ashbury

Did you take my reference to Chief as some kind of appeal to authority fallacy? I was crediting him. His argument on the present subject is persuasive, unlike a pointless exaggeration of some other thing he may have said about something else.

If your take is that Julien has untapped potential, and is not a lost cause, your position on Lee is easier to understand.

A "Julien with a worse bat" is a pretty bold stance. Lee hit at high-A as a 21-year old, he hit at AA at 22, he hit at AAA at 23. His debut in the majors at 23 was a little worrisome and I would prefer he start the season at St. Paul again, but his track record suggests not selling him quite so short at age 24. And I am much less nervous about Lee's glove than Julien's for that matter.

The problem with planning to use a guy for "low-leverage" innings is that those innings will come at inconvenient times. Say your starter has a bad game and you're behind 6-0 before he can even get out of the second inning. It'll be low-leverage from here through the ninth, unless your hitters have some kind of outburst of their own. You bring in your mop-up/long reliever, and he goes 3 1/3, say. No big rally, so you're still down 7-2 after five, say, with three or four innings to go (away vs home). Those innings will be low-leverage too. But the guy you tagged for those is done. Now you bring in a sequence of your one-inning guys, presumably in reverse order of ability and seeing if you can squeeze an additional inning out of one, but by this point it's not going the way your low-leverage plan envisioned. And then the next day, you're winning 8-3 in the eighth, and your long-man low-leverage guy isn't available to mop up because he's resting. And then you have an open date on the schedule, and then you encounter a string of five close games in which you wind up bringing in your low-leverage guy to face the #7 batter to start the inning and he walks a guy or two and suddenly he's facing the top of the order and you grit your teeth and you hold your breath and then possibly wind up taking him out anyway and burning another arm you didn't want to. There exist low-leverage situations - plenty of them during a season in fact - but as Chief says, there are no low-leverage relievers anymore. More precisely, no low-leverage roster spots in a major-league bullpen. The usage of starters has changed since I was a youth, and this is a consequence. I still wanna keep Castellano, but he has to perform at least as well as the waiver-wire dreck that is available.

The Twins have a path to 100 wins. Or if things break badly they could lose 90+. You can't say the first about a few of the bottom-dweller franchises, nor the second about the richest teams. Probably a lot of the teams in the middle could be described like that. This edition of the Twins seems a little more extreme than past years, though. I have 'em pegged at just below .500.

The magician/comedian Teller, in a speaking role? I'll have to give this movie a chance!

Good to know I'll always be immune to injury, then.

If I conveniently forgot that this is Spring Training, an article examining the ins and outs of an 87-pitch start would be the most 2025 thing ever.

If he winds up being the first man up after someone suffers an injury, then I suspect the Twins had higher expectations than just that.

Here's a free idea for RandBalls Stu: Something, something, something else, hangnail, diagnosed as "moderate," expected back around Memorial Day, expected back around July 4, expected back around Labor Day, fan in Blaine explodes in rage. You're welcome.

I was responding more to the message and not particularly about calling you out - indeed I didn't do any due-diligence beforehand to find what you personally might have said a year ago, and you probably weren't touting the Saints for 2024. It's an evergreen subject though, and gets expressed at one minor league level or another. Wichita a couple of years ago was said to be a juggernaut, and instead we had a fizzle. It almost stands to reason why it would automatically be so - if players are actually ready to dominate their league, they wouldn't be placed there in April, and if they showed dominance then they'd be moved up. I agree that AA and A-ball are more likely to be entertaining. AAA is basically my last choice for going to a ballgame unless I'm going with a group. I suppose I've belabored my apathy toward AAA before.

Were we not saying the same thing this time a year ago? The Saints finished 70-79. I'm a prospect hound and I always want to believe. If the Twins themselves look a little questionable, brighter days are surely ahead - why, just look at the crop we have coming up. Oh, our AAA team is gonna be stacked. 🌈 🦄 In the FalVine era, really only the 2017 and 2023 AAA teams had good records. That 2017 Red Wings squad was headlined on offense by ... checking ... Matt Hague, Niko Goodrum, JB Shuck., and with pitching by ... Alex Slegers, David Hurlbut and Drew Rucinski. Okay, be fair, that was the new FO getting its legs under itself. But that mighty 2023 Saints team was led by ... Andrew Stevenson, Mark Contreras, Chris Williams, and the pitchers ... Dobnak, Woods-Richardson, and someone called Patrick Murphy. Okay, SWR is legit. But winning didn't come predominantly from massive numbers of plate appearances and innings pitched by the young stars we want to see - those wins came instead from retreads similar to the retreads the other AAA teams were putting out there too. Sure, go to Saints games - if I still lived there I would too - but keep the expectations in check. You'll be seeing lots of playing time for guys you aren't even aware at the moment that the organization might be signing.

I would like 15 years of Royce Lewis playing baseball at his full potential and for the Minnesota Twins. Is that too much to hope for?

Patience, my friend. Patience. Julien like a coiled spring, ready to unleash madness on us at any moment.

Dang it, Ryan's always been a little prone to the gopherball but so far this spring is ridiculous.

Having worked in business analytics during my career, I can vouch that the results can be pretty bad during the first round, or second, or third.... Thanks for the insight. It would be fun to sit in on those meetings at a team's offices.

Yes, that is unsatisfactory. If it's not the warmup procedure or other things controllable by the team's trainer, I wonder if there is something about the player himself that can be detected at an early age. There are some physical traits that go together, such as double-jointedness and scarring of the skin. That's just one I know of, but in this age of big-data and AI I can't help wondering if some other measurable traits could correlate with outcomes like Lewis has experienced these past two years. It could change the nature of what they measure at scouting showcases and team physicals. "The trade's off, he has too many freckles."

Mike Ford... In Play, Run(s) !

MLB official scorers are a tight-knit group who meet regularly to discuss their experiences and formulate best practices. During the season they cross-check each others' calls. The day of rogue scorers at a given ballpark are long gone. In the minds of many (including yours truly) they have chosen to err on the side of leniency and giving the fielder the benefit of the doubt in following the rulebook that specifies "ordinary effort," but that's a different issue than favoritism. Also, since errors are among the lesser-called outcomes in the sport, slightly more common than HBP, it's not a particularly useful stat anymore (like, for the last 100+ years) in judging a player. Also a separate matter from favoritism.

Perhaps because of all the Trauma and all the Stress we've experienced watching him field and take called strikes? We're not quite Post this Disorder, either; here's hoping he gets better, so we can.

"Thank you for coming to my TED Talk™." 😀

Watched the movie Mickey 17* with Mrs. Ash last night, and I think it would be a nice gesture if Bailey Ober donated his uniform number to Gasper. * Capsule review: go if you are interested in seeing a mashup of Hunger Games and third-season episodes of StarTrek:TOS.

They've changed lead trainers at least once, I think twice. Really expected some improvement in this facet by now. Rocco just needs to Get Tough. "Next guy who fails to stretch before the game and pulls a quad or pulls a hamstring is running laps!" 😀

I was somehow thinking the FO could pick the best time to DFA Canterino (assuming, as you say, the process even allows it), for instance Opening Day when every team is trying to trim down and finalize their working set of players. But then it dawned on me, some bottom-feeder team could just cut a low-talent player, add Canterino to the 40, and then immediately put him on the 60-day IL themselves. No, I expect that as long as the Twins paid the "price" to carry him on the 40 all off-season, they will continue to carry him on the IL as needed, and then see what his post-surgery progress is and decide something about him after the World Series. Service time (accrued during IL-60) surely is not a driving issue for a pitcher of his age anyway - we should be so lucky, if 6 years down the line it's even a tiny issue. I do not know if there is some minor financial aspect during 2025 for the team.

60-day IL versus not comes down to 1) how soon they can't fill needs from the current 40-man and thus need an open spot on the 40 and 2) who else goes down with a serious injury in the meantime.