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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    It was just some free verse. Clear your mind of expectations.
  2. ashbury
    James Paxton has had 1 bad start out of 7 so far this season. The Twins were not the team to accomplish this feat. As expected.
  3. ashbury
    They are required to follow the contusion protocol.
  4. ashbury
    At the end of the day, a 6-man rotation makes room for your 6th best starter, in the hope that extra rest elevates everyone else's performance and stamina. Better innings, more innings - if you don't get either of those, then you are putting extra strain on the 7 remaining bullpeners. I'm skeptical that it would pay off, either short term or long term. The plan is to give Louie Varland more innings in the majors when he needs to tune something up at AAA? No thanks.
  5. ashbury
    Stevenson has the misfortune to bat lefthanded, behind at least one likely-better and definitely-younger guy (Wallner), in an organization that prioritizes handedness at least as much as the average one does. His ability to play CF might be his one edge. If Buxton needs to go on the 60-day IL I wonder if he gets his chance, sooner than Celestino who I think is still kind of marginal despite one hot game out of 5 at AAA so far.
  6. ashbury
    The beauty of baseball is that you can score runs in various ways. Despite the rise of Three True Outcomes (HR/BB/SO), there is still variety. I looked at this year's team totals, and the two teams with fewest GIDP are the Dodgers and the Rangers. They happen to rank #4 and #1 in runs scored this season. The two teams with the fewest strikeouts? Washington and Cleveland. They are, um, not among the leaders in runs scored (#23 and #27). There is no sure fire way to build a solid offense. But avoiding strikeouts is not the place I would look first.
  7. ashbury
  8. ashbury
    Varland is a case in point for my view that there's really no such role as "#5 starter", not as anything permanent for a season anyway. That slot is for pitchers trying to establish a role - either a veteran trying to show he can still be a contributor in a rotation, or a young guy trying to establish himself. The difference is what to do with the guy if he's not making the grade: you DFA the veteran or maybe put him in the bullpen, you probably just option the youngster. Varland is our #5 guy, and right now it's time to send him to St Paul. The uptick in home runs might be just a SSS phenomenon, but it seems clear that whatever deception he brought in the early going has been scouted and adjusted for. So now it's his turn to adjust, and AAA is the place for experimentation and learning.
  9. ashbury
    This year Carlos Correa leads the Twins in total bases, with 97. Meanwhile Shohei Ohtani leads the majors with 175; Carlos ties for 103rd most. We don't meaningfully have a "best hitter" on the team. It's like declearing which of Snow White's little friends was the tallest.
  10. ashbury
    The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Twintown nine that day ... (yadda yadda - eighth inning instead of ninth, two other guys made outs after the bases were loaded) ... But there is no joy in Twintown —mighty Buxton has struck out. / edit - not to pick on Buxton, the whole offense was feeble yet again.
  11. ashbury
    Because any given game this time of year can more easily be made up?
  12. ashbury
    If he had another player he thought might OPS over .893? Yeah, probably.
  13. ashbury
    Sounds about right for Max and Byron. I might have had higher expectations for Jorge than others did, and hoped he would establish himself as a shortstop, but his right arm just never would support him grabbing that role and keeping it. Jorge also has been beset by injuries, less than Byron but more than Max. I think I imagined more from him also.
  14. ashbury
    I always want to see a second season before pronouncing anyone (aside from a few top draftees) a top prospect, but this is the kind of progression you like to see from a college player right out of the gate.
  15. ashbury
    I'll ask my SABR researcher friends to try and name names as to why this particular rule was instituted.
  16. ashbury
    I see on Ronald Acuña Jr.'s Wikipedia page that his son was born in 2020. Are there any early scouting reports on this prospect?
  17. ashbury
    Both I suppose, but I'd probably explain it with percentages. In the seasons they were winning they'd win more when he was a starter. In their losing seasons, they lost less frequently. It's a bit laborious to dig up the numbers in his b-r.com game logs, because partial games carry a bias. And the last I looked might have been a couple years ago so I won't vouch for 2022. Right now 2023 is only closely in his favor, I think.
  18. ashbury
    This year? Now 28-24 in games he started. (Among those are 4 he didn't finish the game but the Twins won all 4.) In years past when he was in CF the W-L record was almost invariably better.
  19. ashbury
    "This guy's just a little bit better than you are used to, sir."
  20. ashbury
    I really hope there is more nuance to the plan than just that. Simple math: in an era of 13-man pitching staffs, a 6-man rotation leaves 7 relievers instead of the current 8. That makes it more important, not less, for most of the starts to be of the longer variety. A sequence of four-inning starts such as Sonny Gray gave us the other day will wear down a 7-man bullpen fast. And the guys who we think of as mop-up pitchers will be thrust into even more frequent high-leverage duty. And who is the one being added to such a rotation? A guy coming off the injured list, likely to be on a pitch limit, with a ceiling of 5 innings or so, at least for a while? Shuttling arms up and down from AAA is not a sustainable solution, due to roster rules that require minimum stays in AAA. Very little margin for error, with such a plan. So I hope there is another rabbit they can pull out of the hat. Or else that the plan is only a couple of times through the rotation in the expectation that something will sort itself out.
  21. ashbury
  22. ashbury
    You can be President of the Ryan Jeffers fan club and I'll be Secretary-Treasurer. Everybody hop on the bandwagon, send your Venmo payment in care of ashbury.definitely.not.a.scam@gmail.scam and we'll mail your secret decoder ring right away.
  23. ashbury
    Don't know whether you already looked it up, but if I added correctly the Twins are 19-24 when Vazquez starts behind the plate, and now 17-11 when Jeffers is the starting catcher (1-1 when Jeffers DHs). Small Sample Size territory still, but perhaps an unexpected trend at season's start.
  24. ashbury
    Didn't watch the game live and am only seeing the play on the video clip, but that is one fine catch and tag by Jeffers. He had to keep his eye on a one-hop throw and immediately apply the tag. He did it all in one motion that had multiple ways for it to go wrong. Probably really good technique (what do I know), definitely excellent execution IMO.
  25. ashbury
    "A new drama is coming soon to the Netflix"? Yeah, I kinda picked up on that note. Still, you raised an angle I thought worth exploring - what the team will do at the deadline is an evergreen topic and Gray's name keeps being speculated here. And the OP and thread are about Gray so this was as good a place as any.
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