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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    It's the outfield that contains so many duplicates. McCusker over CJC would be my choice to question.
  2. ashbury
    When I play Out of the Park, it's sometimes a lot of fun to try an off-season like this. Sometimes it crashes and burns, sometimes it works out. Congrats on a video game experience. 😀
  3. ashbury
    "Aren't you Aaron Hicks?" "Yeah. Didn't you used to be Royce Lewis?" "Hey, that's cold, man. At least I'm still on a major league roster."
  4. ashbury
    First you'll have to teach him how to play catcher.
  5. ashbury
    I imagine New York Mets fans were saying something similar in the winter of 1961-1962.
  6. ashbury
    With Eric Orze's name already being consistently misspelled in this and other threads, I'd like to suggest we go ahead and call him what my anagram generator came up with after several gigawatts of computation: Rice Zero. It will save us all a lot of trouble remembering.
  7. ashbury
    The Mickey Gasper Era is only beginning!
  8. ashbury
    Yeah, that's the part I was remembering. Once added, they have to stay there until Spring Training, or maybe longer. Anyway, not relevant to making room for a pick in December. Which... had to be the case, since trades could occur that might free up a spot - or, as you say, they could need to make room for another acquisition.
  9. ashbury
    So if I'm reading it right, 5 of 6 of Seth's list were added. Klein substitutes in for Culpepper. Must be the injury concern for the latter. The 40-man is full, with 19 pitchers and 21 batters. I expect that ratio to be reversed before opening day. Do they have time to DFA someone to make room for a Rule-5 pick, or is this locked in now through the Winter Meetings?
  10. ashbury
    You mean, the guy who acquired Lopez in the first place?
  11. ashbury
    baseball-reference.com says so, if you're questioning the historical record. If you're questioning the use of the historical record to draw conclusions, I can't help you.
  12. ashbury
    Home run rate across the majors was 3.1% in 2025. When Bert pitched it was more like 2.1%. That more than makes up the difference you're harping on.
  13. ashbury
    Probably he had a pretty specific degree of normalization in mind, that might be more stringent than it has to be to still get useful indications. But it's in the same spirit of the quote frequently attributed to Tom Kelly that you need to wait 1000 PA to know what you've really got in a batter; don't know if Kelly ever applied the principle to how many innings are needed from a pitcher. With statistics, you do the best you can with what you've got. Humans make reasonable statistical inferences in many fields besides just baseball, accepting that there will be a few outliers because you can't wait for enough data to do better. Unless they are life-and-death scenarios, you deal with the outliers and move on without a lot of remorse. Forecasting and optimization-under-uncertainty are examples in industry. Baseball front offices have to make decisions whether or not the amount of data they have access to fits academic standards, so they bank on the high threshold being across many players and the weirdness in any one player instance averages out. Adding further complexity, I don't think Kelly (or Tango after him) was making a particularly statistical argument. He surely was thinking at least as much about all the adjustments and counter-adjustments pitchers and batters make against one another. It takes a while for the "book" on a player to stop being edited constantly. Meanwhile, Keaschall is well under the Tom Kelly Threshold. We'll mostly just have to wait and see, since none of us are tasked to make a financial decision in his regard anyway. If I were betting, I'd surely put my money on the side of the betting line that says his .340 BABIP is a tad high. But as a Twins fan I can hope that that bet loses.
  14. ashbury
    I think your humorous sarcasm is meant in agreement with my above posts. Just to be clear though: when people talk about players regressing to a mean, for any stat really, they should be referring to each player's own mean and not necessarily some league-wide mean. And for young players like Keaschall, we don't yet know what that BABIP mean is. Someone like Mauer, or Judge now, have established very high BABIP means indeed. Max Kepler established a very low mean BABIP; we kept wrongly expecting his to rise.
  15. ashbury
    They did such a great job at that with Laweryson. 🙃 His removal was an incremental step further toward the present imbalance - do they really have X number of better candidates stashed in their system that will fill that side of the 40-man to its customary 20 or 21 (or 22 some years)? And was that roster spot more important than the ones held by DaShawn and Carson? The problem with roster clearing is that the DFA/waiver process lets the other teams snap up anyone with any perceived promise at all, leaving your AAA roster with just the dregs.
  16. ashbury
    Yes, rarely have I seen this much imbalance between pitching and position players. And when there is, it's in the other direction due to hoarding pitchers which I can kind of sympathize with. This hoarding of outfielders, corner ones at that, baffles me at to the long term strategery this FO has in mind.
  17. ashbury
    39. The position players have dual roles.
  18. ashbury
    How does Clemens as the regular at 1B in 2026 move the needle on the longer-term goal?
  19. ashbury
    Ditto. I noticed that they lack a second base coach to complement first and third, and emailed them my resume. Not a peep back.
  20. ashbury
    So Kody's been half-assing his off-seasons up to now, waiting for some team to believe in him enough to pencil him in as a starter? And now he'll Try Real Hard? 😀
  21. ashbury
    This stuff is such a rabbit hole for me. I looked at something else after posting the above, using b-r.com's Stathead tool, and I'll respond to your point in writing it up. And then I intend to stop for the time being. 😁 From 2021 to 2025, only three batters amassed 1500 PA and maintained an overall .300 BA: Arraez, Freeman, and Judge. Their cumulative BABIPs: .325, .341, .347. And the BAs in the same order are .315, .308, .306. Luis doesn't strike out very much, so he doesn't need as high a BABIP as the others to maintain .300. Freddie strikes out more than Luis but partially compensates with more homers. Same goes for Aaron, to an even higher degree. https://www.sports-reference.com/stathead/tiny/f5gMK I'll let you or someone else cross-check these three batters' exit velocities and what not. I think I can take a pretty good guess with two of those guys, but I'm not sure what you'll find with Arraez. Because I was looking at 1973, I also used Stathead to find that in the five year period 1971-1975 there were 9 batters with the same minimum PA and a .300 cumulative BA: in ascending order of BABIP they were Manny Sanguillén, Ted Simmons, Matty Alou, Pete Rose, Bob Watson, Ralph Garr, Richie Zisk, Lou Brock, Rod Carew. Manny was renowned for not striking out much, as I recall. Alou in this list likewise avoided K's like the plague. Carew had the highest BABIP at .368. Only 9 guys means it was still an elite accomplishment even then. https://www.sports-reference.com/stathead/tiny/5kl8a The main thing I'm trying to get across is that high BABIP can be sustainable and we don't know yet what a rookie's true level of skill in this dimension will prove to be. A high BABIP correlates with being a well-regarded hitter in one's era. The hard-hit rate certainly calls into question whether Keaschall will be that guy.
  22. ashbury
    .300 always was an elite thing, except in eras like around 1930 when things got out of whack. I took a look at 1973. BABIP across the majors that year was .281, lower than now. Back then batters didn't strike out nearly as much. 13.7% across the majors that year. 22.2% this year. Carew's BABIP in 1973 was .375. Rose's was .355. But we have that now: Judge's is .376 this year. You're forgetting home runs. For better or for worse, they're not in BABIP. In the years since then, you could argue from these numbers that batters have traded "contact" for "quality of contact." Aaron Judge has an unfair advantage, possessing Carew's elite contact skills plus elite power. I'm sure a deeper study would provide other insights than these two, but these come to mind after 5 minutes of playing on b-r.com.
  23. ashbury
    I guess don't hire me as a proofreader.
  24. ashbury
    I help out in our local schools, so I am hep to this new lingo. You just gotta grin and bear it, apparently.
  25. ashbury
    That's real utility!
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