ashbury

Wallner is the player I have the highest hopes will gain from a new hitting coach's perspective. You didn't touch on what bothers me about Wallner's 2025, and really his entire career stats - something I've posted in another thread and I'll rephrase here. Normally I take at face value the conventional modern stats like OPS (which WAR derives from), because across the majors it correlates very well with the actual goal of scoring runs, - which of course correlates well with winning ballgames during the season - and which correlates with winning a championship. Wallner's actual run and RBI totals have always seemed low compared to his rate stats, and some have pointed to fewer opportunities with men on base and so forth as an explanation. But when sifting through the "Splits" page for Wallner on baseball-reference.com, I noticed a real outlier. When the ballgame is tight, like tied or with a one-run lead for either side, Wallner's OPS is down in the .600s for 2025. When the game is not close - a lead of at least 4 for either side - his OPS zooms up above 1.100. This general pattern has shown up fairly consistently through his short career so far - it's not a one-year blip that I'd more easily dismiss. League-wide there is a slight uptick in hitting performance during garbage time - it stands to reason - but nothing remotely this wide. Pitchers have the right to alter their approach depending on game situations. It's up to the batter to adjust accordingly. My take is that somehow Wallner is not adjusting effectively. When the pitcher's incentive is to just get the game over with (win or lose), and let's say throws more strikes if I want to oversimplify, Wallner's in his element. But in the situations where the game hangs in the balance, somehow he's either going for a pitcher's pitch rather than one he can do something with, or he's waiting for a mistake pitch that (at the MLB level) rarely happens, or he's not using tactics like going opposite field when that's all the pitcher's giving him. So I can only repeat what I said in the first paragraph. I hope the coaches can sit down with him and talk about what his approach has been and what maybe can be simplified, or maybe be adjusted, to correct this imbalance (the part at the low end of acceptable, obviously). Because at present, his high OPS doesn't turn into runs, corroborated by his Win Probability Added which doesn't turn into contributions to wins the way his WAR would suggest. You led off asking why some people "hate" Wallner. I can't speak for others but I suspect it's not hatred so much as a feeling of disconnect between his numbers and the eye-test when watching games.

This team rarely has front line starting pitching, period. So your narrow focus guarantees small sample size to sift through for insight.

That's "lucky at cards." Buying low and selling high is the essence of poker, methinks, unless you're the fish. 😄

Where's the bowl of 7-year stale starlight mints (red peppermint and green spearmint) beside these?

I never graduated from penny collecting when I was a kid because my parents gave me an allowance that made the Pohlads look like spendthrifts by comparison. Nickels? What are we, the Rockefellers?

That was literally in the article. When is the Draft Lottery? The draft lottery occurs in December at the Winter Meetings every year. For 2026, that will put it in the week of December 8th, but the exact date and time have not been announced yet.

Why? Because they OPSed .800+ at Reno? That place is a launching pad. I'd trust their small sample size major league numbers over that.

I can't separate my own feelings about the roster from the need to be realistic in terms of what the FO will (or is constrained to) do. Cashing in viable bullpen pieces that were under control in 2026 told me last July that either ownership or the FO feels there is no chance in 2026. It does me no good if I want to say "oh yes there is a chance!" if they plan to undercut me at every turn. As for Larnach, he makes even less sense to me if I DID think there was a chance in 2026. A DH-type turning 29 before Opening Day and with no plausible path to an .800 OPS would be a downward drag on a team with aspirations to contend. If there's a role in the majors for Larnach anymore, it's for a team with no hope who needs a place holder until the young .... aw crud, I already went through that form of fandom in 2012-2014. Larnach's our new Josh Willingham - no, wait, Willingham actually proved capable of hitting 30+ home runs when healthy. Larnach's our new Ryan Doumit - wait, except he doesn't play behind the plate. I guess Mickey Gasper is our new Doumit, leaving Larnach as, uh, Chris Parmelee? I get depressed about the Twins when I think about Larnach, which makes me sadder because I like the guy.

The article has a paragraph about Watkins moving on. It might be the most recognition this long-time Twins coach gets in a TD article going forward, so I thought I'd add my little tribute.

Tommy Watkins noticing son Bashbury and me in our Twins gear at an Arizona Fall League game and initiating conversation from the field (twice, since we didn't catch on at first he was talking to us) will always stand out in my memories of fall baseball, so I'll miss him even if it may have been time for him to move on.

Ghost written by Joe Pohlad.

We're obviously coming at things from a different point of view, and we had a similar discussion a few weeks ago. Yours is that Larnach isn't the squeakiest wheel, so he's not first in line to have something done about. Mine is that when a lot of things need to be done, the exact ordering is less important than the imperative that they all get done. Even with that said, I'm not quite sure why Larnach is some kind of hill you want to die on for 2026. Baseball-reference.com has an entertaining feature called Similarity Scores near the bottom of most veteran players' pages - it's derived from a Bill James idea from around 40 years ago and is just a toy, but fun. I looked at Larnach's list - here are his 10 most similar players through their age-27 seasons (that's Larnach's 2024 and apparently they haven't updated yet): Gavin Sheets (974.6) Kyle Blanks (973.4) Pavin Smith (972.2) Aaron Altherr (970.2) Steven Souza Jr. (970.0) Ken Wood (970.0) Willie Calhoun (969.9) Joe Hague (968.8) Dante Bichette (968.6) Chris Parmelee (967.9) The numbers aren't important except to illustrate how easy it is to find matches for a given player (with 1000 being someone's virtual clone). The 10th best match for Willie Mays, a much more unique kind of guy, at age 27 is teammate Orlando Cepeda with a similarity score of only 851. Carlos Correa is fun to look at - his age 27 list brings me to Vern Stephens, a really good and sadly forgotten shortstop from the 1940s/50s, and... whoops, that's a rabbit hole I'll have to not dive any further down. Anywho, Larnach has a pretty common set of skills and/or results, leading to a lot of matches in major league history. Which in turn means maybe we can learn something from history, though I'm lazy and will look at only the players this toy gives me. I took a quick glance through the careers of these 10 guys. What jumps out at me is this: 6 of them were out of the majors before age 30. That is to say, they were in the majors at age 27 and matched up closely enough to Larnach (considering the full arc of their careers up to that point) to be on this list, and then *poof* *fizzle*. Blanks, Altherr, Wood, Calhoun, Hague, and our own Parmelee. Of the remaining four, two are currently active players: Sheets has amassed WAR of -1.0 and +0.7 in his age 28 and 29 seasons. Smith likewise has 0.6 and 0.4 to show for his hard work at age 28/29. As to the final two, Steven Souza had a really good WAR of 3.6 at age 28 and then the bottom fell out - he hung on to age 33 but was never again a valuable player. Dante Bichette finally made good on his promise as a prospect and after his rough start he blossomed at age 29, only to sink back into mediocrity, though to his credit he kept finding work until the ripe old age of 37. This is hardly a scientific sampling, nor is the forecasting infallible. Still, it's systematic, and not cherry picking of guys I happen to remember. I was prepared to see evidence in either direction. But if I'm looking for evidence that Larnach was likely to be an asset to the Twins at age 28 (spoiler alert: his WAR in 2025 was 0.1) and going forward, it isn't here. Guys with resumes similar to Larnach's don't last too much longer, or if they do they don't amount to much. Is it worth a 1-in-10 gamble that he turns out as good as Dan Bichette? (The ship has already sailed on an age-28 season like Souza's.) The odds seem better that Larnach's poised to fall off a cliff, and you'll have to do something about him sooner than you think. (And need I belabor the point by saying that the top comps for true stars like Mays and Correa do not fit this fizzle-after-27 pattern? Not that either of us is calling Larnach a star - just, this makes it clear we haven't misjudged Trevor's hidden potential.) Larnach's going to need replacing soon. Rip the bandaid off now. Okay, enough about that. Perhaps your POV also is that removing Larnach from an impending 90-loss team might turn them into a 93-loss team or something like that - or even just that he's a reasonably popular fellow. If I were actually employed by the Twins I might have to take this angle - it's important not to crater so badly that attendance takes even another step downward. But I'm not employed by the Twins. And armchair-GMing a 90-loss team bores me. Like I said, we're coming at things from a different point of view. Whew. I don't know how you do all the typing you do. I'm tired. Maybe I need to use ChatGPT to compose my messages. 😁

From b-r.com: You could try looking there. RIP Albie. You were one of my first baseball cards.

Since the Reds finished with a better W/L record than the Twins, and thus have a lower right during waivers claims, it appears that our FO felt that Ben's not a better backup catcher than the sparse and motley group we already have in-house. He was of course a hold-over from the old Terry Ryan regime, which by now is down to basically Byron Buxton and Michael Tonkin unless I'm forgetting someone.

A team with 12 guys better than Larnach will not need Larnach on the roster with them to serve as their benchmark.

It is doubtful I will find this excellent tool to be of actual entertainment to me this off-season. I keep telling myself I have no interest in playing armchair GM for a bottom-feeding 90-loss team.

I've said before, in the context of Buxton, that you build around players of high talent and great character - and that to have such a player tell the team he wants out should be a firing offense for the FO. I'll modify that a bit to say that if Buxton's dissatisfaction is with ownership too, then the owners and the FO deserve each other. I hope none of this comes to pass.

I made it through most of one episode.

Also known as Rizz - wait, what? Are we seriously not doing Rizz anymore?! Huh, just when you've got game with the opposite sex? Okay fellow boomers, I'll see myself out.

Brooks Lee is 24 and everyone at Twins Daily still thinks he's this young prospect who needs a few more years of seasoning before he emerges as a star. 😁 (Nobody asked, but my actual opinion on Lee is probably between the two extremes.)

When would you say the team started running? In the final 20 games of the season, I count 83 runs. 4.15 runs per game For the entire months of August and September combined, i.e. after the trade deadline, they scored 227 across those 54 games, or 4.20 per game. Pretty much in line with the paltry 4.19 they scored across the season as a whole. MLB average in 2025 was 4.45, and the good offenses in the majors scored more like 5. I don't see any evidence of "success" in terms of actual run-scoring.

But, but, but, but, Brent Rooker! 😄

We old timers have watched the Eephus pitch morph into the 2-seam sinker, and mutter wisely to ourselves about a rose by any other name.

The Twins are "letting" Watkins interview? Is that similar to how they're letting Baldelli interview?