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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    Somebody else brought up the word 'magical'. There's no implication of analytical precision in any of this. And now we're two weeks away from Polanco's eligibility to join the major league team, and he still hasn't appeared in a minor-league box score. So the number 20 isn't even operative anymore, in regard to making it back on schedule. Magic number or not. Rustiness from lack of opportunity is the issue, and the car-door incident threw a big spanner into the works. July 2 is not impossible, but to me the odds went down.
  2. ashbury
    OK, so while I had those pages up, I looked some more, and something popped out at me. Leading off innings, the Twins' on-base percentage this season has been .292, instead of their overall .313. Across the majors, those numbers are .307 and .316 respectively. A bit of a drop. Leading off the game, Twins' OBP is even worse, .265, and for the majors it's .319 (you'd indeed expect it to be higher since the first inning is the only one the manager ordinarily exerts direct control over). It's not just Brian Dozier; his 50 times leading off the game have resulted in just 13 successes, but the 18 PA by other batters have led to 5 successes for only a .277 OBP. We're now down to small sample size, but that's a deficit of 4 first-inning rallies that were at best deferred until 2 outs remained. Obviously, that's not enough to account for anything actually meaningful over the course of a season - on average a couple of runs or so, going by long-term proability tables. But with this team, I think it's going to be little things like this that add up to the lack of situational offensive punch.
  3. ashbury
    Spring ball is played at a different pace than in-season. Batters getting some looks at live pitching in March may not show up in stats. During the season, you don't have pitchers looking for opportunities to throw to a live batter so much, so the batter needs to take the opportunities where they are available.
  4. ashbury
    The situational stats at b-r.com for this season don't directly answer your question, but Twins' batting average and slugging average with men on base are both better than with bases empty, and even better still when runners are in scoring position. This lines up pretty much with league averages, except that the Twins RISP numbers are even a little bit favorable. Twins: https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/split.cgi?t=b&team=MIN&year=2018 MLB: https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/split.cgi?t=b&lg=MLB&year=2018
  5. ashbury
    And inability to throw your best stuff for strikes is many a pitcher's undoing.
  6. ashbury
    Aaron's game at Buffalo Sunday afternoon was a little better than his past couple of starts, but still not the signature statement he wants to make in order to get that next callup to the majors. He allowed a two-out solo homer in the second inning to tie up the game, and then after a walk he should have been out of the inning via a grounder, but Taylor Featherstone at third threw the ball into right field trying for a forceout and the runner came around to score an unearned run. He pitched 3 more innings of scoreless ball, and then came out after having made 88 pitches. Seems like kind of a short start, and I haven't found any indication why his day ended when it did; he's been a workhorse starter all through the minors, and I hope this isn't the start of some kind of physical ailment that he's trying to work through. So his line for the game included 4 hits and 2 walks, plus a hit batsman, and he logged 4 strikeouts. Just the one earned run lowered his season ERA to 3.28. He even took TD Minor League Pitcher of the Day honors (though perhaps somewhat by default). All well and good... but I'm uneasy. He had no one-two-three innings this game. A couple more strikeouts would have been good. This is his fifth straight outing (including the relief appearance in the majors) where he has given up a home run. It's approaching a point where he needs to find one more trick of the trade, to put away batters and really assert himself. Perhaps the increase in homers indicates he's been trying something... in which case, it's apparently not working as hoped.
  7. ashbury
    An Englishman, a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a German on vacation all happen to be watching a busker do some juggling at the city market. The juggler sees that these four gentlemen have an obstructed view, so he stands up on a nearby pedestal and calls out, “can you all see me now?” They reply: “Yes.” “Oui.” “Sí.” “Ja.” And that, folks, is my contributed ingredient to today's Father's Day Stone Soup: a dad joke.
  8. ashbury
    Not to get all off in the weeds over a small transaction, but is there a physical problem for Suniaga? He has far from the worst stats and isn't the youngest on the squad, either of which would be a marker for additional time in rookie-ball.
  9. ashbury
    The revised version of your post has the merit of not depending on random events when clicking the two play buttons.
  10. ashbury
    Try running both copies of the video, starting at different moments, and see whether the time lag results in genius or diabolical dissonance!
  11. ashbury
    I am glad he has made such strides lately, but are there any actual good teams for whom Gibson would top their rotation?
  12. ashbury
    Polanco's return appears to be delayed due to an off-field injury involving a car door.
  13. ashbury
    Try this one: What did the pirate say exactly one year after he turned 79? Aye matey.
  14. ashbury
    Fair enough, but my response was to something I took to be about mismanaged options.
  15. ashbury
    Yeah, I'm going to jinx him now by saying that, at last, I am a believer that his changes in tactics/mechanics are not just a fluke.
  16. ashbury
    Thrilling footage of a 179-plate-appearance streak being snapped: https://mediadownloads.mlb.com/mlbam/mp4/2018/06/16/2157983183/1529108067745/asset_1800K.mp4
  17. ashbury
    Polanco was added to the 40-man at a very young age because the Twins felt there was too high a risk of losing him. Blame the MLB roster rules concerning international free agents, not Twins mismanagement of minor-league options. Bringing Polanco up and down had no bearing on those options once he was on the 40-man and they had to be exercised.
  18. ashbury
    Royce Lewis's big leg kick seems like something a crafty pitcher could exploit to mess up his timing. Not so?
  19. ashbury
    It was a second straight sub-par outing for Slegers on June 12 at Scranton/Wilkes-Barre (cmon guys, make up your minds willya? or, just admit the ballpark is actually in Moosic PA) as he took the loss in a 5-2 decision. Only two of his runs were earned, but the 7 hits and 2 walks in 6 innings give an indication of trouble, and the first-inning 3-run homer, that occurred after (soon-to-be called up) infielder Taylor Motter prolonged the inning with a two-out error, wound up being all the opponents would actually need. Two more solo shots in the third and fourth accounted for the rest of the scoring damage. Actually all the game's scoring occurred on homers, as Stone Hands Motter launched one right after Wings catcher Cameron Rupp did.
  20. ashbury
    After a 3-for-4 night at Palm Beach on June 14, Ben is now batting .400 in high-A ball. No extra-base hits and just one walk to supplement the basic stats, but entering the all-star break it's been a good start.
  21. ashbury
    MLB average so far this year is 32% of inherited runners score (last year 30%). The Twins team-wide are at 42% (last year 28%) - down at the bottom of the majors but tied with a few others. Hildenberger at 65% and Pressly at 42% are the main culprits. Reed's at 25% for the season. It's kind of a crude stat, combining runners' locations and numbers of outs, but still indicates where some of our pain is coming from. A league-average rate would account for about 10 fewer runs, or pro-rated to a full season around 25 if we continued like this. By a common rule of thumb, that would be 2.5 losses - but given all the close games we've had, the leverage is for more than that. Maybe it's just Small Sample Size at this point in the season, but the trend needs to stop.
  22. ashbury
    The article mentioned Hooria Jazaieri at Berkeley and Katerina Bezrukova at University of Buffalo. So the blame is shared equally between the genders.
  23. ashbury
    I usually like the Atlantic, but this article seems to be an amalgam of anecdotes, questionable statistical analysis, and propter hoc arguments. Everyone recognizes chemistry, but only after the championship is won. There doesn't yet seem to be much predictive power. I may have glanced through too quickly, but I didn't spot something I could take to a team and have them act upon.
  24. ashbury
    Does he answer to Jeffersie?
  25. ashbury
    I don't see that humorously rebutting a poster's assertion reflects on the player himself. He is what he is, a solidly built corner defender at most.
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