ashbury

The Dwight meme, hopefully, revealed the tongue-in-cheek humor that was intended, namely that our team invested scarce resources in a player no other team wanted.

Advanced analytics seem to indicate that he has a 1.03 ERA at AAA Reno. The Twins FO wants to prove they're not to be trifled with in the bleeding-edge tech areas.

False. The Twins paid good money for him just last off-season.

I don't need to speak for the panel, but because you asked them specifically about a "moment," and because I put a fair amount of work into it, I'll still provide this link to my own take(s) at the time: You might decide it's impossible to pick one favorite moment.

We need a Duensing, too. Something, something, trade sweetener, something, PROFIT!!!!

Soccer has "stoppage time" at the referee's discretion to take into account instances where play stopped for injury etc.

What are your thoughts on Dug Mintkayvitch?

Be careful what you wish for. He's put up good stats since he's been here but built on a foundation of .207 BABIP. Increase the BABIP by 50% to a more normal proportion, watch the OPS-against increase by 50% as a consequence, and watch the success turn into more mediocrity for this bullpen. Or maybe he could, you know, continue to defy the odds. The present high strikeout rate does suggest he's less susceptible to BABIP fluctuations. Can he keep that up? His time at Tampa Bay doesn't suggest so.

Not everyone is worth trading a valuable pitcher for, either. I was always of the opinion that SWR would be the key to the trade. If you trade away current pitching, you need either current pitching or even better future pitching in return. You can always find a team willing to trade you a bat for your good pitcher. SWR didn't develop the way the Twins expected him to, and Martin didn't establish any important but unanticipated tools such as power or shortstop ability. So for me the trade is a failure.

The manager chose to use kid gloves, as one does with fragile items.

This is a game thread so I was just joshing around a little. Yes, batting advice can't be taken to extremes in any direction and no one means it that way. "Be aggressive and wait for your pitch." 😁

Lewis is hard to predict. But a strikeout looking, to end today's game with a runner in scoring position, probably held a prominent location on everyone's bingo card.

This didn't age well.

Convert him to a starter and hope he becomes our #1. Then he can be:

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.