Blogs

Recently, the team behind MLB's Statcast came up with another visual and defensive metric for our perusal. It's still astonishing to me that the Baseball Savant platform is a free database to the average fan. That's the reality we live in however, and they've now introduced a Directional Outs Above Average leaderboard. In 2018 Byron Buxton obviously isn't...

A lot of us were shocked by the Buxton treatment this year, from playing him with an injury to denying him his September call up. We were almost equally shocked to see Sano sent to A ball and when he returned people talked about him looking a little thinner, but then the season played on and before ending with another injury he resorted to the same 200 h...

The Twins have ridden the roller coaster during the Paul Molitor era. Up in 2015, way down in 2016, a peek at the playoffs in 2017 and now way down in 2018. The roller coaster claimed a front-office victim in longtime GM Terry Ryan two years ago and now there has to be some heat on field manager Molitor after this season's extreme disappointment.

The com...

With the closing of the minor league baseball season on the field, we open up the biennial minor league affiliation-swap season and, to nobody's surprise, the Twins have extended their affiliation with the Class High A Fort Myers Miracle.

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Teams are allowed...

After a 3-game series against the Yankees where Willians Astudillo did not record a strikeout in 10 at-bats, the Yankees officially protested the game on September 12th. Manager Joe Girardi, and pitcher David Robertson, contended that the strike zone should be wider for a batter of Astudillo's girth. Seemingly, David Robertson was frustrated that he allow...

The one sport that stands to benefit most from advances in technology is America’s Pastime. My colleague Ben Beecken shares that sentiment and understands baseball’s big problem and how to solve it. But as a semi-traditionalist baseball fan, I’m not ready to take the umpires off the field in favor of robots.

This was originally published at Grandstand C...

I posted this idea in a discussion thread, but I do think it fits better in the blog section or in its own thread, but chose blog. I will leave the scenario as I posted it in the other thread.

Anyway, in light of a recent debate on the value of defense, I came up with a problem. It would be interesting to run a simulation on this or hear what inputs othe...

Everyone knows that pitchers have much more difficulty the third time through the lineup. Right? Isn't this established baseball knowledge?

Data does back it up. Anecdotally we hear stats on almost every baseball broadcast about how much poorer a pitcher performs his third time through the order. League wide there is data to support this claim. According...

This is an excerpt from an article on Zone Coverage; read it in full here .

Over the weekend the Minnesota Twins made waves in the baseball community by announcing that they were not bringing Byron Buxton up when the Triple-A season ends on Monday. The decision effectively ended Buxton’s 2018 season before it really got a chance to get going, and creat...

The Minnesota Twins have had a strange season in 2018. Unfortunately, that doesn’t compare to the nightmare season their center fielder, Byron Buxton, has gone through so far. A myriad of injuries and struggles at the plate have made the Twins front office of CBO Derek Falvey and GM Thad Levine decide to not have Byron Buxton be a part of their September...

With the minor league season coming to an end, I thought a quick update on my “adopt-a-prospect” would be good.

It was back in early March when I was looking forward to providing “bi-weekly(ish)” updates on Twins prospect Felix Jorge. I had predicted that we would see him at some point in 2018 with a September call-up being the worst case scenario. Not...

Sorry Dickens' fans, this is about the Twins, the Cubs and White Sox. As a lifetime Senators/Twins fan and a longtime resident of Chicago, I've followed all three franchises quite closely - thru thick and thin. Don't worry, we're not going all the way back to 1961 - just wanted to review all three team's recent "rebuilds" and see what lessons we might d...

Let me preface this post by acknowledging that the odds are low Machado signs with the Twins in real life. With low odds, we need to be BOLD and aggressive right upfront to schedule a meeting with him.

Mr. Machado, I want you to remember 3 numbers. 60, 40, and 3. We'll go into more detail what those numbers represent.

Let's start with the first number...

Growing up in Minnesota during the days of Kirby, Hrbie, and World Championships I developed a love of not only the Twins but the game in general. I went to dozens of Twins games as a kid, making the three and a half hour trek one way to Minneapolis usually a couple of times each summer, and would often attend either Redhawks games or whatever semi-pro ty...

Logan Morrison Hip Impingement Q&A
Heezy1323

Twins DH/1B Logan Morrison was recently shut down for the remainder of the season and, by reports, is expected to undergo surgery for a hip condition that has been bothering him for much of the year. The problem is being reported as ‘hip impingement’, which is a fairly common diagnosis. Some may recall tha...

Means 9 trips through the rotation for each starter, and got me to questioning what would be the best way to appropriate those starts from now - 117 games in - through the rest of the season.
The clear emphasis must be on 2019 and 2020 and what will best serve the club moving forward. That is not to say that you stop pitching Berrios, Odorizzi, or...

I’m at Target Field, and it was the Sunday before the all-star break. We were already losing to the Tampa Bay Rays, and it was a high leverage spot in the 5th inning. Suddenly, my friend and I hear the infamous Lil Jon song start to heat up. Fernando Rodney is coming in? I think, “wow, Molitor is finally getting out of his comfort zone with preassigned in...

on Eduardo Escobar, the best and most important Twin in the last several years. As a latin player he can probably be effective to his late 30 s , His dugout presence is worth a majority of the money, I heard a player say, that when he was traded from the White Sox, it was the first time he had seen MLB players cry. Thats how I felt too...but on the flip...

Seeing dozier and Escobar go suck.. but life goes on whether you agree with your front office or not you just hope to win ball games as a player , coach, or fan. I remember when I was young I love playing baseball and football in fact football was my favorite sport up until I was 17..I remember my dad telling me stories about the twins 2 World Series wins...

[re-posted from the night's minor league summary thread...]

I was in attendance at Pawtucket last night, so let me offer some additional impressions and details.

First, a minor correction: the Red Wings' final run scored on a wild pitch. The bases were not loaded when Motter walked, but when ball-four skittered past Mike Ohlman, Edgar Corcino on third...