ashbury

We'll get to it, sometime this week.

With regard to correlating two line graphs...

Is the scale of the y-axis simply off by a factor of 10X for every data point in the graph, or is there something more serious wrong? I know that teams in 2017 didn't draw 25 million, on average.

That's because blogging doesn't compel me to not get to bed until midnight, but attending a major league ballgame pretty much does. On a "school night" that is kind of a big deal.

Said another way (than Thrylos's post, above), of the 13 hitters with at least 50 PA against lefties in 2017, Mauer ranked 5th on the team in OPS. Of all the aspects of the season to fix, this one ranks pretty low.

It is hard to overstate the constraint that the 25-man roster represents, when trying to contend as a top team. Much less of a limiting factor when you're just putzing around as a bottom-feeder.

Maybe we should offer him a minor-league deal with an invite to Spring Training. A lot of guys seem to be going for that.

He's still facing enough batters with unimpressive bats.

I don't wanna launch a lengthy digression, but the insertion of this old chestnut always gets me. Ticket prices are high because other fans are waving fistfuls of dollars to acquire tickets ahead of you. If teams dropped their prices, scalpers would swoop in and pocket the difference. Salaries are more of an effect, than a cause, of high ticket prices.

You raise several tangents and I'll only try to address the three I bolded. I don't think we really know what forecasting the teams use, except to speculate that the kinds of sabrmetric forecasts developed 20 years ago (back when baseball front offices were mostly pooh poohing the business school quants) probably were a starting point, but they've gone in different directions by now and have left the amateurs in the dust - the heavy hitters in the world of business analytics have gotten pretty good at teasing out patterns from so-called Big Data. Occasionally team personnel take part in things like the SABR Analytics Conference (there's one coming up in March, not too late to buy a plane ticket to Phoenix!) but I've never attended one and I don't know what they choose to say there but I bet it's not very much they consider a competitive advantage. Second, I doubt they use one of the WAR variants literally, even if WAR is conceived in the desired spirit of "value added to the team". For one thing, I'm sure we all agree, in deciding on a contract offer it always comes down ultimately to dollars and cents. A team's winning record contributes fuzzily to revenue in ways they surely can model, and individual players in turn contribute fuzzily to winning in ways the teams also model. But in addition, big-ticket players can contribute to revenue a little more directly, such as concessions sales (might Darvish bring in $1M in sales of jerseys shipped to Japan during several years for example?) or simply name-recognition putting fannies in the seats. Just being seen as "going for it" may be quantifiable for revenue as well - which I think several posters here are suggesting as a reason to pull the trigger on a big contract now. The idea of dollars divided by WAR is just a proxy for the real computations the teams make, and I don't think anyone was pretending otherwise. Third, I am guessing that the free agent logjam is indeed an outcome of an adjustment, but not quite straightforwardly. It may be that the forecasts several years ago were inaccurate, but the inaccuracy was apparently skewed toward the overly optimistic side, and not merely random with bad outcomes generally balanced by surprises on the good side. It looks like teams were paying more for wins, in practice, than they believed going in - if that's a circular argument, so be it, because I can't know what goes on inside GMs minds. OTOH, they were easily affording these dollars. Empirically they WERE paying recent free agents $10M per win, or thereabouts; their perhaps not believing it beforehand doesn't make it untrue. So they CAN pay that price per win, if they choose to, and it's a matter of sharpening up their forecasts (which, in the years that have followed, they probably have) to get more wins for their dollar. That in turn perhaps leads them to spread the money around a little more evenly, which in turn disappoints the top-end free agents who keep waiting for the "real" offers to finally start rolling in this off-season. There's a lot to think about, when trying to reverse-engineer what's going on in baseball's front offices.

"Actual cost and actual WAR created by free agents collectively" https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-recent-history-of-free-agent-pricing/ Not the years prior to the FA signing. (Which would, by the way, be a very amateurish way of forecasting. As the writer of the above-referenced article goes on to say, "I have found in the past that projections tend to overshoot actual WAR on average". I choose to give front offices credit for better projections than outsiders, and thus that they know what they are getting into, more or less, when they sign those contracts.)

Similarly I've seen references to Brazil or Ireland as "the country of the future, and always will be". We don't want to be that.

I'm with PDX Twin, this part of the interview was a little disquieting. He went on to say, "next offseason, I’ll know more what to do during the offseason" which may not mean no blueprint at all but still isn't anything I would have expected. The on-field staff has been through this before, the players haven't - give the lads a one-page writeup with half-a-dozen bullet item recommendations and time-frames that they can refer to all during the off-season. If Bailey lost his copy, then that's on him, and I withdraw the suggestion.

Or, perhaps, we just accept that the report was mistaken, and move on.

No one to my knowledge has said that. OTOH, no one to my knowledge has asked them in an interview to give enough insight to the plan in order to rule out speculation. If I had the opportunity, I would pursue these lines of inquiry: What kind of talent did they expect to remain available to them at the 20th pick? Surely they could not target one individual player there. Did they really identify 13+ players (the number at which they actually picked) better than the two they left exposed who got taken?Several teams ahead of them passed (as opposed to "roster full") - isn't that some negative indication of Kinley's likelihood of success?Just out of curiosity, if Bard had not been taken shortly before the Twins' turn, would they have taken him instead of Kinley? I believe the rules permit that.What are the arguments leading to an assumption no other team would take Burdi or Bard?The Pirates were willing to part with $500K in international money in order to acquire Burdi from the Angels right after the draft. Could not an equal or even better deal on the Twins' behalf have been worked out directly with the Pirates or some other team, since such a deal would only have required placing Burdi on the 40-man but not go through the two-year DL shenanigans the Pirates now will have to go through to keep him?Bottom line, do they feel they came out ahead before-and-after the draft? And if so, why?Please review the process that guided the 2017 Rule-5 draft, while we are at it? That one was pretty opaque too, at best.I don't expect fully frank responses to some of these questions, but they ought to be asked.

I didn't wanna click Like on this, but felt compelled anyway. Jeter did seem to make friends easily.

Goin's gone, yes. I was surprised he wasn't reassigned, but for whatever reason they parted company. I see on LinkedIn that he's now with the Diamondbacks as a scout, which was something he mentioned beefing up on a year or so ago. I don't know how the Analytics department is structured; someone named Brandon Johnson is listed in the Twins corporate directory as "Senior Director, Business Strategy & Analytics". Obviously neither Falvey nor Levine are multi-tasking to the extent necessary to run the department themselves, although something tells me they might be more hands-on than the average upper-management guys. But if you look at their organization page, there are names sprinkled all over the place doing things that overlap into what used to be centralized as "analytics". https://www.mlb.com/twins/team/front-office

Yeah, you're not going to earn a lot of brownie points with the umpire if you allow a pitch to smack him right in the facemask, all in the name of not reaching up too high and depriving your pitcher of a called strike.

We got him! https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2018/01/minor-mlb-transactions-12418.html

They might be good people, regardless.

IMO Jack Goin was a good soldier for the organization but was thrust into a role that he wasn't particularly equipped to handle and the results didn't impress the new bosses this past year. A small organization like a baseball team tends to value generalists, unless and until a need for specialization is proven, and it took the Pohlad-based hierarchy an awful long time to embrace this particular need. I'm not qualified to critique any specific IT directions that need to be taken, except to put such decision-making in the hands of highly-qualified people and then get out of their way for a while - after which you do as much independent validation of their results and processes as you can. My one criterion for judging their qualifications as a whole is that someone in the analytics team needs to know extremely well what a linear program is - and then they can choose to use or not use this technique (and related ones) as they see fit.

If TD decides to have a Bulwer-Lytton writing contest, you're in the lead.

I guess it can't be a bad omen to have another TK in the organization.

It would be interesting to see a similar video study performed on one of the catchers in the bottom ten of this list. Not to throw dirt on the poor guy, but to contrast more clearly with the images seen here.

I applaud creative ways to use $100M across four years in the here-and-now, if we think money above that for Darvish is "dead money", and if it turns out Darvish himself can't be signed even for more. In addition to the points already raised, I want to add a touchy subject: Greinke has moved around a lot. Most recently, the Dodgers, who can afford to sign anyone they want (they gave Kershaw-money to Kershaw), said "nah, we're good" when they had the chance to re-sign Greinke after a three Cy-candidate season tenure. I recall him being considered "aloof" early in his career; at age 34 he's probably a different guy by now, but I still have to wonder if he's thought to be not worth the trouble, if Arizona is now known to have him "available" in the right trade after a couple of years in close proximity to him. I don't overweight clubhouse chemistry, but it's a factor to consider.