ashbury

But but but but Spahn and Sain and Pray for Rain....

"That we know of." I am certain that Pagan has single-handedly lost several other games for the Twins and the FO just sweeps it all under the rug.

The trend has been toward 4-man playoff rotations, hasn't it? Houston and Philly both ran that many starters out there in the World Series last year. That gives Ober a spot, as he currently deserves. Also, a potentially unpopular hawt taek here, but I don't think Varland is a lock to even be on the post-season roster. Which unfortunately solves the last part of your dilemma.

WPA is nobody's idea of a perfect stat, and is more about situations than about "how good" a given player is. I do like a couple of things about it, one of which is that it tracks well with the fan psychology. The way WPA works, a 9th inning meltdown is more costly than one occurring in the 8th, since confidence in a lead increases as the end of the game approaches. That's what makes Pagan's most recent loss especially noteworthy. I looked on b-r.com's Stathead tool the next day, and his was only about the 39th worst (negative) game-WPA for a pitcher this season. But 31 of the ones farther up the list occurred in the 9th inning. Special recognition must go to Josh Fleming for his outing against the Dodgers on May 28. You may remember the game. He started and pitched 6 full innings, at which point the score was tied 10-10. His Rays kept scoring runs, piling up positive WPA totaling .849 by game's end, and he just kept giving runs right back (assisted a bit by defensive mistakes), racking up a total of -.713 WPA. Fleming's number is really hard for a starter to achieve, worst for a starter so far this year. Since the Rays were the home team, and it was tied, they still had an estimated 57% historical chance of winning after he finished the top of the 6th, and they did push across a run for an 11-10 thriller; his two relievers justly earned nice WPA ratings. Weird game.

Milwaukee got swept by the Oakland juggernaut. Riding a six-game winning streak now, will the A's ever lose another game?

The Twins' magic number this morning stood at 93 according to the RIOT tool which takes into account contenders playing against each other. I don't see how anyone else catches them, given this fact.

No, because you're expecting me to proactively ask also about Buxton's and Correa's seasons so far.

Wallner will also launch someone's fat pitch toward the stands in RF and you'll say "Kepler would not have caught that," in either sense of the phrase.

Star light, star bright. First star I've seen tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might, have this wish I wish this night: "Have TD get the correct player consistently when they link to baseball-reference.com" Dang it. I forgot to wait until tonight to post this.

Varland has pitched very much like a #5 in the rotation, his past two starts. His seasonal OPS-against indicates the league finds him hittable, with the longball his bugaboo in particular. I hope he puts up a splendid game against the weak-hitting Tigers. Otherwise it may be that the pixie dust has worn off of this lightly-touted prospect and he needs to go to AAA for another application of the magic. Maybe that will coincide with Maeda suddenly being ready to pitch like a rotation asset for the big club; otherwise, we're starting to look at choices like Aaron Sanchez or Brent Headrick, holding our breath each start. Pagan rightly gets vitriol for blowing the lead, but Varland's short start led to Pagan being in the game at all. Starting pitching has been the team's strong point this season, but the supply is not infinite.

Concur. There are times when WAR is a useful measure of a player's contribution, but when the discussion involves words like "greatest" I prefer the related measure, Wins Above Average. On b-r.com this change in view knocks Kepler down to 10th from 8th. This was setting at 80% the number of total games when in the outfield - if I lower it to 60% then I get reminded that Tovar played a lot of CF and should be in the discussion. My Mount Rushmore for Twins outfielders would be something like Puckett, Oliva, Allison, Buxton. For a franchise like the Twins, going much beyond 4 (Mack? Span?) starts to get into a Local Hall of the Very Good, not "greatest." Max Kepler certainly was Very Good.

Clean sweep in the minor league system today? A welcome tonic after getting basically skunked yesterday (maybe one low-minors win?). Kudos to Mr. Soularie for a good game. It would be nice to see something develop from the top of that 2020 draft. Granted, the later rounds* of that draft are working out well. * I jest a little. It was a short draft that year.

75% blame to FalVine for bullpen construction. 25% blame to Pagan for being Pagan.

Probably short for in need of down-time, and not the more dire connotations.

You have to think about how WPA works to really let this number soak in. Each team starts at .500 to win, at the outset. If you put together a win, that means .500 worth of points is available to split among all your participants that day, batters and pitchers together, which brings the sum to 1.000 for the complete win. The reverse point system goes for the losing team, accumulating their negative .500 to bring their sum to .000 and the loss. Pagan in those three batters did more than a typical loss's worth of damage. He turned a very likely win to a very likely loss, in that short span of time. Not unheard of (Cimber had a -.754 just yesterday for Toronto, and we all LOLed), but it's still remarkable. Pagan's ERA for the season rose from 3.76 to 4.61 with this one game. That's the nature of being a short reliever. Bad as the ERA is, his season WPA is now -.781, worst on the staff, and that to me says more. It lines up better with how much of a gut punch his 3 biggest failures this season have been. He racks up tiny positive WPA in the low-leverage successes, but more than offsets them with these disasters.

Paddack's extension can be a starting point for thinking, but the two pitchers' contract situations are very different. Paddack still had two arbitration years ahead of him, so he had less leverage when considering whether to accept the team's offer to guarantee him some money. Mahle is already eligible for free agency after this season. Look at it a different way. Before signing his extension, Paddack had earned about $5M in major league salary*, which is good money but not quite at the "set for life" level for a variety of reasons. The Twins' offer did take him past that threshold. By contrast, Mahle has earned above $15M to date. Assuming he's invested wisely, the Twins can't really approach him and his agent with "we'll guarantee you life-changing money" because his life is already changed for the better. Paddack chose not to gamble on a far higher payday at some intermediate point, during which something unrelated might also go wrong, while still maintaining the potential for a good outcome in free agency further down the road. Mahle might see the gamble as less dependent on anything besides recovery from the elbow surgery, and he's better placed to shoulder** the risk if he wants to roll the dice. Paddack thereby assured his own financial future; for all I know Mahle might be trying to fund a charitable foundation next, for example. I think signing Mahle's going to be harder, because from the Twins' perspective the two situations are indeed pretty similar. The team will have to risk more, with more or less the same potential reward. * I'm taking my numbers from b-r.com, which I find sometimes to be unreliable for the kind of analysis I want to do. ** No pun intended, but there it is.

Roster spots are kind of a precious commodity. but if the FO is ready to move on from some 25-year old at Cedar Rapids and also have a promising young arm in the minor league complex they are ready to try at low-A Ft Myers, then Culpepper has put himself in line for a promotion with his performance this year. As a college draftee, he's not super young, so keep moving him up if his current coach thinks he's mastered what he's at low-A to learn.

The last time they fired a front office, it was mid-season. Unless we're going to get into semantics of "resigned" versus "fired". If they wanted him to ride out the rest of the season, he surely would have.

Offense Wakes Up Late sounds like the beginning to a Randballs Stu headline for an article where the Twins had to forfeit. Glad that instead it was a winning situation.

He's on the borderline for putting himself into the HoF discussion if he has a few more years at his established level of performance. At age 33, that's not a sure thing. And if you look at the proverbial Bus Test, I think HoF voters will see him below the borderline level.

Big Sexy certainly managed to have a long career.

Aside from his own wishes, Royals FO probably has a marketing department, and if they say Perez is one of only two or three bankable players for pulling in revenue, that has to factor in as well, versus what they could get in prospect capital via trade.

That has been conventional wisdom for a long time. Raya is 170 pounds (according to b-r.com) so he is indeed small for a player, particularly a pitcher these days. Yet we go out and acquire 217 pound Chris Paddack and 210 pound Tyler Mahle, and they wind up with arm issues too. If there is one thing I'd like to be able to tap into MLB analytics, it is how different aspects of body type correlate to what kinds of injuries. I am certain that the better teams have gotten more of a handle than I have on it; and, possibly (certainly more importantly), more of a handle on it than our Twins do.