ashbury

He didn't say anything about good, now did he?

Shallow and pedantic for me, please.

It's mostly a Jeremy Zoll interview. I think it's been documented elsewhere that Jeremy and his boss have gone on the record with opposing statements about Priellip's future. My guess is that Priellip isn't the hill Zoll wants to die on if Falvey were to decide to make an issue of it. Not exactly sure how this article was constructed, but if Falvey was in the same room then maybe it's notable that he didn't contradict his underling - or maybe not.

That's true. I refreshed my memory and he had a career BB% of 17.6, which is amazing on the face of it but particularly given that he had little to no power so opposing pitchers weren't pitching around him per se. He had a couple of full seasons at 20+%. He and Harmon dominate the walks-in-a-season category, and it's hard to think of two more-different guys at the plate. He was a strong asset to some pretty mediocre Senators (erm, Nationals) squads - more b-r.com WAR for the franchise than Torii Hunter for instance - Byron Buxton passed him up only this year.

With E-Rod, I thought the question about Walks would have been settled by now, but it still is a giant X-factor. In 2025 he walked in 21% of his plate appearances at St Paul. Nobody in the majors walked even 20% of the time, and the two who came closest are bona fide superstar hitters, Judge and Soto. Is Rodriguez perhaps in their class? He sure doesn't homer at the rate those two do. Interestingly, both of these two potential comps walked at a much lower rate when in the minors, so it;'s not as close of a template to follow as one might think. Rodriguez had even higher walk rates in the lower minors, hard as that is to believe - video game numbers of 29% at single-A Ft Myers. The guy I know of who did have similar BB% in the minors is our own Edouard Julien. That's a bit of a cautionary tale; Eddie met with success in his first taste of the majors but then pitch selectivity seemed to go haywire for him. A related X factor for any high-BB prospect is the coming of the challenge system at the major league level. Maybe Julien will turn things around at the plate if he now has permission to tell the ump, "uh uh, you're squeezing me." Maybe Rodriguez will benefit from this, from the git-go, and not have to deal with any psychological issues of failure. What I keep coming back to for Rodriguez is the following question: given that no one walks at the rate he does in the majors, what happens to the portion of the plate appearances where the walks surely go away? They turn into something else, but what? Strikeouts looking because major league pitchers are just better and the risk he takes looking at a close two-strike pitch is no longer a winning bet? Strikeouts swinging because he gets into unfavorable counts more often than before? Base hits because the major league pitchers are coming in with strikes more often and his patience actually pays off? Home runs, same logic? Or merely weak fly balls and ground outs, where he's trading walks for contact but it's on the pitcher's terms? I honestly don't know what to expect from him. I'll say this, though: the batting average of .258 this past season at AAA doesn't quite line up with what should be an elite eye for spitting on pitches outside the strike zone. And he already strikes out a lot. The potential for "bust" is pretty high. And yet, would I trade him, on the theory that he's at peak value? Um, no. I want to watch what happens with him because he's so unique, and I want it to happen with my team.

Not really, when viewed in the context of someone (not you to start with, I'll acknowledge) cherry picking Brent Rooker as a reason to hold out hope for our new acquisition. I certainly wasn't going to attempt to write up responses to every line in your post. Life is short, and neither your posts nor mine are. 😁 I picked a thing or two to explore in response. I looked again at his splits, and noticed something new to me: he lost his everyday starting job, somewhere around mid-season. There wasn't a stint on the IL to account for this. What happens when a guy goes from playing nearly every day to being a bench player? For one thing, the manager has the luxury of trying to cherry-pick (heh) opportunities where he feels the player may succeed. It's entirely possible that the measured higher velocity correlated with facing pitchers he was more likely to handle. I have no specific information, but am throwing it out there as one possibility - namely that his old team ultimately may have decided that getting the best out of him wasn't worth the trouble in terms of roster management. You know the classic logical fallacy called Appeal To Authority? I am pleased to note that you didn't fall into that particular trap here. 😁 Ah! Common ground at last! 😁 All in good fun, I hope.

I do. It's a tremendous burden on a team's roster to cycle through all the potential Rookers to find the one that clicks. Very much a bottom-feeder strategy. And look who it finally paid off for - when he emerged as a offensive weapon, it was for a squad that went 50-112 that season. Just enough Rookers emerge in the course of a decade to support the dream that "there must be a pony in this pile here, somewhere." That is you doing some mind-reading, since I've seen no comment by the Marlins. And it assumes that their analytics staff is no better than the average fan-on-the-street who looks at season numbers and makes a thumbs-up/thumbs-down determination. And/or, their coaches failing to notice something real behind the numbers in the second half. The simpler explanation: statistical fluke over a small sample. Now, if the Twins do have some kind of special sauce that brings out the best in Wagaman and the others you allude to, I'll be suitably impressed.

And maybe even then ... 😁

In a thread about relief pitching? Sure, I can supply some. Any particular angle of interest to you? Arcia's control is probably decent but he surely has very little stuff - he'll get lit up except in very carefully curated appearances on the mound. His best bet will be to develop either a knuckleball or the eephus pitch. That suit your fancy?

Even his August was a Tale of Two Halves. First half of August his OPS was .639. In the second half his OPS zoomed to 1.051 on the strength of a .391 BABIP and an uncharacteristic 3 home runs in 40 plate appearances. He reverted to 0 HR in all of September. Two weeks of success is pretty short in baseball terms, and neither of these foundations (high BABIP, HR) would seem sustainable based on his track record, so I find it hard to count on the guy for anything much across a full season, which Miami did give him. If the Twins have spotted something correctable in his fundamentals that the Yankees, Angels and Marlins all missed, and he turns in a productive 2026 at first base, I'll give them all the credit.

I kind of thought my crack about Miami DFA'ing him addressed my views regarding Wagaman's actual talent, if you thought I was drawing a comparison. No, Margot's merely my example of how much a manager's hands are tied, versus the tidy theory that you can segregate two complementary players' plate appearances neatly into left-and-right. Manny actually had more plate appearances (by +1) for the Twins against righties than he did versus lefties. I could have used Kyle Garlick as the example, instead. Either your lefty-killer bat gets used more against righties than you would prefer (Margot), or else he's barely a factor at all (Garlick).

Site user-interface got me again.

This explains his team DFAing him. 😀 As for the platooning possibilities, the nature of the game limits the effectiveness of that strategy. Bring in your right hand bat against the other team's mediocre middle innings LHP, and now you're stuck with him for the rest of the game against a parade of righties. Saw more than enough of that with Margot.

Jeremy Zoll was stung by RandBalls Stu's article this morning.

I'm beginning to look back at the Joe Pohlad Era with unexpected fondness.

2029 Falvey is going to be pissed at what errands Current Falvey is not running..

Roll Hoosiers.

Larnach is a bit of a polarizing figure at this site but you don't have to actually duck before uttering his name. 😀

Then you and he could try not belittling someone else's preference, by calling it an addiction.

I'm guessing you both look back with remorse at the RBIs too. Helluva drug.

So your theory involves/requires the new owners being bad decision makers? 😁

Interesting variation on the old Slow Mule Race.

My last post was already long enough so I left out a point that probably is important in this discussion. Like batting average or OPS, any per-162 stats amount to a "rate" stat. These completely leave out the notion of whether a given player is at all available for anything like a full season's workload. "The most important ability is availability," and the latter can be diminished by various reasons that aren't simply "injury" which is already bad enough - for instance if the manager felt the need to platoon the guy a lot, or if poor performance caused him to spend half the season at AAA - yes I have Matt Wallner in mind. Even batting low in the batting order will affect whether a guy has 600+ PA or just 550 or 500, even if the manager wants his glove in the starting lineup every game - huh, I suddenly stopped thinking about Wallner. So, in considering whether to sign a player, it's fair to acknowledge that Arraez has a good track record for earning a paycheck by getting his name in the lineup. (I still may ask, if he has had 600 plate appearances four years running and bats .300+, then why isn't he a run scoring machine with 100 per season, or even 90, on the regular,)

You need to take the extra step when adopting this point of view. Baseball is a slugging driven sport. OPS and its kin are not some kind of trick intended to purposely fool you into thinking the worse player is the better. Those stats try to reflect the game as it's played. But if you're going to cast doubt on that kind of stats, then let's talk about Runs. Nobody wins a World Series by having the highest OPS, they win by scoring runs and preventing runs. There were 21614 runs scored and 20740 RBIs in the majors in 2025. With 30 teams and with each team having 9 spots in the lineup there is a raw average of 80 runs and 77 RBIs. However, batters at the bottom of the lineup get fewer opportunities so a different and perhaps better way to look at what is "average" run production is to take the major league splits at baseball-reference.com by Batting Order Position. Leadoff hitters scored 3077 runs and batted in 2216, so dividing by the 30 teams means roughly 103 runs and 74 RBIs expected in that slot. The full table: 1 103 74 2 97 83 3 91 91 4 84 96 5 77 84 6 69 73 7 68 68 8 68 64 9 65 59 This is just to set expectations - if you bat a guy 9th your expectations should be lower than for an "average" player, much less a player in the top half of the lineup where the opportunities are more plentiful. Separately b-r.com provides for each player a career "162-game average". Nobody plays a full 162 games in a season and many play far fewer, but it represents an answer to the question "what if I plugged this guy in for the full year, what would I get?" I mentioned Trevor Larnach last time. His 162-game average for runs is 73 and for RBIs is also 73. Over his career he's batted all over the place in the lineup but way more than half has been in slots 2, 3 and 4. I wouldn't say he measures up very well at all versus the average player in those 3 slots but it's fair to allow that his run production stats are watered down a bit by the 1/3 of his PA where he batted 5th or lower. Compared to 80 and 77 "raw" runs and RBIs mentioned above, he comes in close to an average run producer. I mentioned Aaron Judge. His 162-game averages are 124 runs and 117 RBIs. For his career he's batted almost exclusively 2nd or 3rd, and measures up VERY well against his counterparts on other teams. So, I come to Arraez. His 162-game average for runs is 84, and for RBIs is 59. Three quarters of his career PA have been in the #1 or #2 slot in the batting order (which is a little less than I expected), but even allowing for a bit of blending with middle-of-the-order experience, his run production is not especially impressive at all. How does Luis Arraez score runs at a rate barely better than Trevor Larnach? Maybe Trevor's better than I give him credit for (and I know you want to hang onto him), but compared to league averages, whichever of the above are most relevant, he's no better than average. How can someone like Arraez who is arguably the best at hitting a baseball and getting on base not lead the league in runs, at least some of the years? Luis has now had 4 seasons of 600+ plate appearances, and never scored more than 88 runs. How? After a while you have to stop blaming teammates and consider if there's something about the guy himself. The whole is somehow less than the sum of the parts. He gets on base but is slow afoot. He doesn't hit with power. Guys like Corbin Carroll amass 162-game averages of above 100 runs scored. Why doesn't Luis? The Twins actually were fifth in the majors in runs scored by their leadoff hitters. Prominent among those hitters was Byron Buxton, who scored 97 runs in a season where he still lost some time to injury. What's Byron got that Luis doesn't? I'm just not enthused about expending a bunch of dollars we don't have, to obtain someone that won't even be a difference maker when at his 2023 peak - to obtain another Trevor Larnach with slightly different skills. And, as you can see, I don't need the shorthand of using OPS to make that argument.

If you're getting these splits from b-r.com, then the game log that the site provides for each player lets us zoom in on how his season began and when things turned around for the better. There wasn't any period where his BA hovered near .220. One can choose two early-season turning points. April 5: Eight games into his season he was batting a frigid .129 (4 for 34), but that afternoon he went 2 for 3 to bring him instantly to .176, 4 for 5 the next day jumped him to .256, and he continued with 2 more multi-hit games to bring up his BA to .313 the morning of April 8. Cue the Forrest Gump "And Just Like That" meme. April 14: But Luis slipped into another funk and his BA dropped until reaching .258 (17 for 66), and then in the game on this date he turned it around again, launching a period into early May where he brought the BA to a season-high .313 again. The rest of the way he hit .288, below the .292 season average he eventually landed at. I know you (Greggory) know all this. I'm just mentioning it because it's often worth going back to the underlying data rather than averages over periods of time which can blur the events.