Angels 4, Twins 2: Twins Fail with Bases Loaded Once Again in the Series Finale

[Vanimal46]

27 minutes ago, USAFChief said:

Games with 3 runs or less: Here's some comparisons, 2023 to date:

TX 13

LAD 15

ClE 28

MN 21

CWS 26

I'm too lazy to go team by team at BBRef and I can't find the data already assembled. 

But at least on first glance, good offenses don't get shut down as often. Which makes intuitive sense to me.

 

 

 

Piggybacking off your data, here are more teams:

Tampa Rays - 14

Baltimore - 14 

Yankees - 19 

Astros - 18 

Atlanta - 14

The amount of losses a team has is pretty dang close to how many games they have scored 3 runs or less. 

Concur that 5 runs is the magic number to reach. If the Twins did that more consistently, they would be a top team in baseball. 

[USAFChief]

8 minutes ago, DJL44 said:

It was good to see Correa produce an RBI double. He's one of the missing middle of the order bats. I'm hopeful Royce Lewis is able to be at least a league average offensive contributor.

I think a reasonable hope for Correa is something like last year. OPS in the low to mid .800s. Certainly valuable, especially at SS, but not something that should be your best hitter.

Hopefully we get something similar from Lewis. That'd help.

We don't have any really good hitters. Consistent .950 OPS guys. 

[USAFChief]

4 minutes ago, Vanimal46 said:

Piggybacking off your data, here are more teams:

Tampa Rays - 14

Baltimore - 14 

Yankees - 19 

Astros - 18 

Atlanta - 14

The amount of losses a team has is pretty dang close to how many games they have scored 3 runs or less. 

Concur that 5 runs is the magic number to reach. If the Twins did that more consistently, they would be a top team in baseball. 

Get back to work, before your boss reads this. 

[DJL44]

9 minutes ago, chpettit19 said:

I think it's pretty extreme to suggest not worrying about keeping your next starting pitcher stretched out while also suggesting they move Maeda to the pen.

Maeda might not be good enough (healthy enough? young enough?) to start anymore. A move to the bullpen might be the only way he can contribute to this team. I'd love to see the Maeda of 2020 again but that guy might not exist anymore.

[chpettit19]

3 minutes ago, DJL44 said:

Maeda might not be good enough (healthy enough? young enough?) to start anymore. A move to the bullpen might be the only way he can contribute to this team. I'd love to see the Maeda of 2020 again but that guy might not exist anymore.

That's fine, but all the more reason to not put Headricks in the pen without a concern on keeping him stretched out. My point was you can't take your top 2 depth starters and transition them both to fulltime pen roles. Leaving a struggling SWR, and the Aaron Sanchez's of the world, as your only rotation depth before the end of May would be a disastrous move.

[h2oface]

4 hours ago, mikelink45 said:

The total runs is a farce.  They score big 10 - 11 runs in 5 games throws the stats out of whack.  Take those 5 games out of our 47 and we drop to3.9 runs per game from 4.7.  Scoring big is fun, but scoring consistently is essential and scoring in the clutch is even better. 

 

2 hours ago, DJL44 said:

Take out the 5 highest scoring games for any team and their average runs per game will fall. If I take out their 5 lowest scoring games their average runs will go up too. Removing data from the sample makes it less representative, not more.

That would be 0,0,0,1,1=2 total runs. Not much. Barely. Insignificant.

 

[ashbury]

5 minutes ago, USAFChief said:

We don't have any really good hitters. Consistent .950 OPS guys. 

I'm with you but the specific bar you set seems a tad high.  Currently there are only six teams with even one such hitter (ATL has two), and this includes Oakland with the ultra-consistent Brent Rooker.  We're still in the small sample size of one-quarter of the season, which always leaves room for flashes in the pan.  For the full season in 2022, only three teams in the majors had the luxury of one "really good" hitter by this standard. Two years ago there were five, and when talking about consistency none of those five have been at .950 this year or last.

But your point is still hugely valid.  Who on this roster is a threat to pull a Nelson Cruz type of season out of his ear, starting now to the rest of the season?  Kirilloff, maybe, but he's got less than a season of experience under his belt and fails the "consistent" criterion.  Gallo's kinda sorta on that track at the moment if he pops another homer or two, but he's never put a full season together at his current level and even at that he falls short of .950.

And in fairness, the standard you set does have a certain kind of merit: last year two of those three teams with a .950 OPS hitter faced each other in the ALCS, and one of them went on to win it all. (That third team, St Louis, went home after losing the wild card series so it's not a sure-fire solution, not that you were saying it was.)

So I've kind of talked myself into a circle and am back to supporting your point after all.  I think it's just the implication by the repeated plural that there are scads of hitters out there and we are failing to scoop any of them up. They are rare, rare, rare.

[joefish]

16 hours ago, Squirrel said:

The win for this series was Plouffe in the booth 

Can we dump the losses on him instead?

[joefish]

When can we start grumbling about Polanco's fragility?

[h2oface]

2 hours ago, David Maro said:

The last time I looked you have to protect the plate with 2 strikes. With bases loaded again Jeffers stood there with the bat on his shoulder. That is this team in a nut shell. Swing at pitches in the dirt like the first pitch he saw or watch a close pitch go by. Even if which is a big if they make the playoffs they will loss in the first round like always. The game is called baseball not homerun,they play homerun.

It is a crying shame that protecting the plate means you have to swing at pitches out of the zone to try to continue an at bat because of the inhuman aspect of the game that still hasn't been corrected - the umpire calling balls a strike when it isn't.

[DJL44]

1 hour ago, ashbury said:

 Currently there are only six teams with even one such hitter

The Angels have zero players with a .950 OPS and they have Trout and Ohtani.

[USAFChief]

7 minutes ago, DJL44 said:

The Angels have zero players with a .950 OPS and they have Trout and Ohtani.

Again, tough to take you seriously. 

Trout's MLB average OPS since 2011 is .998.

That's a middle of the order hitter

 

[DJL44]

1 hour ago, h2oface said:

 

That would be 0,0,0,1,1=2 total runs. Not much. Barely. Insignificant.

 

It's about how it effects the denominator, not the numerator.

Remove the 5 highest and 5 lowest scoring games (which is over 20% of the data BTW). They averaged 6.1 runs per game over those games. Their average runs scored drops from 4.65 to 4.27. If you do that for all the other teams that are above average in runs scored in MLB you will see a drop as well because you can't score fewer runs than zero.

Fun fact - if you ignore their 5 lowest scoring games they haven't been shut out all season!

[DJL44]

7 minutes ago, USAFChief said:

Again, tough to take you seriously. 

Trout's MLB average OPS since 2011 is .998.

That's a middle of the order hitter

And it's .885 this season. 

[USAFChief]

1 minute ago, DJL44 said:

And it's .885 this season. 

And Arraez .914. 

You're right, we don't need either of them.

[KirbyDome89]

4 hours ago, DJL44 said:

Player OPS+

Luis Arraez 153

Alex Kirilloff 191

Joey Gallo 146

The Twins don't really miss Arraez at all.

And you're chiding people for their lack of awareness? Yeesh....

[chpettit19]

2 hours ago, h2oface said:

 

That would be 0,0,0,1,1=2 total runs. Not much. Barely. Insignificant.

 

If you take out those 5 games, while leaving in their top scoring games (so the opposite of what the other poster did) their average runs per game goes from 4.66 (219 runs in 47 games) to 5.17 (217 runs in 42 games). That puts them over 5 runs a game, and, as already discussed on this thread, scoring over 5 runs a game means you win a whole lot of games. A couple of us were showing that simply taking out their 5 top scoring games is obviously going to swing things dramatically, just like simple taking out their 5 lowest scoring games.

[ashbury]

4 hours ago, h2oface said:

That would be 0,0,0,1,1=2 total runs. Not much. Barely. Insignificant.

The problem is that run-scoring isn't evenly distributed, because there's no upper limit for a game but the lower limit you can score is zero.

So there's a skew to the stats which affects simple averages like the mean.

Individual high scores move the running average more than a low score can.

Some of these near-nohitters the Twins have suffered deserve lower than a 0 for runs scored.  It's why this offense feels worse than season run totals would have us believe.  Because, IMO, it is.

[DJL44]

5 hours ago, USAFChief said:

I think a reasonable hope for Correa is something like last year. OPS in the low to mid .800s.

Fangraphs thinks he'll turn it around.

Carlos Correa’s Slow Start Should Turn Around Quickly | FanGraphs Baseball