ashbury

The 2023 Twins were tied for third in all the majors in innings per start. When Rocco has the horses, he lets them run.

The article is about strategies.

Shorten the entire pre-season itself? Or just replace a week's worth of games with continued drills in early March?

The bats started slow last year and got slower, right up to the mid-season mark when suddenly it was like them breaking out big grins and saying to us "what were you worried about, huh?" So one can read those tea leaves either way one wants. The weak batting results in spring training lead me to expect another slow start, which will be hard to take after getting our hopes up like that. Maybe they think they can "work on some new things, give us time" then turn it on at will. I used to have cars like that, back in the days of carburetors and the setting of chokes; I arrived at work late some mornings as a result, though the engine ran fine once it was started.

Also a good setup for any Cardi B jokes you may have on hand.

The FO heard the voice of the fans and moved on from a strikeout machine.

Looking forward to variations on this joke not being in play, once the regular season starts.

I'm on the same page with you about that. Going through the turnstyles is for me the least important part of the experience. I would miss it if I never bought a ticket and went inside, for an entire week's stay or whatever. But the action is elsewhere, and/or earlier in the day.

The tag line for every topic we bother to discuss here.

For summertime I can contribute the cool breeze of sweet reason that I bring to this site with my posts.

What metrics do you think the team uses to measure the effectiveness? As opposed of course to measuring the spin rates and inches of break and so forth. I mean, they can't wait like us until the regular season performance numbers are all in; that would be merely hindsight.

I lived at the Scotland Green apartments in Mounds View (the clear target of this satire) for a few years, and it was swell, so I feel I can bring some expertise to this matter. How much extra do I need to pay Bert, in light of this?

Please add Aaron Slegers bio here. View full player

Chicken and egg, though. Would an NFL-like arrangement, going back 50 years ago, have kept baseball as the national sport it once was? And if so, can any form of catch-up help now? I'm inclined to think so, in both cases. Weighing against is that people who bought top-end franchises aren't so inclined to share with those who bought in at far lower prices (such as our Pohlads) and who now have their hands out for an equal share of the revenue pie. I don't know how to equalize that.

Varland continues to make a strong case for going north with the big club (potentially putting my skepticism to shame).

I think I've shared this one recently but it remains hands down the Best Joke Evar. NSFW, I repeat, Not Safe For Work. "Well, wouldja like to hear me tell a joke?":

Which part?

When I departed Cincy I left behind a little voodoo item. They'll never find it, to be able to take the hex off.

I'm not sure this applies to Farmer. From the article: "The new set of rules fully guarantees the deals of players who agree to terms absent a hearing." Wasn't Nick Gordon the only eligible Twins player to actually go to arbitration?

Chris Williams continues to get chances behind the plate. He's a sleeper prospect I keep an eye on now and then. Overall, it's not apparent anyone is making much of a case to be added to the 26-man roster who isn't already somewhere on the likely-to-lock spectrum. "It's only spring" but the trend toward having difficulty scoring runs (or even getting baserunners, today) remains in effect.

Have the minor league games on the back fields started yet?

This is the kind of deeper dive I totally support, and I agree that just quoting an ERA without the context doesn't give the whole story. I was offering shorthand but 2023 was an outlier. I'll go a little deeper still and suggest that the OPS he put up in AAA of around .760 doesn't support the 3.98 ERA he accrued there. I feel that OPS-against is a more stable way to gauge a pitcher than his ERA, but ERA is the more familiar number so it's worth converting back and forth for best understanding. Doing equivalencies is a bit of guesswork based on larger samples that may not hold up well for an individual season; a year or two ago I drew up a table of league OPS and league ERA, for a sampling of seasons over the decades, and I use that table when thinking about such stuff. So, in my experience, a .760 OPS could be expected to lead to an ERA around 4.40, not the 3.97 he wound up with. ERA fluctuates more than the underlying factors that go into it. As you point out, because of the context of AAA this past season, Varland's OPS-against might be a bit inflated. Overall, the International League had an OPS of .794 in 2023. In 2022 that figure had been .750. Let's use round numbers and suppose everyone's OPS should have .050 deducted to be meaningful. For Louie that's .710 at AAA, and that might correspond to a AAA ERA more like 3.90, coincidentally close to his actual ERA - luck giveth, luck taketh away. But the majors are harder than AAA. My rule of thumb, again not something "official" but just what I use, is that you can expect a batter's OPS to go down .100 when moving up a level; a pitcher's goes up .100 likewise. That's not supported by published research, I've just found it useful (it's helped me identify prospects like Polanco and Kepler in their first years in the minors as better than their numbers indicate, using age as a factor). If Louie's "adjusted OPS-against" of .710 is bumped up to .810 for the majors, that's darn close to the actual .791 he put up while in the majors. Greater precision isn't possible from rules of thumb, but for me, his 2023 stats in both the majors and minors hold together to paint a consistent picture. Your comparative stats for other pitchers in the IL are well taken, but I want to point out that no one is sent to AAA to be dominant for a full season. Without checking, I'm inclined to expect that many dominant performers came and went, either being promoted to AAA from AA because of good performance, or being promoted to the majors from AAA, who failed to reach the 15-start threshold precisely because they were performing well and didn't hang around. That leaves us with a greater problem of "small sample size" than usual, and I don't have any solutions to offer except to advise caution. Basically, no, I think saying Louie "dominated" at AAA is a mild stretch. Unadjusted, the league OPS was .794 and his was .760. Pitchers who don't dominate at AAA may not be great candidates for the rigors of being a rotation mainstay in the majors. That's not to say that Varland can't take that next step. But I'd rather have him do that in a few starts, say 5, at AAA, and if he dominates, then he too can be one of the pitchers who fail to reach the 15-start threshold because he performed well and didn't hang around. Meanwhile, others have pointed out that my preference to have Louie start at AAA would be more supportable if the FO had succeeded in landing a more solid "#2 type" starter instead of DeSclafani. I don't disagree with that either. I do believe that Desclafani is not a mediocrity, but a quality starter who's been beset by injury causing his numbers to suffer. The gamble the FO is taking is 1) that he's over the injuries enough to be ready, and 2) the past injuries haven't robbed him of the abilities that make him a quality starter. I don't especially like the FO's gamble. But until Disco turns out to be a no-go, I really prefer to ride him and stash Varland at AAA for his final bit of development and seasoning. Sorry for all the verbiage, but the short version apparently didn't suffice. 😀

Everyone's ready to appoint to the rotation a player who had a AAA ERA of 3.93 last year, and was at 4.63 in the majors. I really want Varland to get several starts at AAA and dominate, before getting another major league start. This isn't a rebuilding team and we want to rack up the wins. Don't rush the young guy.

If you look at Kranepool's b-r.com page it's remarkable that he could carve out a career of that length, because it took him basically until 10 years in before he was even an average player. That was the era when even their manager would say things like ""The only thing worse than a Mets game is a Mets doubleheader." Kranepool was a case of being in the right place at the right time, to become a beloved Mets legend.