ashbury

Aaron Allan Slegers (pronounced SLAY-gers) Born: September 4, 1992 (age 25 this season) Birthplace: Scottsdale, AZ Signed via the amateur draft in 2013, fifth round (140th overall) Height: 6' 10" Weight: 245 Position: Pitcher Throws: Right Bats: Right Pitching arsenal: fastball, slider, circle change Stats at baseball-reference.com Aaron has been adopted for a second season by yours truly. The lazy approach is being taken at the outset, by a bit of cut-and-paste from last year's post. The Twins signed him in 2013 after a three-year career at Indiana University, where he won Big Ten Conference Baseball Pitcher of the Year honors in 2013, putting him in good company with Tyler Jay (UI 2015), Alex Wimmers (OSU 2009-10), and Glen Perkins (UM 2004). After an initial season in Elizabethton he has moved up in the organization with pretty good speed, seeing time in both Cedar Rapids (A) and Ft Myers (A+) in 2014, Ft Myers and Chattanooga in 2015, and then Chattanooga again in 2016. 2017 was a solid year in Rochester, earning a mid-August callup to the majors for a spot start and then was added again in September. You can look up his numbers at the above link better than I can repeat them. He has done well at every stop - never consistently dominant, but always a workhorse getting the job done. Once in a while he has shut-down stuff, as witnessed by a short-game no-hitter in his first start last April. Aside from his get-the-feet-wet time in Rookie ball, he has always been used strictly as a starting pitcher. He has a good fastball - I saw 94 on the radar gun during the one Spring game of his I watched, or 91 at times (maybe a sinker?). Off-speed at 86 but I don't know if he has anything really slow in his arsenal. He got a very nice "failed checked swing" for a strike 3 on one batter, and in the next inning I saw another called 3rd strike for a 3rd out. I have no idea if those were changeups or sliders. But those batters at least were not able to get a good read on his delivery - if it were the changeup it would be sweet - good two-strike changeups are always sweet, at least except if the batter is sitting on it. I don't personally believe too much in slotting starting pitching prospects' ceilings as #5, #4, or whatever, but in those terms I do see Aaron as having a ceiling more like a #3 workhorse, and it's not impossible that in a few years he'd fill a #2 role in some rotation, maybe even ours. But right now he is fighting simply for a 25-man roster spot and would slot in as a #5-type if he is so fortunate, and he surely has a lot more work to do to learn the final tricks of the trade that let a pitcher succeed at the highest level. Here is Seth Stohs's most recent TD article about Slegers, which contains lots of good tidbits that I didn't (directly [ ] ) plagiarize. Here are his previous Twins Daily Adopt-A-Prospect pages: Aaron Slegers Adopt-A-Prospect 2014 Aaron Slegers Adopt-A-Prospect 2017

Hey! Don't be dissin' my guy Aaron. I recognize a backhanded compliment when I see one.

I should have added: there's the old quip, "don't quit your day job." John Bonnes probably should quit his. I want more of this.

I'm surprised you're surprised. Maybe you are assuming the wording meant it was to their faces - I took it to mean behind their backs but word eventually got to them. There are all kinds of areas in life where poor negotiators get made fun of behind their backs. Starting in middle school, I guess.

We're dealing with fuzzy terms now, but a Best Picture film is unlikely to be not well written, not well directed, not well acted, etc, so at worst it's likely a film worth seeing unless it's in a genre you detest or you have learned it contains triggers or something like that. It's virtually certain to be "good", in fact usually quite good. Winning an Oscar in some category, sure, the other parts of the movie could conceivably be unwatchable. I harken back to when The Sting won Best Picture. I thought it was not that great, and was very surprised, although I don't remember now what would have been a better choice. But, it was good.

Very enlightening. I didn't understand why they had to go to arbitration. Now I do.

Not to worry. Jorge Polanco was doing that a spring or two ago and... uh, well, the jury's still out for him at SS too.

Moderator's note: Let's don't turn "do you need an ace" into a protracted steroid discussion.

These nominated movies are all so different that I find it impossible to rank them. Just see Shape of Water and enjoy it for the vision the creators delivered, rather than try to compare.

If they undervalued him, wouldn't they have accepted the Dodgers' offer, or an offer from some other team?

I don't believe the lottery analogy was offered as a similar situation, merely an easy-to-relate-to example where, if you had 1000 lives to lead you would decide one way (Expectation Value), but with one life you may very well decide differently (either Minimum Regret or Maximum Reward, depending on how life-changing the respective amounts are).

With a pick that some analysts are already calling a reach, ashburyjohn selects.... Aaron Slegers, retaining his rights after a strong 2017.

A market based prediction project using futures-trading for elections has been tried before: https://now.uiowa.edu/2016/09/buying-election If you read the article you'll see it didn't work any better than other methods of prediction.

League-wide, the batting average when the ball is put in play (BABIP) hovers around .300 every year. I suppose a perfect defense would turn everything except a fly ball over the fence into an out, for a BABIP of .000. Even achieving a team-wide BABIP of .200 against you would be stellar beyond belief. Last season's Twins squad had a pretty good defense by most measures. The pitching staff's BABIP was nevertheless .298. So acquiring an Ace who strikes out a lot of guys and doesn't surrender many walks and limits the HR would be worth doing anyway.

Well you've stated the conclusion that to my mind isn't proved, if an increase in runners on base were to turn a lot of high inside pitch homers into low outside pitch groundouts. Two factors in play - number of opportunities (bases empty, men on), and then what the batter does with them. Dozier, as a leadoff hitter, has a career percentage of PA with bases empty higher than MLB average, as might be expected. MLB-wide (2017), SLG tends to go up slightly with men on, but for his career Dozier's goes down. I haven't dug any deeper than that, but it leads me to think that batting leadoff might be about optimal for him, or at least the benefit of batting him lower is less than for other good hitters in the lineup. https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=doziebr01&year=Career&t=b#all_bases https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/split.cgi?t=b&lg=MLB&year=2017#all_bases

We're getting kind of far from the topic of Jorge Polanco, but I do buy it. Now, I consider myself as analytical as the next Stat-Drunk Computer Nerd*, but I've also confirmed to my own satisfaction the observation made by others that Dozier basically feasts off the high inside fastball. I don't know how to quantify it, but I suspect that Dozier may be more dependent on the opposing battery's choice than any other 25+ HR hitter today. If men are on base, he doesn't seem to get the pitch where he wants to drive it; when the stakes are lower the pitcher may opt to challenge him. I don't value solo HRs overly highly, but they do score a run immediately, and are hard to beat as an outcome from your leadoff hitter. Rickey Henderson was (a bit) similar; his 297 career HR may have harmed his SB numbers a bit, but his teams surely didn't care. I've mellowed out regarding Dozier's spot in the batting order. * Any USENET alumni reading?

I don't think they would do very well. Cuellar, McNally and Dobson have passed away, and according to rumor Palmer can barely reach 84 MPH on his fastball anymore.

Early front-runner for descriptive sentence of the week. I bet you did well in creative writing class in school.

Perhaps. But when the total contract values being offered are for less than the prior team was willing to commit to for a single season QO, the length of contract starts to be not relevant to the question of how the market collapsed that much.

I am just throwing out an idea in response to the thread starter. And anyway, records are made to be broken. Pick a slightly higher buyout number, then. Leave the second year money on the table, for instance. But there are two additional thoughts behind the wacky idea. First, while I spelled out the obvious benefit to the team, the benefit to the player is to no longer have to jump all the hurdles spelled out by a MLB contract, staying in shape and doing whatever is necessary to remain able to play at a high level, if the outcome has become obviously futile. My staying in the best possible shape is well worth earning $13M to me of course, but maybe another person than I would see it differently at this stage of the career. Second, at the time of his contract extension, much was made of the player's having turned down the chance to pitch an extra inning or so, to invoke an incentive clause. The implication was that the front office viewed this as demonstrating exactly what a high-character guy he was - I think they just came right out and said it. I don't discount the FO's judgement on that, so another financial concession from Hughes would be in keeping with the picture drawn. I would not have made a similar guess on someone like, say, Nolasco, and that's not casting any aspersions at anyone by saying so. Anyway, it's just a fun guess. If I hit the jackpot, someone pay up; if I'm wrong, I'll go back and erase any mention of my having said so. I'm a high-character guy, y'know.

While I agree that it's premature to discuss this, for the sake of discussion I'll toss out this prediction: at the end of Spring Training, Hughes negotiates a buyout that is favorable to the team, say $10M, relieving them of the need to cut him outright, and he retires.

Implicit, but I think not quite stated, in some of these replies is that if they are in contention, the calculation is: The value of what would come back in trade, versus The value of the draft pick that comes from making a QO, *plus* the value he gives the team during his one last pennant drive with us and hopefully the post-seasonThis is a deceptively simple comp, and opinions will vary. Advanced analytics may be used by the team, or we can do our back-of-the-envelope WAR calculations or even just take our qualitative guesses from experience, trying to integrate established veterans versus high-end prospects. It's not easy. My own view at the moment is that the value derived from a third of a season of Dozier, in his apparently established prime, is underrated and tips the scales. But a lot depends on what offers come from the other teams, and this is something we won't know unless a trade is agreed on.

It's instructive to look at these instances of signing below QO, but I still wonder whether a grievance filing is in the offing if some of these players continue to get only lowball offers. It's not like the players alone mis-judged the market - the teams who issued the QO apparently were comfortable at that price last fall, and a few months later the market has changed THAT much? I'm not ready to embrace any collusion theories yet, but at the dollar values being bandied about via the rumor mill my antennae are up.

Am I completely mis-remembering, or aren't games underway at noon sometimes?

Is the minor league schedule online anywhere?