ashbury

It just goes to show that pitching remains the coin of the realm. We did get an undersized pitching prospect in the deal. Going for better pitching than that becomes exponentially harder, if you use only position players as trade bait.

Stewart just didn't work out, but Jay was one where Terry Ryan tried to think outside the box, and the criticism was immediate and obvious. Ryan had this reputation for conservatism, but he would gamble, and the gambles never seemed to pay off.

It's not the absolute last word regarding a player's value, because there is no such resource to tell you that. Team GMs tend to keep their thoughts to themselves on a topic like this, and every GM will have different perceptions and different situations to work under. The results from any tool like this will be based on the assumptions baked in. The single best thing about it is that it factors in the remaining years of control and the dollars committed in any existing contract. Typically fans will forget about this, and just construct trades based on perceived talent. For example Garver and Jeffers have similar projections for contributions on the field per year, but Jeffers has more years of control remaining and thus looks like the one who would bring more in trade. (Of course the same logic might dictate that he's the one you keep and build on.) Now, does Josh Donaldson (for one example) really have negative trade value, as this site will instruct you? For some trading partners, probably yes. If you wanted to swing a trade with the Orioles, they would have less than zero interest, which is one way of saying "negative value," and you might have to offer a good prospect along with him, or pay most of his remaining salary, just to get him off our books. But money aside, he remains an above average bat, and maybe he won't get injured; if some team with World Series aspirations for 2022 thought he was the missing piece, you might be able to pry a decent prospect away from them. "We have him, and you don't," remains a critical factor, and isn't something easily captured in a tool like BTV. Any trade involving one or more desirable players will go to the highest bidder, almost by definition, which means that some GM saw things differently than any competing GM did, which in turn means the trade will probably violate what BTV would tell you. I don't know how you could construct a tool to predict those outcomes. Bottom line, I like the site very much and I use it as a sanity check for proposed trades. I don't treat it as anything remotely approaching gospel, nor I believe would they expect me to.

He wasn't just some random 16-year old signing, and expectations were high at the outset. He hasn't met them.

Just going by what's on the Twins website. It might be out of date somehow.

Literally the most recent on-field data we have on him is being MVP of the 2019 Fall League, including MVP of the all-star game. It's small sample, but I don't think swing mechanics could be a complete mess and still accomplish that. Recovery from the injury to the knee is of course the biggest "known unknown" - but does that truly stack everything against him?

That's great. Curious in the same way, I looked at the SABR site, and nobody has done a bio on him yet. Seems overdue.

Jharel Cotton is on the Twins' 40-man.

Man! The moderators are going to be all over you, like stink on a skunk!

I didn't know that algorithmic projections were capable of Hawt Taeks. This sure sounds like one, although pleasant.

"Home run hitters drive Cadillacs and singles hitters drive Fords.” (Said of Ralph Kiner just the other day... oops I mean in the 1940s.) See also this 1950s newspaper commentary regarding how to deal with the shift: Why doesn’t Ralph Kiner hit to right against the lopsided defense played against him? He doesn’t want to. When Kiner came up to the Pirates and teams began overshifting on him, he toyed with the idea of hitting to right. Fritz Ostermueller. then a veteran pitcher for the Pirates, told him: “There aren’t any Cadillacs for you in right field, Ralph. Your money is in left.” Nothing new under the sun.

Look at the bright side, why don't you. If the lockout persists, our Twins will be tied for first place on June 1.

While fruitlessly searching for that swing-after-miss, I did find this entertaining if mis-titled example of what his speed could do:

Filling out the rotation to have exactly 5 starters in no way fixes anything for a long season. We are in a world of hurt.

His birth date is September 27, 2000. He's 20th Century, and old Millenium. /pedantic

He'll fall through a hole in the ice and suffer a (rolls dice, consults chart) dislocated cranium, missing (rolls dice) a season and a half for rehab. Because, Twins.

Imagine how much better the 1965 WS would have gone if the Twins had thought to use a center fielder.

Concur. It's a question of game balance, and there were discussions of a forerunner to the DH at least as far back as the 1930s so the recognition of this problem is hardly a new thing. (The 1930s are closer to the beginning of professional baseball than they are to the present day.) The impact of a pitcher's arm on a game is far greater than any contribution he can make with the bat, and people recognized the fact once overhand delivery became legal, and certainly once the Dead Ball era was over. It wouldn't have mattered last year if Matt Shoemaker had been uniquely capable among pitchers of hitting like Nelson Cruz, and all other pitchers hit like Walker Buehler, and there were no DH - using him on the mound meant a likely loss in each game he appeared. That's a structural imbalance which the NL chooses to live with. Baseball is exceedingly conservative. Movie footage of old football or basketball games look hardly at all like their modern incarnations. Baseball still has pitchers hitting.

"Merely" reaching Gagne's offensive level would make him an asset at SS.

82 is over ten times more than 8.1. Sounds like we won this trade!

Jamie? Jaime? Gomez? Garcia? Potayto. Potahto.

Thatsa lotsa trading, but it's part of the fun of OOTP.

You keep banging on the same drum, though, that salaries are the issue, and choosing questionable historical end points to make the argument.

You're not addressing the big picture here. It's billionaires (owners) versus multi-millionaires (players) versus millionaires (ticket buyers) versus Ordinary Joes. The Joes are being outbid for tickets, and that's why prices are high. It's no coincidence that people often remember best the games they saw when their employer gifted them some good seats for a game against a lesser opponent that the employer didn't happen to want to attend. If the teams did unilaterally cut ticket prices by half, scalpers would snap them up and sell them to the highest bidder, and the price to see a game would remain about the same, only the money goes into some other pockets than the team owners and the players. And these scalpers aren't your old-school sleazebags on the street corner - they are corporations like StubHub now - so we're back to talking about billionaires again. I'm not proposing revolution, but we should try to see things as they are.

I assume you are a big free-markets guy. So why in the world would you choose 1970 as the starting point? Curt Flood sat out that season because he didn't wish to play for the Phillies. The players began to get some semblance of control over their destinies after that. So of course their salaries have grown faster, the closer they come to a free market for their services (and they are a long way still from that). That's a good thing! You should be thrilled.