ashbury

As a Twins fan I feel like the statue, and I look up in the sky to see Pagan taking aim.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

Not sure what "nothing to do with baseball" means, in regard to a baseball asset. Fortunately the rest of what you said makes sense to me. And every contract is an asset control move, when you come down to it. If the upside is $60M worth of value (that's a lot of WAR but it's faintly possible as the ceiling) and lower but still appreciable values are also in the mix, then it becomes nearly an "expectation value" kind of physics/economics computation - probability times all the different outcomes, added up. If that's above the $12M or so for a Paddack type of contract, then you offer it. Of course Mahle himself has to want this contract, and not want instead to "bet on himself" as the saying goes. Also, Paddack and Mahle are not very similar looking individuals, and the team might look at the two pitchers very differently when making such a decision. But, and Brian alluded to this just above, there is an additional cost: the value of a 40-man roster spot over not just this off-season but also the next one. Could that roster spot be used for something more valuable than the "expectation value" I just suggested be computed, minus the contract cost of that guarantee. Maybe the roster spot is better used by protecting an additional Rule-5 candidate of our own, or drafting one ourselves, as just an example. It's really complicated, in other words, and I'm sure the FO has very careful accounting practices that help them maintain the discipline to reach an answer they can be comfortable with. At the moment, lacking information on how all the parties look at this, it's kind of a toss-up to me. And then after all that, to circle back to your point about flipping the contract, that decision in turn comes down to whether they find the offer they receive to be better than just keeping him - assuming the trading partner sees value in Mahle, probably so would we.

i feel that way too. Still, it depends on the terms of an extension that would interest him. Does he want a guarantee that sets him up for life, or does he want to gamble? If Dobnak money gets it done, I consider it.

An extension might or might not be the right course, but what we gave up for him has no bearing. That's the Sunk Cost Fallacy in action. Apart from that, I know we're always hopeful that TJS has the guy back and productive in a year, but just going from memory it doesn't seem to work out that way. Rehab begins after a certain point and the player is throwing in earnest from the mound after a year or so, but that's not the same as being ready to win games like he used to. Maeken would be the current example on our roster for that. So if he works real hard, throwing for real at St Paul 14 months from now, maybe he's good to go for 2025. If I'm negotiating, I want a commitment to 2025-26 both, and at not very much money relative to free agents. His hopes of a big payday* are gone, whether the Twins are in the picture or not. Guaranteeing him millions of dollars should get the team something really significant in return. * relative to what he could have commanded on the open market before this happened

Bumpy Road, indeed. Getting nearly no-hit in multiple games has shaken my faith in either the talent level I thought was there, or the strategic approach being preached by the coaching staff that is undermining that talent.

Concur that 15 PA for Farmer is pretty strong evidence already. As for the caliber of pitching at AAA, there are always a few flamethrowers on their way up (or down), but when I go to games I see an awful lot of 88-MPH "fast"balls on the radar gun. Sometimes the entire game is a progression of finesse types slinging it up to the plate. AAA is often where career hopes (pitchers, batters, sometimes managers) go to die. Now that I think about it, though, I'd hate to be the first AAA pitcher last week who had to throw an inside pitch to Farmer. I'd shake off that catcher so, so hard, when the signal was "up and in." No! Just no! Let me practice my slider, low, away!

Concur. I posted this elsewhere in a Mahle thread, but a week ago I watched the Reds in Oakland and they played Steer at first base, and even there he looked stiff and failed a couple of times to do what he intended. He probably has a major league bat but if you start profiling as a DH even that bar is very high, and unless he steps it up a lot in some dimension of his game he's not going to be a big loss to us.

Yes, but so far he's contributed about 1/8 of a season's worth of offense (Total Bases as just one measure).

When Castro came up he was the one on the bubble. I'm not sure he's done so much to increase his stock, as Miranda's has plummeted. If it's up to me I send Miranda down for some emergency remedial work on all facets of his game.

Bah. Losses will happen. I don't like for them to look bad doing it.

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