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Brock Beauchamp

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Everything posted by Brock Beauchamp

  1. Brock Beauchamp
    wRC+ does not adjust for position. That's a good number for a guy behind the dish. Also, a wRC+ of 100 is "average", not to be confused with "replacement level", which is *considerably* lower than that, probably around 80 or so. As I said earlier, it's highly unlikely that Pinto is an improvement over Suzuki while there's a better than average chance he's a significant step backward.
  2. Brock Beauchamp
    And while it's early in the season, Suzuki is hitting well for the second year in a row. It's really unlikely that Pinto would be an upgrade at this point and there's a better than 50% chance he'd be a significant downgrade at the position.
  3. Brock Beauchamp
    And that's fair but the Twins just aren't going to push Suzuki out of the lineup in April. That's the reality of the situation. Until the Twins are ready to give Pinto more than 1-2 games behind the plate a week, he should be refining his defensive game in Rochester.
  4. Brock Beauchamp
    With Pinto, it has always been about his defense. He has eight games played defensively at Rochester, seven of them at catcher. He should stay there and play every day until the Twins are convinced he's ready for MLB defensively or that he'll never be an MLB catcher. They should have been playing him every day at catcher last season but that's a bridge already crossed and debated to no end.
  5. Brock Beauchamp
    Well, sure. If the guy has a long track record of awful play, that's a different situation entirely. Though offhand, I'm not really sure what I'd change about the current roster other than blowing up the bullpen and calling up prospects. I'm fine with the rotation in the short-term now that May is in it. I don't like Robinson, Nunez, & Co but I'd rather see the minor leaguers stay in a place where they can play every day for the time being. But the moment Rosario, Hicks, Pinto, or whomever looks ready, they should be in Minnesota playing every day. Hopefully that time comes soon.
  6. Brock Beauchamp
    Even walks and strikeouts have limited use at this point in the season. If a guy faces a particularly tough pitcher or a guy he doesn't see well, he might golden sombrero and skew the numbers. Right now, it's all about the eye evaluation and incorporating player attitude and demeanor, which we can't do as outsiders. The stats mean virtually nothing.
  7. Brock Beauchamp
    Thank you, Jack. As someone who has been a technical lead on more projects than I can count, it can't be overstated how useless tools are unless you get the tool users to buy into said tool. And that takes time... and often, many compromises that techies don't like to make.
  8. Brock Beauchamp
    Trading Vargas in the future might make sense. Right now, it would be premature and a terrible trade because I think his value is only going to rise in the next 12-24 months. Vargas had a good season but he wasn't a heralded prospect coming through the minors. Opposing GMs are going to be reluctant to loot the farm in trade and for good reason.
  9. Brock Beauchamp
    Nah, the season is over because we've reached the ten game mark and the Twins are under .500.
  10. Brock Beauchamp
    If you can find a single example of a baseball team digging into a player's life to the extent of rooting through his trash before signing the player, I will concede that my statement is "naive". Good luck with that. "Signing a contract in good faith" does not mean skipping research into a player. It means you don't dig deeply into areas where there are no reasons to expect a problem (eg. digging extensively into the drug history of a player who has never been linked to drug use). EVERY contract ever signed has a "good faith" element to it because not everything can be known about another person. You do what you can to mitigate risk but if the other person is devious and clever enough, you WILL get screwed.
  11. Brock Beauchamp
    This is absurd. Are you honestly advocating the Twins to start rifling through free agents' garbage before signing anyone? This is not on the Twins. They signed a contract in good faith and were taken by a cheater (presuming Santana's story isn't on the up-and-up, I personally have a hard time believing he didn't know what he was taking). The problem here is that baseball contracts are too iron clad... Any breach of contract of this magnitude should allow the team to terminate the contract. One can't expect an employer to rifle through a guy's past so deeply that they uncover possible drug use when that guy has never been associated with drugs in the past. Either Santana just started taking these drugs, which deflects any potential blame away from the Twins, or he's so wily that several teams missed the fact that he's a PED user (after all, Ervin Santana played for three different teams from 2012-2014... If the Twins are somehow culpable then so are the Angels, Royals, and Braves).
  12. Brock Beauchamp
    I haven't heard this info either but if my hazy memory is correct, testing is done just before Spring Training games begin (sometime in late February or very early March).
  13. Brock Beauchamp
    Matt Garza is the same ticking time bomb yet continues to be a good starter. I wasn't entirely sold on the Santana signing when it happened but now that he's been busted for steroids, I'm not going to ex postfacto my argument to make me look better and the Twins worse. Ervin Santana has been an MLB player for a decade. First, he should know better than to take something that might contain banned substances (provided he didn't do it on purpose) and second, there's no friggin' way the Twins are expected to know that a guy who has been in the league for a decade and has never been busted for PEDs is, in actuality, a PED risk. There is one person to blame for this Ervin Santana situation: ERVIN SANTANA. This forum and some of the posters on it drive me up the wall some days. There are plenty of reasons to be frustrated with the front office right now, you don't need to go manufacture reasons that involve Terry Ryan being a psychic, soothsayer, and reader of &^%$ing tea leaves. Argh blargh. I'm glad I'm leaving the continent for two weeks tomorrow.
  14. Brock Beauchamp
    There are plenty of "real" fans on the board. Please refrain from trying to start some bizarre competition about who's the superest super fan of them all.
  15. Brock Beauchamp
    3.73 and 3.53 in the NL. 3.92 and 3.63 in the AL. Going from memory of a few minutes ago so numbers might be a touch off.
  16. Brock Beauchamp
    Absolutely. As I said in my first post, my comments were not meant to invalidate your overall point about Santana, just that I didn't like the use of "below average" in that context.
  17. Brock Beauchamp
    My underlying point is that using ERA+ to determine an "average starter" isn't fair because ERA+ is skewed by lower reliever ERAs. An ERA+ of 100 is all pitchers, not just starters. Add in the lower ERAs of relievers and the "average" number of 100 is a touch unfair to starters, who have a higher ERAs. ERA+ is a better stat than ERA. I won't argue that point, only its use to determine "average" when talking about either a reliever or a starter. For example, a starter that posts an ERA+ of 98 is likely above average as a starter, particularly if he pitches in the AL. All those relievers are skewing ERA+ to make that starter look slightly below average when that almost certainly is not the case.
  18. Brock Beauchamp
    This is not invalidating your point but I've seen ERA+ used in this fashion in the past and it always bothers me. An ERA+ of 92 is not necessarily below average for a starter. The NL ERA of starters last year was 3.73 in 1400 innings. The NL ERA of relievers last year was 3.53 in 720 innings. The NL ERA of all pitchers last year was 3.66. So, while Santana was probably a touch under league average in ERA+, the "average starter" in the NL was probably an ERA+ in the 96-ish range, not 100. Santana was in the "close enough" range where I'd consider him a league average starter in 2014. The split was more dramatic in the AL last season, about .30 ERA difference between starters and relievers. I assume this is because NL starters get to face pitchers at the plate while relievers face more pinch-hitters.
  19. Brock Beauchamp
    This is the sticking point for me. Pelfrey wasn't fully stretched out, either. I suspect this was a "make Mike Pelfrey happy" decision, not a "good baseball" decision and that irritates the hell out of me.
  20. Brock Beauchamp
    Putting Mike Pelfrey in the rotation might be the right call from an intellectual standpoint - though I'm far from convinced that's the case - but from a fan emotional standpoint, I never wanted to see Mike Pelfrey make another start for the Twins and I certainly didn't want to see him make starts in April.
  21. Brock Beauchamp
    I can't really disagree with this take, at least not in 2015. The Twins have so many guys who could step into a relief role. I like the idea of scrapheap pick-ups but if they're not performing, you cast them aside quickly and you certainly don't let them get in the way of guys like Burdi.
  22. Brock Beauchamp
    I think Ryan is right in avoiding high profile bullpen arms in free agency. Relievers are just too damned volatile from season to season and the impact of a single reliever just isn't high enough to offset that risk. If things get bad, be aggressive and call up Nick Burdi.
  23. Brock Beauchamp
    I didn't mean to imply that last year's bullpen was good. My intent was to point out that Ryan's bullpens are rarely bad. Last year faltered as yet another rotation fell to pieces mid season but they weren't a very strong group of pitchers in the first place. I'm not going to fret about the bullpen until they throw innings in MLB games that count. Do I trust this bullpen? No, not even a little bit. But given the volatility of bullpen arms and the live arms in the Twins' farm system, I'm not going to go marching up to 34 Twins Way with a torch and pitchfork quite yet.
  24. Brock Beauchamp
    They've gotten the job done, whether xFIP wants you to believe that or not. Any failings of the bullpen have been directly tied to the rotation and eight men bullpens. The Twins' core bullpen guys have been "good enough". No, they're not flashy and no, they're not the darling of advanced metrics but they haven't killed the team. What has killed the pitching staff is a rotation that can barely pitch five innings a game. No bullpen will shine under that spotlight as you dig into your eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh best bullpen option during the season.
  25. Brock Beauchamp
    There are many reasons to be frustrated with Ryan but his bullpens are not one of them. The guy has built a career of slapping together quality bullpens on the cheap. Yeah, I'm not in love with the appearance of the 2015 pen but I'm going to let them pitch before I get too upset about it.
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