ashbury

Thanks for the kind words. Terry Ryan seemed to place a really high priority on switch-hitting, and that's something I liked about him. I'd say the FalVine regime* has carried on in that tradition. Last season there were 17 Twins batters with significant playing time (Kirilloff at #17 with 178 PA and a steep dropoff to Keirsey at #18 with only 14), and of them, 3 were switch-hitters, which I won't bother to research but will guess to compare pretty favorably to most other teams - our two guys with the most PA were of this persuasion. 4 other batters were pure left-handers. So that's 10 guys who face RHP from the right-hand batter's box and 7 who face the other way. (Well, not toward the catcher and some expensive seats down front - you know what I mean.) If a manager wants to, and pretty clearly Rocco did, he can stack his lineup against righty pitchers - Correa and Buxton and Third Baseman and Catcher Du Jour bat right handed and you could fill the other 5 spots from the other side. There were times during the season, especially once Lee was called up, he had the means to do it. And it helps to remember how spread-out the Plate Appearances were across the roster, due to injuries and demotions. All of this is the long way of saying I find the plate appearance stats I quoted to be pretty plausible. It's also a long way of saying that roster construction has a whole lot to do with those PA numbers. Pinch hitting can't be separated from roster construction, as it all comes down to the plan coming into a season. Rocco has a voice in this planning, even if he doesn't decide and certainly doesn't execute. Switch hitting is great of course, but is only a means to an end. The real goal for almost any player who isn't elite but wants to play full time is: do damage against opposite-handed pitchers (.800 OPS?) and be at least playable (.700 OPS?) against same-handed. That's actually a pretty potent player I just described, so it can be shaded downward a little, but not too much. And a switch-hitter in theory ought not to have any consistent splits anyway. And that's my complaint about Santana in particular - he's nominally a switch-hitter but his L/R splits are about the same as if he weren't. He hasn't been effective against RHP in years. My memory of his acquisition was incorrect - I thought he was intended as Kirilloff's emergency Plan B, but I took a look at Kirilloff's game log and even before he started to show signs of injury he rarely played at 1B. That making the signing of a glove-first guy at 1B even harder for me to stomach. I want our pure lefty batters to be good enough to play full time. Unfortunately, all the small-sample results keep pointing in the same wrong direction, when they face LHP. Different players have different skill sets. It's much more plausible to me that a lefty could be simply untrainable against LHP, than the reverse for righties. That's because of the sheer numbers of L vs R pitchers as the player comes up through the minors - a righty who is unplayable against RHP probably won't make it to the majors, no matter how well he mashes LHP. (I don't even want to think about Kyle Garlick.) A lefty hitter could manage to slide by during his formative years, by loading up against RHP since there are so many of them. It could be that no amount of practice would fix it, for certain individuals. It's plausible to me, like I said. That said, I have a lot of confidence in Matt Wallner in particular. I've previously related the experience at Arizona Fall League with Chief seeing Wallner take one off his chin, courtesy of a LHP of course. I don't think he lost any teeth, but there was blood, and my assumption was it was the end for his AZFL season. But just a few days after I left town, Wallner was back in the lineup, and his OPS in the league was above 1.000. In my book, the guy's got guts - amazing how personal experience at a game will shape one's views. With guts, he should be able to learn the tricks of the trade to hit LHP. Wallner's minor league L/R splits were generally reasonable, whereas at the major league level the splits have been beyond anything normally seen. Kepler's presence on the roster interfered with Wallner's opportunities and kept the sample size small (although I imagine Rocco tried to bias those opportunities away from the toughest LHP), which was a reason I had hoped for a trade-deadline deal to send Max and his expiring contract away. In 2024 Wallner finally managed to raise his OPS against LHP above .600. If there's still a little more to his learning curve, he will surpass the threshold of being "playable" versus LHP. If I were in charge, I'd tell him, "Kepler's gone now, you're my guy in RF. You start every game unless you tell the trainer you can't go. Lefties, righties, I don't care. Go get'um." Probably I'd do the same for Larnach in LF/DH, though his splits have been as extreme if not more so. Julien, if he makes the squad, I just dunno, he was just such a mess last year that maybe a little protection will help his morale. Everything is a case by case situation, when you really come down to it. *I just got done giving the recipe for Elephant-Rabbit Stew in another post. In retrospect, Falvey-Levine Stew seems to have had approximately the same proportions.

I'm sorry/disappointed you saw my reply in that light. In that MLB split page, you're right that the Twins had about 100 more PA by their substitutes than an average team. Their subs managed to compile an OPS very slightly higher than the league as a whole, which mitigates the damage just a little. But I'm not here to defend the work of the subs, who clearly let the manager down with their performance. Still, this is to me a second-order effect compared to the field staff trying their best to maximize the favorable L/R matchups, only to be undone by the hitters' ineptitude from the left-hand batter's box. Do you know the recipe for Elephant-Rabbit Stew? You take one medium sized elephant, and cut it into bite sized pieces; this will take a couple of weeks. Then take a medium sized rabbit and also cut it up, which will go much quicker. Put them in a 500 gallon pot with just enough water to cover the meat. Let it come to a boil, and then simmer it for approximately 8 days until tender. Serves 1360. I've heard that it tastes mostly like elephant. But all people want to talk about is the rabbit. That's kind of how I'm seeing the article that led off this discussion.

I wasn't addressing your larger point, merely your assertion that Gallo wasn't terrible. In my book, Gallo was Margot-level terrible - he harms his team's chances to win, season after season. I'm glad he was not here more than one season, but I'm not glad he was here in the first place.

Normally aggregate numbers tell the story. I'm not a big believer in separating out "clutch" from "non-clutch" performers. However, anecdotal evidence while watching games led me to question Gallo's seeming "ability" to crank out homers only when the game was NOT on the line, and b-r.com's splits confirmed to my satisfaction (bases occupied situations, and Win Probability added) that not only was this a problem in his time with the Twins but for a time before that. One of the few players I have pigeonholed as less-than-the-sum-of-the-parts on offense.

It can't have been an overwhelming factor, out of 6123 PA during the season, because they had the fewest unfavorable L/L matchups in the majors, and well below average rates of unfavorable R/R matchups. Meanwhile the failures of multiple L/R matchups across 2000+ PA look pretty overwhelming to me.

Well then this will be ideal, because there will be fewer and fewer of those situations arising. 😀

Is it fair to say that 356 times, the Twins did their best to put batters into a favorable matchup (more often than not), and time after time those batters failed to come through?

This happened a few times. It's not a key to understanding the season though. Wallner played in only 75 games, in the first place. Of those, 43 were complete games - yes in a majority of times Rocco left him in. In 11 others, he was the one brought in, in the 7th inning or later, to finish the game. A couple of times he was brought in for the 6th inning and got 1 plate appearance. That leaves 19 games where he started the game and didn't finish. He was never taken out sooner than the 6th inning - zero cases of coming up once to start the game and then coming out. In 9 of the 19 games he had 3 PA and in 6 others he had 4 or 5. I count 4 of these games as having just 2 PA; 2 of these games were in April when he was going badly. Putrid as Margot the righty was, it doesn't seem like a hill to die on, to me. Not when lefties failing against RHP were a much more systematic problem for the team.

Right, it's cherry picking to make excuses for Margot, the most disappointing pickup I can remember in many years.

This is going to be unpopular. But basic stats show that the platooning worked. The key players failed. b-r.com provides league splits, on which you can drill down to an individual team's splits. For L/R pitchers and L/R batters there are 4 combinations, and I clicked on each then sorted by Plate Appearances and by OPS. Here are the Twins' rankings against the rest of the majors: RPvRB: 2102 PA (24th), OPS .733 (5th) RPvLB: 2394 PA ( 7th), OPS .716 (17th) LPvRB: 1433 PA ( 4th), OPS .746 (9th) LPvLB: 194 PA (30th), OPS .630 (20th) totals 6123 PA ( 9th), OPS .726 (11th) Their platooning had them near the bottom of the majors in opportunities with unfavorable matchups, and near the top in the favorable ones. (These numbers include switch-hitters batting the way they prefer against a given pitcher.) The lefty hitters were putrid when they faced lefties, but they had the fewest opportunities of any team so it wasn't as much of a burden. Among righty batters against righties, Buxton and Correa are pretty good hitters. so they weren't part of any platooning which arguably held the PA higher, while Miranda did well too, and the OPS is overall really quite good. It's the FAVORABLE matchup for the left-handed batters that held the team down. It was the most frequent matchup and they didn't do much clobberin'. Sorting by PA, Willi Castro did okay (.733 OPS) for a guy who is here for his versatility on the field and who by rights shouldn't be leading the team in plate appearances period. Next was Carlos Santana and his OPS was .676 - that's just unplayable at a bat-first position, but they played him anyway (in fairness he was signed as a Plan B). Larnach was good (.784) but Kepler was frustrating (.672) and again at a bat-first position was objectively unplayable. Next is Julien, at an even more unplayable .620 and they did finally take steps with him. Wallner was the only guy who clobbered, .972, in limited playing time at the major league level. Kiriloff was at .663 and we know he wasn't right physically. Finally is Brooks Lee with .580 in 133 chances from the favorable matchup; I'm all for starting him at St Paul this season and have him work his way back up. That's a bunch of guys, too many guys, underperforming when put into favorable matchups. You can't fix that by demoting or cutting them all, though three of the prime offenders are no longer with the team. It's the number one thing that the new batting coach needs to figure out, among the holdover players. This is a strategic look. Getting down to specific tactics such as pinch-hitting isn't covered by this analysis. And it ignores the perhaps bigger-picture aim of letting left-handed batters get more experience against LHP and (perhaps) improve with time. But management achieved what they set out to do in-season, and we might be singing a different tune if the lefty batters didn't let them down big time.

Who's on your roster now?

Without knowing the scoring system you use (I'm not a fantasy guy at all), at first blush Ohtani seems like a sound choice. He's slated to come back to pitching sometime later than Opening Day, so whatever WAR he racks up would be in addition to his batting stats - but weighing against that is not just the elbow surgery to still recover from but also some kind of knee work that was done. So, high risk, high reward. That young fellow playing shortstop for the Royals seems like a strong contender if you can hold your nose and root for a divisional rival. Again, that depends on whether your fantasy league/system includes defense. If it doesn't, Judge is a natural choice, but again you have to hold your nose for him being a Yankee. I can't think of a pitcher who stands head and shoulders above, like these choices, but again it depends on the scoring system. This isn't very clever or outside the box thinking, but for 1/1 you kind of have to ensure the highest of high floors, yes? Hope some others chime in with their thoughts in the coming 45 minutes.

Let me know if you hear him lauding the trenchant commentary from @ashbury.

People could speculate that Derek Falvey has some kind of profit-sharing arrangement in his compensation package and part of that 20M comes out of his pocket too. 😀

Willi's a tweener. Not a good enough glove for a full-time spot up the middle, not a good enough bat for a corner position. His other skills such as baserunning are good quality but nothing extraordinary. The Twins should be commended for getting the most out of a castoff from a rival team, but his only conceivable role on a competitive team is as utility player. It's true that his salary has become a little rich for this role, but if the Twins would struggle to replace his contributions, probably needing two utility players on the 26-man, I'm not bothered by keeping him. But if his second-half bat last season proves to be his first-half bat this year, parting ways could and should (and probably won't) be quick.

I was about to ask the following anyway but you brought up the general subject of the draft, and this is a Willi Castro thread after all. Willi is listed as being born in Puerto Rico, but Cleveland signed him as an International Free Agent. Jose Berrios and Carlos Correa are examples of Puerto Ricans who were subject to the draft; why wasn't Willi? Or was he subject to it, and somehow was overlooked but then signed undrafted? Doesn't sound right, since various articles describe him as a well-regarded high schooler - the draft went 40 rounds then, shortstops are valuable, and scouts are plentiful there. (IFA is a specific category, but maybe Wikipedia just has it wrong.)

Every team probably has someone like that already, or close. Low demand means StL can pick him up for cash, DFA him if they need to with few regrets. Baseball economics are not linear.

I'm away from a proper keyboard, and trying to type on my phone using one index finger instead of two thumbs like a civilized individual, so I will say just this: I hope you don't do that.

13 at a minimum these days.

I think it's also a clue that a trade for Dylan Cease isn't how 40-man spots will be opened

Fair point. I think my purpose was more to explore the best case scenario, and show that even it isn't all that hot.

Rocco (and/or the front office) will likely give him the chance to be that, nonetheless.

The problem with playing platoon games is if you bat your righty 8th or 9th, he may get only one crack at the LHP before the opposing manager brings in the RHP long man from the bullpen in the fourth inning, to face precisely the batter you have in there to deter lefties. Is Bader good enough to lead off when a southpaw is starting? Questionable, even if he gives way to Larnach or Wallner by mid-game. He's better against lefties, but not actually "good."

Get ready also for the Darth Bader jokes, unless I missed one in somebody's post already.

Yikes indeed. This does reduce my enthusiasm. It's our Big Off-season Signing? Well, I wasn't expecting one anyway. I do expect Bader will contribute more than Margot did. Bader hit better in 2024 as a substitute than as a starter, so that already is auspicious.