ashbury

I appreciate the flurry of activity, and want to say that I'm on the road starting today (Arizona Fall League, baby!!!!) so I might not get around to giving your thoughts the time they deserve for a little while. Also, I might not have made clear in my lengthy previous response that, while I did respond to some or all of your comments, the second half (with the bullet items) was about the article I linked and was not directed toward anyone in particular at all. I don't know who Richard Y. Chappell is either, except he seems to be a philosopher who somehow dabbled in this. 😀

Explain Ben Revere then. 😊

I don't disagree that different scenarios could play out and the FO needs to be ready to handle each and every one of them. I just prefer to plan on success except when in a rebuild phase. Trade value at the deadline means little to me during off-season planning. If the team tanks but certain pieces like Paddack were productive, by all means, pivot and sell him (and other expiring contracts, etc). A good FO can do that on nearly a moment's notice, based on whatever standard talent evaluation methods they have. It's a tactic, not a guiding strategy. What I wrote in response to DJL44 was basically that if Paddack is going well then the team has a higher chance of going well too, and if the team is in sell mode at the deadline then the odds are higher that Paddack has flamed out again. Not that he is key to the rotation, but I still see only a thin sliver of scenarios where he's trade bait. However, for off-season planning purposes it's fair to at least acknowledge that in such a scenario, his contract is modest enough that he's not certain to be untradable - he's not Kyle Farmer, where even the player himself expressed surprise he was kept at the price he cost. I don't like trading away pitching. But if there's a reasonable chance that other in-house options will perform as well as the unpredictable Paddack, I might trade him simply because his is an expiring contract going into 2025. If he fails, he fails. If he does well, it's only for a season and that's not part of building a sustainable winner. Only if 2025 is a go-for-it year and Paddack is a key to that effort would I feel differently IOW he's not Sonny Gray, either.

Twins owner taking time with a fan:

Expect to see a lot of opponents going first-to-third on singles. / ninja'd again. "Life moves pretty fast." ― Ferris Bueller

Concur. I read someone saying that poor hitting with RISP was evidence of the players quitting. If so, how do you explain the players who got on base in the first place? (No, there weren't many of those either, but the evidence of quitting was seemingly super selective, from at bat to at bat.)

Falvey's LinkedIn page shows a mystery year after graduating from college, which (while I was digging into Chief's point, looking for hard evidence) may have coincided with a small business venture with a classmate that may or may not have panned out. Falvey would surely mention an MBA in the education segment of a LinkedIn resume. Chief is correct. Still, Falvey gives off much of the vibes of an MBA holder. Such a degree only matters when you're about 23-27 looking for a first or second job to put on your resume. After that, experience and On the Job Training will matter more than school credentials anyway. And that OJT may or may not be explicitly MBA-like. I can attest that back in the heyday of Cray Research in the Twin Cities, they put their technical marketing specialists (i.e. people with tech backgrounds who were going into a marketing role) through many hours of training each year on aspects that would be covered in a good MBA program. It is possible that the Cleveland front office does similar with their own rising in-house talent. When my daughter was getting her MBA at Sloan we had conversations where I felt on very familiar ground to what she was telling us about her studies, and while I don't hold an MBA, I enjoyed the conversations, even if she was maybe humoring her old man a little. Bottom line, Falvey might not be an MBA but he's very much the same "type" that every major league front office seems to gravitate toward. Someone with an undergrad degree in Econ is a very different animal than Terry Ryan who preceded him.

That's threading quite a needle, hanging on to a guy you consider an injury risk and expecting him to remain healthy enough for someone else to want to trade for him at exactly the right moment four months into a six month season before he suddenly goes kablooey. He's just about as likely to go full DeSclafani on us.

Irvin elected free agency after being outrighted to St Paul. The Twins are at liberty to compete for his services, of course, but at this point he's just one of a thousand possibilities. / oops, ninja'd by DJL44

The FO has access to their internal marketing studies and I don't. But if someone in business wants money, revenue plays as big a role as spending (maybe greater since spending can't go below zero or some reasonable floor), and my assumption is that Lopez brings in more revenue than whoever would replace him on the roster if we traded him

I kind of would. They've marketed the heck out of him. He probably does a better job of paying for his own salary than even Buxton or Correa at this stage of things. And to replace Lopez in the rotation? Trading him would not bring back someone I would trust as much - why would another team do that? Trading Lopez would indeed be a tear-it-to-the-studs move, a real rebuild, and that's why I do take issue with the word Reusse chose relative to the plan he laid out (with no mention of Lopez that I could find). Retool - find what you can inside the organization, maybe latch onto a player or two from outside who can fill a perceived gap. "No more Nolascos" is a bit of a strawman since no one is advocating him specifically - but there does seem to be sentiment that we should spend similarly (adjusted for current payroll sizes) and an expectation better results somehow. BTW Nolasco was an early foray by the analytics team on the Twins - remember how much lower Ricky's FIP was than his ERA? Other teams seemed to be more advanced than the Twins where FIP was concerned, since we "outbid" the few other teams interested in him. The Dodgers for example were said to have broken his heart by telling him "no thanks" at the time.

All of Keaschall, EmmaRod, and Prielipp as part of Opening Day Plan A could be a little far-fetched, and my preference is to start Lee at AAA as well. But Reusse is first and foremost a columnist and he writes to entertain. Still, he's also a keen student of the game and I respect his overall acumen, and the direction he advocates here happens to be mine too. Don't waste scarce dollars on veterans whose ceiling is "average" when your own talent evaluation says that rookies you use instead of them may stumble at first but then rise to at least that same level of achievement anyway. I'd term it "reload" or "retool" rather than "rebuild," but the meaning is the same. The talent evaluation had better be right, of course, or else the season could be a disaster. But the talent evaluation has to be right concerning using veterans instead, and we ended up with Manuel Margot who was NOT the backup in CF that was implied when he was traded for, and DeSclafani who was NOT in fact viable as even some kind of mythical #5 in a rotation, and we had a rotating cast of relief arms who did NOT add up to a shutdown bullpen - and we ended up with a team not built for a long run of success. Get the evaluations right, and/or coach the players up, and then the rebuild versus spend argument goes away. Do the latter when you can, of course, but get it right in either case. Our FO didn't get it any better in 2024 than an amateur like me could have, and that's just sad.

Apologies accepted of course, and I'm sorry that I blew up at an attempt at a joke (which I confess I still don't quite see the purpose or relevance, but moving on...) One problem with blog posts is the TD messaging system doesn't let me know there are replies to the main entry, only the replies to my own replies. Now there's a bunch of content to wade into and address, since I last looked. So I'll reply to one reply from each of you - that way TD will inform you both - but I'll cover more territory than just these. What I've tried to do is to stake out a middle ground where it comes to analytics. The article that I referenced in the OP was a little unusual, in that it was in regard to nothing like baseball analytics, nor business analytics, but instead a rather more esoteric topic ("effective altruism" if I have the gist of it correctly), which I don't pretend to understand in its own right - the author uses terminology that is probably familiar to philosophy grad students or economic theorists, both of which I ain't. But that's what made it interesting to me: the author still advocated for a middle ground where it comes to statistical methods in support of arguments in that field (whatever the heck that field actually is). So... to address Brian's post above, item 1 draws no reaction from me since we're in agreement. But bullet 2 seems to simply ignore what has been said. It's a strawman to think that analytics people develop some kind of result, package it with a bow on top, present it to whoever is supposed to receive it, and then go on vacation for 11 months and come back in a year to solve some other problem for all time, and collect a fat paycheck for their effort. No, analytics is a constant, and iterative, process. Do you really think that a team of number-crunchers will overlook the fact that performance is constantly changing? That the underlying facts on which the study was based could have changed overnight? Airline analytics teams may develop a forecast of demand for individual routes for the coming year, so that they can devise a strategic plan for aircraft and crews - and then as the year goes by, they revise the tactical side of the plan as demand rises or falls in a given city or a specific route - and at an even smaller level they devise recovery plans due to weather. Though I have less insight provided by insiders where it comes to baseball, it still seems impossible that the Twins analytics team develops a static picture of, say, Pablo Lopez, and then does not take into account if he develops an effective new pitch like a sweeper, or simply that the results keep changing when he pitches. But baseball being a dynamic game, of pitchers adjusting to batters and batters adjusting to pitchers and the "book" on rookies and veterans alike constantly evolving, don't you think that the forecasts based on past data kind of take this into account anyway? The romance of sports is strong, and we all love a story where we learn that Lopez's recent success is due to his fancy new sweeper. But we've all seen cases where someone's success spawns an article about why it happened, only to see that very same player lay an egg the very next game after the article. Yes, the forecasts may not have a very long shelf life if used at an extremely granular level to predict what Pablo Lopez or Alex Kirilloff or Manuel Margot will do in their next game or next at bat. You can't predict the next roll of the dice either, but that doesn't mean you discard past events, and maybe your analysis even identifies that the dice being used today are loaded somehow. The third bullet item about ignoring the spreadsheet is spot on (other than my detestation of the word which is used to imply something different than what goes on at decision-making time). The analytics team has stated publicly that Rocco deviates from the plan going into a given game all the time, and they specifically discuss those changes with him afterward, which in turn shapes their planning for the next game or whatever I don't know how deviating in certain ways turns into ignoring the spreadsheet. And I especially don't understand how that in turn becomes "You. Can't. Handle. The. Truth." Nor why it's a perfect post. I guess I should let it go, but I like a good laugh, sometimes even at my own expense*, and I feel left out on this one. As for HBD's followup, regarding runners left on base, I can't find where on b-r.com there are stats for LOB for individual pitchers. There are team LOB on the main page for each major league season (the "MLB Summary" link). LOB is such a mixed bag anyway - I don't see a strong correlation of it to high OR low scoring totals - the White Sox had a putrid offense this year and rather low LOB, but not as low as the Royals or Guardians (among a few others) who scored more runs per game. Their pitchers on the other hand did lead the majors in LOB, but they still gave up a high number of runs because they were putting runners on base in the first place. And HR are a complicating factor, because they clear away the LOB. But I don't know how to find that kind of information for individual pitchers - which seems strange - so I can't evaluate whether Lopez and Berrios really do "bear down" when runners are on base to any degree that other pitchers don't. When in doubt, I don't assume any mystical abilities that can't be measured - certainly that marks me as being of the analytical mindset - and what we think we see in one game can be negated in the next. Sonny Gray had a great, clutch performance in the post-season last year, except he couldn't follow it up the next time out, whereas Lopez was nails in both his outings, and the realist in me says to treat them both as small sample size outcomes from two very smart and brave pitchers. Anyway, long way around, I don't know whether or not Lopez and Berrios are wizards with LOB, with better gut and instinct than usual, and I'm not especially willing to grant that they are, in order to follow a discussion on that tangent. What I do lean toward is that LOB correlates strongly with WHIP at the team level (where b-r.com offers easy access) - if you put men on base at a higher rate than average, then you probably will leave more on base when the third out is recorded, unless (there's that complexifying factor again) you give up a lot more HR than average. The Mariners and Tigers had lower WHIP and also lower LOB than any other teams. (Both did at least okay with HR, so I just dunno.) I think I wanna take a step back from the tangents, though, and go back to the article I linked to. To me, it covered several points, which IMO serve to knock down a few straw men arguments. "The ‘All or Nothing’ Assumption". The author says that people get annoyed by language that hedges (“very rough guess,” etc). Folks act as if an analytics team hands down absolutes and treats data as facts. That's a straw man. Baseball analysts are keenly aware that the data itself contains all kinds of traps, not only because the data itself could be inaccurate but because the data involves human beings striving in an environment purposely designed to challenge them. It's difficult hitting a round ball with a round bat, as they say, and because both opponents are trying their best I don't believe in "luck" but I do believe that results may be less, or more, "reproducible." In the words of Ebby LaLoosh, sometimes you win, sometimes, you lose, sometimes it rains. Even minor league data has some predictive value because at even the lowest level, you have young men matched up against other young men of approximately equal innate talent and experience, and who manages to achieve more might be likelier than the next player to achieve more at the next level too, given that the abilities can continue to develop and the amount of experience increases. But such results contain unknowable factors such as one player or another working under a handicap such as a nagging injury or a crisis at home for some reason. Forecasting methods look for trends within piles of uncertain data, and those trends are thus themselves uncertain so any competent analyst is pretty humble about touting such things as "truth." It pleases folks to portray such other folks as "arrogant," when in my experience most of them are anything but. "Practical rationality requires good priors". This one's probably not so controversial or subject to strawmen. If a result looks revolutionary, or even just ground breaking, check it again. And again. It's probably wrong for some reason you overlooked - a hidden bias in the data (or your way of analysis) is often the culprit. Failing to try to poke holes in your own result can come across as arrogant, when it's finally exposed, but probably is more in line with simple human frailty and wanting to do something important. That's where having a team, not just some unique guru, can be put to good use, even if you accomplish half as much because you're required to spend half your time sanity-checking a fellow worker's results. "It’s also quite possible to start with accurate or reasonable numbers, and be led to utter insanity due to doing the wrong things with them." Probably my biggest critique of the Twins' analytics team, strictly outside-looking-in, is what seems a reliance on hiring a lot of college grads with some learning in basic stats, versus sprinkling in also a few expensive guys with training in really advanced statistics. I have a bias toward MBA types, not the general business students from a one-year program with a smattering of accounting, marketing, and so forth, but the so-called Quants or Rocket Scientists who really dug into the relevant fields of analytics during two years of study that go deeply into statistics but also related fields. Wharton, Sloan - those kinds of credentials aren't fake, but they're expensive if you're not bringing in someone as an exec. These people not only know a lot of stuff that can be used to guide a team of generalists, relatively speaking, but they also have developed a network of people they can reach out to when trying to solve a particularly knotty problem. It's still possible to do "the wrong things with" data, but knowing a wider range of techniques than the average person, especially the newest methods (which means hiring someone like that every few years) can go a long way. "Don’t Blindly Dismiss All Numbers". This is the other side of the cautionary messages for the analytics folks themselves, and represents the middle ground that other folks seem to find offensive. I don't know what else to say. Extremism at either end of the spectrum usually strikes me as wrong. "Anyone more quantitatively-inclined than I am is a blind number-cruncher; anyone less inclined is stupid." This is part of a longer section on Fallacies, all of which are good to remind oneself now and then, but this one seems particularly relevant at TD. And perhaps it's the one that a middle-of-the-roader like me is especially prone to, LOL. Just because you staked out some mythical middle-ground doesn't make you right either. But in any case we could do with less name-calling - and "spreadsheet" is basically "blind number-cruncher" in different clothing. Anyway, I held off until now on delivering my own synopsis of the article, to see what discussion might evolve organically, but there's my starter set. * A year or two ago my daughter told me, "nobody cares about your inner monologue," in response to some rambling story I told in a family gathering, and it was a good antidote to whatever I happened to be spewing at the time. 😀

I guess analytics is stupid then. Case dismissed. Didn't realize it would be so easy.

Is this shorthand for "you can't handle the truth", or some other part of the movie? I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of that lengthy scene.

It sickens me that it's even a discussion, due to right-sizing of the payroll. In a better environment, just negotiate with them all and sign them for what you can, and let the arbitrator do their job on the rest. Trade whoever doesn't quite fit your plans for next spring's roster. Kirilloff is the only one I'd even think twice about tendering a contract offer. Instead we're down to debating whether a modestly paid utility player is too rich for our blood. I'm just about out.

I was trying to talk about choices for the 2025 major league squad, and dipped down to high-A to make the point in the extreme, not to give a rundown on who might be ready in 2027.

I want Keirsey to be that guy, but as the OP states, it's not a sure thing his bat plays in the majors. I want to find out. If Keirsey, in the role of Buxton-backup, has to play a lot, then the outfield has to be modified at least by one corner outfielder not being a left-handed batter. But now we're back to the uncertainty - do you trade say Larnach just on the supposition that Keirsey is a viable major leaguer?

Bring the automated strike zone / challenge system to the majors and watch the number of good pitchers there go down too. 😀 That's my theory and I'm sticking with it anyway.

Do you think they mean the jump itself has become harder? Or is it that AAA batting stats are inflated* (my rule of thumb is that OPS is .050 higher at AAA than it was a few years ago and that might be understanding it), making major-league projections out of date or perhaps more tricky? I already take that latter POV into account when saying that Lee's hitting in the majors really doesn't reflect what his AAA numbers were suggesting. But I also can't equate the body language I saw with him in the majors to the .900 OPS he had at St. Paul - and things like BABIP don't do enough to account for it either. * The semi-automated strike zone is an easy first guess as to why.

Very short term, probably. More than a day or three, probably bring Lee up and pray. But Lee's not really a finished product at SS either - Castro might be steadier, just less talent and upside with the glove. Fair question. There isn't anyone else in the organization and they're not bringing in anyone of note. Maybe Helman holds the fort at SS for some kind of medium-term stint, based only on his usage at St Paul where they apparently viewed him as viable, if barely? Really the only benefit to AAA for Lee is less urgency while he continues to "work on some things" he is assigned to work on in Ft. Myers in Feb/March. The plan is that he makes the case, himself, for promotion, rather than have it be due strictly to need at the major league level. If he doesn't, the cupboard is kinda bare - Ben Ross might have the glove but is far from ready with the bat. Rayne Doncon, Jose Salas? Hahaha. (😢)

Small sample or not, the eye-test confirms the numbers he put up - not hopeless at the plate but far from a reliable bat. For what little it's worth, my own 40-man roster at the moment has him assigned to St Paul to begin the next season - he's not yet someone I rely on, much less count on to be a star in 2025.

I don't really disagree, but consider that the two are not really that close in age (11+ years apart), and when Falvey was brought on board there seemed to be a view in the organization that he needed an older partner with more experience. It always seemed a bit odd that the two were jointly called Boy Wonders by their detractors. It could be that Levine had served his purpose and now it's time to take the training wheels off for Falvey. IOW the PBO/GM model evolved under their tenures. Falvey's still not as old as Levine was when he was hired.

"He's fired, Derek."