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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    Your memory is apparently better than mine, and I don't have time to go back and re-read my review of it earlier in this thread, so I guess we'll go with that.
  2. ashbury
    At this moment, I believe the chance is low of Buxton filing an official grievance regarding the lack of September call-up. But... would the formal offer of a long-term extension give him ammunition for one? "Hey, apparently I wasn't good enough in their eyes last September, now four months later they want me on a multi-year contract? What changed during the off-season?" I'm no lawyer but my instinct would be to tread carefully if I were in the Twins front office.
  3. ashbury
    Peter Griffin's long-lost relative?
  4. ashbury
    I find it appealing to know that the HoF's voting rules specify that automatic standards are not to be applied. It's assumed that voters should use their judgement. If eras change, voters should take that into account. The fact that nobody hits .400 or wins 30 games anymore doesn't mean the players all turned crappy or anything.
  5. ashbury
    It worked! The Twins gave up and went to plan B when Slegers answered the phone.
  6. ashbury
    Well, "character" is one among several explicit criteria. From the Hall's statement of the rules for election: 5. Voting: Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played. I applaud that character is permitted to be considered by the voters. But there isn't a separate statement about morals, such as "only those of high morals may be selected," which a phrase like "morals clause" will imply to some readers. And the voters are at liberty to weight these various criteria any way they see fit. If eventually the voters elect Bonds or Clemens, there is no clause in the voting rules saying they shouldn't have.
  7. ashbury
    Brinks truck, guarded by Pinkerton's finest.
  8. ashbury
    Yeah, but I slept better at night, at least until I noticed Direct Deposit had stopped.
  9. ashbury
    When times turned tough at Control Data and then Cray Research, I found that fingers in the ears and "la la la la la la la la la" worked best for me.
  10. ashbury
    About 14 pages. <*rimshot*>
  11. ashbury
    I think the signing wasn't officially announced until today, and the team has some small number of days to add him to the roster. He may stay in DFA limbo while they work the phones to construct some sort of trade that would make room, for example.
  12. ashbury
    Carter's a one-tool player. Bad contact tool, no defense/arm/speed tools. Was there ever a time that a one-tool position player was in high demand (say, $10M+)? Power isn't even considered the most important tool, compared to hit/contact. And if there ever was a time, analytics seems to have weeded those contracts out by now; astute bottom feeders like Tampa and Oakland didn't swoop in to outbid the seeming lowball offer, either of the past two years. Carter's an especially poor example, given that he was indeed out of the majors a year later, putting up suspect PCL numbers at Salt Lake in short duty. The non-bidders were right. Carter brings absolutely nothing to the table other than the homers. An OPS+ just north of 100 is not valuable when no defensive value is combined at all. The similarity to Cruz, an arguable two-tool player, is the risk at his age that he loses a tool. His 2017 numbers are worrisome with his hit-tool, and with another degradation he's Chris Carter. I want to go back to what you said earlier, which launched this tangent: I don't think power hitting has lost market value. Anomalous bursts of power that might not prove sustainable, or power that may soon degrade, or power not augmented by anything else, probably have.
  13. ashbury
    LoMo had a breakout 2017, too, and it was discounted by league GMs. I think TheLeviathan's principle applies just as well to Cron. Show you can do it twice, stay young, and then the big money may flow.
  14. ashbury
  15. ashbury
    Not sure if this belongs here, it being Amazon Prime, but I saw episodes 1 and 2 of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel on my flight the other day, and I recommend it highly. Rachel Brosnahan does a, well, marvelous job. The supporting cast is fun too.
  16. ashbury
    Agreed. Back in the day, other teams in a tight situation would pitch to Puckett and walk Hrbek. Of course Puckett brought more to the table on defense. But Hrbek was up there. But I disagree that a team needs to limit their number retirements to national HoF standards anyway.
  17. ashbury
    Regardless of where each of us might rank Sano on such a list today, how depressing it is to think back to 2012 and imagine someone from the future coming back to tell us then that we'd even have a discussion someday about Sano being somewhere in the second-ten in a team asset ranking.
  18. ashbury
    This kind of recap is really cool. We had a clunker or two for rookies, but also some contributors and rays of hope.
  19. ashbury
    There's agreement here that the owner is not a sportsman in the sense we had a century ago for some teams. The team is treated as a for profit business. But only a business with cash flow problems would let a perceived financial mistake limited to a prior year affect their decision making for a coming year. Decisions are made based on market forecasts etc. And conversely a windfall profit doesn't carry forward. Pohlad does not have cash flow problems, and he's been explicit in the past about not carrying over unused payroll. The way Chief stated it fits my understanding as well.
  20. ashbury
    Baseball-reference.com provides average age for batters, weighted by PA and games (in some mixture). A quick sampling across the past century: 1918: 28.1 1938: 28.4 1958: 28.4 1978: 27.7 1998: 28.9 2018: 28.1 Pitching is roughly similar. If I had better database skillz I'd draw you a graph using every year. Anyway I'm not seeing a definitive trend - we're about where we were 100 years ago. I'm actually surprised by that, since a long time ago it was commonly said that a player didn't reach his prime until 30. Turns out they didn't actually believe it.
  21. ashbury
    The presence or absence of a minus sign also plays a role.
  22. ashbury
    Mod note: Agreed, characterizing another poster rarely ends well.
  23. ashbury
    I see we are on the same page in this.
  24. ashbury
    It would make for a less interesting place if everyone operated under the same definitions. I do hope that Nick can extract from these various comments a way to further refine his description of how he values assets. I have asked similar of Seth when he provides his prospect rankings. Prospect A is ranked higher than Prospect B because he is... uh, more... um...what? One way to arrive at a sharp definition is to imagine a team liquidating its assets by auction. The highest bidder would scoop up Player B for $5M, Player A would fetch $20M, etc. While we amateurs would be purely guessing at these values, even a GM would be unwilling to sign his name to his estimates - no one can know for sure. But at least it would be something pretty well defined, and would allow for a ranked list. But... since teams don't liquidate, and haven't done so for more than a century, would this neat and tidy definition correspond to any kind of actual reality? I have my doubts. Also, highest bid for each player, would not necessarily correspond to any given bidder's rankings of all the players. There are some paradoxes contained even in thought experiments (which here boil down to game theory), to say nothing of real-world complexities. It's hard. I don't forecast real satisfaction from pressing Nick too earnestly. JMO.
  25. ashbury
    What a coincidence! The team with the highest payroll, not to mention one of the more longstanding analytics departments, just happened to win a championship. We can go talk payroll or chemistry or analytics in some different thread devoted to those topics, and I don't want to get off the topic of Nelson Cruz here, but this kind of nonsequitur shouldn't go unmentioned. For what it's worth, I expect Cruz to be a plus in the clubhouse. But I don't particularly overstate his value as a mentor - teams hire coaches and managers to handle those roles as well. Another player will listen to Cruz because he is a peer? Even though Rocco is a year younger?
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