One might believe that being privy to the secretive goings-on at Razzball gives one access to information quicker than your average Joe Q. Public, and one would be absolutely correct in making such a bold declaration. Upon hearing there was not one, but two features on Jo Adell coming down the old Razzball pipeline, my brain did the only thing that seemed logical. I decided to avoid mentioning Jo Adell in order to not clog the blog arteries with too much rich and redundant content.
If you are a weekly reader, you know that the previous sentence is a falsehood, and indeed I could not resist featuring the exponentially-post hype sleeping angel/Angel. Arteries are for clogging, as Redd Foxx kind of said in a way that is totally better than mine, a bit that I discovered from the first Quasimoto record. Ten Razzball Coins to the first reader to locate the Quasimoto track Redd Foxx’s “when you’re dying of nothing” bit appears on. Twenty Razzball Coins if it actually appeared on the second record, which happens to contain one of my favorite DOOM tracks.
Digression aside, I love when baseball players are good at baseball. It’s wonderful fun watching a youngster break out, or an oldster resist breaking down and producing elite baseball statistics. While fantasy baseball necessitates a certain type of angst (like my daily reminder that I own a bunch of Julio Rodriguez, Luis Robert, and Nolan Jones shares), I genuinely love a good baseball player doing well.
As I have previously mentioned in former Blurbstomps, some fantasy sports blurb websites write with such personal scorn aimed at a human baseball player that you would think said player had stolen the blurbist’s family and friends, moved them to a commune, and then labored them to death.
Without further ado (after the Blurbstomp Reminder), we give you an all Jo Adell Blurbstomp. Enjoy!
A Blurbstomp Reminder
We will analyze player blurbs from a given evening, knowing that 1-2 writers are usually responsible for all the player write-ups posted within an hour of the game results. We will look at:
Flowery Diction – examining how words create meaning, and sometimes destroy meaning altogether
Q and Q – Quantitative and Qualitative Oddities in a given blurb
Stephen A. Smith IMG_4346.jpeg Award – Given to the player blurb that promises the most and delivers the least.
Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque – blurbs don’t always need to make sense, friendo
The hope is that by season’s end, we’ll all feel more confident about our player evaluations when it comes to the waiver wire. We will read blurbs and not be swayed by excessive superlatives, faulty injury reporting, and micro-hype. I will know that I have done my job when Grey posts, and there isn’t a single question about catchers in the comments section. Onward to Roto Wokeness!
Q & Q
Adell has started the Angels’ past three games and has a .316/.372/.553 slash line with two homers and five steals in 43 plate appearances this season.
The former top prospect hasn’t been able to establish himself in the majors since making his debut in 2020 and entered the season with a .625 OPS in 178 career games, but he’s now playing well after beginning the season in a bench role. Adell received just three starts in the Halos’ first 14 games of the year, but he’s carved out a regular role in right field of late. The 25-year-old still has some issues and has been caught stealing four times already, but a 23.3 percent strikeout rate is a marked improvement and could illustrate he’s finally ready to make good on his prospect pedigree.
Source: Rotowire
You may be wondering why this blurb is appearing in blurbstomp, and why your author chose a blurb from the 25th of April to highlight. In order to assess the following blurbs, we deemed it necessary to show what a solid player blurb looks like. We have a very brief history of Adell’s rocky ascent with an OPS citation that shows that he has not been unfairly overlooked. The positives are there, but they note the caught stealing issues. This is not a ringing endorsement, but a cautionary celebration of a hyped prospect. Again, it’s fun to root for prospects, especially fellows who have previously struggled. And then we have Rotoworld’s take on the subject:
Jo Adell hit his fourth homer Monday as the Angels edged the Phillies 6-5.
Adell was moved into the second spot in the lineup tonight, and while we’re not sure that’s exactly the right spot for an awful baserunner who strikes out a whole lot, it’s closer to where he belongs than where he was batting previously. Adell remains a flawed player, but he definitely seems to have made some gains again this year after also showing signs of progress last season. Whether he’s a long-term asset in mixed leagues remains to be seen, but he’s worth using right now.
Source: Rotoworld
Let’s address the base running. Is he leading the league in Caught Stealing after one month of play? Yes. Jose Caballero is second with 4 CS, but because he’s been successful 9 times, he’s not considered awful I guess. How about stolen base sleeper-to-some Nicky Lopez? He has stolen 1 base and has been caught four times! That’s nuts! That is an awful base runner! I’ll show my bias by positing that one of Adell’s CS was a controversial game-ending umpire review where he looked safe, but I’m splitting hairs.
When I see the phrase “awful baserunner” with no qualifier, my assumption is that the author of the phrase has done some digging and found Adell has a history of sprinting-related sadness. Strangely enough, it seems that Adell had about a 5:1 stolen base:caught stealing in the minors, and before this season at the major league level he had a 7:4 ratio. He’s been bad at stealing bases this year, but it doesn’t seem like Ron Washington is giving him the red light, which is what fantasy managers are so excited about.
We have found that the author has made the comment “awful baserunner” to describe his work in one month of 2024. I’m sure the same logic then applies to the blurbist’s next thought, wherein Jo Adell “strikes out a whole lot.” Surely a blurbist would be consistent?
Ha, nope. When this blurb was written, Jo was experiencing his first month in the MLB with a K rate below 30%. Every other publication was keying in on this piece of information. Not Rotoworld. Instead, we have analysis that can be summed up thusly:
Jo Adell is an awful baserunner this month.
Jo Adell strikes out too much for his career, ignore this month please.
The worst part about this analysis is the insidious nature of this negative analysis. If the blurbist is right and he starts striking out again, then he gets to wear his “Haters Are Always Right” hat. If he’s wrong and Adell produces, he knows such a blurb will be lost to time and his opinion will not be wrong, only forgotten.
Sometimes such a blurbist is so desperate to be right that you can tell he has alerts on his phone for Adell at bats, praying for strikeouts. Well, guess what happened Wednesday night?
Bob Nightengale Memorial Plaque
Jo Adell went 0-for-5 with four strikeouts on Wednesday in the Angels’ loss to the Phillies.
So much for the whole cutting back on strikeouts storyline. Adell appears to have made some legitimate strides in the plate skills department early on this season, but he looked a bit overwhelmed in this one as he fanned twice in three at-bats against Phillies ace Zack Wheeler before tacking on a pair of additional punch outs later in the contest. He’s been on a tear the last two weeks with three homers and two steals in 12 contests since April 17.
Source: Rotoworld
“So much for the whole cutting back on strikeouts storyline.”
Is there anything sadder than a writer outright denying a “storyline” (Jo Adell has cut down on his strikeouts this month) in a previous blurb, only to bring up the “storyline” when he strikes out a whole bunch in one game? I’ve admitted my own bias previously, and Adell’s at bat in the 5th inning looked pretty bad, but check out this called strike three from umpire Chad Whitson:
That pitch to Adell is on the border of the god dang phantom zone, my friends! Don’t you wish you could be bad at your job, and then go to your boss and say, “Yeah, I didn’t do this task accurately, but let’s acknowledge that it’s really hard and you should keep me on board by creating a new criteria of achievement to allow for more mistakes.” Now imagine that the job is Air Traffic Controller. Or surgeon. Or a quality assurance inspector at a meat-packing plant.
I’m not in the business of saying that Jo Adell had a good game last night, but I am in the business of giving you context for a player’s performance. Did you know that Nick Castellanos went 0-4 with 4K’s on the same night? That the opposing catcher JT Realmuto fanned three times? Or that the Phillies struck out 18 times as a team against 11 strikeouts for the Angels? This was a bad game for most hitters, but sure, single out Adell because…well, as far as I can tell, this blurbist is accusing other fantasy writers and players of being “too excited.”
If the strike out rate had been +30% all season, I wouldn’t be writing this Blurbstomp. Instead, here we are, reminding readers that this week’s Avoiding assignment is to stay positive, dig deeper if you have the time, and remind yourself not to trust sources that pride themselves on being “the best.” Remember that Groucho Marx line that I will not look up and try to paraphrase: “I’d never want to be part of a club that has me as a member.” There was a point to me bringing this up, but I can’t figure it out. I really have no idea why I wrote that, who is in the club, who “I” is, nothing. I’m glad to be a member of this club at Razzball, which it seems might be a strike against me now that I reread that Groucho misquote.
In the meantime, which was a fabulous single by Spacehog, a rare band whose lead singer was the bassist who also played the lead melodic instrument in the band, have a good week and take care of your obliques.
