ashbury

Congrats to Luis! All those hugs emphasized that his listed 5'10" stature on the roster page might be just a tad generous.

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Or, follows Max Kepler's career arc and plods along for a decade or so.

After Correa didn't get what he wanted, perhaps other teams weren't willing to put their necks into a $105M noose for an upside of one all-star caliber SS season and then goodbye?

Okay, good. You asked me about my perspective, and I wasn't sure how to address that, but OOTP plays into it. As background, I'm retired now, but spent my career in a branch of analytics used in a wide variety of industries; my work started on the technical side but I interacted with those industrial users and got a smattering of how those analytics software products were used by airlines, forestry, petroleum, military logistics, financial portfolios, etc, and wound up eventually in product marketing for such products. So, I'm gonna have my opinions, as an outsider looking in on baseball when they start talking up analytics, not so different from a high school baseball coach who thinks he knows how major leaguers operate. I believe OOTP got significant consulting from baseball insiders from its earliest design. So when they have added features involving player personalities, injury risk, and so forth, it makes me go "hmmm". Analytics isn't always about developing formulas that result in a final number to 5 decimal digits. It can be as simple as sorting into "red" versus "green" for what to avoid and what to go after. OOTP's system for injury risk is about like that. The other thing about OOTP that strikes a chord is the thorough database it provides the person at the keyboard about each baseball player. There's no possibility that in the real world you would have such accurate insight into player scouting forecasts, to say nothing of personalities and so forth, and I never forget that it's a game, But the presence in the game suggests to me that top-notch analytics minds are thinking along those lines; even when the data is shaky, you can do some analytics with it, and the results may tell you where you need to invest more resources in getting better data (and where to not even bother). Give me a database, and I'll worry about sharpening up the data that populates it, incrementally. Baldelli's clip talking about OOTP may not imply that baseball teams literally use it as a roster building tool. But I expect that what's seen in OOTP reflects a synthesis of how teams organize their thinking, nothing more (but that's a lot). It's why I asked first of your impression of Rocco's comment. If you thought OOTP is trash, there'd be little common ground for discussion. OOTP "trained" me, in the sense of doing well in their game, to pay close attention to injury risk. My teams do better when I maintain a bias toward always improving the overall risk of injury on my current 40-man roster or even prospects. I trade off the riskier guys while they still have value. Can a team know what the injury risk is for some other team's player? I don't know, but the feature being in the game leads me to believe some analytics experts think they can - always with the proviso that the risk assigned to a player is never exact, always a range - any player can get hurt, but the chances may be greater with some than with others. So, finally.... this is why the trades for Paddack and Mahle, the trade for Gray, the signing of Bundy and Archer, taken together, baffle me. Each trade required a trading partner, and I envisioned the Reds and Padres being OOTP players like me, seeking to recoup the remaining value of a risky player to another team willing to take on that risk. Any individual roster move might be defensible, in the context of a full "portfolio" of lower and higher risks, just as a stock portfolio blends instruments to some acceptable level of risk and reward. Sometimes the Twins risks have worked out to a degree, e.g. value was gotten from Bundy and Archer, at the expense of babying their arms and putting more burden on the bullpen, but even that merely achieved a meager upside. This doesn't even touch on the apparent injury-proneness of some prospects in the pipeline (Ober, Winder, off the top of my head); does one augment that with veterans also in the risky category? The body of work altogether suggests a strategy that I just can't understand - not even just an indifference to injury risk but a downright intentional strategy to use some sort of "secret sauce" they have to leverage more out of the riskier pitchers than other organizations know how. And when the season is over and the excuse is, "ohhhh, teh injurieses, what bad luck!", I'm not receptive. On my less charitable days, I blame bad analytics. Most of the time, I just want to know more, because what I'm seeing doesn't make sense to me and I want to know why. I don't have any visibility into the Twins FO or particularly the analytics staff. In my career I was interacting with analytics teams in industry that were populated with PhD researchers, or MBA holders who were heavy, heavy, heavy on the quant side. (Wall Street went through a "rocket scientist" phase where Physics PhDs were the preferred candidate to hire for portfolio optimization.) That's my bias toward what it takes to succeed. I would be pleasantly surprised to learn the Twins analytic team was like that, even by now under Falvey. There are literally millions of people in the analytics world, and I'm just a guy who spent 35 year or so in a corner of that ecosystem. If you were looking for something else when you asked for perspective, well, sorry.

I don't think Judge could handle the pressure of playing in Minnesota. Pass.

That's, um, half the joke, yeah.

Buxton. He's never been injured playing any other position on the field.

Very different pitchers. Duffey doesn't have enough stuff anymore to succeed. Pagan misses his spots too often. It could be true that being rid of them both is the right thing to do, but they are hardly joined at the hip, even if their 2022 stats are both unacceptable. One cause of the stats may be more correctable than the other.

Salary via arbitration being held down somewhat, due to subpar numbers? Difficult to pass up a bargain like that!

Twins pitchers would all get elbow mono or shoulder mono or hamstring mono or....

That's pretty open ended. Let me counter with something that may seem irrelevant, to try to get on the same page together. What do you think of this 80-second clip of Rocco discussing a computer game? https://www.mlb.com/video/baldelli-on-using-ootp-baseball Separately, Rocco has been quoted concerning that game, “It’s more real than unreal, I’ll tell you that.” Does that fairly represent your impression of the organization's view of Out of the Park, that it's a useful tool? Not a trick question or a Gotcha. I want to understand if my perception is correct about this.

You distilled the argument that keeps popping up in rebuttals to perhaps its purest form, so I'm not really singling you out in this reply, just taking this as the jumping off point. I've heard that a weather prediction formula with high degree of accuracy in certain parts of the country is this: whatever the weather was yesterday, predict the same for today. If it was sunny, 80% chance it'll be sunny today. Did it rain yesterday? Pretty good chance you'll get some of that today too. But of course there are better weather prediction tools than that. The simple one is often good enough for me, but I expect more from the pros. When I heard about the trade for Paddack, I'm pretty sure I was on the fence, saying mainly "I hope they checked his medicals thoroughly." But in the back of my mind was also, "I hope their analytics say he's a good risk." Because there was plenty of public knowledge to indicate significant chance of downtime for this pitcher. Mahle? Lather, rinse, repeat. When people learn of baseball analytics it's usually in terms of stats. "So and So OPS'ed .850 last season, and we forecast .875 this coming year." But analytics need not be numerical, at least not to any decimal precision. It can be probabilistic. It can be as simple as sorting players into buckets. Red, Yellow, Green. High risk, medium risk, low risk. With pitching injuries, better analytics than I'm capable of might estimate a 20% risk for missing some threshold number of starts for pitcher A, and 70% risk of that same threshold for pitcher B. So, green and red for those two, respectively. If pitcher A gets a rotator cuff injury in July, does that mean the analytics were wrong? Not if, say, the 4 others in that green bucket didn't get injured. Garret Cole started 30 games last year. 33 this year. Into the green bucket for next year he goes, using my dumdum form of analytics. I'd be shocked if teams didn't have far better analytics than that, based not solely on past performance and injury history but also body type, pitching style and mix of pitches, and any number of other things. That's what I want from the Twins. Not a promise never to acquire a pitcher with a checkered past. But to have injury analytics that prove to be sound. That can come across like second guessing... except no, we're seeing the red flags and waving them in advance, and with too much regularity the results turn out bad. Rodon started 24 games last year but 31 this year? Green bucket for me. But I'm not the one being paid for my dumdum analytics.

It's all small sample size, but the early returns on his major league defensive numbers on b-r.com weren't too hot at either SS or 2B. I held much higher hopes for him. Corresponding numbers for his time in the minors aren't provided. Just going by SS range factors for the Twins versus his time with the Saints, a little bad luck (small sample, jitters, whatever) may have been involved. I'd hang on to him for the off-season, but on the bubble - would be prepared to jettison him if clearly better alternatives presented themselves. I think he'd have some tiny trade value as a throw-in part of a larger deal.

Before breaking it down with analysis, first look at the big picture. b-r.com splits numbers for Twins and for MLB as a whole. PA with RISP: Twins 1484, MLB 44760 R with RISP: Twins 471, MLB 14969 Ratios of these: Twins .3174, MLB .3344 With runners in scoring position the Twins were pushing across significantly fewer runs per opportunity. Had they held the same ratio as MLB as a whole, 25 more runs might have scored. That's about 2.5 wins over the course of a season. That there is problem seems evident. It's a matter of semantics whether throwing away 2 or 3 wins is dreadful. But it needs fixing. (I hope nobody is engaging in a strawman argument that anyone's saying any particular problem is the ONLY problem.) What the cause is, may be hard to pinpoint. You suggest it's not simply the batting average. I'm not so sure. Batters usually have better numbers with RISP than with bases loaded, for reasons probably not worth dissecting here. MLB wide, BA with bases empty versus RISP were .235/.253. Our Twins notched .236/244. Is that significant? Given the rather large numbers for a team or a league over a full season, not really SSS, I'm inclined to believe yes. Slugging average, likewise. MLB was .383/.409 (empty vs RISP), Twins were .380/.385. When they hit, it wasn't with the usual bump in power, with runners were on 2nd or 3rd. Don't know why. But it seems significant. Maybe it's not all on the batters themselves - could be slow baserunners? This team frustrated us with their running, just by the eye test. Perhaps the run scoring numbers are confirmation of the eye test. I don't know quite how to separate that out, with aggregate figures from b-r.com.

The injury proneness of many in the entire organization represents a dilemma for the FO. But when a player has become marketable, as Arraez surely now is, it goes beyond the simpler calculation of whether he'll help win a pennant, and becomes a question also of ticket sales. I would view him among the last that I would trade away in order to improve the aggregate injury risk. And at the moment, I'm all about injury risk! But Buxton and now Arraez are my two "marketing" exceptions I'd work around when planning the roster.

I'm pretty unimpressed by the outward evidence of analytics, for this supposedly analytics-heavy front office. It will take a long time to win back my own "favor" as the subject line puts it, not simply one off-season. Some things that will move the needle positively for me: a concerted trend with each roster move to improve the aggregate injury risk rather than incrementally keep worsening it less reliance on in-season roster churn for the pitching staff - if guys keep clearing waivers, it's a BAD sign, not a good one visibility into their analytics team to convince me it isn't dominated in numbers by a bunch of recent grads who majored in Stats, because the state of the art in MLB seems considerably beyond that now moves that strengthen the long term health of the franchise and not simply aid the coming year's financial bottom line a little more change in off-field personnel (coaches, trainers, etc) to make an example of perceived failure or mediocrity, even if it looks like change for the sake of change no more Tim Beckhams when every armchair analytics type could forecast batting regression for a player who no longer is an asset on defense

You're asking all the right questions. Every team has roster churn, but I bet a careful study would reveal a strong correlation between fan engagement and keeping a core of recognizable players. The Moneyball philosophy as expressed in Michael Lewis's book has to be considered a failure, in the sense of "the operation was a success but the patient died." Win-loss records are necessarily a zero sum game for any sports league. But what's not zero sum is that each franchise ought to be increasing its engagement and financial success every year. The NFL has done a marvelous job with this. In MLB, the Oaklands and the Tampa Bays and, yes, the Minnesotas engage in a strategy of "blame the fans". Dave St Peter may do wonderful technical work on the business side of the franchise (I wouldn't know), but he should be forbidden to ever speak in public. It's 50/50 each time he opens his mouth whether he does good or harm to the team's image. Frankly Jim Pohlad should impose the same discipline on himself - "he has people for that". Mike Veeck may be too old by now, but someone like him needs to be put in charge of every aspect of the fan experience for the Twins, and that might even including having some limited veto power over roster moves that look likely to harm the franchise overall.

The investment of time or resources should not play into the decision. That's called a sunk cost. The same potential that caused them to be protected might carry over this time too, though.

Obvious or not, this study seems skewed by looking only at, as the writer stated it, "notable Twins pitchers." Do the study on first MLB career starts, period, and the data might show a stronger correlation. Maybe low quality first career starts are made mostly by pitchers who ultimately don't pan out? In that case Berrios might look like more of an outlier, while luminaries like JC Romero would cluster at the lower left. That "other" Romero, with game score 34 in his first major league start, was pretty terrible for two dreary years until he was converted to full-time reliever (which could be another variable to try to account for). Does anyone remember Brad Thomas? Me neither, but his 2001 debut led to a 30 game score and presaged a lifetime WAR in the negative numbers. Leaving guys like them off the chart might lead one to think those 30ish first games are the rarity. I think it's also a mistake to limit the Y-axis to be the portion of a pitcher's career spent with the Twins. Kyle Lohse's value is a good deal higher than the 6.5 WAR he earned as a Twin. Although, really, achieving even 5 WAR is a pretty good accomplishment by itself, as would be demonstrated better if the chart showed every Twin who was allowed to try. The "notable" pitchers would stand out without having to be sifted through beforehand. I'm just not much in favor of throwing out data that doesn't happen to fit a narrative. (Except perhaps whenever it's my narrative. )

They were hired after the 2016 season concluded, which was of the 103-loss variety and marked a low point in a dismal period starting in 2011. I'm not impressed with the current status but it's not like they took over a perennial contender.

Dear Abby may turn out to be a 66 year flash in the pan, but the Buddha has had some staying power. I have learned a lot from this thread.

Ignoring extra innings and walk-offs, when the home team wins they make 24 outs. When they lose, they make 27. Sounds like a strong correlation of wins to not making outs.

Good attendance puts pressure on a Front Office. Good baseball towns like Boston (last place this year) and St Louis (first place) regularly fill up their respective ball parks even if World Series contention isn't likely. A place like Minnesota lets the FO throw up their hands and say whatchagonnado?

Another area where we differ about the player.