ashbury

This explains his team DFAing him. 😀 As for the platooning possibilities, the nature of the game limits the effectiveness of that strategy. Bring in your right hand bat against the other team's mediocre middle innings LHP, and now you're stuck with him for the rest of the game against a parade of righties. Saw more than enough of that with Margot.

Jeremy Zoll was stung by RandBalls Stu's article this morning.

I'm beginning to look back at the Joe Pohlad Era with unexpected fondness.

2029 Falvey is going to be pissed at what errands Current Falvey is not running..

Roll Hoosiers.

Larnach is a bit of a polarizing figure at this site but you don't have to actually duck before uttering his name. 😀

Then you and he could try not belittling someone else's preference, by calling it an addiction.

I'm guessing you both look back with remorse at the RBIs too. Helluva drug.

So your theory involves/requires the new owners being bad decision makers? 😁

Interesting variation on the old Slow Mule Race.

My last post was already long enough so I left out a point that probably is important in this discussion. Like batting average or OPS, any per-162 stats amount to a "rate" stat. These completely leave out the notion of whether a given player is at all available for anything like a full season's workload. "The most important ability is availability," and the latter can be diminished by various reasons that aren't simply "injury" which is already bad enough - for instance if the manager felt the need to platoon the guy a lot, or if poor performance caused him to spend half the season at AAA - yes I have Matt Wallner in mind. Even batting low in the batting order will affect whether a guy has 600+ PA or just 550 or 500, even if the manager wants his glove in the starting lineup every game - huh, I suddenly stopped thinking about Wallner. So, in considering whether to sign a player, it's fair to acknowledge that Arraez has a good track record for earning a paycheck by getting his name in the lineup. (I still may ask, if he has had 600 plate appearances four years running and bats .300+, then why isn't he a run scoring machine with 100 per season, or even 90, on the regular,)

You need to take the extra step when adopting this point of view. Baseball is a slugging driven sport. OPS and its kin are not some kind of trick intended to purposely fool you into thinking the worse player is the better. Those stats try to reflect the game as it's played. But if you're going to cast doubt on that kind of stats, then let's talk about Runs. Nobody wins a World Series by having the highest OPS, they win by scoring runs and preventing runs. There were 21614 runs scored and 20740 RBIs in the majors in 2025. With 30 teams and with each team having 9 spots in the lineup there is a raw average of 80 runs and 77 RBIs. However, batters at the bottom of the lineup get fewer opportunities so a different and perhaps better way to look at what is "average" run production is to take the major league splits at baseball-reference.com by Batting Order Position. Leadoff hitters scored 3077 runs and batted in 2216, so dividing by the 30 teams means roughly 103 runs and 74 RBIs expected in that slot. The full table: 1 103 74 2 97 83 3 91 91 4 84 96 5 77 84 6 69 73 7 68 68 8 68 64 9 65 59 This is just to set expectations - if you bat a guy 9th your expectations should be lower than for an "average" player, much less a player in the top half of the lineup where the opportunities are more plentiful. Separately b-r.com provides for each player a career "162-game average". Nobody plays a full 162 games in a season and many play far fewer, but it represents an answer to the question "what if I plugged this guy in for the full year, what would I get?" I mentioned Trevor Larnach last time. His 162-game average for runs is 73 and for RBIs is also 73. Over his career he's batted all over the place in the lineup but way more than half has been in slots 2, 3 and 4. I wouldn't say he measures up very well at all versus the average player in those 3 slots but it's fair to allow that his run production stats are watered down a bit by the 1/3 of his PA where he batted 5th or lower. Compared to 80 and 77 "raw" runs and RBIs mentioned above, he comes in close to an average run producer. I mentioned Aaron Judge. His 162-game averages are 124 runs and 117 RBIs. For his career he's batted almost exclusively 2nd or 3rd, and measures up VERY well against his counterparts on other teams. So, I come to Arraez. His 162-game average for runs is 84, and for RBIs is 59. Three quarters of his career PA have been in the #1 or #2 slot in the batting order (which is a little less than I expected), but even allowing for a bit of blending with middle-of-the-order experience, his run production is not especially impressive at all. How does Luis Arraez score runs at a rate barely better than Trevor Larnach? Maybe Trevor's better than I give him credit for (and I know you want to hang onto him), but compared to league averages, whichever of the above are most relevant, he's no better than average. How can someone like Arraez who is arguably the best at hitting a baseball and getting on base not lead the league in runs, at least some of the years? Luis has now had 4 seasons of 600+ plate appearances, and never scored more than 88 runs. How? After a while you have to stop blaming teammates and consider if there's something about the guy himself. The whole is somehow less than the sum of the parts. He gets on base but is slow afoot. He doesn't hit with power. Guys like Corbin Carroll amass 162-game averages of above 100 runs scored. Why doesn't Luis? The Twins actually were fifth in the majors in runs scored by their leadoff hitters. Prominent among those hitters was Byron Buxton, who scored 97 runs in a season where he still lost some time to injury. What's Byron got that Luis doesn't? I'm just not enthused about expending a bunch of dollars we don't have, to obtain someone that won't even be a difference maker when at his 2023 peak - to obtain another Trevor Larnach with slightly different skills. And, as you can see, I don't need the shorthand of using OPS to make that argument.

If you're getting these splits from b-r.com, then the game log that the site provides for each player lets us zoom in on how his season began and when things turned around for the better. There wasn't any period where his BA hovered near .220. One can choose two early-season turning points. April 5: Eight games into his season he was batting a frigid .129 (4 for 34), but that afternoon he went 2 for 3 to bring him instantly to .176, 4 for 5 the next day jumped him to .256, and he continued with 2 more multi-hit games to bring up his BA to .313 the morning of April 8. Cue the Forrest Gump "And Just Like That" meme. April 14: But Luis slipped into another funk and his BA dropped until reaching .258 (17 for 66), and then in the game on this date he turned it around again, launching a period into early May where he brought the BA to a season-high .313 again. The rest of the way he hit .288, below the .292 season average he eventually landed at. I know you (Greggory) know all this. I'm just mentioning it because it's often worth going back to the underlying data rather than averages over periods of time which can blur the events.

I'm in favor of this policy. If the 2026 edition of the Twins crashes and burns, send Tom home, and bring in another relief Pohlad.

If they do that then maybe they get an invite to the World Baseball Classic and an outside chance at the FIFA Peace Prize.

It's like in a video game. Just when you think the nemesis has been vanquished, there's always the Final Boss, followed in short order by the True Final Boss.

Then Larnach for Vientos, if the latter serves any particular purpose that I'm not currently seeing. After trading away Nimmo the Mets might value a veteran on a moderate salary who can provide a floor in case some of their preferred options don't pan out.

Ah, so like spam callers situated in a boiler room. 😁

Approves.

I don't believe that's even true. When people complain about so-called sabrmetric stats for offense, I don't know whether they realize how much of a dominant role is still played by good old-fashioned BA. I'll use OPS as a simple version for explanatory purposes. Other fancy stats like WOBA and its derivatives are better respected but harder to explain, and in my experience they correlate pretty closely anyway. Sorry this is long, but I really want skeptics to consider the details. A quick refresher for anyone not immersed in OPS. It's defined as OBP plus SLG. OBP comes from BA plus some additional outcomes (mainly walks), and it's instructive to subtract OBP-BA, although I don't know a name for it - for this post I'll call it an X factor, representing those other ways to get on base. For SLG, there is a name for when you subtract BA from it: Isolated power, or ISO, which reflects basically every extra base after reaching first before the next batter comes to the plate. So OPS equals: (BA + X) for OBP, plus (BA + ISO) for SLG. Taken together, OPS = 2*BA + X + ISO. Take Trevor Larnach's 2025 with the Twins for an example of this. He's a middle of the road offensive player, not terrible and not stellar, with an OPS of .727. His BA for the Twins was .250. The X factor (on base not coming from base hits) was .073 - almost exactly league average. His ISO was .154 - also league average for power, give or take. So his OPS breaks down as 2*.250 + .073 + .154 = .727 as promised. Here's my point: more than HALF of Larnach's OPS comes from his batting average alone. 68.8% of it. He gets a little bump for the walks, he gets a little more bump from what power he offers. But it's mostly the batting average. He's typical of major leaguers. How about Aaron Judge? His OPS is 1.144 this year. That's mostly his homers, right? Not so fast. His BA was .331, and that times two gives .662. So even Aaron Judge's OPS comes more than half (57.9%) from his batting average. That is true even with his X of .126 and phenomenal ISO of .357. (There can be a little roundoff error in that last digit.) Arraez? This year he batted .292. His X factor for walks, etc, comes out at .035 (he never walks very much). His ISO/power is exactly .100, below par for a major leaguer. Added together, it's 2*.292 + .035 + .100, or .719. A hefty 81.2% of his OPS is tied up in his batting average alone. 2025 was a down year for Luis, though. Let's look at his career year, which was his first one in Miami in 2023 right after the trade. BA of .354, X was .039, ISO of .115. Put the pieces together and it's 2*.354 + .039 + .115 = .862 (again roundoff is off by 1 in the last digit). So that's an even heftier 82.1% of OPS earned via BA. So what's the difference between Arraez and Judge? Well, yes, the walks and HR. (Also Runs and RBI, another pair of very old-fashioned stats.) Doesn't matter who the player is. OPS = 2*BA + X + ISO. Batting Average is counted twice in OPS, solely by how OPS is defined. If you broke down other popular "advanced" stats like WOBA, you'd see a similar reliance on BA. Nothing else, not even home runs, matters more than BA. BA is not undervalued by any reputable analyst I'm aware of. And rightly so. It's important. It's... just... not the final word on a batter's production.

I find this information so amazing and disturbing at the same time. How does the team "sell" this to the volunteers? This isn't some PTA running a bake sale.

There is another difference that mostly aligns with what you said but reflects a difference in intent. No one expects a given team to routinely develop someone of the caliber of Alonso. It's a privilege to have him accept your bid and come play for your team, as he improves nearly any roster. Someone like Ty France at this stage of his career? It's really a mark of failure to not have someone in-house already, to take that role. No matter that the price for France last year was a measly $1M. The team grits its teeth and pays the Failure Tax. I'm not quite willing to say "we want somebody better, a real difference maker" and "we don't have anybody" are meaningfully the same approach.

That's some next-level, Randball's Stu kind of satire going on there, using Yale's cheer as a way of mocking a Stanford alum.

This article reminds me that I really need to give Finnegan's Wake another try.