ashbury

75% blame to FalVine for bullpen construction. 25% blame to Pagan for being Pagan.

Probably short for in need of down-time, and not the more dire connotations.

You have to think about how WPA works to really let this number soak in. Each team starts at .500 to win, at the outset. If you put together a win, that means .500 worth of points is available to split among all your participants that day, batters and pitchers together, which brings the sum to 1.000 for the complete win. The reverse point system goes for the losing team, accumulating their negative .500 to bring their sum to .000 and the loss. Pagan in those three batters did more than a typical loss's worth of damage. He turned a very likely win to a very likely loss, in that short span of time. Not unheard of (Cimber had a -.754 just yesterday for Toronto, and we all LOLed), but it's still remarkable. Pagan's ERA for the season rose from 3.76 to 4.61 with this one game. That's the nature of being a short reliever. Bad as the ERA is, his season WPA is now -.781, worst on the staff, and that to me says more. It lines up better with how much of a gut punch his 3 biggest failures this season have been. He racks up tiny positive WPA in the low-leverage successes, but more than offsets them with these disasters.

Paddack's extension can be a starting point for thinking, but the two pitchers' contract situations are very different. Paddack still had two arbitration years ahead of him, so he had less leverage when considering whether to accept the team's offer to guarantee him some money. Mahle is already eligible for free agency after this season. Look at it a different way. Before signing his extension, Paddack had earned about $5M in major league salary*, which is good money but not quite at the "set for life" level for a variety of reasons. The Twins' offer did take him past that threshold. By contrast, Mahle has earned above $15M to date. Assuming he's invested wisely, the Twins can't really approach him and his agent with "we'll guarantee you life-changing money" because his life is already changed for the better. Paddack chose not to gamble on a far higher payday at some intermediate point, during which something unrelated might also go wrong, while still maintaining the potential for a good outcome in free agency further down the road. Mahle might see the gamble as less dependent on anything besides recovery from the elbow surgery, and he's better placed to shoulder** the risk if he wants to roll the dice. Paddack thereby assured his own financial future; for all I know Mahle might be trying to fund a charitable foundation next, for example. I think signing Mahle's going to be harder, because from the Twins' perspective the two situations are indeed pretty similar. The team will have to risk more, with more or less the same potential reward. * I'm taking my numbers from b-r.com, which I find sometimes to be unreliable for the kind of analysis I want to do. ** No pun intended, but there it is.

Roster spots are kind of a precious commodity. but if the FO is ready to move on from some 25-year old at Cedar Rapids and also have a promising young arm in the minor league complex they are ready to try at low-A Ft Myers, then Culpepper has put himself in line for a promotion with his performance this year. As a college draftee, he's not super young, so keep moving him up if his current coach thinks he's mastered what he's at low-A to learn.

The last time they fired a front office, it was mid-season. Unless we're going to get into semantics of "resigned" versus "fired". If they wanted him to ride out the rest of the season, he surely would have.

Offense Wakes Up Late sounds like the beginning to a Randballs Stu headline for an article where the Twins had to forfeit. Glad that instead it was a winning situation.

He's on the borderline for putting himself into the HoF discussion if he has a few more years at his established level of performance. At age 33, that's not a sure thing. And if you look at the proverbial Bus Test, I think HoF voters will see him below the borderline level.

Big Sexy certainly managed to have a long career.

Aside from his own wishes, Royals FO probably has a marketing department, and if they say Perez is one of only two or three bankable players for pulling in revenue, that has to factor in as well, versus what they could get in prospect capital via trade.

That has been conventional wisdom for a long time. Raya is 170 pounds (according to b-r.com) so he is indeed small for a player, particularly a pitcher these days. Yet we go out and acquire 217 pound Chris Paddack and 210 pound Tyler Mahle, and they wind up with arm issues too. If there is one thing I'd like to be able to tap into MLB analytics, it is how different aspects of body type correlate to what kinds of injuries. I am certain that the better teams have gotten more of a handle than I have on it; and, possibly (certainly more importantly), more of a handle on it than our Twins do.

Listen to the video of Gray's post-game comments, provided in the above article. He implies it was the right decision - "kinda made sense to shut it down there." Gray's a battler and he's pretty much never going to ask to come out of any game, but this is how he phrases it.

The Tigers, who have scored the fewest runs in the majors at this writing?

Frustrating series? How about incompetent series, at the plate anyway?

Yes but the proposed trades would all start with Kepler packaged with Pagan for some team's #2 guy.

If I cherry-pick exactly the right way, I can come up with his 8 most recent games at .936 OPS. Not quite sustained, as yet. But more than a couple. But, expand to 11 games or shrink to 6 and it's hard to keep calling the numbers a success, with OPS down in the .700s and at AAA so the major league equivalent would be worse. Like I said, I cherry picked.

When the team has a winning record, even if there's a sense sub-optimally, the manager has to weigh "don't rock the boat" with all the other factors. As we slip below .500 though, it becomes time to rock several boats.

The moment Buxton sings Put Me In Coach and Rocco finally taps his foot and hums along.

Someone else wrote your headline, then?

Glad to see someone finally holding Terry Ryan accountable!

Not to mention, Wallner's L/R splits this year do not show him to be incapable of hitting lefties. Last year, same*. As the old saying goes, I don't want right-handed batters, I want batters who can hit left-handed pitchers. (And vicey versy.) * If the team is going to let 18 PA during his September call-up outweigh much larger samples at AA and AAA I really don't know what to say about their analytics.

No offense, but I take offense at this Twins offense.

I watched him in Arizona last fall. He played in two of the three games I attended, one at SS and one in CF. He badly messed up a room-service DP grounder, so my view of him at SS is now set in stone. He was, unfortunately, completely untested in his game in CF, handling one or two can-of-corn flyballs at most, so I came away with no impression or opinion at all of him out there. Hopefully someone else here has more to add.

I thought my bit of satire was self-evident, as the OP clicked Like on my message, but just so there's no misunderstanding: what I did was quote his own self-deprecating phrase, verbatim, after another poster or two had kindly pointed out that the loophole he thought he'd discovered had already been addressed by MLB's rules. I agree, there's no place for meanness at this site. Sometimes my sense of humor works at the edges.