Jump to content
Twins Daily
  • Create Account

ashbury

Verified Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    42,469

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    470

 Content Type 

Profiles

News

Minnesota Twins Videos

2026 Minnesota Twins Top Prospects Ranking

2022 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks

Minnesota Twins Free Agent & Trade Rumors, Notes, & Tidbits

Guides & Resources

2023 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks

The Minnesota Twins Players Project

2024 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks

2025 Minnesota Twins Draft Pick Tracker

2026 Minnesota Twins Draft Tracker: Picks & Bonuses

Forums

Blogs

Events

Store

Downloads

Gallery

Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    Concur. It's easy to second guess any particular play. But some plays put the game on the line that very moment, while a better choice leaves you the chance to try again if it fails. It was a gamble that forced them to try pass plays only, after that. Bad gamble.
  2. ashbury
    You meant to include a smiley face on that one, right? 😀 But Mrs Ash and I have walked from our budget motel to the ballpark entrance, which is the long way around, and never felt uncomfortable. I'm willing to give a ballpark some bonus points for the neighborhood atmosphere - Fenway and Wrigley remaining the best examples - but I'm disinclined to deduct points for the neighborhood, especially the cases where the standard thing is to take mass transit or just drive into a huge parking lot where there is a lot of tailgating/grilling to enjoy the aromas even if you're not partaking.
  3. ashbury
    There are indoor stadiums I would rank lower. And for whatever the faults, the surroundings at O.co or whatever it was called at the end did not detract from my enjoyment of Bailey Ober's masterpiece last summer. It helped that I could afford seats directly behind home plate. Affording them was helped by their costing only $35. I don't know of a MLB park with consistently better weather to watch a game in - a trait they instantly lose in muggy Sacramento and eventually in convection-oven-like Vegas. Mount Davis never bugged me in the slightest, and that seems to be the biggest knock against the venue. / I hope this doesn't turn into a threadjack. Just didn't want to let the opinion go un-dissented.
  4. ashbury
    I didn't watch even half of Buxton's innings last season, and my "eye test" memory of his year was evidently missing quite a bit, which these video clips helped fill in. I remembered seeing a few balls fall in for singles in front of him, that Jake Cave probably would have dived for and given up a triple or inside the park homer, but Byron himself of years ago would have corralled for outs. The charts further demonstrate he's not the same elite guy in CF that he used to be. I'd love to have similar AAA charts for Keirsey, to provide a frame of reference for what we have in the system as an alternative. I recall watching only one challenging opportunity for Keirsey at Target Field in 2024, a difficult fly at the wall that he couldn't quite haul in. The videos in this article remind me that Byron wasn't 100% on similar plays either; selective memory tells me he used to be.
  5. ashbury
    If the Pohlads had had the foresight to hold off a year or two and invest in Enron instead of the Twins, imagine how things would have turned out for them!
  6. ashbury
    Limbo's never good. That which ye do, do quickly.
  7. ashbury
    Yes!!! Do it before the Dodgers change their minds!!!
  8. 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.
  9. ashbury
    Get ready for a surprise when you find out how frequently relief pitchers are called on to appear in games. 😀
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. ashbury
    Not signed by Falvey either. That was Terry Ryan's doing.
  13. 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.
  14. ashbury
    There is footage of Royce "Hopalong" Lewis rounding second after pulling a quadriceps. Close enough?
  15. ashbury
    A completed sale by Opening Day, as speculated, still means no major moves until the ink is dry. Trade deadline, though? Hmmm...
  16. 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.
  17. ashbury
    Source? All I could find was silence all-around.
  18. 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?
  19. ashbury
    Split the difference - they figured out what to do with a guy who had run out of gas. 😀
  20. ashbury
    But that does hardly anything to address the reason for trading Paddack away in the first place: the salary he's being paid.
  21. 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.
  22. 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. 😀
  23. ashbury
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
×
×
  • Create New...