ashbury

You don't even have to start out working in sports at all. Kevin Mather eventually became president of the Mariners, and his Wikipedia bio says he spent his first 5 years after graduation working as a CPA (Deloitte, I found elsewhere), before getting hired into the Twins organization in a financial capacity. (His Seattle tenure came to an unfortunate end but I don't think that's germane to the discussion of getting one's foot in the door.)

This kind of incentive is, I believe, specifically ruled out. It's not even in the CBA, but in the Major League Rules (not the one that covers definitions of balls and strikes, but the one that lays out how teams may operate). In Rule 3(B)(5) it states: (5) No Major League Uniform Player's Contract or Minor League Uniform Player Contract shall be approved if it contains a bonus for playing, pitching or batting skill or if it provides for the payment of a bonus contingent on the standing of the signing Club at the end of the championship season. (My emphasis) We'd all like to incentivize good outcomes, but pretty clearly MLB has through hard experience learned that there are unintended consequences. A team can reward games played, but not homers or batting average. Which I find interesting, in that I remember seeing that MLB is proposing, during the CBA negotiations, to go well past HR and BA to using something like FangRaphs WAR as a metric. Pretty radical, in that light.

OOTP isn't the hill I would die on, obviously. But they put more effort into their scouting, their financial model, and their trading AI, than one might expect. IMO it's on a par with the trade values site, in other words just somebody's guess but one form of sanity checking.

Fun to think about but we don't line up that well in terms of excess prospect talent to offer, and literally 28 other teams will at least kick the tires to find out how serious the Reds are. The thought-exercise in this article shows why. We'll get outbid, probably by a team who feels that their window is now.

Not really your point, I'm sure, but it's not the throw home that separates LF from RF, but the throw to third. Okay, now that I type this, seems not even worth saying, but I still wonder if there is some difference if you have two similar fielders in terms of range and arm, but one is more likely to miss the cutoff man or throw to the wrong base. I'm thinking, put Brain Cramp Guy in left, but I could be wrong. And no, I'm not saying Eddie was remarkably prone to mental errors.

The offer for Lopez seems light to me, and the trade simulators in Out Of The Park (simulation game) and baseballtradevalues.com come to a similar conclusion - neither of these is gospel but both are constructed with at least some serious intent. A better pitching prospect than Strotman, maybe Canterino, would seem to be indicated, to get Miami to even enter a discussion. A position player prospect like Royce Lewis also would get their attention, but I presume you don't want to go that route.

There are 4 pitchers who threw 200 or more innings (31*6 plus a couple of 7s) in 2021: Zack Wheeler, Walker Buehler, Adam Wainwright, and Sandy Alcantara. Which one shall we sign?

The published reports were incomplete on details. I believe they said the parties were in agreement about the base salary but were apart on the incentives. So I lack insight on how high the Twins had gone, but if they didn't make it possible for the player to make $30M with reasonable full-season performance thresholds (150 games or similar) then IMO the team fouled up. Less likely IMO is that Buxton was holding out for the incentives to reach $40M, in which case I'd cut the team some slack. Probably we'll never know, but as events play out we may be able to guess increasingly well about last summer's negotiations.

If he were to hit free agency this time next year, my expectation would be he'd face a wider spectrum of opinion than most players - no unanimity. The many teams that can't stomach the risk, would give a cold shoulder to him, or offer a heavily-incentive-laden contract at best. But so what - the only ones that matter, from his POV, would be the big-market teams who have World Series aspirations immediately and for the coming seasons, and all it really takes is two to vie for his services. To those teams, getting help for the long regular season is of secondary importance because they expect to reach the post-season already, so Buxton's track record of partial seasons won't bother them the way it would a lesser team. They would look at October. "If we sign him and he's healthy for the post-season, he's a difference maker - and if he's not healthy, then all we did was waste money," would be my expectation of their bottom-line thought process. A good $30M annual value contract offer to him would be merely the cost of doing business, for those anointed teams. No team purposely wastes money, but for a difference-maker they would be willing to take on risk. If Buxton is willing to accept an incentive-laden contract from the Twins, the team should get the paperwork in place. They should have done this already during the last trade deadline, IMO, based on the reporting we saw.

Unless you happen to think Sands isn't a legit prospect, no dice. I'm not trading pitching prospects except for established pitching. Teams hang onto their arms and we shouldn't be handing ours out like candy.

Smart move to hire someone older and more experienced to sit with Rocco on the bench. Jayce's extra [checks baseball-reference.com] 301 days on planet Earth will no doubt make a big difference. Does anyone know the proper pronunciation of the new guy's name? One syllable, with a long-A? Or "Jay-Cee"?

My two would be Jake Cave and Kyle Garlick.

You can put literally any major league hitter at DH. Having a revolving DH amounts to that. But it doesn't amount to an advantage over the opposing team on any given day, if they can put a Yordan Alvarez or a JD Martinez in the lineup against you while you're employing someone with an OPS in the .700s. A top-notch dedicated DH can be a very cost effective way for a team without deep pockets to gain the advantage I want, because they are not paying an additional premium for a glove that sits unused while he's DHing. Nelson Cruz's bat probably could have commanded $20M+ if he could still field a position competently. Cruz might not be the right guy to sign anymore, I don't know. And maybe there isn't anyone out there to acquire who will be at the Alvarez/Martinez/Cruz level. But I wouldn't be satisfied going into the off-season with a stand-pat approach to DH. After all avenues are explored, maybe stand-pat will turn out to be right, come February.

Baseball should follow the NFL's example and do more to celebrate the best players, rather than publicly hem and haw along the lines of "meh, he wasn't THAT good." Both Oliva and Kaat should be enshrined. I will be pleasantly surprised if they get in, though.

I see really little daylight between the two players' resumes. If one is in, the other is too. If one is out, so is the other. I'm a big-Hall* guy, so both are an easy Yes for me. As an aside, bWAR would seem to give Joe a measurable edge over Buster, but a metric more like Wins Above Average has them as about equal across their careers. WAR is a good enough tool for roster decisions, to consider what a player brings to the table compared to AAA fodder, but for Hall of Fame considerations I prefer to ask how much above-average they were over the long haul. * I'm sure I've said before, my version of big-Hall means to formalize the common notion of an Inner Circle within the official HOF, to make it easier for voters to include more fan favorites into the the Hall while allowing a measure of "purity" for the best of the best in that inner group.

Ever the bridesmaid, eh?

Now or never with Cano.

Best news all day! Thanks, Seth.

Thursday afternoon's game in Mesa was marred by an injury to Matt Wallner due to an errant pitch high and inside. I wrote up what I know here. I find it disquieting that we have not quickly heard a simple "X-rays proved negative" by mid-evening. The 11-4 drubbing administered to the home Solar Sox by our Twins' Scottsdale Scorpions pales in comparison to the concern I have for Matt, but here is my game summary from a Twins fan perspective. In attendance along with me at Sloan Park was Twins Daily stalwart USAFChief. Perhaps there were other luminaries in attendance, but this was enough star power for me! Wallner was the only Twins representative in the batting order, playing in RF. In terms of fielding, he handled a routine fly out and dealt capably with the base hits in his direction. As for his work at bat... after striking out to end the first inning, he launched a no-doubter HR to left center to lead off the third, off of Oakland pitching prospect Jeff Criswell (presumably no relation to the famed narrator of Plan Nine From Outer Space). Two innings later, he came to bat again and on 2-0 was hit in the leg on the bounce by a 55-foot pitch that I'll assume to be a curve that got away from Criswell, still in the game for the last of his four innings of work. I thought nothing of it at the moment, but then the next inning Wallner faced a different pitcher, Hogan Harris also of the A's, and I really, really, really hope this was nothing more than a coincidence - the two HBP had little in common in terms of the kind of pitch, and the second one occurred on a 1-2 count which is not a typical situation for a purpose pitch - but in the box score they all look the same. Wallner headed straight to the dugout after the 95-MPH beaning, not taking even a step toward the base he was being awarded. After the third out he was escorted across the field, walking under his own power and seemingly steadily, to the left field corner where presumably medical attention was to be had. Here is a photo of him, a pitch or two before the fateful one: The only Twins farmhand to pitch was Zach Featherstone. As with Laweryson yesterday, the fastballs I saw were low-90s at best, but his mix of pitches was effective and his body of work in the eighth inning was a clean 1-2-3, with two swinging strikeouts after a harmless fly to left. (Chief noted that, what with Funderburk also, the Twins apparently are cornering the market on three-syllable pitcher names. Maybe it's the new market inefficiency.) The layout of the ballpark allows fans to wander over toward the bullpen and observe pitchers warming up from a vantage point above them, and here is a shot of Zach before he came into the game: These are the only Twins tidbits to offer from the game, but it happens that Wallner was not the only person on the field who had unwanted contact with a baseball. Scorpions third base coach Ydwin Villegas (Giants) was nailed, in the shoulder I think, by a sharp foul liner. He was cool as a cucumber, having dodged actual injury, and popped right back up to resume signaling the base runners as though nothing at all had happened. Occupational hazard, which is why base coaches earn the big bucks. The AFL has some experimental rules. One I noticed in both my games so far is that the umpires frequently check pitchers caps and other areas of the uniform for banned substances. Chief remarked on the lack of extreme defensive shifts. And a walk seems to have been awarded to Scorpions first baseman Triston Casas (Red Sox) when the pitcher apparently exceeded the 15-second time limit while there was a 3-ball count - we at first thought a balk had been called, to advance the runners, except that Casas also trotted down to first. This prompted me to look up the rules for the AFL this year, and some these are covered at this website. (I had failed to notice that the bases were slightly larger, and also that in last night's Salt River game the balls and strikes were not being called by the plate ump.) It was a super pleasant afternoon, with temperatures in the low 80s. But it is sobering to realize that Chief and I have not brought the best of luck to Twins prospects in the AFL when we view games together, as we have witnessed AFL-season ending injuries to Taylor Rogers (struck in the shoulder by a line drive) and Lamont Wade (concussion after collision with a fellow outfielder). I hope that Matt bounces back as well as these two players have been able to. Mrs Ash and I will be concluding the Phoenix area portion of our vacation with one more game, a home game at Scottsdale, Friday afternoon.

In all honesty, I kind of wanted to hold off of some of the other, highly important, stuff pending news concerning his well-being. I wanted to say how much I enjoyed the game and the companionship, except there is this "other than that, Mrs Lincoln" aspect looming over it. But yes, Matt did earn an all-important run batted in, to aid in securing the win in this 11-4 squeaker. (He also had a more mundane RBI from the home run leading off the 3rd.)

This photo is of Matt being escorted away from the first-base dugout and toward what I assume to be the field's medical facilities. He gave a little wave to some well-wishers on the third-base side, and I think he replied in some fashion. I have found no further information as yet - hoping for the best.

Matt Wallner was hit in the face by a pitch in this afternoon's game versus Mesa. Looked like his lower jaw. I happened to be taking photos during that plate appearance - it's a bit out of focus and blurry but I can't help uploading and posting it anyway. Matt was able to make his way to the training room at the far end of the ballpark under his own power, so I'm hopeful that he escaped serious injury.

Counter-point: as we've seen since the 2019 HR barrage, you can't necessarily count on the offense clicking when you want it to. Have the pitching on hand in case the offense clicks; have the offense on hand in case the pitching comes together. A sequential build-up year after year depends on too many variables staying put.