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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    My daughter is expecting and she says she's delaying the required blood glucose test until well after the holidays. Now that's putting the baby's needs first! (She's doing wonderfully, actually.)
  2. ashbury
    I was considering formulating a reply but you already expressed the gist of it. MLR treats revenue as the independent variable. I treat revenue as not just a dependent variable, but one that is as good a metric for success as there is. Vying for a World Series win is a zero-sum game, but every franchise increasing its revenue is possible in principle and would reflect better health for the sport overall. I would be open to learning of counter-examples where a team can increase revenue over, say, a 10-year period and somehow harm the franchise. With two exceptions (Oakland and Baltimore) I don't believe that one franchise increasing its long-term revenue harms another franchise, either. Fans in the seats, as you put it, isn't revenue, but it's a pretty good proxy. I want to see every team drawing 3 million. I don't have enough market research available to assert whether the Rays' approach (ditto the Athletics and some others) to trading away good players when they become expensive is a death spiral for fan interest. That's my guess though.
  3. ashbury
    Young, yes, but he's had 3 stints on the IL in the past two years. One, calf contusion, may have been an on-field injury and unavoidable (didn't take the time to research), but the other two look like started out as minor issues that lingered - the toe this season wound up needing surgery. I kind of like the (relatively) wiry guys for durability like Berrios and PLopez - yeah Pablo is listed as 6'4" but he looks trim. Big guys who don't strike out many? Not so much.
  4. ashbury
    I'm on an eating strike. I am binging on Christmas treats, and won't stop until, well, I feel like it. And when my doctor scolds me in January, I will blame the Twins.
  5. ashbury
    Happy now?
  6. ashbury
    "The Band's Getting Back Together" has never interested me much for my baseball team. "You can't go home again" is more like it. Mitch Garver is not the player we had half a decade ago. He's not a fit now.
  7. ashbury
    I'm unwilling to rank trades. Remember the quote from Tolstoy's lesser known sequel, Anna Karenina: The Baseball Chronicles? All happy trades are alike; each unhappy trade is unhappy in its own way. How to compare Tommy Herr, John Ryan Murphy, Paul Harzell, Carlos Gomez, Scott Klingenbeck, Jim Hoey, Matt Capps, Delmon Young, Jorge Lopez, and Tyler Mahle? Don't.
  8. ashbury
    This principle is pretty widely accepted, but I'm not so sure. Remember how we ran out of outfielders in 2022? Remember Royce Lewis tearing up his knee twice? Remember Alex Kirilloff and his wrist? The nature of pitcher injuries versus position player injuries may be different, for instance being more likely to result in shutting down versus trying to play through (and wrecking the guy's batting stats during that time), but I think we gloss over certain injuries while remembering others. Correa's 2023 numbers were down and he had the foot problem - that's not the same as Mahle blowing out his elbow but both affected the team and how to work around them. Personally, I am for trading position players to get legitimate arms. The Mahle trade was the right idea but the wrong arm.
  9. ashbury
    I'm less inclined to attribute anything to his mental makeup, and wonder if the problem is in his eyesight. The young Sano I remember had a remarkable ability to spit on pitches the pitcher wanted him to swing at.
  10. ashbury
    As I said, I'd expect to get outbid with my offer. And I'm fine with that. One year of a stud pitcher is valuable, but we're not yet a perennial contender where getting him takes us to another level; right now we're just struggling to get back to the level Sonny Gray arguably had us. And then in 2025 we have to figure out something new. I don't know what Festa's potential is, but I'm averse to giving up 6 years to get 1, even if that 1 might be better. As we saw with Mahle, acquiring talent (a lower level than Burnes obviously) comes with no guarantee. Even Sonny Gray cost us just one good arm, in return for the potential of 2 good years which more or less panned out (2022 was a little blemished), and it remains to be seen whether that swap will turn out to be a wise exchange; the two years of control we got is exactly what has us in the position we're in now, looking for a second staff leader. A perennial contender will do the math differently and outbid us. I hope 2024 cements that we really are in a window of contention and not just pretension. There is the trade deadline, if we want to acquire an expiring contract on a good arm - I'm not in Wait Until Next Year mode, I just don't want to overpay by that much on Burnes.
  11. ashbury
    It's just sad.
  12. ashbury
    First I learned a great turn of phrase that I'm sure I'll wind up stealing in some future context. And then I learned a new word! All in one post!
  13. ashbury
    Too hip for the room, you are.
  14. ashbury
    Polanco and Burnes on expiring contracts (Polanco with an option year) is a good foundation for a trade. It's just that the talent level doesn't match, so we obviously have to pony up more. Do I also give up two legitimate prospect arms for 1 year of Burnes? I do not. Maybe Prielipp plus Polanco, but not Festa too. The trade values site is a useful tool but isn't gospel, and even if Burnes is a stud I don't see 1 year of him as worth what they assign. If some other Brewers trading partner values him like that, and is willing to outbid us, so be it.
  15. ashbury
    I'm on record enough times on Jax already. Nothing there to ruin, for me.
  16. ashbury
    Heh, I just refreshed my memory on how Luzardo was acquired. He was drafted in 2016 by the Nationals, one spot after the Twins, who took the illustrious.... Griffin Jax. I know a lot of people here like Jax, but c'mon, with perfect hindsight we coulda woulda shoulda had Luzardo.
  17. ashbury
    Man, if you haven't played OOTP yet, you really should.
  18. ashbury
    Falvey and Levine came onboard after the 2016 Total System Failure™ season so Molitor was their manager for two seasons. A lot of people expected it to last just one but 2017 was above .500 and so he lasted another. That isn't relevant to anything in the article, but I have nothing to say about Rocco that hasn't been said 1000 times before.
  19. ashbury
  20. ashbury
    Priester put up a 4.00 ERA as a 22-year old in AAA, relative to a league ERA of 5.18. AAA was tough for pitchers in 2023. He then got his brains beaten in at the major league level, got sent back down for a while, did marginally better (still not good) upon recall For reference, Jose Berrios was getting his brains beaten in, at age 22 in the majors, too. He was #4 on the mlb.com Pirates' prospect list last year, after being a first-round pick in 2019, and apparently has exceeded whatever criterion they use for being a prospect at mlb.com now. For whatever tiny bit it's worth, the eldritch scouting brew OOTP uses has him as an average starting pitching prospect with a potentially very good curve ball, and a hint of frontline potential. He might not be ready to be a rotation mainstay yet, which is our trading focus for now, but could be on the verge come 2025. The writer of the linked article acknowleges that additional pieces would need to go to the Twins; IOW it's a starting point for discussion, with possibly a piece being subtracted or substituted by the Twins instead. If I were FalVine I would be telling my scouts and analytics groups to get me a firm read on this pitcher pronto, if the Pirates approached them with such a proposal. Ditto asking Pete Maki and the AAA pitching coaches what they see to work with. I'd also be surprised if the Pirates are looking to move him, so would be trying to figure out if there's a red flag. I don't embrace this proposal, quite, but I don't dismiss it out of hand either. Young controllable starting pitching is hard to acquire, and age-22 stats don't place any kind of limits on what a player may go on to achieve.
  21. ashbury
    I guess Miranda is going to start striking out more, as a result.
  22. ashbury
    It's really unclear to me what the eligibility is, but if anyone looks at Trevor Larnach as limited to AAA for his ceiling I hold a contrary view and expect him to "step up" at last.
  23. ashbury
    Great closer Very expensive on the open market, no? I just can't envision the Twins wading into those competitive waters. So I don't want to invest the brain waves to even consider it and possibly get my hopes up.
  24. ashbury
    How many seconds did it take you to read "Lots of writers and other dweebs"? Any time invested beyond that point is on you.
  25. ashbury
    This article failed to stake out a clear position, for or against, on Mauer's candidacy.
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