ashbury

I dislike routinely finishing games with inferior players on the field. Unless... the manager didn't have his good players in the starting lineup for some reason?

Completely separately, I fired up my copy of Out Of The Park and took at look at Snell's scouting report. A part of the game that is mostly under-the-hood and affects some aspects of play is "player personalities". How they determine these for the real life players, I don't know, although they catch some obvious players like Chapman and Familia as being actively disliked. Anyway, that scouting report for Snell in this game stated, "Blake isn't one to rock the boat." LOL. Bet there will be a slight update in their database for the next patch release.

I have no idea how to rank these players. Your list seems good. Somehow this article feels like the Saturday Night Live game show, "¿Quién es más macho?" "No, es falso, Fernando Lamas es un poco más macho"

Uffda. When a billionaire jogger gets gunned down, or a wealthy church gets torched, get back to us on that.

Concur. The rationale for why players don't get an even bigger share of the pie than they do, is that "the owners incur all the risk." So now in 2020, out of the blue and without warning, the risk turns into an actual decrease in revenue that may have lasting implications or may sort itself out by 2021. Instead of covering the shortfall, the talk is immediately about give-backs, and plenty of fans are on-board with the billionaires, whom they can identify with so much more readily than with the millionaires. What exactly is the value-proposition the owners bring to the table, again? They are acting like glorified CPAs, informing the players how the books look. Accountants aren't generally the highest paid employees in an organization.

Slowest guy I ever saw on Rochester was Willians Astudillo trudging out to left field, and back, on a day he wasn't catching. I don't remember any complaints about his hustle when the game was on the line, though. There is real hustle, and there is fake hustle, and I don't think many players reach the high minors without a requisite quantity of the former. Who cares about the latter.

The capper was whom we then flipped Herr for. We gave up Bruno for a year of a disgruntled Herr plus Shane Flippin Rawley's bad awful no good career ending season. I'm not consoled by Bruno's post-Twins career being no great shakes. He was Bruno!

Max effort all the time now, mysterious "sore arms" back then that resulted in a bad couple of years and eventual retirement... times are just different today.

Something about Brett Gardner has always rubbed me the wrong way. Oh. Oh. Mike Clevinger. Can't stand to watch him pitch, and his success always gnaws at me.

I played third base for one game on a 1850s-style vintage baseball team based in the Twin Cities, and I foresaw the writing of this article. I wish I had jotted it down at the time, to be able to document this. Not being actually on the Twins, I was given only a glimpse - "something, something, Pagliarulo, Hollins". I did not know what it meant either. Somewhere around the third or fourth inning. Weird. Uncanny feeling. I went back to my normal position, backup bench warmer, as soon as I could.

The DH rule for pitchers was proposed at least as far back as the 1930s. It wasn't too far into the lively ball era before observers noticed that there literally was no floor for how badly a pitcher could swing a bat, as long as he could pitch effectively. By contrast, nobody who bats .100 keeps a job as catcher very long. By now of course a lot of factors have intervened which make it tough to break down. But, I took a look at catchers and pitchers (at least 85% of their games at those respective positions) with at least 50 plate appearances in 2019, and ranked them by OPS. There were quite a few stinkers among the 75 catchers who made this threshold of use - 6 guys had OPS below .500 (MLB average was .758), and Anthony Benboom (Rays/Angels) brought up the rear with an OPS of .349 built on a mighty BA of .150 across 54 plate appearances. Think that's bad? Of the 41 pitchers who came to the plate 50+ times, 20 of them had worse OPS than even Benboom. At the top end, Zack Greinke and Steven Brault were good hitters, but at #3 was German Marquez with an OPS of .583. Management has to weigh the value of the catcher's mitt versus the bat, and only a relative handful of glove-only guys get much playing time. By contrast, there's no strategic weighing of bat versus pitching arm going on by NL team management, at all. (And catcher is indeed the only position where such ineptitude is even countenanced - second base had a low OPS of .480, shortstop .487, and I didn't bother to check the other positions further along the spectrum.*) I think it's purely a strawman to mock the DH by suggesting every position be subbed for. The DH addresses a specific imbalance in the game, one that was recognized for decades - not just a lunkheaded desire for "moar offense!!1!". * "But but but... Zack Cozart!" Yeah. Zack Cozart. Him and three others.

This is above my pay grade to fully grok, but I applaud the devotion.

Your last point first: yeah, I'm OK with that, among the alternatives available to the team for 2020. But the video doesn't do much to persuade me the "arm is fine". Remove the home runs and the highlight reel drops from 8 minutes to about 2. Of that, several plays involve glove-flips to second base, or short throws to first during a shift, or miscellaneous defensive plays (snaring a line drive, tagging a runner at second) that demonstrate major league range and baseball instincts. But the arm? I saw artfully bounced throws to the first baseman, which is a much smarter way to make maximum use of a marginal arm than his earlier approach which too often resulted in scattershot throws that lost accuracy in the pursuit of velocity. As I said, I actually admire the work he has put in to improve his throws. But that's a highlight reel. Of at least equal importance are "plays not made". I don't have a lowlight reel to offer, but my selective memory is that when a play seems like it should have been completed for an out but wasn't, it was usually the arm and not the range per se that accounted for it. I'm no scout, and I'd be prepared to be educted otherwise by a pro.

It's his arm. That's been the issue since day one. I admire that he has found ways of getting the most out of that arm - through a style that I have to say looks unorthodox. But at the end of the day, after this much time to improve it, the arm looks like it will always be just shy of sufficient for the SS job. It's a dilemma for the team, since his bat is way more than sufficient for the job.

Twins Daily: Come for the astute baseball analyses, stay for the pleasurable wormholes.

While watching him on the mound, I get the sense that he's probably already about optimized in this regard. He just doesn't give in to the hitter. If he did, in the quest to finish the plate appearance quicker some of the time, he'd likely give up too many bad outcomes in the process, and not extend his innings on the mound after all.

I'm bad at trivia so I didn't give the article the serious attention it may have deserved. I think I'd have scored approximately the same as you, though.

Speed helps, but there have been plenty of fast but bad outfielders. Byron is a good choice, though, because he almost never gets a bad read on the ball. He doesn't spend time outrunning his mistakes, instead he goes after and gets balls you think there isn't a prayer for. A bad read on the fence or wall, now that's a trite but different subject.

I felt the meaning was clear.

Yeah. What threw me is not seeing the difference (relative to interest rates) between a temporary dislocation that has to clear itself up sooner if not later, versus a condition that could persist. Nobody is going to sell oil for negative values for very long - the solution for each individual driller is to stop pumping*, and let the futures market sort itself out. Whereas, in a condition of persistent deflation, one might rationally accept a negative interest rate from a bank that has FDIC insurance and takes good care of your money. Negative spot oil looks to me like an oddity - while negative interest rates are a very bad symptom of a sick economy. * Acknowledging that there is some outlay of cash in capping a well, and then also to start back up, so it's not done lightly, and thus one might accept some paradoxical pricing for a little while

Will it make my heart sing? Will it make everything.... groovy?

A good reminder of the worst-case of commodities trading: they might deliver the stuff to your door.

I literally don't know how this works. Some upstream drilling company contracts to supply X barrels of oil to downstream refiners for no money? Why? Negative interest rates I can sort of construct a rationale for.

I'm invariably out of my element when attempting to take part in a discussion of the nuts and bolts of playing, but that doesn't seem to stop me. See, if someone had shown me the above photo, without any commentary, I would have guessed it to be a palm ball, or some variant of a circle change that isn't quite a circle. Now, 91.7 is pretty fast for a change up. But in this age of optimized mechanics, it's not very fast for a heater. Seems crazy to describe someone with a two-pitch arsenal of a change and a slider, at least for someone with any hope of a meaningful pro career, but it's almost like that. Thing is, is a changeup usually thrown with four seams? I would think it's usually thrown with two, so that any movement will be downward rather than hanging. With his slider, the "other" pitch needs to stay up, hence the four seams - and I'm wondering if that grip combination is kind of rare? I have the feeling that either 1) I'm not really saying anything different than you already did, or 2) I am, but it's dumb.