Brock Beauchamp

Ditto. One can think Rosario will be a fine player without loving his profile and wondering if he will cave in the moment his wrists slow a bit (probably a few years away at minimum). I'm in no rush to move Eddie but trading him for a pitcher and acquiring a RH OF bat to replace him would round out the roster a bit. Then again, if I have questions about Rosario, so do most GMs, making the point somewhat moot. Hard to say what kind of value he'd bring in return.

I have a newborn in the house so I don't have time to do the math on this but a perfect correlation is one. No correlation is zero. Negative one is a reverse correlation. If you did the math correctly, .437 is a relatively strong correlation.

This... doesn't make any sense. Three things: 1. I said "correlation", not "rigid adherence to identical trends". 2. You're using a binary up/down, which is woefully inadequate to analyze things that are measured in decimal points. There's a season where Mauer's BABIP dropped a tiny .008 but his hard hit went up a small-ish 2%. That's really sloppy analysis and I think you know it. The obvious trend here, the one you seem to be intentionally ignoring, is the one where Mauer spent most of his career hitting balls hard 34-38% of the time and dropped a full nine points immediately after the concussion. Only this year, the year he's showing success once again (shocking!), has that number nudged toward his previous stellar seasons. 3. There's a strong correlation to hard hit balls and BABIP. That's rather undeniable at this point, isn't it? There are loads of articles around the internet connecting those two things.

You're acting as if Joe Mauer is equivalent to Danny Santana. Yes, Mauer had a "career high BABIP" in 2013. It was all of .010 higher than his previous career high. His 2012 BABIP was tied for second-highest in his career to that point, not a career high. When a guy regularly has a .340+ BABIP, jumping up to .380 on occasion is neither out of the norm nor is it going to have a huge impact on his overall OPS. Here are Mauer's BABIP numbers by year, starting in 2006: .364 .319 .342 .373 .348 .319 (bilateralness year) .364 .383 concussion .342 .309 .301 .344 Again, we're talking 150 points of OPS here. Twenty points of BABIP doesn't come close to covering even half that gap, much less all of it. Removing that injury-ridden 2011, Mauer had one season with a BABIP under .340, all the way back in 2007, another injury season where he only played 109 games. If Mauer was healthy through 2013, he was a virtual lock to have a BABIP higher than .340 because that's who he was as a player. On the other hand, let's look at Joe's hard hit %, same time period of 2006 forward: 30.6 36.9 32.9 37.6 41.7 20.8 (again, bilateral year) 37.1 37.4 concussion 28.0 29.1 31.3 35.2 There's a clear correlation between a high hard hit % leading to a high BABIP but not the inverse. I think you're looking at this backwards. Joe stopped hitting the ball hard which led to a drop in BABIP (and maybe shifting had some influence here as well). But there's absolutely no way to make a case that Joe stopped hitting the ball hard because defenses shifted him or "his luck ran out". Again, Occam's Razor here. We can either blame the majority of Mauer's decline on the concussion - which aligns with pretty much every Mauer stat we can find - or we have to use mental gymnastics to explain how Joe didn't suffer concussion effects but managed to stop hitting the ball hard, stop making contact as frequently, and had less discipline overall because he got old (which usually doesn't affect power/discipline nor does it usually happen in seven months) or because defenses shifted him (which makes no sense whatsoever).

I think it has to do more with a person's perception of Mauer than Mauer himself. He can be an aggravating player at times, taking the first pitch so often even Wade Boggs screams "SWING DAMN IT" at his television. Couple that with Joe's large frame, flat swing, and opposite field approach and there are times when even the staunchest Mauer defender groans during his plate appearances. If a person didn't like Mauer's approach and believed Mauer succeeded in spite of that approach, it's easier to rationalize "the rest of baseball caught up to him" instead of believing "he's no longer good because he took a baseball to the face", despite the baseball to the face being a clearcut example of Occam's Razor.

Agreed. In no way do I intend to say that the concussion was the only reason but in my mind, it's obviously the biggest. Mauer missed ~40 games and an offseason because of the concussion. That's around seven months. While the shift and strike zone probably sapped some of his offensive might, that's not much time. Teams and MLB in general don't move that quickly on something and certainly not to the point where Mauer lost a whopping 150 points of OPS. My opinion is that those kinds of changes in MLB strategy usually hide behind the veil of aging. They're subtle, the kind of thing where a guy might lose 20-30 OPS points a season over 3-4 seasons as adjustments are made. They can be mistaken for a guy exiting his prime and getting old. On the other hand, it's damned near impossible to explain away 150 OPS points in just seven months, especially if there's an injury involved and the player's peripherals nosedive in exactly the ways you'd expect with such an injury (stops hitting ball hard, misses on more swings, etc).

Is it just me or is it really weird that four east coast teams have a regular 7pm start on Labor Day? No other teams are starting at the usual weekday 7pm.

He's going to be a bit on the old side and his defense has slid a bit. My guess is he'd get something in the 4/$75m range.

Oh, I know, just agreeing with you.

Mauer is perfect for the second spot, meh for the third. With all that OPS coming from OBP and singles, you want a guy who either gets on base or advances runners. Now if only we could get Dozier where he belongs.

Shifts and the strike zone have probably (definitely?) contributed to Mauer's struggles but they don't explain a massive .120 OPS drop or the fact that Joe neither hits the hard as hard nor as often since the concussion. A shift might be worth a handful of OPS points but it doesn't explain how a guy has a drop of over 10% in hard hit balls. And Mauer's decline wasn't gradual as teams figured out an approach one at a time. It was "August 2013, Joe is an .870 OPS player" to "April 2014, Joe is a .730 OPS player". Baseball is more gradual than that. 30 teams don't figure out the exact same thing at the exact same time.

I think this is a side effect of Mauer seeing the ball better. His hard hit rate, swinging strike, contact rate, etc are at pre-concussion levels (a few are at highs Mauer hasn't hit since 2010). Joe wasn't completely averse to pulling the ball on occasion before the concussion. In fact, his oppo numbers this season are still higher than his pre-concussion days. I suspect this season is the result of Joe finally returning to his previous self, only four years older so not quite as dominant. I'm still baffled how some don't believe Mauer's rapid decline was mostly due to that damned concussion. It appears Joe is following the same track as Morneau, only three years later.

Nope. Hate it.

Fun fact: Escobar has a career MLB OPS (.690) that is only marginally lower than Goodrum's MiLB OPS (.712). Goodrum is 25 years old and getting a September cup of coffee. Escobar was in the majors at age 22 or 23. Goodrum is not better in every way. Maybe you think the $4.5m-ish saved by replacing Escobar is more valuable than the gap of play between the two players but Goodrum is not the offensive equal of Escobar, much less superior.

He's been over .300 since then but never for long and obviously never this late in the season.

So far, the non-trade is looking good (basing it on the centerpiece of De Leon). I suspect Dozier will end up with an OPS at or over .850 this season, putting him close to last year's performance (and better than I expected, frankly). His defense is probably waning a bit but, as you said, is essentially neutral at the position so that's not bad by any means. Still time for that non-deal to turn south but so far, so good.

Yeah, there was really no reason to keep him out there with an expanded roster. Kyle threw a good game, let the bullpen finish it out.

Well done.

It's generally predictive but not terribly accurate. BaseRuns is slightly more accurate but nothing can fully predict a team starting to just play better, as the Twins have over the past month.

You can go ahead and expand that out a bit. Large sample size says things are not trending well for the Royals.

Forgot today was a 6 o'clock start and just flipped to the game. http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/353/279/e31.jpg

It's not about claws coming out, it's about why you chose to crap all over one of the best players to ever don a Twins uniform in a thread about his retirement. You've turned the thread negative for absolutely no reason. The dude hasn't taken the mound wearing a Twins uniform in almost a decade. Why focus on the worst parts of his career?

Yep, Santiago is on the 60-day DL.

The Twins can't win every game for the rest of the season. They're 6-4 over their last ten games and two nights ago, had a dramatic walk-off win. Over the past two weeks, they've outplayed every postseason rival with the exception of the Orioles. They have gained position on both the Yankees and the teams trailing them during that time. Sometimes, you walk off those games with a win. Sometimes, you don't. Sleep on it and move on to the next game.

Joe Nathan blew 9% of his save opportunities with the Twins. That's an elite, dominant number. I haven't crunched the numbers but I'm rather certain it's better than any Twins closer in history. But hey, go ahead and remember how he failed so rarely instead of all those dominant years he posted in a Twins uniform. I mean, it's totally Nathan's fault that Gardenhire tried to get a spot start out of him in extra innings at Yankee Stadium that one time. Oh, and nice job calling out Nathan for his "big money" contract in Detroit when he was 39 years old and injured much of the time. Let's just ignore that dominant stretch he had in Texas after leaving Minnesota.