ashbury

"We are going through a difficult period of time with, obviously, some health issues." -- Rocco Oh, that darn injury bug. I guess pneumonia is an injury to the lungs. I'm still going with my pre-season prognostication of 93 wins, barring injury. If it's valid for them, it's valid for me. Looks like I need to update my terminology though. Barring health issues.

Well, see, I think I've found the problem - we've been letting the evil twin pitch instead of the guy we intended.

Announcers often have insights from coaching personnel, so this sounds like a definite nugget. Thanks.

I came here to lament Mack's demise as well. I expected something from him when he was drafted. Ft Myers has always had a reputation of being a hard place for the hitters, so the .723 OPS didn't bother me, his being a high-school draftee and all, as I don't hold the same bar for catchers as at the offense-minded positions. But he hasn't hit a lick at Cedar Rapids where I think of bats as sometimes coming alive, for two seasons now, and I guess his work behind the plate wasn't good enough to save him. Mack's only 3 months older than Cossetti, but the difference in bat looks pretty undeniable and that spelled the end. I bet he catches on (heh) with another organization, assuming he still wants to go through the grind and all that.

It's an amazing piece of trivia that somehow still manages to understate just how dominant the winning team was that year.

It's a site bug that I believe occurs when you are composing a reply and meanwhile one or more other replies come in that cause the site to construct a new page. You click Submit but it doesn't take you to the new page and you don't see your published post, just the WYSIWYG editor with your text. So you naturally think it's just a glitch and your comment didn't take, so you click Submit again. Over-under is about 3 times, I find. Some post half a dozen duplicates before catching on (or giving up).

Hur dur, hur dur. I will wait to form my opinion about this condescending article until the hivemind informs me of whatever decision coalesces. Meanwhile I will continue to seethe impulsively in my mindless bloodlust for seeing Royce Lewis in a major league uniform on or about June 1 And I reserve the right on or about June 3 to call for his DFA and release if he has an o-fer in his first game. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a festering, bile-spitting pet demon to go feed. Hur dur, hur dur.

The problem is that run-scoring isn't evenly distributed, because there's no upper limit for a game but the lower limit you can score is zero. So there's a skew to the stats which affects simple averages like the mean. Individual high scores move the running average more than a low score can. Some of these near-nohitters the Twins have suffered deserve lower than a 0 for runs scored. It's why this offense feels worse than season run totals would have us believe. Because, IMO, it is.

I'm with you but the specific bar you set seems a tad high. Currently there are only six teams with even one such hitter (ATL has two), and this includes Oakland with the ultra-consistent Brent Rooker. We're still in the small sample size of one-quarter of the season, which always leaves room for flashes in the pan. For the full season in 2022, only three teams in the majors had the luxury of one "really good" hitter by this standard. Two years ago there were five, and when talking about consistency none of those five have been at .950 this year or last. But your point is still hugely valid. Who on this roster is a threat to pull a Nelson Cruz type of season out of his ear, starting now to the rest of the season? Kirilloff, maybe, but he's got less than a season of experience under his belt and fails the "consistent" criterion. Gallo's kinda sorta on that track at the moment if he pops another homer or two, but he's never put a full season together at his current level and even at that he falls short of .950. And in fairness, the standard you set does have a certain kind of merit: last year two of those three teams with a .950 OPS hitter faced each other in the ALCS, and one of them went on to win it all. (That third team, St Louis, went home after losing the wild card series so it's not a sure-fire solution, not that you were saying it was.) So I've kind of talked myself into a circle and am back to supporting your point after all. I think it's just the implication by the repeated plural that there are scads of hitters out there and we are failing to scoop any of them up. They are rare, rare, rare.

The bar is lower for the bat, when it's a catcher. He's maintained similar stats as he's moved up to higher levels, and that's not stagnation but progress. He needs to maintain for the rest of '23 and then progress with the bat two more times, of course, to become relevant; that's one reason I suggested 2025. (The other reason is that the system is so bereft of catching prospects, so he'll get every opportunity* once he's deemed "close".) Wait, I just noticed, he bats lefty. This young man will live forever as a catcher! * Need I say, everything I post comes with "IMO" implicitly sprinkled freely throughout

And that's just their own pitching lines. Doesn't include the inherited runner charged to the starter. Very poor showing after a fine start that had us in a pitchers' duel to that point.

Do they like Pat Winkel's defense? Looking at his progression since being drafted, he's on course to hit the majors in '25, as a quality backup if his glove plays.

The source I used is b-r.com which shows the Twins batters at the top of MLB at 34.0%. Other sites may compute things differently, I don't know. https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2023-advanced-batting.shtml

Straw man. Certainly some things in sports are luck. Nick Gordon breaking his leg on a foul ball is pure bad luck - and you'll notice nobody is taking the opposite tack of saying he's a bad player because someone more skillful would not have let it happen. But in terms of controlling where they hit the ball, batters go to the plate with some kind of plan. Do you think that the Twins leading the league in pull-percentage is just luck because they have no control over what happens when they swing. My position is pretty much smack-dab in the middle. The batter has a plan, the opposing battery has a plan, and let the better plan win over the long haul. Sometimes the batter gets fooled and still winds up on base. Sometimes the pitcher makes a terrible pitch and the batter swings straight through. The statistics smooth out after a season or so, but trends look pretty likely sooner than that. But "great" stuff getting beat over and over is eventually more than just happenstance. Or if you want to believe luck overrides everything (hey, I can do straw men too!), then the front office needs to work on bringing in luckier players.

Still almost two weeks until league rules allow him to be activated.

He's the lead singer of Maroon 5, referenced in the article. Impressive tats, for those impressed by that sort of thing.

Not on an empty stomach, anyway.

Some can claim the partial defense of having wanted to be close to their mother when they were born, and now going back to see her now and then.

Every now and then I post something to the effect that I don't like the word "luck" when applied to human beings doing their respective best against other human beings, although statistically I'll quickly say that some particular result doesn't look "sustainable". This thread is a prime example of what I mean, and others (I'll point out Jocko's post a bit above that talks about tipping pitches) have brought out good ideas that reinforce my opinion. Many here on TD are analytically inclined. So I will toss out for whatever it's worth a bit of wisdom I picked up long ago during a talk given by very smart mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, who said that down through the history of mankind, progress occurs when someone figures out how to understand processes that were previously thought to be "random". Solar and lunar eclipses were an example I remember but he had others. He said this in the context of explaining fractals, which are very interesting geometric shapes that look random from a distance but actually contain repeatable mathematical patterns. There's nothing particularly applicable about fractals to this discussion (the above image is just a pretty picture I found). But I took to heart Mandelbrot's general observation about chipping away at the unknown, those things we chalk up to "random luck". Even when you successfully apply statistical methods to predict something, it doesn't mean you understand it yet. Figuring out why Griffin Jax doesn't have results that match up to his "stuff" is a worthwhile effort. Guys like Emilio Pagan, and Ricky Nolasco (to go back a decade now), are similar cases. It's not luck. It's not that Jax is a bad pitcher, either. It's just something we don't understand yet.

Bad luck for him to be that unlucky so many times now.

As a Twins fan I feel like the statue, and I look up in the sky to see Pagan taking aim.

I'm at a loss too. Expect regression to the mean, probably?

Through sheer determination and great strength of will, I am capable of disappointment with two separate facets of the game at the same time,

Not if the .875 fielding percentage I see for him at 3B in Wichita is indicative of his ability to handle the defensive side of the game. (And it may not be, but is the quickest thing I could find.)

Nothing gets answered in May. But the Dodgers series should provide a meaningful progress report. / edit - welp, shoulda kept reading before posting