ashbury

I dunno. Pivot Tables at 20 paces sounds like a fair fight to me.

Wow. Knock it off.

So baseball fans shouldn't discuss anything. Shut down the site, Brock! 😀

If you haven't looked lately, Wallner might be closer than you imagine. He's been blisteringly hot in the past dozen games or so with a lot of HR. I'd rely on the on-field staff to judge whether this is from teeing off on pitches that he won't see in the majors, or if it's legit. AAA is far from major league of course, and a dozen games is short, so the trained eye will decide. But not every batter in AAA has OPSed above 1.000 in that span, facing that same weak caliber of pitching, so at least he's turning it around at the moment and is no longer the basket case we were forced to watch. As for Julien, I'm with you. He will benefit from AAA only if it's for a long stint and he uses it to re-calibrate his approach. He was being abused by major-league pitchers and the trend was downward when he was demoted.

You bet your sweet bippy they do. They do platoon. A lot. My apologies for the click-bait subject line. (It's fun. Almost went with "One Weird Trick Your 2024 Twins Use To Platoon") How do the Twins rank versus the other 29 teams, in plate appearances by batters in same-arm matchups? LHB-vs-LHP: 29th (64 PA, OPS of .759 which is 5th in the majors) RHB-vs-RHP: 23rd (752 PA, OPS of .680 which is 15th in the majors) They try their darndest not to let it happen, especially with their lefty bats. And here is how they do in opposite arm matchups: RHB-vs-LHP: 7th (520 PA, OPS of .707 which is 16th in the majors) LHB-vs-RHP: 6th (920 PA, OPS of .693 which is 18th in the majors) What is the point of these numbers? One, in case you wondered whether they go to great lengths to set up favorable hitting matchups, yes, yes they do. Two, they aren't notably effective at exploiting these matchups. Three, an oddity is that their unfavorable lefty matchups rank better in OPS versus their competitors than their favorable ones do. Maybe the modest level of success at bat this season (they rank 16th overall in OPS) would be worse if they weren't doing things as they are. Plus in addition also too, because the manager chooses which batter hits when, there is bias to all these statistics that is outside my control to account for. The better results for left-handed batters against lefty pitchers than righties, in absolute terms, suggests Rocco is careful which bats to play in that matchup. But mostly what I see is that they go to extremes, and reap little to no overall reward for their efforts. The lefty bats don't clobber righties, and the righty bats don't crush lefties. Why, again, are we even doing this? I can't help having flashbacks to the old quote from the dugout: "I managed good, but they sure played bad." (ChatGPT 3.5 attributes this to Casey Stengel; therefore I feel 99% confident that it must have been someone else. Rocco Baldelli may become the source of the quote, going forward.) But at some point, that guy who "managed good" needs to stop and ask if it's worth the trouble, and what better thing might be tried.

The Internet is where everybody posts, nobody reads, and everyone disagrees about what was said.

Well, going to have to depart now, and attend to some more pleasant activities. There's this root canal I've been putting off....

Don't do both. Voice of experience? I'm not saying.

Thanks Vazquez.

Can I choose Neither of the Above and get Luis Gil back?

Soto looked surprised to cut off that sharp single by Castro.

We need Pablo to go out there for another inning, methinks.

Yes and I'd be right there with him if, well, if I flew across the continent for a ballgame with the lad I saw just last week.

BTW, son Cashbury is in attendance tonight, in what he describes as possibly the worst seats in the stadium. He saw the outcome of neither of the first two home runs, from his perch in nosebleed RF territory.

Stroman argument, as least where my particular post was concerned. Pre-draft scouting reports hold no weight either, at this point in their respective careers. Performance is what counts. Both first-rounders? That's just disingenuous. #30 overall versus #8 isn't in the same realm, unless a team messes up. I'm glad at least you replaced the silly modifier "slightly" with "certainly". Lee looks better than Levi Michael, period. Time will tell, as with all prospects.

This is your response to our catcher's home run?

Ninja'd. As expected.

VAZQUEZ!!!! As expected.

Across the season so far, "how's that worked" amounts to 18-14 in games started by Vazquez*, and Jeffers weighs in at 15-14. That's no form of analysis at all, of course, but larger-scale than this one Yankees series. The results are in line, anyway, with the notion that Vazquez is doing something that makes up for the empty bat as yet. As you probably know, I'm no Vazquez apologist. The post you replied to was merely wordplay. * his one other start was at DH, which was a loss - go figure

Defense. 🙂

It could be a difference in raw talent, though. Michael was a late first rounder owing to their finish in the standings the prior year, while Lee was a top prospect who fell into their laps. I'm not ready to extrapolate too far about organizational processes.

"Slightly." At age 22 Levi Michael was farting around in high-A and not putting up the numbers there that Brooks Lee did in AAA at the same age. I suggest looking for a better comp.