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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    I'm not gonna judge any team, even one that I hate, on messages from That Guy On Twitter. There are much better reasons to hate the White Sox anyway.
  2. ashbury
    You're gonna make him blush.
  3. ashbury
    Yeesh. Another big arm that can't find the strike zone. It's the Twins' catnip, or maybe their kryptonite.
  4. ashbury
    Only 11 episodes, with some clear closure at the end, plus three "vignettes" probably worth watching first just to get a feel. So it's not an open-ended commitment. I knocked it all off in 3 evenings. Mrs Ash disguised her bemusement as best she could. It checks many little boxes for longtime fans without ever descending into satire or parody; neither does it take itself so seriously that it loses its sense of humor where called for; it's a semi-pro production but never feels like community theater or college skits; it goes beyond even homage, and feels for all the world like a bunch of lost episodes. It's real. I loved the J. J. Abrams movie reboot but I think all in all this is finer. I could imagine people rolling their eyes at this undertaking, for any of several reasons including that 1960s TV wasn't as good as more recent stuff, and I could pick things apart too, but I wouldn't say that any episode is entirely dispensable. My admiration for it is unreserved - as Sarek might say, my logic is uncertain where this series is concerned.
  5. ashbury
    I acknowledged at the outset that every bullpen gives up runs. I'm not holding them up to some unrealistic standard like a WHIP under 1. And even a good WHIP will be a blend of clean innings and some stinkers over the course of the long season. Someone can check my numbers, but starters' WHIP this year is 1.04. Relievers have 1.55. Normal fluctuation means that it's too soon to take seriously any individual pitcher's numbers (so I won't list the ones that for the moment are good, any more than I expect Duffey's 2.00 to remain that high), but overall, it's inescapable that our bullpen is currently giving us no peace.
  6. ashbury
    This isn't TV, exactly, but the episodes on YouTube could fool a person. They date from 2012-17. "Star Trek Continues" A quick search on TD doesn't reveal a mention of this fan-fiction on steroids. Has anyone run across this way back when it came out? I am just flabbergasted by all aspects of this ode to 1960s SciFi.
  7. ashbury
    Keep in mind though, "I never said half the things I said" is another Yogi reference.
  8. ashbury
    Ha ha. Like it's an either-or proposition.
  9. ashbury
    The pitcher doesn't always do well. That is true.
  10. ashbury
  11. ashbury
    That's across all starts, isn't it? Some starts, the pitcher gets injured early and comes out. Gray the other day for instance. Some starts, the pitcher is doing badly and comes out after two or three or four innings. Paddack for instance. (We've actually been pretty free of such games.) Some starts, the pitcher is clearly gassed and comes out, as might be said of Archer yesterday or Bundy the day before. I wonder if you let out those games, what the average is when the pitcher is doing well? I think those are the cases people are questioning.
  12. ashbury
    I'm not as down on Pagan as Szymborski is, but the ceiling is effective middle innings reliever, I expect. He has the experience, and presumably the make up, to set up or close, but not the chops. There will be late inning disasters if he is overexposed.
  13. ashbury
    Socrates long ago perfected the art of asking questions and letting his students puzzle out each step of the syllogism themselves. This article follows in an honored tradition. Tomorrow: "Should Miguel Sano Shift to Center Field?"
  14. ashbury
    You.
  15. ashbury
    Redeploy Tommy, at the very least.
  16. ashbury
    Even the best bullpen gives up some runs. But now and then, elite arms do throw clean innings, i.e. start the inning, 3 batters faced, no runners. Put runners on, and over the long haul you won't dance out of trouble often enough. Here's my count of relevant innings so far in 2022 (no credit for partial innings): Duran: 6 chances, 2 clean innings Smith: 2 chances, 0 clean innings Thielbar: 4 chances, 0 clean innings Coulomb: 2 chances, 0 clean innings Duffey: 3 chances, 0 clean innings Pagan: 3 chances, 2 clean innings Romero: 3 chances, 0 clean innings Jax: 3 chances, 0 clean innings It's late, this was a very quick count and I could be missing a few. Individually, it's all Small Sample Size. Taken as a group, this bullpen is hittable, or else they walk batters. Two guys, Duran and Pagan, have so far shown that they can take charge in the late innings. Smith, maybe, but he's been given partial innings in the cases not mentioned that were clean. Again, I'm looking at baserunners, not actual runs scored, because when you put runners on there will be variability. It's the ability to keep the runners off that tracks, not the ability to somehow magically scatter those runners. Rocco doesn't have the horses, not at this time. It doesn't matter how you deploy your bullpen arms, when there are only two. If things change for the better, later on, that's the time I'll look at how he deploys the resources.
  17. ashbury
    "There is one word in baseball that says it all, and that one word is, 'You never know.'" - Joaquin Andujar
  18. ashbury
    Article GOOD.
  19. ashbury
    CJ is the same player he always has been. Coors elevates some players. Good for him, and I hope the Rockies fans are enjoying the experience. It would be interesting to find out what Sano would do in a couple of years in Colorado also. Looking at his career splits, he has never come to bat there. Looks like we don't find out this year either - the come to Minnesota for 3 games in June.
  20. ashbury
    As I said: permit me a bit of skepticism.
  21. ashbury
    I See What You Did There
  22. ashbury
    Super small sample size so any attempt at analysis is shaky, but I'll point out that both have benefited from a little "luck" in the form of high BABIP. To his credit, Cave has built a high OPS without benefit of one HR. But Cave's BABIP is a totally unsustainable .500 while Lewis's is "only" .429. Normalizing to a more typical .300, Cave's gaudy 1.040 OPS looks more like .624, while Lewis's looks as if it would normalize to around .800 OPS if present performance continued (which it never does). Way overthinking this of course, but the two aren't especially good comps at the moment, and Lewis looks better than Cave. Thank goodness - parallels between Royce Lewis and Jake Cave are fighting words!
  23. ashbury
    Don't underestimate Jean-Luc Picard.
  24. ashbury
    It's a somewhat fuzzy concept of what a full team of replacement players would do, and I've got the number "50" for wins stuck in my head somewhere, but I've always been skeptical of that. The 2019 Tigers went 47-114, serving as some sort of benchmark in the current era, but they were trying and had a handful of players with positive WAR, starters Matthew Boyd and Spencer Turnbull and Daniel Norris prominently. The expansion 1962 Mets went 40-120 but that's too long ago to be useful for gauging today and the expansion draft let them pick a few guys. If you really cut all your major leaguers and tried to assemble a team from waiver pickups and minor-league signings, I think you'd struggle to break 30 wins. I know you were just asking rhetorically, though.
  25. ashbury
    Do you have a particular month in mind? Last year some folks were heartened by a second half with an OPS in the .800 range, but just now I tried to cherry-pick an especially strong 31-day period, and the best I came up with was Aug 18 to Sept 17 where his OPS was .942, but that was buoyed by 10 HR, with only 21 RBI, meaning that half of those were solo homers, and only 16 runs, which of course counts as a good month, but nothing that "carries" a team - I believe the Twins went 12-16 in that span. Once he vacated third base, the bar was necessarily raised for his offensive performance. You can hit like he does, and maybe keep a major league job, but at first base you need to hit really, really well to be an actual asset. And no team is likely to pay the $14M for his 2023 option unless he steps it up considerably from last year, to say nothing of his slow start this year.
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