ashbury

Had he pitched in the 1970s everyone would know who he was.

With a lot of guys like this I keep coming back to the word "tweener". In basketball it's a pretty common concept, e.g. a guy not quite fast enough to play guard and not quite strong enough to play forward, yet a pretty good player if you happen to have the right niche for him. Blankenhorn is too young to be worrying excessively in this regard, but you'd like not to be thinking about fallback plans like corner outfield quite yet.

If that happens, he can be moved. You might not get a lot in trade for him, but unless you think Esco will get worse, his contract would be market-correct and you could get some other team to take him off your hands, with a C-level prospect in return as the fig-leaf. Meantime, you have him to cover your present needs. New prospects pushing their way to the majors - that is generally a good problem to have. But you can't count those chickens until they actually finish hatching.

He's come a long way since the Florimon/Escobar debates. Pay the man.

Not to disagree, particularly, but to elaborate: There's a limit to how much farther the present trend of bullpen use can go anyway, at least with 25-man rosters. Every season you need to cover about 1450 innings (162x9, approximately, plus or minus 8-inning losses and extra-inning games), so even if you expand your pitching staff to 14, that's about 100 innings each. It's not too hard to find guys that can give you 60 good innings a year from the bullpen - that comes out to an inning every 3 games or so. Max effort guys will do this for you, but then you need 24 of them. You can ask more from a given pitcher, and in most cases the quality will suffer. Whether you designate your 3+ inning guys to start the game or come into the middle, there is a premium to be attached to those who can do what it takes to last longer than an inning and still get guys out. They are not plentiful. Starters can't "eat up" much fewer innings than they're doing now or you're going to run out of capable pitchers to cover the innings.

My aim was a lot more limited than yours seems to be. To discredit "the best translation to successful W-L outcomes" (my emphasis) doesn't require much of a study, just a few compelling counterexamples. I didn't cherry pick, just said, OK, what about the WS winners like KC, and convinced myself that the next two years didn't fit this narrative of there being some kind of new rule that KC ushered in. A contending team usually needs to be balanced, and the deeper into the post-season you want to go, the better each phase of your team needs to be. To win it all, you shouldn't plan on having gaping holes. The Twins didn't measure up to Houston in 2017 in any phase of the game - hitting, starting pitching, or relievers. (Maybe defense.) Lotta work still to do. I didn't get the impression kab was staking out a position too different from mine either. Since none of us is advocating to pump up just the bullpen massively and call it an off-season, nor to ignore the bullpen, I think I can stop belaboring my point.

I'm not sure who's asking what anymore. But yesterday when I weighed in on looking at recent WS winners, I was responding to a specific claim: "multiple dominant bullpen arms as the best translation to successful W-L outcomes." This comes across as trying to position the bullpen as the single most important component to winning. It seemed like something a few examples should confirm or deny. I often start getting skeptical as soon as I see "as we all know". I'm hardly the only one posting, but by no means do I think a bullpen isn't important. Is anyone taking that position?

I have no idea how to gauge the frequency, to discuss this more meaningfully. Anecdotal evidence won't suffice, and baseball-reference.com fails to keep proper stats. I'll stand by my take, for now.

Players in the upper salary echelons sometimes set up charitable trusts and the like. An extra $3M to feed some additional hungry children might still get such a player's attention.

I just took a look at the last 4 WS winners. Either by Wins Above Replacement, or Win Probability Added, two measures that are constructed pretty differently from one another, the Royals stand out as winning because of their bullpen, and the Giants, Cubs and Astros do not. You can win a World Series by bludgeoning the other team with your bats, or by shutting them down with your starters, or by shortening the game via your bullpen. I like baseball.

Perhaps, but I don't think this is the thread... (Ditto to the replies that followed.)

I have no problem with this take. I just thought at first I was reading a news scoop.

I've been assuming he is waiting for a team to commit to a sixth year, and that's what's holding up his decision. This is just your supposition, right? I have seen no news announcements saying this.

Moderator's note: Independent of any discussion with TD ownership, the moderators had been discussing the "crushing it" meme. It was fine to debate the term in the comments for the article that introduced it, indeed that is what occurred. However, throwing it around left and right, in thread after thread, starts to look more like trolling than good-natured banter. Regardless of the intentions behind it, I'd like to ask that posters refrain from this particular attempt at humor, going forward.

I can think of one.

Randy Rosario and Nik Turley are the players lost via waivers after the World Series, AFAIK. A guy or two was simply cut from the 40-man, also - Mike Tonkin.

I didn't see any further discussion of these picks. Probably not worth starting a whole new thread for them. Baez is at least worth my time to keep tabs on, just as a novelty. I wouldn't call him a "gamble", more just a $12,000 "flyer" (quibble quibble), and the Twins will likely need to put him on an accelerated development pace going into his age-21 season, given that he's eligible to be drafted away from us the same way next year. An infielder who couldn't hit, he's giving it a try on the mound. He struck out few, and the only scouting report I found with a few moments of searching indicates an 87-MPH heater when he was first signed as a 17-year old. As I understand it, the AAA phase of the draft doesn't put any requirement on where the draftee actually plays, which is good since he's surely not prepared to face AAA batters yet. I would try him at Cedar Rapids and then bump him up to Ft Myers mid-season if he shows any promise. Lugo would seem to throw smoke if his K/9 numbers are to be believed, but the scouting report I found on him shows only a 91-94 fastball and he probably gets his Ks via the curveball. Until 2017 he had mediocre-to-decent control, but this year he fell - both "apart" in the control department, and apparently "out of Cincinnati's plans" at least as far a protecting him from the draft goes. He's already 23 and didn't succeed at high-A, meaning he's close to knocking around the independent leagues for a few years IMO if he can't harness his stuff real soon, but apparently the Twins see something they think they can work with. Maybe I'll take these as Adopt-A-Prospect guys next year, if no one else does. I've already done half the work I do for those, anyway.

I guess the present formulation is newer than I thought. I thought it was an old Bill James idea, but turns out, after a little googling, I was thinking of Pete Palmer, and he called it Pitching Runs and Batting Runs (and Fielding Runs), not "Something Above Average", basing it on his Linear Weights. That goes way, way back, probably to the 60s and 70s, Old win(e) in new bottles, if you ask me - WAR was a reaction to Total Baseball setting 0 at league average, WAA looks like a counter-reaction to that. Anyway, we really need to get this out of the Pineda discussion thread. Start a new thread if you feel like pursuing this further.

WAA has been around a long time. It's fine. Using 0.0 to determine bad players isn't.

Oy, even when I label it as satire... OK, so let me back up. The un-satire version is, calling a player a negative because his WAA is below zero is just as arbitrary as the cutoff point for WAR, because analytics are not especially developed for the purpose of constructing .500 (average) teams. And since this digression already has gone on long enough, that's all I plan to say about it here. Next on my to-do list: a nice collection of stew, roast, baking, boiling, fricassee, and ragout recipes for Irish children... oh wait, I got scooped already.

Mod note: This seems about to turn the corner to saying who may and may not post, which leads to bickering, and without assessing blame I ask that it stop.

Those teams that are adept at teasing out the signal from the noise in the forecasting realm will run circles around those teams that believe there is certainty to be had in any of the numbers. We fans at home are certainly entitled to play along with the celebrity panel.

Nope. I want a new stat, Wins Above Mediocrity. WAM of 0 should be around 4 WAR, not 2. If your nine starting hitters (counting DH) plus at least four rotation starters and your closer aren't contributing at least 0 WAM, the laggards sporting a negative WAM should be jettisoned, or you likely don't have a 100-win caliber team, especially since the rest of your roster can't be contributing many WAM almost by definition. And since I was attempting a little bit of satire with that thought, I'm going to leave it at that. The idea of labeling a major league player as a negative is more than a bit arbitrary.