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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    That was my reaction to the comment above, too. If you wait long enough to know for sure, he's not a prospect anymore. But teams have to make their decisions based on incomplete knowledge; direct scouting and statistical analysis are all they get to use. And when the numbers are at odds with the eye test, as seems to have been the case for SWR until now, it's a really difficult decision.
  2. ashbury
    I'd enjoy reading something that actually persuades, concerning the direction of cause and effect. Correlation not being causation, and all that. (The above-mentioned Athletic article doesn't sound like it addresses this particular tangent exactly.) More plausible to me would be that fewer and fewer youths are playing baseball, and the downsizing of the minors reflects that reality, up and down the farm system; sure, you can find warm bodies to fill any number of rosters but what is the point? But I don't have any actual data, nor any inside sources to confer with.
  3. ashbury
    Did the teams make sure to cut good players along with the bad when they downsized?
  4. ashbury
    To me, their catcher was properly positioned when the throw was on its way, the throw was a bit up the line and he had to go get it. The catch was in time to tag the runner bang-bang, so I would never call this anything but an out.
  5. ashbury
    Sometimes the boundary conditions supplied with the partial differential equations go a little wonky. I'd stick with my Tuesday hunch unless you are a trained professional.
  6. ashbury
    According to mlb.com he went on the 10-day IL May 3, so by some proprietary advanced analytics I believe it could be yesterday or the final day of the season or possibly somewhere in between. But I like to play hunches so I'll throw away the poindexter stuff and guess Tuesday.
  7. ashbury
    I knew you were better than that, and also pretty sure you can take a joke.
  8. ashbury
    The other side of the coin is that this has him relying on the #2, 3 and 4 hitters to drive him in. Or he could drive himself in, as power hitters sometimes do, giving his team a 1-0 lead instantly. Margot is .757 while Kepler is 100 points lower. But that's across career plate appearances in the neighborhood of 1000, whereas you seem to want to look at the most recent one or two dozen as being meaningful for planning. No question Kepler has been hot recently, while Margot has been only so-so against lefties (and excruciatingly bad against right handers). But players go hot and cold at unpredictable intervals. I might be tempted by the hot hand too, but it's not crazy talk to use Margot in the only situation he's on the roster for (because it's become clear it's not "Buxton's backup in center").
  9. ashbury
    Sometimes my head hurts after reading this site, but I go lie down and it gets better.
  10. ashbury
    As for the merits of the post here, even though I'm on the analytic side of the spectrum, I have some skepticism about the brand of analytics I see in the Twins organization, looking only at their outward signs of course. For all the data they have on hand, their strategy seems to be simply, "he bats left, let's minimize his opportunities against lefties." Last year the Twins were second to the bottom in the majors for OPS of L-vs-L. Are they smart to minimize the opportunities? Or are they causing the problem itself, with this strategy (either killing confidence, or not letting the batters practice at it)? This year their L-L OPS is among the best. Kepler has gone nuts against lefties (1.056 OPS) and Julien's held his own (.756) as the two with the most PA. I'm open to being convinced. I'm also open to this being Small Sample Size and we revert back to last year - not coincidentally, the team has the 5th fewest PA in the majors for L-L matchups.
  11. ashbury
    That would be Stat Drunk Computer Nerd™. Were you there on Usenet back in the 90s when SDCNs ruled over rec.sport.baseball? You could tell who they were by their veneration of on-base percentage, and they hated sacrifice bunts. I think noted college professor Earl Weaver may have been among their number.
  12. ashbury
    Yes. I'll try to find time to read the article later, and learn the details of why.
  13. ashbury
    You might want to look into a team called the Chicago White Sox. 😀
  14. ashbury
    I'm confident that there are many who don't appreciate my style of contribution to game threads either.
  15. ashbury
    I am hoping for Cardenas, or literally anyone else, behind the plate just so long as there is no speedo.
  16. ashbury
    Just checked the video. Exciting final play for the win; go to about the 3:46 mark for the final (lengthy and entertaining) plate appearance. Thanks for the tip! https://www.mlb.com/twins
  17. ashbury
    Oh great. Another tangent about Buxton is about to launch. 😀
  18. ashbury
    Slightly contradictory messages in two different parts of the article. I go with the latter. Regardless, as to the spirit of the article itself, I do applaud your writing it, as I think the idea crossed many people's minds immediately after the play had finished. Mind you, I dismissed the idea almost immediately thereafter. But the idea is not so far from the realm of reality that I'm embarrassed to have wondered. It was worth thinking through. / edit - ninja'd a bit by Joe A. Preusser, while I was wordsmithing.
  19. ashbury
    No, but that was. 😀
  20. ashbury
    Soccer has a very different view of sportsmanship than the sports I usually follow, and I have to tip my cap to what seems to be a consistent mindset even if I don't share it. The Offside rule, for example, seems to have as a spirit of "fair play" that simply being the fastest sprinter on the field pitch doesn't entitle you to what they view as cheap goals. The wide receiver beating the cornerback to the endzone to receive a pass simply doesn't exist in soccer. While I don't know every nuance of that sport, I would be surprised if the last defender gets beaten when challenging a player who has the ball on a breakaway to the goal, and goes down in a heap in what seemed to be a clean play, gets the same out-of-bounds courtesy as when the offense magically breaks free in a contested scrimmage as one player goes down. To do so would open up the kinds of abuse that soccer rules seem designed to prevent. As for Kepler's scoring play: the first baseman lost his focus and took too long to notice something was wrong. Absolutely nothing wrong in baseball to try to score.
  21. ashbury
    From MLBTR: "Los Angeles is reportedly covering $6MM of Margot’s $10MM salary for the upcoming season. The Dodgers originally received $4MM from the Rays when acquiring Margot alongside Tyler Glasnow earlier this winter; Tampa Bay also remains on the hook for a $2MM buyout on a $12MM club option for 2025." Twins are on the hook for $4M. If they had a 26-man roster all making that salary, they'd barely have a $100M payroll. Margot's expense to the Twins isn't an issue. Even one dollar wasted, as it has been up to this point, that's an issue of course. It's the roster spot, not the money.
  22. ashbury
    Free Anthony Slama DaShawn Keirsey Jr.!
  23. ashbury
    Fun fact: among Twins who hit from the right side against lefties (so that includes switch-hitters), as of this morning Margot leads the team with 33 plate appearance, with an OPS of .660. That's not stellar but it's not a black hole in the lineup* when facing a left-hander, either. Buxton and Farmer represent right-on-left matchups who've been more of a problem for the Twins this season than Margot. I want to see Keirsey get his opportunity, and his 2024 AAA numbers support that, but I'm not so confident he would exceed that .660 OPS when facing lefties, right out of the chute. So, it is a bit of a conundrum for the FO to figure out. * An example of a black hole would be Margot's .344 OPS versus right-handers
  24. ashbury
    This is a very good point. We know how the FO looks at platooning in general. Here's another point. Keirsey's 2024 stats show him hitting better against lefties than righties. And that seems to include last night, when he hit 2 HR against righties. This is still small-sample territory and last year he did have a more typical L/R split, and they seem to have platooned him more then, than so far this year. But in prior years to that, he didn't have much of a split at all. I dunno, there's a chicken-and-egg aspect to hitting against same-sided pitchers, and I feel like the team has gone a little too far in the one direction.
  25. ashbury
    This closes the books on Ryne Harper's tenure with the Twins. (That's who we traded to get McMahon, back in '20.)
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