ashbury

Re: Photo Dear Twins Daily, Why do you hate me? Please pick a better photo than the insipid one of me you keep using that someone snapped while I was listening to yet another idiot fan explaining why I should bring back nickel beer day. Regards, Derek

The article and headline made clear they are talking about lineups, in response to something on MLB Network. I'd sacrifice some defense and put Killebrew at third to get Hrbek's better defense at first and put Cruz at DH.

You're going to have trouble covering your next mortgage payment if you lose.

I'm married to an amazing woman in STEM. (In case I really need to establish my credentials to make a satirical joke. If you're being satirical too, um, never mind. Oh wait, you did click thumbs up...)

Bad Major Leaguers™:

So did the Twins. I hate this aspect of the DFA/waiver process so much. The Twins do it too, so I'm not saying it as a partisan fan. It's not a good-faith roster move. And before someone rebuts with "it benefits the player", please include a nod to the view that it's merely a zero-sum game for the players who get added versus removed.

I'm not having any luck finding news about a knee problem. Looking at his transactions page I see he got optioned to the Arizona Complex League during September. Could this be the "ACL" he came back from? He was optioned and then recalled about 5 times in 2025, his stints in the majors always being for just a few days at a time. He turned 30 last July and as yet hasn't really established himself. Sorry, I don't mean to make this sound like some kind of hill I would die on; I'm eager to cash in Larnach for something. But Ron Marinaccio looks more like someone to wait to find (again) on the waiver wire, than to trade for.

Seems like a random choice of waiver-wire-level relief help. He had a productive 10.2 innings this past season with the Padres, coupled with very unimpressive results in more extensive duty at AAA. Do you have a deeper insight you'd like to share about the pitcher?

If he thinks there might be any 9th inning leads to protect.

I have no idea whether he's good at getting things across to younger players but he struck me as a thinking ballplayer and of course his defense was top-notch. I love the move, which if nothing else lets me relive and savor the way he pulled Louis Varland's bacon out of the fire "that one time."

I wonder if the Dodgers got mixed up and thought they were claiming their own guy back.

But not what he did for the team that one season.

He didn't say anything about good, now did he?

Shallow and pedantic for me, please.

It's mostly a Jeremy Zoll interview. I think it's been documented elsewhere that Jeremy and his boss have gone on the record with opposing statements about Priellip's future. My guess is that Priellip isn't the hill Zoll wants to die on if Falvey were to decide to make an issue of it. Not exactly sure how this article was constructed, but if Falvey was in the same room then maybe it's notable that he didn't contradict his underling - or maybe not.

That's true. I refreshed my memory and he had a career BB% of 17.6, which is amazing on the face of it but particularly given that he had little to no power so opposing pitchers weren't pitching around him per se. He had a couple of full seasons at 20+%. He and Harmon dominate the walks-in-a-season category, and it's hard to think of two more-different guys at the plate. He was a strong asset to some pretty mediocre Senators (erm, Nationals) squads - more b-r.com WAR for the franchise than Torii Hunter for instance - Byron Buxton passed him up only this year.

With E-Rod, I thought the question about Walks would have been settled by now, but it still is a giant X-factor. In 2025 he walked in 21% of his plate appearances at St Paul. Nobody in the majors walked even 20% of the time, and the two who came closest are bona fide superstar hitters, Judge and Soto. Is Rodriguez perhaps in their class? He sure doesn't homer at the rate those two do. Interestingly, both of these two potential comps walked at a much lower rate when in the minors, so it;'s not as close of a template to follow as one might think. Rodriguez had even higher walk rates in the lower minors, hard as that is to believe - video game numbers of 29% at single-A Ft Myers. The guy I know of who did have similar BB% in the minors is our own Edouard Julien. That's a bit of a cautionary tale; Eddie met with success in his first taste of the majors but then pitch selectivity seemed to go haywire for him. A related X factor for any high-BB prospect is the coming of the challenge system at the major league level. Maybe Julien will turn things around at the plate if he now has permission to tell the ump, "uh uh, you're squeezing me." Maybe Rodriguez will benefit from this, from the git-go, and not have to deal with any psychological issues of failure. What I keep coming back to for Rodriguez is the following question: given that no one walks at the rate he does in the majors, what happens to the portion of the plate appearances where the walks surely go away? They turn into something else, but what? Strikeouts looking because major league pitchers are just better and the risk he takes looking at a close two-strike pitch is no longer a winning bet? Strikeouts swinging because he gets into unfavorable counts more often than before? Base hits because the major league pitchers are coming in with strikes more often and his patience actually pays off? Home runs, same logic? Or merely weak fly balls and ground outs, where he's trading walks for contact but it's on the pitcher's terms? I honestly don't know what to expect from him. I'll say this, though: the batting average of .258 this past season at AAA doesn't quite line up with what should be an elite eye for spitting on pitches outside the strike zone. And he already strikes out a lot. The potential for "bust" is pretty high. And yet, would I trade him, on the theory that he's at peak value? Um, no. I want to watch what happens with him because he's so unique, and I want it to happen with my team.

Not really, when viewed in the context of someone (not you to start with, I'll acknowledge) cherry picking Brent Rooker as a reason to hold out hope for our new acquisition. I certainly wasn't going to attempt to write up responses to every line in your post. Life is short, and neither your posts nor mine are. 😁 I picked a thing or two to explore in response. I looked again at his splits, and noticed something new to me: he lost his everyday starting job, somewhere around mid-season. There wasn't a stint on the IL to account for this. What happens when a guy goes from playing nearly every day to being a bench player? For one thing, the manager has the luxury of trying to cherry-pick (heh) opportunities where he feels the player may succeed. It's entirely possible that the measured higher velocity correlated with facing pitchers he was more likely to handle. I have no specific information, but am throwing it out there as one possibility - namely that his old team ultimately may have decided that getting the best out of him wasn't worth the trouble in terms of roster management. You know the classic logical fallacy called Appeal To Authority? I am pleased to note that you didn't fall into that particular trap here. 😁 Ah! Common ground at last! 😁 All in good fun, I hope.

I do. It's a tremendous burden on a team's roster to cycle through all the potential Rookers to find the one that clicks. Very much a bottom-feeder strategy. And look who it finally paid off for - when he emerged as a offensive weapon, it was for a squad that went 50-112 that season. Just enough Rookers emerge in the course of a decade to support the dream that "there must be a pony in this pile here, somewhere." That is you doing some mind-reading, since I've seen no comment by the Marlins. And it assumes that their analytics staff is no better than the average fan-on-the-street who looks at season numbers and makes a thumbs-up/thumbs-down determination. And/or, their coaches failing to notice something real behind the numbers in the second half. The simpler explanation: statistical fluke over a small sample. Now, if the Twins do have some kind of special sauce that brings out the best in Wagaman and the others you allude to, I'll be suitably impressed.

And maybe even then ... 😁

In a thread about relief pitching? Sure, I can supply some. Any particular angle of interest to you? Arcia's control is probably decent but he surely has very little stuff - he'll get lit up except in very carefully curated appearances on the mound. His best bet will be to develop either a knuckleball or the eephus pitch. That suit your fancy?

Even his August was a Tale of Two Halves. First half of August his OPS was .639. In the second half his OPS zoomed to 1.051 on the strength of a .391 BABIP and an uncharacteristic 3 home runs in 40 plate appearances. He reverted to 0 HR in all of September. Two weeks of success is pretty short in baseball terms, and neither of these foundations (high BABIP, HR) would seem sustainable based on his track record, so I find it hard to count on the guy for anything much across a full season, which Miami did give him. If the Twins have spotted something correctable in his fundamentals that the Yankees, Angels and Marlins all missed, and he turns in a productive 2026 at first base, I'll give them all the credit.

I kind of thought my crack about Miami DFA'ing him addressed my views regarding Wagaman's actual talent, if you thought I was drawing a comparison. No, Margot's merely my example of how much a manager's hands are tied, versus the tidy theory that you can segregate two complementary players' plate appearances neatly into left-and-right. Manny actually had more plate appearances (by +1) for the Twins against righties than he did versus lefties. I could have used Kyle Garlick as the example, instead. Either your lefty-killer bat gets used more against righties than you would prefer (Margot), or else he's barely a factor at all (Garlick).

Site user-interface got me again.