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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    Now THAT'S a hot-take straight from the ovens!
  2. ashbury
    He's played nowhere but LF this season (except for a little DH). We've seen some head scratching choices for our AAA players, but it still would seem very odd to do it this way unless the braintrust sees him playing some in the outfield when he is called up. The one game I saw of him in person, nothing remarkable comes to mind. He'll apparently make the routine plays.
  3. ashbury
    Then you may want to take a look at Brent Rooker's AAA numbers too. Less glove, more OPS goodness, and he's on base at a .400 clip now. He's not on the 40-man, of course, which was the thrust of my comment about Wade. But that isn't a major obstacle if they want to add him.
  4. ashbury
    If you want satire, give RandBall's Stu an infraction warning point for his persistent and blatant trolling. That'll put you on his radar.
  5. ashbury
    Wade is on the 40-man, so it would not take much for him to get the call to the majors at any moment. His AAA numbers don't really have him knocking at the door, much less bashing it open, but he hasn't eliminated himself from consideration with his performance either, if another injury arises or if the FO sours on Cave as first in line. So he's on the bubble, and if the opportunity does come I hope he takes ahold of it. He'll never be more than an emergency/stopgap option in center field, but he could contribute in right or left for a good career - one additional coaching tip that works could do it for him, he's that close.
  6. ashbury
    Hey diehardtwinsfan, your name was in print today! RS, do Riverbrian and USAFChief next!
  7. ashbury
    I'm pleased and flattered that you agreed with me. Let me return the favor by disagreeing with you. I don't think it's useful to compare strikeouts with balls put in play. It confuses the certainty of one result, versus uncertainty on a partial result, when the comparison should be on the approach before the first ball is pitched. What's missing when you say that a strikeout is wasted, is that there was not just the one opportunity, but (according to the umpire) three, namely the three strikes. Now, if the batter just stares at three pitches down the middle, that's certainly wasted. If he flails at three pitches outside of the strike one, that's wasted. If he takes cuts at strikes thrown but in a bad way (say, fooled by a change up or doesn't know how to read a curve), that's wasted. Even the kind of swing can be a bad idea, say an extreme launch angle when a gale is blowing in. But... a good approach and a good eye can still result in a strikeout, and in that case I don't necessarily have a quarrel with the outcome - it just didn't work, on that at bat. Let me turn it around. I could say, "Double plays are a completely wasted at bat. Nothing good can come from it. Nothing. Striking out at least meant you had a chance for a home run." You see how I'm reversing the comparison, one being the final result and the other incorporating the chances that a particular plate appearance had? None of this is to defend Sano's recent trips to the plate, which have been pretty brutal. It's the eye test that he's flunking, not simply the strikeout accumulation. He looks lost.
  8. ashbury
    I guess where relievers are concerned a Debacle is worse than an Experience?
  9. ashbury
    The chasing outside the zone would loom larger for me if he weren't swinging clean through so many strikes in the zone.
  10. ashbury
    This season, when he's played the entire game, the Twins have gone 16-8. In his partial games, they are 6-3. In games he has not played (including his stint in Rochester), they are 26-13. I'm not seeing a big difference in win frequency.
  11. ashbury
    Gulf Coast League. Play starts June 24.
  12. ashbury
    I didn't want to be caught not clicking Like on this one.
  13. ashbury
    Yep, it's #1 so far. All-time? Take a look at this game in 1966, where Art Shamsky came in during the top of the 8th inning as part of a double-switch when a reliever was called in. He hit a home run in the bottom of the inning to give his Reds a lead. Their bullpen coughed up a run in the top of the 9th, and then a go-ahead run in the 10th, so in the bottom of the 10th Shamsky launched another one to extend the game. The Pirates scored two more in the 11th, and Shamsky responded with a two-run shot to send it to the 12th. Only one Red reached base after that, so when the Pirates took the lead again in the 13th, the lead held up because Cardenas grounded into a game-ending DP, leaving Shamsky in the hole. WPA of 1.503, and like Kepler it was only a partial game's worth of work. And the team still lost! https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CIN/CIN196608120.shtml PS. Then there's Jimmie Foxx's 1.307 WPA game, in a 18-17 barnburner. He went 6-for-9 plus a walk, including 3 HR. He played all 18 innings, and I guess that watered down his clutch numbers a bit. Shortstop Johnny Burnett had a .910 WPA for the opponents. No pitcher for either team had a positive WPA, unsurprisingly. (There were only 5 pitchers total!) https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CLE/CLE193207100.shtml Our own Nelson Cruz ranks third all time with 1.220 for this game while he was with Baltimore. He went 4-for-5 with two homers and a triple, driving in every Oriole run in a 7-5 extra innings win. https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/TBA/TBA201409070.shtml
  14. ashbury
    It's bad to chase. It's worse to swing and miss at strikes repeatedly. I'm discouraged after watching (half the game) last night.
  15. ashbury
    I didn't notice the Red Sox broadcasters taking quite that POV. We're still the upstarts and are excited by being in contention. My decision to go to bed after the eighth inning proved wise for my health and sanity. The east coast time zone has definite disadvantages. I figured, once Kepler entered the game, the outcome was no longer in doubt anyway.
  16. ashbury
    I didn't see it mentioned elsewhere at TD, but Max Scherzer broke his nose during bunting drills yesterday. Meh, who wants him.
  17. ashbury
    Rocco discussed that, at about the 1:55 mark in the post-game video in the article. He said Polanco has the latitude to make those decisions. It wasn't called from the bench. I'll read between the lines and guess that Rocco didn't like the choice very much at all. But he's smart enough not to micro-manage his best players, either.
  18. ashbury
    In addition to the other responses... Win Probability Added is a context-defined stat - giving more credit for a plate appearance when the game hangs in the balance than when the outcome is all but decided. Nelson's doing just fine by that measure, trailing Polanco and Buxton who have missed less time. It's true that the majority of his homers have been solo. On the other hand, his batting average has been higher with men on base than when empty. Slicing and dicing the numbers this early in the season always risks Small Sample Size anomalies, of course. I don't trust any stat by itself, but when WPA lines up with the overall production numbers it suggests to me that there's nothing there to discuss in terms of situational hitting. https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/MIN/2019-batting.shtml#all_players_win_probability_batting
  19. ashbury
    I don't know, but I'm willing to bet it's a secret. More constructively, and I forget how analytic your leanings are, but I imagine each team starts with some concept of Wins Above Replacement (WAR) - we can debate the specifics of how that's computed, but wins come from somewhere and to make decisions you have to look at each piece of a roster in that light. If we're talking about run of the mill players, then WAR probably suffices - wins above some mythical level of performance that you could obtain on the waiver wire or other minimum-salary marketplace. But for high-end players, the other team probably is not interested in acquiring two dozen players whose projected WAR adds up to "enough", and instead will focus on something akin to Wins Above Average, which roughly speaking is like subtracting 2 from WAR for a full season. This identifies your difference-makers, and that's what a team like the Mets would be looking for if trading someone like Syndergaard. Most prospects will register with a WAA of zero or below., and will not come up in trade talks except as throw-ins. So my guess is that any "formula" starts with expected or ceiling WAA for several seasons, then applies a fraction multiplier to reflect that prospects flame out a certain percentage of the time, and a different fraction multiplier to reflect that veterans also get hurt or lose their abilities without warning sometimes. Probably there is a fudge factor to reflect character and clubhouse chemistry, injury-proneness from an individual track record, age (improving or declining forecast performance), and of course any existing salary commitments. At some level, I bet that internal computations bring it down to dollars and cents, even for prospects. It costs a certain amount to purchase WAA among free agents, and arbitration sets salaries for other players, so those provide some benchmarks. "Excess value" the veteran player is expected to provide, beyond what the contract calls for in compensation, tells a team whether they can ask a lot in return, or conversely need to pay part of the remaining salary just to move him off their books. Similar calculation is done regarding the team's years of control of a prospect. Altogether I doubt you or I can come up with an actual "formula" that would be meaningful to predict trades. But I think this summarizes how a front office would approach the topic.
  20. ashbury
    This isn't quite "fun" enough for Fun With Numbers. But... Jake Cave's OPS in the majors this season is .615 - his reward is an all-expenses-paid vacation to beautiful Rochester NY. Willians Astudillo's is .630, and he likewise is strutting his stuff in the International League for the time being. Among all the other non-pitchers, Marwin Gonzalez's OPS is next lowest, at .762. The AL OPS so far in 2019 is .752. Literally every position player on the major league roster is at the moment an above-average hitter. I'm too lazy to compute the league's OPS if Minnesota wasn't propping everyone else up, but our worst hitter's disparity over the league would be even greater - that's just Math!
  21. ashbury
    It's really unclear to me why St Louis would be looking to move Gant. Even if they fall further out of the Wild Card race by the deadline, he's under team control for a while longer and I can't imagine the Cardinals doing a fire sale / rebuild. They seem more like buyers than sellers. Maybe I haven't been keeping up with them.
  22. ashbury
    Didn't think I was doing that. Mainly making an observation about Schoop's one play. That was not a long throw from the outfield, and even if Merrifield was not a regular there the throw was more or less like from one infielder to another. I hated seeing the try as soon as Schoop made the turn, and he was out by way too large a margin. I like aggressive baserunning, but not suicidal. I don't remember seeing Adrianza make a mistake (in my view) like that, my comment was just a general memory many weeks ago of the third-base coach waving him home in a situation I thought was a good choice, and he wound up being tagged out because he arrived at the plate a step or two slower than I would have guessed for him. We aren't really a team that is built on speed, and I'm fine with that; our offense is working great at the moment and so we shouldn't like to throw away outs. He's a middle infielder. Transferring the ball is what he does for a living.
  23. ashbury
    That's fair about the 9th inning catch. I was multi-tasking at the time and I didn't see it until now on a video site. I suspect most RFers make that play, as it didn't require many steps, but credit where credit is due. https://cuts.diamond.mlb.com/FORGE/2019/2019-06/15/f2c00e36-0a743b10-11995ccb-CSVM-DIAMONDTMP-asset_1280x720_59_4000K.mp4 Likewise with Adrianza taking a base the other day, I don't recall it. A good lead and smart baserunning wasn't really what I was getting at, though. It just takes him longer to get where he's going, once he's going, than I expect of a guy of his size and general athleticism. Shortstop is more about quick-twitch reaction than raw speed anyway, and I'm just saying that he'd easily lose a footrace to any of the four I named, and that might not be the case for the average utility infielder. I don't have any complaints about Ehire's work on the basepaths - he's just.... not.... you know, fast. If I'm third-base coach and faced with a close decision, I don't send Cron, I don't send Schoop, I don't send Adrianza. Nothing to do with yesterday's game, of course, just a side observation after Schoop was thrown out by a mile at second.
  24. ashbury
    Several takeaways for me, some already touched upon. Marwin is a butcher in RF and isn't getting better. Either give him intensive drills, or play him elsewhere. Nelson Cruz used to play RF, and I bet he still could give you better innings out there than Marwin has shown us. Our backup right fielder is in Rochester. When Buxton sits, either use Rosario in center and put Marwin in left (where he's said to be good, I can't remember), or else give Ehire a try out there. Remember JD Martinez playing RF in the last World Series? Yeah. We're potentially facing that embarrassment when the stage gets bigger and we're not playing the Royals.Cron, what the what? Shake it off and get 'em next game, I guess. I counted 3 plays that he would have made on a different day.Ehire has a major league glove at all the infield positions, but he ain't perfect, as we saw again yesterday.I trust four of our baserunners, Rosario and Kepler and Polanco and Buxton. If you're not in that list, don't go stretching a single into a double in a situation that would only work in a beer league. I'm looking at you, Jonathan Schoop; with two outs a double would be helpful, but it'll have to be the next guy, so be off at the crack of the bat and let him drive you around. It actually catches me by surprise that two capable middle-infielders on our roster, Schoop and Adrianza, are so plodding on the basepaths, but they are what they are. We're mostly a slow team.You can make this many mistakes against the Royals and still win. We used to be the Royals. Heck, we're not that far removed - they're running Lucas Duda out there, and we almost did.
  25. ashbury
    Four of Rogers's 7 earned runs this season have come with 0 days rest, in just 5 2/3 innings. So it seems like there is some validity to your concern, allowing for SSS of course. https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/gl.fcgi?id=rogerta01&t=p&year=2019
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