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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    One doesn't have to go with memory. He was a starter for the big club only two years, 2008 and 2009. The "splits" feature on baseball-reference.com tells the ERAs for these two years. Your memory is correct for 2008, with him showing good results until inning 6 when the clock seemingly struck midnight and he became instantly a pumpkin. But in 2009, after which point the braintrust apparently pulled the plug, he was the opposite way: 1st inning - 11.34 2nd inning - 7.80 3rd inning - 5.40 4th inning - 2.40 5th inning - 5.40 6th inning - 4.35 2010 he had only 1 start but still was no overnight success, with a season ERA as a reliever of 5.29 in short duty in the majors.
  2. ashbury
    Yes, this is why teams pay no attention to the K/9 rates for their pitchers.
  3. ashbury
    FTFY.
  4. ashbury
    I am not intrigued by any of these lefty "names in the mix."
  5. ashbury
    I found this online without having to search very hard, so I don't see a problem if I post it. Congrats to the happy couple!
  6. ashbury
    If nothing else, he's providing great material for some future biographer working on their Hall of Fame plaques.
  7. ashbury
    Gary Pettis, probably. Perennial Gold Glove CF, as you no doubt remember. When I looked up his records I see he only once had an OPS+ above 90, yet routinely racked up 500 PA and played in the majors 11 different seasons. An example of someone with elite defensive skills being able to carve out a career. Sure, he hit .236 lifetime, but it was an empty .236. / nah, he actually walked a lot, giving him a sufficient OBP.
  8. ashbury
    You can't have too much good pitching.
  9. ashbury
    I looked it up, and the Twins have had a Bud Bloomfield (1964) and a Terry "Bud" Bulling (1977), but never a Buddy. A new era is upon us!
  10. ashbury
    Your article did not read itself, either, but it was well worth the effort.
  11. ashbury
    My Beer League softball swing!
  12. ashbury
    Fair points, spycake. It's an eternal balancing act between doing what's best for fans and what's best for the players. Losing the 41st man off your roster isn't the end of the world for fans, but (to me at least) it's a definite irritant. I don't want to punish another team for claiming a player, because it does provide opportunity for some players; it just seems like there's a perverse incentive in play here, when the claiming team changes their mind. I don't see how losing a player the claiming team never had in the first place is a disincentive for them to try to find a spot for the player when they have a genuine opening. The current process leaves me guessing some of the openings aren't genuine.
  13. ashbury
    Wow, this makes you like, what, 124 years old now? I bet you and USAFChief can swap some stories, eh?
  14. ashbury
    This part of the waiver-claim process needs to change. If you decide to drop the player from your 40-man, within some period of time I'll leave others to define, he should be revert back to the previous team and waivers resume, and the previous team can stash him if he clears this time.
  15. ashbury
  16. ashbury
    Sorry but this sounds a lot like when my wife tells me, "it's up to you," and then later can say she didn't tell me what to do.
  17. ashbury
    Well-called.
  18. ashbury
    Yes, and if AA outfielder Tyler Goeddel is likely the first pick (by Philly), then it seems like Michael could be on some team's radar too.
  19. ashbury
    That observation should make any infielder hang his head in shame.
  20. ashbury
    This was the item that somehow I wasn't factoring in. The money's freed up to be redeployed some other way. Maybe not quite as favorably as retaining a player good enough to WANT to opt out. But it mitigates the loss, in the upside case. I'm still pretty meh about acquiring Shields for Nolasco, because his 2015 represents new information that wasn't available when his contract was signed a year earlier. The odds of the contract turning out to approach its worst case can't be the same as back then, yet the cost that factors in those risks hasn't changed. I just want the pain to end, not be extended by a year and to a higher degree, so that colors my approach to computing an expectation value or whatever. My thinking also might be different if I believed the team would be willing to eat the last two years of an untradable $21M/yr contract, were the gamble to fail and that was the way such a trade played out. The fact they haven't already jettisoned Nolasco speaks to that. But it's not April yet and maybe a poor spring really will mean cutting ties with Ricky. Which would mean they didn't make this highly hypothetical trade for Shields, but now this is getting pretty darn circular.
  21. ashbury
    I don't think their methodology claims to be able to separate the cases of "bounceback candidate" and "about to fall off the side of a cliff" for individual players past 30.* It just seems to split the difference of recent seasons, with a small aging factor added. Which may be wise, but doesn't really count as independent data on the subject. * Nor do I.
  22. ashbury
    I just hadn't remembered the details of Shields's contract. The opt-out changes the calculation of risk and reward, beyond the standard "will he bounce back or not" dilemma. It's also true that he could have a "good" 2016 but not one that would lead him to opt out. Then good seasons the following two or even three years would be a lot of value. Given that contracts for starting pitching aren't going down, you'd have to kind of thread the needle to get the level of goodness without it being "too" good. In sum, there's a significant cap on the size of the upside in getting Shields due to the opt-out, and coupled with the cost (both aggregate and per-year) being higher than Nolasco, I'm thinking the expectation value comes out pretty close to a wash.
  23. ashbury
    It's not the worst case. It's the best case. And you are shouldering the risk of up to 3 bad years at an even higher price than Nolasco, to gain it.
  24. ashbury
    Yeah, but the only way Shields opts out is if he has a very good year, good enough to create hopes for an offer greater than $21M a year. And in that case you don't want him to opt out. So that puts a serious cap on the upside a Nolasco for Shields deal would offer: you aren't trading for 3 good years of Shields, you are trading for (the chance at) 1. Seems to me you'd be trading mostly for the downside risk Shields carries. Sounds like 3-1 odds even if the chance of a bounceback season is 50-50.
  25. ashbury
    The human brain, and especially hand-eye coordination, already is a miracle. He suffered that concussion a year ago, and it's at least a mystery whether it has contributed to slightly degraded vision at the plate, and whether it will mend any further on its own given time. Healing's another kind of miracle. I don't think anybody has questioned Buxton's work ethic. So if repetition was the solution, the problem would already be solved. My prescription for the young fella is to relax this winter, maybe play a lot of video games to unwind, keep the mind off of sliders and curveballs, go fishing and let the batteries recharge, and then come to camp and see what happens. I think I read somewhere that there's a correlation between playing baseball and being good at certain video games, so my prescription is only partly tongue in cheek.
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