ashbury

The photo seems unambiguous on that detail. 😀

Fair (implied) point, but I'm guessing the ball in this photo didn't arrive quite as early as the one today.

It won't be updated until tomorrow, but b-r.com has a "team splits" page that tells you that information, and going into today's game the answer is 91 plate appearances so far with the bases loaded. That leads the majors by quite a lot - second place is the Cubs with 79. To anticipate a possible followup question, they have a .307 batting average in those situations, with sufficient walks and power to lead to an OPS of .807. (WHOLE lot better than last year's performance.)

On a different day the runner might have made a different decision than to go in standing up and hard. 😀

He was out by four steps, dead to rights. In the screenshot you can see a trace of white in Caratini's glove that represents the ball being secured. Not sure how Houdini himself could have come up with a slide that would tally the run. Going in standing up and hard was a Richard move that had a greater chance of injuring one of the two players than of dislodging the ball. Our guy explained that to their guy afterward, in his particular dialect of Spanish I suppose (Puerto Rican versus Venezuelan), and the two bullpens came along a bit later to express their nuanced views on the fine art of base running as well, after the chaps in the dugouts had had their say.

Thoughtful response, until you added this strawman.

I just got done saying I would have leaned toward leaving Rojas in too. But horrible decision? Nah. Know your players, indeed - teams commonly put limits on rookies and he'd consumed 45 pitches to get through his 3 innings of work - plus the first two batters coming up in the 9th were righties I believe so maybe that was the correct time to congratulate your lefty arm and play the percentages. If a member of the bullpen can't be trusted to get 3 outs while holding a 3 run lead, they don't belong. Bad things will still happen from time to time, but that's when you go get him and put Taylor in. Horrible? I don't usually believe in absolutes like that.

WINNAR! We were *this* close to it all coming down to Mickey Gasper, though.

Shutdown bullpen, this is not.

Rojas was close to the speculated 50-pitch limit, so I guess if Shelton thinks he has himself a closer, now was the time to use him. Kind of a rocky outing, but maybe it's a learning curve, and not some kind of The Andrew Morris Experience that will go on and on and on through the season. It was a clean 8th inning so I would have been inclined to let Rojas try for the 4-inning save.

Ride Rojas for the rest of the game, assuming he continues to get outs? What kind of pitch count limit should he be on? I would suggest 50.

I believe there was also a perceived logjam of candidates to play second base at the time. A good trade could free up the resources and apply them to a different area of need. The trade, well intentioned from first principles, was not well executed. GG was the only legitimate hope from the very outset. I would have preferred bundling Polanco with a prospect to obtain more of a difference-maker. Very nearly a waste of a good trade chip, but maybe GG will pan out.

Up is down, good is bad, and Red is Yellow (when it's not being Green). What a world we live in today.

If this is the only RandBalls Stu piece you have sampled, I hope you give him a bit more time. His comedy stylings might still grow on you. As for your comments on the medium in particular, one measure I use for good satire is that it provokes thought, and your lengthy post suggests Mission Accomplished in that regard. It seems that this is your first post here. Welcome and I hope you continue to provide nuanced thoughts; those can be in short supply here. 😀

Good start. Let's hope Taj is ready to take advantage of the good fortune.

Yep, the concept I am trying to get at is really difficult (for me anyway) to define. "We scored 6 runs off their bullpen - they must have all been AAAA callups." "We beat Skubal - we beat Crochet - they must have not been on their game that day." These could be legitimate explanations - or just typical BS after the fact. Maybe some important factors are just unknowable. Or maybe Big Data techniques have ways of teasing out the meaning from scads of conflicting data. I tend to believe that if an effect is important, then evidence for it can be found if you look at the evidence correctly. (You can also find evidence for your supposition by looking incorrectly.) It's a bit like, we all believe a .300 hitter is better than a .260 hitter, but when you come down to individual games, anything can happen (and often does). Maybe that .260 hitter has just as many multi-hit games as the .300 guy, but he suffers more o-fers while the .300 guy plugs along with more 1-for-4 days. That kind of variance is completely missed in season-ending averages, but might affect how you value the two players. I spent my career in a small corner of analytics, but I never had the technical chops to tackle a statistically-oriented question involving variance for sets of data (like in baseball) that are a bit unruly to start with. Uniformity is lacking - some days you get 3 plate appearances in a game, some days you get 5, and how do you do a "variance" study of how many hitless days you have, in that environment? A bit of spot-checking along these lines a few days ago didn't turn up the pattern I was hoping to be able to demonstrate to others in support of my view, so I didn't post about it. 😀

"-est" in a word is kind of a tipoff to that. 😀

The basic statistical concept of "mean" (i.e. "average") predominates the rate stats on every site, but I don't know of good sources for the next-level concept of "variance," which is the issue that I've long felt plagues the Minnesota offense. It would take massive research, I think, to track down evidence to support my contention that, to a greater extent than most good teams, we feast when the opponent on the mound is subpar but regularly starve when someone of major league talent is on the mound. Maybe such a study would convince me that my supposition is wrong...

The lefty "starter" today could be out of the game by the time the lower half of the batting order comes up. Look for Gonzalez to perhaps pinch hit if another lefty is brought in to pitch later in the game.

Jeffers belonged on the same stud-tier as Ryan and Buxton even before the season started. The bar is just set differently for catchers. But as for your basic point, I've had the same concerns too, for a long while now. I could quibble in a few cases, such as Ober panning out as "just average" after being a 12th round draft pick, as a development "hit." But a low-revenue team like the Twins needs to make the flat-out misses on high draft picks really low, and they don't.

We're still talking about baseball, right?

Relievers from a hat - "Pitchers You Don't Want To See In A Clutch Situation" - resulting in an aggregate ERA of 5.00.

I'd expect his fastball to have good movement, considering his throws from RF often are not usefully on-target.

The way the Twins won that series was extremely fun and should never be diminished.

Those would be interesting to see.