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LaBombo

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Everything posted by LaBombo

  1. LaBombo
    Fewer than 50 innings is the norm, and the preceding 5 years, 2 in the majors, were the aberration? Maybe it's the new norm if his arm is still screwed up, but otherwise... really? If you look past the shiny ERA, you see shiny (for the Twins) FIPs and xFIPs, BABIP fortune that evens out to average or so, and K/BB and HR rates that should allow a pitcher to sustain a 4ish ERA most of the time. Worley's chance of continued success in a major league rotation took another hit last year, after the 2012 arm problem dealt the first one. And there's no clear place to put him. But for a franchise that blocked half of its top four rotation spots for KC and Pelf again, discarding Worley looks like it might be another sign that a franchise that has been one of the worst in MLB at figuring out starting pitching has failed yet again.
  2. LaBombo
  3. LaBombo
    That was the most irritating thing about the article, but it was also disappointing to see that Gardenhire is apparently only now waking up to the fact that the offense will almost certainly be bad this year. A big chunk of that hole was dug when the team exchanged the best offensive catcher in baseball with one of the worst, but there were plenty of other signs that runs would be in short supply this year. Arcia and Hicks struggled to make contact last year. Plouffe, Florimon, and Parm apparently just can't hit much. And if the Twins really are planning on getting 140+ games in left from Willi, then there's very little evidence in the team's roadmap for 2014 that they know the DH position exists. The Twins moved forward on the rotation this year, and that was what pretty much everyone felt was the highest priority. But they resigned themselves to the waiting game and offensive mediocrity at best in 2014 when they made no greater effort to improve the offense than auditioning the mummified remains of the Jasons.
  4. LaBombo
    Yeah, bad policy usually, and especially for a guy like Hicks who's not doing poorly and needs all the confidence he can get if they're going to throw him into the fire again.
  5. LaBombo
    Agree with the last part, but Blackburn isn't really a comp for Worley, he's the floor of the range of sustained mediocrity the organization will tolerate. Unlike Worley, Blackburn was unable to miss bats except for the occasional intentional walk. So Worley might end up being the ceiling of the range of mediocre guys they don't tolerate. Won't be crying in my Corona if Worleybird is waived and claimed, but after what other guys have repeatedly gotten by with, it would be a bit of a head-scratcher.
  6. LaBombo
    Most of the good starting prospects are still over a year away from AAA. And it seems to me that if the Twins can absorb over 300 innings of major and minor league pitching from Nick Blackburn after his 2010 season that made it apparent to everyone but the Twins FO that he's a bad pitcher, they ought to be able to scrape up some innings somewhere for Worley and Diamond to get sorted out.
  7. LaBombo
    When was the last time a 26 year old starter was waived after putting together 250+ sub-4.00 innings followed by just one bad season? Doesn't mean the Twins can't or shouldn't waive him, but it seems like an awfully unusual career path.
  8. LaBombo
    Still kind of hoping that Antony does something to earn his job...
  9. LaBombo
    Second paragraph. First was pretty standard fare for me.
  10. LaBombo
    Before the internet and mainstream saber, there was much hand wringing in the press and in the stands about where to bat Rickey Hendersen. He stole a bajillion bases pretty often, but also cranked out mid-teens to mid-twenties homers. In addition to being one of the more interesting Hall of Famers (and one of its biggest A-holes going back to Ty Cobb), Hendersen is also the poster child for batting order debates, going back to when the internet was called newspapers, and people still thought that Joe Morgan knew more about baseball than the mole that Bill James had removed from his neck while fully conscious and prehistorically FaceBlogging into a spiral notebook that baseball could be a little better if math didn't have its head shoved into a toilet full of idiotic scouting terds about body types and dad athleticisim. /Rant over/
  11. LaBombo
    Or Span, although the degree to which they're missed may have something to do with the fact that Meyer may already be the best starter in the organization while May's projection is increasingly being downgraded and Worley is being written off.
  12. LaBombo
    Season?!?! Good God, man, we're approaching the halfway point of a long decade! Homer.
  13. LaBombo
    Well done, much appreciated, and know what you mean. Tonight's game has dragged on to the point where I found myself internally debating for several seconds whether to pull for Guerra to make the squad or to get cut so we don't have to hear about the Santana trade quite as often...
  14. LaBombo
    http://www.mormoncontributor.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/play-aschamp2.jpg
  15. LaBombo
    Aaaand Bartlett locks down center field for 2014. Grab some bench, Hicks and Elvis!
  16. LaBombo
    Ahhhhh!!! Stop! We get it! Non-Mauer Twins couldn't hit a pinata unblindfolded and armed with a laser-guided Louisville Slugger. J/k, thanks for the updates, it's confirming that the Twins aren't unlucky at the plate tonight, they're just overmatched.
  17. LaBombo
    Bert with an interesting plug for collusion, via his anecdote about owners controlling costs by not signing VGuer back in the day...
  18. LaBombo
    Good stuff, and I think this is true of middle defense in general. C/SS/2b/CF is important, and therefore more scrutinized and agonized over if it's perceived as below average. But mostly if you're well below average defensively at one of those positions, you simply don't get to play there. You slide down the defensive spectrum to an IF or OF corner. If you can hit, eventually a team (especially NL) will find a corner for you where they can live with your defense to keep your bat in the lineup. The end result is probably that you generally don't get the shortstop equivalent of Delmon Young. That would mean that while middle defense is still important, being better than average defensively in those positions is less valuable than being above average offensively. Eyeballing the differentials, the Off/Def Fangraphs splits for those positions tend to reflect that.
  19. LaBombo
    Florimon still following the ancient Dominican baseball proverb... "You can't get off an island by walking".
  20. LaBombo
    There was plenty of anti-Worley sentiment going back to when he was stinking it up with the Twins last year, let alone after looking mediocre at AAA and having an abysmal spring. I get it. But the Twins committed to two guys, Correia and Pelfrey, who will almost certainly never be part of a competitive Twins rotation. And they're apparently still entertaining the notion of using Deduno or Diamond in the 5th spot. Those 4 guys have had 4 good seasons in the past 3 years, combined. Worley has two. And none of their best seasons in that span were as good as his best.
  21. LaBombo
    Was thinking the same thing. It's possible to make a good trade and have it not work out, and so is the reverse. It goes without saying that it's too early to throw in the towel on May, but it is on Worley too. He had two good years before getting injured and struggling last year, and he's just 26. He's been brutal in spring training and was only ok in AAA last year, but the Twins had better figure out a way to hang on to him.
  22. LaBombo
    Did I read in another thread that Suzuki led the majors last year in fastball percentage called for? And that his framing wasn't good? At least he got one borderline called third strike for Vanimal, who wouldn't be having a good night with anyone other than Obi-wan Kenobi influencing the umpire.
  23. LaBombo
    Who is this Zobrith guy Bert keeps talking about? Know the Rays have All Star superutilityman Ben ZobriST, but a conscientious and highly articulate professional broadcaster like Bert wouldn't keep butchering the name of one of the most popular players in baseball, right? Love that Dick and Bert are like an old married couple now; Dick knows Bert's mangling a name, but like someone who lets a spouse keep telling the story of a long-ago event wrong over and over, he just lets it go instead of correcting him during the break. Has anyone survived 9 innings of the Bert name-butchery drinking game? Might be a good wager for 2014: who makes it deeper into a game this season, a Twins starter or a TD Bert drinking game poster.
  24. LaBombo
    Sorry for the buzz... err' date=' mood elevation kill. Someone likens me to a Hollywood person, and it's to arguably the most frightening female villain in the history of movies. Brilliant casting decision, btw. Well, like Bela Lugosi said in the historical documentary [i']Ed Wood[/i], "there's no such thing as bad publicity!" Be well, my only Official TD friend!
  25. LaBombo
    If you've played at Rochester or have extensive evidence it's a hellhole that is widely regarded as punishment by the organization's players, please share. Otherwise you don't know any more about it than the rest of us, so how does that help your argument? Fwiw, I've actually been there on business several times, and it's really a pretty nice city. And Hicks was pretty freakin' far from puffing up his OPS when he played there last year. Maybe it was the injury, maybe it wasn't. The way to find that out would have been to have him try AAA again. But instead the Twins are setting him up to fail and get demoted again, which, and I'm just spitballing here, might be worse for him than enduring the horror of having to play in Rochester for a few weeks. Interesting that you keep bringing up the scouting trope about body type. Puckett and Hrbek are two of the most iconic players in Twins history, and they both looked like they were chosen at random from the stands for a 'Play an Inning of Major League Ball!' Veeck promotional stunt.
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