Hey, I'm famous!! But I wish I had read the Fangraphs article first. I could have just posted a link....it's way better than my stuff (more below). Hadn't seen it, however.
Nope, Aoki's 2nd half 183 AB's don't change my evaluation of him. He got hot and brought his year's totals up to his career norms. He was real cold before that you will remember.
He's going to hit .285, get on base at a .350 clip and not have much power. But he's like clockwork at those rates of production. He's a very safe bet...which is why teams continue to grab him.
More on Thames: the Fangraphs article has two projections for Thames moving forward; one is a pure MLE based on AAA and KBO performance, the other compares Thames to 4 similar players (including Khris Davis and Justin Smoak).
The pure MLB projection is .262-.348-.493. The similar player projection is .251-.321-.478
Based on the translation of other KBO players coming to the US, I said that .270-.340-.450 from Thameswouldn't surprise me at all. I wasn't far off the two projections above. Compared to those two the .270 was a bit optimistic and the .450 a bit pessimistic.
I said a .790 OPS wouldn't surprise me (and said he might go quite a bit higher). Those two projections have him at .841 and .799.
I did get his lack of positonal data wrong. Fangraphs says that Thames played 1B in Korea. I thought he was a DH. Oops.
Overall not bad, though.