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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    You're right. I have to confess that I must have still had in mind a proposal more like 3 years for $100M (apparently from some other thread) and lumped your idea in with that. I was keeping the numbers simple, but you're right that factors like you mention would affect everyone's calculations. Still, it's a second-order effect, and doesn't lead to a player accepting a short deal for a lot less money; we're poking around at the margins. Also, team ownership could likewise find ways to invest the money if it's not paid out as quickly, so maybe Jim Pohlad would be the one to turn thumbs down.* Since the team is privately owned, getting contracts off the books may be only as much of an issue as they choose to make it. Finally, I doubt that taxes affect player and team equally, so maybe there is a tax lawyer reading this who could give a few rules of thumb as guidance as to when dollar totals aren't what they seem. * I got interrupted while writing this, and in the meantime I acknowledge the others who raised this point as well.
  2. ashbury

    Robo Umps

    ashbury replied to Platoon's topic in Other Baseball

    That may be so, but the game is about the players. Suggesting to automate the players if we automate the umps is a strawman argument.
  3. ashbury
    "Actual cost and actual WAR created by free agents collectively" https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-recent-history-of-free-agent-pricing/ Not the years prior to the FA signing. (Which would, by the way, be a very amateurish way of forecasting. As the writer of the above-referenced article goes on to say, "I have found in the past that projections tend to overshoot actual WAR on average". I choose to give front offices credit for better projections than outsiders, and thus that they know what they are getting into, more or less, when they sign those contracts.)
  4. ashbury

    Robo Umps

    ashbury replied to Platoon's topic in Other Baseball

    Because the game is a contest between two teams, and the umpire is not on an equal standing, so there is no connection if a different form of umpiring is chosen.
  5. ashbury
    Similarly I've seen references to Brazil or Ireland as "the country of the future, and always will be". We don't want to be that.
  6. ashbury
    I'm with PDX Twin, this part of the interview was a little disquieting. He went on to say, "next offseason, I’ll know more what to do during the offseason" which may not mean no blueprint at all but still isn't anything I would have expected. The on-field staff has been through this before, the players haven't - give the lads a one-page writeup with half-a-dozen bullet item recommendations and time-frames that they can refer to all during the off-season. If Bailey lost his copy, then that's on him, and I withdraw the suggestion.
  7. ashbury
    They don't build basements in Florida, probably for that very reason.
  8. ashbury
    Or, perhaps, we just accept that the report was mistaken, and move on.
  9. ashbury
    I do a lot of baking, but rarely put frosting on the potatoes when they are done.
  10. ashbury
    It's true that there's not a crisp and clear definition of how to do rankings. OTOH teams trade hitters for pitchers all the time, so there has to be some kind of way to bridge the difference. Ranks are just for fun, and a way to concretely say who we think is good. It doesn't make sense to try and push them farther than that.
  11. ashbury
    I have to suppose that most teams have cases like these, though. The bottom line for me is that we have some decent prospects, but only one that really bowls people over. On the positive side, these prospect rankings are always wrong in hindsight, except about the most obvious top-tier guys.
  12. ashbury
    No one to my knowledge has said that. OTOH, no one to my knowledge has asked them in an interview to give enough insight to the plan in order to rule out speculation. If I had the opportunity, I would pursue these lines of inquiry: What kind of talent did they expect to remain available to them at the 20th pick? Surely they could not target one individual player there. Did they really identify 13+ players (the number at which they actually picked) better than the two they left exposed who got taken?Several teams ahead of them passed (as opposed to "roster full") - isn't that some negative indication of Kinley's likelihood of success?Just out of curiosity, if Bard had not been taken shortly before the Twins' turn, would they have taken him instead of Kinley? I believe the rules permit that.What are the arguments leading to an assumption no other team would take Burdi or Bard?The Pirates were willing to part with $500K in international money in order to acquire Burdi from the Angels right after the draft. Could not an equal or even better deal on the Twins' behalf have been worked out directly with the Pirates or some other team, since such a deal would only have required placing Burdi on the 40-man but not go through the two-year DL shenanigans the Pirates now will have to go through to keep him?Bottom line, do they feel they came out ahead before-and-after the draft? And if so, why?Please review the process that guided the 2017 Rule-5 draft, while we are at it? That one was pretty opaque too, at best.I don't expect fully frank responses to some of these questions, but they ought to be asked.
  13. ashbury
    For the same reason you are attracted to committing to only $140M instead of $150M, the pitcher probably would accept the latter, if different teams offered this choice of contracts. He's at a stage in his career where guaranteed totals are likely the main thing; Joe Mauer for example is not a lock to garner a total of $10M for the remainder of his career after his current contract expires.
  14. ashbury
    I didn't wanna click Like on this, but felt compelled anyway. Jeter did seem to make friends easily.
  15. ashbury
    This argument reminds me of the quotation attributed to Mark Twain, "The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read."
  16. ashbury
    Also the arbitration years are heavily influenced by performance. Only the pre-arb years are more or less "scale".
  17. ashbury
    Goin's gone, yes. I was surprised he wasn't reassigned, but for whatever reason they parted company. I see on LinkedIn that he's now with the Diamondbacks as a scout, which was something he mentioned beefing up on a year or so ago. I don't know how the Analytics department is structured; someone named Brandon Johnson is listed in the Twins corporate directory as "Senior Director, Business Strategy & Analytics". Obviously neither Falvey nor Levine are multi-tasking to the extent necessary to run the department themselves, although something tells me they might be more hands-on than the average upper-management guys. But if you look at their organization page, there are names sprinkled all over the place doing things that overlap into what used to be centralized as "analytics". https://www.mlb.com/twins/team/front-office
  18. ashbury
    Yeah, you're not going to earn a lot of brownie points with the umpire if you allow a pitch to smack him right in the facemask, all in the name of not reaching up too high and depriving your pitcher of a called strike.
  19. ashbury
    We got him! https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2018/01/minor-mlb-transactions-12418.html
  20. ashbury
    They might be good people, regardless.
  21. ashbury
    Off the top of my head, not allowing walks is always desirable, and probably pairs better with a bad defense so that when miscues occur they aren't compounded by an unnecessary guy on base who maybe put pressure on that defense in the first place.
  22. ashbury
    IMO Jack Goin was a good soldier for the organization but was thrust into a role that he wasn't particularly equipped to handle and the results didn't impress the new bosses this past year. A small organization like a baseball team tends to value generalists, unless and until a need for specialization is proven, and it took the Pohlad-based hierarchy an awful long time to embrace this particular need. I'm not qualified to critique any specific IT directions that need to be taken, except to put such decision-making in the hands of highly-qualified people and then get out of their way for a while - after which you do as much independent validation of their results and processes as you can. My one criterion for judging their qualifications as a whole is that someone in the analytics team needs to know extremely well what a linear program is - and then they can choose to use or not use this technique (and related ones) as they see fit.
  23. ashbury
    If TD decides to have a Bulwer-Lytton writing contest, you're in the lead.
  24. ashbury
    I guess it can't be a bad omen to have another TK in the organization.
  25. ashbury
    It would be interesting to see a similar video study performed on one of the catchers in the bottom ten of this list. Not to throw dirt on the poor guy, but to contrast more clearly with the images seen here.
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