ashbury

I had the fantastic good luck of being there at Oakland Coliseum for this one. Most enjoyable ballgame I watched all season.

He didn't, a couple of years ago anyway. 😀

The worth of any long term contract is tied to the perceived risk. Two years of solid health and high production on the field would have greatly mitigated that risk. The combination didn't happen, so I really don't see a change. No one is going to give the Twins any prospects or valuable veterans to obtain a player on a contract they could have freely offered themselves two years ago. Instead 29 other GMs are nodding and saying to themselves, this is about what I expected, when I said no, two years ago.

#we_got_him.gif

Concur. I had this on my mind too. A lot of people think that the key to success for a GM is being a wheeler dealer, always outsmarting the other GM and buying low while selling high. Overlooked entirely is the value actually delivered on the field. Sometimes the best use of a player with a guaranteed but expiring contract is to just let him play. In the case of Kepler, the team was in the hunt for the postseason, at the trading deadline, and some lottery ticket prospect would not have been worth losing an average but reliable right fielder for two additional, final, months. In other words, being the best player to walk "for nothing" is kind of a fluke stat.

I'm not a big believer in trying to choreograph the events that will happen during an inning, so I'm in the camp that says just put your best hitters up top and the worst down lower. The best hitters get the most chances, that way, while Christian Vazquez gets the fewest. Batting clean up in this scenario amounts to a fluke of whoever happens to be fourth best among the hitters you plan to use that day. Yeah probably a power hitter who strikes out a lot. IOW, color me uninterested. 😊

Would you have outbid Cleveland, as events have in fact unfolded? To the tune of $13M or so? (For all we know, Falvey did make a competitive bid for Santana, and the Guardians went to twelve and he threw in the towel only at that point. One can presume that Cleveland wasn't bidding against itself.)

I wonder if those here who advocated for him, on general principles, would have outbid Cleveland to win the actual bidding. That's a pretty rich contract.

Sir, you have my curiosity. But now you have my attention. "I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation." -- George Bernard Shaw Delmon was only 9 years old when Manuel was born, but denizens of the underworld do have capabilities beyond those of mere mortals, so I suppose the claim is possible.

I wouldn't want to get down into the weeds of what exact multiplier to use, but in general, I concur. BTV is a very valuable way to look at trades, normalizing around a dollar value that surely at least resonates with one manner in how a front office would look at things; it's a step up from fans saying "these two guys are both good, make a trade of one for the other" if the contract statuses are unequal. But when it comes to well-above average established players, there is an additional factor that must be considered: "we have him, and you don't." There are only so many difference-maker players out there. If a contending team wants one, to put them into serious championship contention, then they need to expect to pay a premium for the privilege; the team who holds that player's contract might also have aspirations too. IOW an overpay. National baseball writers and front offices have a symbiotic relationship. When I read of an item like this one, I choose to assume that the FO opted to give the writer a minor "scoop" that fits with their own aims. It's like placing a want ad, one that you know 29 other front offices will read, to encourage some additional bidders. Of course you are right that any FO will listen to another FO at any time. But a source within a FO giving out information implies a little bit of active intent.

He might not have been "good" defensively, but if an important game is on the line and an opposing runner is rounding third while the center fielder is getting ready to fire the ball home, there is no one else I'd rather have behind the plate. 😀

She's gonna find out when she decides to upgrade her MegaYacht to something nicer.

I steal all my material, but my special sauce is that I steal from the best.

That was the polite fiction which veteran shill Sid Hartman, may he rest in peace, kept running in his columns. She may have liked the sport more than her hubby did, but it's doubtful a good word from her affected the team's balance sheet materially.

Forbes lists Justin at $4.9B net worth. That seems actually a bit light in this day and age, where you don't want a market downturn to suddenly cause team management to sell assets or whatever because the owner's wealth is highly leveraged. Still, it's a good start - a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you're talking real money. 😀

I play more than my share of the game Out Of The Park, and it interests me that several years ago they added a Personality feature to their game. Most players are labeled as Normal, but a few are Captain, Prankster, Humble, Sparkplug, and of course a few negative ones are labeled Disruptive, Selfish, etc. Underlying this are user-visible traits including Intelligence, Work Ethic, Leader, and a few others. Reputedly, there are additional traits for these players, under the hood, that the human player can not see - this manifests most notably when a player turns out to be Outspoken and seeking controversy, despite none of the normal/visible traits showing red flags. It's just a game. But I find it intriguing, because reputedly the game designers have gained insights from insiders who work as consultants to them. This tells me that front offices do more than simply label players "clubhouse cancers" but try to dig a little deeper. Not all analytics involves numbers to three decimal places, and good analytics can be simply to break down something into smaller components to understand them better, even if on a simple "red/green" scale. In the game, if you can't form a team of boy scouts for players, the other approach is to hire a manager and staff who are Temperamental or Controlling, rather than Easygoing or Personable (yes, the game has personalities for managers too). Rocco Baldelli (yes, the game has him as Personable, getting along best with Easygoing co-workers) in real life allowed himself to be quoted long ago for OOTP's marketing purposes as saying their game is "more real than not." Even if major league teams don't use exactly the database that OOTP offers the game player, where the unknowable is just a little too certainly known, I have a feeling most of them try to address the question of personality in a systematic way. Games like OOTP aside, I think Rocco might indeed be the wrong manager if a front office thinks truly disruptive players are a market inefficiency to exploit. But they could experiment at the margins on this.

"If you play against him, you hate him. If you play with him, you hate him a little less." 😀

Great compilation of videos. This shows him at his best, as you say, but until they reach the majors that's what you go by with prospects. Off-speed seems to be his out pitches, less so than simply the high heat, and I'm never sure how well that translates to the majors, but a lot of it is disguising what's coming so perhaps he's got what it takes when facing major league batting eyes too. He received what looked like a couple of check-swing "gifts" from the umps, and I bet a rookie pitcher doesn't get that same latitude or deference from the guys in blue, but we'll see. I'm not sure he should be classified as converted from reliever to starter. My glance through his pitching logs is that the Phils simply treated his arm carefully, with never a pitch count higher than 68 that I could see, but in a manner like a starter would be asked. Sometimes, those 50-ish pitches wouldn't last longer than a couple of innings if he wasn't going well that day. In the low minors, I am not sure there is much distinction made about who is on the mound in inning 1 through 3, versus 4 through 6, say - you get your 50-60 pitches of work in, and call it a day. But in his age-23 season they ramped up his workload, exceeding 50 pitches more consistently. IOW to my eye the Phillies were bringing him along as a potential starter, not too differently than our own Marco Raya. (And yes, plenty of people question whether Raya is destined to stick as a starter.) Long relief should be a comfortable role for Castellano if he sticks.

For the first decade after the move from Washington, the team was reliably in the top 10 of attendance in the majors and often in the top 5 - never quite #1 but topping out at #3 in 1963. (The late-1950s Senators had been routinely last in the majors or close to it.) By 1971 the Twins' attendance had begun to decline badly, finishing in the bottom half of the majors from that year forward and nudging the very bottom repeatedly, hitting dead last 1980-82. Since Flood v. Kuhn Supreme Court didn't happen until 1972 and the new CBA took effect in 1976, something other than free agency triggered the franchise's problems (though arguably it contributed to further losses, and Calvin loved to point the finger at it, only making matters worse). Things turned around some when the Dome was opened, but got truly better only when a strong and charismatic roster of players showed up. I don't know exactly what you have in mind for "modern media". But my interpretation is that the Twins had a strong fan base as long as the team was winning - which is kind of the opposite of my idea of a "good baseball town" that will come out and support the team through thick and thin.

First Law of Holes: when you find yourself in one, stop digging. 😀

I count 24 pitchers on the Phils' 40-man, and only 16 position players. I guess that means they have 24 arms they like better for 2025 - IOW the draft is working the way intended, so that teams with lots of good players can't hoard them all and keep deserving players stuck in the minors.

That number looks like just 2024. b-r.com has his L/R career splits: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=keplema01&year=Career&t=b#all_plato His overall lifetime OPS of .747 is divided up as .655 against lefties and .778 versus righthanders. Yearly splits can fluctuate wildly, but overall he can not be expected to hit better against same-side pitching.

Why wouldn't Boston just sign Sasaki for that kind of money, if they need pitching?