ashbury

They say PoTayTo, you say PoTahTo.

By any other name...

Issuing a walk now qualifies as a clean inning?

If you prefer old school for what sets the good batters apart then let's discuss Triple Crown numbers. BA/HR/RBI. Nothing new under the sun. We're expressing the ideas a little differently nowadays, is all.

Well, Ryan and Lopez were acquired via trade in the first place. Unless you believe recently departed Thad Levine was the keeper of that secret sauce.

That would at least intrigue me into another road trip. 😀

Trading the high salaries makes sense. The Pohlads need to right-size their pockets.

What did you say that was nice about the 7-0 lead up to that point?

72 and 58 could be the difference between fans with no paper bags on heads, and fewer fans, some with paper bags on heads. No one's striving for mediocrity. That's a strawman argument. Now, incompetence, perhaps that is a topic that's on the table. 😀

Ah, you caught my bit of Swiftian satire. .... aaaand, there it is.

I'm waiting for the meltdown before commenting on this game.

You're touching on the reason it was ill-advised to sign a pitcher named Genesis. You remember the first words in the Bible: "In the big inning..."

I think the problem is gambling on human competition (this includes horse racing and I'm sure others). If it's a test of skill, such as poker, or mere chance, such as roulette, the opportunity for corruption of the human spirit is much less.

What budding All-Stars do you expect them to be replaced with?

I looked for a meme involving three rhinoceroses Latin-dancing, but came up empty. Perhaps I mis-read.

Fine. We can talk about Runs. This year Luis Arraez has scored 53 of 'em. He's driven in 49. In fewer plate appearances (480 to Luis's 567), Trevor Larnach's numbers are 54 and 53, respectively. Is anyone really lobbying for another Larnach in the Twins batting order? In slightly fewer plate appearance still (455), Carlos Santana racked up 49 and 52, and he just got released, despite reputedly being better with the glove than either of these two.

Clickbait article. Not happening.

WPA shouldn't be compared directly to WAR. WAR's baseline is a mythical AAAA player you can acquire for peanuts. WPA's baseline is, more or less, a .500 winning percentage, and thus a mythical average major league player. If you want to compare WPA, compare it to WAA, which is Wins Above Average and is derived from WAR. Of course most versions of WAA (and WAR) taken into account defensive stats while WPA is just situational batting, so a player whose WAR is significantly aided by his defense numbers will have a WPA that looks bad, on average. I don't even want to get into the discussion of whether any of these aggregate stats are good. But let's not compare apples to oranges.

So who is doing that? I haven't noticed it.

Larnach and Wallner fill the same role. That role is left-handed corner outfielder. You can have only so many of these on your roster. Sure, if two candidates both prove capable defensively and can produce offense against righty and lefty pitchers alike, then there is ample room for them both. Left-handed batters are always valued. But when there are deficiencies, well, the two guys with similar profiles are always going to be a bit of an odd match on your roster. Players can go about their jobs in different ways, as Larnach and Wallner do, and still face this. So it's natural that they are thought of together. If Wallner is proving to be the better hitter and (slightly?) better outfielder, and Larnach in particular remains helpless against left-handed pitchers, then Larnach's the one who has to go.

I tried to tell everyone before the season that the Twins bullpen would be a liability, not a strength. But nobody would listen.

Concur. What's hidden under the surface when you have a reliable starter is all the sifting you had to go through to find him. Except for the very top draft choices (and probably not even them), there's no assurance that any pitcher can handle the workload of a full season of 32 starts and, on top of that, excel. Even when you trade for a "major league ready" arm like Joe Ryan, there are doubts, and you are paying the price of risk-analysis by acquiring him (look at it this way, the Rays weren't sold on Ryan or he would have been untouchable). Look at Ryan more specifically. The same season we traded for him, we were also crapping around giving starts to such luminaries as Beau Burrows, Lewis Thorpe, Charlie Barnes, Griffin Jax (who was later repurposed to the pen). The Joe Ryan we see today isn't simply this singular talent; he contains these other guys too. There's a high potential for a lot of losing baseball while we work at replacing him. And yet, I can't disagree that the we're headed toward trading him and Lopez away. The die was cast, when the FO traded away all of the established bullpen talent. What I just said about sifting through to find the gems applies even moreso to the relievers - we're not getting back to the general level of bullpen competence (it was never "shutdown" like some teams achieve) in a single offseason. I didn't advocate for a teardown and I don't particularly like it and I especially dislike giving the same FO another rebuild given that the last one they architected has fizzled, but here we are. I don't advocate half-assing things now. I hope the FO doesn't try to muddle through. LFG, finish the remake by getting something in return for the value our best pitchers provide in a pair of coming seasons in which the Twins won't reap any benefits anyway. FWIW though, I have taking this approach at times when I play OOTP as a general manager. It almost always doesn't work out the way I hope, and instead puts the franchise in a death spiral of declining revenue and ever-narrowing options. A final note: I don't think you can leave out of the analysis the possibility that there will be a work-stoppage of some kind in 2027 when the Collective Bargaining Agreement is renegotiated. If 2027 was already questionable as a year of contention for the Twins, it tilts the decision even stronger toward trading away the assets controlled in that year. OTOH the other teams read the same tea leaves, and it's possible the "prospect haul" will be lower than most people are expecting.

I stopped reading here, thanks.