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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    So apparently Rocco is using both too much analytics and too little.
  2. ashbury
    If benching Cave against a left handed starter is analytics, then they've been doing analytics in baseball for more than a century now.
  3. ashbury
    Yeah, that was kind of my point, although I don't see Kepler moving the needle even in a 5:1 trade.
  4. ashbury
    No matter how much coaching he gets, those errors at Elizabethton and Cedar Rapids are never going away. He showed improvement in this stat at Wichita and St Paul this year. If 22 errors is your metric for defense, he'll be 30 years old before that stigma gets wiped away from his totals. His range factor per nine innings looks a bit low to me, but runners at AAA were challenging his arm and getting thrown out often enough to almost offset that. If his bat is legit I can live with slightly subpar defense at a corner.
  5. ashbury
    Wouldn't we all. Any candidate teams in mind, who are looking to unload a pitching stud in return for an average-ish right fielder who isn't underpaid?
  6. ashbury
    How to define the season? A roster constructed full of known injury risks, or at least needing to plan a reduced load around. Then when injuries occur?
  7. ashbury
    Concise.
  8. ashbury
    Pushback from a couple of people on my take, and looking narrowly at the deadline (which indeed was the topic of the article), I can't disagree. I think my view was stated in a bigger-picture way, toward roster construction during the off-season, but I didn't flesh it out. Basically, I was lukewarm on getting a non-ironman like Sonny Gray, at least in exchange for our top draft choice (a pitcher, at that), and was skeptical about Mahle given the recent shoulder woes (a red flag for any pitcher). But those two trade with the Red give us a good idea, in the rear view mirror, of what prospects of ours they were interested in, and how they valued them. WHAT IF (that useless phrase) those considerable assets had been applied to getting Castillo, last off-season? Even though he was coming off a down season, I think I'd have liked him better than either of the two we got, and we might not have had to add a Royce Lewis type of player to a package headlined by Petty, Steer, CES and Hajjar. Pitching is the coin of the realm and that is two good arms in the package, plus a middle infielder and a potent bat, and that should have been appealing for the best pitcher of the three starters Cincy was shopping around. Going back to the deadline itself, the FO had put themselves in an arguably impossible position due to the roster they had constructed prior to the season. I didn't say much about the Mahle acquisition at the time, partly not to be raining on everyone's parade during the excitement of Having Done Something At The Deadline For Once. But partly because I was hoping against hope that our FO's professional analytics types had drawn out something better with their access to good data, than my amateur analytics approach of "steer clear of guys recently injured, unless the price is low." The price wasn't low.
  9. ashbury
    I don't necessarily disagree about him, but do you have specific instances in mind where this trait shows up? Eh, even at that, on-field rah-rah may or may not carry over to the clubhouse, or for that matter result in improved play from teammates. I don't deny that clubhouse chemistry is important but how are fans really to know where it concerns a particular player?
  10. ashbury
    Pagan wasn't the type I'd have been hoping to get back, and indeed he was a throw-in (a possible DFA candidate at that), so comparing the two isn't productive. But I was all for trading Rogers, who I thought to be an injury risk until he proves he isn't, as long as they had a plan for replacing his important role in the bullpen. They didn't do that, and compounded the error by trading for a player, in Paddack, who was a bigger injury risk (as the Mets later attested) than Rogers himself. That's what made it a bad trade. Not Pagan. As for the article itself, it sets up a false dilemma. The better option would have been to aim higher. Beat Seattle's offer for Castillo for instance. And we know from the Mahle trade what Cincy was interested in from us, so start from that and add something. (No, I don't know what, but it wouldn't have to involve Royce Lewis etc.) Prime talent will cost you, but going for second best is a false economy.
  11. ashbury
    Diminish? Diminish?!? (You kidding me? I just hope we can win a game! Another game.)
  12. ashbury
    Would that have been the case for the Twins, had he passed through waivers? I'm not up on the fine points of minor league veteran player rights.
  13. ashbury
    He's already signed, and he holds the option whether to void it or go another year. The non-hyphenated (nonhyphenated?) version might be more correct, if a "not" were removed from the sentence.
  14. ashbury
    The process the Twins used indicated they would have liked to keep him around, but not at the continued expense of a 40-man spot. I expect the Rangers will conduct a similar charade in the near future. In any case nobody's just plain releasing him.
  15. ashbury
  16. ashbury
    There are only 27 outs per game, and we're nowhere near an era where starters achieve anything close to that. So an out or two, out of about 15 or 16 is looking meaningful to me, over the course of what's almost now a complete season.
  17. ashbury
    https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2022-starter-pitching.shtml This season they are fourth or fifth from the bottom in the majors, with 4.8 innings per start versus 5.2 league average. The Astros lead with 5.9. https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2021-starter-pitching.shtml Last year by contrast there were just a shade below MLB average, well within what I'd guess to be "noise" rather than useful information. So, yes and no. The trend has been down all across the majors (with some kind of uptick this year), but the Twins have been accelerating that trend this season. Choosing to run with Archer and Bundy could have a lot to do with that - but it is a choice that the FO made and which Rocco then was tasked to implement with short duty for these two arms in particular.
  18. ashbury
    I don't know how anyone could phrase it better. Kudos. They are below .500, looking up at a team which is 13 games over .500. The fat lady has not only sung, she is in the dressing room enjoying refreshments and thinking about her next performance for a different audience.
  19. ashbury
    Can't point to very many Twins prospects who made a case that demanded a promotion yet weren't given their due. No budding Juan Sotos have been left to languish. Instead, we've drafted a lot of can't-miss bats who need a lot of work on their defense and even their initial hitting numbers in the minors look "okay, but not stellar" (or worse, *cough* Sabato *cough*). Or good gloves whose bat stays a work-in-progress for longer than we like. I don't think there are very many players whom you can just force-feed at the major league level. Instead, I look at Jorge Polanco, who has turned out to be a very productive major leaguer but who was forced by roster rules to be on the 40-man before he was ready and his brief introductions to the majors were, ahem, less than inspiring. All of which is to say, good for Brooks Lee, if he turns out to be that kind of player whom the Twins keep on the fast track all the way to the majors.
  20. ashbury
    You might have a short memory. Alex Colome served a similar role just last season. The situational stat Win Probability Added was even more negative for Colome than for Pagan in their respective Twins seasons. Trevor Hildenberger was even more terrible than that in 2018, but we don't remember it because expectations for him were low anyway. He repeatedly came up small when the situation was big that season. I won't bore you with the specific negative numbers these gentlemen all put up, but they are each completely dwarfed by TWO different seasons Ron Davis put up for our Twins, in 1984 and 1986. Chances are that those '84 Twins weren't quite ready for prime time, but they did finish only 3 games behind in the standings, and Davis by himself could well have accounted for more than that number of mind-numbingly spirit-sapping losses compared to just some rando minor league arm called up for duty in his place. Billy Gardner and Ray Miller sure stuck with their spreadsheets during those two seasons!
  21. ashbury
    Falvey took over in 2016 after the World Series. Levine was added in early November that year. The team they took over was a 103-loss team, doubtless resulting in a Get Well Plan for the new FO, and has been under their watch for these seasons: 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 As I said, we're approaching the end of the 2022 season. Not sure if you're taking issue with the math, or what. This FO has brought the team forward. Not sure they have demonstrated they have any special sauce, though; and Terry Ryan no longer being the right man for the job in 2016 doesn't confer the present group any special standing by now. There are always qualified candidates who could bring a different vision. I'm particular concerned about what I view as a reckless attitude toward injury risk that could run this franchise right into the ground.
  22. ashbury
    I didn't call his stylings on the mound the Emilio Pagan Experience, earlier this season, for nothing!
  23. ashbury
    Defensive stats are inherently cursed by small sample size, compared to the stats for batting and pitching. Fielding percentage holds no special advantage over other defensive statistics in terms of sample size. You know it's small sample with batting average, early in the season, when a good day raises someone's BA 50 points. Even one seeing-eye single can have an impact, when it's SSS. Well, with Gordon's fielding numbers, if even one attempt of his that got ruled a base hit had happened to be called an error, his fielding PCT would have dropped from above Polanco's to below him. That makes pretty thin gruel for any sustenance.
  24. ashbury
    Any list where Sandy Alcantara ranks #148 and Max Scherzer ranks #155 (fastball spin), while luminaries like Eli Morgan and Anthony Banda are #1/#2, is a list I will not pay much attention to. I loves me some baseball data, but I want data that correlates with something successful.
  25. ashbury
    When I try to find bright spots, they're hard to locate. I can't point a finger of blame at one phase, because nothing is really at a championship level in the other phases. Some bad luck is involved, but the words Total System Failure keep coming to mind, simply on the grounds that Total System Mediocrity isn't a thing. I can't pin it down to "moments" in the season The roster was constructed for an outcome like this
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