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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    I don't see the purpose as having to do with bullpen load. What's the one time in the game a manager gets to select who comes to bat? Those first three batters in the first inning. So then when is the one best time to insert a good one-inning pitcher to neutralize them as best you can? It's the corollary to people asking that the closer pitch the 7th or 8th inning, instead of potentially the bottom of the order in the 9th. As an aside, something I've mentioned before, the biggest inning for scoring is the first inning. So these managers aren't setting up their batting orders at random. And for some reason, home teams have a bigger advantage in the first inning than any other game. So this "opener" strategy looks especially promising for visiting teams. All of which is in line with your saying to try avoid the guy who's pitching the longest from facing the best batters 3 times.
  2. ashbury
    Which options do you believe are wasted? An option, once exercised, is good for the whole season. Within certain other rules, you can send a guy up and down indefinitely.
  3. ashbury
    Last season, on behalf of my adoptee Ben Rortvedt, I quoted my mama, "if you don't have something nice to say about someone, don't say anything at all." Sometimes it's appropriate to just let matters sit for a spell.
  4. ashbury
    That's the nature of relief pitching. But to counter-balance one inning with a crooked number, a reliever needs to put up quite a few clean innings. Lots of pitchers do. Belisle doesn't, very much. Too many of the zero-run appearances have involved baserunners. And most of his no-hit no-walk outings for us have been of the partial-inning variety. A couple of times this month he's contributed a clean full inning. But now we're back to this. Often what separates successful players from the unsuccessful isn't the quality of their ability, but how frequently they are able to bring their best. It seems to me that too many times Belisle has to scuffle along with less than his best, and the results haven't been good. Doesn't matter if he has what it takes when he's on - if you can't count on him, he's not of much use. I'm sure he's pitched with courage and I don't question his makeup, but it may be that Father Time has robbed him of his resilience.
  5. ashbury
    Infield flies yes, but I think the designers of BABIP would say that strikeouts neither harm nor help one's BABIP. Strikeouts simply are excluded from consideration for batting average for balls in play. I just took a look at the top-20 BABIP among qualified batters this year, and they're all over the map in AB/SO, some above MLB average and some below - if any trend, they're a little better at not striking out, not worse. Same outcome for the bottom-20 in BABIP. Paradox? No, batters who qualify for the batting title collectively strike out less than league average. This doesn't count as a careful study, but I don't see enough there to suggest anyone carry one out.
  6. ashbury
    Sure. Since July 14 he's batting .500 with an 1.100 OPS! OK, cherry-picking just a little farther back: since June 26 his BA is .362, with enough walks to account for a .423 on-base percentage, and with extra-base power for a .594 slugging average.
  7. ashbury
    Casilla is 37, has declining strikeout numbers and walks a lot of batters, and his ERA has been buoyed by a spacious home park. So yes, all things considered he's better than Belisle.
  8. ashbury
    Also, a prevailing wind versus a gust.
  9. ashbury
    FTFY.
  10. ashbury
    I don't believe in luck on the baseball diamond. These are guys trying their best, against opponents also trying their best. The plays come out the way they're going to. I do, however, believe in sustainable versus non-sustainable performance, which seem to come and go without advance warning to the manager.
  11. ashbury
    Completely aside from the topic discussed here, but I wonder if any MLB team's analytics department has ever added an MD with top notch analytical skills and a medical-generalist's mindset, to investigate any number of topics that would pay huge dividends if something was discovered - for instance along the lines of physiological cues that would guide drafting for talent development or for injury avoidance - I don't mean just sifting data on players, but locating studies that tell a team what new data to try to collect, things a non-medical layman might not know how to look for in the literature.
  12. ashbury
    http://www.budgetsaresexy.com/images/seems-legit-gif.gif
  13. ashbury
    Well yes, and add that to the fact that committed 2019 payroll is not yet large. Still, it's a finite budget, and $17M here and $17M there starts to add up. You still have to make choices. And if it's about a player who's likely to draw $5-10M (depending on whom you ask here) per year, and yet you can't get him to sign with you for that, then maybe you have to move on and apply those funds some different way.
  14. ashbury
    The bar is pretty high for corner fielders, but if the team sees him as having a bat that will put him above average even for that cohort, then I'm wrong to have suggested packaging him for an established veteran. Competent corner players can be acquired cheaply, but beyond a certain level they carry a team offensively and are hard to get. Certainly his current performance isn't hurting his ceiling.
  15. ashbury
  16. ashbury
    Billy Beane trades you one of the guys in his major league rotation for... a starting pitcher? That's some kind of money ball, I guess.
  17. ashbury
    I haven't followed Williams Ramirez much, if at all, but since the middle of May he's suddenly unable to prevent runs. Moving up through the organization he's had nothing but success as far as I can see, and his first several weeks of 2018 were OK. Physical problem?
  18. ashbury
    I think we actually are pretty far away. The distance from catchers to pitchers is far larger than the distance from catchers to whoever else is next up. And the DH rule for pitchers was a near thing to get instituted, at that.
  19. ashbury
    Did the Twins offer you a minor-league contract on the spot?
  20. ashbury

    Lollygagging?

    ashbury commented on ashbury's blog entry in Left Coast Bias

    Yeah, I don't really have a narrative to push about the player. I certainly didn't title this blog entry with that word, and if Lollygagging comes across as too close to that, then it was too strong a word for me to choose. OTOH, if we agree it was a mistake, and if that mistake came from the relative lack of effort in the first instant... well, I'd give a nickel to pick his brain candidly about this one play. And maybe Polanco's. I'd stand a chance of learning a fine point.
  21. ashbury
    Foul ball, broken bone in foot.
  22. ashbury
    Plenty of trade proposals where both teams would say no. This might be one.
  23. ashbury
    This choice perfectly exemplifies the dilemma between floor and ceiling, or potential versus demonstrated performance. Graterol has a very large chance of being "who???, oh yeah, whatever happened to him?" three years from now. But there's no denying the big fastball.
  24. ashbury
    An out to LF, a dribbler to the catcher, and a routine grounder to second. The batters looked so bad in doing this that all three were demoted to AA Trenton before the game was over.
  25. ashbury
    An experienced journalist learns how to deal with unattributed sources. No pitcher wants to see his name in the paper throwing Garver under the bus. If Reusse asks, say, Gibson, "do you prefer throwing to Bobby Wilson," Gibby might smile and say, "look, I'm not going to say that." It's his way of not saying what he's saying - he could answer a different way if he really had no opinion. Although I'm inventing this particular dialog, I presume Reusse got a few of those, and decided it was solid enough to run with. The turn of phrase isn't literal, but gets the meaning across.
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