ashbury

That third hitter wasn't too badly fooled.

Sí, Ortega!

Those LSD flashbacks still haunt us all.

I actually meant it as a compliment to the man. He is tough.

/ obligatory - assuming I'm not already ninja'd on this too

Wittless is not the same as Happless, which is probably more my lot in all this.

Or refuses to change his game in the face of adversity.

Wittless from here on, you're saying / edit - ninja'd. As expected.

Farmer is just nails.

Very Witty.

All kinds of fun now!

Byron beats out the slow grounder. This is fun.

You picked a funny day to say this. He's looked good on defense today and of course owns the first 4 RBIs of the game for the Twins. He's looked engaged when the camera is on him. I don't put much stock in any small sample of results, and merely say this is very welcome and a bit overdue from our right fielder.

I don't question his effort nor his clutchiness nor anything about his approach. But the results this year are illusory. Maybe it's just small samples cut up into too many pieces. But among his 221 plate appearances for the Twins: Team ahead: 85 PA, 1.143 OPS Tie game: 55 PA, .642 OPS Team behind: 81 PA, .549 OPS* Gallo had a crucial homer the other day. But in the long view, his contributions when the team most needs him have been less than his overall OPS suggests. I'm not sure I've ever watched an "empty" .800 OPS but this might be one. *(MLB wide the disparity is not nearly so severe: OPS of .743, .728, .719. The Twins as a team show a worse than average disparity this year, .752, .713, .667, but nothing like Gallo.)

I know there are arguments for wRC but I can't remember a time when I found that it and OPS were at odds on a player I was looking at. Right now b-r.com has OPS+ of 117 for Gallo, and these numbers are barely worth one significant digit (not counting the leading 1 or 0), so this and 121 are basically congruent. wRC+ doesn't give me insight that OPS+ doesn't already, so I rarely resort to it. WPA has real problems, especially if used as "is this guy good?" versus "what kind of year has he had?" Still, as I said, I find that ordinarily WPA pairs up with WAA (which for a full season is roughly like WAR-2.0), to suggest how well the player contributes to being over .500. Gallo is an outlier, for whatever reason. Between WPA or WAA (or wRC+), which one gives the fairest picture, I don't know if there is an absolute answer out there. I do think Gallo's negative WPA is more congruent with what fans who post at TD have said his season feels like to them.

You misspelled "Luck", the new topic of this thread.

Good. There was a year that Nolan Ryan led his league in ERA with plenty of games started and innings pitched. His WAR and WAA and WPA and any other alphabet soup you happen to look at confirms his good season. And yet he went 8-16. It can happen. I won't go so far as to say ignore W-L record for a starter in the modern game, but it should be looked at in context. If all else looks solid, and the W-L isn't there, maybe the rest of the roster let him down. By various measures, Sonny Gray is one of the top 5 starting pitchers in the league this year. The only knock is he doesn't go as deep into games as some, and that's as much the on-field staff's decision as his own performance. The innings he has pitched, he has delivered.

What tipped you off? The little smiley face?

If Gray alone is going, then Rocco needs to be in the discussion for Manager of the Year for leading this ragtag pitching staff to essentially a tie in the majors for ERA. And they need to institute a similar award for pitching coaches so that Pete Maki can bask in the limelight of making a silk purse from his collection of 23 (and counting) sows ears.

Concur with Rod both on his kudos and on his insights. Some observations... Tom Kelly is often quoted that you need to give a hitter 1000 PA. People sometimes assume that to mean you need to give any prospect that long of a leash, but I think he meant that you can tell pretty quickly if someone isn't going to hit, but when someone succeeds you still need to allow it some time until you conclude he's for real. Probably for pitchers you could use a similar criterion like batters-faced. A general manager long ago, let's say Branch Rickey though it could have been Bill Veeck or Frank "Trader" Lane, said that it's better to trade a veteran a year too early than a year too late. It used to be thought that a player reaching age 30 was just entering his prime. We now expect that at that age he has already entered a decline phase. While we remember the long careers like Musial and Ripken and Cabrera and Spahn and Ryan and Verlander, the truth is that most players, even the stars, have a relatively brief career. Sometimes that's due to injury, sometimes to circumstance. By the time you have figured out someone's any good, he's already showing signs that he won't be for long. Part of being a Hall of Famer is defying that trend. Players get hurt, and sometimes can play through it all season, and heal up in the off-season. Might that be the case for Burnes? Who knows? As Rod said, very difficult questions. That's why the GM gets paid the big bucks.

Normally I like OPS as overall offensive stat as well as any other. But recently I was looking around and comparing Wins Above Average, which to my eye correlates well with OPS (except when defense is either end of the spectrum), to Win Probability Added, and Gallo is a huge outlier. WAA about zero (average player), negative WPA. (Both stats take .500 performance as a baseline, unlike WAR and OPS, and think in terms of where wins come from.) Career wise his WAA is positive, his WPA negative. His contributions don't come often enough when the team needs him, if you buy WPA's logic. He had a couple big homers this week. But his negative performances are death by a thousand cuts. His OPS is kind of suspect IMO.

Who are the other ninth round pitching draft picks from 2022 who are at AA? I haven't taken the time to look - maybe there's a bunch and the other franchises are running rings around us.

Several times today I have encountered a failure message. At the moment when I click on... https://twinsdaily.com/forums/topic/62951-buxton/ ... I get a screen that says "Sorry, there is a problem. Something went wrong. Please try again." Before I go digging into what could possibly be different about my browser (both Firefox and Chrome) or internet connection today I thought I should ask if anyone else if having ths type of problem on TD? / edit - this page, for whatever reason, loads just fine for me

I totally missed the link and reference in the article. Learn To Read, they tell me. Live And Don't Learn, is my standard response. Colt Emerson it is. Book it. 🙂

Yes. I didn't want to be Captain Wetblanket after that first game, but the breakdown of run scoring jumped out at me right away. It seems like the same old pattern, which of course applies to any team but somehow seems more extreme with the 2023 Twins than I ever remember: fatten up on a pitcher who is clearly not having a good day, get shut down by any competent major leaguer who has a good plan and the command to carry it out.