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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    No matter how much heart in a player, Father Time has final say. And they do have metrics for that: Eddie hit .219 this year with little power, and Nelson hit .234 with little power. Carlos would like a contract that will have some team paying him tens of millions of dollars for multiple seasons where he may be hitting like that. The team doesn't move on, the skills do, and the front office has no way of reversing that. What the front office can do is try to anticipate it. Sure, I'd like 2018 Eddie back, or 2019 Nelson, but those guys don't exist today. If I'm wishing, I'll wish for 1969 Harmon, 1977 Rod and 2009 Joe while I'm at it.
  2. ashbury
    I expected him to be a little more tactful than that.
  3. ashbury
    Been a while since our Twins scored in double digits. Good teams, like NY and Houston, do that - 4 times in September, each. Zilch for us in September.
  4. ashbury
    Crap, the site software tricked me into double posting yet again.
  5. ashbury
    The "kid" turns 31 in a couple weeks.
  6. ashbury
    The thrust of the commentary is "poor decision making," "really haven't done a great job at building a pitching staff," et cetera, but the conclusion is "one more year to see how they respond." Personally I have lost all curiosity about that.
  7. ashbury
    To denote Missouri, or Mississippi, or Montana? Milwaukee, or Missoula, or Muncie?
  8. ashbury
    The majority of runners in the Boston Marathon, or similar, do not train by running a practice marathon alone. They condition to distances much shorter, and then push themselves on race day.
  9. ashbury
    I feel like the FO's analytics aren't all they are cracked up to be, and I haven't really discussed their approach to relievers. They basically seem to subscribe to the most basic analytic view that armchair analytics fans such as my self have absorbed: Closers Are Overrated. But they seem to have taken it further, and treat arms that look elite as easily replaceable. They traded away Pressly. They traded away Rogers. They traded away Graterol. In each case they got something back of value; I saw Rogers as becoming a chronic injury risk and thought he would be a good trade chip (whom they flipped for didn't work out so great, though). But they don't seem to follow up these moves with anything but belief that the Pitching Pipeline™ will spit out another similar arm at will. Other teams don't seem to undervalue good relief arms, and offer value in return, and I wish our FO would stop and think harder about why that is.
  10. ashbury
    We all get the logic, but it's a dead end. Keep going and you'll reach it. The ultimate MVP by this view is to pick the lowest-seeded team that barely made it as a wild card (usually a close race, maybe just one game in the standings), pick an average guy who played full time for them (Gio Urshela, say, had we been so lucky), and boom, he's your league MVP - he provided a couple of wins that a AAAA replacement wouldn't have. Without Gio, or his clone on that team, the team misses the post-season. Actually, he's co-MVP with presumably several players on the same team better than him - lose any one of them and they miss the playoffs - but none of them is more valuable than Gio. Dead heat for MVP. Okay, let's look at what you specifically suggested. Imagine the Yankees calling up Cleveland's FO and says, "hey, we really like Clase. We'll give you Judge for him." Ignoring contract considerations (which MVP voting certainly does), can you imagine the Guardians saying no? Trading away an MVP to get someone even better makes no sense. And New York wouldn't offer that trade anyway. Historically, MVP votes count heavily in the arguments for a player eventually making the Hall of Fame. The MVP is shorthand for future generations to know: "this guy was as good as it got, that year." If MVP were done your way, you'd have a Hall full of players who earned Brownie points with the voters through freak arithmetic where they were on teams that were good, but not too good. For folks who dislike cultural relativism, this is just another example: demonstrable worth taking a back seat to outside factors. Being the best is mainly what the award is all about, plus some sentiment as a tie breaker. To do otherwise gets you lost in a corn maze of faulty conclusions.
  11. ashbury
    As a fan, I can state with some assurance that I'm not to blame.
  12. ashbury
    Kinda nice to come to the box score late in the game and find this kind of pitching gem in progress. Get the RISP numbers a little higher on offense and this could have been a laugher.
  13. ashbury
    The Twins have a decision to make after the end of the World Series. Buy out his 2023 contract for $2.75M, or let the $14M contract vest and thus bank on a comeback season. My guess is the former. I don't see him as a net $11.25M gamble.
  14. ashbury
    They aren't releasing Kepler. Doesn't matter what I "think", bounce backs or whatever. Cut bait, eat the salary? They aren't.
  15. ashbury
    It needs to. High end pitching needs to bring back high end prospect arms. I've always viewed the trade as Berrios for SWR, with Martin as a very good sweetener. I would have preferred one or two additional arms instead of Martin.
  16. ashbury
    Sano's contract next year is a team option, which the Twins will surely decline and buy out, whereas Kepler's 2023 money is guaranteed. Not a similar situation.
  17. ashbury
    Jay Leno may have a world class collection of cars, but if I have a $28M Rolls Royce Boat Tail* parked in my garage next to my 2010 Subaru Forester, I might have the Most Valuable Car regardless of whether people scoff at my bizarre overall roster of rolling iron. PS: I don't. *Or, if you prefer, the DeLorean from Back To The Future that really could time-travel - what would someone pay for THAT?
  18. ashbury
    And just who was responsible for the empty cupboard? I realize that your article wasn't meant to be Yet Another Referendum on the FO. But turns of phrase in the article itself, and then in comments, go ahead and invite exactly that. It comes across as a apology for the FO, and begs rebuttal.
  19. ashbury
    Is he any improvement over Celestino? I'm thinking no.
  20. ashbury
    This is a knotty problem for our, or any, FO to solve. They need someone on the roster who is good enough to step in as a CFer for long stretches of time, and those don't grow on trees, moreover someone that good is probably good enough to be a starter in a corner outfield spot though probably with not enough bat to be more than an average asset when playing there. So then (looking ahead to 2023) that cuts down on available playing time for the Larnachs and Wallners and perhaps Kirilloff (if 1B is needed for Arraez/Miranda due to their defensive shortcomings). Decisions become interlocked in a hurry. In years past that CF backup had been Kepler. I think for a time our buddy Jake Cave was viewed in that light as well. Kep's still good in RF but has probably lost a step, and Cave is barely major league level by now. For 2022 perhaps they thought Gilberto Celestino (the first to start in CF when Buxton DH'ed this April,I believe) was ready, but he wasn't and wound up barely replacement level, and while I'm not down on the kid yet because at age 23 there is still room for growth, in retrospect we can see this roster choice was more wishful thinking than accurate evaluation. A stud like Buxton is a rich team's luxury. A team in the top revenue echelon can construct whatever competitive roster they want, and then "oh one more thing" add a Byron Buxton for $15M a year and if he's injured come playoff time they really haven't lost anything but if he's healthy then he might put a team over the top and he's worth whatever incentive salary he earns. I don't begrudge the Twins extending his contract as they did, though. It would have been a marketing black eye to have not done it.
  21. ashbury
    The fascination with Trevor Megill's stuff needs to be OVER so badly!
  22. ashbury
    It's arguably not even an improvement. Counting up the complete games in CF according to b-r.com: 2022: 43 2021: 53 2020: 34 (10/27 of a season) 2019: 73 Partial games in CF represent some type of disruption that day, for a talent like his. Games spent batting as DH do not represent some kind of success for a plan, when there's no one else you'd rather see out there on defense and it isn't turning out to aid his injury resistance anyway. He's going backward in terms of the kind of durability a team with championship aspirations needs. I'm not questioning Buxton's heart, by any means. But the facts have to be faced.
  23. ashbury
    If Judge wins Triple Crown, despite the trivial difference of finishing first or a close third in BA, I give it to him, because MVP is more about sentiment than analytic value anyway. If he doesn't, I think I still give it to him but could be persuaded either way. If only Ohtani could spend his non-pitching days fielding a position, even first base, that could be enough to tip my choice his way. He's a fine DH but not other-worldly at that specific job, where the bar for hitting performance is very high. Yordan Alvarez is a better DH, for instance. Ohtani's a unique combination of talents, but Judge's monster year is hard for me to snub. Said another way, using the analytic approach, looking at aggregate WAR they are extremely close, but using the higher bar of Wins Above Average, Judge noses ahead.
  24. ashbury
    There is no reason to release Dobber. He's got a guaranteed contract, and he's off the 40-man, so the Twins may as well pay the man, and if by some chance he returns to form, they can benefit. If they release him and he bounces back, they're paying for some other team to reap the benefit. (Other teams had the opportunity to assume the remainder of his multi-year contract, when he passed through waivers a week or so ago.)
  25. ashbury
    Last year we were assured that the fall from two consecutive division titles was just some bad luck. Another season later, and now we're being told, give 'em time. Personally, I've seen enough to want to shop around for other eager and talented underlings from some other FO to guide the team if we're talking rebuild. Although, in fairness, if I don't care for this FO, it is how we got them 6 years ago.
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