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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    Redeploy Tommy, at the very least.
  2. 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.
  3. ashbury
    "There is one word in baseball that says it all, and that one word is, 'You never know.'" - Joaquin Andujar
  4. ashbury
    Article GOOD.
  5. 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.
  6. ashbury
    As I said: permit me a bit of skepticism.
  7. ashbury
    I See What You Did There
  8. 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!
  9. ashbury
    Don't underestimate Jean-Luc Picard.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. ashbury
    I continue to believe what I did when Sano was stationed at third: he's a little shy of the ball. A terrible thing to have to say (especially with no expertise to back it up), and I don't mean it in some extreme way, but at third he almost always approached a hot grounder in a way that kept a little extra distance between himself and the ball, fielding with the glove outstretched rather than stepping toward the ball and being ready to block it with his body if need be. By contrast, he excelled at slow-rollers, which he could barehand and then rocket to first base - no chance of a bad hop leaving an owie. That play yesterday brought back those memories. I know those plays happen fast, but something doesn't look right, a lot of the time, and maybe a quality coach could tell me I'm imagining things. (I can't find the video that I saw yesterday, to double check my thoughts on this.)
  13. ashbury
    It's a sad case, because the player is seemingly angry at the organization, but honestly what else could the front office have done if he isn't breaking panes of glass with regularity? So they DFAed him (and he passed through waivers unclaimed) because he was out of minor league options. Humiliating, because this never happened to Clayton Kershaw, but it is what it is. This first game at AAA does nothing to deny that decision.
  14. ashbury
    Boston series so far: one step forward, two steps back.
  15. ashbury
    The primness about referring to the team the way it was named when he was with them, is a bit reminiscent of some people's discomfort with the name of the leagues Satchel Paige pitched in before the American League belatedly allowed him entry.
  16. ashbury
    Good game for Winder, and good games at the plate for Larnach and Arraez and Sano. The others.... not so much.
  17. ashbury
  18. ashbury
    I hate to see the word "tip" in a headline concerning pitchers. For that brief moment I thought I was about to learn our pitchers had developed a bad habit.
  19. ashbury
  20. ashbury
    If you mean his strikeoutitis is infectious, exposing him to other teams could be a smart strategy.
  21. ashbury
    False. In pure capitalism one is never paid more than one is worth. So... um, your point still stands.
  22. ashbury
    More than I'm earning, currently.
  23. ashbury
    Four dollars to watch either of those Dodger games? Sign me up! Wait, *I* have to pay *them*?
  24. ashbury
    Arguably the guy who came closest to 30/30 was Corey Koskie in 2001, 26/27. Torii did 29/23 one year. Players in the entire franchise history (1901 Senators and forward) have done even 15/15 just 21 times. The Yankees by contrast have 59 such player/seasons. Seven Twins players have managed 20/20.
  25. ashbury
    Didn't look like two WS teams though - not even a WS team vs a playoff hopeful. This was Dodgers against Pirates territory. And Kershaw doesn't throw perfectos every game - by some measure this might be his best game since 2016, and wouldn't you know it, it came against us. It's only two games, but (like in the season opener) we have good reason to reevaluate whether this is actually a strong offense at all. The league is full of future Hall of Famers and it can't be the excuse every time. When do our guys start imposing their will on other teams' good players for a change?
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