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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    Limbo's never good. That which ye do, do quickly.
  2. ashbury
    Yes!!! Do it before the Dodgers change their minds!!!
  3. ashbury
    In Wallner's tenure with the Twins, they have been at or above league average in OBP every season. Really, the problem is just that 580 PA is still short of a full-time season's worth. The Yankees alone had 5 players with more PA than that, in 2024. Give Wallner the 713 PA that Soto had this past season, and he'd probably come close to Soto's 109 RBI.
  4. ashbury
    Get ready for a surprise when you find out how frequently relief pitchers are called on to appear in games. 😀
  5. ashbury
    Fantastic lottery ticket! I'm always leery of going against LA's player evaluation machine (did we just trade them the next Luis Gil?), but even if Cartaya's chances of becoming a star are lower than before, he's still a guy who kind of held his own in AAA at age 22. Assuming the glove is OK behind the plate, he'll be a useful major league catcher in a year or two. It costs a 40-man spot, but other than that, the price seems right.
  6. ashbury
    I'm a little surprised how heavily you weight trade value, given the one-line summary "most indispensable to fulfilling the vision of building a champion." (I do see in your first article in the series the longer explanation, in which you mention it as one of the factors.) Another poster mentions BTV, which basically computes a dollar value a player brings on the field and subtracts his contract. Thus, every contract signed by the team for a player above major-league minimum is a drag on the value of the team's portfolio of assets relative to the player's on-field contributions. Is it the position that the team should strive for a $26M payroll, give or take, and every dollar spent above that harms the vision of building a champion? What if you had a roster of 25 good young players with championship aspirations, all making the minimum, and then you went out and as a finishing touch signed a Juan Soto for $100M a season, well above even his market value? You wouldn't be able to trade Soto at that salary. Did you just tank the team's chances with this acquisition, with a payroll now of $125M? I think (admittedly fanciful) edge cases like that help sharpen the view of how money affects the building of a champion. Unlike young regulars or prospects, even one as good as Walker Jenkins, Correa's value to building that champion does not lie in his trade value. If they trade Correa, it means something has gone very very wrong and the window for championship contention is closed.
  7. ashbury
    Not signed by Falvey either. That was Terry Ryan's doing.
  8. ashbury
    Comps are an underrated form of analytics today and were used for decades before Bill James ("he looks like a young Joe Dimaggio"). Thank you for these insights.
  9. ashbury
    There is footage of Royce "Hopalong" Lewis rounding second after pulling a quadriceps. Close enough?
  10. ashbury
    A completed sale by Opening Day, as speculated, still means no major moves until the ink is dry. Trade deadline, though? Hmmm...
  11. ashbury
    Okay, but that is a non-answer on his part, that doesn't address what we actually want to know. Others have done this and probably better, but here's my synopsis. At the end of the season, the Twins shed the salary obligations of DeSclafani ($4M since other teams were paying part of his $12M), Kepler ($10M), Santana ($5M), Farmer ($6M), and Thielbar ($3M). Weighing against that, for 2025, Pablo Lopez's salary goes up from $8M to $21M. Paddack goes up from $2.5M to $7.5M. Correa goes up from $32M to $36M. And then you have players in arbitration who'll get pay raises: Castro, Jeffers, Ober, Ryan, Jax, Larnach, Lewis, Duran, Alcala, Topa, Tonkin - that's a lot of small numbers and I don't know the arbitration outcomes, but the sum combines to be significant because some good players are getting their paydays. Doing nothing, the FO still faces a higher payroll. Ownership says there won't be lower payroll, but carefully avoids saying the obvious. I don't see where anyone here was taking this opposite tack, either. Well I hope not. You're a good poster here. I'm sorry that my response looked too personally harsh.
  12. ashbury
    Source? All I could find was silence all-around.
  13. ashbury
    I give "young" Joe Pohlad (who is older than any of my adult children) credit for learning not to say the quiet part out loud. He got a lot of blowback from using business-speak to refer to "right-sizing", and since then has clammed up about money. In a very pointed interview by Aaron Gleeman, Joe was pressed on matters concerning payroll. When Aaron speculated that revenue was down in 2024 and asked what impact that would have on payroll, Joe gave the correct answer in terms of PR: "I'm not going to get into payroll right now." If he had something positive to say, such as "a decline in revenue won't push payroll downward," he would have grabbed that opportunity to say it. The most optimistic view is total payroll remains unchanged. But some salaries have gone up year over year, and the departures of Kepler and Santana don't make up for that. In light of Joe's non-statement, I think the onus is on those who believe "salary does not need to be cleared" in the form of Paddack, Vazquez, and Castro, to give some evidence why. An article like this one on what shape a salary dump of Paddack would look like, is a worthwhile discussion. That's a nice strawman to close your rebuttal with. Did anyone in this thread imply something like this at all?
  14. ashbury
    Split the difference - they figured out what to do with a guy who had run out of gas. 😀
  15. ashbury
    But that does hardly anything to address the reason for trading Paddack away in the first place: the salary he's being paid.
  16. ashbury
    For a player like Cartaya who you wouldn't dare put on waivers during the DFA process, that is correct. Guys like Dobnak get DFA'd and brought back seemingly at will.
  17. ashbury
    Hoping for Ramirez to regain the magic touch against LHP that he had in 2023 might require that he regain the .447 BABIP he enjoyed against them that season . Anything can happen in 124 PA. There's your magic. 😀
  18. ashbury
  19. ashbury
    Well that's good. But buying into the narrative by even calling it a "problem" elevates it. Look at it from the other team's perspective, though. The Twins had fewer than average CS, but they also had fewer successful SB against them. That taken together means attempts were far below league average, near the bottom. Kansas City had far-and-away the fewest steals attempted against them; but the Twins are in the next lowest tier with a few other teams, a group that no one was running against in any large numbers. One reasonable conclusion is that other teams attempted steals versus the Twins only when the runner felt especially sure of making it. Whether by throwing out runners or simply inhibiting the attempts (which is partly on the catchers but not entirely), by hook or by crook the Twins on defense kept the opposing running game in check. That's the opposite of a "problem." And then we nitpick how it was accomplished and call it a problem anyway.
  20. ashbury
    Looking at CS and declaring there to be a problem is approximately on a par with judging defensive skill using only fielding percentage. 😀 Are other teams stealing bases in large numbers? No? Then the various ways they do not reach the extra base are arguing at the margins - yes it's nicer to erase a runner and ring up an out, but it's infrequent whichever team you are looking at. The Marlins led the majors in CS, one every 4 games or so, and no one points to the Marlins as a team to emulate. CS are interesting, but referring to it as a problem is a second-order effect at most. Success rate on a small number is still a small number.
  21. ashbury
    What stolen base problem? The average MLB team surrendered 121 SB in 2024. The Twins allowed 112. No one was running wild, per the poster you were responding to; don't accept a false narrative.
  22. ashbury
    Yabbut they went sumpin like 22-0 against the White Sox, didn't they? 😀
  23. ashbury
    Depending on how some other team views him, I would like to see Gonzalez's value be put to maximum use by including him in a trade for significant major league talent. Mercedes I would hang on to, a little more tenaciously, in trade talks.
  24. ashbury
    MLB.com has an amazingly fantastic glossary of terms and this is one that they cover: https://www.mlb.com/glossary/transactions/designate-for-assignment I remembered 10 days, and it used to be, but now the DFA process is limited to 7 days. The (separate) waiver process, in order to outright a player to the minors, requires 3 days. A team can fit those 3 days into the 7-day window any way they wish, as I understand it - and the waiver is not necessarily announced publicly. But trade him or cut him or outright him, they have to make their decision in 7 days.
  25. ashbury
    A lot like Nick Gordon. The gamble when taking such a player is that he will blossom in one of the important tools, and not be merely average across the board. The Twins apparently tried to get Austin to hit with power, and I think that was the plan with Nick too. They stuck with both at shortstop for longer than results warranted, as well.
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