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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    Kuo Hua Lo and Brian Gilbert being released is a little surprising to me. Any reason to think they asked for their release? There are a couple of guys at Ft Myers with worse results and higher age than Gilbert. And Lo has a very strange stat line at Cedar Rapids this year, giving up 24 runs of which only 13 are earned - so a 23-year-old pitcher with a 2.60 ERA got his release. Maybe they think the way those unearned runs came in reflect badly on him anyway. Neither guy looks like a strong prospect, but still...
  2. ashbury
    We've been hearing things like this about him for months.
  3. ashbury
    http://celebritygossiper.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/takei-twitter-400x242.jpg
  4. ashbury
    You're trying to hint that The Gardy Boys is not the shining example all should follow?
  5. ashbury
    That would be Tommy Milone.
  6. ashbury
    ESan to Toronto, with some third team providing young players to the Twins because the Twins didn't like what the Jays were offering. My partial guess.
  7. ashbury
    You've seen Polanco in Spring Training. Do you think he has the arm to play short? Because when I watched him aim the ball and bounce it to the first baseman, or cut loose and then throw wide, I didn't.
  8. ashbury
    I was about to go with how valuable Pedro Florimon would be if he could hit, but your way is good too.
  9. ashbury
    The flexibility aspect has been covered sufficiently by now, so let me introduce another angle. I use chess as an analogy now and then, even though I barely remember from game to game how the horsey is supposed to move. But as I understand it, chess at high levels is a game of small incremental advantages (barring outright mate-in-three blunders), built up until the advantage is overwhelming. The analogy isn't completely apt since a baseball GM is not playing against a single opponent but 4 or 14 or even 29. Still, I am content with a series of roster moves that follow a plan and that succeed two times out of three without any outright blunders. From such patience, championships can be built. I'm not going to go to the mat defending this one trade, but I am cautiously optimistic we are seeing the beginning of a self-consistent blueprint for 2017 and beyond. If your analysis is we came out 1 win or $9M ahead of where we were on one deal, that's OK by me.
  10. ashbury
    I think you are baking assumptions into your conclusion as well, namely that the Twins retooled FO will be foolish in how they evaluate Santiago some months from now. My previous post explored the options if he leaves. But, if he exceeds our modest expectations the rest of the way in 2016, I have no problem with hanging on to him IF the talent evaluators believe it's not a fluke - trading him at the next deadline isn't ruled out by this. Or, if his 2016 performance with us is good, it could increase what we could get for him in the coming off-season. These just represent additional scenarios. What I keep saying is that this trade increased the team's flexibility. Keeping Nolasco, there would be only two scenarios, cut him or play him (or else another trade like this one). It's true that a good strategy for the coming six months is not enough - it has to be executed well, including but not limited to proper player evaluation/scouting. I'm hopeful in that regard, but if we end up with poor players on the 2017 roster then the flexibility will not have been used well. But even that would not invalidate the thinking I believe to be behind this trade.
  11. ashbury
    Where in the world did you get this? I have him marked down as chronic shoulder problems that will likely end his career.
  12. ashbury
    At the risk of being misinterpreted, just how well is necessary?
  13. ashbury
    Toward the end of my career, and I say this with no pride whatsoever, Wally become somewhat of a hero to me.
  14. ashbury
    Guys lacking power get shortchanged by OPS, so this is actually a decent number. You can't have a team full of table-setters, but one with a good glove can usually find a spot. Hope he keeps progressing, so that these numbers translate to the major league level in 2018 or soon after.
  15. ashbury
    All results. Some statisticians.
  16. ashbury
    I am concerned that only by combining the skills of Sano and Polanco could you have a good fielder at third for the present. Polanco would surely handle the popups better and likely deal with the screaming liners destined to go through the legs better; but I think his arm will be as disappointing to purists as it has been at short. Routine plays will have you holding your breath until the ball reaches the first baseman, and slow rollers or bunts will likewise be an adventure.
  17. ashbury
    DFA'ing Ricky means eating the salary. The narrative isn't finished with this deal. Suppose Santiago gets traded in the coming off-season for a single-A prospect of some mild promise - a Chih-Wei Hu type, someone with mixed reviews from scouts, just to be concrete. Then you have in essence a trade of Meyer for Busenitz plus Hu plus $9M of freed up money to apply to some need. Sound more enticing? For me, Meyer's high ceiling combined with his risks add up to less than this return. If Santiago just has to be non-tendered, it's a closer outcome but I'm still fine with it, ASSUMING the freed up money is used well in combination with other assets.
  18. ashbury
    The moves are consistent with a larger strategy to both add young talent and improve roster flexibility. No single move will accomplish it all, so in that sense you're right, and the real proof will be what they do in the off-season with this (and any additional) new-found flexibility. But I am a lot more positive toward the possibility of RA having "Interim" removed from his title, and I never thought I'd say that after his first go-round. It seems decisions are finally being made about who fits into the team's long-term plans and who does not - e.g. Alex Meyer. I am somewhere between Decent and Accolades at the moment.
  19. ashbury
    FA, I am skeptical too. Via trade, though? Possibilities should abound, shouldn't they? Dozier and his affordable salary plus a prospect or two for someone's good $20M pitcher under control a few years? If some GM needs salary relief, maybe that could be constructed....
  20. ashbury
    Going aggressively after a stud catcher is a luxury for teams that have essentially no other positions to upgrade. If by luck of drafting and development you happen to wind up with one, great. But on a team with holes, a stud catcher gives you a lot of problems with flexibility, since he'll need to play DH/1B nearly one out of three games if you don't want to lose his bat. We went through that learning experience with Mauer. It's not an unsolvable problem but it reduces your manager's flexibility by quite a bit and he'll be begging to carry a third catcher. Like I said, a luxury, to be reserved for a team that is ready to contend, since it's less painful to sit your stud catcher when it's not his day to catch if your lineup is pretty solid. You probably get less bang for buck at that position than any other.
  21. ashbury
    Don't you just llove autocorrect?
  22. ashbury
    Or, going farther, combine such savings with other funds such as Plouffe being no longer with the team, and aim for a difference maker bearing a higher salary via FA or trade, rather than the usual "million here, million there" strategy.
  23. ashbury
    I have been seeing something similar - a reroute of a tab for Twins Daily to some site purporting to be Firefox wanting me to run an update executable. (The legitimate Firefox updater tells me I am up to date, of course.) It will occur sometimes even when I haven't clicked on anything or even moved the mouse cursor in a few minutes, while I'm reading or maybe called away for a while. It's always a TD page that gets it, which leads me to wonder if somehow TD has a virus/worm on its server that kicks in at random times. (My Norton program comes up clean when I run it on my machine.)
  24. ashbury
    Double the runs from 0-9? So then we should be 18-0. Typical Twins underperformance.
  25. ashbury
    We are on a pace to finish 98-64, assuming we don't lose any more games. Our Magic Number is... well, we don't have one, as a 98 win record could still be beaten by one or more teams. However, our win target needs to be 29 more, according to http://lyle.smu.edu/~olinick/riot/american_league.html - that's the number above which it's theoretically possible that the other teams lose all their games and we finish on top.
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