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Brock Beauchamp

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Everything posted by Brock Beauchamp

  1. Brock Beauchamp
    I kinda worded that poorly. I should have said "scoops and catches don't have a lot of value in advanced metrics because everyone's pretty good at it". They're important and they count in metrics but if everyone is good at something, players who are great at it won't gain much value. It's the defensive equivalent of a player having a .320 batting average while wearing a Rockies uniform in 1998. When everyone else is hitting .310, the accomplishment doesn't mean a whole lot.
  2. Brock Beauchamp
    Mauer is a fine defender at first but catching the ball isn't very hard. There's an expected level of competency at the MLB level and first basemen catching the ball isn't really note-worthy. AFAIK, scooping and catching the ball isn't a focus of first base defense in advanced metrics for that reason: everybody does it well enough to not make it worth much in defensive value. Again, not knocking Joe, he's a good defender at first... but most of that value seems to come from his range and baseball smarts. Whereas Byron Buxton is doing things at an up-the-middle position that I'm not sure anyone else in baseball can even do physically, excepting possibly Billy Hamilton.
  3. Brock Beauchamp
    It's pretty hard to do that when Kyle Gibson has been so much worse than Phil Hughes. If someone needs to be ousted from the rotation, it's Kyle Gibson. By comparison, Phil Hughes has looked like Greg Maddux.
  4. Brock Beauchamp
    I agree on mid-June as a target. That's nearly half a season to right the ship. For me, he can stay if he's hitting somewhere above .600 (not overall for the season, the few weeks preceding mid-to-late June).
  5. Brock Beauchamp
    Despite the horrific struggles, I think management is handling Buxton correctly. As you said, he seems to be taking better plate appearances lately and both the radio and television crews have mentioned how he's taking extra reps on his frequent days off. We know Buxton can mash AAA pitching. I feel that if he's going to make an adjustment, it needs to be at the MLB level with the best coaches in the Twins organization (or, at least they should be the best coaches in the org). Buxton has crossed 500 MLB PAs. He needs to figure out how to adjust against the best pitching in the world, even if it causes fan agony to watch the process unfold five times a week.
  6. Brock Beauchamp
    I'm pretty sure this was the Twins' first one run victory.
  7. Brock Beauchamp
    Yeah, that trade number is ugly. I'd like to see the 2017 numbers. I'd expect the Twins amateur draft and international signings should look a fair amount better.
  8. Brock Beauchamp
    Polanco was my sleeper this season so I was pretty bullish on the guy. I expected him to hit but I wasn't sure he'd be a competent shortstop. As for Buxton, yeah, if you're including defense the scale slides considerably. If he's a decent hitter with great defense, he's a very good player.
  9. Brock Beauchamp
    I don't know if it's that extreme. Buxton needs to be acceptable. Good would be better. Excellent is a luxury. With guys like Kepler and Polanco stepping forward this season, the importance of Buxton's bat diminishes a bit. But he can't be bad and certainly not as bad as he has been thus far.
  10. Brock Beauchamp
    I'd want two guys simply because if a guy has upside, is in the low minors, but doesn't crack any top 100 lists, he's a pretty big risk. Think Lewis Thorpe or Adam Brett Walker (had he been drafted as prep instead of college) when they were drafted/acquired. I'm not talking about some prep fireballer who cracks top 100 lists right out of the gate.
  11. Brock Beauchamp
    That is seriously NOT stiff for a controlled pitcher who has been well above average for two seasons. That's a damned reasonable request. And I've never been particularly high on Santana. That's a fair going rate for a pitcher with 1.5 seasons of control plus an option.
  12. Brock Beauchamp
    I'd try to move him but, as always, it'd require a solid deal to get it done. If Santana keeps rolling as a strong #2, I'd want a 50-ish prospect and two more upside guys from the low minors.
  13. Brock Beauchamp
    Yep. When you have a bunch of questionable-to-bad starter options, the only solution is to pile depth behind them and hope for the best. And that's why I was in favor of retaining Santiago. I didn't expect him to be a good pitcher but I did expect him to be better than some Andrew Albers-type pitcher. And if not for Santiago, right now we'd be looking at the Twins moving some bad AAAA arm into the rotation when they next need a fifth starter. And we're 17 games into the season.
  14. Brock Beauchamp
    Well, FIP assumes that all in the park contact is the same. And that works for most pitchers. Generally speaking, over a long enough period of time, there is enough consistency in the talent of MLB pitchers that all in the park contact normalizes somewhat and FIP becomes a reasonably good predictor of future success. My problem with the usage of FIP is the assumption that it works for all pitchers. It doesn't. Like most predictive stats, there are outliers who routinely under- or over-perform their "talent" (for lack of a better word) and kinda break FIP. I also dislike the use of career FIP once a pitcher logs several seasons of play, especially if said pitcher splits their career between multiple teams and leagues (thereby diminishing the impact of good/bad team defense and park effect). At that point, ERA becomes a more accurate assessment of that pitcher's ability because it (mostly) tracks what actually happened, not what was supposed to happen. But over- and under-performers of FIP appear to be relatively rare (Santiago and Nolasco are good examples of each), which means FIP is still a pretty useful tool, IMO. But, like most other metrics, it needs to be used correctly and it needs to be acknowledged that the metric doesn't work for every player 100% of the time.
  15. Brock Beauchamp
    I don't think he's streaky so much as he hasn't really put it together offensively. His career high season OPS is .721 and looking through his splits, he only has four months OPSing above .800 or below .600 (out of a possible 16 months total). And that's including this month, which hasn't finished yet (currently at .861, could drop considerably in next 7-8 days).
  16. Brock Beauchamp
    And that's fair. My point was that the deficiency against LHP is greater. Lots of lefties in this lineup and none of them even adequate against LHP (which is pretty common). It's not a huge gap though.
  17. Brock Beauchamp
    Santana's the only guy from that list I would have predicted on opening day.
  18. Brock Beauchamp
    Be wary of glancing at any player who posted numbers while wearing a Rockies jersey. In 2015, he posted a 99 OPS+ overall. Decent, right? Well, maybe... or maybe not. Paulsen had just 354 PAs in 2015 so we're already dealing with a moderately small sample size and that sample size becomes even more problematic when you start splitting it. Paulsen had an .847 OPS at home, just .718 on the road. In typical Colorado fashion, part of that was powered by a .293 home batting average and a .258 road batting average. But where things get really confusing is the BABIP: .352 at home, .351 on the road. So, despite Paulsen posting just a .718 road OPS, he used a .351 BABIP to get there. You expect the Colorado BABIP to be high but the fact he posted kinda bad numbers on the road with that BABIP should set off alarm bells. How good was Paulsen in 2015? My answer is "not very". Add in his defense and I don't see him being anything but a liability. As an added bonus, in 2015 Paulsen had an extreme L/R split in favor of RHP (though his career numbers are mixed with an extremely SSS against LHP, the guy has spent his career protected against LHP). The Twins already have a bunch of guys who can hit RHP. They need bats against LHP.
  19. Brock Beauchamp
    I didn't like the insistence that Molitor stick around. That irked me. The POBO should make that call. On the other hand, given Molitor's apparent willingness to try new things this season, I'm skeptical he's the actual problem. I've actually liked most of Molitor's moves this season, even some of the moves that failed.
  20. Brock Beauchamp
    And that's fair. I have no problems with people saying Duffey should get another shot at starting, as the situation is pretty murky. But 2015 didn't prove anything to us one way or the other. Nor did 2016, for that matter. Personally, I'd keep him in the pen right now because this team can't even seem to get Jose Berrios in their rotation. I'm not willing to punt on Berrios in favor of Duffey, who *should* be a solid bullpen arm given his profile.
  21. Brock Beauchamp
    Duffey had four starts pre-expansion in 2015. His performance was somewhere between holding his own and a little bit bad. But that doesn't really matter to me (pre- or post-expansion). What matters to me is putting too much weight in a pitcher entering MLB and having a dozen or so good starts. Hitters haven't seen that pitcher. Film hasn't been collected on the guy. No notebooks are collated with his pitching tendencies. He's the baseball version of the technology industry's "security through obscurity" rule. Maybe that guy is succeeding because he's good. Maybe that guy is succeeding because no one is ready for him. Either way, I'm not going to draw a conclusion when the reason for his success is muddy. To anyone who wants to point to Duffey's 2015 success as proof of anything, I will simply reply "Scott Diamond".
  22. Brock Beauchamp
    Oh hush. I commented in your thread. I know it exists. Jeremy wanted to write a piece about it, obviously... Which is why this thread exists. Lots of people only read the front page of Twins Daily. Others only read the forum.
  23. Brock Beauchamp
    The Goose Egg is almost exactly what I wanted to see but I never did the legwork myself to drill down into the situations where the stat should "activate". I'm glad someone finally did that in what appears to be a relatively simple but accurate way.
  24. Brock Beauchamp
    I've been waiting for someone to create a good counting stat to rate relievers for 15 years and the Goose Egg is the best I've seen. I hope someone like Fangraphs picks it up and gives it traction.
  25. Brock Beauchamp
    But that doesn't fix the Mauer problem. Even when Joe is "rolling", he only tops out as an .800 OPS guy at this point in his career. Adding a quasi-platoon bat to spell both Mauer and Grossman from their daily roles seems like a good way to increase offensive capabilities overall. The only reason I'd even consider this is because the Twins are in a rather unique situation. They have an elite guy in center and two guys at the corners who can hold their own in center. I believe this opportunity affords the Twins a luxury few other teams enjoy: the ability to carry a fourth outfielder who can hit. Because you're not going to get a fourth outfielder who can hit and field. Those guys are more commonly referred to as "starting outfielders".
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