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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    Duensing has been better against righties this year than his putrid 2011 against them. Cincy can throw a lot of righthanded hitters at him; all but Votto and Bruce the other day against Mets lefty Niese. Should be a good test.
  2. ashbury
    He quite possibly would, assuming he's not fed up with the organization and wants to start fresh somewhere. This is why Terry Ryan sits in the big chair - a very difficult decision. Shades of signing Nick Blackburn - there's a very big risk that a year from now Liriano is back to scuffling and the contract makes him totally untradeable, instead of just not tradeable for as much as we'd want. A similar size contract to what was given to Willingham, but with much greater risk/reward either side.
  3. ashbury
    I wonder what Willingham would say if someone believed this enough to say it to his face.
  4. ashbury
    I do not have the skills to scout any player. But it's not Monday morning quarterbacking, or second guessing, to say that this was a massive failure on the part of the scout or scouts who said "Yes. This guy has what it takes to help us." It's good to swing for the fences sometimes, but not with your eyes closed, and this one pretty clearly was like that.
  5. ashbury
    A GM like Bill Smith has to rely on Special Assistants because he will freely admit to lacking deep fundamental insights. Someone like Terry Ryan, who has great self-confidence in his methods, might hire a Special Assistant and let him make decisions at the margins, but this Assistant will constantly get overruled on anything important like whether to draft Buxton versus a pitcher.
  6. ashbury
    Which loss of focus are you referring to? Willingham's lost fly ball? My mind reading skills must not be as good as yours; is the losing mentality process "gee, that ball's in the sun, sometimes I can make that play, but wait, we're a last place team, guess I'll take my eye off of it"? I would have thought there'd be some different evidence for it developing, than that.
  7. ashbury
    I suspect that over in Japan the opportunities are not wide open - recall the lengthy negotiation period just to get rights to work out a contract with the player. Probably he can only be offered back to the original team there, and the Twins thus have zero leverage. You're right that maybe a $1M figure would be interesting to the Japanese team, but maybe (to resort to an Asian meme) the Twins aren't ready to lose face yet.
  8. ashbury
    I took a similar tack on this question in a blog entry a little more than a week ago. My conclusion was similar to the "prepare to be disappointed" theme here. The problem is that what you get in return goes down pretty sharply as the talent you are unloading gets closer to average. Take Pence versus Span, looking at WAR from baseball-reference.com Age Pence Span 24 3.3 4.2 25 2.1 3.7 26 3.7 1.5 27 2.8 2.3 28 3.2 2.3 (The age-28 seasons are both partial and thus somewhat comparable, a little to Span's detriment.) Span's career started out stronger but the recent track record favors Pence, and there would also be the lingering concern over the concussion. I do think you can expect one can't-miss prospect plus maybe another middling prospect in return for Span, but not a haul like Pence fetched. Based on WAR I saw Span as a trading asset as somewhat matched (ironically) to a pitcher, Zambrano. Would you like a Span-for-Kazmir type of trade? I probably would, but that's about the limit - you won't restock the starting rotation with Span as the bait, and he's about the best/only trading asset we've got.
  9. ashbury
    When in doubt, look at their birth dates and see who is youngest. If they are up at AA already at age 22 or so, somebody in the organization thinks they're pretty good, and up to age 24 they aren't really "getting a little old" for the league yet. In addition to Arcia and Hicks already mentioned, pitcher B.J. Hermsen seems to be up and coming. (Edit: I was a little slow in typing, and I see that Hermsen has now already been mentioned, but I'll refrain from deleting since I think the age guidance may be useful to the original poster.)
  10. ashbury
    Well, I was responding to Nick's post that looked at what can be done to compete in 2013. I see two main reasons to trade: 1) to move replaceable talent (A.J. Pierzynski would be an example of that, with Mauer ready) in favor of shoring up a weakness, or 2) to change the talent pipeline either forward or backward in time (moving expiring contracts at deadline is the classic example, in one direction for a team giving up on the present season, in the other direction for the team giving up the prospects). Everything else is tit-for-tat and does not actually make the team better. Span is the only valuable trading chip they have in the first category, if you believe Revere is a good enough replacement that you're not simply opening up a hole in CF to close a hole in SP. Given Nick's premise that 2013 can be competitive, I could trade Span for that reason, but not for the second reason. Span is signed favorably through 2014, with a team opt-out for 2015, so only if the thought is that the team can't compete until 2015 would I look at trading Span for the time-shifting reason.
  11. ashbury
    At this point I think I keep Span. I'd really like to know the ages of all these players, as a 25 year old SP in AA doesn't interest me but a 22 year old might. Given the framework explained for option 3, if the addition of Doumit pries loose the third prospect, then I would like to explore keeping Span and just making it Doumit for that one pitcher (if he's not 25!!!), throwing in a spare-part single-A prospect if necessary to MAKE THIS DEAL! I know this goes against the rules of the game you've set up, but I'm guilty of getting back to reality, I'm afraid, and sometimes trades arise out of a completely different discussion. By the way, good job on making these trade packages realistic - apparently you matched the past trades very well to what Span brings to the table. Most of these trades sound like pieces that don't fit in very well with their current team - which is kind of how Delmon Young found his way onto the Twins. As the old saying goes, the best trades are the ones you don't make - almost always the other GM knows what he's got and is trading it away for a reason.
  12. ashbury
    There is another reason to not blow up the team in search of starting pitching: the trading chips the Twins do have would not bring the return that some folks here expect. You see comments like "trade Pavano (Liriano, Casilla, Valencia, ...) for a good starting pitching prospect". I don't think offers like that will be on the table, for Terry Ryan to choose from. Capps might bring a second-tier prospect. Span probably could net one legitimate prospect, plus a few pieces to fill out a trade, but even he is probably not viewed as that much above average in CF. Everyone else on the 40-man roster, I think, carries too much baggage of one kind or another, or else is just not viewed as worth very much in the first place. You could back up the truck, and trade every conceivable asset they have, and wind up with only two or three stud starting pitchers for 2013 (or a staff filled with other teams' fifth starters), and then nobody to play behind them. Most of what the Twins have is more valuable to them on the field than as trade bait. I do expect some trades near the deadline, mainly of the expiring contracts, and look forward to being pleasantly surprised (except for a Span trade) if Terry Ryan brings back anything that looks like a star in the making for 2013-16.
  13. ashbury
    Boy, if you looked up the word "journeyman" in the dictionary you might see Kevin Correia's picture. And yet he's got the Twins well in hand through four. Everytime we think the offense is looking OK, they make some guy seem like Cy Young.
  14. ashbury
    I keep wrestling with the question as stated, and just can't come up with an answer. I have some assumptions about what you could get in trade for Plouffe or Diamond or Revere, namely that it would not justify giving up a young player who is starting to look like a bona fide major leaguer at a very favorable contract status. I also have assumptions about the big-salary guys Mauer and Morneau, that likewise would make trading them unlikely. I don't think I have a core of players I would not trade.
  15. ashbury
    I'd guess that's more a vote against Oakland than a vote for TF. Later rounds will be interesting. FWIW I've had generally good experiences at Oakland's ballpark. Not sure why it gets so much hate.
  16. ashbury
    For contrast, you could rate Darin Mastroianni's beard: http://media.scout.com/Media/Image/43/437017m.jpg
  17. ashbury
    If I did the math right, one time in 120 this should happen at random. That's like a million-to-one odds!
  18. ashbury
    Yeah, pretty much. Another exclusive by Scoop Olney.
  19. ashbury
    Doesn't sound like you're even saying they can win the division, merely "compete". That lowers the bar a second time, to a level that for me loses almost all its meaning. Sure, "you never know", but if everything in the world is random what do you really have? You started the article with an observation about the trading deadline. You didn't really come back to that, but the rest of the article seems to lead to the conclusion that the Twins should not be sellers when the time comes. Was that your point? That the team with the worst AL record can't pull the trigger on trades because a magical season might still be in the works? I don't know of a big enough supply of pixie dust to allow for that.
  20. ashbury
    Ryan said,"We need pitching, and we need it bad." No, they need it good, and they need it badly.
  21. ashbury
    Only if it's bilateral.
  22. ashbury
    [T]he Twins have a tough road ahead of them, but it’s not impossible by any means. Just look at the 2011 collapse of the Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves. Yeah, if other teams can collapse, so can the Twins... win the pennant. I see it now.
  23. ashbury
    I just logged on to see what's going on. You'd never know the Twins won the game, after shutout ball from the bullpen for inning after inning, with all the Gloomy Guses here.
  24. ashbury
    Ouch. Morneau against lefties still not good.
  25. ashbury
    It's a bit of chicken-and-egg. If somebody's drawing few walks due to not having power, then it's the lack of power that probably does him in, although the lack of walks correlates. Revere's the rare case, with a batting average at the moment high enough to keep him in the majors all by itself. We'll see if the walks increase as time goes along. I'm not sure what the mechanism for that would be though, if (say) he sees 20% more pitches in the strike zone than an average hitter. Is any such statistic available?
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