ashbury

Varland's OPS-against is almost as low as OUTman's OPS-for. Imagine a pitcher who turns the average hitter practically into James Outman. Yes, it means something. 😁 Would you be curious what SWR's OPS-against is? 😁 He turns the average hitter into Juan Soto.

Details, details.

I'm partial to OPS-against, just as I like OPS for batters as a quick measure. Correlates well to run scoring, normalizes quicker over a season than ERA. Varland's OPS-against is .503.

Justin Lawrence. 2/3 inning, zero earned runs. All he does is win, baby.

The scouting I look at (OOTP, I know, I know) thinks his fundamentals in left field could be pretty good. Another Austin Martin with a little better power and a little worse eye for drawing walks, and similar defense or (maybe?) even a little better range if given the chance? Beats me. Anyway at 1B it suggests he could become pretty good eventually, but would be rough if put there right now. If somebody has access to other 20-80 scale scouting reports, from reputable scouts, on things like range and arm strength, I'd love to know. I think they're mostly behind paywalls.

They should get credit for their effort, because I know no one is intentionally trying to fail. But if you are flipping coins, or playing some other chance-based games, you can get anomalous results such as seen above, with a string of low-offensive output that just happens to scratch across a run. I don't believe baseball is anything like coin-flipping, but you can use probability methods to make sense of a lot in the game. Neither do I think the Twins hitters have a mystical ability to Try Real Hard when facing a shutout and get that all-important tally across the plate to make the final score 5-1. They try real hard all the time - for all the good it does them in many of these cases. The chips fall where they may and the spreadsheets of results are not tidy. As for sequencing... I did a bit of checking, details which I won't bore you with except in summary, to say, yep, sequencing seems the likeliest cause. OPS generally correlates very strongly with run scoring, but even at a team level it takes a long time for it not to be "small sample." Right now the Twins are scoring runs at a much higher rate per game than last season, even with OPS still in that same range as last year - while at the same time, compared to two seasons ago they're scoring at about the same rate but based on a much lower OPS. IOW the last two seasons line up like someone might expect, OPS to R/G, while this year's an outlier so far. Meanwhile league-wide the correlation remains steady across the three seasons. This season's runs per game across the majors is up a tiny, tiny bit, on slightly lower aggregate OPS - perhaps due entirely to the anomaly in scoring by our Twins. Asking whether productive sequencing can persist amounts to the "does clutch hitting exist?" argument, and I don't want to provoke a lengthy back and forth but will put my chips on the "not likely to persist long-term" side. Maybe the hitting coaches found the magic elixir but I doubt it. Even if sequencing goes back to normal for the rest of the season, 2026 may end up with slightly high run scoring compared to similar other team OPSes - I don't believe "luck" (which I think is the wrong term to use anyway) evens out, merely regresses to some mean eventually. Wallner, I believe, is a different story than this team-wide sequencing effect for the Twins. I think opposing pitchers know how to pitch to him. Bases empty, or even with runners but a large lead (or deficit), he can't really hurt them. So they give him pitches that give him a chance to park one over the fence but also a greater chance of an out, when he can't hurt them, and his stats (which he's NOT intentionally padding) go up in those cases, and make you think he is producing when it counts. But, by this theory, he somehow can't compensate enough for the different way he's pitched when the chips are down. (I'm not enough of a scout or pitching/hitting coach to describe what the pitchers are doing, or what Wallner is failing to do.) Again, that's a lengthy discussion that I don't plan to defend again, merely putting down explicitly as my view for the sake of this little dialog. Good stuff.

A game like today certainly works toward cementing the first base argument for the present.

It's true that 1B is a place where offensive production is paramount, and HR is one of the best ways to accomplish that. Still, if the choice is how to deploy 4 hitters among the infield position, I'd put the shakiest glove at 1B. Most of the plays that come to 1B are intended to be catchable; that's not the intent of the batter, for the other 3 infield positions.

Nice to see Buxton with a base hit to lead off the bottom of the first. That always gives his team a chance to score!

I smell a "Josh Bell for SS" campaign about to commence.

Royce Lewis at 1B and Luke Keaschall at 2B kind of boggles my mind, though. Luke seems like the one to just stand there and take the balls that are thrown to him.

Among the choices given.... looking at their fielding fundamentals, Keaschall seems destined for first base (or a corner outfield spot). Culpepper seems head and shoulders above both Lewis and Lee in the tools needed for the shortstop role. Between those remaining two, I don't see enough difference in aspects of their defensive game to differentiate one as clearly the 3B or the 2B. Lewis before the demotion seemed to have elevated himself to an average 3B, and Lee's not quite at the same level statistically (granting that the fielding stats I look at don;'t mean terribly much), so by default I'd install Lee at 2B and see how it all goes, but it's really a coin flip.

What if he was bad at relieving, though? The cash the team just received by trading him to Toronto while his value is still high goes out the window! 😁

Depends on how you define top prospect, but the off-season after he was drafted the MLB ranking had him 7th among all players, 2nd among pitchers, in the Mets system.

6'2", 240 pounds. Once Smith has gotten a head of steam, he may not be fast but I would not want to stand in his way. His running style in the video could be described as "earnest."

It feels misleading to me. 1) The Rays are having a good season. Their run-scoring is about the same as the Twins. They've been shut out 3 times. But they've been held to 1 run only five times. Our Twins have been shut out just once, but they've scored 1 run ten times. Not much difference in win probability, 0 versus 1 run. The Rays happened to pitch a shutout one of the times I mentioned, the Twins won none of their 1-run offense games, "as expected". Bottom line, there's not much difference in scoring a run versus not, if we're looking at shutouts only. 1a) Atlanta is right up at the top with the Nationals and Dodgers, in runs scored. They've been shut out five times this season, and scored 1 run five other times. Lost 'em all, "as expected." As for the Nationals and Dodgerts, two shutouts and six 1-run games, for each of them - no wins. Anyway, none of these offenses have demonstrated the same kind of futility as often as our Twins have. To be "impressive", I'd want to see the Twins be on more of a par with the big boys, in avoiding the no-chance-to-win games. 2) The eye test tells me this is just not a reliable offense. I realize their runs per game are a titch above league average. They racks up runs, like any team does, when the opposition is weak in some way. But it "feels" to me like it's more of a factor with this team than average. The eye test also tells me a lot of times they score meaningless runs to avert the shutout; that's hard to define a metric for and I certainly don't know how. It's perplexing that now and then they'll score against top opposing pitchers, and I don't know how to separate out "good pitcher having a bad day" versus "good pitcher unable to shut our unstoppable guys down," either.

He's responding tongue-in-cheek to my joke about it amounting to a three-team trade. Or am I joking? 😁

Full circle would have been back to the Mets, no? (Or else Kempner HS in Sugar Land, TX, but when's the last time you saw a high school make a significant trade?) Here's my eccentric report in another thread thirty minutes ago: Breaking news: BLOCKBUSTER THREE-TEAM TRADE Blue Jays receive Simeon Woods Richardson Twins receive Justin Lawrence Pirates receive cash Initial speculation has Pittsburgh being the big winner in this transaction. More on this exciting development as we learn about it!

The commentary? Yes. The actual pieces moving? No joke. SWR is reported going to Toronto for cash. Unless the difference is substantial, the money Minnesota sent to Pittsburgh is (in effect) Toronto money. https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2026/06/twins-to-trade-simeon-woods-richardson-to-blue-jays.html

Breaking news: BLOCKBUSTER THREE-TEAM TRADE Blue Jays receive Simeon Woods Richardson Twins receive Justin Lawrence Pirates receive cash Initial speculation has Pittsburgh being the big winner in this transaction. More on this exciting development as we learn about it!

Hit batsmen.

Tune In Again to tomorrow's game thread to find out!!!

I was thinking merely of an alternative verb when I saw the headline, but making it a game is the next step.