ashbury

Lefty reliever alert! Diamondbacks just DFAed Joe Jacques to make room for Puk. Should we grab him? Just kidding. He looks terrible.

You use the word "could" in two different ways in one sentence, one slightly more probable than the other. If you manage to score dinner with the man, please consider finding a way I can tag along too.

Gosh darn it all to flipping heck. I figured out my main mistake from yesterday and tried again.. I think I'm really close to answering this question by using Stathead, but now we may have a slight problem with definitions, or possibly software bugs, or both In several cases, Margot has come into the game as a pinch-hitter, but then stayed in as the defensive replacement. When I ask Stathead for a streak and specify pinch-hitting appearances, it seems that it only looks at games where the hitter came in and then was immediately replaced the next inning (most often for the pitcher, historically). For anyone who's paid for Stathead, this link may give you my starting point and let you experiment. For almost everyone else probably, you can have a look at the results here. But to summarize: the player with the longest hitless streak when "strictly" pinch-hitting is Charlie Gilbert, a 1940s journeyman who flailed his way through 50 fruitless attempts. Or maybe it was 57 - there could be a bug in the database or the software that presents itself. Oh goody, another bug report to send to my good friends there. (It's a SABR project and I do like to support it every way I can.) So maybe Charlie Gilbert, maybe not, but our good friend Margot is likely very far from setting any all-time records. Second on the list is Mike Mordecai from 1997 to 2000, playing for Atlanta and Montreal, with 40 hitless appearances. Our other good friend Billy Martin shows up high in this list too, at 33 failures spread across 1950 through 1961. You know, the more I look at this, the less I trust the results - would the Yankees have kept trying him so many times? I'll have to get back to y'all on this; it will likely take days and I know you're all waiting breathlessly. 😀

If the dying man's explicit instructions included, "and whatever else you do, make sure you trigger serious cash flow problems before the end of the season," I might absolve the GM of blame. 😀 Oh man. Now you've given me the heebie jeebies at the thought of Dave St. Peter scheduling an off-the-cuff press conference to discuss the trade deadline. "Due to the deadbeat fans this franchise has managed to attract like vermin to a rotting... well, I mean, our fans are bad, and we're fine, let me just leave it at that. It's not our fault, but we're looking to trim a couple million in payroll. Any GMs out there looking for a washed-up backup infielder? Oh, did I mention the broadcast situation is very much in flux, still? The fans need to come to the ballpark and watch a couple games in person, instead of sitting on their fat wallets watching the boob tube, I'm trying to say."

Okay, but the dropoff of what you get in return is pretty sharp, once you place the Untouchable tag on about 5 players we all can name. I'm happy to cash Tanner Schobel in for something, but to get a real difference maker is going to take more than even a package of 5 Tanner Schobels or his equivalent. I hope our FO surprises me.

I tried to tease this information out from b-r.com's Stathead tool, but misused it or something because I never came up with anything close to what I was asking. Did you find this at some website, or have a good way of doing the primary research yourself?

If Preller himself didn't take the step, there has to be some drone in the organization with "risk assessment" in their job title, who should have suggested setting up a line of credit, so as to avert a dire situation that results in a scramble. But I suppose that is 20/20 hindsight. (Which a risk assessment drone on the payroll is supposed to avoid, but I repeat myself.)

I see a trenchant point made, down in the comments section of that post from 9 months ago: "How does Preller still have a job?" 😀

For a team with post-season pretensions, we sure have a lot of dead wood and/or underperforming youth.

Have you seen some of that contact? Just going from memory, those weak grounders don't look like the kind of drives that earn the average ballplayer a BABIP around .300. Possibly my memory is selective and/or my sample is skewed.

My time horizon where it comes to the White Sox is longer than my expected remaining lifespan, sonny. 😀

Isn't that something that would get a GM (or whatever title-inflated name is given) fired? A. J. Preller seems to be gainfully employed by the Padres still. But I don't keep up with the news.

I'm not sending any prospects that help the White Sox. Schobel, sure, okay, I don't see him as a help. He has some trade value, but not a difference maker. Except, I'm not spending Schobel on someone like Paxton.

Not only that, but they had been running with 21 position players and only 19 pitchers. That's a very unusual ratio in this day and age. It was pretty much going to have to be a hitter that made room for Brock Stewart.

This was an underrated headline that I somehow missed.

Yes we all saw that. Passan is a good read but he doesn't say anything here to identify it as anything other than his own analysis; it happens to coincide with my own picture of things although that doesn't matter. But the OP here talked about the team making "statements" in contrast to keeping their "mouths shut". Are there any links to actual "statements" from FalVine's open mouth? Or Rocco's? Or even Associate GM Carlos Correa's?

Lee would bring back a haul in trade. His major league stats would be a blip to any FO, especially given the rapid learning curve he's demonstrated at every level in the minors. We'd be chumps to trade Lee for anything other than blue-chip starting pitching with lots of years of control. Came here to say that last part. The article is about whom to move if the Twins do pull off a deadline deal, i.e. who has some trade value while freeing up a 40-man spot. My vote would be Severino - a team with pitching to spare probably has needs on offense (otherwise wouldn't they be in the playoff hunt?), and maybe one of them sees the guy as a productive bat even if he's limited to DH. Maybe Henriquez has a tiny bit of trade value and could play the 2024 Brian Duensing "sweetener" role for every imagined trade. But now of course we're discussing every imaginable trade. 😀

Ladies and gentlemen, Cole Sands: Phillies killer.

b-r.com keeps track of that for us too: https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/MIN/2024-pitching.shtml#all_players_reliever_pitching Will it surprise you to know that Thielbar leads the team in percentage of runners who score, at 57%? (Majors-wide it's 33%. and no one in the Twins bullpen is below this figure except Alcala and Stewart.) Sands has had only 9 runners on base when he's come in, and allowed 4 to score, so that's not a good percentage but in sheer numbers it doesn't make up very much of his resume one way or the other, except to reinforce my belief that he's okay but nothing special this year; if they replaced him it would likely be with someone worse. And he could improve. Sure. Why not. Thanks for the compliment.

No one does well with 2-strike counts. Across the majors, there's a collective .509 OPS when the count reaches that point. Our Twins as a whole do slightly better at .553. Julien is a bit below par at .460; Kepler, Margot and Kirilloff have all done worse. But no question, a trend of backwards Ks is maddening.

Oh good grief. Totally ninjaed.

I can't bear to watch this game live via mlb.tv, but monitoring occasionally via MLB Gameday, I can only think of this: I. Also. Like. To. Live. Dangerously. /edit - grievously ninjaed. I can't bear to keep up with game threads on a game like this either.

You mentioned Cole Sands in reference to low leverage, which immediately reminded me of USAFChief's principle that in modern bullpen usage there are no low-leverage arms. However, I checked the numbers, and if there is a poster child for correct usage, Sands is it. baseball-reference.com provides a "Leverage" category in its splits page (for team or for player). By definition, a lot of innings by starting pitchers qualify as low leverage and I am not going to go into that. But if you rank Twins pitchers by batters faced (PA) in low leverage situations, Sands is behind only Ryan/Lopez/Ober/Paddack. When the game is out of hand or safely put away, Sands is the arm Rocco prefers to go to. (Funderburk and Jay Jackson rank highly too, and now they are gone.) With medium or high leverage, Sands drops behind Duran/Jax/Alcala in batters faced. And the clincher for me is this: when you slice and dice the numbers for Sands, the pattern of results is stark: Low Leverage: 127 PA, .497 OPS Medium Leverage: 29 PA, .661 OPS High Leverage: 30 PA, .798 OPS Yes, this is Small Sample Size. I would not stake a lot on this. But the trend is consistent with Sands being used correctly. .798 OPS is losing baseball (from the pitcher's perspective). I am happy for Sands that he is putting together a nice season. But I don't trust him in an important role and I would not call him a top setup man. It seems that Rocco prefers to avoid such a role for Sands except when the bullpen is otherwise depleted.

Philly would have presented him with a bigger challenge.

I said you could look it up. I didn't expect anyone would actually do it.