Jump to content
Twins Daily
  • Create Account

ashbury

Verified Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    40,838

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    463

 Content Type 

Profiles

News

Minnesota Twins Videos

2026 Minnesota Twins Top Prospects Ranking

2022 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks

Minnesota Twins Free Agent & Trade Rumors, Notes, & Tidbits

Guides & Resources

2023 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks

The Minnesota Twins Players Project

2024 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks

2025 Minnesota Twins Draft Pick Tracker

Forums

Blogs

Events

Store

Downloads

Gallery

Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    Who? This is such a strawman argument.
  2. ashbury
    We had only one. Back in the day, the Braves had Larvell Blanks.
  3. ashbury
    Clicked Like twice, once for each paragraph. Jeremy Tanner believes you should read The Onion more often.
  4. ashbury
    Psst, Falvey or Levine, get on the horn with Philly ASAP, we've got a hot trade rumor for you to follow up on!
  5. ashbury
    But that's the point. To point to two prospects whose stock have fallen is cherry picking. You have to look at the overall concept of trading prospects for veterans, and accept the bigger picture of what you miss out on as a consequence. Nobody, inside front offices or outside, is good enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and only trade the chaff. Some fans wanted to trade Polanco. Some were willing to listen on Berrios. Without Berrios and Polanco, perhaps we aren't a "potential championship team", on which to build by making an astute trade. I'm not against overpaying in prospects. That's built into the drafting strategy we have. The window is open now. Address weaknesses using the farm as bait. I'm against perfect 20-20 hindsight that lets us believe we could have traded failing prospects at their peak. Because that pattern would also divest us of our core, assuring the endless cycle of mediocrity that we want to break out of with the trades that get discussed.
  6. ashbury
    Probably something similar to what we could have gotten two years prior to that for Jose Berrios and Jorge Polanco.
  7. ashbury
    To A Good Home
  8. ashbury
  9. ashbury
    FWIW, here is what the Official Scorer at the game has to say: "High throw but should have been caught. I thought he would have put Gordon out so it was a missed out error and no RBI."
  10. ashbury
    There was only 10 guys. That one lady's a player, for sure.
  11. ashbury
    That argument is black-and-white - die versus not die. But it's the quality of life that should matter more. Having a heart attack at 48 and living a diminished life until finally succumbing just past a 60th birthday is nobody's idea of a good "way out". You can't guarantee a good or bad outcome, and I know better than to be smug, but man, there are strong correlations.
  12. ashbury
    Yep. A double and a walk, followed by a sac-bunt ... and then "oh, if only the throw were better or the catch made, we'd have wriggled out of this." It can't be a clean inning every time, but lately we've been wriggling out of too many jams.
  13. ashbury
    "Our mop-up reliever is red hot! Your mop-up reliever ain't doodly squat!"
  14. ashbury
    "TRIPLE dumbass on you!"
  15. ashbury
    Also the moon has been quite a bit fuller this year.
  16. ashbury
    It's been a wet spring. Royce Lewis will hit better once conditions dry out a bit.
  17. ashbury
    How about OPS-against, though?
  18. ashbury
    Moderator's note: Folks, in case Diehard's soliloquy didn't get the point across, may I remind you all that the site's Comment Policy is specific: "Please be mindful that comments relating to racial, cultural, religious, national, gender and sexual identity can be offensive, ditto locker room talk, even when there is no disrespectful intent."
  19. ashbury
    It's the same as when Ted Williams was playing. Opponents would mutter, "it's like he was sent down, from a higher league." I thought maybe they would do like with kids (niño, niña) and change the a to an o. But I just checked Google Translate for a different species, and ended up with "empty cow" as my translation back to English.
  20. ashbury
    Louisville Slugger did make him a braille baseball bat. That could make the difference. Stevie would probably tell you himself that he could also do some damage as an umpire.
  21. ashbury
    I usually like advanced stats and can find a use for most, but IMO FIP (the X variety or otherwise) does not achieve its aim. There is nothing in FIP that, for example, depends on whether Buxton or Cave is in CF. Simply put, it doesn't eliminate defense, it eliminates from consideration the part of the game that makes it baseball and substitutes average performance in its place. Much simpler for me is to look at OPS-against. League-wide, you can draw a rough comparison of OPS to the ERA that you could usually expect. Pineda for instance has an OPS-against of .809, and over the years that has worked out to an ERA somewhere a little north of 5.00. Not good, which we already know. Gibson's OPS is .750, and ordinarily that should result in an ERA like 4.35. Perez, .700, for an ERA equivalent around 3.75. Berrios, .666, which I'd expect an ERA around 3.20 or so. Odorizzi? Batters have a BA against him of .181 coming into this game, built on an unusually low BABIP of .243. The OPS is a minuscule .511, so low that I'm not even confident what ERA it translates to on a league-wide basis, but let's safely say it would be under 2.00. Which is where he is. Really, all our starters are giving up runs about in line with the underlying hitting stats against them. xFIP says that a certain percentage of flyballs go out, and Odorizzi hasn't given up his fair share so xFIP reflects skepticism. BABIP usually doesn't stay as low as .243, so there is another reason to expect more hits to fall in. But he's leading the league in ERA right now. Simple "regression to mean" logic would point toward not keeping up the pace for the rest of the season. xFIP doesn't win any points from me for merely predicting that. Meanwhile Jake has logged another very good 6 innings today. We keep expecting regression, but so far, he just keeps chugging along.
  22. ashbury
    And not to belabor the point, but I've seen comments that it's premature to assume the division and look toward the post-season. I'm not assuming anything - we could still finish out of the money. But the parameters for planning on June 9 have changed for our FO from some equivalent point six months ago. Then, we were coming off a mediocre season and didn't know what to expect in terms of higher performance we've all been awaiting for almost a decade. Now, we're contending. Let's prepare for success, as opposed to another lame "just glad to be here" appearance in a divisional series.
  23. ashbury
    It can't be anything due to the performance last night, so I trust he has taken the AAA start as a positive, and will redouble his efforts to keep moving up.
  24. ashbury
    I'm fine if our FO determined that Kimbrel isn't the guy. But they need to get a guy for the bullpen. They need to get two, and I wouldn't be opposed to getting three. If their off-season plan was "let's play April and May to see what we've got among our large backlog of young arms," they have their answer by now and it's mainly in the negative. It's good to stay the course, but there comes a point where you can't. Last year the Dodgers got to the World Series because they had a deep bullpen. That allowed them to survive a 4.1 inning start by Ryu and a 4.2 inning start by Buehler and a 5 inning start by Rich Hill and still win those games against the Brewers - losing any of them would have been curtains. The Dodgers led their league in runs per game, but in the post season you can't count on that. In two of those games they used 8 relievers! In the regular season whoever uses the most relievers usually is the losing team. But the post season is a different game. (And yes, one of those games was 13 innings. But do you want to lose in 11 because your last guys just can't cut it?) If we got three new reliable arms, we still wouldn't have what the Dodgers found necessary in order to stagger into the World Series. But it would be a huge improvement to our chances on the big stage. Our bullpen is woefully unready for what we hope is to come.
  25. ashbury
×
×
  • Create New...