ashbury

The Other, Wrong, Downright Awful, Very Bad Lopez.

"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln..." 😀

They won't be welcome at this website, either. 😀

I like projection systems as a quick and dirty way of thinking about many things. But such systems necessarily operate on a conservative basis - "if present trends continue, things will remain about the same." It's just too early to try to say anything definitive about a trade of a guy who will be 31 this coming season versus two guys who will be 26 and 24. I've been down on Martin since the trade was made, but I still hold out hope that he finds one or two tweaks to his game that let him be productive - a little more comfort at the plate and he's suddenly a valuable leadoff hitter for a few years. SWR was always the key to the trade for me, and if 2024 was a kid-gloves approach to him by the manager and pitching coach, maybe 2025 is the year the constraints come off (maybe with the aid of some additional off-season conditioning?). Martin and SWR could of course turn out to be the latest incarnations of Nick Gordon and Fernando Romero respectively. Not ready to make any real judgements.

Hope you find a way to work the events of Sunday, September 27, 1987 into your bio of Newmie - one of the most electrifying moments in Twins history in the top of the first inning!

Seems like a team-friendly deal that gives the player the guarantee he wants - win/win. Factoring into that is full-time DHs just don't get paid the same (for similar offensive production) as a position player, which is what made Nelson Cruz so affordable to the Twins for instance. Makes this deal a little less team-friendly than at first glance. Simply a good, fair deal.

It wasn't my intent to get into platooning per se, merely make the point that you stated at the end. Our new friend hadn't mentioned Kjerstad himself, so I was just reacting to a bit of what I read at their site, which is to be expected since fans of other teams won't necessarily be aware of details like this. But it's the details that make or break a trade proposal.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this discussion is that the Orioles' best young players lean heavily toward lefty bats. The Twins already have a bit of an overload of corner outfielders who bat from that side, which could make matching up needs a bit hard, even at other positions. Seeing names like Kjerstad mentioned at O's Hangout strikes me as not realistic; a third team would have to be brought into the mix. Mayo and Westburg bat right but I'm not sure how well they'd fit into the current Twins roster. As an aside, I do enjoy the atmosphere at your site. Good, thoughtful posters there.

Concur. It's easy to second guess any particular play. But some plays put the game on the line that very moment, while a better choice leaves you the chance to try again if it fails. It was a gamble that forced them to try pass plays only, after that. Bad gamble.

You meant to include a smiley face on that one, right? 😀 But Mrs Ash and I have walked from our budget motel to the ballpark entrance, which is the long way around, and never felt uncomfortable. I'm willing to give a ballpark some bonus points for the neighborhood atmosphere - Fenway and Wrigley remaining the best examples - but I'm disinclined to deduct points for the neighborhood, especially the cases where the standard thing is to take mass transit or just drive into a huge parking lot where there is a lot of tailgating/grilling to enjoy the aromas even if you're not partaking.

There are indoor stadiums I would rank lower. And for whatever the faults, the surroundings at O.co or whatever it was called at the end did not detract from my enjoyment of Bailey Ober's masterpiece last summer. It helped that I could afford seats directly behind home plate. Affording them was helped by their costing only $35. I don't know of a MLB park with consistently better weather to watch a game in - a trait they instantly lose in muggy Sacramento and eventually in convection-oven-like Vegas. Mount Davis never bugged me in the slightest, and that seems to be the biggest knock against the venue. / I hope this doesn't turn into a threadjack. Just didn't want to let the opinion go un-dissented.

I didn't watch even half of Buxton's innings last season, and my "eye test" memory of his year was evidently missing quite a bit, which these video clips helped fill in. I remembered seeing a few balls fall in for singles in front of him, that Jake Cave probably would have dived for and given up a triple or inside the park homer, but Byron himself of years ago would have corralled for outs. The charts further demonstrate he's not the same elite guy in CF that he used to be. I'd love to have similar AAA charts for Keirsey, to provide a frame of reference for what we have in the system as an alternative. I recall watching only one challenging opportunity for Keirsey at Target Field in 2024, a difficult fly at the wall that he couldn't quite haul in. The videos in this article remind me that Byron wasn't 100% on similar plays either; selective memory tells me he used to be.

If the Pohlads had had the foresight to hold off a year or two and invest in Enron instead of the Twins, imagine how things would have turned out for them!

Limbo's never good. That which ye do, do quickly.

Yes!!! Do it before the Dodgers change their minds!!!

In Wallner's tenure with the Twins, they have been at or above league average in OBP every season. Really, the problem is just that 580 PA is still short of a full-time season's worth. The Yankees alone had 5 players with more PA than that, in 2024. Give Wallner the 713 PA that Soto had this past season, and he'd probably come close to Soto's 109 RBI.

Get ready for a surprise when you find out how frequently relief pitchers are called on to appear in games. 😀

Fantastic lottery ticket! I'm always leery of going against LA's player evaluation machine (did we just trade them the next Luis Gil?), but even if Cartaya's chances of becoming a star are lower than before, he's still a guy who kind of held his own in AAA at age 22. Assuming the glove is OK behind the plate, he'll be a useful major league catcher in a year or two. It costs a 40-man spot, but other than that, the price seems right.

I'm a little surprised how heavily you weight trade value, given the one-line summary "most indispensable to fulfilling the vision of building a champion." (I do see in your first article in the series the longer explanation, in which you mention it as one of the factors.) Another poster mentions BTV, which basically computes a dollar value a player brings on the field and subtracts his contract. Thus, every contract signed by the team for a player above major-league minimum is a drag on the value of the team's portfolio of assets relative to the player's on-field contributions. Is it the position that the team should strive for a $26M payroll, give or take, and every dollar spent above that harms the vision of building a champion? What if you had a roster of 25 good young players with championship aspirations, all making the minimum, and then you went out and as a finishing touch signed a Juan Soto for $100M a season, well above even his market value? You wouldn't be able to trade Soto at that salary. Did you just tank the team's chances with this acquisition, with a payroll now of $125M? I think (admittedly fanciful) edge cases like that help sharpen the view of how money affects the building of a champion. Unlike young regulars or prospects, even one as good as Walker Jenkins, Correa's value to building that champion does not lie in his trade value. If they trade Correa, it means something has gone very very wrong and the window for championship contention is closed.

Not signed by Falvey either. That was Terry Ryan's doing.

Comps are an underrated form of analytics today and were used for decades before Bill James ("he looks like a young Joe Dimaggio"). Thank you for these insights.

There is footage of Royce "Hopalong" Lewis rounding second after pulling a quadriceps. Close enough?

A completed sale by Opening Day, as speculated, still means no major moves until the ink is dry. Trade deadline, though? Hmmm...

Okay, but that is a non-answer on his part, that doesn't address what we actually want to know. Others have done this and probably better, but here's my synopsis. At the end of the season, the Twins shed the salary obligations of DeSclafani ($4M since other teams were paying part of his $12M), Kepler ($10M), Santana ($5M), Farmer ($6M), and Thielbar ($3M). Weighing against that, for 2025, Pablo Lopez's salary goes up from $8M to $21M. Paddack goes up from $2.5M to $7.5M. Correa goes up from $32M to $36M. And then you have players in arbitration who'll get pay raises: Castro, Jeffers, Ober, Ryan, Jax, Larnach, Lewis, Duran, Alcala, Topa, Tonkin - that's a lot of small numbers and I don't know the arbitration outcomes, but the sum combines to be significant because some good players are getting their paydays. Doing nothing, the FO still faces a higher payroll. Ownership says there won't be lower payroll, but carefully avoids saying the obvious. I don't see where anyone here was taking this opposite tack, either. Well I hope not. You're a good poster here. I'm sorry that my response looked too personally harsh.

Source? All I could find was silence all-around.