ashbury

Catcher's ERA is one of those will o' the wisps people want to believe, but to my knowledge every study that has tried to pin it down wound up finding thing that would carry over from one period of time to the next. I, too, want to believe that the catcher makes a difference in pitchers' records, but I remain skeptical of whether to give more than about 0.05 credit where ERA is concerned.

Wait, there's two of him?

How dare you. As Ernest Rutherford said, all science is either Physics or Stamp Collecting.

Which, if nothing else, suggests a floor of "very good reliever." That makes him useful, and gives him a career. It's the starters who always give up first-inning runs, and then settle down, who bug me. What exactly are you supposed to do with the guy, just accept being down 3-0, and then depend on the offense to catch up and the bullpen to be close to perfect, after he wobbles through four more innings of tightrope-walking?

Nicely pitched game though, LOL.

It helps to already like Marney, otherwise the joshing around and the mildly incoherent play calls would be hard for a newcomer (such as a fan of the opposing team) to take - we make fun of the other team's broadcast when it isn't buttoned down and understated. And I wouldn't like it all the time, or even very often. But, as a "welcome back" from a very rough turn of events for her, it was a fun listen. And we already know that under normal broadcast circumstances she's all business at the microphone.

I'll want to see it against other opponents but these past two games against the Cubs were a welcome tonic for Twins offense.

I truly don't know how to judge the work a catcher does behind the plate, so I'm guilty of going with whatever is obvious and sticks in my mind. An aggressive throw that goes wrong looks worse than it probably was, and yet that's what I remember. If the talent evaluators think that Vazquez is doing the job, I'm fine to let the batting numbers slide a little longer and continue to view him as the starter. But, if it was up to me and I had no access to better scouting, probably I'd make the change to Jeffers getting 60% of the work for a while.

It's definitely a double-edged sword and it's right to look at it both ways. You want for trades to bring value for value - but should not overlook where that original value came from.

Do we have so many awards that we are celebrating players who are only a little above average? If not, then let's let MLB continue to market our game and its best players any way they can.

These new-fangled batting averages and whatnot drive me crazy. Just give me runs and RBIs, that's how you win games.

Isn't he the guy who basically replaced Vinegar Bend Mizell in the Cards' rotation? Whatever became of that nice young man anyway?

You said this straight up, to her face, I bet.

We scored a run in the first inning against this schmoe. Just like a good team! As expected.

Max isn't my age but I find that too much time in the easy chair has bad impact when I get back up.

If the cramps are strong enough they could pull a muscle.

I don't use ERA for relief pitchers. FIP may be an improvement over ERA for forecasting, for starting pitchers, but I don't pay it much mind for relievers either. I like two other ways better. OPS-against tells you a certain amount, clean innings tells you more, because unlike for starters, a reliever's job is to shut down the opposition for one inning. The one thing I like about Jax's season so far is that he's limited the extra-base hits. Just two doubles and no HR. That's very important, and it helps keep his OPS-against to an impressive .589 this year. But ... he's hittable. Opponents are batting .239, and league-wide the BA is only .247. In the small numbers we have so far, that's basically an average pitcher. As was pointed out, he walks some batters, so his OBP of .320 is likewise around league-average. Looking at his 2023 game log, I see 6 appearances out of 18 where he gave up neither a hit nor a walk. I don't know what is "average" but this doesn't look like a shut down arm to me. Why I harp on clean innings - if you throw a lot of them, then one instance of "bad luck" won't do you (or the team) in. If men are on base when the bad luck happens, then a run may score and you can try to explain it away as not the pitcher's fault and the "defense gifted the opponents a run" but the pitcher's hands ain't clean. He's also given up 5 stolen bases this year. They say you steal on the pitcher, not the catcher, but I'd have to dig deeper to the individual cases to make sure these SB weren't someone else's fault than Jax's. Nor can you say it's situational, being in tight games or whatever - Duran and JLopez each have 2 SB, by contrast. In late innings of tight games, it's the little things that sometimes separate winning from losing. Jax to me isn't a difference-maker, and I don't think it's fair to call it bad luck. If we're going to focus on one seeing-eye double against the shift, it doesn't negate the other innings where he put men on base. His BABIP is .329, so probably that one double accounts for him being any different than the league on this. I don't dislike Jax - average pitchers are useful - but he's miscast. If he's option #7 in an 8-man bullpen, you have a real good bullpen. If he's counted on as #3, it spells trouble. I want a real good bullpen, so for me, explaining away Jax's bad outcomes is merely a distraction.

Against the Mariners, Dodgers, and Reds, he gave up first-inning runs en route to being yanked before completing five. Let's see if the Twins can capitalize on first-inning jitters, otherwise he may settle in.

A lot of the damage to his season stats occurred in the first two starts. But then looking closer, 4 of his next 5 starts were facing teams near the very bottom of the major leagues in run production. So a high-caliber offense like ours should be able to chase him by the fourth inning, methinks.

Forecasting baseball is hard. I could leave my reply at that, but I want to draw a distinction between forecasting how someone's end-of-year stat line is going to look, now that we know the actual results one-quarter of the way in, versus forecasting how that player is going to do from here on out. You just have to live with the former, but you make decisions on the latter. Use Carlos Correa as an example. Say the FO had Carlos penciled in for an .800 OPS in addition to playing GG caliber SS. So you pencil him in as your everyday shortstop. Now, on the morning of May 13, we see him with an OPS of .649. Supposing that he's really an .800 hitter, you could blend 25% of what he's done so far with 75% of your .800 projection and guess he'll end up around .760 at season's end. Kind of like blending ethanol into your gasoline, by mistakenly pouring a blend with too little alcohol into the drum to start with and then figuring out how far off you will be if you finish by filling with the regular blend. But ballplayers aren't barrels of automobile fuel. They aren't pairs of dice, or poker cards, or coins that you flip, either. There's the Gambler's Fallacy where you figure you must be due for tails after flipping heads 3 times in a row; you'll lose money in the long run if you give different odds than 50/50 for the next flip. But even if ballplayers aren't coins, it's also a mistake to say a player is due for a hit - it's fairer to say he's OVERdue for that next hit. (*cough* Joey Gallo *cough*) Because players aren't coins or decks of cards or roulette balls, it's beyond reasonable and merely common sense to re-evaluate your forecast after new data has come in. Maybe Correa (April aside but going forward) isn't the .800 guy they thought he was. Even though last year he had an April similar to this year's, by mid-May he was showing much better results while in 2023 he's still scuffling at bat and causing the name Pedro Florimon to come to mind. In a post above, jorgenswest points out that underlying metrics should hold more sway, and maybe the most granular data suggests Correa's still the same hitter he always has been. If not, maybe the forecast ought to be .750 OPS from here to the end of the regular season, in which case he's still a starting caliber shortstop and you don't make a move, despite knowing that his year-end stats will be that 25/75 blend but now down to more like .725. That's still way better than Florimon. Correa's a tough case though because even if all the metrics point to him being truly a .650 OPS guy from now on, there's not a whole lot you can do about it because of the contract. Anyway, similar thoughts apply to Gordon, to Kepler, to every player. The FO can't stand still after establishing their off-season guesses. But it would be dumb for them to put too much weight on the first 6 weeks of this season, either. Do they stick to their guns with their earlier forecasts (the "long game" as you termed it) or adjust? Probably the latter, but it may not be as abrupt an adjustment as you seem to be hoping for, in terms of visible evidence of change. For now I think you'll see roster changes and lineup changes only at the margins.

So we ran into the reincarnation of Cy Young. Again. Bad luck, that.

Pull-percentage. Because no one asked.... here's more. What's different for our Twins this year? Well, for one thing we added Joey Gallo, and he's kind of off the charts as a pull hitter. 47.8% this year. That's just kind of how he rolls, but he's above even his lofty career norm of 40.5%. Of course due to injury he hasn't accounted for that many PA, so he's a factor but it's not like he's pulling the team percentage that far up all by himself. And then there's Buxton. He's right behind Gallo in pull-percentage at 43.9%. Last year he was only at 36% and his career percentage is 33.6%. He's pulling like crazy this year. (As an aside, league-wide, among qualifiers for the batting title, Kyle Schwarber leads the way at 48.9% pull. Kyle is batting a lusty .187 this season.) Let's see, who else leads the Twins in pull%? Polanco's at 40.7%, Kepler's at 39.2% (you KNOW he's going to show up as a leader in pulling the ball), and looky here, Nick Gordon is pulling 34.8% of the time (I think of him as a slap hitter - wrongly). Bringing up the rear in pull% is Michael A Taylor at 19.7. If Nick Gordon surprised me, at least MAT doesn'.t. And lest you think I'm saying "go to the opposite field, your batting average is sure to rise," there is Carlos Correa. He is just above MAT in pull% at 25.5%, pretty close to his career mark, and his batting average sits below .200, which is not his career mark. Oh well, if there were simple answers, the offense would already be fixed. One more thing. What else is different this year is we traded Luis Arraez. His pull% last year was 26.4%. He's similar this year for the Marlins. This is all anecdotal, because I'm not a wizard with spreadsheets so I just look up stuff that's interesting. And I'm not a batting coach either - maybe for instance pitchers have some say over whether their opponents at bat get the kind of pitches you just have to try and pull and this year they're feeding our Twins a lot of that. See the ball, pull the ball - it's simple and it gets complicated in a hurry. Anyway, correlation isn't causation. Low BA and high pull% just makes me go hmmmm.

The MLB pull-percentage in 1988, the first year I find those numbers on b-r.com, was 31.7% overall. This year it's at 29.9%. That's a downward trend, not up. I would have guessed the opposite, but it is what it is. And our Twins are at 33.4%. That would be near the highest even if it were still 1988, and definitely is tops (well, Seattle's a close second, and they are another low-BA team) in 2023. Last year, if you're worried about small sample size for this young season, was 29.5% for MLB, and 30.2% for the Twins, so they were more in line with the league - closer to the middle than to the top. There's something new going on with our guys, since last year. The batting average for the Twins is at an extreme this season, too. Correlation is not causation, but it's still a place to look.

The Twins are at the top of the majors in pull-percentage, though. https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2023-advanced-batting.shtml

I believe they have to carry him on the 40 all during the offseason. That could be at the expense of one more prospect subject to the Rule 5 draft - or, not taking one such player ourselves - as two examples.