Whammy

I'm not arguing for ABW to play 3B (obviously), or even necessarily DH. But, if people are trying to find the Twins a capable RF with some offensive upside, I'd argue we have one playing RF in Chattanooga.

His numbers against righties have been a decent amount better in 3 of his 4 years (2012, 2014, 2015, and pretty similar in the other year (2013)

I forgot one little thing worth noting.... I was doing this manually and ignored HBP and Sacrifices. It's small sample stuff and would have made it much more complicated.

I posted about this in the Sano thread, but it's bound to get lost in there. Plus, I did some "shoot from the hip" analysis of what his numbers would be with less strikeouts. It was late. I was on my phone and it was tough to crunch the numbers. But I wanted to circle back this morning and get the real numbers. Adam Brett Walker's actual stats: 220 PA 15 BB 54 H 14 2B 16 HR 80 K (36%) 263 AVG (303 BABIP) 317 OBP 585 SLG 902 OPS The premise of my post last night was, those number are pretty good, even with all of those strikeouts. People wanted to call up Sano and have him learn RF on the fly. Why would we call up Sano to play RF when we have a player on Sano's team who actually plays RF and is out performing Sano. People have just gotten so hung up with his strikeouts, which, don't get me wrong, are happening too often. In the post last night I said something like "If he struck out half as much, he'd have a 330 batting average and would be a top 10 prospect in baseball" Turns out I was actually selling him short. Here are ABW's stats in plate appearances that he doesn't strike out: 432 BA 552 OBP 960 SLG 1512 OPS Wouldn't that be nice So, back to my premise last night. We are going to waive our magic wand and turn half of ABW's strikeouts into non-strikeout at bats. Half as many strikeouts (40): 355 BA 412 OBP 789 SLG 1201 OPS 21 HR If he was doing that at AA, he's be in the Correa, Buxton, Seager group. Maybe even on top of that list. How about removing 1/4 of his strikeouts (20 K's removed): 309 BA 363 OBP 685 SLG 1048 OPS 18 HR Easily top 10 prospect, right? Probably in that 5-8 range. How about just removing 10 strikeouts: 286 BA 338 OBP 636 SLG 974 OPS This is a top 20 prospect, right? I guess my question is this.... how can ten measly strikeouts in a little over 1/3 of a season really affect someone's prospect status and fans' opinion of him that much? To be fair, let's take things the other direction. Let's say that ABW's move to the majors caused him to now strike out in HALF of his at bats, but the rest of his non-strikeout AB translated. That's pretty extreme, and I'm not sure any of us would predict that, but he're what his numbers would be: Striking out in half his at bats: 216 BA 276 OBP 480 SLG 756 OPS That OPS would put him just ahead of Plouffe and just behind Hunter, and be 3rd on the team. Why force a square peg (Sano) into a round hole (RF), when we have a round peg who's just the masher Sano is.

I mean, why can ABW3 be Nelson Cruz eventually?

I know we wish he would strike out less, but this argument for Sano playing RF makes me say "why not Walker?" He strikes out 1/3 of his at bats. That's not good. We want that number reduced but even with all of those strikeouts his batting average is in relatively the same territory as Sano and Buxton. All he does is get extra base hits and lead every league he plays in in RBI. If he struck out half as much he'd be batting 320 and we'd be talking about him as a top 10 prospect in baseball. Alas, he strikes out 1/3 of the time.... That's his wart. I can live with that wart.

We've decided to stockpile top-notch defensive replacements.....

2 decades running

This offense has been painful to watch for the last week

This is interesting for 2 reasons 1) as a prospect, you wouldn't expect him to be sitting on the bench much. He'll be playing regularly 2) I'm pretty sure i heard that Escobar was told something like "this is your job now. Show us you deserve it"

In my opinion, there is only one person in this organization that in completely off limits in a trade scenario. Pelfrey. Oops, sorry, I mean Buxton. I wouldn't have a problem moving Arcia as part of a package that got us the true ace that has eluded us for years. Having said that, I think people in this thread are too easily dismissing him as a future key part of this team. We've all been keen on Max Kepler and what he's doing at AA, but go back and look at what Arcia did in 2012 (2 years younger than Kepler) he destroyed high A and AA. He's struggling right now, but it's crazy to me that people would trade him for bullpen help.

Don't worry everyone, I found the perfect solution. I just activated Carlos Correa in my Yahoo Fantasy Baseball league and I was looking for someone else to stash in my "NA" slot that Correa had occupied for the last couple months. Turns out Miguel Sano is available. Here's the best part: Miguel Sano Min - 3B,SS He can play shortstop! And here we were all worried about finding him a position to play. Turns out he can play our team's weakest position. Someone call Terry Ryan and let him know.

Great lineup, or greatest lineup?

The limit is 20 days, which he was about 2 weeks short of. (30 for pitchers)

jimmer, on 04 Jun 2015 - 10:29 AM, said: RBI is a stat that is very much dependent on other people's performance and wRC+ tells us how well a player created runs in relation to the rest of the league. It measures what has happened and how valuable that player was at creating runs. And Mauer has very often been a good example of how RBI is a bad stat to judge performance. This year it's just being done in the opposite way. But we clearly disagree, and that's okay. -------------------------------- Let's take this to an extreme.... (and I agree, that it's fine for us to disagree on the topic) Let's say Miguel Cabrera won the triple crown this year. His average was inflated by a historic .440 BABIP His RBI were inflated by having an inordinate number of men on base when he got his hits And his HR total was inflated by a ridiculous HR/FB Rate We would say that Miguel Cabrera had an absolutely fantastic year, but we would also say that he's very likely to regress in 2016 and that would be shown by a much lower WRC+ than one might expect for a triple crown winner.

RBI is a stat, so in that regard it's a good way of measuring performance. WRC+ is a metric, so it's a good way of predicting future success Using Joe Mauer as an example, I would say in spite of his relatively low AVG and OBP, he's had a pretty successful year so far, because he's doing something that a 3rd hitter should do, which is driving in runs. However, his WRC+ probably predicts that his success, in that regard, is unlikely to continue at it's current high level.

Are you saying this because you know that we are close? Or are you just saying "theoretically it could prevent Super 2 from kicking in?" Super 2 doesn't save seasons of control, only money, right?

I'm definitely not as knowledgeable on options as many people on here. If the Twins didn't use one of Arcia's options this year, could they use it next year (not that if he was with the major league team all this year that they would have any reason to send him down next year)? If so, when do "left over" options expire? I'm guessing we never used all of Joe Mauer's options, but I'm pretty sure we couldn't option him to AAA at this point.

I think you just helped make my point.... He's getting paid a Major League Salary and Accruing service time while he's on the DL or on his rehab assignment from being on the DL. The Twins could have left that as the status quo for the next 2 weeks (rehabbing in Rochester), but instead decided to activate him after 4-5 days of rehab, then option him to Rochester. The only reason to do this is money (whatever 2-weeks of pay difference between his ML Salary and his AAA Salary) and/or service time. Seems like something that might annoy me if I was a baseball player. Seems like a rather trivial amount of money (probably around $35,000) or service time savings for potentially annoying a player.

I know it's probably semantics, but is this a service time issue? I mean, he was technically allowed to be "on a rehab assignment" in AAA for another couple weeks (20 days max). No moves technically needed to be made, but the Twins made a point of activating him, then sending him down. Does that buy the Twins a couple weeks of service time? Does that buy the Twins two weeks of reduced paychecks to Oswaldo?

That BABIP is unsustainable

I was at the gym, so I couldn't post this, but that three pitch strikeout of Swihart, by May in the 3rd inning was an absolute thing of beauty.

Remind me again how many lefties we have faced this year and how many Mauer has sat out against? Also, what's our record in those games?

Worst Lineup of the year, without a doubt. We've been told for years, that if Mauer played for Boston, he'd have 100 doubles. Why no Mauer?

We have a 5th minor league team to follow on a daily basis, but I'm pretty sure most of us would say we know the least about the players on the DSL Twins team, compared to our other minor league teams. So, who are the names to watch?