ashbury

Whether it turns out that the Twins and Padres get serious at the deadline, I really enjoyed this deep dive. Kepler makes sense in trade to a select few teams, and you identified the reasons the Padres should have their feet held to the fire. I am not as high on Snell as you are, anymore - he feels to me like a second coming of Archer with short starts that have to be artfully managed - but all that matters is whether the Twins talent evaluators feel they could bring more out of him than he has shown in 2021-2. For the purpose of discussion I'll go along with your assessment that the Twins would want him. I agree that if this is the basis for the trade, then the Twins need more than this 1-1 swap. And that's where I come back to holding the Padres' feet to the fire. They need a RF upgrade. And I'm not that enamored of catcher Campusano (hitting numbers in the California League and at El Paso are always suspect to me). So yes, let's go ahead and talk about Abrams or Hassell. What if we include Austin Martin, everyone's favorite trade chip at the moment? Prospect lists have him either as first or second on the Twins, but I doubt that a revised ranking would have him so high. Would the Padres go along with downgrading from Abrams to Martin in middle infield, in return for the sizable upgrade in RF from Kepler plus the salary relief on Snell? Or would they downgrade from Hassell to Martin in the outfield (if that's the latter's eventual destination anyway), and "throw in" power hitting 1Bman James Wood? (I know, both are high ranked, but Kepler is really, really valuable.) Maybe we have to add a lottery-ticket arm from the low minors, say (picking from a hat) 2021 draftee Pierson Ohl, or they give us one if they won't include Wood with Hassell, to even things out. I'm not wedded to any particular deal or structure. The Trade Simulator site seems to like either of these added arrangements enough to make it at least the start for a conversation, but I don't get too hung up on exact values (they value Hassell less than Abrams) because it depends on how the two teams specifically evaluate each chip in the trade. I like to aim high, and if we have leverage over the other team via Kepler it's a chance to snag a difference maker.

Helman's a textbook example of my frustration with how prospects get promoted. Many organizations in all walks of life have a policy of "Up or Out" for their young employees - if they aren't good enough to promote, then they are shown the door, gently or abruptly as the situation demands I know Covid played havoc, after he had a sub-par 2019, but still... a college draftee who is at high-A at age 25 accomplishes essentially nothing. "Wellll, he's pretty good, but we don't know how he'll do against tougher competition." The timing of his development (poor first-half in 2021 then he came on) worked against him. So now at age 26 he has split time at AA and AAA, and we still have to wonder, "wellll, his AAA stats look good but they're small sample size - maybe he'll regress." Everything has finally worked out the way they hoped, and now it's decision time, and he isn't a good trade chip and he isn't a guy they'll add. Wasted development time, quite possibly - they've still got a few months to prove that view wrong.

Modern analytics aside, baseball has always been the most statistical of the major sports. So I have never understood why simple average is commonly used (runs per game, in this case), but the additional step of considering standard deviation is not. This Twins offense would seem to lead the league in the latter, and seeing a simple tabular league ranking would help make more understandable the sense that this is a feast-or-famine offense. I would be very interested to see how high-deviation offenses fare historically in the post-season; I have this feeling that those are the teams who suffer surprising quick exits. But I'm too lazy to do the work of programming and populating a spreadsheet ...

The guy who leads them now is Joe Ryan. More than half the season to go, but if allowed to bet on one guy, he'd be it for me. And he's already at the halfway mark to that magical 10-win season!

Won't dispute the defense, but on the batting side, yeah, I guess I'm gonna be That Guy. Over the course of the season so far, Gio has been one of the culprits in the Twins not driving runners in. With the bases empty, his BA (not yet including today's game) has been .283, and most of his limited power has come in those situations too. Whereas, with bases occupied, his BA is .239 and when you further narrow it to runners in scoring position, it's .212. His Win Probability Added (a stat to give weight to situational hitting) is not good either. The timely hits have been relatively infrequent.

Lee MacPhail?

I probably undersold Ezra by saying his career wasn't very remarkable. Anybody who gets paid to do something for almost 20 years, even in the early years of a "business", must be pretty good at it. Depending on what you mean by "legitimate" and "candidate", I'd tap the brakes on his HoF credentials, though. There are a number of nineteenth century players already in the Hall, and there is a SABR committee that studies that century pretty exhaustively. In fact, and you might already know this, that committee conducts an Overlooked Legends vote each year, to highlight a player they think should be given consideration by Cooperstown. A couple of years ago they voted for Bud Fowler, giving impetus to Fowler being inducted this year, so I think this SABR initiative is taken fairly seriously. I don't recall Sutton being touted for this - I refreshed my memory and he wasn't included in the preliminary round of voting this year, at least. I guess I could ask around, if it really matters, and see whether anyone there has pushed his case. If Sutton belongs in the Hall of Very Good, as people sometimes say of players, probably it improves the comparison I was making to Arraez. So, thank you for that clarification.

As do most hitters since even a .300 BA carries some failure with it. This season, he's come up with the bases loaded 3 times and delivered 2 doubles. I'm not worried about his clutch abilities.

Gordon has no minor league options and the FO isn't just going to give him away to another team. Since May 20, Miranda is batting .333 with power. Finding room isn't going to be that easy.

I think it's pretty much a given.

I have no idea how an MLB analyst looks at Mancini and thinks, "know who would be a good team for him? The Twins!" Castillo will of course be expensive. Contreras will likely be in huge demand, driving up the cost of a part-year rental. Either one would be desirable for our team. I have my doubts either one becomes a Twin though.

2016 was the year of the total system failure. Except, not quite!

"One of a kind" is apt. Baseball-reference.com has this fun tool called Similarity Scores (developed by a certified "stat geek" way back when), and Luis now has enough plate appearances for them to invoke it. https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/a/arraelu01.shtml#all_ss_other Look at the guys he statistically he matches up with best at age 24. You have to go down to #6, Matt Duffy, to find a similar player whose career started after 1950. Luis wouldn't have seemed one of a kind back in 1871, when someone named Ezra Sutton* started his long and not very remarkable pro career. But Luis kind of is, now, and is indeed remarkable. It's been said that one mark of a great player is that it's hard to find comparable players to him. Of course, that point of view can lead you to Willians Astudillo, too. But it's true of a good unique hitter like Arraez. * For additional stat geek fun, go to Sutton's b-r.com page and look at his simiiarity scores. I spotted no names except Arraez (in the age-24 group) from anything like the modern era.

Was preparing to respond similarly when I saw yours. Let me add this perspective: "stat geeks" so "despise" BA that when they designed OPS they included BA twice. Because BA contributes to on-base percentage, and BA contributes to slugging average At any given point in a season, a humble seeing-eye single improves a batter's OBP and it improves his SLG (unless maybe he's Barry Bonds on some sort of tear). And then you add 'em up. Contact is arguably the most indispensable of the tools, and "stat geeks" honor it in many ways. Zero "stat geeks" have said BA doesn-... well, you said that already.

Twins don't control what happens with Correa. All these other scenarios become moot if he decides to stick around another year, or another year after that. It's okay to what-if the scenarios now, but choosing one or the other is premature.

They evoke some great memories for me; I enjoy the look. But if they're a documented jinx, nuke 'em from outer space. (During such time as no player is wearing one, of course. Except [name your current least favorite roster member].)

But according to b-r.com, Pineda cost the Tigers $5.75M while we got Bundy for $4M plus a $1M buyout. So now who's the real winner?

Super slo-mo on Tortuga? I thought that was regular speed.

This isn't really the thread I should try discussing the big picture, and the post I'm responding to isn't beyond the norm, so I don't mean this too personally. But there's this underlying belief that if we can just get past this spate of injuries, we'll really start to see results. And my feeling is this: injuries have been baked into this roster by the way it was constructed, one FO decision at a time. Each decision may have its justification in a vacuum, e.g signing Buxton long-term instead of trading him, trading a propect for less-than-ironman Gray, trading a closer coming off a finger injury for a starting pitcher in Paddack who had a worse injury history in his elbow. Ryan seems like the only one on the IL whom you can't reasonably say, "didn't see THAT coming" about. The FO chose this plan based on an idea of swapping in spare parts as needed. Every team faces injuries of course. This FO seems to value durability less than most others, though, just looking at the injury history for players during 2021 and seeing what (if anything) they've done to make roster changes. When this "cavalry" charges in, it will likely be to replace other mounted soldiers who have just fallen. Hope I'm wrong when September rolls around.

Finally caught on that they had signed the wrong one? / LOL - IALTO

I wish you could, too. Brock, whatever happened to the You Win Teh Internets Today button you were working on?

Up the middle talent is always coveted by trading partners. Trading two, even for a starting pitcher, is not to be done lightly, especially since pitching prospects will also be part of the deal.

My comment to your article was a little flippant, but was intended to be constructive. There was no further data at the time and I had said what I wanted to say, so I left it. Today Buxton had an o-fer, so maybe it is an okay time to circle back to this example of data analysis. By no means is my purpose to do an "I told you so" (as some seem to want) about Buxton's breakout right after this article came out, because I made no such prediction. But I want to revisit the tangent about his week's statistics prior to the article. No one, a week ago or now, disputes that Buxton had had a terrible several weeks following his injury. An article looking back at the Twins' decision not to put him on the IL earlier in May could have been interesting, albeit second-guessing (which isn't always wrong to do). But the topic was whether to IL him "now" (a week ago). The only thing a batting record can tell us about that question is a portion of his most recent games. And that's hard because Small Sample Size is very risky to predict from, as we all understand. You did look at this small sample, and to your credit you let it start when Buxton's string of o-fers ended. But he'd had one good offensive game in a week - the month was no longer relevant if we were looking for evidence he was healing. And his other games in that span were not a complete loss. Good hitters can have a week like that even when they are 100% - as I pointed out, his OPS was even a tiny bit above league average for the period. Sometimes data needs to be sifted, and outliers removed. If Nick Gordon had been the topic of discussion, the game you wanted to discard from those recent ones might have made sense - that didn't look like a "Nick Gordon at his best" game, as it was too good - it would have been just a fluke in Gordon's season. But this was Buxton, and that one game a couple Fridays ago was not beyond his ability when he's going good. Tossing out that game was dangerous for a statistician to do without a very good rationale for doing so Yours was a thought-provoking article. But overlooking the one bit of contradictory evidence, that might suggest our favorite center fielder had found himself, was a mistake. There's the old turn of phrase about "separating the wheat from the chaff." You did that when you looked at Buxton's batting log. And then, through bad luck or whatever, you threw away the statistical wheat, and continued to dwell on the chaff. That was the point behind my quick comment. I really think there is something to learn from this one. And yes, if Buxton had gone an empty 3-for16 after your article, which could about equally well have happened, I probably wouldn't have thought to write this rejoinder now. But I still should have.

Yabbut the manager doing what the boss tells him is not a silly extreme.

If you bring up Kirilloff and Godoy, who else do you send down besides Jeffers? I'm always willing to overlook a slow start if it gets corrected, but Jeffers has combined that with another downward trend, and this looks serious enough to merit the demotion. Have I mentioned that I was very skeptical about the trades of Garver and Rortvedt for exactly this reason? With hindsight we can see that Rortvedt is injured and Garver is DH'ing more than he's catching, but without the trades perhaps things play out differently, and we could send down to AAA either of the young catchers who needed it the most. I didn't think we had an oversupply of catching at the time - a veteran and two youngsters with plenty of minor league options seemed about optimal to me. Oh well, water under the bridge - and acquiring good catching now is tough.