ashbury

When does the 60-Day Injured List become available again? I think it's sometime early in spring training - maybe already. That could be the solution for whom to drop from the 40-man when Marwin is added - retroactive to when the surgery occurred - defer the decision, in other words, since other injuries could arise.

If I got to know 'im, I'd expect to take away something to remember about 'im from the experience. Smart guy (Duke being academically selective), not yet very experienced, knows what the minors are like... a profile that fits a lot of people, one that gives him a chance to succeed but not a guarantee. So far, so good, from his perspective.

Yeah, those road trips to Houston and Eduardo's mysterious "visa problems" preventing him from making the flight... both from Venezuela... the pieces are starting to come together.

In basketball, you often see players who are termed "tweeners". Talented but not supremely so. A little tall to be a guard and lacking the quickness for the position or the deadly three-point range, but not quite strong enough to play forward. Or, similarly, a tall guy who lacks the muscle to play a purely inside game, but isn't quite quick enough to give the guys on the wings trouble defending him if he plays outside. Marwin Gonzalez is a tweener, in my view. Unless he has another 2017 in him. If you put him where his glove is an asset, such as LF or 1B, his bat really doesn't shine in the company of other players at those positions. If you put him where his bat is an asset, like at SS, his glove gives away about as many additional baserunners (compared to more gifted defenders) as he gains at the plate. At third base, his bat's a little light. At second base, the glove probably isn't quite what it needs to be. Houston is a hell of a team, but still there are 7 positions aside from catcher and pitcher, and Marwin (in several seasons now) never was viewed as a guy who should be penciled in to any one of them on a permanent basis. Free agency is an expensive way to acquire talent. $11M for a 2-WAR type of player is about the going rate. Marwin's a very good backup, where often the backup is a 1-WAR type. Those who suggested that signing Marwin didn't improve our ceiling very much, but did raise our floor quite it bit, are on the right track. And I think John Bonnes said it best, that Marwin is a solution to a problem that we don't know about yet. Again, if 2017 Marwin still exists, then he's not a tweener, and he needs to play every day.

Followup: ha, I brought up Eduardo Escobar's b-r.com page while checking something for the above post, and guess who shows up #2 in the Similarity Score career rankings, and #1 through age-29 seasons? Marwin. Small world. Maybe this was already been brought up?

That's my first reaction too. But - they did get a pretty good return in the form of prospects when they traded him. And it's far from a 100% chance that they could have signed him - he played pretty much as a regular for Arizona as a third-baseman, whereas at MN the evidence is pretty clear that he's viewed as a backup. Maybe he's been promised a starting 3B role for 2019 at Arizona. It might have taken nearly the same money as for Marwin, to convince Eduardo to sign an extension last July (or to lure him back as a free agent, which I think he never became). And, we do have those prospects. I just worry that by mid-season there's going to be a lot of carping here about Marwin's fielding, unless he is confined to corner-defense duty. I haven't watched him and I could be wrong about that. / edit - I took too long typing, and basically repeated dbminn

Pronunciation: \MAR-win\ You're on your own, for the last name.

Concur. I envision the third-best reliever in your bullpen for the role. A guy you would be calling into service anyway, only later, in a game you intend to try hard to win. If you are sending Matty Belisle out there to begin the game, You're Doing It Wrong.

This is on the right track but I would add a little more. If the guy who would otherwise be your starting pitcher is like this, then there's no chance in the world he's pitching a complete game, and extremely unlikely to pitch even six full innings, even if he does pretty well within his limitations. So your bullpen is virtually certain to be used heavily. In that case, bite the bullet. Get a quality short man in there to face the top of the lineup right away. With luck, the "starter" you bring in for the second inning will do well with the lower portion of the lineup, and then get through the complete lineup two more times after that. This strategy potentially gets an extra inning or so out of the starter, compared to having to come rescue him when he gets in trouble the third time through the top of the lineup. Then you turn the game over to the bullpen as you otherwise would have to, when he's about to face the top of the lineup a third time (fourth time overall in the game). It's basically matching up mediocrity against the bottom of the lineup, more times than against the top. You don't do it with a starter who has a track record of holding his own. And you use this as carrot-and-stick with your shaky starter, to tell him that when he starts to demonstrate better staying power, for instance by letting him go ahead and face the top of the lineup a third time if the game is going well and you have a decent lead, then eventually you can take the training wheels off and let him start the game like normal. It's training wheels for youngsters. A walker for the older starter who is just hanging on.

I wonder what Cole yells at the opposing dugout when a lefty is brought in to pinch hit against him.

Physics. Good man.

FTFY

Closer to Hammond Stadium is Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve, IMO a worthwhile alternative/addition to the nature activities already mentioned. There are guided walks twice a day this time of year. Further south is Naples Botanical Garden, which Mrs Ash and I enjoyed.

Hammond sells out too, for an easily predictable set of opponents. Yankees and Red Sox come to mind. You can pick up tickets from scalpers, but I personally rebel at too high a price for a game where the stars only play part of a game. Anyway, planning ahead is probably a good idea for every Twins game too, unless you are OK with a backup Plan B for your afternoon.

Mid-March is the time for me (sadly, not this year). By then the minor league schedule has started, and you can geek out all afternoon in addition to the morning activities JB outlined. Two, perhaps three, games are running simultaneously, and those back fields are arranged so you can pivot from one to another with minimal effort, for instance to watch key prospects bat in both games. Even better is when one of the major-leaguers gets left behind for extra work, when the big squad is off to a road game - the games are umpired but the ground rules are uber-loose, and so you might see a veteran bat leadoff every inning against a succession of the other team's AA hopefuls - or an inning may end abruptly with two outs and runners in scoring position as the pitcher reaches a pitch count, no one wanting to bother warming up a reliever prematurely to finish the inning. You can get right up close, for the best photos you are capable of taking. I prefer that environment most days, even on the days the big club isn't on the road.

The breaking pitches to Buxton that I remember, I want to be laid off, not swung at.

I suspect you're going to be equally wowed by every contract extension of a not-yet-FA-eligible young player you read about, by any team, then. The reason $7M for a good season will be a great deal is that the contract blends also all the risk of not-great outcomes into the price. You're looking at the upside but not the downside. Which... is fine for our team to do. They, being the ones who sign a few dozen player contracts every year, are better placed to absorb the risk, than the player who has only one life to live and values the certainty. Kepler's now set for life - the tradeoff being that he could have bet on himself and possibly gotten more, but just as possibly ended up with almost nothing if the worst were to happen. So, good deal for both sides - just like life insurance is a good deal for those at certain times in their lives - the individual has the risk smoothed out, the big company comes out ahead on average. But way short of "incredible," the term you chose, for the team.

You've aged a lot in recent weeks.

I'm not sure if the story was actually buried. I believe that Kodiak brown bear received some MVP votes the following November in recognition of his contribution to the team. We've collectively just pushed Clete out of our memory.

It was of course Seth who brought up FG, in the first reply. While well-intentioned, and casts the new contract in a favorable light, I think it is a serious misuse of the notion of dollars-per-WAR. And not for the reasons already brought up. I wouldn't quibble about the exact value per win - you'll find differing values depending on which FG article you look at and which years were looked at, and whether the methodology was forward-looking or backward-looking, among other things. The bigger problem is that the number pertains to free agents. The Collective Bargaining Agreement is structured a certain way. As it has evolved, the premium paid to free agents amounts to the Stupidity Tax you pay for not having developed your own, young, cheap talent, for whatever spot on the roster you have decided is below par. Every team has to pay this Stupidity Tax now and then (so I use the word Stupidity as mildly humorous); on the other hand, no team is now willing to pay also the Luxury Tax that comes on top of paying the Stupidity Tax for every player on the roster. All teams are somewhere between the extremes. Max Kepler was not a free agent. Full stop. Using the free agent Stupidity Tax, as a benchmark, is what one boss of mine used to call "interesting, but not relevant." The CBA makes it so that good players are vastly underpaid their first several years, and maybe marginally underpaid for the next several as well. Your (John's) charts demonstrate this quite well. Any contract extension that is reached during these years of a player's career is going to be shaped partly by the years remaining under team control, partly by the years of free agency being bought out, and partly by the security it gives both player and team. EVERY such contract is going to look good, compared to paying the Stupidity Tax. That doesn't mean an individual contract is good, by itself. Free agency is the wrong benchmark to use. Max Kepler wasn't a free agent. (Yes, that bears repeating.) What difference does it make? None, really, to us fans. But if our front office is congratulating themselves to the degree that Seth suggested, saying that the contract is a steal? Then it's a problem. If I were in Dave St Peter's or Jim Pohlad's position, I'd be very concerned about their acumen and would walk into their champagne party to tell them so. Anyone could load up on players with contract extensions like this, and still not have a very good, or particularly cost-effective, team for competing to make the post-season. I'm sure FalVine are not actually breaking open a bottle of the bubbly this week. Max is entitled to - he's now set for life, as he deserves to be in this economy. Like any long-term contract, Kepler's has enough uncertainty that it could turn out to be a steal for the team, or could turn out to be a bust - either outcome won't in retrospect make this any other than what it seems to be, a contract that's about market-correct. If someone with a sharper business eye than mine, or has better forecasting tools, thinks it's team-friendly, it's got to be only by a smidgen. Sprinkle IMO everywhere in the above, to taste.

Great article, and in return I offer mere quibbles: - Max's baseball experience in Germany is often mischaracterized like that. There is a small but strong American influence there, and he played as a young child, and attended the best baseball academy in that country. Maybe the instruction wasn't quite as good as he'd have gotten at the best places here. But it's far from him having been discovered on a Pacific atoll throwing coconuts into the ocean to conk distant dolphins, and having a tourist show him a baseball and ask, "y'ever seen one a these?" - Age 27 is about when a player had better already have established what he's going to establish, and not hope for further upswing. That's about the point where further learning and experience starts to collide with Father Time eroding the physical gifts. - This off-season free agent market has been a wakeup call for players in their thirties, and additionally with the CBA coming up for renegotiation it's really unclear what the market for Max will be when the time comes. Yes, he'll find employment if he's still capable, but it may turn out in retrospect that players in his age cohort had better have made the vast majority of their lifetime earnings during the period this new contract covers. The times, they are a-changing.

The Sophomore Jinx was a common trope when I was growing up, and back then we didn't know to look for signs like a high BABIP that might not be sustainable. Nowadays we spot these things in advance, and guys like Danny Santana don't catch us by surprise as often. This is what has people looking skeptically at Cave this year - though he might still defy this sign (his bat is better than Santana's). Think about how good rookie seasons occur. If a young guy does poorly in April, he may get sent down to AAA before his rookie status is expired, rather than let him see whether the breaks might even out for him over the course of the full season. They also don't suffer the nagging injuries that can torpedo a season. Only the guys doing well stay up long enough to qualify for Rookie of the Year discussion. So there's a bit of a statistical bias built in, where there's more to lose than to gain in the following season, if luck happens to even out in the other direction. Tampa's relatively unheralded Joey Wendle got RoY votes, and his BABIP was .353 - guess who I'd put money on suffering some kind of mild Sophomore Jinx? I don't have the database chops to do it, but I bet if you went back to the era before sabrmetrics took hold, you could take the guys with good rookie seasons and find a strong (negative) correlation between BABIP and how well they did the next season. The same study done on more modern players might not show as strong a correlation because front offices are paying attention to that, putting a different kind of bias into the data. Anyway. Jake Cave. Yeah.

Nice tidbits - his close tie to Polanco was something I don't recall seeing. Also, did you know his parents dance ballet? (yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss)

“We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well, but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” -- Mark Twin [sic]

That's a whatever-is-the-opposite-of-scorching Tepid Take, man!