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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    and Megill... and Duffey and others no longer on the roster...
  2. ashbury
    So many clean innings from the bullpen!
  3. ashbury
    Randy "The Vulture" Dobnak!
  4. ashbury
    Dear Giants Fans: Ha ha, you're now the Royals.
  5. ashbury
    Someone forgot to phrase the headline in the form of a question. I'm still going to stick my neck out and answer, 'no.'
  6. ashbury
  7. ashbury
    Archer to the pen, only if he's used to face the bottom of the batting order. This year leadoff men have a 1.040 OPS against him, and cleanup guys are 1.157. Batters 6-9 are collectively about .500.
  8. ashbury
    The four guys on the bench also impressed me, by staying seated.
  9. ashbury
    Am I just engaging in selective memory or are we back to wins being very difficult for our farm teams to come by?
  10. ashbury
    As has pretty much every batter that pitcher's faced this season.
  11. ashbury
    Not really. Not mainly. Here is the list of the top 8 players for plate appearances, this year at St Paul: Jermaine Palacios Jake Cave Mark Contreras Curtis Terry Michael Helman Elliot Soto Caleb Hamilton Spencer Steer Cave and Soto fit your description. The other six are in their age-27 season or younger, and the Twins are (or were, in a couple of cases) trying to see what if any value they may be capable of giving the big club. Three have been called up, one was a trade chip. Players like Royce Lewis, Jose Miranda, Alex Kirilloff, Trevor Larnach, have seen significant time there too, only their performance was such that they did get called up and stuck (except for injury).
  12. ashbury
    Only if the opposition promises to start LHP exclusively.
  13. ashbury
    It's Time to Shut Down Tim Beckham / if you ask me
  14. ashbury
    Larnach was hitting .299 at the end of May after peaking shortly before then at .310. He clearly wasn't right during the month of June and got shut down when they discovered the problem. Players have ups and downs, but I don't think .232 gives a useful picture of him as a player. Garlick has a role: Designated Lefty Killer. I'm not a big fan of using scarce roster spots that way in this era of large pitching staffs, but it's fairer to look at his career .266 BA when facing those of the left handed persuasion, if assessing what he may bring to the offense if he comes back. Of course I'm not a big fan of using BA to judge a player, but I'm replying to your take, not some other.
  15. ashbury
    If he has to play, then I'm all for it. It's by far his best defensive position.
  16. ashbury
    What's your plan for the set now that you have it?
  17. ashbury
    Not to mention, the majors as a whole exhibit this same pattern. In 2022 across the majors, there have been 2213 solo HR, out of 3904 total HR, for 57%. Buxton's at 61%, right in that same neighborhood. What's more, as Prouster suggests, it's a matter of opportunity. Again, league wide this season, 57% of plate appearances are with the bases empty, tying in directly to that HR rate. 228 of Buxton's 382 PA this year are with the bases empty, for 60%, real close to his HR figure. As a whole, the Twins' bases-empty percentage of PA is only 56%, which reflects a better than average team OBP. Since Buxton bats leadoff a lot this year, and his first time up is guaranteed to be bases-empty, that's probably the reason for the difference. Nothing to see here, folks.
  18. ashbury
    It's almost as if you used to be a frequent poster here, and are back with an axe to grind.
  19. ashbury
    In his eighth year in the majors. I'm not buying the cited article as anything but a PR-inspired puff piece during a dreary part of the season.
  20. ashbury
    I didn't even realize the minors had a 60-day IL. It's needed in the majors in order to remove a seriously injured player from the 40-man and add someone else, with the downside being that the player can't be activated again for those 60 days (to cut down on roster shenanigans). But what's the purpose when it's a young minor leaguer, relative to just putting him on a short-term injured list?
  21. ashbury
    TD should probably adopt this as their new motto.
  22. ashbury
    Twins alumnus Doctor Mike Marshall was a proponent of biomechanics way back when he pitched, and claimed that it was the secret to his being able to pitch a hundred games a season. Who knows if his theories really bore scrutiny and he was shunned by the baseball establishment (due to his brash/cocky personality as much as to the merits of his ideas IMO). I'm sure there has been a lot of progress since his day. He's 78 now but I bet would welcome a chance to say I Told You So.
  23. ashbury
    You reacted strongly to just one of the possibilities I laid out, and FWIW that's the one I consider to be least likely as the major source of shortfall relative to other teams. I listed all that came to mind, simply for completeness. Apart from that, I referred to "medical approach", while you extrapolated to "incompetence", which grossly distorts my (emerging) view on the subject. Maybe I used an additional turn of phrase that was misleading that way. While no one claims that players are machines, the WW II analogy was based on the idea that managers of any chaotic and stressful process have to make decisions under fire using incomplete information, and despite extreme uniqueness and variability in individual cases, forecasting methods over large numbers tend to emerge from the better organizations. It's just too critical not to. The military was an early practitioner of what we consider modern analytics. Indeed, the final sentence of that analogy paragraph essentially takes the medical staff off the hook. Said another way, the FO may be dealing the development staff and the medical staff a losing hand. Said still another way, it's a mantra of those in systems analysis for failure to be only rarely due to individuals, and more often to the process. I am inclined at the moment to believe that the team's analytic forecasts are not nearly as solid as the FO believes, and that they are placing bets on players that other teams' FOs are saying in effect "sure, you can have him," whether during the draft process, or when acquiring FA, or when considering trades. You can see it directly in trades for a non-workhorse (Gray, in recent seasons) and an acute injury risk (Paddack), or signings of Bundy and Archer whom they surely understood would tax the bullpen because they themselves should not be overtaxed, or drafting Prielipp who is coming off surgery and may or may not be the same as before. I don't think it's even arguable whether the FalVine regime is consciously going against the grain where it comes to injury risk. (I named only pitchers, above, but signing Buxton to guaranteed money would be another instance, granting that the marketing circumstances may have dictated leaning toward that decision.) My only question at this point is whether it's a reasonable calculation that may or may not work, or is reckless. I, like virtually everyone else, appreciate the insights you bring that few of us are qualified to come up with.
  24. ashbury
    It's definitely a big concern. It also explains why teams are fine with letting the last several FA signings occur during spring training when the 60-day opens back up. Correa, Smith and Archer were like that, I believe. They get back up to 40 pretty quickly, and not simply with roster-filler no other team would want. Regarding Opening Day, as a newcomer in 1978 it took me a while to learn that in Minnesota that phrase has a widely understood double meaning, since it pertains to fishing and/or hunting too. In fact for possibly a majority of people in the state it's the latter meaning that's understood first.
  25. ashbury
    There. You. Go. "See that guy? We want a car-load of him." (Not that that necessarily is the missing piece to the solution, but it's a form of thinking I sure hope they are doing already.)
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