ashbury

I should do some kind of study on the cities I consider "good baseball towns" and see if my theories hold water.

I like it enough to have been a paying user for several years now, even when they increased the price (and added functionality and I guess changed the name) for 2021. I probably don't use it enough to justify the cost to Mrs Ash, so don't bring it up at the next TD gathering, but probably I use it at least once a week, just to answer a casual question like Rocco raised. I'm not even real good at database queries, and so I feel I only scratch the surface of what this tool can do.

Rocco asks rhetorically, "how many guys at this age have stolen a base?" A metric butt-ton, Rocco. Names like Cobb and Musial and Henderson and Bonds ring a bell? Dozens, anyway - 411 such games since 1901, though I didn't sift down to unique players. Heck, I just looked it up, and 19 games have been played where a player at Cruz's age (40 years 338 days) or older hit a HR and also stole a base. Tell Nelly that Davey Lopes is sitting at his home near Providence laughing at your punch-and-judy 2-for-3 this afternoon. https://stathead.com/tiny/oMZaH (I think this link should work for any/everybody, Please tell me if you try and it doesn't)

I'm not hungry enough for that. Make it just a small jumbo shrimp for me. Rocco thinks they played a well-played game? Grammar/style quibbles aside, I would prefer a higher standard than to call it that.

In his last 10 games, going into this afternoon's contest, he's given us 47 PA worth of .947 OPS, built on a .308 BA, 5 walks, and a couple of homers. That's small sample size territory, but not cherry picked particularly, to suggest he's on an all-star track for now. Please keep it up, Josh!

I guess I should let this tangent drop after this, because I have no data one way or the other compared to other markets, but my impression of the TC fan base (present company most definitely not included) is not good. "Low Information Consumers" might sum up a sizable proportion, particularly from outstate. Some arrive wondering why Mauer isn't in the day's lineup. The steady drip-drip-drip of a losing season may be only vaguely registering; but when there are headlines in the straight news section of the paper that the nearest team is trading off their assets, the tour buses may stop rolling in from points south and west of the cities. If they're gonna be low-information, you don't want to push the information faster than you have to. Which wasn't to say that early trades can't be made. Just that it's an additional challenge for the FO to pull off.

You could make that assumption in some markets, but my impression of the Twin Cities is that the fans are willfully punitive - "I'll withhold my support, THAT'LL help 'em to get better." Probably the MBAs in the front office have numbers reflecting Demand Elasticity or whatnot. Not much can prevent a collapse of day-of-game ticket sales after late July when the white-flag trades no longer can be deferred, but every dollar not reaped between now and then (falling short of projections, say) likely comes out of the FO's hide in one form or another.

The Event Horizon for the Observable Universe is closer than... oh never mind, this isn't a competition.

It's a nice thought, and will work for pitchers who aren't seen as difference makers. But the better pitchers will get counter offers from the teams with deeper pockets and thus more able to take on risk. "We'll give you the same money as the Twins, but guaranteed."

Surely they do. But doing something abrupt that kills the revenue stream is an opposite pitfall they can not ignore.

I would sharpen up the terminology to suggest being elite in talent evaluation, and the acquisition part will follow. And you are right, it's not easy, particularly where it comes to projecting 18-year olds and younger. You have to be elite in the evaluation, and aggressive (to the point of overkill) in the acquisition by every means available.

IALTO.

There is construction still going on, so that will color my view, for instance of the walk from the train station to the park, because we had to take a roundabout route that I expect will be nicer eventually. (A ten-minute walk from our condo to the train station, then a ten minute walk from grand old Union Station in Worcester to the ballpark, was impossible for us to resist - any baseball fan living along that railway line from downtown Boston to points west should make the trek at least once.) Here's a photo out toward left field, which I took because a train was going past the ballpark, reminiscent of when I would watch the St Paul Saints play in the 90s. It's a bit fuzzy (I blame the pervasive netting in the foreground) and you can't really tell that what you see is a train unless I tell you, so I didn't bother to post it originally, but in it you can also see that a structure is under construction just beyond the left field wall, that will eventually be an office building with retail on the first floor that fans may be using pre-game for buying popcorn or whatever. Here is another blurry shot, that gives a little different view of that side. And here is another blurry one, intended to show the bad score-in-progress (it got worse, the score not the blurriness I mean), which gives an idea on the other side of the park down the right field line. Unfortunately I didn't frame it to show the "309" marking of distance down the line. The high wall helps some, but the home runs still felt cheap to me. (Major league parks built after the expansion era are required to be at least 325 down the line, and I thought MLB had instituted better standards for minor league parks resulting in some cities losing their teams, but apparently 309 is A-OK with them. Don't trust minor-league stats in this regard.) All in all the park is a work-in-progress and maybe the story will be more inviting in various ways a year from now. Both inside the park, and also in the surrounding neighborhood - Worcester is an interesting economic story and I hope this is one part of a renaissance for them - having a vibrant after-game atmosphere would be tremendous. Oh, one thing I noticed was a smattering of uniformed police officers along our walking route, indicative of something or other I suppose - rent-a-cops are commonplace near a minor league park but these seemed to be the real thing. It's a nice modern ballpark, with seats much more comfortable than the ones at Fenway, but I'm not sure if they have the infrastructure to serve a full house of fans quite yet. They had the usual assortment of minor-league events going on between innings - kids doing baseball-themed races in foul territory, t-shirt giveaways thrown to the crowd, and so forth. This was the first week of unrestricted crowd size, so they are surely feeling their way still. I don't know if they have specially themed nights planned, but there wasn't a theme for our game. (The defunct Lowell Spinners of low-A used to have a theme pretty much every game, by contrast.)

The PawSox left Pawtucket and venerable and widely despised McCoy Stadium. As you know, I have fonder memories of the place. The Southern New England chapter of SABR is based in Providence, and I can tell you from talking with those folks that there are very hard feelings down there. Chances are that not many Rhode Islanders will make the drive up Route 146 to see their team in new unis.

Pig swill aside, I am ready to re-deploy Wes Johnson, and get a pitching coach with prior experience. Make him the roving minor-league instructor or something. Bring in someone who has answers for when veterans struggle. I have no inside knowledge of the personal dynamics, of course, but my inference is that the veterans tune him out and feel he has nothing to offer, if his special sauce for getting extra MPH out of their fastball doesn't happen to be applicable. Any individual pitcher can be explained away, but I find it hard to believe that experienced major-leaguers all suddenly find themselves unable to adjust at all. Players can be a flash in the pan? Well, so can a pitching coach.

I skipped the game and watched Ready Player One on TBS with Mrs Ash. It was less surreal and dystopian than Shoemaker's performance, as it turns out.

Seems like a trade scenario concocted on Brewers Daily.

In related news, the Twins are approaching the threshold where other teams in the league are obligated to chip in and provide them a center fielder who holds a positive WAR since the start of the season, free of charge. They currently stand at 6, and if they reach 8 starting CFers used the clause kicks in. It's possible that the other teams will contest this, on the grounds that Rob Refsnyder shouldn't count toward the 8 because he is in no sense a center fielder and knocked himself out trying to be one; rumors are that the official lineup cards Rocco handed to the umpire listed two LF each of those games.

"He only sits 88-91 and his slider is more like a slow cutter, and yet here he is shutting down a Triple-A lineup. " Sitting at a AAA game last night in Worcester and watching the radar gun readout served to remind me that this is today's norm. Anyone with a legit fastball is up in the majors, or else at a lower classification still working on command.

"Minnesota’s depth in center field was tested this week after Rob Refsnyder plowed into the wall in Baltimore." I have to take issue with the opening context. Their depth in CF was tested before Refsnyder. None of his other major league teams had ever put RobRef out there. He had 13 games of AAA experience in CF before joining the Twins organization. If he has a concussion, it's a really sad outcome to his being willing to gamely go along with a reckless contingency plan by the FO. The video of him playing that flyball looks exactly like someone underprepared for the role. Not his fault. As for the thrust of the article, there is not much to say. Injury (Buxton, Cave, Kepler), unreadiness (Celestino, Whitefield), and basic lack of demonstrated hitting ability (Broxton, Kerrigan) have successively removed all the reasonable options to play CF. The team's up the creek.

Mrs Ash and I went to Worcester last night to see their brand-new AAA team, the Worcester Red Sox (known almost exclusively as the Woo Sox). It's part of our farewell tour in New England as we prepare to move back to Nevada. We took a train scheduled to arrive an hour early, so as to have time to take in the sights, but mechanical troubles had us traveling about 5 MPH for the last 5 miles, meaning we arrived about when the next train was supposed to (though it became delayed too, in a ripple effect), and we found our seats only in time for the first pitch. Polar Park, named for a local soft-drink maker, is a nice modern ballpark. Most of the food tends toward mundane hot dogs and nachos, but we did pass up the long line for the George's Coney Island hot dog stand (which is a satellite of a Worcester landmark that Mrs Ash and I ate at on one previous trip to the city) and likewise long line at a BBQ stand. The park was pretty close to a sellout crowd on this Wednesday night, not too surprising for a brand new team/park but the waning of the pandemic makes everything hard to predict. The game itself was not much better than the train ride, a 18-5 drubbing at the hands of the visiting Rochester Red Wings, who apparently took the Twins' snub personally when St Paul came into the league, as they have aligned themselves with another franchise, the Nationals. What ingrates. The visitors had the losing record (7-18) coming in, whereas the home team was 15-10, but the game didn't reflect the past. Daniel Palka was in the lineup as DH for the Wings, and Chris Herrmann subbed in at catcher for the Woo Sox. Twins fans may recall they were once swapped for each other in a trade with Arizona. Both have bounced around a bit since then, still seeking another chance in the majors. Palka had much the better of it last night, launching home runs in two consecutive innings; I don't remember Herrmann doing anything except look tall behind the plate. Palka was aided by a very short porch in right field, with an outfield wall insufficiently high to moderate the advantage to a dead-pull lefty bat. Kind of the opposite layout to Fenway Park in that regard, and the AAA decision makers apparently chose to not even try to draw comparisons to the major league counterpart 40 miles to the east. (Although, they do play Sweet Caroline during the 8th inning, because Red Sox.) Among young talent in the lineups, Rochester had only Luis Garcia, a highly-regarded 21-year old second baseman, and Carter Kieboom, who I thought was a "perennial prospect" but turns out to be still only 23. Worcester had a broader smattering of starters 25 and under, I'm not sure anyone really stood out for me - I saw various bad reads and weak arms in the outfield, and a strange decision by third-baseman Yairo Munoz to not dive for a grounder than looked reachable. Until about the 8th inning or so, none of the pitchers for either side registered higher than about 90 on the radar gun. Not many sharp breaking pitches diving into the dirt, for that matter. Made it nearly through the entire first inning before a walk and then a strikeout. Coincidentally or not, 26-year old Wings starter Sterling Sharp was the youngest of ten men (five for each team) to take the mound. For pitchers, AAA seems to be the graveyard of dreams, and few with a live fastball or good sliders stay there for long. AAA is really kind of my least favorite level of baseball, but oh well. On a less grouchy note, Rochester hurler Joan Baez came into the game for the sixth inning; if they played Diamonds & Rust on the PA system when he was introduced, I missed it. I snapped a few photos at the park but none came out as anything interesting. Here's a routine shot of Josh Ockimey striking out against Wings starter Sharp in the fourth inning.

"When I look at his OWar 9.7 and his DWar 2.1 they add up to 11.8 so someone will have to explain BR math to me." I can try to explain it, but not defend it. B-r.com includes a positional adjustment to both OWar and DWar. Right field isn't a prime skill position, so the adjustment is negative, a fraction of a win each year. But Kepler is a good right fielder*, so his defensive contribution is still positive. Adding OWar and DWar means the adjustment is there twice. War is accumulative, not a rate stat, so the positional adjustment grows as playing time does. Over the course of his career, that adjustment seems to be -1.4 While I think the idea of positional adjustment is sound, I wish they didn't do it this way. * Yes Max plays CF some, and this is included in all the WAR numbers, but it's a small percentage of his playing time so the RF part of his contribution predominates..

When I saw the slo-mo replay I thought the ball hit just above where the cup would be. If so, then "groin contusion" isn't just some euphemism, but really is the groin. But I'm not the doctor. Some kind of official explanation would be welcome, though overly personal.

"Drab" aptly describes this season. Generally they don't even lose interestingly.

I think it's nothing more complicated than an incredible level of inertia in "the Book" of strategy. The game today is vastly different from the one 150 years ago. First base was once considered a defense-first position, fielding errors were prevalent, the ball was softer, the athletes were part-timers who had other jobs in the off-season, sore-armed pitchers were a mystery that they tried to avoid by "pitching in the pinch". Slowly the game evolved, but the strategies remained entrenched - ground balls were still prized and an "uppercut" swing was generally derided as showboating. When someone like Bill James in the 1980s used evidence-based logic that walks, for instance, were undervalued, or that a certain percentage of fly balls were destined to go out, there was tremendous pushback from the old guard, even if he was merely reinforcing what some of that old guard (e.g. Earl Weaver) was saying. The ability to generate evidence now dwarfs what was available to James, and the strategies reflect that.