ashbury

Duran established himself as an elite reliever. There's a couple of guys in the AL on a par with his 2022. I"m grateful to have him. As for whom he beats out for honors on the Twins, it's an incredibly weak field, in some cases due to partial seasons on the IL. Looking at Wins Above Average (which gives a little edge to top relievers relative to its cousin WAR) on b-r.com as a quick and dirty estimate, Duran would be a clear choice only on Detroit or Oakland, teams we wouldn't want to emulate. He might be in the conversation if on Seattle, versus Logan Gilbert. No other team, though.

Oui.

It was the unexpected feature that got me. (I was typing a number into the blank SS salary slot, pressed the return key out of habit, et, voilà.)

I clicked on the master link, experimented with the interface on one cell for a minute, and suddenly I had posted. If I knew how to delete things, I would. I guess the die is cast now, and I have a last place team.

C: Ryan Jeffers ($0.7M) 1B: Luis Arraez ($4.5M) 2B: Jorge Polanco ($7.50M) 3B: Gio Urshela ($9.00M) LF: Alex Kirilloff ($0.70M) CF: Byron Buxton ($15.00M) RF: Max Kepler ($8.50M) DH: Jose Miranda ($0.70M) 4th OF: Kyle Garlick ($0.70M) Utility: Nick Gordon ($0.70M) Utility: Gilberto Celestino ($0.70M) SP1: Sonny Gray ($12.00M) SP2: Tyler Mahle ($8.00M) SP3: Kenta Maeda ($9.00M) SP4: Joe Ryan ($0.70M) SP5: Bailey Ober ($0.70M) RP: Jhoan Duran ($0.70M) RP: Jorge Lopez ($3.00M) RP: Griffin Jax ($0.70M) RP: Jorge Alcala ($1.00M) RP: Caleb Thielbar ($2.00M) Payroll is 13.21% under budget

$42M a year starts the conversation, but for how long a contract?

And the two Jakes still wouldn't consume as many plate appearances as Aaron, leaving room for some rookies to step up and contribute! You could have an OPS above 2.000 before you know it.

I have unhappy visions of the Twins dropping Correa's contract and not replacing it with anything significant, leaving payroll somewhere around $100 or a bit under. The rationale would be that attendance is down, something Dave St Peter already has floated, so the public bears the blame. That would drop the Twins rank from the current #18 to somewhere around #23 in the majors for payroll. The Offseason Handbook's table of recent history indicates that the Twins haven't ranked that low since 2017 (#21). So, maybe my worst case estimate of what they'll do is a bit low. Cot's ranks the Reds at #21, with a payroll of about $114M. Maybe that's around the comfort level where the Twins will settle in - no more of this rarefied #18 air.

Keep these reports coming!

Enjoy your short stay as a TD member.

Yeah, we've crossed over into camp now.

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.