ashbury

There's no question that BABIP is a skill for batters and likewise a skill for pitchers, to a degree separate from walks and homers and strikeouts. It's hardly an accident that a HoFer like Clayton Kershaw maintained a career BABIP of .275 when the league ran .296. At the other end of the spectrum, perpetual "look at that FIP" posterboy Ricky Nolasco's BABIP was .317 in a league that ran .299 - it's no accident that his ERA was better than his FIP in only two seasons (neither of which was for the Twins). Still, most pitchers won't be at these extremes, and closer to the league average all you can do is nibble away at the edges. A better way to bring the ERA into alignment with FIP is to shore up the defense - as already noted - and which in fairness the Twins were accomplishing during the season. The even better way to improve the ERA, period, is to improve the underlying FIP. The Twins were 20th in the majors in FIP, so bemoaning that their team ERA was an even worse 25th is overlooking the problem. Raise the Ks, cut the BBs and HRs, if you want a pitching staff that leads you to a real window of competitiveness. It's just that easy. 😁

Moi aussi. 😁

Smell The Bat. Spinal Tap's little-known followup to their low-selling baseball themed album.

How do you pry away Washington's #4 prospect, according to MLB.com, using Caratini/Larnach/Ober? Why would Chicago trade Quero to a divisional rival? Have I missed something in the news?

Why do you think Wallner was the sole plan? Besides the possibility that Outman could resuscitate his career (I don't know what evidence they relied on for that), there were two high-ranking prospects rostered at AAA. The day Wallner was sent down, Walker Jenkins was on the injured list for the umpteenth time, and Emmanuel Rodriguez was on the injured list for the umpteen-plus-first time. How many plans do you demand of a front office beyond B, C, and D, involving major-league-quality players who can be plugged in at will? If anything, the untimely absence of these options could have sustained Wallner's time on the roster for longer than otherwise would have been tenable given the collapse of Wallner's productivity. I.e., under-reaction rather than over-reaction. As for the analogy you offered, I use analogies as much as the next guy on the internet, but to use the analogy for an extended argument it needs to be pretty solid. Substance abuse can be disguised by the person for extended periods of time and then suddenly it re-manifests. Inability to hit a high fastball, if that's Wallner's problem, isn't so easy to disguise. Not to mention, an incident of throwing up on an inlaw feels like punching down.

If Dubon considers himself still a full-time everyday player who simply moves around a bit on the diamond, it could be difficult to persuade him to sign unless there's a significant overpay, or maybe at all. I don't think he belongs in this list.

Don't forget he also scored 83 runs a couple years ago, plus 71, 67, 66, all in seasons with 600+ PA at the top of the batting order. The man's a run-scoring powerhouse!

How did you outbid the Yankees 4/$75M offer to Jeffers with just 4/$60M?

I'm sorry if that angle came across too harshly, my friend. You've joked in the past about recognizing your prose can be, uh, well, many things, so I figured the tongue-in-cheek part would be okay. I likewise have a reputation for being unable to be brief, not just here but in more serious pursuits, where I have to pull out the old quote attributed to Blaise Pascal that "I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.:" But I was also serious in the sense that I didn't have a ton of time that day to go through point by point so I invoked a tool (which I use in many contexts, and certainly not to diminish anyone) that would help me get to the heart of things. I felt I demonstrated pretty convincingly he lost full confidence after a little more than a dozen games, and the confidence dwindled for another month but he hung on, until there was no longer a role for him on a 26-man MLB roster. He did go from their choice in RF to losing his MLB job entirely, but I think we all saw it coming as the first quarter of the season unfolded, so the Poof moment was more like "what took them so long?" I can't believe Wallner himself felt a Poof moment either, except a sickening pang of regret when the axe finally fell. If Wallner went Poof, every demotion to AAA is Poof. I don't know how to determine whether Wallner's unraveling was inevitable and the FO and manager failed to judge correctly during the Spring, or whether they failed to notice the unraveling as anything more than bad luck and stuck with him unreasonably long, or whether he was actually a good bet but events proved otherwise and they allowed sufficient time before pulling the plug. I could probably make this reply shorter but, well, I gotta run. 😁

Would be fun to take part in celebrating Luis's first 90-run season in the majors.

It was a little more gradual than you portray it. Wallner was the starter in the first 14 games of the season,. He played RF and was there for every inning. That definitely demonstrated conviction on the part of the braintrust. He sat out game #15, having rewarded the braintrust with a .677 OPS. After that, Wallner started in 19 of the next 28 games. The FO and/or manager showed a certain kind of stubbornness by never DHing him even in this period, and when he played it was for the entire game, except one time he didn't start but came in to bat in the 9th inning. He wasn't an everyday starter anymore but they still invested the month trying any way they could to let him show the value that they obviously thought was there in the first place, not jerking him around when he did play. The reward for this additional patience was a .441 OPS. Beyond unplayable. No longer having a role on the major league roster even as a bench player - you can't bring him in for the bat, you can't bring him in for the glove, you can't bring him in to run the bases - he was indeed gone, and never came back. But this wasn't a poof!-he-gone situation. He was phased out until he positively played himself out of a job. It's fair to ask whether the judgement going into Opening Day was that mistaken, and it's fair to question how long you go until you pull the plug. But I think they are separate matters. My own guess is that there was a conviction within the FO that if Wallner went to AAA, he wasn't coming back. So they wanted to make really, really sure.

It's not the same thing, but the title of this article is so excellent, and it reminds me of this.

I might have been clearer that my first paragraph was intended to explain why Pineda isn't a better alternative to Caratini and Jackson. The remainder of the post was back to the topic of the article.

There's a reason Pereda never had a MLB at bat until a day before his 28th birthday. His career OPS+ is 90 in very light duty, and there is a good argument even that level of offensive output isn't sustainable if he were a full-timer. Catchers with a bat like Jeffers' do not grow on trees. The QO is an overpay but that's the failure tax they keep paying (Caratini, Vazquez before him) for having developed no worthwhile starting catcher since Jeffers himself.

Almost exactly a year ago I addressed this mistaken point of view that comes from attempting to mind-read rather than accept the man at his word. Why would a pitcher tell his agent to "work on some things" to bring about a reunion with a manager he "was not a fan of"? Makes no sense. /edit - I see a couple of other posters addressed this more or less the same way.

Wallner was drafted late in the '16 draft but didn't sign. There's a term for that, draft and follow. When he did sign in '19 it was as a late first-rounder (the Twins took the immortal Keoni Cavaco higher up in the round).

"Or"?

Concur. Gotta find a spot for him. He's precisely the kind of player that typical HoFs miss out on. Pariahs? Gotta give Tommy Herr a bit of consideration. Heh, I just got done saying I wouldn't quibble. Consider these to be extensions. 😁

The whole concept is great. It gets away from baseball's tendency to degrade its own best players in a futile attempt to rank dozens and dozens of players. It implicitly accepts a "big HoF" rather than only an exclusive one, by saying that "Fame" can take many forms - for what reason does this player deserve to be remembered? Another aspect of any HoF is whether it is meant to "recognize" fame, or to "confer it," and this kind of exercise allows for both. which is what I support (the addition of Negro Leagues players in Cooperstown is an example of conferring fame on people who have been excluded and forgotten). I wouldn't quibble with a single choice, in Cody's articles or in your list here. It's a chance to celebrate the best that this franchise has to offer. What's not to like about that?

I'm not going to research it but my recollection is that Terry Ryan embraced the phrase, if not actually coined it, and he resigned not too long afterward. That would be taking responsibility, unless I'm mistaken in what I remember. I'm going to guess that research into the FO's comments about Paul Molitor when they came on board, compared to whatever they said when they finally fired him and brought in their own managerial choice, could contain some self-contradictions, but again it's not my research project and my plate's full enough at the moment.

Remember that guy from Ferris Bueller's Day Off? Not Ferris, but his friend? The guy who had a long neck, and sounded like Jim Backus? How come he's pitching in the World Series for Milwaukee?

This post aged well.

And we'll see you tomorrow night.

False positive on him, too.