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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    You are correct but I think the family's installing Joe as "Executive Chair" obscures that uncle Jim Pohlad still controls things from the very top. It's merely speculation on my part, but what I've read suggests that it's a classic case of nepotism where a relative is given operational control but with significant guardrails put in place by the elder generation. I really believe the budget cuts were forced on Joe, who had no choice but to force them on FalVine. I doubt Joe had final say on the current teevee decisions either. It's not like Joe has this string of business successes to his name. He ran a broadcast enterprise into the ground, if I recall correctly. To whatever extent this current situation is entirely Joe's doing, it looks like "business as usual" for the young-ish man*, with the family giving him second and maybe third chances, that we'll have to suffer through if current results are any guide. It's fine to address your open letter to Joe; he'll just refer it to his uncle anyway. Quick, quick: look at Jim Pohlad's Wikipedia page. While fact-checking myself a little, I noticed that some joker (not me, I swear) edited it on April 20 to say "James Pohlad (born March 10, 1953)[1] is a cheap American businessman who...". LOL. Wonder how much longer it will stay up. * an article I looked up had him as a 40-year old in late 2022. There's a chance he's even older than that, by now. 😀
  2. ashbury
    At the moment, the only pitchers on the 26-man roster whose numbers look worse than league-average are Thielbar, who got rocked early but may have sorted himself out, Paddack who is a starter, and Okert who is also a lefty. When the righty Topa is done with his rehab stint, the pitcher who at the moment I would see as the best choice for assignment to St Paul is ... Justin Topa himself. FangRaphs' roster display surprisingly shows him as still having minor-league options. The only question is whether the FO would do that, after having traded for him, and the other major-league piece in that trade having already proven to be a bust. But I'd let Topa prove himself at AAA until a roster opening occurs, which it inevitably will.
  3. ashbury
    Lights went out in the clubhouse when he was dressing for the game.
  4. ashbury
    A "little stumble" by Julien on the DP ball could have cost against a better opponent.
  5. ashbury
    Jay Jackson is earning $1.3M this season, plus a $200K buyout for the club option on 2025. Topa is earning only $1.25M. You didn't say it had to be a good argument. 😀
  6. ashbury
    I would like to see a lot less aggregation of the data. Dividing into equal thirds is convenient for making tables, but may obscure where the real action is, or where the breakpoints between success and failure lie. Maybe the ideal launch angle is near the center of that 2-25 degree "bucket", or maybe it's closer to one end than the other. Conversely (somewhat), maybe the really good angles are more prevalent, because major league batters are, you know, good at their jobs, and more of the buckets would demonstrate that. A table broken down into buckets of a single degree might be overkill, but I wouldn't assume that to be the case until I saw it. True, there is a risk of "small sample size" if you have too many buckets, but with n=20000 or so I don't worry too much about that, and one can eyeball where the anomalies start to show up and decide that the right level of aggregation is 3 degrees or whatever, to smooth out the presentation of data. Another thing is that when you have two metrics for success (OBP and SLG here), it's possible that the peaks for each occur at very different launch angles. Combining into 3 buckets obscures this possibility. Seeing the disaggregated data is a better guide for where the aggregation should take place, than simply equalizing all the buckets. Said another way, you can always aggregate data if it's too finely divided, but you can't easily go the other way.
  7. ashbury
    Oh, good point, I forgot about there being players on the 60-day. That would be a clear use for the spot.
  8. ashbury
    An aspect of the move I didn't notice being discussed it that it opens up a spot on the 40-man roster, which would not be the case had they optioned one of the younger players. The 26-man active roster is full at the moment, but next time there is an opening, might they add someone who currently isn't on the 40? Waiver-wire pickup, or is there someone in the minors who is making the case for a promotion? (I count 20 pitchers and 19 position players, so my bet would be a pitcher to take the empty spot eventually.)
  9. ashbury
    Dang it, the TD user interface did it again and let me double-post.
  10. ashbury
    Both Farmer and Margot have more than 5 years of major league service time, and by MLB rules can not be sent to the minors without their permission (which I doubt either would offer) even if they have minor league options remaining (I think they both might).
  11. ashbury
    Piker. I want to suck the marrow from their bones, and grind their skulls to powder. To carve those bones into flutes for Twins fans' children to play with. To tear down their cities, blacken their sky, sow their ground with salt! To completely and utter erase them!
  12. ashbury
    He still has time and room to grow, but right now he's like the second coming of Nick Gordon; both profile best in LF but haven't shown enough with the bat to excel there. As first-round draft picks, they took slightly different paths but have somehow converged, for me anyway.
  13. ashbury
    You glided past the equally subjective "fast approaching." I'm not saying he's there yet. He's playable at 2B for the time being, so long as his bat remains playable. He's like a power-hitting Donovan Solano, who is currently toiling at AAA in El Paso and not really excelling so far; Polanco is still a step up from Solano, assuming the bat warms up from a cold April. Don't misunderstand, Polanco has always been a sentimental favorite for me and I kept hoping they could find one missing tweak to his game that would let his arm suffice at SS. But it's not just the arm anymore; it was painful watching a batted ball clank off his chest in the post-season when he was pressed into emergency duty at 3B when Royce Lewis was injured. There was also a less-than-stellar play on a batted ball when he was at 2B later. I have no doubt 29 GMs around the majors noticed that in October too. Me moreso than you., my friend, but you are kind. 😀 Man, what I'd give to go back and be Polanco's age again, and resume being a terrible, terrible right fielder in slow-pitch. I think this gets it backward. To whatever degree both teams thought that DeSclafani was dead money, you need to subtract the $4M, not add it. The Giants are paying Disco $6M not to pitch for them, the Mariners are paying $2M for the same services, and the Twins took the Mariners off the hook for the remaining $4M. In effect, and again only if you saw the pitcher as worthless, the Mariners are paying Polanco $6.5M.
  14. ashbury
    It's even less obfuscated than you make it. Castro is a switch-hitter. Santana is a switch-hitter. There. Mystery solved. The Twins are playing an aggressive strategy of intra-game Platoon Ball, brought to an extreme by the absence of Correa, and constrained only by the league's 13-player roster limit. I'd have to do more research than I want to, to back up my guess that we haven't seen the likes of this in many, many seasons.
  15. ashbury
    Polanco has always been defensively challenged due to his arm, and he's fast approaching the end of his useful shelf-life anywhere at all on the diamond. Unless they would use him as a full-time DH, it would have been hard to find him enough plate appearances this year. He was the right one to move. I'm unimpressed by the return the FO managed to get, and expected him to be packaged with a pitching prospect for an established or MLB-ready starting pitcher, but apparently all the other FOs saw the same player in Jorge that ours did.
  16. ashbury
    I was still working on my post when yours showed up, so I just want to point out that the Twins seem to be taking this principle to a much greater extreme than any other team I have noticed. Their platoon bat at second base leads the team in plate appearances.
  17. ashbury
    Julien has played in every game and leads the Twins in plate appearances. Castro has a streak of complete games due only to Correa's injury. Santana... well, Rocco seems to believe in Santana, and at the moment he's getting results. By such measure, no one on the Twins is playing full time. Julien ranks 119th in the majors in plate appearances. Rocco and the analytics team have worked out some kind of 3-D chess strategy with their platoons, and color me skeptical. But singling out Julien or Castro or Santana obscures what's going on.
  18. ashbury
    10 or 15 more weeks like this past one should put us in good position for a wild card at least.
  19. ashbury
    Fighting off tough two-strike pitches doesn't seem to be something they taught him in the minors. Maybe because there aren't as many tough two-strike pitches down there. It's a frustrating gap in an otherwise promising set of skills.
  20. ashbury
    If adding Duran would make him the 14th pitcher, I don't think league rules allow that. Probably the question concerns Correa when he comes back.
  21. ashbury
    Buxton would have scored on that one.
  22. ashbury
    "Flattery will get you nowhere?"
  23. ashbury
    I used to call him Crashbury here, until he got a job with a financial firm.
  24. ashbury
    Sassbury, more like.
  25. ashbury
    The last five are mere hearsay brought by women whom I barely even know.
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