The Falvey And Levine Machine

I don't even think its an error. Going into July 31st the Twins were 3 games below .500, in 3rd place in the division 6.5 games back. For the wildcard they were 4.5 games back and had 4 teams between them and the final spot with a cool 5% chance to make the post-season. Advocating buying is essentially like advocating lottery tickets as a good way to make money.

 

Cautious selling is 100% the right move.

I think that 5% was too low with that much baseball left to be played. First of all, Fangraphs projections hated us -- 3rd worst projected rest of season win percentage in the AL at that point, ahead of only the White Sox and barely the Orioles. Lower than Oakland! Lower than Detroit. We have been reading a constant drumbeat on this site about Fangraphs projections underestimating our Twins for 3 years now -- and now we want our front office agreeing with them? 538 doesn't update daily, but they had us at 9% just prior to that, and 24% just 10 days prior (before the Royals win streak).

Also, outside the Twins, what either playoff odds system doesn't realize is the Royals just had a little hot streak. It is like a .250 "true talent" hitter (assuming there is such a thing for the sake or argument) -- they may have a little hitting streak to spike up to .290 at some point in a season, but they are likely to come down. The projection system says those hits are in the bank and they will hit their true talent .250 from here out, and it will buoy their overall numbers to .270 or so. And that is certainly possible. But we also know that given enough time, just like they over performed for a stretch, they will probably underperform enough for a stretch to wipe out some of gains from the "banked" hits in the final average. All of the playoff odds at the trade deadline were banking wins for the Royals that they were not terribly likely to hold on to with 1/3 of the season left to be played.

Also, factual correction: there were only 2-3 teams "between" the Twins and the 2nd wild card at the close of play on July 30 depending on how you define between). Red Sox held the 1st wild card, Royals the second, then Rays, Mariners, Twins.

Look at that crowd: Royals, Rays, Mariners. These are really the teams we want the Twins FO to be afraid of, with 2 months to play? No team is perfect, of course, but those 3 seemed particularly flawed and restricted. The Twins were too, but there was no reason we couldn't hang in that hunt. 1.5-2.5 game deficits behind the Mariners and Rays are darn near meaningless with 2 months to play, and even the 5 game deficit with the Royals was hardly that daunting with 7 head to head games left (and a .667 win percentage against them so far).

If you want to make the case against a risky buy on July 31, I could see that, but to me, giving up Kintzler was a bit too risky of a sell. We're really kind of lucky that it won't be a big issue in the final regular season standings, but as we assemble postseason rosters, it feels like we are not quite taking as good of a shot at this thing as we should be. We're hopefully still improving in years to come, but our guys were promising enough today to at least deserve keeping their all-star closer over a #18 org prospect still in A ball.

Note that KC only had to go 30-28 after the deadline to finish with 85 wins. So the plan to "go for it" needed to not only foresee that the Twins would catch fire after a 10-15 July, but a recent champion that had been 33-19 in June-July would completely collapse, and then every other WC2 contender that was ahead of, or just about even with, the Twins would also collapse or float around .500 down the stretch.

 

"Recent champion", love it. They may not have Cueto, Shields, Ventura, or Davis anymore -- but we'd better give them credit for them!

You are falling into the trap of selective endpoints (see my post above). The Royals were not that good as the July 30 snapshot suggested and we had ample time/opportunity left to dent the 5 game lead they built over 1 week in July. (In fact, it only took 10 days to completely erase it and put us back into a virtual tie for the wild card -- not that the FO should have predicted it would happen that immediately and quickly, but it was very possible with 2 months remaining.)

And no one else had to collapse. No other contender was really even good enough on July 30 for their post-July 30 performance to count as a collapse. Tampa, Seattle, etc. continuing to hover around .500 was eminently predictable. There just weren't any dormant powerhouse teams or sleeping giants among the 2nd wild card contenders this year. If you thought the Twins could hang around .500, you basically thought they had a solid chance of hanging in the race until the final weeks.

Four .500-ish teams playing at a sub-.450 clip and all but one team playing under .500 ball isn't folding?

 

I don't feel like this is a difficult concept to grasp but apparently it is.

 

Here's my point, clarified:

 

If you have eight .500-ish teams with two months to play, you'll usually end up with a few of them under .500, a few of them will remain around .500, and a few of them will end up over .500. And that's ignoring the potential improvement some of those teams will see by making trades to shore up deficiencies.

 

For all of them but one to remain under .500 is a statistical fluke, one you do not see very often in baseball (again, this is the first time this century the AL has ended up with just five teams over .500).

 

It requires a lot of teams folding to end up at that number, which is why we haven't seen it in at least the past 20 years (I stopped checking at 2000).

Who are the 4? At close of play July 30, we trailed only 3 for the 2nd wild card. (The Angels have actually gone .519 since then!)

Any teams, or these specific teams? I hope the FO isn't basing their decisions on abstract theoretical teams.

Also, note that the Twins are up by 5 games. They didn't need the Royals and Rays to play .420 ball the last 2 months to be in the hunt this late. Both could have been right around .500 and we could have lost a couple more and we'd still only be a game out entering the final weekend.

The Angels didn't make a strong run. They played two games over .500 for two months after getting Trout back two weeks before the deadline and acquiring a very good Upton for September.

 

If you consider their record going into mid-July, they underperformed their previous record by getting back a 1+ WAR per month player and a .900 OPS player in Upton.

 

For that team to play 27-25 baseball down the stretch is a pretty big disappointment for them.

Have you seen the Angels pitching staff? Ricky Nolasco? As of late July, they were pinning their hopes on the healthy return of Alex Meyer. That was supposed to intimidate the Twins into selling?

I feel like you keep bringing up hypotheticals that don't match anything the Twins should have known about the field as of July 30.

What hypotheticals? That out of eight teams, a flawed and significantly outscored to that point Twins team wouldn't hang with over half the AL for a single postseason spot?

 

That's not a hypothetical. The Twins had the worst run differential of the bunch (going from memory) and were in a backwards slide, posting a terrible record in July.

 

And it was unreasonable to expect all seven teams to falter. Hell, head-to-head matchups almost dictate that at least one of them would end up a winner.

What team in that group would you have forecast to have great post-July 30 success? None of those teams had a good case of separating from the pack.

Maybe it's unusual that there is so much mediocrity in the AL now, but there is. And that was apparent in July. Didn't mean the Twins had a great chance, but it meant they had a decent chance. And the Twins FO should be expected to know that and not disregard, even if historically unusual.

Brock, I feel like you and others are basically saying the Twins were right to sell because in order to stay relevant, they needed to play great AND see a bunch of teams collapse/falter. But that's not right. That happened, and we actually won the 2nd wild card fairly comfortably. If just one of those things happens, we are still in the hunt. If neither happens to quite the degree that they actually happened, we are still in the hunt.

At close of play on July 30, we trailed KC by 5, Tampa by 2.5, and Seattle by 1.5, with ~55 to play. We weren't likely to win it, but it wasn't necessarily going to require any miracles either. We were in the thick of it, with no sleeping giants poised to awaken (no, the Royals were not sleeping giants who awoke in late July).