ashbury

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.