ashbury

I'd even go so far as to say that what happens in May, June, July, August, and September will together be 5X as important as April.

"Beating the teams they should beat" to the tune of 10-3 seems the biggest risk to the plan. Do that, and yes, they should be sitting pretty well, even if they stumble against good teams. Events don't always unfold like we anticipate, but that's why we watch the games.

I don't think what I said is at odds with your deeper look at the numbers. It seemed unlikely that "good" performance at either location on the diamond could be lurking anywhere inside Miranda's negative aggregate dWAR in 2022. So I left it at that and didn't bother to go deeper. (I think we both left out mentioning that dWAR assigns a negative value to each inning as a DH so that definitely clouds the picture except for taking a quick look.) The fundamental problem with defensive stats is not which tool you choose, but sample size. Batting stats over the full course of a season are thought to be meaningful, and I'm convinced it's not simply that a full time player shows his abilities during 700 plate appearances, but through a few thousand individual pitches that he sees and uses his judgment and skill on. Those pitches are what I see as equivalent to fielding chances on defense - Buxton recognizing (or not!) a breaking pitch that's destined to be low and should be laid off is about on a par with tracking a deep fly ball in the gap with the wind blowing (that Byron hauls in with deceptive ease). Buxton doesn't get thousands of repetitions on defense like he does at bat, because nobody does, but he's good enough that we don't really need defensive stats to appreciate him. So, I like the analytic approach to things but sometimes the data just isn't there and the eye test needs to hold sway (and I maintain that you can do sound analytics using eye tests and other coarse forms of information gathering when statistically reliable samples aren't possible). Defense falls into that category for me, and I use any numbers I see as only a first-order guide - I think you did similarly when suggesting a 20-run range for Miranda's work last year. That doesn't mean you can't glean tentative opinions from small data samples - we didn't need thousands of pitches to determine that Pedro Florimon would be a bad hitter in the majors and you'd be hard pressed to find a 150 PA consecutive sample from the Florimonster that could fool you into thinking otherwise, nor did anyone need to suggest a caveat that his offense might actually have been 10 runs better than his numbers showed. Ditto for defensive stats - you can get some value from them - but they are inherently more prone to have little blips, such as a young 3Bman having stats that fluctuate or make him seem better at 3rd than at 1st over the course of far less than a season at either spot. Bottom line for me still is, Miranda's not yet 25 and he might have it within him to become a positive contributor to a contending team at third. His uninspiring stats in 2022 are worrisome but not enough for me to give up on him, and we have the springtime "feel good" story involving Correa's term "sexy" to suggest there could be substance to that hope. Every player is arriving at Ft Myers in the best shape of his life, after all - they can't print that in the newspaper if it isn't true!

Mookie Betts is listed at 5'9" and 180 pounds. He hit 35 dingers for the Dodgers last year. Let's not worry obsessively about a power hitter's weight being too low. I don't know how seriously to take public statements by and about players, but in Do-Hyoung Park's recent article where Correa was credited with the "sexy" comment there were a few useful nuggets, one of which was Miranda laying off of chocolate. Losing a bit of weight and then putting on muscle to replace it may not be a linear process and it could be "one step back before two steps forward" and might require more than one off-season to really see through to completion. But his batting stats for the last couple of months of the season were not good enough for a bat-first guy and in the above article Miranda acknowledged that. He chalked it up to conditioning for the long major league season, basically. The change discussed here stands to help on that. His defensive metrics stunk whether he was at third or at first. b-r.com's defensive WAR for him is overall negative and he spent many more innings at first, so moving to first was no cure-all, which I think matches the eye-test. So DH him forever? The DH spot is used in various ways by different teams. Often it's a place to cycle through position players who need a day of partial rest or to hide an injury. A few teams have a hitter strong enough to devote that spot to him nearly exclusively; but the bar is set incredibly high for such a player to be a difference maker for a team with aspirations to contend. Nelson Cruz was such a bat, but they are rare. To tag Miranda with that label so soon is IMO a bigger risk to his career (not to mention the team's playoff aspirations) than letting him try to continue to develop in the field. Terry Ryan during his second tenure ran afoul of loading up with too many "and if all else fails, he can DH" types, mostly because they were cheap to acquire or to pay. Ryan Doumit and Josh Willingham resided on the same roster two years running, for example. Trouble is they can't all DH at once, and now you have hardening of the arteries in the rest of your roster. There's a real opportunity cost to how the DH is used because it's literally the last resort for every single player (last year Byron Buxton of all people, for example). If Miranda ends up weighing less, it wasn't the kind of weight that would help a player in the first place. At least, I never heard of anyone eating chocolate to get stronger and hit more homers. So cutting that out, even if said a little in jest in that article rather than literally, seems constructive. The young man doesn't turn 25 until mid-season. We still don't know what he can be. If he's dedicated to improving in an important aspect of his game, don't stop him. I'm pretty content to trust the team's judgment on this change in his diet combined with a better workout regimen .

That was an interesting point about Farmer's ranking. Perhaps the restrictions on the shift prompted the Reds to deal him for whatever they could get, which IMO wasn't much.

The Twins are going to win 100 games in 2023 and I am seriously uninterested in hearing any information to the contrary. / am I doing this right?

That's not up for discussion.

Maybe I didn't read the article carefully enough, but given the current roster and that we're apparently not trading Kepler for prospects, who would you remove from the 40-man to make room to have kept Gio?

F cancer, kudos to Mike. Sounds like a life well lived.

I know everybody wants to learn the rankings in some computer game. Out of the Park seems to put effort into their scouting reports, and both players earn a three-star ceiling, which is "pretty good" but not "future Hall of Famer good." (Only Buxton among outfielders ranks better in the system.) The scouts they rely on like Rodriguez's bat a little better; they like Mercedes's range on defense a little better and give him a better chance at sticking in CF though neither projects as an elite defender there. The ratings for batting eye (Ks and BBs) are remarkably similar between them. Those evaluations probably date back to a year ago though. As Seth said, the consensus is probably "pretty even" to one another for now.

I like to consider myself better than average at teasing out rough forecasts by eyeballing data, but no way am I trying that with 18-year olds below single-A ball. Unless we have professional level skills at in-person evaluation, we have to content ourselves with going from the public evaluations by those who do have those fundamental skills. If one of those people says, "he looks like a young Byron Buxton to me," for instance, that means more than a season's worth of stats in an instructional league. There is a nice evaluation of Mercedes at the MLB.com site that contains numerical ratings in the 50s for each of his tools (and an overall rating of 45 that I therefore don't quite understand), along with nuggets like "an athletic and projectable 6-foot-2 frame." That latter bit sounds like what they might have said about Buxton ten years ago, and comes from many factors including looking at close family members. All in all I look at it more as "an absence of red flags," really, but also to say "he'll probably end up bigger and stronger than Gilberto Celestino, yet just as athletic." But there are a ton of young players you can say these things about. Where do you put "a young Byron Buxton" (and this is a phrase I totally pull out of the air by inference) at age 18 in a farm system's rankings? Maybe right around where Mercedes is now, so as to say "he's too good already to just ignore as too young." As you say, it's a struggle. It's not just the lack of data. It's that the player is so far from maturity (not just physically), and many paths in his life are still possible. Will he someday be able to hit a major-league quality yakker? He likely can't now. He could flame out before ever reaching AA; he could end up in the Hall of Fame. Where *do* you rank prospects like that?

Concur. Or, maybe, not.

Hard to rank moves because the size of the move may be smallish but executed well. I like both the Taylor and Farmer trades - acquiring low-cost, solid, unspectacular veterans for what seems like a pittance. Those two will earn $10M salary combined, or a little more than what Urshela will get in arbitration (I haven't seen an announcement for him yet). The combination of the three trades moves the talent from "corner" to "up the middle," and deserves congratulations even if the big-ticket moves get more attention.

Byron Buxton can beat the other team in so many ways!

Please do. Piecemeal memory is no substitute for someone taking a careful pass through the record. Many teams play the waiver-wire game, and our Twin are part of it, so it's worth evaluating whether it's been worth the effort and roster churn.

Phillies and Padres made it to the NL championship without one. Meanwhile the Twins did have one and went nowhere.

Always comes down to disguising the pitch. But when done right, there is hardly a more devastating combination than a four-seamer with a perfect changeup, is there? Factor in just about any other offerings and you're really got something to work with.

Everyone "knew about" the ankle. The fact he had had a plate installed long ago was well known. What IMO was new was information that the SF doctors found, that signs of arthritis had become evident and of a nature that could cloud the outlook 10 years down the line. The Twins doctors a year earlier might not have looked at things with a 10-year horizon in mind, given the contract discussion was 3 years., but this time it mattered and the offer was scaled back to a more comfortable 6 years. Had Correa agreed to the Twins' 10-year offer originally, there's no reason to think their doctors wouldn't have made the same diagnosis. Again, IMO, but I think it fits with all available information.

I see Woods-Richardson but not Austin Martin in the table. I noticed that while following up on the trend of trading for pitchers. By contrast Alcala and Celestino were acquired together and both are listed. Looks like Farmer's the first instance of trading for a position player alone. And now Taylor. / edit - No. No no no. Near as I can tell, their first position player traded for was... Jake Cave. The table of course is clearly marked as of the current roster.

You won't get 7 max-effort innings out of the guy, start after start. He won't be the same lights-out guy as we saw in the bullpen. I agree that starters are more valuable, but you have to take into account what is achievable. If Duran wants to start, it's a delicate matter for Rocco to manage, but that's why they pay him the big bucks. The FO can also contribute to the solution by offering Duran a long-term contract at mid-season, assuming he starts out strong, for top dollar for a closer, to ease the financial "regret" he may feel at not being a starter - his agent might advise "take the 6/$100M rather than try for something higher as a starter and risk coming out with a lot less than that." He's still years away from arbitration, so adjust the contract offer from what I said; I think 6 years only buys out his arb years, which may be stupid on the team's part, so some creativity is needed. But a happy player is important and may be worth bending some principles.

It's a useful way of thinking. Pretty wide ranges out outcome but that's the nature of player evaluation.

Let me try and say it another way: I like the idea of measuring performance against the best. Unless our goal is just to sneak into the postseason and then get swept, I don't particularly care how a reliever does against the number 8 and 9 batters - Emilio Pagan did excellently against them too. The level of competition goes up in various ways, in October, because even the best teams experiment with their rosters throughout the long season but they settle on who they think is best starting in game 163. Many of those 8/9 hitters are gone by then. I'm not seeing a lockdown pen right now. Reliever numbers are always sparse, so what I pointed out about Griffin Jax is merely an anomaly to wonder about.

His pattern just looks more extreme than most. It stood out to me. And again (again, again), it's small sample size when sliced 9 ways, so I'm not taking it more seriously than, "hm".

Concur on the first sentence. The second sentence? American Leaguers in 2022 OPSed .789 when batting third. https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/split.cgi?t=b&lg=AL&year=2022#all_lineu I just don't see evidence Jax (.828 respectively) was something special against good hitters last season. And I wouldn't make an issue of him except that he's one of the handful of relievers people point to as being the makings of a shutdown pen. Can he improve? Sure, along with the other young arms, and I hope so. BTW, Jhoan Duran's OPS-against when facing #3 hitters was .696. I'm not asking for miracles when facing the best. Just... for evidence of effectiveness not dropping off. I mean, Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera allowed a .724 OPS against #3 hitters (though league OPS during his era was nearly .100 points higher), so no one is immune. Say, do you want to know Emilio Pagan's 2022 OPS-against when facing #3? Do you wanna? DO YOU WANNA? Okay, since you twisted my arm. 1.011. (#4 beat him to the tune of 1.134, also.) (Again, for the individual relievers, it's all small-sample, so I wouldn't take any of this terribly seriously. I'm just looking for a reason to change my opinion about Jax, and not finding any in the season's results.)