ashbury

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.

I ain't no second guesser. (Well, truth be told, I am.)

The name for my next rock band.

Eisenreich's been covered, and Allison was before my time (as a Twins follower). Lombo is mostly notable to me as being deficient enough to cause the ill-starred Brunansky trade bringing in Tommy Herr. Molitor brought in as a DH just didn't do much for me - my main memory of that era is that some little niece or nephew of Molitor was at the same home-daycare place as our youngest son. Pretty thin soup; I basically don't have a "favorite" memory of a #4

Scott Diamond could be Richard Diamond's son and heir to his private detective business. Drew Butera (or Darin Mastroianni) could be the college-educated son of a mob boss, and Anthony Swarzak could be the goon who protects him, while Trevor Plouffe could be the hairdresser (and snitch) for Butera's girlfriend Jamie (sic) Carroll. Joe Benson sounds like he'd be the bartender Scott Diamond goes to for the word on the street when Plouffe comes up empty. You might be onto something there.

I was thinking Garrison Keillor. But yes.

Yeah, I'm guilty of my share of snark on this forum, but deep down I'm a starry-eyed optimist.

The man really missed his calling as a poet. Take away the capital letters and punctuation, and it would be publishable. to me this is the icing on the cake and not a good cake a crap cake with putrid frosting go twins

And I'm not sure of the legal distinction between copyrighted material and pay-sites, but the fair-use doctrine seems like it ought to cover a brief excerpt that has correct attribution.

I'm putting my over-under at 74 wins.