ashbury

Business school teaches you a lot more than that.

F it, I'm still making the drive down. But this is underwhelming. Kala'i Rosario, Danny De Andrade, Ben Ross, Liam Rocha, Devin Kirby (Kevin Derby?), Jacob King, Kade Bragg. A veritable Who's Who of "Who's He?"

Long term? Absolutely.

Indeed. In the past 6 seasons his OPS has been below .800 only once, and we know that in that one season he was hurt badly enough that he never set foot in CF all year. Availability has been the downfall. Not the bat.

I had two of the best baseball experiences of my life last October in the playoffs at Target Field. But most of the time at TF, the crowd sits on their hands except when the PA system is playing some happy-clappy music while the Jumbotron pleads to "let's get LOUD", and when it stops any enthusiasm dissipates instantly. I don't honestly know what the people are there for. I don't think they know, and they stop attending as a result.

What's missing is that in actual playoff baseball, there is some demonstrated capacity to succeed.

I've lived in other places that were better "baseball towns" than the Twin Cities. If they wouldn't fill the ballpark when they had a winning team to watch, IMO the region has the team they deserve, one that is again* at risk of circling the drain in a never ending downward spiral of payroll cuts and declining revenues, always in tacit support of ownership's principle that a certain percentage of revenue is entitled as profit. Dave St. Peter was beyond stupid to say it out loud, blaming the fans last year. But he wasn't wrong. * remember "contraction"?

You'd rather not see five wins in a row? That's pretty much what it would take for your scenario to play out. And then followed by two quick losses? I dunno, that's cutting off your nose to spite your face, in my book. I want to see winning baseball.

A fitting end to the season. Unfortunately there are still 5 games to go.

Thanks for the conversation starter. I come at things from a business analytics perspective, and this article pretty well encapsulates the attitude I saw across 35 years or so. An airline for example might use a form of analytics to minimize crew costs when scheduling their fleet for a month, and might have to use the same tools to recover when a snowstorm snarls their schedule. In neither case would they simply turn off their brains and rely on the output from the computer without incorporating their significant expertise in their own industry; before the advent of software powerful enough to address the problem, they had plenty of heuristics they used to get quite-good solutions. But in the first case they have the luxury of looking at the minimum-cost solution and seeing whether they can improve robustness or union satisfaction or a multitude of other factors, while in the other case they may be willing to take "any" quick and dirty solution the software offers quickly rather than wait for a truly minimum-cost solution to fix the immediate problem (the algorithms being quite time-consuming if allowed to run to completion), tweaking minor logistics issues by hand if necessary. A big thing baseball has in common with airlines is fuzzy data and huge uncertainties. Airlines deal with uncertain demand, can be hit by weather (as mentioned), and small random delays can have a cascading effect on a schedule. I don't have a similar inside look at what baseball teams do, but from the outside looking in, I don't detect nearly the arrogant analytics point of view that gets attributed to them. The Twins analytics representative who spoke at a panel discussion at the SABR national convention in August described the team's approach as analytics-assisted. That's how industry looks at it too. One fun tidbit from that panel was the insight that after every game, Rocco and the analytics team go over the ways that he deviated from the plan going into the game. People on the outside call that plan a "spreadsheet" to be disparaging, but the point is that Rocco routinely deviates from it (multiple times per game, it was implied), and the analytics team wants to understand. Not the other way around. Of course, I could be projecting my own approach onto what they said. 😀

I ran across an article, in a completely non-sports context (ethical choices), that fairly well sums up my view on using analytics wisely. Have a read, see what you think. I'm not going to short-circuit discussion by providing a summary; if no discussion occurs, so be it. https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/good-judgment-with-numbers

The base rate goes on to say, "very slightly.". The effect is there but IMO is overblown. How the pitcher looks that day may override the usual trend. "He'll be a little worse than so far, but he's been very good." I'm not saying it's clear-cut to leave Zebby in.

That's more or less a restatement of what I thought I was trying to say. I don't know what his third-time-through numbers "really" are, but I'm feeling that OPS=.813 isn't it. I do think that third-time-through is a concept best left to more capable statisticians than myself, because it involves conditional probability that is tough to sift through - there is a built-in bias to the numbers collected, for one thing that (usually) you only get to face a batter for a third time if you're having a pretty good game, but if you're having a REALLY good game, maybe the effect isn't as big. Across the majors, 1st/2nd/3rd time is a measurable difference but not as dramatic as people sometimes think - but again there is that bias to remember. Let me throw in an additional thought. The Twins beat Cleveland 4-1 on September 17, the one win we had in that important series. Zebby was the starting pitcher in that one too, but he didn't get the win because he got taken out with 2 gone in the 5th inning, after giving up a base runner. Sound familiar? A lefty, Gimenez, was coming to the plate. Sound really familiar? Which reliever came in? Irvin. Woah, deja vu all over again. What was the result? A groundout. Cole Sands entered the game to begin the next inning, and did well. History doesn't always repeat itself, but sometimes it tries and fails. Big difference being that Duran's having a lot better season at the plate than Gimenez.

The third-time-through logic has this one missing piece: Zebby's OPS-against is even worse the first time through (.862) and second time (.904) than the third (.813). If you were not going to let him continue a third time through, due to the numbers, then those numbers say you shouldn't have started him in the first place. Given this paradox, I'd be inclined to give less credence to the small sample of data to work with. Here's the other way I look at it. If you leave Zebby in and he fails to get Duran, you can take him out and put in a righty to replace him that you trust more. If you put in either lefty and he fails to get Duran, you are stuck with no new option for two more batters. Ultimately, though, if Sands would have been the man (to clean up immediately after Zebby vs Duran), the outcome when he actually did come in a few batters later doesn't suggest anything better. A lose-lose proposition. We do not have a shut-down bullpen. I leave Zebby in, last batter regardless of the outcome, feeling that all the options are low probability for success. Maybe a success against a tough batter gives the youngster an extra shot of confidence going forward., plus it puts him in line for the W since it'll be 5 complete innings. If he fails, worst case it's 2-2. We saw the worst case with the lefty he brought in: 3-2 (okay okay, I guess 4-2 was a possibility too).

"When healthy," Buxton's bat plays, even in a corner OF role. The people last year who were saying that his numbers indicated who he really was as a hitter, and that his bat had always been overrated and the injuries were a bogus excuse, are mysteriously silent about it this year. But the health issue is part of the full package of the player. And at least to me, the eye-test lines up with the defensive stats, that he's now an average center fielder. I thought his range was still good, and it was mainly his unwillingness to try risky plays that are costing him defensive value, in the name of keeping him on the field at all. But maybe he's lost a step too. He still has a remarkable ability to track fly balls and go get them on a straight line, and most importantly to "close the deal" when the ball is at the limit of what he can reach at the wall. A bat that is good enough to let him play RF is more than enough to be an asset for an "average" defensive CFer, if that's what he is now. I would be in no hurry to move him from the position. He's Michael A. Taylor with a better bat. If the day ever comes that the three outfielders you want to start a given game because of their bats includes someone who can push Byron to a corner, that's for sure the time to move him, but until that day comes, he stays put if I'm in charge. Even a diminished Buxton is better in CF than anyone else MLB-ready in the organization, including Keirsey for now (basing that on my small-sample eye-test of the latter trying to "close the deal" on a tough flyball at the wall).

nm, i got ninja'd.

Hard to believe a waiver-wire pickup like Cole Irvin didn't prove to be a lights-out member of the bullpen.

Correa looks like his usual self at shortstop, which is to say state-of-the-art-reliable. But Buxton is only a fraction of himself defensively, unable and unwilling to lay out for difficult chances lest he tweak the hip (or whatever the risk is). He goes back to the wall just fine, but since his return I recall at least two dying-quail liners that he's allowed to drop in front of him when I felt confident that the Buxton of years past would have grabbed them. So even having our guys back doesn't mean it's all the same. We've all said that Byron needed to learn to protect his body, but this is the cost; he's just another center fielder at the moment.

See this a lot. What's the source of this recurring opinion about what's inside someone else's noggin? Just an echo chamber here, after someone once said it must be so? Meanwhile we have thread after thread full of people who are certain they are smarter, and tell us so, repeatedly. So who actually deserves to be labeled this way? Some folks might ask themselves, Reddit-style, AITA?

"Played the OF more." Boo hoo. Move the goalposts now, sure. SMH.

I'll start watching the Farm Dog report on CNBC.

Rain rain go away. Come again some other day when the Twins aren't in town.

I think the other day you pegged his odds at 50-50. Is there some futures market I can invest in, to play these volatile percentages? 😀

Other than Buxton and Kepler, you mean. SMH. https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/MIN/2024-fielding.shtml#all_players_standard_fielding_of And Margot didn't have a start in the outfield until game 7 of the season. He played more, after that, due to injury and/or non-performance of other players higher on the depth chart. But you wanna blame Rocco for adapting to conditions, nothing's gonna stop you.

Maybe a Minnesota record but not yet a franchise record. I checked on bb-ref.com and Senators star Kid Elberfeld took 25 in the ribs or noggin or wherever, back in 1911. Of course he was only a kid then (age 36). And no, he wasn't really a star but he did rack up 33 WAR in his lengthy career, mostly with the Tigers and Highlanders. But even Elberfeld is a piker by comparison. During spring training back in the 1970s, Ron Hunt and Don Baylor would sneak out to the bullpen before the game and throw baseballs at each other's head to warm up, just for the fun of it, when their respective teams met. You Could Look It Up!* * And not find it.