ashbury

Productive out from Keaschall. Keep it going.

And Cerda with the ringing double. No stopping this squad now.

All right, Holland with the leadoff single. Big ninth inning, coming right up. Here We Go!

Samuel Perez pitching in the ninth. He's someone they've slow-walked through the minors, repeating single-A Ft Myers 3 years in a row now with only tiny tastes of high-A, and now he's 25 years old and they want to see how he'll do against other tail-enders in a spring game? Is there really no other arm who is healthy and available this afternoon that they'd rather see?

If his first name is Leocadio and his middle name is Francisco, how did he get the nickname Tony?

And which so far this spring has not, Buxton being the lone exception. It's all SSS, but I'd have hoped for more SSS of good numbers to balance out the bad. Cross fingers for today - Rocco is giving clear signs as to what starting lineup he'd like to see emerge.

Also of note, our pitchers faced a lot of batters.

One of the marks of good satire, IMO, is when it occasionally gets taken seriously. Otherwise it's just a spoof or parody or whatnot.

Every single year with this team. Sometimes I'm wrong (Carlos Santana). Sometimes the jury's still out during the next spring training (Caleb Thielbar) though it still feels inevitable. Sometimes it becomes quickly clear (Jay Jackson). BTW at first I misread and thought you were doing a story on Mike Tonkin. The same lead sentence would apply.

Concur. Kepler's gone, and IMO Wallner will get every opportunity to fill his role now.

Nobody* has a "good" two-strike approach. At least, across the majors, the overall OPS was .509 for plate appearances where a two strike count was reached. However, Julien went "below and beyond" by OPSing .398 in those situations. So, yeah, a change seems called for. Getting into those situation in the first place is also something that could be avoided better. Across the majors, 53% of PA reached two strikes, and for Julien it was 58%; in 2023 his ratio was only 47%. Every little bit helps, since not-reaching-two-strikes has an OPS somewhere in the 800s or 900s (I don't see that particular breakdown at b-r.com and am not going to invest effort to compute exactly). Julien faced 5 or 10 percent more unfavorable situations (depending on how you compute it) than the typical batter in 2024. * Shohei had .683 OPS once two strikes were reached in 2024. Aaron Judge did achieve .811, but that's also a huge dropoff from his other situations. I'm not going to search further.

It's a good summary of the probabilities, but amounts to preaching to the choir. It won't convince the fan who believes Ground ball: good, a chance anyway. Fly ball: good, a chance anyway. Whiff: bad, no chance The problem is when you conflate results with what the batter was trying to accomplish. The latter is much more complex to analyze. The table of probabilities concerns itself with the outcomes, and you might say that it suffers from the weakness of not considering the alternative outcomes that could have happened from the same approach at the plate. But the Whiff Bad point of view is even worse because for strikeouts it only considers the outcome while for groundballs especially it subtly mixes in the view that the ball might sneak past the infielder anyway, ignoring that those outcomes are already included in a batters hit total or the records kept on errors. This is exemplified when excusing a mediocre batter, "sure, he hits only .200, but he hardly ever strikes out." Compare the above list of 3 outcomes, versus the paragraph I just wrote to delve a little into it, and it's not surprising that the former has a lot of staying power. Baseball's just a game after all, not an exercise in Bayesian probabilities for most people. The batter who strikes out when trying to launch a three-run homer to win the game doesn't get credit for that potential homer in that particular at bat. Which is fine, but even those homers that a decent power hitter gets are devalued by the anti-strikeout fan with a mention of the Ks that go with it. Decent singles hitters aren't held to that same standard - "oh, sure, but he grounds out too much" does not factor into many discussions. The batter who strikes out by looking at a close pitch on a 3-2 count may have judged that his best chance for a good outcome was to lay off of what looks like an unhittable pitch down and away. The cases where he guesses right are simply chalked up on the scoresheet as a walk, which many fans will immediately denigrate as not as good as a single, ignoring the situation that on this pitch a base hit was unlikely. The batter who grounds out may have done so because he tried to pull a pitch that was farther outside than he expected, meekly grounding out to a middle infielder. The fan who hates strikeouts will cheer that at least the batter gave himself a chance, even after the outcome is registered by the first-base umpire. This doesn't even touch on the even more important (and complex) question of what happened earlier in the count. That backward K may have occurred because it was set up on the previous pitch when the batter swung through a meatball pitch that might have gone for extra bases. It's very hard to construct an apples-to-apples argument because the focus on the outcome is only part of the story, and the typical fan understands this when it comes to grounders and flyballs but gives no benefit of the doubt to the result that's a K. Partial analyses are dangerous because they are true but misleading. Of course all analyses are partial, so one has to pick where they think stopping is least dangerous. As I implied, the probability tables in the referenced article are also a partial analysis. The whiffs-are-bad fans simply choose a different stopping point than others. No one has a complete analysis.

No need for Falvey to go out and acquire a big name pitcher now. We've got our guy.

Elderly person unable to distinguish brake pedal from accelerator?

Is that one of those degenerative finger conditions that most people don't get until they're 75?

Today is a welcome tonic, then. Although Wallner has turned a good start into a slow start this spring, with today's 0-for-4. Small Sample Size brings lots of hawt taeks!

Rocco is leaning into this Wallner-leads-off thing. The rest of this starting lineup looks pretty representative of what he'd be happy to go with too, assuming players perform during these next few weeks. No Willi, no Harrison, no Ty - these three would be either bench contributors or (in the case of Ty France) not getting the salary clause invoked. I'm reading into it the way I please, of course. And to repeat myself, certain folks like Lee and Julien better produce when given this opportunity, because replacement options are numerous.

Well, if Diego Castillo had been available I'm sure Rocco would have batted him leadoff.

I'm glad those numbers added up. What I did is looked at the Batters Faced in the pitching section. Same as SSo1, so maybe I misadded.

Sure. For comparison, the average MLB team got 8 hits per game last season. If our batters got 9 one particular day, I'm not sure that's the stat I would use in a one-sentence summary.. That's all I was really saying; the 11 sounds great until put into the context of an overall lousy game.

Twins Pitching Pipeline™. I'm pretty sure someone must have trademark that combination of words by now.

Wallner and Correa, at the top of this batting order, led the team last season in OBP (if you don't count Diego Castillo's 8 plate appearances with .500 OBP). Make of that what you will, as regards to the leadup to Opening Day.

When you face 43 batters (if I added correctly*), 11 K isn't really an impressive number. / * edit - upon further review... I did not