a player making a major mechanical change. I also realize that can start to appear as noise in data if you don't understand on a deeper level mechanics. This is probably why I was unconvinced on Arrieta until around July. I owned up to being wrong on him. However, the great thing about stats is over a long enough time frame they always normalize. After 3 months, Arrieta seemed like small sample size noise, after a full year of this it appears to be his new norm. If and when Baez makes that change I'll change my opinion.
Regardless, we're talking about someone who is hitting .171/.233/.348 with 41.1% K rate. Rationalize it however you like but until that improves you're not talking about a major league player. Baez has hit worse in Septemeber than he did in August. As I said with Olt, the fan bias here is obvious. If you change Baez's name with Barney no one would even give a shit about a player hitting that poorly. That same Barney everyone talked about as garbage(rightly so) hit .208/.266/.303 last year. Being 21 shouldn't entirely shield you from that. Being 21 gives you time to change but you still have to make that change. Historically speaking, players who've debuted like this haven't made the change. If people want to believe he will make that change that's fine but it's based on faith not empirical data. My issue is people seem to believe that this sort of struggle is common and that people generally turn things around. That's not the case. It's rare that players who can k at a 40% rate even get to the majors.
