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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    I'm not real fond of W-L, but Slegers did have himself a nice AAA. season. For a little closer look at the game-by-game results, Baseball-reference.com provides a version of Bill James's "Game Score" in their game log, where a score of 50 and above represents something fairly close to a quality start, and Aaron had 15 of those in his 24 starts at Rochester, 4 so-so games with scores 40-49, and 5 stinkers below 40. Perhaps more importantly, he got 4 of those 5 stinkers out of his system by early June, and compiled a nice streak of 11 games of 40+ scores, most of those being 50+. That's the kind of consistency I imagined the front office was looking for before they would call him up, and they did indeed add him to the 40-man for a spot start in August, and then invited him for September as well. Come to think of it, 15 good starts and 5 stinkers comes pretty close to that 15-4 W-L, with the fluctuations happening to basically cancel out, but I still trust game scores a little better. I don't hype him as a future ace, obviously, but I see his upside as rotation workhorse more than just fifth starter.
  2. ashbury
    Anecdotal evidence is one thing. (Hypothetical anecdotes, a strange subclass. ) But, people have tried to slice and dice the available data in many ways, and to my knowledge no one has come up with convincing evidence that Morris was capable of repeatedly doing what is claimed over any significant period of time. Here are a couple of links: one, a primary-source study by someone with pretty good credentials, and the other, an essay by a writer I respect who says here he's looked at studies. See what you think after reading: http://cybermetric.blogspot.com/2016/05/jack-morris-pitching-to-score-and-hall.html http://joeposnanski.com/the-reality-and-absurdity-of-pitching-to-the-score/ There's a ton more from my googling "pitching to the score jack morris" without the quotes. You might try a different key word list and find a further ton more. In any case, a hypothetical scenario on a guy for whom actual data exists doesn't move the needle for me.
  3. ashbury
    Concur, on both counts. I just wish he could get his head screwed on straight - either that, or it's his hat.
  4. ashbury
    You have to have 11, before you can have 12. That's just math.
  5. ashbury
    I enjoyed watching Kent Hrbek screwing around taking grounders at SS during fielding drills, back in the day. He was pretty graceful for a big guy, although obviously no threat to supplant Gagne. Vargas has IMO an undeserved rap for his fielding. But yeah, at SS his quick-twitch reflexes probably would look like a freight locomotive getting underway. "I'm moving, but nothing's happening, Coach!"
  6. ashbury
    That's definitely a meaningful distinction. At one time, I thought that an uppercut was kind of looked down upon, as prone to popups if you get under it and unlikely to give line drives if you miss in the other direction. But trends change, and I agree that lately the all-or-nothing approach is more favored and probably rightly so in careful analytic terms. BTW I'm disappointed that your fine quiz didn't generate more/better discussion than the weak tea I was able to serve you.
  7. ashbury
    That's the puzzling part. The rest just highlights that whatever it was, didn't work. And as already stated, the 25-man roster spot was the more valuable resource, than just the 18 innings. They saved some face with a stint on the DL, presumably stalling to let him gain some more benefit from coaching, and threw in the towel when out of choices. Take Haley first, I'm cool with that, because I'll trust that the FO felt he was the best pick to click. Monkey around during the draft like they did, and my tolerance for the misfire during the season is just that much less. Unless someone clarifies to me that it wasn't monkeying around at all. Even if it didn't work out like they hoped (because, say, some other team drafted in the interim in some unplanned way).
  8. ashbury
    He was no Steady Eddie Bressoud. Alan Trammell was, in addition to being dependable and consistent, *really* good. Really, really good. A plus defender at a premium position, who could hit. He could hit well above the league average most seasons during his prime. His team might have been happy with his bat if he had played at first base, those years. But he didn't play first, he played SS, meaning you could go out and get a bat-only guy for first base if you liked. And you didn't have to substitute him out in the late innings for defense - no, if his bat had been bad, he might still have been the late-inning defensive substitute. I might be seriously underselling him by saying he's really, really good. He was *really*, really, really good. Greatest SS ever? No. But a long-standing oversight has finally been corrected.
  9. ashbury
    It's a fair point, but not really relevant. In addition to the replies so far, I'll mention that the US population by itself is nearly three times the size as in Babe Ruth's day. Had there been no baseball expansion, the 16 teams would be packed thrice as deep in high-end talent, because the bell-curve still has the same shape but the greater number of candidates moves the cutoff line higher.
  10. ashbury
    Assuming the demand doesn't still exceed the supply, in which case even the scraps cost more than they might have a few days/weeks earlier. It's a game of musical chairs, one chair and one contestant removed at each step - except that some years there are more chairs than contestants, and other years there are more contestants than chairs. Which contestant, or which chair, will end up left out at the end?
  11. ashbury
    Baseball should be celebrating its great players more, not less. I'm in favor of a "big" HoF, and then a new Inner Circle that is more restrictive than the current Hall, which would recognize the current way we think of the hierarchy within the Hall anyway. It wouldn't eliminate arguments, but would frame the arguments in a more positive way for the game. Until such a day, welcome to the Pantheon, Alan and Jack!
  12. ashbury
    "He's not your everyday Japanese player. He's 6-foot-5, 6-6 and he's huge" B-r.com lists him at 6'3" and 189. Tall for a Japanese ballplayer, no doubt. He's not some kind of sumo wrestler though. A bit tall and perhaps borderline gangly, for an athlete, judging from those stats. Particularly if height is usually fudged by at least an inch in Japan as is often done here.
  13. ashbury
    In advance of the Rule-5 draft, we have 14 position players on the 40-man roster. Fourteen! A team can't realistically go into a season with that number, can they? Something has got to be in the works to add to that quantity. Even with the number of pitchers exposed to possible drafting, we have 22 hurlers on the 40-man. That becomes a seemingly unsustainable 23 if a pitcher is added via free-agency. For comparison, a team like the Astros currently are at 18/20. Dodgers, 18/22. A ratio like 20/20 or 19/21 seems like the norm when the dust settles and the season starts. 14/22?!? I have to believe big changes are coming to pull these numbers for the Twins closer in balance, in a way not currently being discussed whatsoever.
  14. ashbury
    I've been wrong before.
  15. ashbury
    All we need is to run the two-minute drill to perfection. This one's as good as tied.
  16. ashbury
    Keenum throws 3 consecutive TD passes and comes away with zero points due to one stellar defensive play and two near misses by his receivers.
  17. ashbury
    Interpretive Dance could be effective at expressing the anger we are all feeling.
  18. ashbury
    I have clicked refresh approximately 100 times since reading this post, and still no Darvish. Come on!
  19. ashbury
    I plead guilty, but in fairness the thread was perhaps made irrelevant when the Twins did in fact sign an interesting player, as speculated.
  20. ashbury
    It seems intuitive, since 25-man rosters are the limiting factor. You can't get to 100 wins with (say) 60 1-WAR players. If you sign two 2-WAR players, that ties up two roster spots, whereas signing one 4-WAR player doesn't limit you to a 0-WAR player for the other roster spot. Teams with championship aspirations would bid that 4-WAR guy right up. But the above-mentioned Matt Swartz wrote an article demonstrating that linearity is not a bad assumption, after all. I think the solution to the seeming paradox is to remember (again) that we are talking about the cost of signing players who have bargaining power, only. And we are discussing actual WAR delivered (in hindsight), not the (unknowable) forecasts that the contract offers are based on. Since any team with championship aspirations has a pipeline of cheap talent coming up too, with a precious few of those prospects forecasted to be above 3 or 4 WAR themselves, augmenting the roster with a 2-WAR player might be more valuable than it looks. Also, it's really important to avoid a 0- (or negative-) WAR player, and a couple of proven veterans at the 2-WAR level might be more appealing than taking a chance on a rookie. As Swartz (inelegantly ) summarized, "there are, in practice, many different options a teams has". Linearity aside, the table Swartz offers also show a trend over time toward teams paying more and more, for less and less return.
  21. ashbury
    The July 2 date was the information I was looking for - thanks.That's a lot farther away than I realized. Yes, amjgt captured what I was trying to ask before. I imagine the team has to specify which pool the money will come from, and probably well before July in this case, but might it not have to be until after the player passes the physical and the contract is completed? Is there still time to augment this year's pool enough to afford the player? In any case, this IFA pool money concept is becoming more interesting. It is the new PTBNL, and potentially much more consequential than the usual roster-filler that completes a trade.
  22. ashbury
    That's a detail I'm not sure we (or even they) know. When do the books close on this year's signing pool? What if a trade is in the works that involves some pool dollars for 2017 coming our way before that deadline? Can the accounting of signings be determined at the end of the (fiscal) year to their best advantage?
  23. ashbury
    Mod note: The original poster asked for posts about Twins prospects being written up, the conversation drifted (with apparent buy-in from that original poster) toward discussion of the analysts themselves, then to processes by the front office regarding prospects, and as of now a stray reference to Terry Ryan is turning this thread into a referendum on, well, Terry Ryan. I have removed the latter bunch, and ask please to keep it closer to the intended topic. You can always start a new thread if your thirst to discuss Terry Ryan is unquenched.
  24. ashbury
    I tried to find an excuse to tout for inclusion my Adopt-A-Prospect, and final 2017 Twins draft pick, Austin Bizzle, who did well in limited duty in Elizabethton, but your top 100 seems sound enough that I gave up. I'm curious if you're willing to tackle a question I wind up asking in some form of anyone with a prospect ranking: what does it all mean? If Prospect A is ranked ahead of Prospect B, it's because (fill in the blank) you think he ____X_____ because he _____Y____ . For instance, you might have for X, "would have the greater value as part of some trade package", versus "has the higher ceiling", versus "has the higher floor", versus "stands to rack up the greater career WAR", etc. Or for Y, "was young for his league", or "had a lot of strikeouts per 9 innings", or "I saw him play and his tools are legit", etc. Probably you don't have a cut-and-dried answer to this, but your thoughts about it might be interesting.
  25. ashbury
    I figured if we're throwing around extra 'R's, I'd join the fun.
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