ashbury

People will think you are exaggerating, but if anything you are underestimating. Pujols will actually be nearly 42 when his contract ends.

Could it be that a double by Mauer scores someone like Revere from first ahead of him, while a double by Willingham leaves Mauer on third waiting to be driven in? This is a reason I don't trust RISP statistics very much.

Happy to be of service. Take out the word if you don't like it. This still leaves the observation, And with no mention of Mauer at all [in the cited article], the headline of "Re: Mauer's Contract" doesn't make sense at all. You could as well have titled the posting "Re: Butera's contract".

I'm no fan of unrelenting negativity, but this is apples-to-oranges. That other article was "could the team go this one way, instead of the other". This one is "this guy sure looks good". Not much to say in response except "yup yup, he sure looks good." Well, maybe someone will bang his stick on the ground that they never should have traded Span, or that the trade should have netted them Dylan Bundy, but this is one of those rare instances of near unanimous opinion that they needed to trade from strength for pitching prospects not yet ready for the majors.

> After developing a lot in college Basically just a quibble, but I don't believe Meyer developed in such an unusual way that going from a 20th rounder as a high schooler to 1st round after college is out of the norm. He would surely have developed a lot had he signed the first time. Teams often use their late-round draft picks to go for high schoolers they expect will turn down any pro offer at that time, for the chance to offer him a good bonus and see if his mind changes. If somehow they could have put a gun to his head, a team might very well have drafted him in the 1st round that time too. I know you know all this (and probably more ), so as I said I am just quibbling about how you presented it in case a more casual reader came across it. Oh, and with the new bonus slotting rules that started last year, I guess we'll see less of this in the late rounds and more of it around round 10 or so?

2yr/$10M for Correia is the loose change some teams find in the sofa cushions - it was about the smallest per-year contract of the ones in this article, and even at that it didn't make either the Top-15 *or* the [dis-]Honorable Mention. If one buys the truism that there's no such thing as a bad one-year contract, a corollary would be that putting yourself on the hook for a single $5M contract in year two can't be a soul-killing burden on the future of a team. And with no mention of Mauer at all, the inflammatory headline of "Re: Mauer's Contract" doesn't make sense at all. Return on investment often follows an S-shaped curve. Because of the collective bargaining agreement, MLB's curve has the lower part of that S truncated - I would play for $1 and the team would get no benefit, while someone better might demand $50K, but neither of us is allowed to sign for those amounts. The upper part of an S-shaped curve reflects a decreasing return to scale - beyond a certain level of skill, to get a slightly better player means paying proportionately more and more. The Twins tend to stay far away from that part of the curve. In the rare cases like Mauer where they found it basically inevitable to pay at that level, I have a hard time faulting them for it, if that's the purpose of this headline.

She has to want to come to MN. Sometimes you just can't give away your money.

Worley should be better than Esmerling. But that's it.

Well, there's the draft, but that's not an issue at the moment and doesn't normally provide instant relief anyway. But I guess Gardy is really a dyed-in-the-wool Twin if he also overlooks the potential of ever getting "good pitching" via this new-fangled mechanism called Free Agency. (Is he tacitly agreeing that Kevin C is *not* "good pitching"?)

I can't get worked up over a player who had an age-26 OPS of .800 in a PCL hitter's haven. Put Drew Butera in Tucson, he'd hit about the same. And anyway upgrading your third-string catcher is about 25th priority on a last place team, and addressing such a need by dumpster-diving for players every other team has passed on is not what I want the team I root for doing unless they think they have spotted a real "pony in the pile".

He could switch to being a righty, but I sense a case of bilateral arm weakness coming on. /snark

In 1980 the Twins had a 25-year-old two-year veteran third baseman who looked like he was going to be a mainstay for the team for a decade. And then the back problems began, and by 29 he was gone... and some Guy Eddie wound up taking his place at third and we forgot all about Johnny Castino. One of the game's small tragedies.

Do laws of probability explain why athletes are like coins? The first law, as usually stated, is a bit circular, as it asserts independence of individual events. It doesn't demonstrate that the independence exists. Dozier and Plouffe both improving at bat, for instance, might be because the two of them both benefit from Brunansky being with the parent club; or it could be from them sitting together on the bench between at-bats and discussing their approaches at the plate and having some kind of simultaneous epiphany about Uncle Charley. Nothing really wrong with 7 heads out of 9 flips as a quick estimate of how much assumption is being built into one's season forecast. But it's not really a mathematical theorem either.

+1. You win teh Internets.

I'm confident that someone like Terry Ryan is very sensitive to the fact that with his scouting background it would be very easy to be seen as running roughshod over the guys actually doing the work now - careful not to start too many comments with "well, back when *I* was scouting...". On the other hand, I still find it difficult to accept that there is no difference ("regardless of who"), in how draft day plays out when a Bill Smith is in the big chair versus when Terry Ryan is - Smith will certainly defer to exactly whatever his chief of scouting recommends, Ryan would by contrast... what? The discussion as the rankings are constructed the day before the draft would have to be colored in some way by his take on how to synthesize all the information into a strong and cohesive draft for that year, and as draft day itself unfolds I could imagine a glance across the room to Ryan, where even a shrug of the shoulders saying "use your judgement" means more than not even looking in Smith's direction to make each call.

To repeat a theme, he was before my time. As a youth I was unimpressed by low-BA power hitters, and since my first real concept of BA was in 1961, .288 was low, in the presence of hitters like Norm Cash. And he didn't even hit 54 or 61 homers like certain Yankees were prone to do - some power hitter, all he could hit that year was 46, same as Jim Gentile who my dad assured me was nothing special. So not yet being a Twins fan had me apathetic about the man. I got better. My actual memory of Harmon therefore is tied to that 1961 baseball card, specifically the one on the back of the Post cereal box. As pre-teens, my brother and I later on devised our own home-brew poor-man's Strat-O-Matic game before we even knew such a product existed, or the equally fun type with the disk and spinner. We got our stats from baseball cards (please don't press me on the details on what we did to derive useful pitching probabilities), and we decided early on that 1) you had to actually possess a card of that guy's year to include him on a particular team and 2) whatever the card said, goes. For Harmon Killebrew, that 1961 Post card said "Infielder". So, even though by the mid-sixties we knew it flew in the face of reality, we allowed our Twins team to position him at Shortstop. Made for a much stronger all-time team if you had 1961 Harmon play short, while 1967/1969 Harmon played first and third, while a miscellaneous Harmon roamed left field. A crummy memory, but a memory nonetheless. [Edit: not that anyone's going to call me out on it, but yes, that would be the 1962 Killebrew card in the Post set. My brother and I also had our own nomenclature for the sets/years, and old habits die hard.]

My new favorite emoticon.

Great interview, with credit to both interviewer and interviewee. As for the nugget that he and other scouts sometimes read here: I can't imagine ever writing a comment that would be worth their attention, so if by chance I get 10 seconds of their attention all I'll say is an echo of other sentiments here: thanks for your work, guys!

Shucks, I thought this was the hotline to the Twins front office, where I could tell them what to do. If the Twins are going to do things their own way regardless of my preferences, I guess there's no point in discussing what-ifs. With a good-glove weak-stick backup catcher, you would designate some utility infielder as your emergency backup catcher, and pick a better hitter for your last bench spot, who could have more of an impact on games than Drew Butera is ever allowed to have. I have not been one of the stick-bangers about Mauer's contract. But this observation causes me to re-consider how wise his contract is. A contract for 15+ million kind of says to me "plug him into the lineup and forget about him, that spot is set barring injury". Can't do that with a catcher, he is going to have days off. Kind of a dilemma when you draft a top-talent catcher in the first place - are you setting yourself up for years and years of this kind of roster juggling that you wouldn't face with an ordinary starter and a typical backup? In the abstract you say "hey, it's a problem anyone would like to have." But in the concrete, you have a third catcher taking up space on the bench and rarely appearing in games.

OK, that's another way of stating my objection to how Terry Ryan phrased it: leave out the words in his sentence that came after "better". But I don't think that is what he meant, he really meant it was the RISP situations that defines the problem, and not power hitting in all situations. Hitting for more power means more situations where RISP means "man on second" instead of "man on first", all of which tends to get lumped in together in a way that obscures rather than clarifies. And hitting for more power can mean a homer which clears the bases, thus eliminating a RISP opportunity at all.

Plenty to chew on in Ryan's interview. Here's one: > We're going to have to pitch better to do that, and we're going to have to hit better with runners in scoring position to do that. Check, on the first half of this. I can't believe the second part is key for the offense. The Twins scored 100+ runs fewer than the Rangers did in 2012; surely the fact that the Rangers hit 30 more doubles and 70 more homers than the Twins goes a very long way toward explaining this difference, without resorting to RISP stats. An inning here and there where the Twins follow a single with a single, while the Rangers follow a single with a run-scoring double or a homer, matters more than hoping you can somehow be more able than other teams to bat .400 when someone's on second.

Once the ink was dry on Doumit's contract, it was clear the Twins would carry a third catcher and it would be someone like Butera. In a day and age where teams often carry only 13 position players, someone like Doumit strikes me as a false bargain. Sign a good-field no-hit catcher, and you have to compensate with a bench player who will pinch-hit for this catcher when you are behind; in other games, this bench player can handle a different role. When you sign a good-hit no-field catcher, your bench option is to get another catcher. This is why the Twins were able to "out bid" any other team for Doumit's services. The scholarship to Butera is just shorthand for this larger strategic choice.

It being at a house, not at TwinsFest per se, kind of ruins my baseless speculation that Hrbek put the body-slam on him while waiting around to do autographs.

He has a lifetime OPS of 1.000 in the majors, and also has never committed an error. So I am also intrigued to see if he can keep it up.

Of Rage.