ashbury

Against 28 year-old ex-Twins farmhand Bryan Sammons who came into the game sporting a 5.21 ERA. Oh my OMG.

I was worried sick about Gallo's (checks transactions log) "left" "foot" "contusion." Glad to find out he's staged a miraculous recovery so quickly.

Concur. Second half numbers, which are by now more than merely the Smallest of Sample Sizes, have both Ober and Ryan's ERAs in the 5's and Maeda's at 4.14. Unless there is something currently the matter with Kenta physically, he'd be my choice for a Game 3.

I don't share this same nostalgia for September 2022. The team had banked a good percentage of wins by mid-May, and after that they were a stubbornly sub-.500 team for the large majority of the year. By early August the trend seemed pretty well established, and I felt like the Earnest Young Ensign in some space-faring movie, where the good ship is spiraling into the atmosphere and he whispers to his superior beside him at the helm, "we're not gonna make it, are we?" September was just a slightly further accelerated nosedive straight into the planet's surface, but they were never going to pull out; gravity got 'em. This article makes several nods in this direction, but nevertheless holds to the romance that they were still in first place or close to it, and merely needed to hold on but couldn't due to a spate injuries. For me the die was cast much earlier, and yes injuries were key all season. Constructing a roster that was injury-prone in the first place and then accentuating that tendency with moves such as the trades for Paddack and Mahle was the story.

Last year Miami's offense was third from the bottom in the majors. This year they are fourth from the bottom. Last year the Twins' runs-against per game was around the middle of the pack. This year they rank fourth best. A table-setter for a solid starting pitcher, assuming the talent evaluation and medicals all check out, is a trade I make every time. Pitchers are inherently injury-prone but we know from experience that position-players miss time and see declining performance due to physical ailments too. I liked the trade even when Arraez was hitting .400 earlier this season, and I like it now. Setting the table wasn't any kind of panacea for Miami.

Julien hit lefties very capably in single-A. Then he had a serious platoon split at AA. But in his short stint in AAA his numbers against lefties were good again. Now the small-sample numbers in the majors are bad, very bad - imagine walking man Julien drawing zero bases on balls in any random sample of 42 plate appearances, but that's what has happened facing left-handers since he was called up. Left-handed AAA pitchers aren't as skilled as their major league counterparts. But the same is true of right-handers. So I don't see the promotion by itself as the cause of problems on one side but not the other. Full time players are incredibly valuable. Julien's already a bit on the bubble with his defense. If he starts to profile as merely a platoon DH, that's not worth very much, even if it's the "strong" side of the platoon. If it were up to me, I'd make sure the batting coaches are giving him useful tips on what to do against really good lefties seen at the major league level, and then give him a lot of opportunity even if there are growing pains. I'd invest the plate appearances.

Does anyone here recall from past experience (2019, and on back) how easy it is to acquire Twins playoff tickets in advance? Me 'n' the boys are considering popping in for an impromptu visit to the Twin Cities, and wouldn't want to commit to airfare etc without pretty good confidence in having seats inside the ballpark. Chances are we want just one game, which probably flies in the face of the team wanting to sell the full series? Does the team do first-come-first-served or run a lottery? With the rise of the online secondary market, are the prices consistently far higher than face, or does the "spot market" rise and then fall? So many unknowns. Would be fun but don't want to arrive and come away empty.

"It's hard to field the ball when you have both hands around your throat." Just in case any young'uns might misunderstand, my recollection is that Gaetti was speaking of himself only, after (with a memory refresher on b-r.com) the Twins dropped a second straight crucial game in their final series, on Sept 28, 1984, in which they entered the bottom of the 6th leading Cleveland 10-2 and exited that inning clinging to only a 10-9 lead, keyed by an E-5 with two outs leading to 3 unearned runs, enroute to a crushing 11-10 outcome that ended their season hopes. Losing pitcher for the eventual ninth-inning walkoff? Who else, but Ron Davis. Gaetti was totally a standup guy as that "young player" critiquing himself in the moment for all to hear. Perhaps he "understood" something later on when looking back, but at the time he was simply sick at heart and embarrassed and didn't try to hide it. It's right to give him mad props for a quote for the ages. Poetic. You could write a Country song with that as the tag line. Our current crop may have similar growing pains before they are ready. Hope it doesn't take another 3 years like it did for The Rat and company.

Jays, Rays, what's the difference, who can tell those teams apart anyway? :

Since the All-Star break: Vazquez, 28 starts Jeffers, 28 starts The tide is turning.

I am not sure I'm willing to grant him even that. When Josh Donaldson was released by the Yankees last month, an opinion piece in the New York Post mentioned Gallo's "edginess" in the same breath with Donaldson's "prickliness" and implied he's not precisely a good fit in just every clubhouse. The Post is kind of a rag but I still give some credence when whispers like that are put in print.

Mrs Ash and I attended a AAA game in Reno last night in which the score was 13-0 after three innings. Glad the Twins decided to take a page from that same playbook, to go up by a couple of touchdowns before letting the opponents do much. How many sacks did the Twins defense manage to accumulate?

Currently waivers are player-centric, and each player is handled separately according to which team(s) put in a claim. That's usually fine when only a player or two at a time is put on waivers. When there are a lot of players, desirable ones at that, you have to have a draft. It need not be a public spectacle like the June draft or the Rule 5 draft in December, when multiple desirable players are routinely available. Instead, each team just has to manage its current list of waiver claims by priority, at the commissioner's office. If you want Matt Moore the most, followed by someone else, rank them #1 and #2 respectively. Every day, one of the commissioner's minions* goes through in priority order (this year Oakland first, then KC, etc) and if they have any waiver claims, they get their top priority. Then on to the next team in order. If it's your turn and your #1 guy is already gone, then you get your #2, unless he's gone too. And so on. Just like any draft, except everyone has made their decisions in advance, because the numbers of players are so much fewer than in June or December and the decision making is manageable. (Imagine ranking all the amateurs for the June draft, that would not be manageable.) Most days the process would be trivial, and with exactly the same results as we're used to - players pass unclaimed through waivers all the time and that would continue. But on a day where a team like the Angels has put a lot of good talent on waivers, the process spreads out the talent to multiple teams. * In truth the minion would be a computer program that runs through the list** as many times as needed, but I don't want to rile up any anti-computer hysteria. ** I was going to say database, but, well, you know.

That's mighty Big of you.

Tired, tired, tired of being the little people.

I look forward to a time that my team is regularly so far up in the standings that manufactured events like what the Angels just pulled are not relevant.

Such bad luck, just barely missing on Matt Moore. They tried. If only there had been a way to acquire his services, not just for September and a possible postseason, but all of 2023!

Of course it would be different. A .500 team whose record involves young players taking some lumps but now might be prepared to go on an upswing for a few years to come, is different from a veteran-laden team with the same record and likely to get worse if the status quo is maintained. Go to any site that lists 2023 teams' player stats, and sort by plate appearances (batters) or innings (pitchers). Then look at the ages. You went with Cincinnati as the comparison team. Our top 6 batters by usage ALL are older than ANY of the Reds' top 8 batters. The story with the pitchers is slightly better, with 3 of the 5 Twins with the most innings being age 27 and 2 of age 33-35, but the Reds top 5 are 4 arms age 23-25 and one at 29. Better days are more likely in store for the Reds than for the Twins. It's a supposition that some new wave of rookies will supplant our veterans, because with a couple of exceptions everyone who's going to be any good in 2024 is already up. Meanwhile in Cincinnati you don't even have to suppose. That why I'm "not very positive" on this team.

Guardians and Reds, LOL.

I don't think it can be tweaked quite that simply. The current waiver process (as with many roster rules) is purposely player-centric, not team-centric. The claims are all handled simultaneously. Which player goes first, for this new purpose? Ideally, the "best" one, but that's subjective. IMO the solution when there are a lot of such players is to make it more like a draft, of the kind for amateurs in June or the minor league Rule 5 draft in December. But it's not necessary to make it a public spectacle of any kind. Just that, beyond simply putting in waiver claims on players, each team must manage its current list of waiver claims, providing the league a ranked order that the league will use if there are enough players currently on waivers and there is contention for them. Most days of the year, there are only a handful of players and most don't even get claimed - on those days the new system would operate as a practical matter like it does now. But if there are lots of claims then the league runs an automated draft that day, taking each team in their priority order and assigning them the one player they put at the top of their current list of claims. The process would continue in circular order until no remaining claims exist. This preserves the principle that a team has to be serious when they make a waiver claim. If they put in 6 claims, they'd better be prepared to find room for them all, if no one else takes any. Waivers and the claims need to remain irrevocable in both directions. No farting around. The teams are already connected by databases via the league office. This would be easy-peasy, and would cut down on abuses by one team scooping up talent for September. (Assuming that the league even sees this as an abuse that harms public perception of fairness, which they may not.)

In the fall of 2021 in suburban Phoenix, USAFChief and I shared the experience of watching Wallner get smacked square in the jaw with a pitch. There was blood, it was frightening, and I figured that would be the end of his Arizona Fall League season. Not so - a few games later he was back in the lineup, hitting just as well as before (1.000+ OPS) and I was impressed with his toughness. Obviously he was fortunate not to have had an outcome more like Kyle Farmer this season. Luck and grit combined in that instance. I''ll take the author's word for it that video of this season's HBP are all along the lines shown in the two videos, and nothing reckless. Armored elbows and feet are risky but not usually career threatening when hit. But the beaning in 2021 shows the downside to his strategy at the plate. No professional pitcher goes out there to try to hurt another player. But I could easily imagine a pitcher thinking, "oh, so you want to crowd the plate and take me deep by pulling an outside pitch, huh? How about if I give you something to think about first, and a little higher?" And then the pitch gets away, or Wallner fails in this one instance to react quite in time. I've believed in his bat since before the AFL, and more power to him and his approach to inside pitches, I guess. But I hope he really has a plan beyond "if they throw inside I'll let it hit me," and that it's been vetted by older players who have seen a thing or three in their time. Once a player has a reputation around the league, it's hard to shake. What would a frank conversation between Wallner and Solano be like, for instance?

Of course it would. My beef with the FO has been about results the two seasons before the present one. A strong finishing kick to 2023 and then a representative showing in the post season would satisfy me into the next season.

Yeah, she'd slap you if you tried.

Balazovic got sent down to St Paul yesterday, didn't he?