ashbury

What excuse will MLB.tv give me today for not letting me watch the game? "Oh, sorry, we sold the rights to someone else. Go ask YOUR MOM."

(Sorry, I thought this was in the game thread.)

That is such an anomaly. Almost makes me want to ask the b-r.com folks to look at that.

Oh that's true. Just makes the sequence a bit weirder, and probably less meaningful as to who-went-down-for-whom.

Sonny Gray! Everything's A-OK!

I'll go with the consensus that Kirilloff will be the first pinch hitter once Cleveland brings in a righty reliever.

They sent down Larnach, thinking they might go with 14 pitchers for a while, as they brought up DRod?

He's launched 3 out of the park in the last 10 days. OPS in that very small sample is up to an acceptable .769. Maybe he's already looked at some video and made an adjustment, and some singles will start to fall in too?

Last 10 days: Castro: 10 PA, .786 OPS Miranda: 30 PA, .769 OPS Solano: 14 PA, .436 OPS Man, I thought this would clarify something, but it still comes down to cutting a guy you'd probably prefer to not give up on, versus two guys who can be sent down freely but maybe you don't want to. I say Castro when Farmer is activated, but it's a tough one for Rocco to break the news to him about. "This is the part of my job I hate the most, Willi, but ..."

He's just a baby but it's great to have him in the system and follow his progress.

I'm actually with you on this. We are watching players trying their best, with the opposing team trying their best to stop them. Once in a while a ground ball hits a pebble that no one could have foreseen, otherwise I try to avoid that word. I wouldn't personally have picked that particular headline for this article, unless I slipped up. But I do believe some patterns of results are unsustainable. Pete Rose hitting .300 year after year? Sustainable, and you pretty much knew it once he really got going. Nick Gordon putting together a career that looks like 2022? Possibly not sustainable. But the string of poor results Gordon has shown early in 2023? Probably not sustainable in that direction either.

It still comes down to Ws and Ls. Everything else, batting average and ERA included, boil down to just trying to understand where those Ws come from. But none of them actually replace the Ws.

Thanks for the research I was too lazy to provide. Memo to Thad Levine: you're on the clock now, make something good happen between now and the trading deadline. (Not gonna get much from a team looking for a 4th outfielder though.)

I can't see Kepler being of interest to a team with no post-season aspirations. So can we come up with another team besides the Yankees who have a need for an average player in a non-key defensive spot, and who see getting him as the difference between success and failure? Because if not, the Yanks will offer a lottery-ticket player and say "take it or leave it, we're doing enough by taking the remainder of his salary off your books. We'll give you a little more for one of your young guys, though." And if we keep him, can we envision him being the guy who gets hot and helps carry the team to a playoff series win, a la Eddie Rosario? He's barely worth discussing, almost. And I don't hate him.

That's a very interesting idea. I think the answer's no, but it's worth considering. Presumably the team traded for him because they believe in his work ethic. But guaranteeing two or three more years, even at a reduced rate relative to his free-agency hopes, would reflect an even high regard for his self-discipline. "We'd like to guarantee you $7M a year for three years*, with a fourth-year team option for $12M, as you work back from injury. We know you were hoping for more in the free market but we feel..." "I accept! The doc says to take it easy for a while, though." (under breath) "What. Have. We. Done?" * I think the guarantee to Dobnak was under $10M total. Different circumstances though.

You're missing some deep, deep insights*, then. But, what is there to discuss, about the current injury and prognosis and rehab? Has the team said anything, since the MLBTR blurb a week ago suggesting a four-week stay on the IL? Now he's transferred to the 60-day without further explanation I know of. His elbow hurts. Varland is in the rotation to replace him. Pretty short thread, that. * Plus a pleasant 60s oldie to listen to. (And by that I don't mean yours truly.)

I feel like adding that the package we gave up was pretty ideal from our side, when trying to go big. You can't avoid giving up pitching to get pitching in return, so 2nd rounder Hajjer is painful to give up but he represents merely a hope versus the established guy we're getting, so it's got to be him plus more. Steer and Encarnacion-Strand seem to be mediocre gloves who will get wherever they go because of their bats, and you can only have so many DHs on your roster. I don't think I've mentioned but when I was in Oakland last weekend I watched Steer playing first base, and I was extremely unimpressed with a couple of plays, including a trivial one that doesn't show up in the box score but indicated a general lack of gracefulness. I see some say that if we had Steer then we could option Miranda and still have 3rd base covered, but I say, have you actually watched Steer? I've watched him exactly once, and now have a working theory on why he was offered. I think we'd be yelling about his defense if he were on the Twins now.

It's a fair question, but I'm going to start by basically dodging it and say that we can't know all the things that a plugged-in front office can know, such as who might be available given the right price. Among the candidates we think we knew about, we saw that Luis Castillo got traded just days earlier, for a much steeper and more painful price, and the Mariners subsequently signed him to an extension slightly larger than what we (recently) have given Pablo Lopez. With Royce Lewis injured by then and Brooks Lee not yet available for trade, I don't know if we even had what the Reds were demanding, if we piled 10 "good" prospects into our offer. Also acquiring Castillo might mean not going after Pablo Lopez this past off-season if the plan were to extend Lopez too. Wheels within wheels, when deciding. So... I'm back to "but not Mahle." My own data-free analysis was that Mahle was at the time too high a medical risk, just based on his recent health record at the time; he had a solid 2021 but was on the IL in '22 for a shoulder problem, and shoulders scare me as much or more than elbows (though ironically it looks like the elbow is what got Mahle this time). I trust that teams have better analytics on pitcher health than I do (more data, more time to experiment with "models" of what contributes to good risks and what doesn't), and yet I maintain they missed something that seemed obvious to me. So, if it were me as GM, I'd have gone back to my underlings and told them, go through the list of candidates and get me someone else. And if they came back again and said there was no one, Mahle or nobody, then I guess I don't trade those prospect chips after all. I hate that answer, because we were in first place at the time (and had been sinking for two months or so), and you don't want to punt. But they say that sometimes the best trades are the ones you don't make. And then that contradicts the success they've had with other trades. Not to mention that every pitcher comes with health risks. Every. Single. One. But at heart, I believe that there are analytics that no one publishes for public consumption about this whole topic, and that some teams have a better handle on pitching risk than others do, and when we traded for Paddack and then for Mahle, we were seeing the difference. I'll always link the trades for Paddack and Mahle together, as a calculation that the way to win a World Series is by having high-end talent, and the mid-market teams have to assume more health risk to get those arms and then hope. I don't especially like it.

I liked the concept, needing another arm, and approved of the choice of prospects to move, but thought Mahle was too high risk to be the target.

Glad you had fun.

Shutdown bullpen today!

This article aged well.

Wow. Wow wow wow. Gutty win.