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Hmmm... so leadoff help.Wonder if Hicks can step into that role next year.Not sure I'm ready for Buxton there just yet, but letting Dozier bat with meon on base would be nice.

Certainly Danny Santana wasn't the answer. 

I like Hicks' skill sets. I'm not entirely sure he is a guy who is fully prepared for that role. He hit much better down in the order than at the top but a lot of his leadoff at bats came after his hamstring injury. 

Is Plouffe's .220 average against fastballs (thanks for letting the cat out of the bag, by the way) something to be concerned about, or just an anomaly?

You typically don't see good hitters not being able to hit fastballs. Some good hitters have had bad seasons vs fastballs (Mike Moustakas was bad two years in a row then had a good one this year). Most will tell you having success vs sliders/curves is unsustainable. 

Would you give more stats on Buxton? Buck obviously has the upside but needs to produce on the field.

You can find a lot of stats on Buxton's season in my last post: http://twinsdaily.com/articles.html/_/minnesota-twins-news/behind-byron-buxtons-struggles-r4198

This was asked on Twitter but I thought I'd share here:

No question that Suzuki's 2015 season was disappointing. The drop in offense versus right handed pitchers is a product of his inability to go the other way as well as he did last year. 

In 2014, he hit .271 (.163 well-hit average) with seven doubles when going to right field. This year he hit just .145 (.095 well-hit average) with a lone double the other way. 

Why this happened is unclear. Pitchers seemed to use the same weapons and attacked him in a similar manner. Looking over some of his swings, you see that he was often pulling off on his swing (particularly with his head). Here is an example of two similar pitches that Suzuki hit to right field. The top is 2014 and the bottom is 2015. 

http://i.imgur.com/uwfvhW3.png

While the point of contact looks almost identical in the swing from 2014, Suzuki laces a liner to right. In the 2015, he flies out to right. Now, watch what Suzuki's head does on these two swings.  

2014

http://i.imgur.com/KFDUd0r.gif

2015

http://i.imgur.com/tSe53n8.gif

In the example above, the head stays still and follows the pitch to right field. In the one below, he is pulling off, which explains why he "just missed" that pitch. I believe this is a microcosm for what has happened to him all season in that scenario. 

Suzuki, like Hughes, went back to who they had been for a few years.  Wasn't hard to see their 2014 were outliers nor hard to predict huge regression in 2015 (especially for Suzuki who started his regression in 2nd half of 2014).

Yes and no. 

Suzuki's career has been inconsistent but 2014 wasn't necessarily that big of an outlier for him. He's had four seasons when he's had a wOBA of .320 or higher (above average for a catcher over the last five years) and he's had three seasons of a wOBA of .275 or lower (well below average for a catcher). 

Now you could easily say his numbers were going to come down from 2014 but the fact that it turned into his second worst season in his career has more to do with injuries and approach than the mystical workings of baseball regression. 

Yeah, when you point out that it was his 2nd worst season in his career, that's a bit misleading no?Technically it's true but it doesn't really tell us how much worse it was than his 3rd worst season does it? The difference between his 2nd worst season and 3rd worst season is a whopping 1 point difference in wRC+ so it's not like the dropoff from 2013 to 2015 was huge and, therefore, pointing out it was his 2nd worst season really doesn't mean much.

 

Here are his wRC+ numbers in the last 4 seasons (which includes his worst, 2nd worst and 3rd worst offensive seasons). 63, 67, 109 and 66.  One of those is CLEARLY not like the others (2014) and the other three (the ones that are his three worse seasons) are all within 5 points of each other. In other words, not much different at all and his 3 worst seasons have occurred in his last 4 seasons. In other words, they haven't been spread over his career suggesting his 2015 was out of the blue.  From 2012-2015 we see his worst, 3rd worst, best by far and then his 2nd worst.

 

But 2014, his best season ever, isn't the extreme outlier?  If someone sees a over 30 year old catcher guy with a 63 and 67 wRC+ in his previous two seasons (his two worst seasons at the time), then he has a career year at 107 wRC+. which seems more likely to happen the following season when looking at magical regression?  Most likely the next year is going to be way closer to the 63 and 67, no?  And look what happened.

I think you are rifling through a lot of words and numbers to say basically the same thing: Regression was inevitable. 

Where I disagree with you is on the method that you reached that conclusion. If you looked at Suzuki's four seasons prior to 2014, you would have wRC+ of 83, 90, 64 and 67. Yes, 2014 was a jump but it also came with a change in his approach at the plate (http://twinsdaily.com/articles.html/_/minnesota-twins-news/minnesota-twins/kurt-suzuki-makes-changes-at-the-plate-r2553) that began when he was traded back to Oakland in late 2013. If you were looking at his body of work prior to the 2014 season, you could easily take a gamble that Suzuki might perform close to the league-average (which he wound up doing over that year). 

If you are going off of four seasons, you know have wRC+ of 90, 64, 67, 107. Now you have two seasons of average to above average sandwiching two bad years. Based on that, there is really no reason to suspect a sudden drop-off based on your methodology. Yes, age, second-half decline and wear & tear as a catcher were reasons to expect a drop in production in 2015 but it doesn't really answer the question why he was able to produce at his career best one year and drop off to one of the career worst the next. 

Do you have any insight on why opponents were able get an .831 OPS on Gibson's pitches in the zone? Were they waiting for the sinker in a hitter's count? Just didn't have the "stuff" to fool opposing hitters?

It's not surprising but the majority of the in-zone damage was on sinkers that were left up in the zone. It's not that it is an particular count but hitters have attacked sinkers that don't stay down. 

But we disagree on methods.  I felt comfortable with my method, even moreso knowing how it worked out.

A broken clock is right twice a day too. 

Again, I think we're saying roughly the same thing regarding his regression. But the conversation is not "how much regression" but "why" and, to me, simply saying because his three or four year sample size indicated a pattern that should result in another bad year isn't good enough to answer the "why" question. 

I tip my cap to your ability to foresee Suzuki's terrible season. 

Do you have any stats on the Twins number of called 3rd strikes, vs swinging. And how it compares with MLB averages?

 

The Twins struck out looking 21% of their strikeouts. That was below the MLB average of 23%.