ashbury

I can just see Chief wringing his hands and saying "pleasepleasepleaseplease let me play these guys here for MONEY."

Argh, in poker you don't pay to try to obtain better cards, you pay to go to the next reveal. Not to mention that all players' cards are more or less face up in baseball - no one is wondering "maybe the Twins have Mike Trout". So it's not a good analogy, and I give up on that. But the point is the improved information at each reveal and a revised estimate of your chances - that's where there's a similarity, and where there can be a sudden turn for the worse in your calculation of your chances that (later on with hindsight) turns out not to be decisive after all. You still have to make your decision at the time, with much still uncertain. And if the decision at one stage is close, the next card will easily reverse that decision.

Also, the term "contention" is a fuzzy one. A great many arguments arise from people assigning different meanings to words. Maybe Falvey and Levine had in mind some threshold, like 10% odds of reaching the post-season, and decided to make a middling move such as for Garcia. A mere 6 days later, the same calculation looked more like 4% to them, and they went with their convictions. Chief likes Texas Hold 'Em. I'm sure he's had plenty of hands where his first two cards were worth betting but then he rightly folded when the flop came down, and then (against the odds) exactly the right turn card came which would have made the hand worth seeing through after all. Unlike poker, baseball doesn't require (or allow) you to completely fold, on the other hand after a certain point not very near the end you can't make meaningful additional bets. But under baseball-like rules, maybe you'd like to re-open that folded poker hand and pay to see the river card. I don't know poker well enough to construct a very good analogy, but that's how I see it. Each card that gets played gives you new information and new odds. That one week in July, five very poor "cards" were revealed to the Twins and they took a little bit out of the pot. It happened that the remaining cards for the rest of the season were a lot better. That's cards; that's baseball.

39-0. The way you're carrying on, I was thinking it was a rout or something.

I think I get where you're coming from. Vacillation will blow leadership credibility in a hurry. That's important in any organization, and I suppose especially so in a sports org. Even though I just got done explaining why I was OK with the trading deadline about-face, as an interesting case-study in Analytics, I recognize you can't do that very many times.

Whew, for a moment there I was worried this story wasn't leading anywhere.

It depends on how they use the international bonus slot money that was part of the deal. It's the new PTBNL.

You in the meantime condensed my argument to its pith and essence.

The Twins were 49-49 the day they acquired Garcia. That's not a good enough pace to make the playoffs, but the FO bet on their players by providing an additional resource. A few days later, the team had gone the wrong direction, now standing at 50-53. Not only the wrong direction, but now that many fewer games to make up the difference for making the postseason. It tipped the scales on how to approach the remainder of the season. To everyone's delight, the team went ahead and finished at a healthy 35-24 (.593) clip anyway. Even that brought them to only 85 wins. I don't remember the last time an 85-win team made it to the postseason. Certainly not in the two-wildcard-team era. Even if Garcia provided a couple of wins more than whoever soaked up his starts, that's still not enough to make it, most seasons. If any other rivals had gotten hot, the Twins would have been on the outside. I think our front office looked at that particular situation very reasonably, concluding that two unlikely things both had to happen, and came away arguably ahead on the transactions. I particularly applaud using cash during a season the major league payroll isn't very high. If FalVine took the wrong side of a 4% proposition (guessing one in five teams below .500 finishes that strongly, at best one in five years 87 wins earns you more than heartbreak), that's a bad beat. And it's hard to demonstrate Garcia would have changed our postseason results any.

There is no disabled list in the off-season. Anyone with a guaranteed major league contract must be on the 40-man (looking at you, Phil Hughes); apart from that, it's up to the team to decide whom to protect from the upcoming draft. According to this site, the 60-day DL starts up again well before Opening Day: "9. A player cannot be placed on the MLB Emergency Disabled List (60-day DL) after the conclusion of the MLB regular season, and during the post-season and off-season, up until the start of Spring Training (beginning on the date that pitchers & catchers are scheduled to report)."

Good read. This snippet from Radcliff answers my question in another thread about Palacios: "[He] continues to show that he'll be able to stay at short, which was our concern."

I think you answered your own question. All but the top prospects have minimal trade value, the next tier maybe are sweeteners in a trade for bigger names, and that value drops to zero as rule-5 eligibility approaches. Good players in an absolute sense, at least compared to the guys we knew in high school, but too many interchangeable parts to make it worth it to someone else to trade anything of value for them. Bundling up several doesn't help either - it just makes the other team's 40-man problems that much worse. Roster churn is hard to watch sometimes, but that's the business side of baseball.

How was Palacios's defense this year? Is it a given he will stick at SS?

Officially it's an island surrounded by water, big water, ocean water.

As the Adopt-A-Prospect sponsor for Ben Rortvedt, I gotta stand up for my guy. I don't know if he'll eventually hit either*, but it's spelled Rortvedt, just like it's pronounced. *Actually I think he will.

There's an article on how the award came out, so I am closing this thread to further discussion.

It is always difficult to rate managers, but I like this choice. His disciplined management of the bullpen in the early weeks possibly made the difference in several wins.

Some really nice photos, Seth. Are they yours? Did you get them to pose for you, as opposed to purely candid/action shots?

Surprise Stadium has a radar readout, Peoria's park (Friday night) does not. I didn't take notes, but I don't remember any of our guys hitting 95 the way other organizations' prospects seemed to. Maybe Jay hit 93 once on Thursday, more like 91 or 92 most of his fastballs. I was hoping for better. You could ask Chief because he might recall something. (Insert "worse memory than Chief??? But he's OLD!!!" joke.)

You should do yourself a favor and give the Cape Cod League a whirl sometime, too.

I offer a brief writeup for the final game of my three-game Arizona Fall League visit, which the host Surprise Saguaros lost to the Peoria Javelinas 11-10 in disappointing fashion Saturday night. The headline from the game of course would be Lamont Wade's concussion injury from a collision in right-center field. I posted a few photos in reply to that thread, found here. He was injured in the top of the second inning, before having a turn at bat. I haven't talked too much about the other teams, but in this game Ronald Acuna launched 2 home runs for Peoria. The guy hasn't turned 20 yet - he's a huge prospect for Atlanta. Here he is: One thing about Acuna: he doesn't cheat himself when he swings. Chris Paul had a nice game. He went 2-for-4 including a triple, scoring both times and driving in 4. He was part of the big 7-run fourth inning, in which he was driven in by Nicky Lopez's grand slam. The Twins' other batter on the roster, Sean Miller, did not appear in this game. Given the 20-man pitching staff, it was questionable whether we would see any Twins pitchers, either, given that they all had pitched on Thursday. But Andrew Vasquez did come in, in the eighth, and unfortunately the results were not good. You'd think the big inning for Surprise would have put away the game, but no, pitchers for both teams were giving up rockets all over the place, and the bases were loaded with only a two-run lead by that point. Vasquez earned himself a Blown Save by surrendering a walk and then a hit batsman before getting that third out on strikes. The lefty was brought in to face a lefty - a classic LOOGY situation - so had he done his job the lead would have been protected. Very disappointing that he wouldn't throw strikes. A rude fan was heard saying "you had one job. ONE JOB!" Wait, that fan was me. Peoria pushed across another run in the top of the ninth, and Surprise went quietly with three strikeouts to end the game. A downer of an outcome. I still found the short vacation very satisfying - beautiful weather, and it's baseball! I close with a post-game photo of Chris Paul visiting with (apparently) a relative or family friend.

I got spoiled seeing Buxton and Rosario at the AFL in 2014. Neither pitchers nor batters have done anything similar to raise my hopes this year. Different players, different purposes... but still. Chris Paul, maybe - he had some nice at bats this weekend, so I'll be looking forward to Steve's take.