Twins Minor League Report (6/20): Lee Blasts Two Homers for Saints

[Road trip]

7 minutes ago, roger said:

Are we certain Julien will ever return?  I am not.  And his play at St. Paul doesn't have anyone all that excited.  Seems same old, same old.

Oh, I'm sure he will at some point.  You don't hit an OPS+ of 132 as a rookie and then never see the majors again, barring injury.

Now that doesn't mean he will ever be starting regularly at 2B for the Twins again.  He could get permanently passed by any number of players.  However he will get a shot again, somewhere, even if the Twins give up and trade him (which wouldn't be the worst idea in the world... he has substantial value yet and the Twins have a large number of potential future solutions for 2B between Castro, Lee, Martin, and the fast rising Luke Keaschall).

[Linus]

11 minutes ago, roger said:

Are we certain Julien will ever return?  I am not.  And his play at St. Paul doesn't have anyone all that excited.  Seems same old, same old.

I was heckled a bit last season / winter when I said to hold off anointing him the second coming. The bapip was really high and clubs were starting to make adjustments. He now has been pretty bad almost as long as he was good last year. Neither outcome is likely where he ends up. And as a bat first guy he has to hit. 

[bean5302]

4 hours ago, Minderbinder said:

Wallner is 3 for his last 14, all HRs, two walks but nine SOs.  If he's adjusted his hitting approach from earlier in the season nobody here has been able to figure out what he's doing differently.  They could bring up Lee and put him at 2B, shift Castro to LF and Margo to RF.

Wallner over his last insignificant 14 PA, another way to put it is this:
.214/.313/.857 OPS 1.170 wRC+ 173 12.5% BB, 56.3% K.

He's taking walks. The K rate looks rough, but in the 4 games before your tiny sample size, his K rate was 10.0%... which is why 4 game samples are not relevant.

[chpettit19]

21 minutes ago, bean5302 said:

Wallner over his last insignificant 14 PA, another way to put it is this:
.214/.313/.857 OPS 1.170 wRC+ 173 12.5% BB, 56.3% K.

He's taking walks. The K rate looks rough, but in the 4 games before your tiny sample size, his K rate was 10.0%... which is why 4 game samples are not relevant.

What is Matt Wallner's AAA line against everyone outside the Louisville Bats and their horrendous staff? 

[DJL44]

2 hours ago, stringer bell said:

Having Julien (2B-1B), Miranda (1B-3B), Lee (2B-SS-3B), Correa (SS) and Lewis for 2025 and on would be a strong, deep, versatile infield. 

I wouldn't mind keeping Castro in the mix as well.

[bean5302]

1 hour ago, chpettit19 said:

What is Matt Wallner's AAA line against everyone outside the Louisville Bats and their horrendous staff? 

I'll help to answer your question. 

[Patzky]

5 hours ago, Doctor Gast said:

There are some who are concerned that Lee doesn't mash LHPs & that playing around 75% of the time at 2B isn't enough. But since Lee's return to AAA he's been mashing LHPs. I'm all for holding back Lee at AAA as long as possible but we need him at 2B now. Since he'll be needed at 2B, someone needs to tell the FO that he'll need time at 2B to get ready & Julien finally at 1B.

Oakland is throwing two leftys at us. Perhaps the Lee callup comes Monday, especially if Kep is out or ineffective due to injury.

[chpettit19]

2 hours ago, bean5302 said:

I'll help to answer your question. 

That actually doesn't answer my question. I do appreciate the "whatever" when you point out you're actively leaving out a large chunk of the data by ignoring relievers, though. 

Here's the answer to my question:

Matt Wallner's overall AAA line is .244/.329/.545/.875 with 17 HRs and 79 Ks in 209 ABs. Not bad quad slash and HRs really.

Against Louisville Matt Wallner has a .404/.439/.904/1.342 line with 8 HRs and 15 Ks in 52 ABs.

Against all the other AAA pitching he's faced Matt Wallner has a .191/.295/.427/.722 line with 9 HRs and 64 Ks in 157 ABs. 

Want to take out his first 2 series in AAA before he went off against the Bats the first time? OK. In the 31 games between the Louisville series he had a .196/.308/.455/.764 line with 7 HRs and 43 Ks in 112 ABs.

And after the most recent series with the Bats he's gone 1 for 11 with 7 Ks. 

Matt Wallner has absolutely demolished Louisville Bat pitching. He has been solidly below average against the rest of the AAA pitching he's faced. I know you're going to thumbs down this and continue to deny these facts, so I'll take my leave. We're all cheering for Matt and want him to succeed. But the numbers are pretty clear here. He's not what he was last year at this moment. I really hope he gets back there, but maintaining that kind of production after Houston showed the league his play book in the postseason was never going to be easy.

[Guest]

On 6/21/2024 at 11:37 AM, bean5302 said:

Wallner over his last insignificant 14 PA, another way to put it is this:
.214/.313/.857 OPS 1.170 wRC+ 173 12.5% BB, 56.3% K.

He's taking walks. The K rate looks rough, but in the 4 games before your tiny sample size, his K rate was 10.0%... which is why 4 game samples are not relevant.

Absent an understanding of what exactly Wallner's change in his approach, it's difficult to be confident he's changed.  A K rate of roughly 33% over even an 8-game span at AAA does not inspire confidence that Wallner's changed for the better.

[NYCTK]

On 6/21/2024 at 5:54 PM, chpettit19 said:

That actually doesn't answer my question. I do appreciate the "whatever" when you point out you're actively leaving out a large chunk of the data by ignoring relievers, though. 

Here's the answer to my question:

Matt Wallner's overall AAA line is .244/.329/.545/.875 with 17 HRs and 79 Ks in 209 ABs. Not bad quad slash and HRs really.

Against Louisville Matt Wallner has a .404/.439/.904/1.342 line with 8 HRs and 15 Ks in 52 ABs.

Against all the other AAA pitching he's faced Matt Wallner has a .191/.295/.427/.722 line with 9 HRs and 64 Ks in 157 ABs. 

Want to take out his first 2 series in AAA before he went off against the Bats the first time? OK. In the 31 games between the Louisville series he had a .196/.308/.455/.764 line with 7 HRs and 43 Ks in 112 ABs.

And after the most recent series with the Bats he's gone 1 for 11 with 7 Ks. 

Matt Wallner has absolutely demolished Louisville Bat pitching. He has been solidly below average against the rest of the AAA pitching he's faced. I know you're going to thumbs down this and continue to deny these facts, so I'll take my leave. We're all cheering for Matt and want him to succeed. But the numbers are pretty clear here. He's not what he was last year at this moment. I really hope he gets back there, but maintaining that kind of production after Houston showed the league his play book in the postseason was never going to be easy.

This is all just next level cherry picking. You've decided he's not ready, which is fine, but are trying so hard to discount his successes. The Louisville Bats aren't some Colorado Rockies pitching staff in the IL. They're in fact right in the middle of the pack in basically every statistic. If they were any where near as pitiful as you'd said we should see them bottom of the league in K rate (14/20), HR rate (7/20), RA (8/20), etc. 

I am with you, that I don't know know that I believe he's actually made improvements, but you gotta show some level of optimism my dude. Don't just default to being a hater. 

[chpettit19]

4 hours ago, NYCTK said:

This is all just next level cherry picking. You've decided he's not ready, which is fine, but are trying so hard to discount his successes. The Louisville Bats aren't some Colorado Rockies pitching staff in the IL. They're in fact right in the middle of the pack in basically every statistic. If they were any where near as pitiful as you'd said we should see them bottom of the league in K rate (14/20), HR rate (7/20), RA (8/20), etc. 

I am with you, that I don't know know that I believe he's actually made improvements, but you gotta show some level of optimism my dude. Don't just default to being a hater. 

In their series after the Bats he went 4 for 23 with 14 strike outs. I didn't say they should cut him or he's doomed to never see the majors again. I'm not defaulting to being a hater, I'm looking critically at Matt Wallner's AAA production. The other poster has claimed Wallner has been raking for months and there's people all over these boards calling for him to be recalled because he destroyed the Bats again. Matt Wallner hasn't raked for months, and his performance against everyone else in AAA has been below average. 

The truth is he's a 26 year old in his 3rd stint at AAA continuing to strike out at a very high rate. I'm not calling for his release, but he has a very real hole in his swing and it's not being a hater to point that out. I promise you the Twins are looking at the same things.

[NYCTK]

18 hours ago, chpettit19 said:

In their series after the Bats he went 4 for 23 with 14 strike outs. I didn't say they should cut him or he's doomed to never see the majors again. I'm not defaulting to being a hater, I'm looking critically at Matt Wallner's AAA production. The other poster has claimed Wallner has been raking for months and there's people all over these boards calling for him to be recalled because he destroyed the Bats again. Matt Wallner hasn't raked for months, and his performance against everyone else in AAA has been below average. 

The truth is he's a 26 year old in his 3rd stint at AAA continuing to strike out at a very high rate. I'm not calling for his release, but he has a very real hole in his swing and it's not being a hater to point that out. I promise you the Twins are looking at the same things.

I largely agree with you, but you are absolutely cherry picking. The Louisville Bats aren't even close to the worst pitching staff in AAA so why are you removing his production there? Because you're cherry picking to match your preconceived conclusion. 

I agree, let's let him stay there for a bit longer but let's not be a hater. 

[chpettit19]

21 minutes ago, NYCTK said:

I largely agree with you, but you are absolutely cherry picking. The Louisville Bats aren't even close to the worst pitching staff in AAA so why are you removing his production there? Because you're cherry picking to match your preconceived conclusion. 

I agree, let's let him stay there for a bit longer but let's not be a hater. 

Because his production against them is nearly twice as good as it's been against the rest of the league. The sample size is small enough that that extreme production in 12 games can be stretched over a month and make him look like he's been doing great. That's what other posters were doing to match their preconceived conclusions. 

Critical analysis is not "being a hater." It's not cherry picking to point out the extreme outlier in a small sample size that is skewing his data. I didn't hide data, I didn't run from data. I provided his overall line that included every single one of his AAA at bats this year up until the point of that post. I then provided my opinion on his performance and pointed out that his performance against 1 team is really skewing his data and people were making claims about his overall performance that I disagreed with. I explained my reasoning. You agree with my reasoning, apparently, but don't like that I have the same stance as you. I don't know what to say to that. I don't know how else to say "he's actually not performing that well against the vast majority of AAA pitching" without it being negative. 

You're going to find this a lot on this site. Not just from me, but from a lot of posters. There will be positive and negative opinions about the same player. There will be different analysis of data. It's what takes place in front offices as well. The Twins aren't "being haters" by critically analyzing his performance and choosing to not IL Kepler and call him up. It's what makes Twins Daily so great. A lot of really smart people making a lot of really well informed and nuanced arguments. It's what keeps us coming back. It's not being a hater to say a player isn't playing that well. It's just giving an informed opinion. With data to back it up in this situation.

[NYCTK]

2 hours ago, chpettit19 said:

Because his production against them is nearly twice as good as it's been against the rest of the league. The sample size is small enough that that extreme production in 12 games can be stretched over a month and make him look like he's been doing great. That's what other posters were doing to match their preconceived conclusions. 

Critical analysis is not "being a hater." It's not cherry picking to point out the extreme outlier in a small sample size that is skewing his data. I didn't hide data, I didn't run from data. I provided his overall line that included every single one of his AAA at bats this year up until the point of that post. I then provided my opinion on his performance and pointed out that his performance against 1 team is really skewing his data and people were making claims about his overall performance that I disagreed with. I explained my reasoning. You agree with my reasoning, apparently, but don't like that I have the same stance as you. I don't know what to say to that. I don't know how else to say "he's actually not performing that well against the vast majority of AAA pitching" without it being negative. 

You're going to find this a lot on this site. Not just from me, but from a lot of posters. There will be positive and negative opinions about the same player. There will be different analysis of data. It's what takes place in front offices as well. The Twins aren't "being haters" by critically analyzing his performance and choosing to not IL Kepler and call him up. It's what makes Twins Daily so great. A lot of really smart people making a lot of really well informed and nuanced arguments. It's what keeps us coming back. It's not being a hater to say a player isn't playing that well. It's just giving an informed opinion. With data to back it up in this situation.

HRs and Ks against Toledo aren't any less or more important than Louisville. If you're parsing data to a granular level in order to support your conclusion, you're cherry picking. And when that starts with the idea that Louisville are some pitiful staff, which is why we should discount the results, it should at least be true. And it simply isn't. 

Again, I think your conclusion is valid, but let's not pretend as if HRs against Louisville don't matter. 

[chpettit19]

1 minute ago, NYCTK said:

HRs and Ks against Toledo aren't any less or more important than Louisville. If you're parsing data to a granular level in order to support your conclusion, you're cherry picking. And when that starts with the idea that Louisville are some pitiful staff, which is why we should discount the results, it should at least be true. And it simply isn't. 

Again, I think your conclusion is valid, but let's not pretend as if HRs against Louisville don't matter. 

Again, I didn't just use Toledo. The comment you initially responded to literally listed his entire AAA stat line, and then included over a month of stats outside of Louisville. My conclusion was drawn from the parsing of data, not the other way around. I thought "dang, Wallner videos have been popping up all over my social media this week (the week they were playing Louisville) I should see if he's figured things out." Then I went to his baseball reference page and pulled up his game log and saw it bright as day that he'd been on a very short tear. I looked more into it (and I'm not the only one, there were multiple others on this site who pointed out the same thing) and saw that he'd dominated Louisville in 2 series and struggled pretty much everywhere else.

That isn't cherry picking. That was me being interested in what he was doing, looking at data, and drawing a conclusion. Your assumption that I had my conclusion before I looked at the data is wrong. I went into it thinking it may be time to call him back up because he may have figured things out. I analyzed the data to the best of my ability and drew a conclusion. I presented that conclusion here. Of course his HRs vs Louisville matter, and I presented them as well. I presented every last bit of data that was available to me and gave an opinion about it. I gave his entire AAA line. That isn't cherry picking. That's drawing a conclusion based on all the available data.

But this conversation isn't going anywhere. You can feel free to believe whatever you'd like about the order of things. But my original thought was that I was going to find a Matt Wallner who'd figured things out and I'd have something to complain on here about because the Twins were doing like last year and not calling him up when he'd figured things out. The data changed that to me drawing the conclusion that he hadn't figured things out and just owns Louisville (no matter how good their staff is). And his series against Toledo just provided more data to confirm my opinion.

[NYCTK]

On 6/21/2024 at 1:58 PM, chpettit19 said:

What is Matt Wallner's AAA line against everyone outside the Louisville Bats and their horrendous staff? 

This is what I'm going back to. 

[chpettit19]

1 minute ago, NYCTK said:

This is what I'm going back to. 

And that was a question I asked because I'd looked at his AAA game logs and saw that he'd destroyed Louisville with an OPS over 1.300 while struggling to an OPS of .720ish against everybody else. My conclusion was drawn after having looked at his AAA performance as a whole. The other poster didn't actually answer my question because they knew the answer, so I presented all of the data, including the vast difference when he faces Louisville, and at that point you accused me of cherry picking so I've since tried to explain that I wasn't cherry picking I was providing an opinion based on looking at his stats as a whole and drawing conclusions from the pretty dramatic splits of him nearly doubling his OPS against them than what he had against the rest of the league.

[NYCTK]

10 minutes ago, chpettit19 said:

And that was a question I asked because I'd looked at his AAA game logs and saw that he'd destroyed Louisville with an OPS over 1.300 while struggling to an OPS of .720ish against everybody else. My conclusion was drawn after having looked at his AAA performance as a whole. The other poster didn't actually answer my question because they knew the answer, so I presented all of the data, including the vast difference when he faces Louisville, and at that point you accused me of cherry picking so I've since tried to explain that I wasn't cherry picking I was providing an opinion based on looking at his stats as a whole and drawing conclusions from the pretty dramatic splits of him nearly doubling his OPS against them than what he had against the rest of the league.

You started with an assumption, and it wasn't true. Louisville isn't a horrendous staff. 

Simple as that. 

[DJL44]

3 minutes ago, NYCTK said:

You started with an assumption, and it wasn't true. Louisville isn't a horrendous staff.

They're pretty bad at getting Matt Wallner out.

[chpettit19]

3 minutes ago, NYCTK said:

You started with an assumption, and it wasn't true. Louisville isn't a horrendous staff. 

Simple as that. 

No. I didn't. I started with an assumption that Matt Wallner had figured things out and the Twins should call him up. I formulated an opinion after looking at his entire stat line that what actually happened was Matt Wallner figured out the Louisville Bats and not AAA pitching in general. I asked about the Bats because that other poster and I had already had this discussion on another thread and he didn't want to admit that Wallner's numbers against everybody else were not good. He came on this thread and started making the same claims about Wallner having figured things out so I wanted them to address the elephant in the room of him dominating Louisville but struggling against everyone else.

I don't honestly care about how good Louisville's staff is. That isn't the point. The point is Matt Wallner hasn't figured out AAA pitching, he's figured out Louisville pitching. You chose to quote my comment that listed his entire AAA line and accuse me of cherry picking. Now I've explained what the process actually was 3 times. Either believe me or don't, I don't care. I looked at his game log and came to a conclusion. That's the entire story. That's how data analysis works. Look at data and draw a conclusion. Weird thing is that you agree with my conclusion, but are set on coming after me anyways for reasons unknown. Have a great rest of your day.

[NYCTK]

24 minutes ago, DJL44 said:

They're pretty bad at getting Matt Wallner out.

Which is a credit to Wallner, not a strike against him (although he knows plenty about having strikes against him amirite boys!). 

[NYCTK]

17 minutes ago, chpettit19 said:

You chose to quote my comment that listed his entire AAA line and accuse me of cherry picking.

You 100% did though. And it's ok. We all do from time to time. I'm just saying you're wrong to do so, while still agreeing with your conclusion. You started with the assumption and the cherry picked data confirmed your idea, even if you started with a faulty assumption that Louisville's staff is horrendous and his success against them should be discounted. 

What other reason do we have to assume you're removing his success against Louisville? He's like Bruce Wayne and his fear of Bats manifests itself as a strength, but only against that one team? That's a more reasonable theory than calling a league average staff horrendous if we're being honest...