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jmlease1

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Everything posted by jmlease1

  1. jmlease1
    Great to see Zebby cooking and showing top end velocity. Sure looks like he's added to the fastball again, and it'll be interesting to see if he can maintain that all season. i think it's complicated to yank Paddack this early in the season, though I would have preferred to let the kids cook and have Paddack reinforce the bullpen from the jump. we're literally talking about 3 starts, and Paddack was good in his last turn out (Game Score of 60, not his fault the offense took the day off). Zebby has been great and looks to have a bright future, but he's still only started 7 games and thrown 34 innings in AAA. It's not a sin to give Paddack another start and let Zebby build confidence. Amick is making a case for early promotion to AA. It's still early and 10 games is a small sample, but boy he's been good. If he keeps scorching it like this for another month, send him to Wichita. keaschall & Rodriguez haven't shown a lot of power yet, but I'm not too worried about either of them. I'd like them both to get more time, so hopefully Correa & Wallner were pulled more for precautionary reasons rather than needing to dip down now.
  2. jmlease1
    I think that's right. It certainly did look like Julien got in his head last season when struggling at the plate and instead of just making the play in the field, he was thinking about it. That's when he starts double-clutching on throws, etc. So far this season I think he's been doing better, and if he's hitting he doesn't need to be a special defender to be valuable. Keaschall is almost certainly going to be a better defender. It will be interesting to see where everyone fits when Royce comes back especially if Lee & Julien are hitting.
  3. jmlease1
    What has he done to show he deserves more time? I like his speed and defense, but he hasn't hit. And please, let's not talk about Mike Trout in the same discussion as Kiersey. Putting down a bunt when asked to is the sort of thing that a player like him needs to execute on to earn more opportunities. He's got good speed and a track record as a baserunner, so when he's asked to pinch run, he needs to take the extra base, swipe a bag when the steal is on, and not get himself thrown out when running. he needs to show good range and a steady glove when he's an as a defender. So far, he's been good enough defensively. But missing that bunt was a moment for him to earn more time and he didn't come through. I'm rooting for him, but he's a fringe player who isn't going to get tons of chances absent injury and needs to come through to earn more time. Missing a fundamental play like laying down a bunt doesn't help him.
  4. jmlease1
    He's been ok? I mean, I think a positive result for Julien in the field is for him to be unmemorable. If he's steady and consistent while swinging the bat well, that'll be just fine. Good to see him with no errors the last 2 weeks, and hopefully it continues.
  5. jmlease1
    Hope it's nothing serious on the injuries; the lineup is a little thin right now and offense wasn't exactly the team strong suit. Need Wallner & Correa out there. Really disappointing to see Kiersey botch that bunt attempt; he's a speed guy, it's not like they were asking Jeffers or Wallner to lay one down. I get he hasn't been playing much, but he needs to execute. Ober pitched ok, but danced on the edge a bit. The Alonzo hr wasn't great; he's killing fastballs right now and that one was very hittable. The Soto one was a little less bad, but when Ober is homer-happy it doesn't usually end well. Glad he was able to scrape through. Welcome back Brooks Lee! Tough to come in mid-AB, but he handled it well and the homer added a very needed run. Can't believe we had another botched throw from a pitcher. Those are starting to really stick out.
  6. jmlease1
    Happy to see Festa get another start. Hope to be able to catch at least some of the game, would definitely like to see how he's throwing. I'm still a big fan of the Slim Reaper and his development has been quite good. His biggest problem in his first stint was handing out too many free passes, and he was also a little bit too hittable. In his first outing he was on top of both of those things, even if he didn't get out of the 5th. I thin if he can limit the baserunners, he's going to do just fine and this will be a good test for him. I would say it's probably the right move from an organizational standpoint to give Festa another start rather than tap Matthews, even though Matthews has been on it so far and looking very sharp in AAA. Once the decision was made to go with Festa for the first start, there's not a good enough reason to swap him out for Matthews at this point and some good ones to give Festa another start, not the least of which is Festa pitched pretty well. I'm sure we'll see Matthews at some point, but I'm excited by Festa's potential as well. Be interesting to see if he deploys that sinker, or if it's not ready for prime time yet...
  7. jmlease1
    Some nice hitting performances at cedar rapids to start the season. Good to see things going well from Amick, deBarge, GG, and Culpepper (hope he's not out long!). The early season injuries in the minors is a bit concerning. hope there's nothing too significant?
  8. jmlease1
    Neither Buxton nor Correa are playing up to their capability right now and we need them to do much better at the plate. But just stop with the Arraez nonsense. Dude has an OPS+ of 78 right now and doesn't play a lick of defense either. There's a reason SD shopped him this offseason. Ryan did a good job grinding through 5. Too bad his pitch counts climbed so high so fast. But he's been quite good this season and showing no problems coming back from the injury. Alcala is very disappointing. He's simply too inconsistent to continue right now: it's all or nothing with him right now and that's just not going to work, especially since everyone in this bullpen will pitch and pitch often.
  9. jmlease1
    I've never really understood it either. Julien had a bad season in 2024, but was excellent in 2023. he also put up some big hitting numbers in the minors and shown some skill on the basepaths. Maybe it's just a style thing? I expect him to have some struggles this season, at some point, because he looks more like a good player than an all-star and very few guys get through the long grind of a baseball season without some struggle. But I think he can be a quality hitter and this team needs as many of those as they can squeeze into the lineup.
  10. jmlease1
    3rd on the team right now in OPS+. yeah, we better rid of him.
  11. jmlease1
    What counts as a regular? In 1991 Pagliarulo only made 112 starts at 3B. Also, Gladden played a lot, but wasn't very solid...
  12. jmlease1
    Sabato is on a rehab assignment, isn't he? sadly, there's been very little to suggest he's going to make it. Winokur was ice cold to start, much better lately. he's definitely got some work to do, but he's also the youngest hitter on the roster, so grace is warranted. Really like what we're seeing out of GG to start the season. Hopefully he stays healthy and keeps swinging a hot bat. be nice to get some real value out of the Polanco salary dump. (congrats to Jorge for having a good start at the plate this season as well, though I don't think it's going to end well for them if he plays too much 3B...) Looks like CHS Field and the International League are still pretty hitter-friendly environments? not a great start for E-Rod in Saint Paul, and clearly getting Cartaya right is going to be a process. but it makes it harder to evaluate someone like McCusker, i think, who appears to be hitting well...but is it enough to give him a look at some point? Just don't know with the inflated numbers at CHS, especially with guy who isn't going to give you anything else.
  13. jmlease1
    It's great to see Julien make the necessary adjustments and start to hit hit again. The peripherals have been looking good this season even when the results weren't there, so it's good that he's been able to stick with the change and start getting the result he and the team might have expected. I do think he's taken his struggles at the plate out into the field with him at times, so while I don't expect him to be a plus defender I think we might see improvement still at 2B. But frankly the team can handle him being below average defensively if he's putting up an OPS+ in the 110-125 range. I would expect pitchers to adjust to him again; if he can keep from chasing it wouldn't surprise me at all to see the walk rate start climbing back up, even if the K's go back up a bit more too. Miranda has some work to do. Previously when he's struggled in MLB it's been more injury related; there really doesn't seem to be that issue for him right now. He's just a mess at the plate in every way, swinging at everything, while not getting the barrel on the ball like he needs to. You look at his launch angle and it shows a player who needs a big ol' reset. Hopefully he can go back down to Saint Paul and find himself again. He's never going to be a player that takes lots of walks, but he can be a guy who makes lots of good hard contact. It's interesting, since he doesn't appear to big fighting an injury this time, to see whether he can get himself out of this. Wallner pulled it off last season and when he returned he was a damn good hitter for the Twins. Hopefully Miranda can as well.
  14. jmlease1
    I loved Bremer, but let's not pretend he wasn't a homer. Part of that was Dick is Mr. Positivity, but still. And Bert wasn't much different that today's crew when it came criticizing Twins players and basically never took a poke at the manager or front office. When Dick & Bert were in their prime, it was great, but you're clearly not remembering the last several seasons with Bert, where he was mailing it in and frankly dragging Bremer down with him. Bremer got a second wind when he got new partners.
  15. jmlease1
    Julien is a good fit for the leadoff spot if he's made the adjustments that will keep him hitting. Nice to see him doing well right now, and hopefully he's got his confidence back. Reasonable choice to pull SWR; I suspect they might have let him go longer if it was a bigger lead. He doesn't dominate, but he keeps the team in the game. Hope Ryan can go deep against the Mets, and the offense can generate enough to give us a chance.
  16. jmlease1
    Good to see DeBarge showing some pop. He's off to a nice start. Bummer to have Culpepper going to the IL; he was playing well and injuries to top picks just make me twitchy as hell at this point. Happy for Tanner Schobel to see him off to a good start. It had looked like AA had flummoxed him and he might have hit his ceiling. long way to go, and he'll need to keep hitting, but this is a real crossroads season for him: if he can't hit AA pitching in his 3rd shot at it at age 24, then he's probably cooked as a prospect. But maybe he just needed a little more development time and a key adjustment to get it going. Wichita is interesting this year in that most of the lineup are guys who are 24-25. (only 3 under 24, only 1 under 22) It'll be interesting to see where the average age lands in AA this year, I think. Just happy to see Prielipp apparently healthy. Hope to keep seeing results from him into the summer. Very nice job by Dasan Hill. Twins are clearly being careful in trying to build him up (which I have no problem with at all--he's only 19) but boy oh boy the stuff looks good. He's going to be fun to track this season as he makes his professional debut.
  17. jmlease1
    No one is saying that a bad manager can't cost games, or that a superior manager can't win games for their team. It's the scope that's the issue here. Baseball managers simply don't have so much impact on the game that their decision-making makes them responsible for 20 wins or losses. They're not calling every pitch, they're not personally positioning every fielder on every play, and they're not making swing decisions on hitters like a video game. Lineup selection & construction matters, as does when to go to the bullpen, who to send it and how many batters to have them face, pinch-hitting, defensive replacements, etc. But those decisions are also in the context of what the players actually do, which is always much much more impactful. A great manager making perfect decisions simply can't take a team with the talent of a 70 win team and make them a 90 win team.
  18. jmlease1
    Great to see Soto have a dominant start. So much talent there, but it doesn't always translate. Soto is really impressing at 19. His starts should be appointment viewing for Cedar Rapids. It's going to be interesting to see how the Twins manage his innings this season. There's no real injury history there, so maybe they'll handle him differently than someone like Raya? It's an interesting group of hitters at Cedar Rapids right now. Feels like Iowa is the prime spot for Twins prospects right now. Amick keeps raking: it's only 7 games, but it's everything we could have hoped for from the 2nd round pick. Would love to know more about what his defense is looking like at the corners?
  19. jmlease1
    Hard to feel good about the decision to pull Festa there. Yes, he'd surrendered the lead, but he'd been pitching well. Not Festa's fault there was an error in there. Not much faith there from the manager. Only 64 pitches thrown, multiple clean innings, he's throwing strikes and there's 2 outs in the inning. Instead we burn Coulombe for 1 batter and after Alcala implodes ask Blewett to go 2+ to finish so we don't use 5 relievers to finish out the game? I don't blame Baldelli for Alcala imploding; that's on the player. But Festa isn't in his first go-around, and the quick hook is a mistake. Feels like Baldelli is managing scared, trying to keep his job and instead is making it worse.
  20. jmlease1
    it's possible Sonny Gray has never thought he should come out of a game in his entire life. It's like asking Buxton or Lewis if they can play that day: even if a limb was falling off they'd say yes. Ask Gray if he's got another inning in him and he's going to say yes. It's both admirable and foolish. He had a good first season with MN followed by one of the best seasons of his career. If coming off one of the best seasons of your career, where you were the runner up for the Cy Young award you're mad at the team for how they handled you to the point of not wanting to come back? Maybe you don't have the first damn clue what's actually best for you on the field. but Gray wasn't going to sign here because we weren't going to give him 3+ years at $20M+ per season. I would argue the Twins made the correct choice in making him the QO, then letting him go when he declined.
  21. jmlease1
    I'm not sure these seasons do much to refute my point: Julien's 2023 was substantially better than Cave's 2018, and Julien produced more in his 2+ seasons than cave did in 7 MLB seasons. Cutting off everything from Cave after 2020 doesn't make him a more impactful player. was Julien bad last year? yes he was. There's literally no one arguing that he was good last season. If this is about Baldelli's relationship to Cave & Julien, then skip the 2018 season when Molitor was his manager? Cave was an ok-ish bench bat and 4th OF his first couple of seasons in MLB. Then he stopped hitting and was basically a replacement level player after that. Julien had a great rookie season and a bad sophomore slump after MLB pitching adjusted to him, he was less lucky, and struggled to adjust. He's made a substantial adjustment this season and so far hasn't got any breaks with it, but there are promising signs (barrel%, hard hit%, etc) as well as ones that are worrisome (chase rate). but he doesn't really look like Jake Cave.
  22. jmlease1
    he's 10th in games played and ABs so far this season. (and would almost certainly be lower if Brooks Lee wasn't hurt to start the season) You'd prefer more Mickey Gasper? the Cave comp is weird: Julien has already been more productive in his 2+ seasons than Cave was in 7, and Cave never had a season as good as Julien's 2023. If Julien can't improve over last season he'll likely be gone and/or fighting to try to get a roster spot. But I'm always amazed how quickly people want to give up on him, though: dude produced in 2023, and now people act like that never happened and he's trash with no upside left. If Julien can reduce his chase rate while getting the kind of barrels he's been registering so far, he should see better results. We'll see if he can do it. It's a good sign that he's been able to change his approach up from something that was working for him for a long time, but clearly he's got work to do.
  23. jmlease1
    this is the thing though: they're clearly not just doing it based purely on pitch count or number of times through the order. They're also looking at his velocity and factoring in his illness and lack of innings so far. Whether or not they made the correct decision in this case, we'll never actually know, but it's not a dogmatic "ope, you're going to face the top of the order for the 4th time, so out you go!" This is why so many of the "Rocco manages off a spreadsheet" and the anti-analytic arguments are unpersuasive. cherry-picking 1 or 2 bits to reach a predetermined conclusion doesn't convince many people of anything, just encourages those that already agree. I don't think Rocco has done a particularly good job so far; there have been decisions that were questionable at the time that have not gone his way, and basically none of the levers he's pulled have worked so far. But in baseball I always lay the vast majority of the blame on the players. Even the actively bad/stupid managers aren't going to substantially change a team's destiny. Look at the White Sox last season: would a good manager have made them an average team? No. At best we're talking about going from historically bad to just regular bad. Sizemore was ok as a manager when he took over, but the team still stunk. (even the fire sale didn't make much impact; Fedde was the only guy playing well, maybe gets them a few more wins, but it was the end of July with 2/3 of the season already done and dusted.)
  24. jmlease1
    Huge bummer for Martin, who didn't pout about going back to AAA but instead put his energy on the field, hitting well and showing improvement in the field. Sucks to see him going down like that, especially when he's on a heater. Glad to see Winokur get a hit (his reaction tells me the ofer was getting in his head) and hopefully that gets him started. He's been very cold so far. GG and Amick are both off to great starts in Cedar Rapids, which is very nice to see. GG looks healthy and his power production is back to where we thought it would be. he seems like someone who if he stays healthy and on track will be looking at a midseason promotion. Amick is doing almost everything you could ask for from a draft pick in his first full year pro season; the only possible concern is the K's but it's a small thing for a guy who's hitting so well.
  25. jmlease1
    It's absolutely hilarious to invoke Earl Weaver in an anti-analytics screed. Earl was one of the forerunners of modern analytics in how he constructed and ran his teams. But we've also seen that Baldelli generally lets his starters go as long as anyone in the league...when his starting pitching is good. But he (and this is true of most managers today) doesn't just go "well, it's one of my best guys, that's the most important thing". This kind of decision is one that there's literally no way for the manager to win on: if he pulls Ober and 'pen implodes, he's an idiot. If he leave him in and Ober melts down, he should have known better. If he leave him in and Ober cruises through another inning, then it's all because of Ober. (and he'll get killed if he goes to the bullpen for the 8th too). Even if the bullpen gets through the inning, he's going to get hit for pulling his starter "too early" and using up his bullpen. Baldelli made a significant mistake in letting Ober start in StL while needing more recovery time. Since it was the start of the season there's no reason they couldn't have shuffled the rotation or simply given Dobnak the start. that's a case of him probably trusting the player too much. Now people are mad because he supposedly didn't trust the player enough. I think Baldelli has some problems with lineups and bullpen usage. But he's generally been good at handling the starting pitching. Last night was just one of those ones where it went sideways. the problem is, he's getting the worst possible result on these kinds of decisions that ight normally go his way most of the time right now as the team flails. This magnifies the impact of those choices and makes him look worse than he probably is. If the team doesn't score more runs and win more close games it's not going to matter much: he'll eventually get fired. Baldelli is like most managers in baseball: he looks good when his players are good and are healthy. He looks bad when his players are playing poorly and his got a bunch of injuries to deal with. Right now, too many guys are still playing poorly, especially on offense.
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