Brock Beauchamp

After two years then, who is your outfield, with Revere and Willingham gone? Hicks, Arcia, Benson, Rosario, Buxton, Kepler... There's no shortage of Twins outfield prospects. Where does Joe Benson's or Aaron Hick's minor league track records compare so favorably to Ben Revere's minor league track record. Why would you expect them to be better than Revere at the Major league level? Then you have Buxton and Kepler who are still in A Ball. How is floating Revere something like 5/14 with a 6th option so much riskier than penciling in Buxton and Kepler into your 2015 and 2016 outfield? As a 22 year old, Aaron Hicks OPSed .844 in New Britain. As a 22 year old, Ben Revere OPSed .734 in New Britain. It's safe to say that Hicks is the better player. He's fast, he's rangy, he can out-throw me, he can draw a walk, and he actually hits for a little bit of power. Outside of raw speed, Revere doesn't do anything better than Hicks (and the speed bit is up for debate). As for Benson, he's a wildcard. Fell on his face last season and this will be his make-or-break season. If Revere's value is high after 2013 or 2014, it would be in the Twins' best interest to move him, just as they moved Span. That's what you do with a surplus.

This, this, and this.

After two years then, who is your outfield, with Revere and Willingham gone? Hicks, Arcia, Benson, Rosario, Buxton, Kepler... There's no shortage of Twins outfield prospects.

Mauer has always been a perfect candidate for the second spot in the lineup. Hopefully, Gardenhire will move him back to that position.

Hockey is huge, but many years the basketball merchandise is nip and tuck for the biggest sellers at Gold Country. Football isn't tremendously popular, but then again, going more retro and bringing out some of the history of the program would make for cool shirts. Something like "My favorite college football team is the last team to win 3 consecutive national championships, and my grandpa was 12 when it happened!" I don't know enough about college sports and the Gophers to even think of ideas for those shirts. To be honest, I kinda hate college sports. I like March Madness and I'd probably get into college hockey if the opportunity arose but I will never be a diehard fan of either. Who cares what you think about college sports...if you run an ice cream business and don't like chocolate, you still carry it. College sports sell merchandise, especially a university with 53,000 students located in the middle of a city with a population of 3,317,308 Yeah, that's exactly what I said. You did read the first sentence of my post, right? There were only three sentences in total so I can't see how you would have missed it.

Denard and Ben had nearly the same number of PAs in 2012. Denard took about 25 more total bases than Revere (not the stat, actual bases). This is using Total Bases (on hits) + Walks + HBP + SB - CS. Revere also went into a serious tailspin after a hot streak that may or may not be repeated (.627, .595 OPS in Aug/Sept) while Denard was on par with his career norms. Span is the better player by quite a bit. More reliable to perform (if healthy) at the very least.

I'd argue that you're underrating him by looking at all the wrong stats. The injuries are definitely a concern and that's what drove down Denard's price... But it doesn't matter if he hit .300 or .280. RBIs are mostly irrelevant for any hitter but they're completely irrelevant for a leadoff man. He gets on base 36% of the time. He plays good defense at an up-the-middle position. That's what you want from your leadoff guy, batting average be damned. Plus, once he's away from Target Field, I expect to see his slugging percentage go up a fair amount as 3-5 more balls leave the park off his bat.

No. Hell no. Play him for another year or two and then flip him.

Which is why you use three seasons with all numbers combined to get an accurate representation of a player's value. Players will have up seasons, players will have down seasons. An extra season means more opportunities. An extra season means a different pitching staff. An extra season means, in all likelihood, a different third and/or second baseman. All of these things affect UZR and therefore, the larger the sample size with different variables, the more likely you are to reach some sort of meaningful conclusion. Season B is no more accurate on its own than Season A but when combined, they start to paint a picture of the player's defensive ability. Again, the metric is flawed and there are still situations not accounted for or not recorded accurately (as Dave mentioned, Field f/x would be a huge step forward). But that doesn't mean we throw the baby out with the bath water. We continue working toward improving it instead of dismissing it entirely.

So, whatever happened with this rumor? Anything?

It's because players like Revere tend to have short careers that end brutally. I'm not against Revere as a stopgap; what I'm against is having him through his late 20s and then paying him a bunch of money just as he falls on his face (see Figgins, Chone). The Twins can keep Revere for a year or two but if they're smart, they'll ditch him the moment his value is high and they have someone else to play the position.

Dude what on earth are you talking about? We are talking about how he doubled his UZR in 2011/2012 vs what he was putting up yearly in 2008-2010. In 2008-2010 he was healthy almost the entire time, 2011-2012 is when he had injury issues. Unless you think his concussion issues made him magically have a doubled UZR over his career average it is easy to assume that his UZR yearly average doubled 95% because of the fact that Revere was manning the OF with him. Perhaps he went 2 years without being challenged. Derp.

1. He's saying that Jeter's situation and the low frequency of "determining" statistics (which is going to happen when you're dealing with a large number of variables and conditions) made Jeter look better than he actually was in reality. Conditions were favorable to him looking good as a fielder and there weren't enough "outlier" opportunities to draw a meaningful conclusion. Given the low frequency of certain situations that determine a player's "range", that's going to happen over the course of a season, even to shortstops (and definitely to outfielders, who receive even fewer opportunities to show their defensive acumen). 2. And I can list you fielding percentages. It doesn't tell you much of anything on its own. Yes, those fielding percentages "happened". It doesn't mean they're of much use to anyone. At the end of the day, looking at batting average is going to tell you just that, batting average. Which, on its own, is of limited use. UZR is attempting to do much more than that. It's trying to factor in dozens of things and give an accurate representation of what the fielder does in the field. Unfortunately, all those variables mean that you need A LOT of opportunities to draw any sort of meaningful conclusion... Again, we're back to the Law of Large Numbers. Was Danny Valencia better than average defensively over that period of time? I have no idea, just like you'd have no idea if he faced scrub pitching to attain that .311 batting average. In the end, what do you prefer? A flawed metric that tries to take into account all possibilities faced by a player or a boolean metric that tells you only a fraction of the story? Me, I'll take the flawed metric that tries to explain the entire situation.

Hockey is huge, but many years the basketball merchandise is nip and tuck for the biggest sellers at Gold Country. Football isn't tremendously popular, but then again, going more retro and bringing out some of the history of the program would make for cool shirts. Something like "My favorite college football team is the last team to win 3 consecutive national championships, and my grandpa was 12 when it happened!" I don't know enough about college sports and the Gophers to even think of ideas for those shirts. To be honest, I kinda hate college sports. I like March Madness and I'd probably get into college hockey if the opportunity arose but I will never be a diehard fan of either.

I think we'd be able to sell that shirt to every single person in Canada.

The door should have stopped with Bartlett.

Was Valencia really a .311 hitter or was he not? Or don't we know? Isn't that the crux of the issue? Yes, for that period of time, Valencia hit .311. Unequivocal fact. He hit .311 but that tells you virtually nothing about how he actually played. I could also look at a guy's walk rate and then declare he had a stellar season because he walked 52 times in 500 PAs. But then I'd probably tell you that it was Jamey Carroll and you'd laugh me out of the room.

I'm assuming you're addressing the Lichtman quote. It's from the Fangraphs "UZR Primer:" http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/the-fangraphs-uzr-primer/ Jesus, Chief. This is the very next paragraph: So he's not saying that he didn't play good defense, he's simply saying that the fielder was not challenged. It's akin to Joe Mauer getting to face AAAA pitchers for the entirety of September. Did he hit .450? Sure. Is that representative of how well he batted? Absolutely not.

I'm not admitting that Span's UZR was doubled because of Revere. Ben almost certainly had an impact but the bulk of Span's "improvement" likely came from being healthy.

That is a very poorly written paragraph. Jesus. I had to read it four times just to understand where he was going with it. Do you have a link to the full transcript or is that all there is to it? Anyway, there are so many variables to UZR that the Law of Large Numbers applies even more than most statistics. When you're splitting the field into 80 (or whatever) zones, factoring out homers, line drives, infield flies, etc., then also factoring in pitcher GB rate, pitch speed, and a myriad of other factors, you're going to need a really large sample size for the metric to work.

It's one way of building a really expensive team, that's for sure. Even the Yankees can't survive on free agents alone; trying to do just that was the main reason they failed to win a World Series for almost a decade.

We've tossed around some Gophers stuff but nothing has really clicked yet. Personally, I'm more interested in pro sports and if the NHL ever drops a puck on the ice again, I'd like to get a lot more Wild stuff out there.

A **** ton of money. Trust me on this, I have looked into it. Yep, I've also looked into it. Not even in the realm of possibility.

And those are absolutely valid criticisms of the metrics. I don't think anyone would argue that there isn't room for improvement. Defensive metrics are barely out of their infancy; they have a lot of room to grow and improve. Even I try to avoid relying on them too much. WAR is a good quick-and-dirty metric but I wouldn't base my entire opinion on the metric because of its reliance on somewhat flawed defensive ratings. But we're off to a good start and the metrics continue to improve as they are refined.

Drew Butera has hit incredibly well over short stretches of time, but given a large enough sample, it inevitably regresses to his true level of putridity. It's no different for something like UZR, odd things can happen in small samples. Except nobody says, "I know the numbers say Butera hit .350 over the last month. But that's not what happened. I know he's a bad hitter, therefore that couldn't have happened." But that's exactly what the inventor of UZR, and others, say about defensive metrics. Either Valencia saved 6 runs that year, or the metric is extremely unreliable at best, worthless at worst. Which is it? BTW, do you agree with the idea (as implied above) that Valencia's UZR was positively influenced by playing next to Hardy? Or, as I've seen stated here that Span's UZR benefitted from Revere? If that's the case, wouldn't that be another reason to question whether UZR actually measures anything? We've been through this sooooo many times, Chief. Nobody says "that didn't happen". They say "that was a statistical variance". It happened. Just as Butera hitting a homerun is not indicative of his usual performance, Delmon Young making an out-of-zone diving catch is not indicative of his usual performance. That doesn't mean it did not happen, it states that it is outside the statistical mean.