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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    The higher up in the organization, the more skills are needed. One reason I'm reluctant to see Terry Ryan go, even if I can name some faults, is that the GM position requires so many skills and our current guy doesn't have (IMO) a fatal flaw in any of them - the next person who sits in the chair will have a different collection of faults and it might not be clear that some of them are deal-breakers until too late. Being field manager is also complex, though IMO less so than the GM position, so I have similar concerns about trading Gardy's flaws for somebody else's. But at the coaching level, well, more than one attribute may be needed, but still the skills seem much less rare. Anderson may indeed still be a good coach, but if he is mistakenly fired his replacement is much less likely to flame out totally, than for the higher-up positions. It's thus less risky to simply go by results and say it's time to move on. I feel the same about any coaching position, if a pattern of failure is showing.
  2. ashbury
    I don't think Anderson is necessarily a "bad" pitching coach. But his job is to find answers and not enough answers have been found the past several seasons. I like Ryan and am OK with Gardy, but I think pitching coach is a weak spot that needs to be addressed.
  3. ashbury
    I missed that news item, and/or didn't recall such things in the past. Good to hear. With all the extra players, you need the extra babysitters too.
  4. ashbury
    In either case, I'm not looking for exact parallels. I'm looking for principles behind what a successful organization has been doing.
  5. ashbury
    When Bernier came into the game the score was already 10-3 and he came in to face a journeyman reliever having a bad season. Doug's going to play some innings, and these were not ones that would be terribly indicative of anything or particularly educational had Santana played them. Relative to the start Nunez is getting tonight, this one doesn't register, for me.
  6. ashbury
    Are coaches ever called up for September? Because I'd like to see what Rochester's pitching coach could do.
  7. ashbury
    You're asking the right questions and I don't know the answers. If you ever get a chance to interview Adam Wainright, you could ask him. 2006: 61 games 75 IP 2007: 32 games 202 IP Rigorous simulated innings between relief appearances his rookie year, is my guess, but purely that. Other Cardinal pitchers had less extreme situations. Lance Lynn in the bullpen for a while in 2011 and then a full SP load the next year, Shelby Miller in a short stint of relief in 2012 before full-time starting. But they don't always do it that way either, Michael Wacha started in his first 5 major league appearances. Unless the front office wants to divulge their secret sauce, you'd probably have to piece it together by interviewing pitchers one by one and see what emerged about their process and whether anything could be inferred as to the philosophy.
  8. ashbury
    I like how St Louis sometimes gets prospective starters' feet wet with some time in their major league bullpen, as much as a full season, and I would like to see some of that here too.
  9. ashbury
    You frequently find Runs/Game numbers for teams and leagues, but I don't remember ever seeing the next step taken and publish the standard deviation of runs scored by teams. With 20 runs against the Twins the other day, I would think sigma for the Twins would be a bit high, indicating an offense you can't rely on as much as the mean would suggest.
  10. ashbury
    I don't care much one way or the other whether assessing Aaron Hicks in September is meaningful. I care more about giving him additional experience with major league competition - even with Sept callups it's more representative than AAA. Another month of experience can hardly be a bad thing, can it? What else is he to do with his September, play videogames in his mancave? / disclaimer - I know nothing about the gentleman's home situation or his recreational preferences, it's just a metaphor
  11. ashbury
    I think the other managers will respect Gardenhire and/or Ryan (which to me is the main issue at stake) if every game they put together a representative lineup that includes sensible callups, e.g. when lefty-righty matchups call for it. It's not a winning team so having the nominal "starters" always in the lineup isn't necessarily better. I doubt some obvious metric like "3 callups" would improve anything; moreover the Twins aren't facing all the contenders in equal numbers of games so consistency in numbers won't matter with the teams not being played against.
  12. ashbury
    FYI, if you want to use it, there is an Edit button on the same line under your post as "MultiQuote" and "Quote". You have to play a little hide-and-seek using your mouse to locate it, if your eyes are over 30 years old, but once the mouse/cursor is in the vicinity the options light up. Don't know why.
  13. ashbury
    A product manager who influenced me many years ago assured me that successful business people do not use gambling metaphors for their decision making process.
  14. ashbury
    I'm in the camp that views him as a utility player for a ceiling. More specifically, a good utility player for a contending team, or a starter for a bad team. Since I don't want the Twins to continue being bad, I don't focus on the latter. But what you said (ignoring names of other candidates) fits in with this general POV. He'll stop being a starter when the Twins reach the state where he shouldn't be their starter, IMO.
  15. ashbury
    Moderator's note: Yep. I'd add that bashing, as such, usually violates respectful dialog, so that might be why you don't see much. Disrespect and trolling/threadjacking are the two most important taboos highlighted in the TD Comment Policy. OTOH intelligent and constructive criticism of the team, even when highly pointed, has never been grounds for moderator action. Any thread stands to be subjected to somebody wanting to look at things from a "higher level" or other forms of topic drift, and a certain amount of it makes for lively discussion. But a write-up of a day's minor league results doesn't need to become a referendum on the state of the Twins franchise, because that could be repeated every day. I think that point has been reached now; if someone wants to continue the high-level discussion of the Twins organization, please start a new thread.
  16. ashbury
    Actually, your observational bias isn't as bad as that. It's true that a majority of Arcia's HR have not come with the game essentially out of reach. But that's because relatively few of his plate appearances come in such conditions. So the counting stats don't come out as extreme, but the rate stats do: From B-R.com, and not counting tonight's game: Lead within 4: 231 PA, .203 BA, 7 HR, .653 OPS Lead > 4: 37 PA, .351 BA, 4 HR, 1.130 If he could get a full season of PA at the rate of that second line, he'd hit 75 HR or so. Needless to say, the first line isn't a very big sample size, and the second line is woefully small. League-wide, the rates in such pairs of lines tend to be more close to each other, and likely with more chances Arcia's numbers would trend more like that too. But, if one is remembering very good performance from Arcia this season (and to a lesser degree last season) in blowout situations, it's not observational bias per se. Unless your observational bias is that the Twins are hopelessly behind in 50% of their plate appearances. Source: http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.cgi?id=arciaos01&year=2014&t=b
  17. ashbury
    I could imagine moderators giving scrutiny to posts in this thread, yes.
  18. ashbury
    Exactly how they'd do it, I imagine. It's the kind of thing that makes it easier to sign quality minor leaguers and give your farm teams competitive seasons, and if it costs the team next to nothing then why not do it?
  19. ashbury
    Harrisburg 5, New Britain 1?
  20. ashbury

    The Game

    ashbury commented on ashbury's blog entry in Left Coast Bias

    Everything somewhat came together except for Morneau inexplicably being super logical and all. I decided that "oh, he's Canadian" was enough of a joke to carry his alien-ness. If not for that, coolly confident Mauer would be the better Spock, but then there is no captain of the team - Gardy? Nah. Ryan? Nah. Or I could have brought back college-boy Slowey as Spock, but I didn't think any special chemistry between him and Mauer would make sense. Gardy's a good sputtering humanist like McCoy, but he doesn't consider Morneau/Spock an annoyance. Ryan makes a passable "engineer" of the team as Scotty, but I doubt he's a heavy drinker. More work could make it better, but I liked the idea of making minimal edits (of a story nobody has ever heard of ), and hey, it's only a blog.
  21. ashbury
    At the end of the day, the "number of World Series rings" is still the most telling statistic for starting pitchers. Phil Hughes has one, none of these other bums have any.
  22. ashbury

    The Game

    ashbury commented on ashbury's blog entry in Left Coast Bias

    I appreciate the kind feedback; I had fun too. Just don't promote it to article-hood - it won't be to everyone's taste for one thing, and the derivative aspect of using someone else's writing quite so boldly is funny when it's just a guy's blog but problematic for a full website IMO. 99% of the creativity was from the original author. One prediction: you'll never look at the photo up at the top the same way again.
  23. ashbury
    If you really want to combine deals, I think it's simpler to look at the earlier trade as Fuld for Milone+Schafer (via waiver pickup). The A's could probably have had Schafer but apparently preferred the trade, therefore I choose to connect those moves. Trading Correia then stands on its own, though we don't yet know the return.
  24. ashbury
    "My mom has better sideburns than Joe Mauer." Your mom does have better sideburns. I'm not sure who's trolling whom on that one.
  25. ashbury
    Great insights, as it's always useful to have a more detailed scouting report from another organization. I'll close by observing that if there really is a logjam of talent at one position in the Braves' organization, it's surprising a trade of some sort wasn't the solution instead of just a waiver.
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