MIN 4, BOS 1: For Grossman and Kepler, The Price Was Right

Going for the sweep. As expected.

Great win! Let's complete the sweep this time - they almost did it in Cleveland last series, sure would be nice to see it happen today!

Dozier, one day after being called out by the Twins round table, delivers! Another "just-get-the-job-done" outing by Lynn, nice to see Reed have a clean inning as well.

Logan Morrison. Dud city. The guy seems to strike out or hit grounders to 1st base every time. Not much "sting" on the ball either. I'd rather see Gregor Petit in the batter's box, and I'm not joking.

Break out the brooms!

The Twins are doing everything to keep us interested for as long as possible!

There is still life, more than I saw a week ago today.

The Indians are good. Very good. In fact, they are better than the Twins.

However, the Indians also have more glaring warts than the Twins do. They are a couple good trades away from fixing those, but the Twins are a couple trades away from being a legitimate threat too, so long as everyone starts performing to expectations.

Lynn gave them a chance. It was ugly and not very fun to watch, but he worked out of many jams. I'm still not in the "worth the wait" camp, but he did beat a very good team with the help of four lock-down relief outings.

Kluber, Carrasco, Sale, Price and Porcello. There is no way the offense can do enough damage to beat this quintet of Cy Young winners and near winners. Is there?

Even in Lynn's poor early starts he wasn't being hit hard. He should just target the middle of the plate and let the ball do the work. Absolutely no reason not to win today and keep the broom moving when the Rangers get to town. 4 of 6 is always a nice pace but 5 of 6 or even better on this home stand is doable.

As an aside, pitching, always a huge part of the game obviously, is everything right now. Its to point where the stat heads are saying that batting average is no longer important. Bryce Harper is at .213. Sanchez, Yankees catcher, below .200.  Its pitching and the long ball period.

We'll have to agree to disagree.

 

"Not making an out" isn't the most important thing a hitter can do, and here's why I believe that:

 

Two hitters, one goes 0-0 with four walks for his team, the other 1-4 with a HR. Which hitter guaranteed his team a run?

But what if the guy with 4 walks scored 3 times?  I still like OPS better, which obviously combines the two, mainly because I don't like conflict and having to choose. . . 

Twins continue to be very lucky in these wins, with the other team unable to get hits with men on base. It's good when it happens though!

To your point about it being lucky the other team can't get a hit with men on base, does that mean the Twins had been unlucky the entire first third of the season?

Oooh, I like the idea of looking at outs as currency. BTW, it's one of the reasons I can tolerate Grossman as a hitter. Despite his BA, he is a fairly patient hitter and ends up walking quite frequently in high leverage situations. His fielding, well that's a different matter.

Well lets use math to figure this one out. The linear weight value of a walk is .55 runs, while the linear weight value of a home run is 1.65 runs (all relative to making an out). So, if a guy walks 4 times his total value was 2.2 runs, while a guy that just hits 1 home run was worth 1.65 runs. So yeah, give me the guy with 4 walks every day of the week.

 

But to your point, which guy didn't use up any of his teams precious 27 outs? Outs are the games currency, you only get 27 of them to spend and the goal is to score as many runs as possible before you've spent them all.

Sorry for the formatting, but if you look at the teams ranking in runs scored, OBP and SLG, SLG correlates a lot closer to runs scored. The OBP ranking has some large outlier in the Reds (4th in OBP and 17 in runs) and Rays (12th in OBP and 25th in runs scored.

Team Run OBP Slg
Astros 1 2 3
Yankees 2 3 1
Red Sox 3 5 2
Braves 4 6 5
Indians 5 7 4
Rockies 6 13 9
Cubs 7 1 10
Dodgers 8 9 7
Angels 9 10 6
Pirates 10 8 13
Athletics 11 22 11
Blue Jays 12 23 12
Rangers 13 15 23
Diamondbacks 14 25 19
Mariners 15 14 8
Brewers 16 17 14
Reds 17 4 20
Giants 18 11 15
Tigers 19 20 17
Phillies 20 16 24
Cardinals 21 19 18
Nationals 22 18 21
Twins 23 21 16
Padres 24 29 28
Rays 25 12 25
Mets 26 24 26
White Sox 27 28 22
Royals 28 27 29
Marlins 29 26 30
Orioles 30 30 27

We'll have to agree to disagree.

 

"Not making an out" isn't the most important thing a hitter can do, and here's why I believe that:

 

Two hitters, one goes 0-0 with four walks for his team, the other 1-4 with a HR. Which hitter guaranteed his team a run?

Your scenario works when you're only talking about one game and assuming no other impacts from other players. Over the course of a season, avoiding making outs is a more important individual skill for scoring runs than hitting for power.

The same thinking applies to the cliche of "a walk is as good as a hit". In isolation, that's true: both have avoided spending an out. But a hit, even a single, is more valuable than a walk because of all the other things that can happen because of it (driving in a run, creating the possibility of a fielding error, creating the possibility of a throwing error, advancing a runner an extra base, etc).

As far as slugging v obp is concerned, all I know is that the players carry a bat to the plate for a reason and if a hitter's goal is to do anything other than drive a baseball somewhere with some authority that hitter has the wrong mind set in most cases. If they can do that and be selective at the same time, so much the better.