ashbury

I can hold contradictory ideas in my head. The deal will come down to total dollars, and that almost certainly means whichever team offers the most guaranteed years (ignore any option years), and the Twins are on record not liking to do lots of years for pitchers. And yet, I am optimistic that the team and the player somehow will find a way. Book it? No, not really.

This kind of analysis would have me believe also that Dusty Baker is about average. Likewise Terry Francona. Bruce Bochy has a pretty good reputation but this chart would have me say he's below average. Buck Showalter was manager of the year for the Mets last season; this season he's a chump sez the chart. Look also at the comparison of the 2023 column to the last column, for last season. I don't see a lot of correlation, which means that managers get smart or dumb on each cycle of the Earth around the Sun. If anything, my memory of studies is that close games are irreproducible results, and about the last thing you look at when drawing conclusions about something lasting. Instead the teams that win the most comfortably, more often, are the better teams. A manager has more input in making that happen than you give him credit for - getting the right players into the right situations, maintaining a good clubhouse, knowing how to handle his starting pitchers, etc. But in any case slicing and dicing manager data is really hard.

Altuve's on track to be your least favorite Hall of Famer, too.

I just wanted to circle back and say that I checked with some SABR folks, and a full-blown attempt at serious bios of additional Twins may not be in anybody's future, but maybe a few will arise in coming months. If I spot any synergy between your Wiki project and what SABR does, I'll try to bring folks together. But it will be very small scale, one or two individuals at most I would imagine. Maybe zero - different aims. If you want any help fostering the TD wiki project after the site software is in place, let me know.

Paywall. What's the summary?

We acquired Farmer for a run of the mill relief prospect, Casey Legumina. Kyle has been a good Twin but didn't do much this year to raise his stock. I can't imagine getting much more than we gave up, if we trade him now. Sure, move him if he's redundant, but the difference between trading him and simply releasing him will be slight; he won't be a key part of a trade for high-end pitching, say, any more than Legumina would have been.

"Thank you for coming so quickly, Officer. I know it sounds crazy, but there's a guy just standing there in my kitchen. I was busy cooking up something I hoped would be good, and all of a sudden he's there, welcoming me to my own crib, inviting me to use the spices and so forth. No, no, I don't want you to tase him - he doesn't seem malicious, just see if you can talk to him. But don't let him make off with any pots and pans on his way out, either."

The economics of baseball have changed a lot since Flood's playing days. (Due in fair measure to Flood himself.). A journeyman like Trevor May stands to make a lot more money in his career, even in equivalent dollars, than back then. It's asking a lot of a middle class guy, to make that sacrifice. To me, it makes perfect sense to take The Man's dough and then turn around and blast Him, laughing all the way to the bank. Poor form would be to blast the fans who ultimately paid him. Your veneration of Curt Flood is well placed, though.

Every grand slam after his first, and both blasts in the first playoff game, were solidly in Oh No He Didn't territory. He may succeed or fail in any given plate appearance, but for now no moment is too big for Royce Lewis

You're both right. According to native cultures, no one owns stone, we're only the caretaker of it before passing it along to another generation of defensive butcher.

The article focuses on salary arbitration, but minor league options matter more. If the talent is stashed at AAA while the journeymen must play in the majors, it's a funny definition of depth. It's why signing Gallo was a big gamble, and not because of the millions he was paid, but because he was only a bounce-back candidate.

I'm glad I read slow. I lol'ed at 9/12th's comment. Then after I settled down and had a sip of morning coffee I scrolled down to your topper and lol'ed again. Oh my OMG. No. Just no. Put me down for a zero. I'm not subjecting myself to that. Someday I will be diagnosed with Alzheimers*. And my wife will ask, "how'm I supposed to tell the difference from before?" * my apologies to anyone triggered by joking about the subject. My mom died of it. And I know others in the readership have coped with it in the family too.

Looks like I picked the right year to skip making the trek down to the Phoenix area.

Both these on-the-cusp-of-stardom guys gave me the Willies back in the day.

If that's true then explain Cleveland and Cincinnati. They quite literally had OBP results in direct contradiction of their strikeout rates.

That would set this effort off from what's already on the regular Wikipedia page, for players like Greg Gagne who was mentioned.

I tuned out after Schwarber's second homer. Not a dull game, exactly, but it seemed like a good time to go do something else for a while. I didn't come back until the last batter of the eighth. Guess I missed a bit of action. 😊

This is where our opinions diverge, because for example Cleveland struck out the fewest this year and yet their OBP was below average. Cincy struck out a lot and their OBP was above average.

You do say this a lot, and it's plainly true*, but I'm not sure what wisdom it really imparts. If Falvey tells Levine, "go make a trade, improve the team," will Levine do more than just stare at him and say, "well, yeah, duh"? * An exception is that the team also needs to sell tickets. Trading Arraez was a gamble that I tip my hat to the FO for making. But trading away Puckett in his prime, if another team offered them the world, might not be a step our guys could reasonably take. There might other reasons to not be open to an otherwise favorable trade.

Bingo. The team with the fewest strikeouts this season, Cleveland, would have led the majors in that stat in 1987. The game has simply changed. That's not to say that leading in majors in Ks is a good thing. But the focus should be elsewhere. Leading the majors in groundouts or flyouts is harmful too, but those stats aren't as easily accessible, for us to bang our drums about. Outs made on the basepaths are even worse. Six teams this year averaged 5 or more runs per game. You know what correlates strongly with run scoring? Plate appearances. Only TB somehow managed those 5 runs without being near the top in PA. So we should just get some more players who are strong at racking up plate appearances, right? Right? OK that's a little tongue in cheek, but it leads to an actual insight that I do believe. The 6 teams that led the majors in OBP also led the majors in run scoring. That's not a guarantee, but it's strong correlation of success. If you just replace strikeouts with outs on the ground or in the air, you really aren't accomplishing much. Washington and Cleveland were at the bottom in striking out, and were nobody's idea of good offenses, and I bet you'd find those missing strikeouts were replaced with easy outs of other types. One more team. What do Cleveland, Washington, and Houston have in common? Houston was the third lowest team in strikeouts. And yet their run production was among those top-six I mentioned earlier. How could eliminating strikeouts as your primary goal in 2023 possibly be the right thing when you had a 1 out of 3 chance this year of instead ending up with bad run scoring? These 3 teams aligned in one particular counting stat but were very different in ways that matter. That's weak correlation to success. The correlation of strikeouts to runs is just not that strong. The correlation of getting on base, and bringing up your buddy for another PA, is. The Reds struck out a lot, they also had high OBP, and guess what, they scored runs above MLB average. They were also high in plate appearances. Keep the inning going. Focus on OBP, and the strikeouts will "magically" decline, and the run scoring go up, and the We Hates Strikeouts crowd will tell us that the lower strikeouts were the cure. The rooster crows, and the sun rises., and the rooster will let you know he caused it.

Almost certainly. I have snarked more than twice about links to players leading to someone who played college ball back in 1997 and never was drafted, or like that. I assumed it was a q&d tool you had cooked up to automate the process for your authors, and it's certainly useful to have a link to a player's stat page the first time they're mentioned in a TD article. I had no idea it was a q&d tool by b-r.com themselves. Sorry for the bad vibes sent your way in those cases. Who do you think is the best person to complain to, at their site? There is significant overlap between them and SABR and I don't think it would take much to get them to increase the priority.

I dashed off my comment before reading the rest of the thread, and I think you'd like the SABR Bio project, which consists of mostly amateur writers who are supported by a team of professionals who, for example, insist that the writer document everything, and who fix up the grammar (Chicago Manual of Style I think). They use (also amateur) fact checkers to weed out the worst of the factual mistakes which inevitably creep in despite best intent. This proposed Wiki would have lower aims than that of course. But also broader since the prospects are players that the SABR project wouldn't touch for at least another decade. I just think it's worth thinking through the vision for how the Wiki would fit into the larger ecosystem. Brock already brought up the risk of overlapping (to be charitable) what b-r.com does. Maybe a little sharper definition of what the intended audience is, and exactly how they will be served. If I can cash in 50,000 points to perma-ban a TD commenter of my own choosing, we're on to something.

I went to the SABR Bio Project and looked up Greg Gagne since he was mentioned, expecting to find several thousand words on his life and career and then planning to ask how everyone would see this proposed Wiki interacting with a bunch of well written info already out there. But it turns out nobody has written one for Gagne yet. Huh. I think I'll have to nag your local SABR chapter to get on the ball and do what the Boston chapter has already done for milestone teams like their 1986 World Series loser, which resulted in a book. We surely could do as well documenting a 1987 or 1991 winner. It's only a few thousand man-hours of effort. Anyway, there do exist bios on guys like Puckett and Hrbek, so investing time on them in a Wiki project should be done with at least knowledge of "prior art" being out there.

The thing that somehow caught me by surprise is that the batting lineup was essentially the same for every game. A time or two, a couple of batters got swapped in the order. Playing the same catcher every game stands out, but the rest was pretty consistent, obscured by his heavy use of platoon-bat pinch-hitting. In the regular season Rocco employed 13 different leadoff batters to begin the game. Our opponent in the wild card had used 4. Houston used 6. And so on, down the batting order. It's easy to guess any of several reasons it played out like this, but I'd be interested in eliminating the guesswork by someone asking Rocco to spell it out.