ashbury

Rocco's use of Funderburk was in direct contradiction of what he said in yesterday's post game about not giving up until elimination was mathematically official.

You do you. 😀

Goody. I was disappointed not to see Austin Martin get tested when he played CF the last time I went; just a couple of can-o'-corn flies or routine singles dumped in front of him in that one game I saw. So this year I want to see Kala'i challenged to go back to the wall and leap, and then on the next batter come in on a humpback liner and decide whether to dive or play safe. And of course to see Danny and Ben tested on hard smashes just barely within reach. Can't judge much when the pitchers are striking out the side - hm, maybe there is method to all the respective front offices' madness?

A nice way for Rocco to celebrate his 43rd birthday.

The Twins are Twinsing a bit, too. When Topa gives up the lead in the 9th you all are going to lose your collective minds. 😀

I mentioned elsewhere that on the Red Sox fan site "Talk Sox," someone launched a "Fire Alex Cora" thread on October 19, 2017, three days BEFORE he was hired. Early posts: How long do we have to wait for a W? no improvement in the kids yet. This DD hire is a disaster. Bum. Hasn't won a single game yet. Unbelievable. His communication skills are very questionable. In fact, none of the players have heard a thing from him. He won't give a news conference. He hasn't named a starter for the next game. And he doesn't even travel with the damn team! Now THAT'S a fan base worth respecting and a site worth reading.

Unless the 40-man spot itself can be put to better use. I haven't looked at what prospects need protecting from Rule 5.

The customer wants flying cars for zero dollars. I learned early in the marketing phase of my career to treat customers with respect but not to take them too seriously, and keep decisions grounded in actual reality rather than what customers will tell you. You go by actions, not words, where customers are concerned.

F it. I'm still making the drive down. 😀

Good luck on that. Thumbs up on your post rather than sad-face, in a spirit of optimism for the outcome.

I don't know why you are turning thumbs down on my posts when you and I are saying the same thing. In the words of Yogi, if people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them. I'd feel different if the Twins were perennial losers now, like in the 2011-2018 era, but last year and until August this year there was a good product to watch. Milwaukee and St Louis clean our clocks on attendance year after year. Winning is a zero-sum game across the league, so you have to have a better marketing plan than "win every year".

Sports is unlike most businesses.

Business school teaches you a lot more than that.

F it, I'm still making the drive down. But this is underwhelming. Kala'i Rosario, Danny De Andrade, Ben Ross, Liam Rocha, Devin Kirby (Kevin Derby?), Jacob King, Kade Bragg. A veritable Who's Who of "Who's He?"

Long term? Absolutely.

Indeed. In the past 6 seasons his OPS has been below .800 only once, and we know that in that one season he was hurt badly enough that he never set foot in CF all year. Availability has been the downfall. Not the bat.

I had two of the best baseball experiences of my life last October in the playoffs at Target Field. But most of the time at TF, the crowd sits on their hands except when the PA system is playing some happy-clappy music while the Jumbotron pleads to "let's get LOUD", and when it stops any enthusiasm dissipates instantly. I don't honestly know what the people are there for. I don't think they know, and they stop attending as a result.

What's missing is that in actual playoff baseball, there is some demonstrated capacity to succeed.

I've lived in other places that were better "baseball towns" than the Twin Cities. If they wouldn't fill the ballpark when they had a winning team to watch, IMO the region has the team they deserve, one that is again* at risk of circling the drain in a never ending downward spiral of payroll cuts and declining revenues, always in tacit support of ownership's principle that a certain percentage of revenue is entitled as profit. Dave St. Peter was beyond stupid to say it out loud, blaming the fans last year. But he wasn't wrong. * remember "contraction"?

You'd rather not see five wins in a row? That's pretty much what it would take for your scenario to play out. And then followed by two quick losses? I dunno, that's cutting off your nose to spite your face, in my book. I want to see winning baseball.

A fitting end to the season. Unfortunately there are still 5 games to go.

Thanks for the conversation starter. I come at things from a business analytics perspective, and this article pretty well encapsulates the attitude I saw across 35 years or so. An airline for example might use a form of analytics to minimize crew costs when scheduling their fleet for a month, and might have to use the same tools to recover when a snowstorm snarls their schedule. In neither case would they simply turn off their brains and rely on the output from the computer without incorporating their significant expertise in their own industry; before the advent of software powerful enough to address the problem, they had plenty of heuristics they used to get quite-good solutions. But in the first case they have the luxury of looking at the minimum-cost solution and seeing whether they can improve robustness or union satisfaction or a multitude of other factors, while in the other case they may be willing to take "any" quick and dirty solution the software offers quickly rather than wait for a truly minimum-cost solution to fix the immediate problem (the algorithms being quite time-consuming if allowed to run to completion), tweaking minor logistics issues by hand if necessary. A big thing baseball has in common with airlines is fuzzy data and huge uncertainties. Airlines deal with uncertain demand, can be hit by weather (as mentioned), and small random delays can have a cascading effect on a schedule. I don't have a similar inside look at what baseball teams do, but from the outside looking in, I don't detect nearly the arrogant analytics point of view that gets attributed to them. The Twins analytics representative who spoke at a panel discussion at the SABR national convention in August described the team's approach as analytics-assisted. That's how industry looks at it too. One fun tidbit from that panel was the insight that after every game, Rocco and the analytics team go over the ways that he deviated from the plan going into the game. People on the outside call that plan a "spreadsheet" to be disparaging, but the point is that Rocco routinely deviates from it (multiple times per game, it was implied), and the analytics team wants to understand. Not the other way around. Of course, I could be projecting my own approach onto what they said. 😀

I ran across an article, in a completely non-sports context (ethical choices), that fairly well sums up my view on using analytics wisely. Have a read, see what you think. I'm not going to short-circuit discussion by providing a summary; if no discussion occurs, so be it. https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/good-judgment-with-numbers

The base rate goes on to say, "very slightly.". The effect is there but IMO is overblown. How the pitcher looks that day may override the usual trend. "He'll be a little worse than so far, but he's been very good." I'm not saying it's clear-cut to leave Zebby in.