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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    Incredible catch by Adolis García fighting the sun in RF!
  2. ashbury
    I hope our team wins.
  3. ashbury
    Twins franchise record, possibly. But then there's the Angels' legendary 2021 draft: https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?team_ID=ANA&year_ID=2021&draft_type=junreg&query_type=franch_year&from_type_jc=0&from_type_hs=0&from_type_4y=0&from_type_unk=0 20 picks. 20 arms.
  4. ashbury
    Let me be the first to suggest that new pitching prospect Xander Hamilton is not throwing away his shot!
  5. ashbury
    6-man rotations are a bad idea for multiple reasons. If Keuchel isn't at least the 5th best starting option, don't start him. And I don't think he is.
  6. ashbury
    Okay, so your answer to my first question is Yes. I would agree. How do you answer the second question?
  7. ashbury
    Does anybody actually go to the plate trying to put the ball in play? Does anybody actually go to the plate trying to strike out? If your answer to these two questions is not the same, then please stop trying to equate the two. It is the source of the disconnect between people's respective positions on the subject.
  8. ashbury
    Not an analogy. Facts, served straight up.
  9. ashbury
    Washington is the team with the fewest strikeouts. Cleveland is next lowest. They are a problem how? Both score barely 4 a game. That's how. Strikeouts are by themselves neither cause nor cure to batting woes. / edit - Ninja'd to a degree by chpettit
  10. ashbury
    "Then watch what I do and do the opposite. Same as with our front office basically. You're welcome."
  11. ashbury
    After that home run, Julien should have been made to stand up and apologize to the crowd for prolonging the game any longer than it absolutely had to.
  12. ashbury
  13. ashbury
    FalVine might want to brush up on their Seinfeld lore, and maybe take it to heart. George : Yeah, I should do the opposite, I should. Jerry : If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.
  14. ashbury
    I'm still upset about losing Nelson Cruz over some untested rookie pitcher. We all have that one hill we need to die on and that shall be mine.
  15. ashbury
    I'll stick my neck out and guess that the young man never gets tired of the riffs on his name. 🙂
  16. ashbury
    They have a very high chance of being in the playoffs. Even if they are an underdog against any other first-round opponent, I do not want to field a crippled roster for that series. So I am not trading expiring-contract assets like Gray. I am not trading Polanco, either - that would have been a defensible off-season move six months ago. Players who do not fit the roster, I am fine with discarding in favor of a prospect already on hand - Gallo stands out, possibly Pagan. But depth in case of injury remains a concern so I don't want to weed out the roster very much. Sure, get a reliever, preferably on an expiring contract so we don't spend much to get him. This isn't our year, apparently. But a playoff invitation still is likely. So, small moves in either direction.
  17. ashbury
    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.
  18. ashbury
    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.)
  19. ashbury
    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.
  20. ashbury
    You misspelled "Luck", the new topic of this thread.
  21. ashbury
    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.
  22. ashbury
    What tipped you off? The little smiley face?
  23. ashbury
    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.
  24. ashbury
    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.
  25. ashbury
    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.
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