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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    What would that be? Gumption? ☺
  2. ashbury
    As long as we are putting the jinx on things, I would like to take credit for the nice 3-game winning streak with my awesome doom-and-gloom anti-jinx of a few days ago.
  3. ashbury
    1) Your take on Royce Lewis, while hardly crackpot, is a thread-the-needle combination of pessimism (over his glove at SS) and optimism (his glove in CF plus his bat) and exact timing. I wouldn't personally base contract decisions on someone two years away - we've seen the damage of decisions made under the assumption that guys like Aaron Hicks will arrive exactly on time as though riding the morning light rail into Target Field. 2) That is a more favorable view of Buxton than I recall seeing from you, and I am content to close by accepting your view of both players, and to agree to disagree on how you and I would both implement contract decisions based on that view.. I can think of holes to poke in my own 2017 season argument that you were too polite to mention, and I could work up a rebuttal to yours, to little value to anyone.
  4. ashbury
    Small Sample Size, sliced-and-diced stats, yadda yadda yadda, but... Didn't the team make a post-season push, sans Sano? His game log on b-r.com shows the team went 58-56 with him, marginally better at 27-21 without. Whereas with Buxton in the lineup, even with the horrific start at the plate, they went 77-63 with him, and a putrid 8-14 when he was out. Looks like the Twins managed to find players to fill in for Sano, while they struggled to find a way to replace Buxton. The data, insufficient though it may be, points in the other direction you suggest. Is Granite an obvious replacement for Buxton? Hardly. Who else we got knocking on the door?
  5. ashbury
    Perhaps a Billy Hamilton who somehow forgot his skills and played a below-average LF instead of above-average CF.
  6. ashbury
    The price of perfect information is quite high in a free market. This not being exactly a free market... the price is still quite high. The larger entity, namely the team, is always better placed to take on the risk, since they can spread it out over multiple players contracts. The player has only one life to live. If the team believes in its forecasts for their various players (or, more importantly, the various forecasts contain assumptions about risk), then they can save a lot of money that can be put to other uses. If they wait until the forecasts come true, there is not much scope for them to offer the trade-off of risk relief to the player for salary relief to the team.
  7. ashbury
    Blame the punitive system MLB has in place toward teams signing 16-year olds. You have to add the player to the 40-man so young. And the 40-man is your reservoir of replacements during a season, so Polanco was used the way he was because of the constraints on the team. Don't hate the player team, hate the game.
  8. ashbury
    I'd suggest "death by a thousand cuts" as a useful metaphor - if it were just one guy shouting words one time, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Also, when someone experiences harm, it's surely infuriating to be told it's not "true" enough. Remember the senate candidate not long ago who came to grief when he tried to parse exactly what kind of rape was "legitimate"? Bottom line, empathy is a good trait to have. PS, please don't shout via ALL CAPS.
  9. ashbury
    Sign him for two more years at something around or above $10M/per. Sometimes events force a team's hand. Public relations can't be ignored.
  10. ashbury
    Aaron was exceptional too. Aaron's power and stolen base trend for his career are both unlike very many other players. Plus we don't know Trout's trajectory yet. So I don't know how the comparison will go as time moves forward. It's just that Trout leaped to mind.
  11. ashbury
    Through age 25, Hank Aaron had 179 HR and 20 SB. Go refresh your memory and look up Mike Trout.
  12. ashbury
    I'm often asked by people, "I just want to know where the line is." Or "I just want to know what the limits are." Here is the answer: We are in a very nebulous and dynamic environment. We are figuring out our policy for maintaining civil discussion as we go along. There are people with different opinions. Every time each of those people checks in, they're in a different state of mind.So there is no line. There is no limit. There are a lot of them, and they're always changing and that's the way it has to be. So just stay the hell away from it. And frankly, that shouldn't be so hard. -- lightly paraphrased from a smart guy back in 2013
  13. ashbury
    You mean to say that by age 5, little human beings will have started trying out the social mores they have observed around themselves? Shocking! I'd venture to say that a whole lot of different types of behavior have manifested themselves by that age. The saying "in order to reform a man, you must begin with his grandfather*" comes to mind in this situation as well. * Actually the attribution I found to Victor Hugo used the word "grandmother", but that sounds a little too pointed in this context.
  14. ashbury
    I trust both Mejia and Gibson more than I trust Tillman, which is not saying a lot. A Tillman signing would be merely the embodiment of the saying that there's no such thing as a bad one-year contract - on the 25% chance that he bounces back to what he once was. Except, that it would take up a 40-man spot and (I assume) a 25-man spot, both of which are currently kind of full. And the ceiling for Tillman hasn't been very high for a long time, unless you're a team with a sturdy bullpen because even his best years lately have been of the "six inning pitcher" variety.
  15. ashbury
    I live to serve.
  16. ashbury
    For helping in your decision process.
  17. ashbury
    You're welcome.
  18. ashbury
    Only if one equates "romantic" with "erotic". I think there's quite a line separating the two. Glunn elaborated further in that vein. The comparison to Beauty and the Beast goes only so far. And this hard-R movie contains many triggers for different people, as glunn also alluded to, so I don't think it's especially wrong to spell those out a little. Someone who likes cats an awful, awful lot might want to be forewarned, for instance. (That's a mild spoiler, but not a crucial plot point.) And, like glunn probably, I was moved to tears by (another mild spoiler, sorry) the sight of a pristine vintage Cadillac getting mutilated in an unfortunate accident, in a scene gratuitously set up by this edgy director. Isn't there a concept called Chekhov's Chevy, where a car featured early in the film is bound to figure into the denouement?
  19. ashbury
    Fair warning, more like. It's rated R for several reasons.
  20. ashbury
    Just got back from seeing it. Since I liked La La Land very much, I probably should have felt the same way about this one, but for me it was too realistic to be a fantasy, and far too silly to be taken at face value.* The symbolism and moral values were administered with anything but a light touch. That said, it's good, and probably benefits more from the big screen than the average (non-"action") film - with regard to Carole's comment about waiting for Netflix. I'll also say that, for someone with exactly the right mindset, it might be the most genuinely erotic movie of the year. Unfortunately, that exact mindset isn't mine. * My one-iine review is probably that it's a Donald Trump movie: meant to be taken seriously, but not literally.
  21. ashbury
    Perhaps my attempt at humor was a little too "meta" - based on a takeoff on a longtime Nicolas Cage meme. BABIP (and any other stat) is a thing, whether the people being measured are aware of it or not. So I'm not actually in disagreement with you, and I apologize for my misfire at a joke. (Unless your "gif is insulting" was intended as parody of "hair is a bird", in which case, OK, you got me back.)
  22. ashbury
    BABIP didn't exist in the days of Ruth, Aaron and Mays.
  23. ashbury
    If more than one big-market team felt their forecast on any pitcher was solid enough to predict this, the six-year $160M contract that MLBTR predicted for Darvish back in November would get obliterated. It's hard to keep up with how rapidly the price has gone up for players who control their own destiny. An ERA you mentioned would be something like 3-4 WAR if at a starter's full workload. Estimates of the going rate in free agency have been in the neighborhood of $10M per WAR lately. And six years of solid performance like that, regardless of the pitcher's age, is a whale of a long time. $200M would probably be a cheap outcome for the team that wins the bidding. MLB is raking in the dough. Top players are getting their cut. If Darvish does go for the mid-$100M range, it won't be with the performance expectation you laid out.
  24. ashbury
    It's still not too late.
  25. ashbury
    Watching tonight's Celtics game, I saw no meaningful defense in the 4th quarter from these Wolves. If that doesn't change, they will be no factor in the playoffs, if they make it that far - they will be blown out in the 1st quarter instead of the 4th, at that point in the season.
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