Oxtung

There are very few elite pitchers available. I agree. If that has been your point all the way along then perhaps we're just talking past each other.

I have no opinion or knowledge into how many elite pitchers choose FA over resigning with their original teams. Basing a claim off of 8 contracts out of the 40 or so that have been signed seems a little silly to me. The cost for good pitchers is high no matter if they make it to FA or not. Verlander just resigned for $180M over 7 years, King Felix for $175M over 7 years and Greinke for $148 over 6 years. So the money seems to be the same either way for the elite pitchers. Unless you two are suggesting that the elite pitchers that do make it to FA are more prone to injuries/poor pitching than their brethren that resign with their original franchise, then my point still stands. If you are saying that elite FA pitchers are riskier than pitchers that re-up with the same team then show some kind of analysis.

6 weeks ago I was one who wanted to see more consistency out of Gibson. At that point he was literally Good-Bad-Good-Bad. Since then he has only had one really bad start out of his last seven or so. I think at this point I think he is capable of coming up and performing as well as any other pitcher. That said, Albers is having a fantastic year as well. There is nothing wrong with Ryan acknowledging that. At this point he hasn't promoted Albers instead of Gibson or anything, he only replied to a question he may or may not have been prepared for. If another pitcher was needed who knows what would actually happen. Lastly, whether Gibson pitchers 5, 50 or 150 innings for the Twins this year it changes nothing about next year. He is still going to open up the season with the Twins and , barring an injury or a Blackburnesque collapse, will have a spot in the rotation all season long. That will be his year to perform regardless of what he does or does not do this year. So while we might be itching for him to come up so we can "oooh" and "ahhhhh" at the pitching when you zoom out and look at the bigger picture this year means little for Gibson's career or the Twins future.

According to Jim Bowden of ESPN Ryan is floating Morneau, Willingham and Correia already. Perkins was also mentioned but Ryan seemed less interested in moving him.

Greinke, shortly after signing, said he signed with the Dodgers because they offered the most money. He further went on to say he would have signed with whoever offered the most and it didn't matter what team it was. So we know for sure that at least one big FA would have signed here.

Thanks for doing the research!

So again, do you have anything to back up your assertion that signing free agents is worse than resigning players?

Not to take away from your larger point but I've seen this said multiple times and I just don't believe it is true. Player - Games/Innings at AAA Will Myers - 162 games and counting Trevor Bauer- 140 IP and counting Zach Wheeler - 102 IP and counting Gerrit Cole - 74 IP and counting (he's up because of an injury) Danny Hultzen- 70 IP and counting Tyler Skaggs- 109 IP Travis D'Arnaud- 79 games and counting Shelby Miller- 136 IP Julio Teheran- 275 IP Nick Franklin- 103 games Jake Odorizzi- 163 IP These are the top prospects in baseball that reached AAA last season at some point, some for just a few games at the end of the season. As you can see every one spent a large amount of time at AAA. The idea that AAA doesn't matter and that top prospects don't need to play there just isn't true.

You seem to be making the claim that pitchers that resign with their current team do better than their career average while pitchers that become FA's do worse than their career average. Do you have anything to support your supposition? I made the point that many big contracts work out quite well for the signing team. I did research and found evidence to support my claim. Now the onus is on you to support yours.

I have many problems with the "let's wait for our prospects to develop and then sign a big time FA!" idea. First, it takes a long time to build up enough prospects to make a run because prospects are so unpredictable. Let's take a look: Rangers: 8 of 9 seasons of below .500 ball before they got good. Rays: 10 straight 90+ loss seasons before becoming good. Orioles: 14 years of sub-.500 baseball before becoming good. Royals: 18 of 19 seasons of sub-.500 baseball and still waiting on their prospects. Athletics: 5 seasons of sub-.500 baseball before becoming good. Mariners: 8 of 10 seasons of sub-.500 baseball and still waiting.... Astros: 6 of 7 years of sub-.500 baseball and still waiting... Nationals: 12 out of 15 years sub-.500 before becoming good. Reds: 9 straight seasons of sub-.500 ball before becoming good. Pirates: 20 straight seasons of sub-.500 ball and still waiting.... Most (perhaps all?) spent a long time waiting for prospects to mature. I don't want to wait 10-20 years. Here is another team. Twins: 8 straight years of sub-.500 ball before becoming good in 2001. Most often the first wave of prospects doesn't propel you out of the basement. It takes several waves before enough prospects pan out to contend again. My second problem is that people seem to think that all of these big deals are doomed to be failures. I looked at the 20 largest contracts signed during the '00's. There were definately some clunkers; Zito, Jason Schmidt, Mike Hampton, etc... but there were many that worked out very well. Roy Halladay 3 years 159 ERA+ Roy Oswalt 5 years 121 ERA+ Mark Buerhle 4 years 115 ERA+ Chris Carpenter 4 years 130 ERA+ (one season injured) Ryan Dempster 4 years 107 ERA+ (one bad season 3 good to great seasons) Justin Verlander 3 years 150 ERA+ (was a longer contract but got renegotiated in year 3) Felix Hernandez 3 years 131 ERA+ (longer contract that got renegotiated) Pedro Martinez 6 years 212 ERA+ Many of these contracts work out very well for the signing team. Of those 20 largest contracts 65% of the seasons were above average, they averaged 199.6 IP/season with an average ERA+ of 116. 42% of the seasons were outstanding with an >120 ERA+. In only ~13% of the seasons was the pitcher injured for much of the season. The third problem is that if you wait for your prospects to be ready to compete to sign your big FA to a long term contract you will no longer be able to retain all of your prospects when they are post-arbitration because your big FA acquisition will still be tying up money. For example the Twins will probably, if most of the prospects pan out, be ready to compete in 2016. If you sign a big money FA then to a 5 year contract it won't expire until 2020. Every prospect that comes up in 2013 or 2014 will need to sign post-arbitration contracts before then. That likely includes, Plouffe, Parmelee, Hicks, Arcia, Gibson, Diamond, Hendriks, Meyer, May, Sano, Rosario, Baxendale, Hernandez, Pressly, Thielbar, Tonkin, Danny Santana, Pinto, Wimmers and Morales. If they move quickly you might also have Buxton, Berrios, Duffey, Chargois, Vargas, Zach Jones, Stewart, Harrison, Walker, Polanco, Goodrum, Kepler, Eades and Corey Williams. Now not all of those guys are going to pan out but, in this scenario enough of them do that we are signing a big money FA to put us over the top. You can see how the Twins would run out of money very quickly forcing some tough decisions. On the other hand if you sign the big FA in 2013 that contract comes off the books just as all those players are needing to be resigned for big money.

At the very least I should have had an apostrophe, you're right. RBI's? R'sBI? I don't know which is correct when you're using an acronym. This RBI discussion has been waged several times so I made the assumption that you would know the arguments at this point. Mea Culpa. All that RBI measures is how many runners you plated, not how efficient (ie clutch) you were at doing so. There are better stats to measure efficiency including one you mentioned in your own post, RISP, which directly measure how efficient a hitter is when it counts. RBI on the other hand are a function of two things. First it is dependent on having someone on base in front of you, so you could be the best hitter in the world but if people are rarely on in front of you, no RBI. Or you could be a very bad hitter but if there are always guys on when you come to the plate your RBI total will be large just because of the number of opportunities. The second factor is how "clutch" a hitter is but because the first factor is so important in deriving an RBI it is impossible to tell "clutchiness" from the RBI stat. Here is a case in point. Morneau vs. Mauer career stats with RISP: [TABLE=width: 500] [/TD][TD]RBI OPS Opportunities Morneau 578 .866 1544 Mauer 494 .953 1336 [/TABLE] As you can see Joe has actually been more "clutch" with RISP but Morneau has more RBI's because he's had more opportunities. In reality because Mauer, with his ridiculous .406 OBP, has always hit in front of Morneau, Morneau ends up with more RBI's.

RBI's don't tell you anything about if a hitter is "clutch". If you want "clutchiness" stats then use one. There are several to choose from but RBI isn't one of them.

You might want to reconsider the use of RBI's to determine how good a hitter is. They are a team stat not a player stat. While Morneau's batting average is actually above average his overall hitting ability is below average for 1st base. He currently ranks 20th in OPS amongst 1st basemen which is actually an improvement from a month ago, IIRC.

The Tigers have the 2nd best run differential in baseball. They are a very good team that we will not be catching even if the rest of our division is bad. At some point the Tiger's bad luck will turn into good luck and they'll approach their expected wins/losses which right now is 41-23.

If most fans are doing something else and therefore it doesn't matter if they only show BA & HR's then why doesn't that logic also apply to more advanced metrics? What's good for the goose....

IIRC he didn't feel the same as you about his contract.

I'm not really sure I get Crawford's point. He seems to think the Twins were pretty risky in taking several players later in the draft with big questions. But in my mind after the first round every pick is risky. If they're all risky then go with the one with a chance to be a very good player. What's the point in playing it safe in the 10th round? If he's one of the few who pan out you get a 4th OF?

Typically I would say yes. He will be deteriorating with age most likely at the beginning of our next run at the World Series. However something Span said recently has me rethinking my position. Essentially Span said he signed with the Twins because he wanted to play here (he didn't elucidate reasons why) and he probably took less than he was worth to do so. In return the Twins traded him away in large part because of his contract. Essentially that is what we're talking about doing with Perkins as well. How many players in the future will be willing to sign team friendly deals if they know the Twins will just trade them? It's a quandary and I certainly don't know the answers.

This thread is about the Twins CF discussion. I know it's easy to get dragged off topic but let's try and keep it relevant. In addition the off season starting pitching has been hashed and rehashed ad nauseum.

To those people who dislike advanced stats do you think a few advanced stats interspersed throughout a broadcast would sour or even ruin your viewing experience? I'm just trying to gauge how big a deal this is.

This is a pet peeve of mine so forgive my little mini-rant here. "Science" and "scientific" have specific meanings. Most things mathematical are not scientific. Science is defined by the Scientific Method which is a specific process to answer a specific question through carefully controlled experiments to obtain reproducible results. The original question is compared to these results and is either accepted, discarded or adapted. This leads to new questions and then new results. I know people don't mean anything negative when they say "science" out of context, in fact it is often the opposite, but this dilutes the word and leads to confusion. Sorry for the long rant! /rant

Just another thought. For most of these stats it isn't really important to know how they are calculated. The math behind them isn't the important part. It's knowing what they mean in comparison to other players that is important. For instance using WAR as an example, it doesn't matter what it's component parts are, what matters and what you would mention to your viewers is something like this, "WAR is a stat that attempts to measure a players all around game. It takes into account a players hitting skills, base running skills and defensive abilities. The higher the number the better that player has been." Now who wouldn't understand that? That is about as simple as it gets. Higher is better.

Why would you not have a spot at the table? You could just ignore what you don't want see/know about. I couldn't care less about the color commentators stories so every time I start to hear one I just mute the TV for several seconds. Most posters so far seem to be under the assumption that at the first whiff of advanced statistics the majority of fans would .... well I don't know what, clearly something terrible though. That implies however that the broadcast is perfect as it is now and that changing anything is taboo. I disagree, I think there are plenty of things that fans get annoyed with. So if there are things that annoy fans, and they keep watching, how is throwing in an advanced metric every once in a while, and talking knowledgably about it, any different? Why would they riot over that and not the other parts of the broadcast they dislike? I'd just like to second Parker's previous statement. Batting average, on base percentage, slugging, RBI's are only easily digested because at some point in the past fans have been taught what those numbers mean and why they are important. So if your argument is we can't implement advanced metrics because most fans don't understand them but you are unwilling to educate them then what you are really saying is we don't ever want to add these advanced stats into our broadcasts. The only way for these stats to become familiar and understood by the public is to talk about them. Repetition is what leads to familiarity. On another note I don't understand why some advanced stats couldn't be added to graphics that already appear on the screen. For instance why couldn't WHIP or FIP or xFIP be added to the other stats posted on the screen when a new pitcher comes into the ball game? Is that one extra row on the screen going to cause people to riot? The graphic already exists. People could then choose to look at that stat or not at their own discretion. How about OPS+ when a batter comes to the plate and they list his BA, OBP, SLG?

I'm not interested in arguing this because it has been hashed out before and probably will be again but I will state my opinion then walk away. I think the Twins did Hicks, themselves and their fans a disservice by forcing Hicks into the starting lineup. By not finding a veteran to fill the opening the only alternative was to let Hicks play. Wasn't going to be Benson, he had hardly played in a year and even then he was terrible. Mastro would have required a new 4th OF to be found because it sure wasn't going to be Hicks or Benson sitting on the bench behind him. That leaves only Hicks. Forcing Hicks into the role was a bad idea for all the reasons already stated, slow starter, jumped two levels, no time at AAA, arbitration/control reasons and a lot of pressure for a young guy with no experience. There was plenty of money and it was obvious CF was going to be a problem to begin the year. I'm disappointed that nothing was done about it.

Does she look anything like Brandon McCarthy's wife?