ashbury

By the numbers you might think this Twins offense is top-8 based on a nice runs per game that has been boosted in recent weeks. But then they face a good pitcher not having an off-night, and they put up two runs in six innings, and none in the four innings of relief they faced including a 10th inning gift runner at second. They run up the score when a good pitcher has a bad game, or against pitchers who don't belong in the majors in the first place. And, if they make the playoffs, guess what kind of pitchers they don't face very often? Despite the potential we've been seeing for years, this team still doesn't know how to shift strategy and "find a way" against a pitcher who is making his pitches. Yesterday they stuck with Plan A, apparently, and scored one homer for two runs as a result. I don't have a specific remedy to offer but that's the job of the batting coaches, and probably the others involved in strategy.

I don't know.

Tonight our batters face a very tough opponent in Logan Gilbert. I wish the Twins had traded Polanco for Gilbert last off-season when I suggested it, instead of Desclafani. No way the Mariners were trading Gilbert for any conceivable price I would agree to, and certainly not for Jorge alone.

Glad to see we've got a game thread for tomorrow already up. 😀

Twins batters are indeed getting hit a lot, leading the majors or close to it. But their pitchers are around the middle of the pack for hit batsmen, so it's not like they're shying away from pitching inside. I'm not in favor of retaliation in most cases.

So you have had, how many, days to research this important topic and come back to us empty-handed?

Why does Vazquez's chest protector have green on it?

This article would be tongue-in-cheek except I have it on good authority that Lou Hennessy had an emergency glossectomy performed several months ago.

We gotta protect Willi Castro from crazy swings at changeups!

Stop rotating your head and you'll notice I'm just covering all the bases. 😀

Yeah, but that 20-9 game in St Paul last Sunday is a little difficult to look past.

Apparently the talent evaluators aren't bothered by the three home runs in his final two AAA starts. This is always a case where I don't bother trying to form an independent opinion. His overall stats look good enough this year and if the guys who earn a living watching players say he's ready, I'm not going to argue against, nor second guess if he lays an egg his first try in the majors. I'm just a fan.

Imagine Trevor Bauer saying something like the following, 50 years from now. I said I would never want to do it again.* I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and say, ‘The rough sex guy can’t eat here.’ I would go to a hotel and they’d say, ‘the rough sex guy can’t stay here.’ We went to a country club for a welcome home dinner for the team and they pointed me out with the R-S words, ‘he can’t come in here.’ The owner marched the whole team out. … Finally, they let me in there and he said, ‘We’re going to go eat hamburgers. We’ll go where we’re wanted.’ Quite the trail-blazing pioneer, eh? * paraphrasing Reggie Jackson's comments the other day about Birmingham, of course

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/23/sport/trevor-bauer-woman-charged-fraud-spt/index.html He has had multiple accusers. This one is named Darcy Adanna Esemonu. There is also a Lindsey Hill, who as far as I know is not involved in legal proceedings now.

Wonder which AAA team has the highest payroll this year?

Looks like Jackson is accepting the minor league assignment. No surprise, he'd have to be pretty mad at the team to take a pay cut to play somewhere else. Not that $1.3M (plus the $200K buyout) the Twins are on the hook for is that huge, but money is money and the difference is a lot to walk away from.

If the complaint is that defense isn't included, tell me a defensive stat that everyone agrees with, and we can improve WPA by using that. To the degree that the individual events correspond to what the fan experiences, I think WPA usually stacks up pretty well. The batter gets credit for a base hit. He loses credit for a strikeout. A strikeout to end the inning with runners on base and a close score, well, don't we groan when that happens? Adding them all up during a game tells one story, listing individual numbers tells another - but for those who call it a garbage stat, nothing TD does will satisfy them. (Individual events will almost always favor the batters, won't they?) Margot getting thrown out at third base to give Royce Lewis an undeserved additional negative score for what should have been a fly out is just noise in the system, by comparison. That kind of stuff evens out during the course of a long season. But people want to throw it all out instead of looking for the information that does get imparted.

And that seems to be the core of the argument against WPA. "What if something else had happened?" As the game actually played out, the Twins scored a run in the top of the first, for which the batters got suitable credit (surely you agree that scoring the first run in a game brings a significant advantage), and then Ober gave away that advantage with a home run in the bottom of that inning. The hitters put the game away, for all intents and purposes, in the top of the second. Ober still gave up a home run in the bottom of that inning too, which was much less damaging, and from there on he was lights out - but by that point they would have likely won (96 times out 100, with that lead, according to b-r.com's tally) even if he or some relievers who followed had been less effective. Bailey Ober had a fine game. But the hitters won it, and during the brief period the game was still in doubt, Ober was not effective at the job of holding the lead. "What if those hitters hadn't scored in the top of the second? What if the big inning had been in the top of the ninth?" Different, non-existent ballgames, those. It's not Ober's "fault" that he had little opportunity to affect the winning outcome, but that first inning wasn't a plus. I'm not one to dwell on "clutch" performances too much, but to whatever degree major leaguers are clutch, WPA may reflect it. Joey Gallo last year had a negative WPA despite positive WAR, because the stats that feed WAR seemed to come only when the team was already comfortably ahead - and that seemed to agree with the eye test of all of us who disliked having him in the lineup. I'm not going to cast aspersions at Ober now, but merely point out that in this one game, his performance got better when the game was not tight anymore; other games, Ober has done well when it counted. Pablo pitched his masterpiece on Sunday under much tighter circumstances, clinging to a 1-run lead for six of his eight innings, and did better by surrendering zero runs, not two. WPA reflects all of that too. The batters other than Buxton (and Castro and Correa to a degree) didn't win that game, Lopez (to whatever degree we assign anything to one person) did - three runs by the offense loses more times than not. One final observation, WPA might reflect the fan's mood as the game progresses. I enjoyed my afternoon in the sun in Oakland in a much different, more relaxed, way with that early lead than if it had been a tight ballgame. The much-maligned Manuel Margot gave me that luxury as a fan, and he deserves the WPA he earned. WPA reflects the game, as it actually went, better than the box score and rhetorical arguments do. Does the stat have flaws? Yes! Is it the one ultimate stat that tells us how good a player is? Not at all! But criticizing it for not doing things it's not designed to, isn't any more fair than me criticizing RBIs because they don't include defense. Someone else called it a garbage stat, not you, I believe. That's no way to start a reasoned discussion.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with what you said leading up to this, what you say here in conclusion seems exactly what the original objectors disagree with.

Did you watch the game, or merely read the box score?

No, no isn't. 😊

Are we going to do this every night? WPA is not a garbage stat. You're not going to read what I say, so I'll leave it at this: WPA is not measuring what you apparently want it to measure. It addresses "why did the team win? (or lose?)". Not "who had a good game?" There are plenty of other stats for the latter. Often the two forms of question line up; when they don't, there is insight to be had as to why not.

Carlos didn't tag up to go to second, though. Running ourselves out of an inning.

Oh Margot! Know thyself.