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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    Not a corner bat at #5, please!
  2. ashbury
    I foresee Rocco in the Twins' front office someday, possibly even soon. He's just too much on the same page with FalVine for them to ever cut him loose, even if the on-field performance dictates a change in personnel in the dugout, which is almost every major league manager's eventual fate.
  3. ashbury
    And these are the same people posting these wildly divergent opinions from one day to the next?
  4. ashbury
    And he's still usually viewed as the primary chip toward acquiring front-line talent. It will take more than this one article before he's truly the sweetener that Duensing was.
  5. ashbury
    All this indignation over a man's indignation? That kind of thing kind of riles me up. Almost to the point of indignation. Almost. Almost? Nah, let's be honest. I'm indignant. I'm all in.
  6. ashbury
    MLB isn't college football, where the hometown heroes can go 2-10 but the season is a success if they beat Iowa and Wisconsin. Unless the rivalry during a particular season is organic, I'm not too interested in that aspect. Cleveland and Chicago certainly look like the main challengers in the Central, but I don't feel like worrying about them until it's too late.
  7. ashbury
    It occurs to me that there might be a bias toward readers rather than video watchers in these comments, because the readership gravitated here in the first place. Bonnes could be reaching a new audience.
  8. ashbury
    I tend to avoid podcasts and the like, too, but an aggressively edited two-minute video was hardly a deal breaker for me in this case.
  9. ashbury
  10. ashbury
    I'll quibble with third over second, if you mean defensive importance. Last season third base ranked behind only first base in aggregate OPS. That seems to me strong evidence that managers will strain to get a good bat into the lineup at that position. Catcher is unique IMO and belongs at the top of your list. Aggregate OPS for catchers ranked last.
  11. ashbury
    Eddie Mathews was not drafted.
  12. ashbury
    The over, but not by much.
  13. ashbury
    Good move to name that one field for Tom Kelly. It was a highlight of my visits to watch him hold court at first base, especially teaching the fine points of the position to players not ready to learn them.
  14. ashbury
    Does Buxton have any minor league options remaining? Send him down and bring up someone who can hit.
  15. ashbury
    At the request of absolutely nobody, I took a closer look at the question of how DHing affects a batter. I went in with the assumption that guys would hit better if they concentrated on only batting on a given day, despite having seen quotes from players that DHing is tough. So I went to the 2022 stats and picked out guys who DHed a lot but also split their time playing positions too. My not-very-random sample was Stanton, McCutchen, Blackmon, Alvarez, Ozuna, Buxton, and Mancini. My expectation was not supported. Only Blackmon had a better OPS as a DH than as a fielder. It's a small sample. Someone else can figure out a more careful study. I don't know how to control for the effect of injury, where a given player is DH only when not 100% physically. But based on this sampling, I guess the players could be right. DH is a tough role. Buxton certainly has said so; I should believe him. It makes what Nelson Cruz accomplished that much more wonderful. And it makes me leery of just picking a player like Polanco and saying, you're my switch-hitting DH now. But I remain leery of spreading the duty around like the current plan seems to be; each such batter doing worse than usual isn't much of a help overall, and finding that special player who can excel at DH becomes more important than ever.
  16. ashbury
    Across the majors last year, aggregate DH output was an OPS of only .710, compared to the overall .707 OPS. (Best by position were 1B and 3B at .746 and .725 respectively, worst unsurprisingly was C at .663.) Apparently the majority of teams must be rotating their DH too. Seems like a dedicated DH is one of the few opportunities for a lower-budget team to find a competitive advantage, even at the cost of a shorter bench for the position players in this era of 13-man batting rosters.
  17. ashbury
    Will our DH be better than the opponent's DH, most games? If not, then I don't like this rotational strategy. If a key player needs a day of rest, rest him. A hitter like Nelson Cruz wasn't simply a great DH, he was a cost-effective DH. Because you aren't paying one penny for a glove. When a position player fills the role, his salary doesn't drop for that game, but whatever you're paying for his glove is wasted anyway. Of course it's not easy to find and sign a guy like Cruz, because other teams are in there bidding for his services as well. Having him was good while it lasted. To be clear, given the roster we have now, rotation may be the way to go. I'm talking about roster construction, dating back a few months now. But unless Nick Gordon (for instance) steps up his offense a bit further than he already has (and maybe he can), very many games with him as DH is going to look a lot like that time in the post-season where Jason Tyner DH'ed. And in that case I'm back to criticizing the roster construction. Literally any major league player is capable of filling the DH slot, but that's a low hurdle and I want a DH who excels, same as every spot in the lineup.
  18. ashbury
    I dunno. Now we may have gone from Mount Rushmore to Mount Everest. All alone up there.
  19. ashbury
    Concur. OTOH multi-tool players typically need for all their tools to click, unless you have the fabled 5-tool player like Correa or Buxton who go high in the draft and aren't available anyway where Sabato was chosen. Nick Gordon is the poster child for having no one tool being bad when drafted but no one tool that stood out, and he almost got buried in the minors before finally putting it all together (arguably it was his high draft slot in the first place that caused him to get the long leash, otherwise he might be bouncing around). There's more than one way to reach the majors, and also more than one way to not quite make it. If the talent evaluator really believes in one tool that a player has, it can be a reasonable move to draft that player and hope that one or two additional tools emerge as at least adequate. The "hit" tool, more so than "power" or any other single tool, would be the one I'd bank on, so in that light Sabato was kind of a reach.
  20. ashbury
    Does being on Cedar Rapids and Wichita amount to playing in the Styx?
  21. ashbury
    I got a contact high just from watching that video, you jerk.
  22. ashbury
    So then to achieve roughly comparable numbers at the same age and league level, he must be more talented and/or accomplished than Duvall was. Cool beans.
  23. ashbury
    17 HR by a 23-year old at High-A ball, followed by 5 more in short duty at AA? Seems like nothing to sneeze at. I decided to take a look back, 10 years ago, and see what happened afterward to anyone with similar age and numbers at high-A in 2012. At first I was going to look at the Twins own farm system, but High-A back then was in Ft Myers, and the Florida State League is widely considered a pitcher's league. Certainly no one on that 2012 squad approached those figures. So I opted for a different franchise and picked the Giants at random. Their High-A team in 2012 was in San Jose in the higher-offense California League. On that team was Adam Duvall, who at age 23 hit 30 dingers. He used 598 PA in which to accomplish that, while our guy Aaron had his HR in only 348 and 99 at A+ and AA respectively. Duvall's BA was .258 while Sabato's was .226/.179, but adding in walks Sabato's OBP was actually a tad higher of the two. Not a perfect comp but close enough to suit me. Lots of minor leaguers fail, regardless of their pedigree or resume up to a given point. So I'm not going to continue looking for additional comps *cough* Kennys Vargas 2013 *cough*. If Sabato turns out like Duvall, for a few seasons, and it looks like he does have a chance, then our late first rounder will have worked out OK.
  24. ashbury
    Quite rightly.
  25. ashbury
    If nothing else, RandBalls Stu thoroughly understands the age demographic he is writing for.
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