ashbury

That has to be somewhere close to a record, doesn't it?

It is.

Okay, they lost a game yesterday. If they lose today, it's called "two in a row". And if they lose again tomorrow, it's called a "losing streak"... It has happened before.

Pretty sure they called them grinders when I went to school in Providence years and years ago, and the little metrowest Boston town I'm in now has at least one sandwich shop that calls them grinders. So call it a New England thing, moreso than just CT. Possibly just southern NE, unless one of the precincts in VT/NH/ME is heard from.

How many years?

He got clobbered by Houston, but did OK against the Orioles. Maybe Texas will go the same for him as Baltimore. (Ignoring that the Yankees, who aren't in general setting the world on fire at bat, also clobbered him...)

Pick the right guy to trade away... Grade: A. Pick a reasonable guy to try to develop... Grade: C-, based on results this year. Then punt it away by gambling that no bottom-feeder team would desire a guy with minor league options for 2021 and 2022, a guy you yourself had thought was promising? Grade: F. Shaking my head.

The issues are all tied together. I feel like injury/health is the next big area that analytics can tackle - even if definitive answers can't be obtained, trends could be teased out that identify who are the good candidates and whom to steer clear of. Except... I suspect this kind of analytics is already in a pretty advanced state or close to it, and the teams that have it aren't publicizing it. As with analytics on the fundamental tools of playing the game, there is interplay between the identification and the development. Find the good candidates, then bring them along correctly. If I were younger and looking for work, I'd be really interested in getting hired to a team's analytics department, finding out the state of the art on injury analysis, and trying to push that frontier forward. Body type? Track record? Work load? Many avenues to explore.

Go to Subway and treat the server rudely, and they'll provide you a ham, swiss and spitball sub at no extra charge.

He doesn't. He and his agent have educated guesses. But it's still a year and a half out before they can "know". You've seen those hurricane cone maps? It's kind of like that, except probably with even more variance, and without a certainty of "weakening" like a storm will do as its geographic track plays out. We're at Wednesday AM right now. We're trying to pick a price that shuts the door on him finding out where the Monday AM location will be. Some players might accept the conservative offer, to reduce all the risk. Other players are said to "bet on themselves", and you will have to offer pretty close to the maximum in that cone of probabilities, to shut that door for them. 5 years for $80M is $16M a year. That is Kimbrel/Chapman territory - top relievers, but starters get more. Money like Bauer and Cole got may not be achievable. But I'm thinking $20M for 7 years is what's needed to get him to say, "OK, never mind about the Yankees and free agency." 1.5 years away, $140M will get his attention, $80M will not.

Mrs Ash and I happen to be about to embark on a driving trip west, which happens on top of that to go through Bartlesville OK and then to Denver. Wichita is right on the way! Unfortunately it looks like we will pass through there on July 4, and the Surge is in Amarillo that day, and then Monday is an off day. Don't know if I can stall to when they host NW Arkansas by offering to sit through two extra days in Chicago with my inlaws.

Of course the expectations explicitly set ahead of time might (always) be, "you're done when the skipper says you are done." I just got done expounding elsewhere about good organizational practices, baseball or otherwise. But there are some ways that baseball is vastly different from the businesses you and I worked at. You and I are pretty good but not at a level that each and every MLB player is. Managing a clubhouse of egos to match the talent may mean wide latitude in certain areas and narrow rigidity in others. I would not presume much about this instance beyond what we see publicly.

I have established an account at FriscoGiantsDaily.com to register my views on the Total System Failure that their front office has presided over.

PerHAPS???? 14 hits and 4 walks in 3.2 innings doesn't require ornamentation. I'm glad he turned it around and showed us his best. (No J.A. Happs were harmed in the making of this post.)

Am I stupid, or do I just keep walking into these?

Most gobsmacking in team history. Also either unluckiest or worst evaluated during the off-season. Every "plan B" type of pitcher failed when called in to clean up after the "plan A" guys who failed or became unavailable. Waddell, Law, Anderson... at least the FO has shown willingness to pull the plug on some of what hasn't worked. There are smatterings of success with the "plan C" guys they have brought up from the farm system.

Give Ober a 4-year guaranteed contract with 3 option years like Dobnak, or just go ahead and guarantee all 7?

Not Seth, but here is what I found. It seems that the June draft is being held in July. The 2021 MLB Draft will be held in Denver, Co., as part of the league’s All-Star Break festivities. The 10-round spectacle, which is set to kick off on Sunday, July 11, will span three days.

I already had forgotten about Littell, when thinking about this debacle of a season. They simply dropped him from the 40-man by outrighting him to AAA last season, and he opted for free agency instead of agreeing to a minor league renewal with the Twins. His good numbers this year are definitely Small Sample Size as yet, and last year was a disaster for him due in large part to the longball which oftentimes will correct itself. But he seems like a good example for consideration. So, was it fundamental talent evaluation, marking him as simply not good enough to keep on the 40-man? stats analytics, downplaying his potential for a rebound from high BABIP and ridiculous HR rate? coaching, not finding him a way to succeed last year, taking into account injury? medical staff, judging that his elbow was a deal breaker? Levine and/or Falvey, improperly synthesizing the above information being given to them? Would one person in the above web of experts saying "no, no, we need to keep him" have been enough? (Maybe one did, and was outvoted/overruled.) I'd also love to have insight about Littell's own decision to accept a minor-league offer from a different franchise. Just a clearer path back to the majors? Or was there something in the Twins organization he found distasteful? Can't ever know, of course. Was it just bad luck? Or Total System Failure? I'm really concerned about the decision making.

Recently a side comment came up about why modern pitchers don't start 40 games a season like they used to. The question intrigued me so I did a little searching. The results surprised me. Mostly I used the Stathead tool at baseball-reference.com, and the most useful table I constructed is this: https://stathead.com/tiny/SBDaM Since the modern era, 1901 and forward, it's never been the case that pitchers in general were regularly making 40 starts. For periods of years, the major league leader would regularly reach 40. A few years, there would be more than just one, but never ever as many as there were teams, meaning less than one per team. So it wasn't part of the job description, it was an achievement. There was kind of a peak of 40-game starts around 1904-08, another 1914-17, then it picked up again after expansion in 1962 (when the season got a little longer), then quieted down and peaked again around 1973, then basically died out around 1979. The last 40-game starter was knuckleballer Charlie Hough in 1987, who come to think of it had that in common with other "recent" 40-game-starters Phil Niekro and Wilbur Wood. In those 87 years, there were a total of 140 such pitcher-seasons. One or two a year. Zero since then of course. The individual pitchers weren't doing it for years and years without end, either. Only 31 such seasons were logged by pitchers over the age of 30 (despite the myth that that was when a player would enter his prime). 8 by anyone 35 or older. Starting 40 was always a young man's game. For another perspective, Sandy Koufax in 1965 holds the record for season strikeout percentage, 29.5%, among pitchers who started 40 games in a season (and of course Sandy led his entire league in that regard that year, among players who qualified for the ERA title). By contrast, in 2019 there were 16 ERA qualifiers who had a higher percentage than that. And even though Sandy was a "unicorn" of his era, and also a prototype for today's pitcher, he was finished before his 31st birthday. Most of the guys who ever started 40 games weren't striking out the side. Today it's 5-man rotations. Divided into 162 games, that's about 32 starts per season. Used to be 4-man rotations. Divided into 162, that gives you 40. Divided into the older 154-game schedule, that's 38 or so. Of course in really olden days, back into the 19th century, you might have 3 or even 2 workhorses who handled the bulk of the chores. But back then the schedules could be more erratic too, and the game was just played differently. Anyway, major league teams settled into an every-fourth-game routine a lot quicker than people sometimes remember. Well, remember reading about. That made 40 an uncommon feat. Managers would love to have their best pitcher get as many starts as possible, so they'd be sending someone out 40 times if they could. The tImes changed, not the intestinal fortitude of the players.

Larnach exudes so much confidence. I wouldn't say Kirilloff lacks that, exactly, but whenever I see him I feel as though he's wearing his older brother's baseball cap. Larnach somehow fills out his own hat better.