bean5302

He would literally be the 2nd best starter on the Twins. Hasn't had a season ERA above 3.95 since 2018.

Breaking news... zero runs insufficient for Twins to beat Yankees.

I think that's pretty obvious.

It works like this: Lopez, Ryan, Ober, Paddack, Woods Richardson = 130 starts. Twins top 5 combined for 139 starts in 2023, 117 starts in 2022, 101 starts in 2021. Varland is a long shot to be an MLB caliber starter. Festa has more potential than Varland at this point, but he's no guarantee. If we're expecting 32 starts to be missed to due IL, that's a full starter's workload which needs to be soaked up by somebody, and that's a pretty best case scenario. In regard to the future, neither Paddack, nor Woods Richardson are sure things IMHO. Hopefully, Festa or another MiLB pitching prospect can show some potential as an upper rotation guy and allow us to trade some assets. The Twins are far from deep in pitching assets right now.

Some latest updates on players in general. https://www.mlb.com/news/twins-injuries-and-roster-moves

Well, you're correct. I don't like any of our starting pitching prospects a whole lot because I'd like to see prospects who don't put a ton of runners on base. Zebby Matthews is the only one in AA+ who has the peripherals and results which are exciting, but he has only 1 start at AA. Also, as great as you make Festa's first full season out to be, if you take away his SSSS Ft. Myers numbers and look at his results from A+ ball (majority of his season), it looks a heck of a lot less impressive. (5) David Festa - Can't keep runners off the bases because of BBs coming from what seems like a lack of control. His last start numbers were pretty. 6.0 innings, 0 ER, 3 hits, 3 BBs. That's sustainable. Also came with 2 wild pitches, though. (6) Marco Raya - Isn't a starter prospect anymore. 50 pitch count limit. (7) Charlee Soto - Only 18, struggling a bit in A ball, hopefully it starts clicking. (8) C.J. Culpepper - Walking more than the Proclaimers in his A+ repeat this year. 4 inning starter. (12) Corey Lewis - Shoulder injury. Has some potential if his shoulder doesn't need surgery. (13) Matt Canterino - Not really a starter anymore after injury history. 34 innings in AA 2yrs ago (17) Connor Prielipp - Not really a starter anymore after injury history. 4 innings above rookie ball. (18) Andrew Morris - Repeating A+, but he's pitching very well with a big jump in K rate. Probably going to AA soon. (20) Zebby Matthews - Elite results this year. Big jump in K rate, first start at AA was awesome. Fingers crossed. (23) Simeon WR - 15 innings before rookie status is exhausted. Holding his own at MLB, fingers crossed. (27) Cesar Lares - Holding his own in A ball at 20. Potential to develop a little further. (29) Darren Bowen - Late round pick traded from Seattle. K's are good. BB's are not. This is the complaint many fans have. There isn't a pitching pipeline; there's a pitching cocktail straw.

Festa was drafted at 6'6" and 185lbs in 2020 at age 20. That was 4 years ago. He's 24 now, and about 15% of all starting pitching prospects on "Fangraphs The Board" are as tall or taller than Festa. Festa's had the velocity for years. There's no need to grow into his body anymore. That's been done years ago. There really isn't any more time for excuses for a pitcher nearing the non-prospect age. Prove you can throw strikes and the balls will stay in the stadium. That's what needs to be on his agenda.

There isn't because it doesn't. Over the past 25 years or so, the number of qualified batters has decreased a little. On average in 2000-2007, there would be 5-6 qualified position players on any given MLB team. In 2008-2020, it was 5 straight. After the 2020 season, things changed and it dropped to 4, but the projection is at 6 this season at the moment. Terry Ryan 97%, Bill Smith 90%, Derek Falvey 74% Tom Kelly 102%. Ron Gardenhire 100%, Paul Molitor 60%, Rocco Baldelli 78% (72% excluding 2020) The Twins have consistently had few qualifying hitters the last few years. I remain convinced Baldelli's trying to revise his injury riddled career vicariously though his current players pretending more time off would have made him successful. It's purely my opinion I formed from reading his comments and interviews in the past.

Festa needs to become more consistent with his good games. 3 of his last 5 games have been good. 2 were not. Festa has struggled with throwing strikes for years now, and those high walk rates in the minors generally translate to a AAAA ceiling. If pitchers' "stuff" is good enough, they shouldn't need to be throwing pitches outside the strike zone all the time. MLB caliber hitters aren't often going to chase that pitch 2" outside the zone. They'll take their ball 4, load up the bases and wait for the 3-0 meatball.

Shoeless Joe Jackson testified in court that he accepted a bribe to throw the World Series. Pete Rose bet on baseball games, and he refused to admit or take responsibility for it. If the competitive nature of MLB were to be called into question, it could potentially break the sport entirely. All the major sports have intense rules on gambling inside the sport.

Nobody can have that utility. Utility guys, even in the old days, were generally guys who could cover multiple positions "adequately" while the starters were out for a few days with an injury. The Nick Punto's of the world are extremely rare.

https://www.mlb.com/news/mlb-broadcasters-settle-tv-lawsuit-c162312178#:~:text=The lawsuit argued that baseball's,their own national television deals. I suspect we're going to see some more anti-trust lawsuits filed against MLB as they continue to break the intent of the agreements.

I sold my tickets to todays game to fans of the Evil Empire, LOL.

Yeah, that's a different item, and well worth directing some hate towards Manfred. Baseball is doing everything it can to kill it's market.

This is how streaming services have operated for years and years now. Buy market share through loss leaders, get people on board with the programming, then jack up the rates. Streaming services almost always start off with weak content for free. Then they add some exclusive, quality content for a few months, then they start price hiking. Users who are in the middle of a series they like or whatever are more willing to pay to continue to watch. Peacock killed their free version for new users early in 2023 and forced existing users into the paywall in June of 2023.

This is an effect of the "positional flexibility" system the Twins operate. Our prospects seem like they almost always come up to the MLB level with little awareness of their position defensively and have to learn on the job. When they get consistent reps at the same position day in and day out, they improve. Martin or Kirilloff (probably Martin) gets the demotion when Buxton returns in a few days. Kirilloff probably gets the boot when Lewis returns in a couple weeks. Margot probably gets cut when Falvey and Baldelli manage to buy back that picture of them at Vladimir Putin's Christmas party.

Why is this Manfred's responsibility? To be honest, I've been pretty happy with Manfred's stewardship over the past couple years. The game is better than it's been in 15+ years, and it's been accomplished in the most difficult environment MLB has faced in 20+ years. Dave St. Peter decided to choose Bally Sports North or was simply unable to negotiate in any successful way with a potentially different set of partners. The Twins could have taken the disastrous experience with Bally Sports and gone in a different direction this year, but they decided to double-down on a unreliable and intensely hated business partner. It's not like the organization didn't cut payroll with the specific intent to shield themselves from a drop in TV revenue. Bally Sports North has much bigger negative impact on the franchise's fan engagement than signing Trevor Bauer would have.

Agreed. If you already have Chromecast/Apple TV, there's no real wall to casting the Roku channel from a laptop/mobile device. onto the TV. vs. In this instance, I agree with Chief's sentiments. Not everybody wants 2,371 log ins/user IDs/companies with data breaches tracking your every move and selling the information to any willing buyers (that is when your data isn't being stolen and sold on the black market). Chief paid for a service. It would be nice for the service to work rather than saying, hey, our service doesn't work anymore so buy a new service or let them sell/lose all your data (which is the same as buying). It's still a mixed bag of issues. Some arguments are more valid than others, but baseball's TV situation is a catastrophe. Like any software design, increasing complexity is always, ALWAYS a negative. The question is whether or not the increased complexity is offset by increased functionality. This Roku thing really doesn't fix the problem in any meaningful way so it's probably a net negative IMHO.

Canterino - Rotator cuff strain. Started throwing program a couple weeks ago. Prielipp - Continuing rehab from UCL repair. He'd be a longshot to see pitching competitively before August. I wouldn't even expect him to be throwing bullpen sessions prior to next month. Lee - Herniated disc. Rehab plan was 2 months to run through May. Jenkins - Won the Powerball, probably. Retired. We can't have nice things. In all reality, standard hamstring strain. 6/8ish weeks, typically. Puts Jenkins into the very earliest window of maybe we could see him soon. My expectations, anyway.

Is a weak rolling GIDP better than a strikeout? Is a 10% ball vs. 90% strike call better than a 95% strikeout or ground out? That's what Julien is deciding on, and why he's not swinging. The 95% out vs. the 90% chance he'll be out and take another player with him on the GIDP.

Larnach is utterly locked in on fastballs, but unlike in years past, it's almost any type of fastball. Sinkers and cutters are getting hit, too. The split-finger still beats him, and the changeup remains a black hole, but we're still dealing with small sample sizes.

HR/FB rates are not remotely stable at 17 innings pitched and nearly 20% of his "fly balls" have been popups this year. He's a bit of a fly ball pitcher, but so long as he's generating a lot of weak popup batted balls, he'll be fine as a middle reliever, IMHO. The only "large" sample size in a season we have for Alcala is 2021. It started a bit rocky for him, but he was excellent to end the season, allowing only 1 HR over his final 23 appearances.

Julien striking out looking has to do with him understand what he can hit, and what he can't. I think he knows he's better off hoping a corner strike gets called a ball rather than swinging at it and either missing entirely or GIDP. He definitely breaks the mold at the plate.

Agreed. I have no idea what Baldelli is doing right now with the bullpen. It's non-sensical to me.

I suppose I should address the actual data, though, haha. It's a novelty for me right now, but I'm not sure how relevant this data will be. There's getting to be a pretty tall learning curve into baseball analytics for hitters. Compiling all the data into something usable is becoming pretty cumbersome. I wish we had a more accurate (updated) version of SIERA for pitchers.