Otto von Ballpark

Magill should post at Twins Daily -- no mental ability required!

Exactly. And depending on the context, there's nothing wrong with that. It's quite possible Buxton didn't need yet another hitting coach makeover this winter, and maybe "that's how it's going to stay" just means for the immediate future, i.e. this spring. Athletes aren't exactly known for choosing each one of their words carefully (not like us TD posters ). Without any further context to suggest otherwise, I'd say it's far more likely that's what he meant, rather than that he's swearing off coaching forever.

I think you mean The Athletic. https://theathletic.com/author/john-sickels/

I wouldn't read that much into it. It's not clear if a hitting coach was even offered to him early this past offseason, given the turnover and uncertainty on the Twins staff at the time. By the time Baldelli was hired and visited him, Buxton was probably quite comfortable with his own offseason program. And the context of "that's how it's going to stay" could simply be that he doesn't want to tinker with his swing *right now*, which is completely understandable. The writer of the article certainly didn't imply that Buxton was swearing an eternal blood feud with Baldelli and Rowson, so I'm not sure why we'd isolate and interpret that one line as such.

I think the only difference is "https" versus "http" at the beginning. The OP probably copied the address without that prefix, and software assumed it was "http" but that doesn't work.

Hard to judge without more context. The guy's been tinkered with by a number of hitting coaches the last few years. It's quite possible the reporter's questions alluded to that fact, or even just asked him who is responsible for his swing this spring, and Buxton proudly responded that he's working on it himself now.

Your 2/26 link didn't work for me, but this did: https://www.mlb.com/twins/news/byron-buxton-discusses-new-hitting-mentality

The Garza deal started a little better, but it seemed to end in a similar place. FWIW, Fangraphs has Garza as worth 5.4 fWAR in Milwaukee, or 1.7 fWAR per 30 starts, based on his peripherals; meanwhile, B-Ref has him at -0.9 bWAR for the same period. He really started getting knocked around on balls in play with the Brewers.

Actually, the Twins did lose Vargas the first time they sent him through waivers, to the Reds last spring. But we claimed him back on waivers a few days later, then finally passed him through unclaimed a few days after that. I see one big difference between Vargas and Austin so far: opportunity. Vargas had 859 MLB PA when we sent him through waivers, while Austin only has 404. I could see some clubs wanting to give Austin a shot, where maybe they felt they had already seen enough from Vargas. Actually, I see another difference too: power. While their overall wRC+ are the same, the shape of their production has been a bit different. Austin has shown more power the last couple years than Vargas ever really managed to sustain -- it's just that Austin K's more and walks less. Maybe someone thinks they can tweak Austin towards productivity better than they could Vargas.

Bump! This promo has been officially announced for 2019 again. Redemptions will start Tuesday, March 26, through Monday, April 1: https://www.t-mobile.com/mlb

"I'm from LA and I'm having trouble deciding which movie star I should date" Good problems to have. Please let us know before the Cards drop anybody, so the Twins can have first dibs!

Now I understand, you were largely referring to glovework / defense. The inclusion of Turner should have made that obvious to me, but I was thinking more overall value.

Just want to say, I have enjoyed this discussion and all participants! My overly long posts are not screeds of negativity. Not about Gonzalez, and certainly not about any viewpoints here. Just exploration.

No, I was just evaluating it from Hicks' perspective. From the Yankees perspective, they potentially get a very good value on a plus player in the early years of the deal, and as mentioned, they spread out the immediate luxury tax hit compared to signing someone like, say, Michael Brantley for 2/32.

Worth remembering that a median projection is really just an average of weighted scenarios. We can all come up with scenarios where Gonzalez helps more than +1 win -- like your 0 WAR or negative WAR replacement scenarios -- but we can also easily come up with scenarios where he helps less than +1 win. Even scenarios where Gonzalez proves to be an absolutely useful, valuable contributor, he's not necessarily improving our overall projection. As an example, note that the median projection has Sano and Buxton worth ~2.3 WAR at their respective positions for 2019. After 2018, it's not hard to imagine a scenario where one of those guys contributes 0, either by performance or health, and Gonzalez spending most of his PAs directly or indirectly covering those spots. That scenario -- which sounds like an absolutely useful, valuable deployment of Gonzalez -- still doesn't represents a net increase from our pre-Gonzalez median projection, because Gonzalez himself only projects to 1.5 WAR: 82 wins pre-Gonzalez projection minus 2.3 WAR from Buxton or Sano plus 1.5 WAR from Gonzales equals 81.2 wins The scenario would actually need at least +1.8 WAR of good luck (Kepler breaking out, etc.) to get to where Fangraphs is right now, at +1 win post-Gonzalez (83 wins). And that would be fair, to project at least 1.8 WAR good luck to balance out -2.3 of bad luck. Rounding might be a factor here too -- you could easily refer to Fangraphs +1 win as +1.5 wins, perhaps even as high as +1.9, without changing my point, or constituting a blind spot in the projections -- but hopefully you can see how hard it is to move the needle significantly with these weighted scenarios, without assuming more than neutral luck. Ultimately, it's worth remembering that Gonzalez doesn't bring us more than neutral luck -- which could represent many wins; rather, he just shifts our neutral luck point upward, which appears more modest (but can still be useful and valuable, and again, doesn't necessarily indicate a blind spot in the projections). (And note I'm not claiming any precision to measurable WAR or accuracy in these particular projections, just using these figures for illustration purposes of actual value.)

What examples would you cite for this? Seems to me that most such instances are where we're committed to playing a guy for other reasons (i.e. Morrison), not where we're simply cycling through replacement options seeking a 0-1 WAR band-aid. I agree there's no extreme precision to WAR measurement -- although that cuts both ways, positive and negative. And an extreme SSS limits the extent of the potential damage in actual WAR. Note that when I say 0 measurable WAR, I'm really thinking of a range from -0.5 to +0.5 actual WAR, at least (maybe more for defense). In any case, Gonzalez doesn't move the needle much differently between those values -- either in small sample, because Gonzalez isn't generating much actual WAR himself in a small sample, and over a larger sample because -0.5 actual WAR is obvious enough over a small sample that it isn't allowed to increase over a larger sample! The Twins could be desperate enough sign a guy off the street again like Steve Holm, and I'm pretty confident he won't be worth more than -0.5 actual WAR before we've seen enough to move on from him to the next option. And for the 95% of the time when MLB teams aren't that desperate, when they're choosing between guys who aren't simply signed off the street -- Adrianza, Torreyes, even Palka or Petit or LaMarre -- I'm very confident they won't be worse than -0.5 actual WAR, and most will probably be 0 or better.

Absolutely true. But there's enough of them out there, and they are fungible enough, that collectively they shouldn't be much worse than 0 WAR. Adrianza, Torreyes, Astudillo -- these guys were very recently freely available, and while perhaps not starters, they seem comfortably above 0 WAR to many of us now. Johnny Field, Ryan LaMarre, Gregorio Petit. Palka too. Cave and Austin didn't cost much, if you want to extend the spectrum above "zero cost" a bit. Virtually every team stocks enough of these guys in the high minors every year, or has the resources to regularly grab them from someone else's bench or high minors, that their collective performance shouldn't be much worse than 0 WAR. Heck, I've picked on the 2011 Twins for being unprepared and grabbing catchers off the street when Mauer went down -- but even those catchers off the street weren't necessarily that bad. Steve Holm was -0.2 bWAR in just 18 PA, then Rene Rivera was -0.1 bWAR in 114 PA. The big mistake was trusting Drew Butera so much (-1.6 bWAR in 254 PA). True, but not many teams unexpectedly wind up giving a ton of at bats to guys who are replacement level, at least not where signing a guy like Gonzalez before the season would be the only better option.

First of all, I don't know if you were implying this here, but the median projection isn't assuming no "bad luck", particularly at the team level. It's really assuming neutral luck -- part of which will be the inevitable bad luck as you note, but part of which should be offset by some similarly inevitable good luck too. Projections aren't dismissing the effects of bad luck, or under-rating them, but rather saying the net effects of luck -- good and bad -- are a bit unpredictable, and it's worth isolating that net effect to better estimate other factors of player and team performance. You and I and others are correct in noting that Gonzalez, as a versatile, competent replacement helps mitigate the effects of bad luck. Others have noted that Gonzalez gives us a slightly better chance at another 4 WAR player too on the good luck side. Both of these factors effectively increase our neutral luck, like the projection shows with +1 win. But as I understand, you were skeptical of whether the projection reflects the benefit enough. I think it does, and hopefully I can explain better below. This is all true to some extent, but it's important to keep in mind that Gonzales is only a projected 1.5-2 WAR player himself. It appears to be a fairly solid 1.5-2 WAR, but there's a limit to how much you can expect to gain with him. Even in an extreme scenario, if Gonzalez spent every single one of his ~500 PA replacing a 0 WAR performance -- Gonzalez is still only contributing 1.5-2 WAR. And we shouldn't expect that to simply add +1.5-2 wins on top of our median, neutral luck projection, because we don't expect to have 500 PA of 0 WAR performance in neutral luck. And in order for us to get to a situation where we actually might need 0 WAR replacement level players for 500+ PA in a season if we didn't have Gonzalez, we're likely losing some PAs from players with higher projected WAR totals than Gonzalez too, like Polanco (2.5 WAR), Rosario (2.7 WAR), and Kepler (2.7). The downgrade from them to Gonzalez is going to offset some of the gains that Gonzalez provides over other replacement options, and limit how much Gonzalez can improve the median neutral luck projection. And obviously, if the example is less extreme, and Gonzalez only spends half of his PAs replacing 0 WAR performance, that cuts this benefit in half too. And while replacement level is not necessarily a super-predictable, exact science, the odds that Gonzalez would be displacing net 0 WAR performance over 500 PA is fairly low, given our roster, and the odds of him displacing notably net negative WAR performance over 500 PA is extremely low. That's not to say there wouldn't be a negative WAR guy in the mix if we had to turn to those replacements -- there probably would be -- but we'd be unlikely to *net* worse than, say, -1 WAR performance overall, among all of the replacements, in a reasonable worst case over those 500 PA. Looking at Fangraphs, Adrianza has played in parts of 6 MLB seasons now, and has never posted a negative WAR -- he's actually +1.1 WAR per 500 PA. Torreyes has 4 MLB seasons, again never posting a negative WAR, and he's +1.4 WAR per 500 PA. It's certainly possible they don't reach those levels in small samples in 2019, and especially over extended action -- but they're probably not posting significantly negative WAR either. They don't have the equity to accumulate much more than -0.3 WAR or so before they get replaced themselves. The same is true for our other replacement options (Cave, Austin, Granite, Reed, even Duda, heaven forbid!), and even a few our starters like Cron and Schoop. And simple odds tell us that it's highly unlikely we'd get enough of these -0.3 WAR performances in a row, without the occasional 0 or even +0.3 WAR, to wind up cumulatively worse than -1 WAR among this group. That's not to say it's impossible, I could flip a coin 10 times in a row and get heads each time too, but the odds of that series of events are low enough that we can't really assign much value to Gonzalez now for potentially mitigating such an unlikely occurrence. Considering all this, it certainly seems to me like a median projection of +1 win, from adding the projected 1.5-2 WAR Gonzalez to this roster, is accurately capturing his median projected value as a versatile replacement. That's not to say that Gonzalez can't help more than that -- we can all come up with scenarios demonstrating otherwise -- just that the Twins can't really count on it being much more than +1 win right now, even allowing for the inevitability of injuries etc. I hope that's clear? Let me know if something doesn't ring true to you. It was an interesting question, and it's been fun for me to ponder.

Hicks, I think. Obviously the highest "Twin" since then was the Twins originally signing Ervin at $55 mil. The highest ex-Twin deal prior to Hicks (since the Mauer extension, anyway) was Hardy at $40 mil. Liriano close behind at $39 mil.

Yes, Hicks was still bad in 2016 -- but that was in part influenced by how the Twins failed to develop him from 2013-2015 (which is a source of frustration on top of the trade itself). Another MLB club had Hicks positioned as a valuable MLB contributor in just over a year's time after he left the Twins. And regardless of his later performance, at the time of the trade he ostensibly had some value (as a cheap CF coming off a decent performance in 2015) and we completely whiffed on getting *any* value out of the player we accepted in return. The whole thing contributed, at least in part, towards the firing of our GM and coaches. Obviously we shouldn't hold it against the current front office or coaches, but we shouldn't soften our view of it all either, or forget the lessons learned. (Gomez is a little more complicated -- Hardy for two-plus seasons would have been a solid return, although we bungled Hardy as an asset after just one season too.)

-- limit.

Or a five word post --

FWIW, the Padres front office pulled a stunt a few years ago where they intentionally withheld medical information on players, most notably in the Drew Pomeranz deal with Boston. The GM was punished by MLB but is still in place. I'd guess that influences some of the anti-SD sentiment here.

I don't know. 6/64 seems perfectly fine for his age 30-35 seasons, given his short resume so far. And he banked that 1 year early -- if Hicks got hurt or struggled this year, he might have found himself looking at some pretty unimpressive 1-year offers for the rest of his career.

Tatis Jr. is obviously speculative as a prospect -- but I'm not sure Hosmer contributes much positively to that "wowza". A better hypothetical would probably substitute Myers for Hosmer at 1B, and use the extra money to sign a pitcher.