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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.

Guh. That is all.

I could waste time disputing Seth's adjective "strong" to describe Santana's season, but our glove-only first baseman is in the rear view mirror and is Cleveland's problem now. I'm totally on board with getting the most out of our in-house options, and stop wasting resources (roster space more so than money) on retreads.

Rule 5 isn't quite the same as other transactions, but the fact he wasn't taken serves as a damper to how much trade value he really would have. Don't most teams have a middling corner outfielder somewhere in their system already? He might bring back an infielder who has warts of his own.

Thanks for the kind words. Terry Ryan seemed to place a really high priority on switch-hitting, and that's something I liked about him. I'd say the FalVine regime* has carried on in that tradition. Last season there were 17 Twins batters with significant playing time (Kirilloff at #17 with 178 PA and a steep dropoff to Keirsey at #18 with only 14), and of them, 3 were switch-hitters, which I won't bother to research but will guess to compare pretty favorably to most other teams - our two guys with the most PA were of this persuasion. 4 other batters were pure left-handers. So that's 10 guys who face RHP from the right-hand batter's box and 7 who face the other way. (Well, not toward the catcher and some expensive seats down front - you know what I mean.) If a manager wants to, and pretty clearly Rocco did, he can stack his lineup against righty pitchers - Correa and Buxton and Third Baseman and Catcher Du Jour bat right handed and you could fill the other 5 spots from the other side. There were times during the season, especially once Lee was called up, he had the means to do it. And it helps to remember how spread-out the Plate Appearances were across the roster, due to injuries and demotions. All of this is the long way of saying I find the plate appearance stats I quoted to be pretty plausible. It's also a long way of saying that roster construction has a whole lot to do with those PA numbers. Pinch hitting can't be separated from roster construction, as it all comes down to the plan coming into a season. Rocco has a voice in this planning, even if he doesn't decide and certainly doesn't execute. Switch hitting is great of course, but is only a means to an end. The real goal for almost any player who isn't elite but wants to play full time is: do damage against opposite-handed pitchers (.800 OPS?) and be at least playable (.700 OPS?) against same-handed. That's actually a pretty potent player I just described, so it can be shaded downward a little, but not too much. And a switch-hitter in theory ought not to have any consistent splits anyway. And that's my complaint about Santana in particular - he's nominally a switch-hitter but his L/R splits are about the same as if he weren't. He hasn't been effective against RHP in years. My memory of his acquisition was incorrect - I thought he was intended as Kirilloff's emergency Plan B, but I took a look at Kirilloff's game log and even before he started to show signs of injury he rarely played at 1B. That making the signing of a glove-first guy at 1B even harder for me to stomach. I want our pure lefty batters to be good enough to play full time. Unfortunately, all the small-sample results keep pointing in the same wrong direction, when they face LHP. Different players have different skill sets. It's much more plausible to me that a lefty could be simply untrainable against LHP, than the reverse for righties. That's because of the sheer numbers of L vs R pitchers as the player comes up through the minors - a righty who is unplayable against RHP probably won't make it to the majors, no matter how well he mashes LHP. (I don't even want to think about Kyle Garlick.) A lefty hitter could manage to slide by during his formative years, by loading up against RHP since there are so many of them. It could be that no amount of practice would fix it, for certain individuals. It's plausible to me, like I said. That said, I have a lot of confidence in Matt Wallner in particular. I've previously related the experience at Arizona Fall League with Chief seeing Wallner take one off his chin, courtesy of a LHP of course. I don't think he lost any teeth, but there was blood, and my assumption was it was the end for his AZFL season. But just a few days after I left town, Wallner was back in the lineup, and his OPS in the league was above 1.000. In my book, the guy's got guts - amazing how personal experience at a game will shape one's views. With guts, he should be able to learn the tricks of the trade to hit LHP. Wallner's minor league L/R splits were generally reasonable, whereas at the major league level the splits have been beyond anything normally seen. Kepler's presence on the roster interfered with Wallner's opportunities and kept the sample size small (although I imagine Rocco tried to bias those opportunities away from the toughest LHP), which was a reason I had hoped for a trade-deadline deal to send Max and his expiring contract away. In 2024 Wallner finally managed to raise his OPS against LHP above .600. If there's still a little more to his learning curve, he will surpass the threshold of being "playable" versus LHP. If I were in charge, I'd tell him, "Kepler's gone now, you're my guy in RF. You start every game unless you tell the trainer you can't go. Lefties, righties, I don't care. Go get'um." Probably I'd do the same for Larnach in LF/DH, though his splits have been as extreme if not more so. Julien, if he makes the squad, I just dunno, he was just such a mess last year that maybe a little protection will help his morale. Everything is a case by case situation, when you really come down to it. *I just got done giving the recipe for Elephant-Rabbit Stew in another post. In retrospect, Falvey-Levine Stew seems to have had approximately the same proportions.

I'm sorry/disappointed you saw my reply in that light. In that MLB split page, you're right that the Twins had about 100 more PA by their substitutes than an average team. Their subs managed to compile an OPS very slightly higher than the league as a whole, which mitigates the damage just a little. But I'm not here to defend the work of the subs, who clearly let the manager down with their performance. Still, this is to me a second-order effect compared to the field staff trying their best to maximize the favorable L/R matchups, only to be undone by the hitters' ineptitude from the left-hand batter's box. Do you know the recipe for Elephant-Rabbit Stew? You take one medium sized elephant, and cut it into bite sized pieces; this will take a couple of weeks. Then take a medium sized rabbit and also cut it up, which will go much quicker. Put them in a 500 gallon pot with just enough water to cover the meat. Let it come to a boil, and then simmer it for approximately 8 days until tender. Serves 1360. I've heard that it tastes mostly like elephant. But all people want to talk about is the rabbit. That's kind of how I'm seeing the article that led off this discussion.

I wasn't addressing your larger point, merely your assertion that Gallo wasn't terrible. In my book, Gallo was Margot-level terrible - he harms his team's chances to win, season after season. I'm glad he was not here more than one season, but I'm not glad he was here in the first place.

Normally aggregate numbers tell the story. I'm not a big believer in separating out "clutch" from "non-clutch" performers. However, anecdotal evidence while watching games led me to question Gallo's seeming "ability" to crank out homers only when the game was NOT on the line, and b-r.com's splits confirmed to my satisfaction (bases occupied situations, and Win Probability added) that not only was this a problem in his time with the Twins but for a time before that. One of the few players I have pigeonholed as less-than-the-sum-of-the-parts on offense.

It can't have been an overwhelming factor, out of 6123 PA during the season, because they had the fewest unfavorable L/L matchups in the majors, and well below average rates of unfavorable R/R matchups. Meanwhile the failures of multiple L/R matchups across 2000+ PA look pretty overwhelming to me.