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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    I don't know what Luplow has to do with rookies. His rookie status expired in 2018 and he turned 30 years old last week.
  2. ashbury
    Rock, Paper, Scissors, with the ultimate tiebreaker to Scissors. 😊
  3. ashbury
    When one comes to an article via the Forums rather than the front page, there may not be bright red text to read. One mark of good satire is that when there isn't sufficient warning, some readers will think it's legit.
  4. ashbury
  5. ashbury
    Have you looked at who these three teams play in the coming week? Each other, to a large degree. Wins are guaranteed to happen. It's still faintly possible for the Twins to pass all three but in the spirit of fairness you should offer higher odds than 10-1 or you're just taking Peter's dollar.
  6. ashbury
    Sonny Gray, this coming November: "In September you gave me Stevenson, Luplow, and Vazquez in the starting lineup with MAT as DH to rub it in. Today I'm giving you my polite turndown of your Qualifying Offer."
  7. ashbury
    Concur. Second half numbers, which are by now more than merely the Smallest of Sample Sizes, have both Ober and Ryan's ERAs in the 5's and Maeda's at 4.14. Unless there is something currently the matter with Kenta physically, he'd be my choice for a Game 3.
  8. ashbury
    I don't share this same nostalgia for September 2022. The team had banked a good percentage of wins by mid-May, and after that they were a stubbornly sub-.500 team for the large majority of the year. By early August the trend seemed pretty well established, and I felt like the Earnest Young Ensign in some space-faring movie, where the good ship is spiraling into the atmosphere and he whispers to his superior beside him at the helm, "we're not gonna make it, are we?" September was just a slightly further accelerated nosedive straight into the planet's surface, but they were never going to pull out; gravity got 'em. This article makes several nods in this direction, but nevertheless holds to the romance that they were still in first place or close to it, and merely needed to hold on but couldn't due to a spate injuries. For me the die was cast much earlier, and yes injuries were key all season. Constructing a roster that was injury-prone in the first place and then accentuating that tendency with moves such as the trades for Paddack and Mahle was the story.
  9. ashbury
    Last year Miami's offense was third from the bottom in the majors. This year they are fourth from the bottom. Last year the Twins' runs-against per game was around the middle of the pack. This year they rank fourth best. A table-setter for a solid starting pitcher, assuming the talent evaluation and medicals all check out, is a trade I make every time. Pitchers are inherently injury-prone but we know from experience that position-players miss time and see declining performance due to physical ailments too. I liked the trade even when Arraez was hitting .400 earlier this season, and I like it now. Setting the table wasn't any kind of panacea for Miami.
  10. ashbury
    Julien hit lefties very capably in single-A. Then he had a serious platoon split at AA. But in his short stint in AAA his numbers against lefties were good again. Now the small-sample numbers in the majors are bad, very bad - imagine walking man Julien drawing zero bases on balls in any random sample of 42 plate appearances, but that's what has happened facing left-handers since he was called up. Left-handed AAA pitchers aren't as skilled as their major league counterparts. But the same is true of right-handers. So I don't see the promotion by itself as the cause of problems on one side but not the other. Full time players are incredibly valuable. Julien's already a bit on the bubble with his defense. If he starts to profile as merely a platoon DH, that's not worth very much, even if it's the "strong" side of the platoon. If it were up to me, I'd make sure the batting coaches are giving him useful tips on what to do against really good lefties seen at the major league level, and then give him a lot of opportunity even if there are growing pains. I'd invest the plate appearances.
  11. ashbury
    "It's hard to field the ball when you have both hands around your throat." Just in case any young'uns might misunderstand, my recollection is that Gaetti was speaking of himself only, after (with a memory refresher on b-r.com) the Twins dropped a second straight crucial game in their final series, on Sept 28, 1984, in which they entered the bottom of the 6th leading Cleveland 10-2 and exited that inning clinging to only a 10-9 lead, keyed by an E-5 with two outs leading to 3 unearned runs, enroute to a crushing 11-10 outcome that ended their season hopes. Losing pitcher for the eventual ninth-inning walkoff? Who else, but Ron Davis. Gaetti was totally a standup guy as that "young player" critiquing himself in the moment for all to hear. Perhaps he "understood" something later on when looking back, but at the time he was simply sick at heart and embarrassed and didn't try to hide it. It's right to give him mad props for a quote for the ages. Poetic. You could write a Country song with that as the tag line. Our current crop may have similar growing pains before they are ready. Hope it doesn't take another 3 years like it did for The Rat and company.
  12. ashbury
    Jays, Rays, what's the difference, who can tell those teams apart anyway? :
  13. ashbury
    Since the All-Star break: Vazquez, 28 starts Jeffers, 28 starts The tide is turning.
  14. ashbury
    Mrs Ash and I attended a AAA game in Reno last night in which the score was 13-0 after three innings. Glad the Twins decided to take a page from that same playbook, to go up by a couple of touchdowns before letting the opponents do much. How many sacks did the Twins defense manage to accumulate?
  15. ashbury
    Currently waivers are player-centric, and each player is handled separately according to which team(s) put in a claim. That's usually fine when only a player or two at a time is put on waivers. When there are a lot of players, desirable ones at that, you have to have a draft. It need not be a public spectacle like the June draft or the Rule 5 draft in December, when multiple desirable players are routinely available. Instead, each team just has to manage its current list of waiver claims by priority, at the commissioner's office. If you want Matt Moore the most, followed by someone else, rank them #1 and #2 respectively. Every day, one of the commissioner's minions* goes through in priority order (this year Oakland first, then KC, etc) and if they have any waiver claims, they get their top priority. Then on to the next team in order. If it's your turn and your #1 guy is already gone, then you get your #2, unless he's gone too. And so on. Just like any draft, except everyone has made their decisions in advance, because the numbers of players are so much fewer than in June or December and the decision making is manageable. (Imagine ranking all the amateurs for the June draft, that would not be manageable.) Most days the process would be trivial, and with exactly the same results as we're used to - players pass unclaimed through waivers all the time and that would continue. But on a day where a team like the Angels has put a lot of good talent on waivers, the process spreads out the talent to multiple teams. * In truth the minion would be a computer program that runs through the list** as many times as needed, but I don't want to rile up any anti-computer hysteria. ** I was going to say database, but, well, you know.
  16. ashbury
    Such bad luck, just barely missing on Matt Moore. They tried. If only there had been a way to acquire his services, not just for September and a possible postseason, but all of 2023!
  17. ashbury
    Guardians and Reds, LOL.
  18. ashbury
    In the fall of 2021 in suburban Phoenix, USAFChief and I shared the experience of watching Wallner get smacked square in the jaw with a pitch. There was blood, it was frightening, and I figured that would be the end of his Arizona Fall League season. Not so - a few games later he was back in the lineup, hitting just as well as before (1.000+ OPS) and I was impressed with his toughness. Obviously he was fortunate not to have had an outcome more like Kyle Farmer this season. Luck and grit combined in that instance. I''ll take the author's word for it that video of this season's HBP are all along the lines shown in the two videos, and nothing reckless. Armored elbows and feet are risky but not usually career threatening when hit. But the beaning in 2021 shows the downside to his strategy at the plate. No professional pitcher goes out there to try to hurt another player. But I could easily imagine a pitcher thinking, "oh, so you want to crowd the plate and take me deep by pulling an outside pitch, huh? How about if I give you something to think about first, and a little higher?" And then the pitch gets away, or Wallner fails in this one instance to react quite in time. I've believed in his bat since before the AFL, and more power to him and his approach to inside pitches, I guess. But I hope he really has a plan beyond "if they throw inside I'll let it hit me," and that it's been vetted by older players who have seen a thing or three in their time. Once a player has a reputation around the league, it's hard to shake. What would a frank conversation between Wallner and Solano be like, for instance?
  19. ashbury
  20. ashbury
    Balazovic got sent down to St Paul yesterday, didn't he?
  21. ashbury
    The scouting report in OOTP agrees regarding his fastball but seems to think more highly of his off-speed stuff. It concurs regarding control.
  22. ashbury
    You may have Griffin Jax in your bullpen and not even know it.
  23. ashbury
    Chuck Knoblauch scored 140 runs in 1996, a figure not approached by a Twin before or since. Greatest Twins individual offensive season ever and unlikely to be matched in the future.
  24. ashbury
    Cleveland lost.
  25. ashbury
    Willi Castro's "unique" skill set is that he's a competent shortstop who doesn't hit well enough to be a regular for a contending team. Sending him further and further down the defensive spectrum (CF, 3B, LF??!?) only highlights the below-average bat more sharply - there is no way a 91 OPS+ is an asset when used in left field on a frequent basis. He's currently 6th on the team in plate appearances, which means that injuries have riddled the roster and, like MAT, he is playing more than his substitute role should have called for.
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