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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    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.
  2. ashbury
    Are you perhaps obliquely referring to the nickname Kent Hrbek saddled him with? Booger, 1) because Hrbie thought his name sounded like "My Nose", and 2) because this is Hrbie.
  3. ashbury
    I didn't move to the Twin Cities until 1978, so I'll go with that season and nominate Willie Norwood. Groomed as a fast center fielder but not even quite average at tracking the ball as a corner outfielder in the majors, someone who also never quite mastered hitting against big league hurling - not a good combination! But at the time, there was hope, as he had hit well at AAA. For me, he exemplified the futility of my newly-adopted home team, and looking back I can't say I feel any differently now although the memory is mellowed to bittersweet - I was trying to fall in love with a team that just wasn't ready to earn that love for a few more years. Norwood seemed to be a good guy, but just couldn't quite make the grade, and a lasting memory remains multiple times watching him chase to the left field wall a ball that he'd misplayed. The line between success and failure is sometimes razor thin. I looked him up and he turns 70 this November. Here's to you, Willie - I suffered along with you, and you're not forgotten.
  4. ashbury
    It's too bad the process was "tedious and time consuming" because I now want the same data for 29 other teams. It's really hard to put this in context without it, even if we have the strong suspicion that it was an outlier season.
  5. ashbury
    The natural logic is that it's easier to find 4 good starters than 5. Another way to look at it is to decide who your #5 would be, and then ask whether his stuff would play up better in short stints from the bullpen. Well, not just "better", but unusually better, since in most seasons starters' ERAs are worse than relievers'. If #5 is Jhoulys Chacín then I'm not too sure - for his career his ERA as a starter is better than in relief, although his OPS-against is a more normal split.
  6. ashbury
    The TD Moderators have just finished their simulation of the 2020 season. This wound up being a record-breaking season and was a lot of fun! Among the many earning lifetime bans because of the stressful conditions were John Bonnes (repeated disrespectful posts mocking new members for telling their overly similar stories in the Get To Know Each Other thread), and Seth Stohs (trolling with a series of fawning profiles of Yankees and White Sox farmhands). In somewhat of an upset, RandBalls Stu earned only a 0-point warning from a moderator all season long, for a random typo. Of course by the end of the season essentially no one was earning Warning Points because most of the moderators themselves had been banned by one another.
  7. ashbury
    93.1 innings for Face. To find anyone in major league history with just one more win, you have to go all the way up to 169.1 innings, to get Storm Davis in 1989. Increase the innings to 180.2 and you get the 2017 edition of Blake Snell, who leapfrogged 20 and went directly to 21 wins. (The fewest innings with exactly 20 wins is 188.2 by Jered Weaver in 2012.) Weird way of looking at it, but it brings back some good names. And it points up just how much of an anomaly Face's 1959 season was. Andrew Bailey needed just 4 innings in 2017 to achieve 2 wins, setting a new major league mark.
  8. ashbury
    Concur. It would seem strange not to put Larkin's walk-off in the #1 spot for "drama and excitement", even though it amounted to a glorified sac-fly (outfield drawn in with fewer than two outs). But I can't put Gladden's contribution to that game-winner any lower than #5 in this ranking. For the several moments while Gladden motored from home to second, Twins fans' emotions were whipsawed - "it could fall... yes! no, you fool, no no no... YES!" It was said that Jack Morris prepared his entire life for his moment, and was ready. But Dan Gladden, probably, could be described this way even more so. It is a testament to what an exciting World Series 1991 was, that four other "moments" outrank it. PS. The Lonnie "Skates" Smith baserunning mistake also needed to be on this list of "Wow!" moments.
  9. ashbury
    Prefer Perry's body of work to Radke's, if you want. (Both accumulated ERA's 13% better than their respective league averages during their tenures with the Twins.) But yours is an incredibly bad take, concerning Radke's character. Read this contemporary report at the end of his 2006 season. He did the exact opposite of spitting out the bit. He pitched courageously.
  10. ashbury
    The biggest one-season phenom for the Twins has to be Jack Morris. He showed up, won us a World Series, then promptly disappeared. Whatever happened to him, anyhow? Danny Santana had himself lined up for mention in this article, but then went and screwed it up in 2019 by putting together a quality season in Texas. Boooo!! Not very many people shared your opinion.
  11. ashbury
    WAR was mentioned in a few of these mini-bios. While I appreciate the analytic side, when it comes to discussing the "top" of anything I feel that WAR rewards longevity at the expense of career peak. WAA (wins above average) is an alternative measure, valuable and flawed in similar ways to WAR but with little credit given for racking up seasons of averageness. (There is something to be said for longevity being remarkable, but for thinking about "top" players I personally don't give it as much weight.) Kaat doesn't get much love by this metric - lots of games/starts but at a consistently lower level of performance. A glance at b-r.com's list of top WAA by Twins pitchers gives the same top 4 as this article, with a sharp dropoff after the top 3, but suggests a few names, mentioned already in the comments, for consideration at #5: Jim Perry, Dave Goltz, Kevin Tapani, and Camilo Pascual. Perry looks to me like the choice when considering both WAA and WAR. He was a little before my time as a local Twins fan, so I don't have a lot of conviction in suggesting him. But at #5, the pickings are starting to get a bit slim, in terms of real luminaries. For a close decision I happily add intangibles like fan appeal, and I'm not sure anyone among these ranks higher on that than Kaat. Any metric represents just a starting point for discussion, in my book.
  12. ashbury
    I guess I have to trot out my pet idea. The NFL does a marvelous job of promoting itself by inducting tons of players every year to their HoF. Baseball should do the same. But then, to address the point you (and many) are making, the baseball HoF should institute a new Inner Circle, corresponding to the notion that we all have anyway, that some HoFers are well beyond the others. Perhaps 1 out of 10 could be voted Inner Circle Hall of Famers by some process TBD. It would not eliminate the arguments over who gets in, but does it in a more constructive way. Currently, baseball purists are forced to argue that this star player or that "was good, sure, but wasn't that good", because enshrinement is binary.
  13. ashbury
    I stumbled across Dispatches From Elsewhere. Only seen episodes 3 and 1 (out of order) so far. The show has a certain style to it. Not sure where it's going but I may continue to find out.
  14. ashbury
    Mauer had the slight misfortune of having Buster Posey show up around that time, and put up a season about on a par with his (in a tougher home park to hit in) in 2012. Made it seem like, "meh, catchers be catchin'."
  15. ashbury
    Plate Discipline probably is better measured by a pitch-by-pitch analysis, than by the outcome of each plate appearance. Many a ringing double off of a 3-1 pitch is because the batter didn't bite on the slider buried in the dirt that would have made it 2-2. And so forth. However, the Little Red Hen rightly asked, "who will help me grind the wheat and bake the bread?" Not I, said ashbury. NOC probably tells us more than having nothing.
  16. ashbury
    All right, I don't feel like starting a new thread, so I will just express it here for lack of anywhere else: ARRRRGHHHH. I launched a season actively running the Twins, and on April 6 Byron Buxton broke his hand and was out for 3 months. When he came back, he was out for 5 days with "back tightness". Four days after that? Ruptured achilles tendon, out for 4-5 months. Sure, tape a Kick Me sign to the poor guy's back (probably led to the back tightness). I am sooooo done with OOTP.
  17. ashbury
    Modern analytics seems to confirm the opinion of the folks who watched every day, one that mystified a kid like me at the time.
  18. ashbury
    Out Of The Park 21 has Hill on the Injured List with a 2-3 month estimated recovery time. Just sayin'.
  19. ashbury
    Josh Donaldson might not show up for work the next day after batting ninth.
  20. ashbury
    Thought this was snark, then went back and checked the source of the comment and it dated back to 2011.
  21. ashbury
    I can be of two minds about this. It's laudable for any front office to locate Diamonds in the rough (pun intended) and develop them into productive major league assets; and of course on a human level you want to root for players who defy the odds. It's not laudable when that is too often the biggest accomplishment of the FO. These guys highlighted in the article would have been just dandy as third or fourth guys in a rotation featuring a couple of real studs. Who else comes to mind? Carlos Silva was probably the poster-boy for succeeding without a strikeout pitch, and he put together a couple of above-average seasons for us. But you actually asked who else were [my] favorites. I have to say, none. I didn't like having to root for that kind of pitching staff, to be honest.
  22. ashbury
    I don't get it, unless the joke is that you don't have any idea who is the manager.
  23. ashbury
    Fire the fans! They didn't cheer loudly enough.
  24. ashbury
    As Casey Stengel was reputed to have said about a young prospect, "now that fella over there, he's just 20 years old, and ten years from now he's got a great chance to be 30."
  25. ashbury
    Nice highlight of four guys I'm pretty sure I never heard of, candidates for "keep an eye on them" or (in one case) "breakout potential". It's what I come to TD for. Thanks!
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