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jokin

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Everything posted by jokin

  1. jokin
    The Twins have been down the assumption path before and gotten burned. Spring Training has historically been a very poor predictor for readiness levels (good or bad).
  2. jokin
    Fair points that I don't disagree with. As I've said about Hicks, it's all on the come- flawed players ofttimes fix their flaws, especially if the underlying talent is there. He clearly has the tools and athleticism of a first round draft pick (he's one of only a very small handful of MLB OFers who have thrown 100 MPH relays- the Twins had another in Carlos Gomez). In 2015, Hicks also took some big steps forward in a level he basically skipped/failed at previously- AAA. I don't think anyone can deny that Hicks looked like a different player in 2015, both at the plate and in the field. If this really was the best the market had to offer for Hicks alone, I just think it would have been a lot smarter to consider putting Hicks in a package together for one of the young studs who are blocked at the major league level, like Sanchez at NY, like McGuire at Pitt, like Contreras with the Cubs. Or take a deeper look at the Plouffe option. In the meantime, the Twins could have seen if Hicks could continue to build on that value and potential... while Buxton and Kepler spent the opening months in Rochester to put on the finishing touches. As of right now, the opening day OF is in a major state of uncertainty and disarray. The Twins gambled down this path over the last 3 seasons, I'm surprised they are willing to expose themselves again in this way so cavalierly.
  3. jokin
    Severe small sample overestimation plus BABIP and Yankee Stadium factors not fully discounted for.
  4. jokin
    Not for the first two months.... (at least)
  5. jokin
    One can surely dream... But then reality bites us in the rear end: http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site569/2013/0603/20130603__1-clete%20thomas_400.jpg
  6. jokin
    Hah...! It does seem like he's destined to go out there in order to "keep his bat fresh" as the 5th OF, doesn it? But I looked it up... Murphy's too good for a mere corner OF spot. His only other position besides catcher in the minors was 3rd base- 37 games... so at least he's got that going for him
  7. jokin
    Uhh, were you not watching the Twins on a daily basis...? For all of his faults... he more than proved in 2015 that he could be far more than adequate as a placeholder until Buxton was ready.
  8. jokin
    So true. Why don't people actually look at the potential names likely to be on the opening day roster filling OF spots? And no proven CF. The options there are Rosario and Santana and/or the semi-inevitable bargain bin veteran signee. And then you have Arcia and perhaps Sano, who's never played there. You were right Chief, as of this moment, we know of only one for-sure real live actual OF, and no true CFer.
  9. jokin
    That's the crux of it , isn't it. This wasn't exactly a mirror image trade of potentiality. In addition, it clearly lowers the Twins net talent level on the opening day roster.
  10. jokin
    Suzuki played 131 games and had 479 PAs in 2015. Suzuki's option vests if he manages 485 PAs in 2016. Do we really think that Suzuki will not finish somewhere just under the numbers he hit in 2015? Murphy will be hard-pressed to be able to produce more than 0.5 WAR, even in the best-case scenario. Meanwhile, Hicks currently projects to put up 2+ WAR for the Yankees if he gets a full-time gig, higher than that if he gets the CF job, the same as Ellsbury and Gardner. For the Twins to have made this a great trade, they needed a decent bullpen arm as part of the trade, they didn't get anything close to that in return. I just looked up the Cameron article on the trade... the following text isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of the profile that Murphy offers as potential salvation at the catcher position for the Twins:" "Overall, Murphy looks like he likely fits best as a part-time catching option, a guy with enough skills to not be a black hole behind the plate, but probably not a guy deserving of a full-time job. The Twins needed help behind the plate, and this beats paying a lot of money to Matt Wieters or something, but I don’t know that Murphy is going to be more than a decent platoon guy in Minnesota."
  11. jokin
    I hope you're right. However, his career MiLB BABIP is .295. Until convinced otherwise, I gotta think he will regress to his historical mean. His two-year MLB BABIP number is comparable to Goldschmidt, Harper and Cabrera... I kind-of doubt that even if he has indeed changed his batting style, that he can maintain numbers at this elite level of play.
  12. jokin
    Lots of other experts aren't so sure that he's much more than that. The BABIP thing might have been more addressed by KLaw... How soon we forget rookies and BABIP. Danny Santana from .405 BABIP to .290 BABIP in 2015. Murphy BABIPed at .365 in 2014-15, and his MiLB BABIP is historically much lower than Santana's was. The 2015 AL average BABIP is .296. Anyone care to wager or guess which side of .296 BABIP Murphy ends up on in 2016? I'll take the under...
  13. jokin
    Taking bets on who gets the most PAs in 2016....
  14. jokin
    I wish Ryan would actually take chances on upside. Murphy pretty much is what he is. And how much did Yankee Stadium inflate his hitting? Quite a bit. Yankee Stadium: wRC+ 105 OPS .749 Away Games: wRC+ 71 OPS .623 This looks like more Metrodome budget-ball soon-to-be-expensive player spin-off. The road map suggests that Murphy was primarily acquired to be certain that he merits and gets just enough PAs to guarantee that Suzuki's option doesn't vest, and not much more. Let's break this down more simply. The Twins traded an uncertain, but still, a former 1st rounder and starting, decent-defending, CF- who finally showed glimpses of realizing his full potential.... for, so far anyway, only a back-up catcher with little upside behind the plate? In what world is that a good trade? This created more uncertainty in the OF, while failing to significantly upgrade the glaring deficit at the catcher position. How did the Twins not get a decent bullpen arm thrown into this trade, at minimum? Just a bad move. (And I'm writing this as one of HIcks' biggest critics. I hope I'm completely wrong on Murphy and he excels and somehow takes the job from Zuke, but if the Yanks see their way to giving Hicks 500 PAs, he has the potential to be a 20-20 producer in that park.)
  15. jokin
    I can.
  16. jokin
    #1 or #2 prospect in all of baseball, and only 3# on the Twins....? Nope
  17. jokin
    Uhh, yeah... could the Twins even get a decent 4th OF for him at this point?
  18. jokin
    That seems logical and could possibly be the best path for Meyer to reach the majors next year. But Seth didn't qualify his comments with that nuance- he made it sound like RP was his new permanent career track.
  19. jokin
    Umm, I wasn't suggesting a one-for-one swap of Span for Storen. I was suggesting that fairer value in that trade would have been much closer to Span for Storen AND Meyer.. I thought that was obviously stated in my post. Storen was the insurance policy so you had the likelihood of at least some MLB return back for a near-elite CF in his absolute prime, plus your lotto ticket in Meyer. Perhaps the Twins would have had to throw in a C+ prospect to get it done, but I don't know how anyone can say that the Twins didn't get taken in this trade- and there were many of us, including professional writers who said just that at the time of the trade.
  20. jokin
    Well stated. Frankly, there's way too much"Burn the Witch" intolerance going on in this country all the way around. Just take a look at history to the countless atrocities against humanity that are often the end result of taking the matter of a difference of opinion- to stigmatization- to hate- to persecution.
  21. jokin
    And I didn't say it was "benign"... I said "more benign than deserved of being called a racist". See how subtle semantic differences altered contextually can so quickly change the quality of a discussion?
  22. jokin
    Lots of reasons why lots of people choose to take offense at things. The language about "imposters" was indeed pretty crude stuff- and there's probably an economic argument to be made that more speculative American black baseball players have priced themselves out of the market when there is an easy alternative in that you can sign maybe up to a dozen young Latin players at around the same price as one black ball player in the first 10-15 rounds in the draft ,and certainly when salaries start to quickly accelerate at the major league level . Both of these feelings are probably still a pretty widespread sentiment among the African American community, especially when phrased with less-charged rhetoric than Torii's verbose rant. With regards to "authenticity", if you recall, in 2007-8, there was a strong movement in that same community that Obama wasn't an authentic-enough African American to be deserving of the mantle- I don't recall cries of racism being thrown around during that dust-up. FWIW, I had a chance to coach an inner-city high school team for 10 years. I learned through multiple occasions and testimony that the resentment against the African immigrant and refugee communities is widespread among the African American community.
  23. jokin
    It's kind-of important when you use one of the most politically charged words in American culture- like "racist", to use them with precision (or else their meaning becomes diluted). It's the same sort of semantic inelegance that Torii demonstrated when trying to explain why his experience as an African-American was different ("more valid") than that of Caribbean Latins of the same race. Quite simply, his behavior was more benign than being worthy of being called a "racist", and also definitionally inaccurate.
  24. jokin
    "Dominican" and "Latin" are not races, they're nationalities and ethnicities. The players in question that Torii disparaged were members of the same race as Torii- can one really be "racist" against members of his own race? The term you were looking for was probably "anti-cultural bias" not racism. Torii was very clumsily trying to explain why the cultural experience for American blacks as a minority group is "authentic"... versus the experience of non-American blacks who come from a culture where their race is in the majority.
  25. jokin
    I was just about to let him have it with both barrels. Good thing I read down the thread. Well-said, Sir.
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