ashbury

WAR, which has been mentioned a few times, is a quick and dirty indicator to help suggest who should get closer scrutiny and who shouldn't. But for HOF purposes, the indicator I like better is WAA - Wins Above Average. On b-r.com it's basically WAR adjusted to take away a couple of "wins" each year to reflect an average player. As with JAWS, Torii doesn't fare too well with WAA - b-r.com ranks him 352nd all time among hitters that way, while WAR likes him a great deal better at 187th. Basically WAR is an indicator of the ability to remain at the major league level, while WAA gives more of an idea of the ability to excel relative to his peers. WAA doesn't "penalize longevity" - Henry Aaron does just fine under either measure - but it does seem to weed out players who simply racked up workmanlike seasons. For me, the difference drops Torii from "marginal HOF candidate" to "I'm not going to invest further thought." Sorry. Really good player, loved him on my team, but he's not going in. / edit - in answer to a question just above about who else on the Twins isn't in, Tony Oliva is an excellent counter-discussion. Tony's career was tragically short, and his WAR is lower than Torii's (43.1 vs 50.7) and yet his Wins Above Average is higher (20.2 vs 16.4). I'm not going to put a guy in the HOF based on one all-around number, but Tony's the one I would look closely at before Torii. Of course, Tony's been looked at closely, for decades now. Tough call IMO. I'd vote yes on him, but HOF is partly about emotion.

I can tell this discussion isn't serious because there is no mention of Backyard Baseball.

I believe that's for 4 years, if the contract goes its full length. b-r.com has him earning $6.4M in 2021 and $8.4M in 2022. After that, ties can be cut with a $1M buyout; otherwise the succeeding years are $8M and $10M. That kind of money sounds about market-correct for a high-end utility type, if that terminology makes sense, who is past the years with zero contract leverage. Marwin made a little more, for instance, as a full-fledged free agent.

Story is a desirable upgrade, but a year and then he walks is a tough one for me to pull the trigger on. And I'm not super interested in trading much of anything for a utility player. Also, I would much rather the Twins trade from an area of oversupply, and pitching in the farm system isn't that. So, I am most favorable to #2. I always want more pitching. Two corner outfield prospects seems redundant and something another team wouldn't go for, but it's where we are stacked up the most, so that's worth a try; the two pitchers additionally mentioned in the package represent what we'd hope might someday turn into what we'd be receiving in return, so I'm OK with including them. This all presupposes the professional talent evaluators don't think Hader's control problem in 2020 is permanent.

Rumors are that Jim Beam, George Dickel, Johnnie Walker, Jack Daniel, and Glen Fiddich will round out the coaching staff.

I will be shocked if a corner outfield prospect of any caliber, alone, brings high-end pitching in return - I have been skeptical all along about our early-round drafting strategy. Pitching, and right now salary relief, are the coin(s) of the realm. And I'm not too thrilled with trading top pitching for pitching. So, a combination of taking on salary, trading a high-end corner outfielder, and offering a smattering of lower-caliber pitching prospects, seems the way to go, if a difference maker is to be obtained. Which... I want.

Mohr's trade was a month later than the AJ trade. Not saying there couldn't have been a connection, but it is not listed as such. Indeed, if Mohr was conceptually a Player To Be Named Later in the big trade in November, it's odd that the way b-r.com lists his trade is that he departed in December for a PTBNL who arrived two days afterward.

My main concern is that he will never again pitch enough innings to qualify for an ERA title, due to fragility and pitch inefficiency, and the cost-benefit ratio is thus not as good as might at first glance be expected. But, good pitching is hard to acquire, and if the FO can't see a better avenue for obtaining it, I won't complain too greatly if we end up signing him. I just don't think he'd be my top priority, going into the negotiating period.

Schadenfreude is the only way I can slightly justify taking pleasure in this turn for the worse, since it's a rival team.

Can someone please explain the Brady Bunch reference?

News regarding a couple of vaccines might have more to do with today's jump. Very hard to separate signal from noise, let alone signal from other signal.

-- Nathan "Chip" Hale

Articles like this are why I continue to pay the monthly Premium Subscription fee.

Jordy Blaze is indeed a given, and Rortvedt was the name that jumped out at me as likely to be interesting to another team. Although... keeping a 3rd string catcher all season long is hard to do, and a 2nd string catcher has bigger responsibility than most understudies on a squad so you have to be pretty sure he's ready, to make such a draft pick. I took a look at the 2017-19 rule-5 drafts and I didn't see any catchers taken in the major league portion. AAA portion, yes, but I presume Rortvedt would be added to the protected list at that point. Teams take pitchers. Pitchers, pitchers, the occasional shortstop, and pitchers.

They keep track of these things, and you are quite correct - the Twins as a team had a season total of 7 PA across 4 games, after pitch #100. https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/split.cgi?t=p&team=MIN&year=2020#all_pitco Maeda had 1 game, 4 PA. Berrios had 2 games, 2 PA. Pineda had 1 game, 1 PA. Not much, is it?

The size of the strike zone is indeed an additional variable at our command, but whatever the size of the zone, pitchers will have incentive to try to work at the edges, so I believe the effect on walks would be small. The main reason pitchers risk walks is that the alternative is too costly; so if they are reassured that pitches that catch a little too much of the plate won't automatically get launched out of the park, that to me is what will drive down walks. How much the ball should be deadened is hard to judge, and I don't want it to become the norm that 18 HR leads the league, but it needs to be deadened enough that the default launch angle isn't optimized for homers on every ball-strike count like it seemingly has become now.

Every team makes moves like these every offseason...

The glove routine obviously is just a means toward an end. One frequent refrain you hear in player interviews is that the game will move too fast if you let it. It's true for batters and for pitchers - if your concentration isn't 100%, you're walking back to the dugout with three strikes, or conversely facing a bases loaded situation, before you even feel you had time to blink. Every pitch is valuable, to both opponents, and they want to make sure their mind is in the game for each and every one. The argument would be that you are seeing baseball at its best, with everyone giving their best on every pitch. This creates some natural tension for the fans, who have to sit through what sometimes seems like a chess match. There is also the obvious rejoinder when a pitcher can't find the strike zone or the batter looks clueless on three pitches in the dirt - "this is baseball at its best?" I don't have a better solution than to enforce a clock on the pitcher and to not freely grant time-outs to batters. Make the batter and the pitcher equally uncomfortable, in the name of moving the game along.

Two pitchers for whom control seems to be the weak link. Maybe the Twins think they have a secret sauce to fix that particular failing. Or, these two will just hold a place until the 40-man fills back up and the team hopes they will be able to pass waivers then.

If you want more base hits and fewer walks/HR, deaden the ball and lower the mound. These specs have varied through the years anyway. The combination of the two stands a chance of keeping offense levels around the same, but batters will quickly wise up that fewer HRs come to them, and pitchers will be more willing to throw strikes but less able to catch only front or back corners of the three-dimensional strike zone. Win win. This has the advantage also of not changing any of the familiar ground rules of the game, just the effectiveness of strategies.

That's the ESSENCE of satire, as opposed to just parody. The best satire picks a worthy target.

You can. But every game you DH somebody with defensive skills, you are still paying a portion of salary for that glove sitting idle. If indeed it's a prospect earning MLB-minimum, as you propose, that's not an issue. But if it's sometimes someone with seniority, then there's a cost. I continue to believe Cruz was an excellent signing because a top-notch DH is a very cost-effective roster move for a budget-conscious team like the Twins; in almost no games in 2019-20 did we pay to have a good glove sit unused. That bat must be top-notch, though, or the move doesn't work.

In the early days of the game, basemen were required to be standing on their respective bases when the pitch was made. The SS was viewed as kind of a rover. We traditionalists might advocate going back to that. I applaud the historical POV but Keeler faced 70 MPH fastballs so the art of hitting may have changed juuuust a tad. Going with the pitch is one thing now, but trying to go the other way when the pitcher and defense are on the same page is a bit harder than when Wee Willie was a Highlander. Anyway, I'm not too much in favor of trying to outlaw shifts in baseball, as I think it will wind up like when the NBA tried to keep the zone defense illegal - everyone was pushing the boundary of legality, with lots of borderline calls by the refs.

He earned his money, and we thank him for his contributions, but it's time to part ways.

Fun watching him in pregame infield practice, taking grounders at shortstop. He would not have made a good major league SS. But he was nimble for a big man. And he would take the extra base when it was a close decision and rarely get thrown out. So, concur: he was a ballplayer, not just a slugger.