ashbury

And like a good neighbor, Taylor is there! (for the insurance.)

There is a nice gentleman standing in foul territory near third base who can provide him some confirmation, if he looks. As for seeming awkward on defense, I think it's a little worse than merely that. There's been a bit of everything, as Stringer alluded, the common theme being plays not made. (I agree that that one grounder this past inning would have been very tough to convert.)

I know. We were treated to the phrase "pitching pipeline" when Falvey and Levine came onboard, and until now I've been skeptical. But if they have some magic sauce to take a 15th round pick from a small college and add 5 MPH to the fastball while teaching command of the strike zone plus the evident ability to disguise pitches, well, sign me up for that and keep 'em coming.

He's got worse than Little League instincts sometimes. That game where he got thrown out rounding second was of a similar caliber to this defensive "gem."

And against Long Man Mushinski, topic of a different thread a few days ago. / edit - okay, very much a side topic

Big hits with the bases loaded! As expected.

My knowledge of college statistics is poorer than I'd like, but the above graph displays both strong skew (lack of symmetry) and strong kurtosis (long tail). Part of the problem with using simply the mean is that there's no practical upper limit to scoring, but you can't do worse than a shutout for these purposes. That's the skew - exploding for 13 runs against an emergency starter and AAAA relievers and then scoring one run each against the opponent's two aces puts you in a worse position for winning a three game series than consistently scoring 5. I agree that showing a team's standard deviation of their scoring would add useful insight to the simple mean and I don't really understand why that hasn't become a conventional stat. It would highlight a team that operates like the example above. I know what skew and kurtosis are (at least in a layman's way). I just don't know what to do about 'em.

Maybe it's just a matter of semantics, but by "best trade chips" I did not mean "best prospects". My approach is probably pretty conventional: rate all your prospects, pick out your keepers (perhaps with balance as to positions they play), listen to offers on the rest, and the ones who attract interest are your best trade chips. Steer and Encarnacion-Strand struck me as not having a clear defensive spot and you can only roster so many DHs, so at the time they made the most sense to trade for something of value. Thus, "best". Did you mean something else? Yes it does stink to not get what we thought we were getting. Because we can't go and do those trades repeatedly. I'm about to start repeating myself though, so this is where I expect to stop.

It's true. Because I fully acknowledge that I would get roasted by the press for not doing something meaningful at the deadline. Even if my paycheck is signed by a Pohlad and not by the press, you do have to take that into account.

Mahle's career IL resume was pretty clean... until one month before the trade. "Strained right shoulder." I find shoulders scarier than elbows for pitchers. Past history at that point means less than the here-and-now. We won't get an answer, but your question needs to be turned around and also presented to the FO, as to why they felt a guy 10 days and 2 starts removed from a shoulder strain, severe enough to warrant a "quick" 20-day stay on the injured list, was a good gamble when spending two of our best trade chips. I don't think it's fair to place all the burden on us fans.

I've posted my Ultimate SSS observation from a game at Oakland before, but when I watched Steer playing first base what I noticed was a lack of nimbleness, and hand-eye coordination. I don't see him being an asset at any defensive position on the diamond, merely "adequate". With that as a baseline, the bar is set pretty high for his bat to cause regret. The package we traded was a good idea. Mahle being the choice of target is what made it a below-par gamble for a trade. And I still don't have a good answer for who else I would have targeted at the trade deadline give that we were in first place at the time; "nobody, or some lower target and hang on to our best trade chips for the offseason," is about the closest I can come.

These are all fair questions and I'm not sure I'm up to the challenge of giving you a definitive answer. I have opinions, and it's going to be hard to avoid rambling on a topic like this. I don't know whether enough others are even reading this thread by this point, to make it worthwhile to open a dialog, but I do find it hard to resist potential rabbit holes. 😀 I could invest many words defining WAR and its relative Wins Above Average, contrasted to WPA, but trying to be brief I'll say that they approach the ultimate analytics question of "Where Do Wins Come From?" from different starting points and nearly completely different philosophies. One tries to compare a log of a player's outcomes to a mythical replacement player (say, Ryan Lamarre or Tyler White?), one compares to a generalized average player (Max Kepler?), and one starts with the assumption that a team is 50% to win any particular game and looks for the contributions that day that bring a given game to 100% or down to 0% by game's end. Expressed as fractions, that is .500 to divvy up among the players' contributions on the winning side, and -.500 for the losing team. Of course if you have a lot of bad players, you're not 50-50 to win, and their WPA for the season will eventually reflect that. Let's take a step back and look at Cole Sands for an example that will be meaningful to Twins fans and probably no other team. He pitched on Tuesday, and his season ERA is now an impressive 0.73, across 7 games and 12.1 IP. Is he good? I dunno. Obviously it's a small sample. His WAR on b-r.com stands at 0.4, which is pretty good - multiply everything by 10 for a moderately used pitcher across a full season and you've got a WAR of about 4.0 in 120+ innings which is verging on All-Star performance, so he's going at a good rate right now This is reflected in the WAA on that same web page, currently 0.6, even higher than his WAR which is unusual. Even though "Wins" is in the name of both those stats, has Cole actually contributed to any wins this season? Is he actually above average? Take a look at his game log. His first three appearances were 2 inning jobs to close out blowout wins (11-1, 11-2, 11-1). Then he was brought in to soak up some innings in losses where the offense wasn't doing much (7-3, 4-1, 3-0, 5-1). He's only given up a run once, but whether he pitched well or not, he wasn't likely to do so badly as to blow those three wins, nor will putting up zeroes for an inning or two usually bring a win when you are behind by multiple runs in mid to late innings. (We all remember the dramatic comebacks or the choke jobs, but overall they are pretty seldom.) It may not be Cole's fault that he's been used this way, but a rookie needs to establish some trust and his 2022 didn't do that, so in the early going he's been used gingerly. And WPA (at least IMO) reflects this reality. The in-game WPA for each of his 7 appearances has been positive, but close to zero. 0.001, etc don't add up to much. Yesterday was his high-water mark so far, because he was brought in for the fifth inning of a loss instead of late, and even so it only improved his team's chances by 0.017 (again, the team that wins accrues 0.500 together while the losing team accrues -.500). For the season those little numbers add up to just 0.043, which is about an order of magnitude lower than his WAR or WAA. In terms of the Twins season record, I think the tiny number more accurately reflects Cole's actual contribution. WAA would have you believe he's contributed nearly a win more than an average reliever would have done, and I just can't see it. Okay, I'm belaboring Cole, simply because his season looks so easy to understand - he's had no ups and downs, merely ups, in games where the stakes were low - and the ways of measuring him differ greatly (percentage-wise anyway, given the small sample) which helps highlight how the ways are not the same. Cole's lack of meaningful use stands as contrast to how others are used. Now compare to game logs for Griffin and Emilio. They have pitched more, and pitched (at times) when the stakes were high. Jax was the winning pitcher twice, in extra innings where one mistake could reverse the outcome, and he was credited with a massive .304 WPA each time, justly so. But he's also blown leads in late innings, resulting in negative WPA of similar or greater magnitude. Jax has actually had only 6 games out of his 25 appearances where his WPA (positive or negative) was as small as Cole Sands's largest WPA. Ups and downs come with the territory of being a reliever. Jax's WAR is 0.0, his WAA is thus slightly negative at -0.1, which suggests mediocrity. The problem is that bad outings can saddle the team with a loss nearly on the spot, unless the offense stages a miracle comeback - whereas an inning or two of good work won't necessarily preserve the win unless you're the closer because it still leaves some work to the next pitcher in line. IOW, just subjectively speaking, the downs for a reliever hurt the team more than the ups help. And this is reflected in Jax's aggregate negative WPA of -.809. He hasn't destroyed his team's season by any means, but all in all he may have cost us a net loss of a game compared to an average reliever. Pagan has fared better than Jax. Some ups, some downs. 6 of his 20 games have resulted in tiny WPA, so relatively he's been used in somewhat lower leverage than Jax, and again the negatives outweigh the positive (a blown save against the Dodgers, a disastrous outing versus Boston) for an aggregate -0.173 - basically the good and bad have cancelled each other. Circling back to Cole Sands, would he have done any better? I'm skeptical, but we just don't know, and his near-zero WPA more accurately reflects my uncertainty than his 0.6 Wins Above Average amassed in garbage time. More than that, none of these stats take into account whether a pitcher was facing the heart of the lineup or the bottom of the order, and we do see Rocco picking his moments for putting in one reliever versus another. And just for completeness, any stat is likely to confirm that Jhoan Duran has been really good, even if he has suffered a blown save and a ninth-inning loss - WAR is 1.1, WAA is 0.8, and WPA is 0885. Being the closer is the definition of high-leverage and WPA reflects that - but so does his WAR. He gets statistical credit with WPA for pitching in high leverage, but it's high leverage for a reason and the downfall would be large if he failed. Not sure I've directly answered the questions you asked, but maybe this point of view helps you form your own opinions.

This post did not age well. 😀 A week later his OPS is already down to .771 (early season numbers still fluctuate), and he's not among the league leaders for DH. He's an acceptable regular at DH if the rest of the lineup is really strong at bat, but we know that's not the case. And we all feel he is capable of so much more. I still hope we are in a "rehab" situation for his knee or hip or whatever holds him back, and we still get the Real Byron Buxton this season, preferably sooner than later.

I don't remember the exact details and it may vary with how old the player was when the first contract was signed, but yes, there is that too.

Speed is fun to watch, plain and simple, with SB only one aspect. Not sure we win today's game without Willi's baserunning. Lack of speed OTOH can be painful to watch, for instance when Julien decided to take two bases while the baserunner ahead of him took only one. I don't know how much of the other "tools" I'd sacrifice to get an extra increment of speed, but I'd give at least a little.

What's he like away from the ballpark? At dinner in a quiet restaurant, for instance? Does he loosen up and speak his mind to you, when there's no microphones?

Nerve-wracking but a satisfying outcome. World Series here we come! 😀 / edit - haven't seen mention of Jorge Lopez's three-up three-down eighth inning (okay, so a DP was needed), and I want to highlight that as key to letting Duran cover the ninth and tenth. He's had a bumpy time of late, so coming through like that was big!

Something, something, commando, something. So come on over! / ninja'ed to a degree by wsnydes but that's life

What is the role for Sonny the Gray?

Come over any game, and do ours!

Henceforth this shall be known as The Holy Mackerel Game. 😀

INCREDIBLE win!

Somewhere somebody constructs charts of a game's worth of these and sees if at least it was balanced. I look forward to someone posting that for this game. IMO it will be scalding on this ump.