ashbury

How does Clemens as the regular at 1B in 2026 move the needle on the longer-term goal?

Ditto. I noticed that they lack a second base coach to complement first and third, and emailed them my resume. Not a peep back.

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? 😀

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.

.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.

I guess don't hire me as a proofreader.

I help out in our local schools, so I am hep to this new lingo. You just gotta grin and bear it, apparently.

That's real utility!

Seattle had subpar offensive production at 3B and 2B this year. Maybe they'd take a package of Julien and Bride. 🙃 Brooks Lee for Ford, though? OOTP says that's not enough from us, but that game can be persnickety about certain players sometimes.

In a Wallner thread I mentioned him as the player I have greatest hopes for improvement under some new coaches. I forgot, though, that Lewis is right up there too. Just clearing up a little thing here or there in their approach at the plate, which I am the opposite of qualified to specifically name, could make a whale of a difference.

I use BABIP as a benchmark too. Across the majors this year, BABIP was .291. .340 stands out as high and possibly unsustainable. However, I always like to point out that a very few batters manage to maintain high BABIPs throughout a long career. HOFer Joe Mauer's lifetime BABIP was .341. Same-in-reverse goes for pitchers; HOFer-in-waiting Clayton Kershaw kept a .275 through a career that included seasons when BABIP league-wide was close to .010 higher than 2025. * If Keaschall's is high, it could be a fluke. Same for SWR's career .276 BABIP. Or it could be that both are on Hall of Fame arcs too. ** 😄 BABIP is useful when a player has a track record and has a period of time that seems out of keeping. Luke hasn't yet established a track record in the majors. His BABIP in his short minor league career was usually high too. But I have a sense that this might be true in general for the minors - I don't know where to find tables of minor league BABIP as easily as I can find it for the majors, but if I did some hand-calculation correctly, the number for the International League as a whole this season was .308, significantly higher than for the majors. (I'll chalk it up to a different level of competition and talent between the two levels.) Basically, my point is that people use BABIP as shorthand for "luck," and I don't believe in luck very much for ballplayers. They're grown men trying their best against other grown men also trying their best, and what happens on the field happens, and we keep records of it. Some short term results are unsustainable, some numbers reflect actual talent, and the challenge for statistically-minded folks like us is to sift out one from the other. BABIP was developed in terms of filtering out defense from the usual statistics, and I'm not sure it does a very good job of that, and I also don't believe it inherently does a good job of separating so-called "luck" from a measurable skill, such as hitting the crap out of the ball in a way that fielders have difficulty with. Was 2025 a unicorn season for Keaschall, or is Keaschall himself a unicorn player? Yes, keep an eye on him in this regard. Either way it goes, there will be new insight. That's really all I'm willing to predict at this point: "watch what happens next." 😁 * On the other side of the coin, we kept waiting for monster seasons from Max Kepler and Ricky Nolasco, "once their BABIPs normalize," and they never did. ** BABIP, IMO, is only a small component of what makes a Hall of Famer.

Yes. I was dismayed by the trades of Jax, Duran, and Varland, and have therefore pretty much checked out mentally as to what fresh hell this FO intends for 2026. 🙃 But I'll still call out a bad argument when I see one.

I'm merely pointing out the weakness of your argument.

Wallner is the player I have the highest hopes will gain from a new hitting coach's perspective. You didn't touch on what bothers me about Wallner's 2025, and really his entire career stats - something I've posted in another thread and I'll rephrase here. Normally I take at face value the conventional modern stats like OPS (which WAR derives from), because across the majors it correlates very well with the actual goal of scoring runs, - which of course correlates well with winning ballgames during the season - and which correlates with winning a championship. Wallner's actual run and RBI totals have always seemed low compared to his rate stats, and some have pointed to fewer opportunities with men on base and so forth as an explanation. But when sifting through the "Splits" page for Wallner on baseball-reference.com, I noticed a real outlier. When the ballgame is tight, like tied or with a one-run lead for either side, Wallner's OPS is down in the .600s for 2025. When the game is not close - a lead of at least 4 for either side - his OPS zooms up above 1.100. This general pattern has shown up fairly consistently through his short career so far - it's not a one-year blip that I'd more easily dismiss. League-wide there is a slight uptick in hitting performance during garbage time - it stands to reason - but nothing remotely this wide. Pitchers have the right to alter their approach depending on game situations. It's up to the batter to adjust accordingly. My take is that somehow Wallner is not adjusting effectively. When the pitcher's incentive is to just get the game over with (win or lose), and let's say throws more strikes if I want to oversimplify, Wallner's in his element. But in the situations where the game hangs in the balance, somehow he's either going for a pitcher's pitch rather than one he can do something with, or he's waiting for a mistake pitch that (at the MLB level) rarely happens, or he's not using tactics like going opposite field when that's all the pitcher's giving him. So I can only repeat what I said in the first paragraph. I hope the coaches can sit down with him and talk about what his approach has been and what maybe can be simplified, or maybe be adjusted, to correct this imbalance (the part at the low end of acceptable, obviously). Because at present, his high OPS doesn't turn into runs, corroborated by his Win Probability Added which doesn't turn into contributions to wins the way his WAR would suggest. You led off asking why some people "hate" Wallner. I can't speak for others but I suspect it's not hatred so much as a feeling of disconnect between his numbers and the eye-test when watching games.

This team rarely has front line starting pitching, period. So your narrow focus guarantees small sample size to sift through for insight.

That's "lucky at cards." Buying low and selling high is the essence of poker, methinks, unless you're the fish. 😄

Where's the bowl of 7-year stale starlight mints (red peppermint and green spearmint) beside these?

I never graduated from penny collecting when I was a kid because my parents gave me an allowance that made the Pohlads look like spendthrifts by comparison. Nickels? What are we, the Rockefellers?

That was literally in the article. When is the Draft Lottery? The draft lottery occurs in December at the Winter Meetings every year. For 2026, that will put it in the week of December 8th, but the exact date and time have not been announced yet.

Why? Because they OPSed .800+ at Reno? That place is a launching pad. I'd trust their small sample size major league numbers over that.

I can't separate my own feelings about the roster from the need to be realistic in terms of what the FO will (or is constrained to) do. Cashing in viable bullpen pieces that were under control in 2026 told me last July that either ownership or the FO feels there is no chance in 2026. It does me no good if I want to say "oh yes there is a chance!" if they plan to undercut me at every turn. As for Larnach, he makes even less sense to me if I DID think there was a chance in 2026. A DH-type turning 29 before Opening Day and with no plausible path to an .800 OPS would be a downward drag on a team with aspirations to contend. If there's a role in the majors for Larnach anymore, it's for a team with no hope who needs a place holder until the young .... aw crud, I already went through that form of fandom in 2012-2014. Larnach's our new Josh Willingham - no, wait, Willingham actually proved capable of hitting 30+ home runs when healthy. Larnach's our new Ryan Doumit - wait, except he doesn't play behind the plate. I guess Mickey Gasper is our new Doumit, leaving Larnach as, uh, Chris Parmelee? I get depressed about the Twins when I think about Larnach, which makes me sadder because I like the guy.

The article has a paragraph about Watkins moving on. It might be the most recognition this long-time Twins coach gets in a TD article going forward, so I thought I'd add my little tribute.

Tommy Watkins noticing son Bashbury and me in our Twins gear at an Arizona Fall League game and initiating conversation from the field (twice, since we didn't catch on at first he was talking to us) will always stand out in my memories of fall baseball, so I'll miss him even if it may have been time for him to move on.

Ghost written by Joe Pohlad.