ashbury

If that's true then explain Cleveland and Cincinnati. They quite literally had OBP results in direct contradiction of their strikeout rates.

That would set this effort off from what's already on the regular Wikipedia page, for players like Greg Gagne who was mentioned.

I tuned out after Schwarber's second homer. Not a dull game, exactly, but it seemed like a good time to go do something else for a while. I didn't come back until the last batter of the eighth. Guess I missed a bit of action. 😊

This is where our opinions diverge, because for example Cleveland struck out the fewest this year and yet their OBP was below average. Cincy struck out a lot and their OBP was above average.

You do say this a lot, and it's plainly true*, but I'm not sure what wisdom it really imparts. If Falvey tells Levine, "go make a trade, improve the team," will Levine do more than just stare at him and say, "well, yeah, duh"? * An exception is that the team also needs to sell tickets. Trading Arraez was a gamble that I tip my hat to the FO for making. But trading away Puckett in his prime, if another team offered them the world, might not be a step our guys could reasonably take. There might other reasons to not be open to an otherwise favorable trade.

Bingo. The team with the fewest strikeouts this season, Cleveland, would have led the majors in that stat in 1987. The game has simply changed. That's not to say that leading in majors in Ks is a good thing. But the focus should be elsewhere. Leading the majors in groundouts or flyouts is harmful too, but those stats aren't as easily accessible, for us to bang our drums about. Outs made on the basepaths are even worse. Six teams this year averaged 5 or more runs per game. You know what correlates strongly with run scoring? Plate appearances. Only TB somehow managed those 5 runs without being near the top in PA. So we should just get some more players who are strong at racking up plate appearances, right? Right? OK that's a little tongue in cheek, but it leads to an actual insight that I do believe. The 6 teams that led the majors in OBP also led the majors in run scoring. That's not a guarantee, but it's strong correlation of success. If you just replace strikeouts with outs on the ground or in the air, you really aren't accomplishing much. Washington and Cleveland were at the bottom in striking out, and were nobody's idea of good offenses, and I bet you'd find those missing strikeouts were replaced with easy outs of other types. One more team. What do Cleveland, Washington, and Houston have in common? Houston was the third lowest team in strikeouts. And yet their run production was among those top-six I mentioned earlier. How could eliminating strikeouts as your primary goal in 2023 possibly be the right thing when you had a 1 out of 3 chance this year of instead ending up with bad run scoring? These 3 teams aligned in one particular counting stat but were very different in ways that matter. That's weak correlation to success. The correlation of strikeouts to runs is just not that strong. The correlation of getting on base, and bringing up your buddy for another PA, is. The Reds struck out a lot, they also had high OBP, and guess what, they scored runs above MLB average. They were also high in plate appearances. Keep the inning going. Focus on OBP, and the strikeouts will "magically" decline, and the run scoring go up, and the We Hates Strikeouts crowd will tell us that the lower strikeouts were the cure. The rooster crows, and the sun rises., and the rooster will let you know he caused it.

Almost certainly. I have snarked more than twice about links to players leading to someone who played college ball back in 1997 and never was drafted, or like that. I assumed it was a q&d tool you had cooked up to automate the process for your authors, and it's certainly useful to have a link to a player's stat page the first time they're mentioned in a TD article. I had no idea it was a q&d tool by b-r.com themselves. Sorry for the bad vibes sent your way in those cases. Who do you think is the best person to complain to, at their site? There is significant overlap between them and SABR and I don't think it would take much to get them to increase the priority.

I dashed off my comment before reading the rest of the thread, and I think you'd like the SABR Bio project, which consists of mostly amateur writers who are supported by a team of professionals who, for example, insist that the writer document everything, and who fix up the grammar (Chicago Manual of Style I think). They use (also amateur) fact checkers to weed out the worst of the factual mistakes which inevitably creep in despite best intent. This proposed Wiki would have lower aims than that of course. But also broader since the prospects are players that the SABR project wouldn't touch for at least another decade. I just think it's worth thinking through the vision for how the Wiki would fit into the larger ecosystem. Brock already brought up the risk of overlapping (to be charitable) what b-r.com does. Maybe a little sharper definition of what the intended audience is, and exactly how they will be served. If I can cash in 50,000 points to perma-ban a TD commenter of my own choosing, we're on to something.

I went to the SABR Bio Project and looked up Greg Gagne since he was mentioned, expecting to find several thousand words on his life and career and then planning to ask how everyone would see this proposed Wiki interacting with a bunch of well written info already out there. But it turns out nobody has written one for Gagne yet. Huh. I think I'll have to nag your local SABR chapter to get on the ball and do what the Boston chapter has already done for milestone teams like their 1986 World Series loser, which resulted in a book. We surely could do as well documenting a 1987 or 1991 winner. It's only a few thousand man-hours of effort. Anyway, there do exist bios on guys like Puckett and Hrbek, so investing time on them in a Wiki project should be done with at least knowledge of "prior art" being out there.

The thing that somehow caught me by surprise is that the batting lineup was essentially the same for every game. A time or two, a couple of batters got swapped in the order. Playing the same catcher every game stands out, but the rest was pretty consistent, obscured by his heavy use of platoon-bat pinch-hitting. In the regular season Rocco employed 13 different leadoff batters to begin the game. Our opponent in the wild card had used 4. Houston used 6. And so on, down the batting order. It's easy to guess any of several reasons it played out like this, but I'd be interested in eliminating the guesswork by someone asking Rocco to spell it out.

Ancient history What has Dusty accomplished lately?

True dat. Doesn't even have to be for money. I never paid such close attention to an NFL season as last year when I got roped into a family fantasy league.

Yeah, the headline to this post seems to have it backwards. The team exercised their half of the mutual option for 2024, and she turned hers down. She also turned down their offer of a contract extension aside from the 2024 option. She quit.

By that rule, doesn't he come out? Ryan's last 3 batters faced were HR - single - groundout. Looks like a "first sign of trouble" to me. If that were part of Emilio Pagan's body of work for the game, you would be hollering "Next!"

We can defer whatever discussions we wish, but the FO does not have that luxury, and so if we're all playing "the home version of the game," we might want to follow along. It's not a matter of guesswork/fantasy - it is scenario planning, and there is a wider range of scenarios for Buxton than just about anyone else. The FO has to plan around failure (Buxton still is no go), but they also have to plan around success (Buxton is a true asset for whatever number of games), and their off-season planning has to cover the negative while not making it impossible to cash in if the positive happens. "I think Buxton will be 100%, come Opening Day" is of course the futile kind of guesswork or downright fantasy that deserves to be made fun of, ditto "Buxton will retire", but that doesn't mean intelligent discussion about his situation isn't possible or even fun. If someone sees a thread about Byron and thinks it's a waste of time, there's no rule compelling any members to take part by posting, anyway.

On the morning of May 5 Buxton sported an OPS of .920. Up to that point the experiment to let him DH-only was working. From that date to the end of the season his OPS was .629. His batting average on balls in play was in the low .200s, which could be bad luck except we were watching him and the quality of the balls in play wasn't at his normal level. That OPS isn't sustainable for a major league hitter unless he is playing elite defense (and even then it's marginal) - and he still wasn't playing defense at all. It's impossible to pinpoint from the batting record when exactly something happened physically, but we can be pretty sure that something did. Post-surgery he had been on what was apparently an upward trajectory, with hope that DH would transition to CF, but instead something went downward. People say he proved he shouldn't play DH, that the mental stress of sitting was too much, but all the season demonstrated to me was that trying to keep him healthy by DHing him was a miserable failure this time. Next year he needs to be either on the active roster and playing CF most of the time, or else on the IL. It's foolish to bank on the Best Case given his health history, but it's also foolish to say it can't happen, and if it does the rewards could be considerable.

I just saw Montgomery get squeezed on an outside pitch that looked like it caught the black. But I haven't been paying attention most of the game, just listening, until now.

Game looks a lot like the ones our Twins played. Rallies ending with a batter flailing at strike three in the dirt. Less compelling TV when I don't have a dog in the fight. I don't know a solution.

At age 32 MAT had the second best offensive season of his career. Maybe Popkins unlocked something in him but I would not be inclined to bet on the same production in 2024. MAT at this point is a supreme backup outfielder, at least on a contending team. A bottom feeder team could use him as a starter without qualm, but our aspirations are higher than that for now.

The most difficult thing to find. Spot on. It may be fleeting and the FO obviously is always on the look. But at the moment, mission accomplished. Now get us one or two more.

Yes, but the reverse is also often true.

I don't know why the narrative doesn't die, but it needs to. Twins relievers pitched the 4th FEWEST innings in the majors in 2023. Starters pitched the 4th MOST; they were 7 innings across the entire season from overtaking Seattle for top honors.

In a world where "what have you done for us lately?" rules, let's celebrate what Maki has done lately. Next year will come soon enough. PS. Are there teams for whom the pitching coach holds 90 minute meetings?