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Otto von Ballpark

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Everything posted by Otto von Ballpark

  1. Otto von Ballpark
    They could announce the signing but not make it official until Feb. 13.
  2. Otto von Ballpark
    Looks like the Rangers have found their Darvish replacement: "Rangers, Bartolo Colon Nearing Minor-League Deal" https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2018/02/rangers-bartolo-colon-nearing-minor-league-deal.html
  3. Otto von Ballpark
    Obviously it's better to develop an ace than to sign one. But that's not really the choice here -- it's sign an ace*** or go without one indefinitely. Plenty of teams choose to do the latter, but given the position we are in, with the rest of our roster, and our payroll room now and in the future, I would rather not be one of those teams. *** and before anybody quibbles with calling Darvish an "ace", he was a top 20 SP in MLB last year, is apparently fully healthy, only 31 years old, and projected to be a top 20 SP in 2018 by Steamer and ZiPS. And if your definition of "ace" is so narrow as to exclude him, the odds of the Twins developing are even more remote too.
  4. Otto von Ballpark
    The Hughes extension is working out poorly concerning Hughes specifically -- but it has barely been a speed bump for the team as a whole. We still made the postseason last year, and we still have enough payroll space to add Darvish this winter if we want and still more space next winter. (And insurance might be covering a portion of Hughes' contract too.) Keep in mind, Hughes was never a top FA. The problem with his extension was that we were so afraid of bidding on top FA that we actually tore up Hughes's remaining 2/16 contract and replaced it with 5/58 -- essentially bidding against ourselves! -- on the basis of one good (but not great) year, after a string of mediocre ones. I think the lesson from that might be, putzing around with the likes of Hughes and Nolasco and Ervin isn't necessarily any safer or better from a risk perspective than aiming high (and might be worse from a reward perspective).
  5. Otto von Ballpark
    Well, if we take the front office at their word, they have maintained interest in Darvish all winter, even with offers apparently around 5/125. That suggests they don't have too many doubts about the value of Darvish -- and they probably have enough concerns about the state of our starting pitching that we need more than just a Tillman type. Or, if we doubt their word, they have exaggerated their interest in Darvish for PR gain, but I hope not.
  6. Otto von Ballpark
    I don't think he is asking for $175 mil yet -- the report Nick linked said he wanted something "closer" to 7/175 than the reported 5 year, ~$125 mil offers so far. That could just mean 6/150 or 6/160 (which is what MLBTR predicted at the beginning of the offseason, by the way), and perhaps invoking 7/175 makes 6/150 seem more reasonable.
  7. Otto von Ballpark
    Maybe we should be scouting the California Penal League for a new pitcher too?
  8. Otto von Ballpark
    With the relatively small number of players that trickle out into the FA market each year, I think you have to time your splash more by its availability than by the clarity of your needs. (That said, I doubt our SP needs will be meaningfully reduced by next winter anyway, assuming we fail to land Darvish this winter.)
  9. Otto von Ballpark
    You're much more confident than I am that the Twins can figure out a lot about their internal SP candidates in a single season. None of their SP prospects even have any meaningful AAA experience yet. They might debut later in 2018 but I don't think we'll be confident enough in any of them to lessen our need for external reinforcements before 2019.
  10. Otto von Ballpark
    The Stanton trade was great (for them!), but they pretty much used up all their flexibility to do it.
  11. Otto von Ballpark
    That assumes Cobb and Lynn are willing to move much at this point. If Darvish gets 6 years, Cobb and Lynn probably think they could leverage that into 5 year deals for themselves. With a ton of guys still unsigned, there is not much risk for Cobb and Lynn to continue to wait too. Also, the Yankees talk around Darvish is just that, talk. Same for the Dodgers. There is no way those teams can move the Ellsbury or Kemp contracts at this point, and they need to reset the luxury tax penalties before next offseason.
  12. Otto von Ballpark
    I also realized in the other thread that Steamer projects Cobb and Lynn to about 3.8 WAR combined in 2018 (prorated to 31 starts each, or 62 total), and Darvish at 3.8 WAR per 31 starts all by himself. The latter would be significantly more valuable than the former.
  13. Otto von Ballpark
    Thanks for the clarification. I feel like you might now be under-rating the difficulty of actually landing free agents by targeting a combination of two. The Cobb plus Lynn plan has more moving parts outside the Twins control -- if you only manage to land one but not the other, you will be suboptimally using your resources anyway. Imagine a fantasy draft, and you have 50 dollars to spend, you might think you are being smart by passing on the 40 dollar guy and planning to draft two 20 dollar guys instead, but if someone else swoops in and drafts the 2nd guy before you can, you may wind up with $20 that you are unable to allocate on anything useful.
  14. Otto von Ballpark
    Worth noting that Correia and Pelfrey met the expectations of their modest contracts -- the problem was the front office was aiming too low. Failing to make even a competitive offer for Darvish would seem to increase the likelihood of that problem reoccurring (with greater negative effects now given the rest of our roster).
  15. Otto von Ballpark
    Given we are talking about a potential contract about half the length and value of Pujols' deal, and we don't have an equivalent of 2009 Mauer to extend to avoid impending FA, I am not sure if this statement is particularly relevant. The options are: sign Darvish, sign an arguably lesser FA pitcher for less (but still probably $60-70 mil), trade a lot of talent for a SP (Lewis+ for Archer?), or do nothing. Those are your options. You can't just hide behind the fantasy of finding another player or contract that doesn't exist. There is a very real chance that Darvish is your best chance at a net improvement for the Twins in the near future, even at 5/125 or whatever. You may not like Darvish, or free agency, or the economic structure of baseball in general, but that doesn't change that basic fact.
  16. Otto von Ballpark
    So... should we give back Ervin Santana?
  17. Otto von Ballpark
    The first blog post you link is pretty vague, but I notice it doesn't cover pitchers at all, only position players. And using averages across a group of players seems like a terrible methodology for this -- if 10 free agents sign, and 9 of them perform exactly as expected and 1 crashes like Chone Figgins, guess what? The average of the whole group of 10 will show a decline. Does that mean all free agent contracts are bad? And ultimately, how does the fact that Chone Figgins flopped on a free agent deal 10 years ago really affect the Twins pursuit of Yu Darvish today? The second article you reference was judging those signings on the first 4 months. Justin Upton and Zack Greinke were both judged as flops at that time, and both were ~6 WAR all stars the next year. I don't think the author of that article would at all endorse your interpretation of it (which seems to be, never sign free agents, ever).
  18. Otto von Ballpark
    I think you are over-rating how easy it is to project 3 years from now. There isn't much confidence in projections 3 years out, so I wouldn't strategize too much around them. If you have a good team today, and a need, and resources available, you should probably just address that need. For that matter, you can't project that the FA options will be better in 3 years than Darvish today, or even equally willing to sign with us. Also keep in mind while peak age was found to be roughly 27, that was in the aggregate over thousands of players. Over the Twins cohort of 5-6 players, that may not be true. For all we know, Rosario already hit his peak in 2017, Kepler may never achieve a meaningfully higher peak, Sano's peak could continue to be plagued by injuries, etc. Why weaken your team while you still have Dozier, Santana, etc. for a future that may never come?
  19. Otto von Ballpark
    I was actually referring to month to month performance variation as well. I don't see anything in Vargas's 2017 monthly splits to suggest he was more "inconsistent" than, say, Grossman or Napoli by the same criteria. Check out their monthly tOPS+ numbers at B-Ref (monthly OPS relative to seasob OPS) -- the 3 worst months for each: Vargas: 50, 86, 87 Grossman: 47, 84, 89 Napoli: 44, 83, 91 Heck, Mauer had 37, 86, 91. Players aren't robots, their performance is variable, so it struck me as an odd criticism to pin on Vargas alone in this article.
  20. Otto von Ballpark
    I assure you, I am "settled down", the strong language came from the poster I was quoting. The current rule is 12 seconds between pitches, with no one on base. Here's a study of similar games from 1984 and 2014: https://www.sbnation.com/a/mlb-2017-season-preview/game-length Its conclusion: An extra 10 seconds between every pitch really adds up.
  21. Otto von Ballpark
    I am not so sure. Cain just got 5/80. Sounds like JD Martinez has a 5/125 offer from Boston, but he doesn't want to DH. Hosmer has a 7 year offer of probably at least $120 mil from San Diego. And Darvish has a 5 year offer from someone too, if not the Twins. Seems like the players aren't getting the variety of 5-7 year offers they wanted (perhaps because the Yankees, Dodgers, and others are sitting out for luxury tax purposes), and they are still holding out for their preferred teams/situations, but they are still getting 5-7 year offers at comparable dollars as before.
  22. Otto von Ballpark
    How so? Unless you mean he hasn't gotten consistent playing time, with which I'd agree. Otherwise, the variations in his performance seem consistent with his established talent level and comparable to the variations of other players, including the others you mention in this article (Grossman, Napoli, etc.).
  23. Otto von Ballpark
    Actually, there are pitch times specified in the rule book that player and umpire routines conformed to for all of Major League baseball history up until very recently (last 20 years?).I am not sure why some people consider the last 20 years of MLB to be more "real baseball" than the previous ~125 of MLB, or all ~145 of all other levels of baseball (which is simply what the pitch clock would train modern MLB player and umpire routines to follow). Another way to put the above: "There's no 40 second break between pitches in baseball. No 40 second break. I don't give a @$% what they've done in MLB since 2000. There's No. Effing. 40. Second. Break."
  24. Otto von Ballpark
    I suspect Cobb and Lynn aren't moving much in negotiations either.
  25. Otto von Ballpark
    I think you answered your own question when you brought up Steamer projections. Nobody expects Cain to post the same WAR rates from ages 32-36 as he did from 29-31. His Steamer projection for 2018 is 2.9 WAR, and a rule of thumb is to subtract a half a win per year for aging. That's 9.5 WAR over the life of the deal, or $8.4 mil per win. Now, I suspect the Brewers expect a bit better of him that that, but a realistic median projection might fall in the $7 mil per win range over the life of the deal, especially when you factor in health (he's likely to miss more time as he ages). A guy like Cozart muddies the water further because so much of his WAR has been in one outlier season, it adds a lot of uncertainty to his projection. He's only once reached that 2.97 WAR figure in his entire career, can you really expect him to average that over the next 3 (ages 32-34)? I too am not sure about the $10 mil per win estimate (maybe around relievers? the post was from almost a month ago), but it seems like $7 mil is still going strong.
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