ashbury

That's the moment he descends into "Why guy" territory. I really liked your "why not" category.

Fielding percentages are far higher than batting averages. Rare is the Dick Stuart (Dr. Strangeglove) type who screws up enough to lose his first base job if he's hitting homers, and of course now there's the DH to bail such a player out. Yours is a much poorer comparison.

I've never woofed for Headrick and I'm not going to defend him now. He's lefty and he's breathing, so he'll continue getting chances, and another poster aptly characterized him as a "why not?" 40-man choice. The Yankees, far from a joke team, apparently saw the same value since they seem to be light on lefties at the moment, so now he's the Yankees' why-not guy. He hasn't yet regressed into a "why?" guy. 😀 But that doesn't mean there was any trade value before Headrick was put on waivers. Still, 40-man spots have value and the team liked France enough to give him one in preference to whoever they were considering, in a situation where the contract usually is MiLB with a Spring invite and then the $1M commitment if he makes the 26-man roster. I suppose the 40-man spot was some kind of sweetener to induce France to agree, since being on the 40-man does confer certain perks. All I'm saying is that there is more of an investment by the Twins than the potential $1M. Which makes me question the investment on a guy like him, unless their talent evaluation is better now than when they plucked guys like Margot. He's simply a slightly more expensive why-not guy. Why?

How many errors of any kind were first-basemen charged with last season? 222. How many home runs did first-basemen hit last season? 670. One of these is of more importance than the other (not every error leads to a run, while every home run does), and is also more frequent. Of course a slick-fielding first baseman is valuable, but if he doesn't hit home runs at a pace which keeps up with his peers, he's dragging his team down, one plate appearance at a time. Elephant-rabbit stew, and we keep wanting to talk about the rabbit.

Contract-wise, specifically, yes. But they like him well enough they risked, and lost, so-so lefty Brent Headrick. Would I have traded Headrick for France even-up last Trade Deadline? Probably not. Has France improved in the meantime, by getting healthier? Seems to be what the Twins FO is thinking, because they made this "trade."

Nitpick: I expect Rick would want you to know it's "The Ohio State University", with a capital T. I never went there, but the graduates have burned this into my consciousness.

Heh, not to beat a dead horse, but your question amounts to asking where on the efficient frontier you are willing to sit. Or, if some choices are significantly far from the frontier. Oh, and in your other reply to me, where you mentioned the Tetris board clogging up: now you're touching on the field of Constrained Portfolio Optimization. Okay, I'm done. This isn't a Quant class in MBA school and I'm not qualified to teach one. 😀

Mostly agree. But aside from Buxton, the Twins have no one else anywhere in their system with CF skills close to Bader's. Not even in the low minors, where defense is more about potential. Maybe they decided that's a major lack. (To which I would ask them why they've not developed anyone.) If you substitute Keirsey for Bader, you (probably? maybe?) gain some offense but at the cost of some defense. If you are familiar with the idea of "efficient frontiers" in investment portfolios, I see this as somewhat similar to comparing investments. In a nutshell, many opportunities (whether financial investments or baseball players) are clearly better than others, but among the best choices available, it's often still a question of tradeoffs. For example, expected return on a bond, versus its risk. You can draw a curve of all the good opportunities (where worse ones in both dimensions lie elsewhere below the curve), and then choose the spot you want to be, on that outermost curve. Replace Risk and Return with Offense and Defense, and hopefully the parallel is clear. (Offense, Defense, and investment Return are all positive things, while Risk is a negative attribute, so for baseball players that X-axis would be defensive ineptitude, I suppose.) Among baseball players in general, guys like Buxton are on the efficient frontier while Bader is not. But players like Buxton aren't available since they are under contract to other teams. In terms of backup players who are actually available, Bader might actually belong on the efficient frontier of players the Twins could have added. For some situations (e.g. Buxton down for a lengthy period), you might want to choose him simply because of the unique skillset. Weighing against that is Bader's salary compared to Keirsey, and the inability to shuttle him down and up to St Paul as you can with Keirsey. Efficient frontiers are hard to wrangle by hand, when you go above 2 dimensions, and you need a computer. I still find it a useful way of generalized thinking, and I see Bader as actually somewhere close to the efficient frontier one could draw of Twins talent under current control. That's not the same as saying he's my choice, but he's not a crazy choice. He's close to unique. BTW, I mentioned last year that in August at the SABR convention, I had the opportunity to informally chat one-on-one with each of Derek and Thad, who were both very gracious with their time. I mentioned portfolio theory to them, and it didn't seem to resonate as a tool they apply to their "investments" in players. Top analytics guy Josh Kalk knew what I was talking about, though.

In what way do you see them as similar? Body types are not similar, defensive positions are not similar, Kepler has lower success on balls hit in play but has shown a higher peak for home run power and he walks more. Except for the fact they both play baseball and neither one is a pitcher, the two are not comps that I would have picked for one another.

Phillies currently have a full 40-man, 23 pitchers and 17 hitters. They're a strong team and probably have enough arms of a caliber like Headrick/Henriquez to not be interested in DFAing one of their own similar pitchers. Do they want a utility player like Helman? Who knows, but I bet Falvey/Zoll asked them before selling him to someone else for cash considerations. Maybe they were told, "hey, we're set, we've got Buddy Kennedy." 😀

I make it a point to also follow Ken Rooosenthal and Jon Heyyyyyman and Bobby Nightengaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaale for accurate and up-to-the-minute reporting of breaking news. But seriously, why would someone bother posting a fake news item like that one, about non-star players?

Yep. They are thin, thin, thin. They're already at a point they probably have to keep one of Lee, Julien, or Martin despite no evidence they have bats that contribute at the moment. I don't like to trust Spring Training numbers but this year it looks like they will have to. One bit of evidence that they know they are thin: the 40-man currently carries 19 position players and 21 pitchers, when normally they prefer 18/22 and sometimes go with 17/23. They are just hoping a larger number of players will mean that someone comes through.

For sure. They do have the choice, close to Opening Day, to cut ties then and there. The nightmare scenario is that he rakes in Ft Myers and then immediately goes cold in April. Everyone has hot streaks and cold streaks, so how much patience is right? And how much patience will the FO actually give him, if the team is muddling along at say 10-13 and he's not contributing?

I'm more worried about the position players roster makeup than the pitchers, who I'm confident will get sorted out by Opening Day. I've got a lengthy list of batters I figure should start the year in St. Paul: Diego Cartaya Jair Camargo Mickey Gasper Brooks Lee Austin Martin Edouard Julien Emmanuel Rodriguez DaShawn Keirsey Problem is, with the addition of Ty France bringing the list of 40-man choices to 19, that leaves only 11 players, and normally you carry 13. That means 2 guys who are (in my estimation) either under-qualified or not ready will need to go north anyway. (Well, west - from St Paul to Minneapolis.) Hope something positive develops during Spring Training to change my view.

Concur. The man is 64 years old and can't get around on the heater anymore.

The contracts for more than say $2M, which is Bader, probably do remain for longer than I'd like. But guys simply on 1-year contracts in the neighborhood of $1M are frequently let go with the Twins eating the remainder of the contract - you immediately mentioned Jay Jackson who pitched himself out of a job by mid-June, and two other pitchers with inexpensive commitments likewise were done away with, Okert (who pitched effectively until mid-June and they gave him 2 more months to get right and finally DFAed and nobody took him so he went to St Paul) and Staumont (who they kept as long as his ERA was literally zero based on a crazy .154 BABIP, then released after a 6-appearance stretch in July with a .454 BABIP, thereupon picked up by the Cubs). I don't wanna branch out into a full examination of the Twins' attitudes about contracts, and for the most part they show patience rather than knee-jerk impatience with someone they thought well enough of to sign. But since the topic here is Ty France and his contract (if exercised) will be only about $1M, I think this is enough evidence not to worry on that particular score.

This in turn accounts for losing Headrick on waivers, I think. Signing France to a non-guaranteed contract could surely have waited a few days, if someone was headed to the IL.

Analytics doesn't have to be about numbers, a simple grading scale of Good/Average/Bad or Green/Yellow/Red can be used. It almost sounds like this with regard to sticking with the pitch-calling plan. I'd love to know more, though. And I doubt they'll tell us. Sometimes deviating from the plan is the right thing to do, as Jeffers alluded to and the article explains. Sometimes it's right to stick to the plan. So the Green/Yellow/Red pattern is really unclear to me.

I was about to suggest a nice Chianti, but this being France I guess it needs to be a Bordeaux.

AAA would be my preference for Lee anyway. He's got some things to work on, both defensively and at the plate. Started out solid but then the major league opponents seemed to have his number. Hopefully good instruction in Ft Myers and then a month or two at St Paul gets him headed in the right direction again. None of which has to do with Ty Flipping France, who I hope wins Comeback Player of the Year but possibly will not.

I declined to even try, given my understanding of the payroll constraints the FO was under. This higher limit would at least have been some fun to work with.

Thanks. I think. 😀 I think I misused the Dumb and Dumber one a little, this time, because your post did actually spell out a legitimate way that the signing could pan out. Not likely, but way above one-in-a-million. Your post clarified some things.

Thanks. I was looking in vain for the upside in the signing.