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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/split.cgi?t=b&team=MIN&year=2022#all_plato Twins team OPS versus righties is .721, and against lefties it's .726. These are higher than AL numbers as a whole (.684 and .690 respectively).
  2. ashbury
    And people even smarter than them will second guess whichever way they go.
  3. ashbury
    Pitching matchup tomorrow: Sunday 1:10 pm CST: Sonny Gray (21-1, 2.60 ERA) Wow, the season is really flying by. Those are some Cy Young credentials he's putting up.
  4. ashbury
    Wasn't it two out? Santana had grounded out and Lopez had flied out. Duffy came in to face the 6-7-8 batters and when one reached he still could have finished matters against the lefty pinch hitter, but didn't.
  5. ashbury
    Buxton has more than one chronic ailment. Remember the migraines? He suffered a concussion or two as well. And the team doesn't announce each and every problem that the medical staff learns about in the course of their work day. I don't rule out that Byron's just not seeing the ball well, given the complicated relationship between brain function and vision. Oops, sorry, this was supposed to be a satire article. I was, um, satirizing those who take things too seriously, yeah, that's it.
  6. ashbury
    The key is to be able to define the problem. Then you can set analytics on it to see if it can be broken down to smaller sub problems, or whatever. Bill James did that to a degree not seen in baseball before. But he chose the easy problems - what is a single worth versus a double or a walk? What you are talking about seems an order of magnitude harder.
  7. ashbury
    Unscientific correlation here, but the sorted list of Twins pitchers by tempo with bases empty corresponds, especially at the bottom, with the pitchers I feel least confident in when their name is announced as coming into the game. Maybe they're not too confident either.
  8. ashbury
    Maybe not furlong though.
  9. ashbury
    Last year, it was like they found a new way to lose, every day. This year, it's a different way to win each time out. Good stuff!
  10. ashbury
    If Arraez is coming up every half inning, some other guys must be doing their jobs, too.
  11. ashbury
    Hey, Cano kept his team in the game. That's all you can ask of a reliever.
  12. ashbury
    He kept them in the game.
  13. ashbury
    Lots of batters may benefit from a more predictable zone. Pitching is about disrupting timing, and uncertainty of any kind has to contribute to that, even if the pitcher is the victim half the time when the call is incorrect. I'm a big proponent of automating the ball-strike call, but I believe some sort of adjustment in another way may also be necessary to maintain game balance - maybe a slightly bigger strike zone, for instance, or a little more-deadened ball.
  14. ashbury
    If it's really stopped then I can't see the digital display to confirm this bit of wisdom.
  15. ashbury
    Without the crying. So far.
  16. ashbury
    "This restaurant serves terrible food, but at least they keep the portions small."
  17. ashbury
    Pagan and the rest of staff killing time while waiting for the bullpen phone to ring.
  18. ashbury
    "Don't try to get everybody out. Clean innings are fascist. Put some runners on - it's more democratic." / I may have misremembered the movie quote slightly.
  19. ashbury
    A front office hears about things in the trainer's room and from medical staff that the general public never gets a whiff of. Minor ailments that respond to treatment, for instance. I imagine that an attitude sets in, "hey, show me a pitcher who HASN'T encountered elbow soreness." Still, by the time the public does become aware, the odds become higher that the problem is serious. Statisticians have a concept about "conditional probability" that covers it. This instance feels like, among all the minute details that the Twins must have considered about the return in the trade they were negotiating, they managed to discount the one big red flag that was waving: the centerpiece of their trade had recently been on the injured list with elbow soreness. Trading for 3 years of contractual control over a good starting pitcher looks like a lot less of a bargain if the odds are 50/50 that you'll lose 18 months of those years to diminished performance, surgery and recovery, and rehab stints in the minors. The trade looked bad the moment the rumors came out. I'm not against taking a risk, but it needed to be on an arm with bigger upside than Chris Paddack.
  20. ashbury
    One of these comes out each Friday, almost as though on a set schedule. You might consider just skipping them all. Perhaps your capsule review of Jonathan Swift's work would have been, "the title is misleading and should have been A Ridiculous Proposal. In any case Irish babies ought not be cooked and eaten," back in the day.
  21. ashbury
    It's not like Lewis is being converted from linebacker or power forward to third base. He'll pick up the nuances just fine. Left field if they do that, ditto. A few weeks at AAA again, to clean up whatever list of things I bet they gave him to work on, and he'll be back up to stay. Miranda is the one who should be worried, having muffed his chance when either 3B or 1B was there for the taking - it may not be so easy later in the season to find playing time in the majors if he belatedly proves he's "ready".
  22. ashbury
    This article summarizes why winning the Central isn't quite the prize it is for other divisions. We have a first place team, but with a winning percentage lower than any other division leader's. And either second place team in the AL East or West would be ahead of the Twins if they were in the same division. All in all, good start for the Twins, especially compared to 2021, but I'm keeping my enthusiasm for what comes next in check.
  23. ashbury
    It comes down to MLB roster rules, specifically that the 40-man roster is where your major league squad can come from. If you want to promote someone else, you first need to drop someone from the 40, and that means every other team has the choice to grab who you drop. Prospects, after being in the organization for a certain (arcane and varying) number of years, must either be protected by being placed on the 40-man, or else be exposed to a draft for other teams to choose from. Thus, you will have some guys on the 40 who aren't quite ready, but at times you have to press them into major league service anyway, or else have to make a tough decision on whom to lose. Celestino and especially Lewis are prized prospects and in need of roster protection, so they become higher on the pecking order when a replacement player is needed, and are prime examples of what you asked about. Jorge Polanco was in a similar situation a few seasons ago, on the 40-man well before he was considered ready, but up he came a few times for emergency duty anyway. Almost all the "why him when this other guy was doing better at AAA" questions get answered by looking at the situation this way. I should try to find a good history of the 40-man roster, because my sense is that the current rules that define it have become outdated relative to the way major league teams manage their rosters. / edit - not that you asked, but I did locate the following article, apparently vetted by a SABR member so I give it some credence, which states that the 40-man limit in slightly different form was in place by 1910. The motivations for exactly what the limit should be surely have changed over the years, so I'll stick with my contention that the concept is outdated and ought to be rethought. https://www.baseball-almanac.com/articles/baseball_rosters.shtml
  24. ashbury
    Thad Levine turned 50 last year. I wish anyone had thought of me as a boy genius when I was that age. I wish anyone had thought of me as a boy genius when I was a boy.
  25. ashbury
    I don't see significant advantage of Vogelbach over what the team already has stashed at AAA, Curtis Terry. I.e., meh. Josh Bell, mentioned above, maybe could be interesting, but not at very high cost or else I would stick with the in-house options.
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