Can the Rockies with the players they have now win the 1st Wild Card spot or will they need to make an in-season trade to get that spot? The division seems out of reach this year. AWESOME podcast keep it up.

Oh man, you hit the nail in the head when you said that probably the most frustrating thing as a Rockies fan is when our pitchers are somehow NOT given the same treatment but in opposite direction as our hitters do. And this is true even among people who understand and use advanced analytics.

Just the other day, a very saber-inclined fríend of mine, practically laughed at me for suggesting that Gray/Anderson/Marquez have a very good chance of performing better than Bumgarner/Samardzija/Cueto. Of course the only way this is a good bet is if we look at stats like FIP-, and not ERA or even unadjusted FIP. The weird thing is how people are perfectly happy taking Nolan’s 129 wRC+ for 2017 at face value, but have a really rough time wrapping their heads around Gray’s 2017 FIP- of 69.

On a different subject, with regard to balancing the usage of vets and youngsters, I read a commenter on purple row suggesting a rough plan for allocating playing time that seemed not only reasonable, but also possible. He talked about percentages, but I’ll translate that to games started and fine-tune it to my liking. It would be something like this

LF
Dahl 90
Desmond 62
Parra 10

CF
Blackmon 145
Dahl 10
Desmond 7

RF
CarGo 100
Parra 40
Dahl 22

1B
McMahon 110
Desmond 52

Obviously this is not going to play out exactly like this because stuff happens, but as a general layout, how realistic do you think this is? Do you think they’ll be willing to limit Parra to just 50 starts? Also, as you might have noticed, there’s no Tapia there, which is a sad thing, but a direct result of siginig CarGo.

Sorry for the length of the comment, hope to get your thoughts on this. Keep it up.