ashbury

Donnie Barrels starting to earn his pay?

Might have to throw in Pagan as a sweetener.

Captain Morgan certainly didn't lead no infantry.

Go ahead and eat your chicken dinner now. It can't hurt.

Brand loyalty is important.

A Lieutenant Coke that got a promotion.

Many plate appearances have multiple opportunities for skill by the batter - the ones he swings at, the ones he doesn't. Not to start a tangent, but that's part of why defensive stats are always haunted by Small Sample Size even across a full season. Batters don't merely have 700 PA for full-time play, they have 3,000 or so individual decisions on pitches, that separate the good players from the others over the long haul. A corner outfielder gets 10% of that many fielding chances, and a lot of those are cans o' corn.

I don't think a market like Minnesota pays someone $3.5M to pitch mopup. They clearly thought his stuff can be harnessed for better than that. Plus, they have beaucoup candidates for the role you are suggesting; every team does. Now that the money's spent, of course, he's as good a candidate as the others. Unlike some others, he can't be sent at will to St Paul as part of a shuttle, and that in turn makes him a DFA candidate in order to send him down. WIshful thinking, failure to execute the plan, bad player evaluation - one way or another, it hasn't worked.

Kirilloff can complain about that close third-strike call, but the wild and crazy swing for strike two was no one's fault but his own and the pitch that finished him off really shouldn't have been the deciding factor.

Well ninja'd, sir.

Guess we're about to find out.

Listening once again to a Pablo Lopez interview, I am struck by what sounds like a concerted effort to speak with a "general American English" accent. Occasional words like "pitch" give a clue he was born abroad - I don't know at what age he came here from Venezuela, but I presume it was when he went into pro ball, in which case he seems to have made this a priority.

Very true. My editor had the day off today and I was just winging it. That'll teach me.

But but but but Spahn and Sain and Pray for Rain....

In his career Burnes hasn't allowed lefties much success against him, and on top of that he is absolute murder on the right-handed batters. Somehow righties have been doing okay this year, but given his track record I wouldn't expect a reverse-split like that to continue. Let's hope our lefties manage to scratch and claw a few runs out, and Pablo makes that stand up.

"That we know of." I am certain that Pagan has single-handedly lost several other games for the Twins and the FO just sweeps it all under the rug.

The trend has been toward 4-man playoff rotations, hasn't it? Houston and Philly both ran that many starters out there in the World Series last year. That gives Ober a spot, as he currently deserves. Also, a potentially unpopular hawt taek here, but I don't think Varland is a lock to even be on the post-season roster. Which unfortunately solves the last part of your dilemma.

I saw the start to this thread and was about to post, "people are treating the phrase could play like it's a simple yes/no situation." But the conversation immediately turned more productive, with this observation about risk. I'm not sure I have much to contribute except that different decision makers would have different criteria, thresholds, and circumstances for their choices, and I haven't been much for second-guessing the consensus that FO/manager/player have reached, except to note the less-visible cost in terms of strain on the roster with the present situation. Replacing MAT's marginal bat with Julien's untested bat is part of the calculation too, since it's not quite a sure thing. It's complex, and I'm only inclined to lament the fact.

WPA is nobody's idea of a perfect stat, and is more about situations than about "how good" a given player is. I do like a couple of things about it, one of which is that it tracks well with the fan psychology. The way WPA works, a 9th inning meltdown is more costly than one occurring in the 8th, since confidence in a lead increases as the end of the game approaches. That's what makes Pagan's most recent loss especially noteworthy. I looked on b-r.com's Stathead tool the next day, and his was only about the 39th worst (negative) game-WPA for a pitcher this season. But 31 of the ones farther up the list occurred in the 9th inning. Special recognition must go to Josh Fleming for his outing against the Dodgers on May 28. You may remember the game. He started and pitched 6 full innings, at which point the score was tied 10-10. His Rays kept scoring runs, piling up positive WPA totaling .849 by game's end, and he just kept giving runs right back (assisted a bit by defensive mistakes), racking up a total of -.713 WPA. Fleming's number is really hard for a starter to achieve, worst for a starter so far this year. Since the Rays were the home team, and it was tied, they still had an estimated 57% historical chance of winning after he finished the top of the 6th, and they did push across a run for an 11-10 thriller; his two relievers justly earned nice WPA ratings. Weird game.

Milwaukee got swept by the Oakland juggernaut. Riding a six-game winning streak now, will the A's ever lose another game?

You make it sound worse than it was. He was drunk after finishing off the 5th. Meh, as for Buxton, if he can hit like Nelson Cruz did for us then his salary at DH will be justifiable. Maybe most of the years he will? I'm not optimistic but it's not without hope. The contract is much better when he plays a sizable proportion of CF. Doubt there's any argument about that.

The Twins' magic number this morning stood at 93 according to the RIOT tool which takes into account contenders playing against each other. I don't see how anyone else catches them, given this fact.