Otto von Ballpark

Too bad TBD is scheduled to throw for the Yankees that day. Could be Taillon or King, and Deivi Garcia would be eligible to be recalled by then too.

That might be Nick's wishful thinking. No Twins SP have been announced beyond the Yankees series. After their public comments about Shoemaker, and their caution with both Ober and Pineda this past weekend, I would be surprised if they didn't start Shoemaker on Friday.

That's fair. Per Baseball Trade Values, Buxton (37.5) would be close to Brujan (41.1) straight up, although any valuation/projection for Buxton is going to have a crazy-ton of variance. Berrios is at 29.7.

Brujan isn't even remotely possible as a target. He's the #22 prospect in MLB, per Fangraphs. Baseball Trade Values isn't gospel, but it pegs his median trade value at +41, compared to -18 (that's negative 18) for Sano. I don't think there's anything that Sano could do in less than 2 months to make up that gap, even if the Twins ate the full salary. Mancini from BAL would be a better target. Trade value +20, Tampa could probably get him without giving up Brujan too. (They could also just buy a 1B glove for Brujan, he has played just about everywhere else so far at AAA.)

Tampa's biggest weakness right now is not at DH or in the outfield (again, depending on how one views Kiermaier's CF defense relative to the other OF). LHB 1B Ji-Man Choi is on the IL again, with an uncertain timeline for returning. RHB Yandy Diaz isn't bad, but his OBP-and-little-else batting line may not be a good everyday option there. And they already traded Tsutsugo. Tampa's top prospects are SS Franco and INF/OF Brujan, which can help just about everywhere except 1B. Unless Cruz starts hitting like 2019-2020 again, I'd guess that Tampa would be better off getting a bat that can play 1B rather than an exclusive DH. Trey Mancini could be an excellent target, with a cheaper 2021 salary and 2022 control too. If KC decides to sell, Santana could be a target. Looks like SF may actually stick in the race, otherwise Belt would be in play. Cheaper targets would be Aguilar from MIA, etc.

I know there can be a "DH penalty" where players hit worse in that spot than when playing the field, but DH-only batting splits aren't particularly useful, especially in such small samples. I'm not sure how this makes sense. Cruz only enhances the Tampa lineup if Meadows replaces a weak outfielder. And depending on how one views Kiermaier's CF defense relative to their other 3 outfielders, I'm not sure this would net much benefit for them.

Maeda is still on the shelf and could have a setback in rehab, and Pineda's health is a bit uncertain at the moment too. Neither Jax or Barnes is even a top-30 org prospect. The only reason even one of them was added to the 40-man is because our bullpen needs help right now. For all of his struggles, Shoemaker still has a better rest-of-season ZiPS ERA/FIP than either Jax or Barnes. I understand that we don't have any confidence in Shoemaker. But I think the DFA threshold should be higher than just that -- you have to consider your whole roster and alternatives. And at the moment, I think it's defensible for the Twins to try holding on to Shoemaker just a little bit longer, until a few other roster situations are resolved.

7-6, actually! We started 12 games under .500 and finished 11 games under .500.

How do you like Stathead? I think it might be fun sometimes but the price seems kind of steep to me.

In fairness to Gladden, they are still broadcasting road games remotely, and given the limitations of their monitor feeds, there is understandably some doubt involved when they try to call "no doubters"

At 43 mph, though, batters will have time to not only recognize the offspeed pitch, but also to consult their hitting coach about it before returning to the plate to swing. It may still be effective in situations where it’s considered unsportsmanlike for the batting team to be successful.

And I just realized the team has had artificially constrained revenue the past year-plus, so they may not be so keen on a self-inflicted revenue reduction for the rest of 2021. Then again, the team is playing so poorly right now, that punitive fan revenue drop may happen whether they start selling players or not?

Arguably, the revenue stream impacts would be lessened in 2021? Fans should come out in decent numbers as allowed capacities increase, even with an "indecent" team? Obviously, some moves would affect 2022 as well (Donaldson, Buxton, Berrios), but rental deals could be on the table right now.

There's a blast from the past! Shoemaker is very close to Bergman territory, in more ways than one. Their ERA+ figures are exactly the same now (54), and Bergman's last start was on June 14, 2000, in team game #66. Shoemaker's start last night was team game #57. Of course, the 2000 Twins were never remotely expected to contend, much less get back in the race. Despite his disastrous overall Twins tenure, Bergman will always hold a special place in my heart, for beating the Yankees in New York, pre-curse.

Baseball Reference has inherited runners/scored, on the detailed pitching stats page (reliever pitching table). https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/MIN/2021-pitching.shtml#players_reliever_pitching::16 Name GR IR IS IS% ▼ Runr Empt Derek Law 5 6 6 100% 3 2 Shaun Anderson 4 2 2 100% 1 3 Alex Colome 22 1 1 100% 3 19 Tyler Duffey 22 11 9 82% 7 15 Caleb Thielbar (10-day IL)* 20 13 10 77% 7 13 Cody Stashak (40-man) 15 9 6 67% 6 9 Taylor Rogers* 20 9 5 56% 5 15 League Average 36% Jorge Alcala 22 10 3 30% 7 15 Hansel Robles 25 4 1 25% 5 20 Devin Smeltzer (10-day IL)* 1 2 0 0% 1 0 Willians Astudillo 3 0 0 0 3 Randy Dobnak 7 0 0 1 6 Luke Farrell 7 0 0 0 7 Juan Minaya 4 0 0 0 4 Lewis Thorpe (40-man)* 1 0 0 0 1 Brandon Waddell* 4 0 0 1 3 TOTAL 67 43 64% "GR" is just games in relief, while "Runr" is the number of games entered with runners on, and "Empt" is entered with bases empty. 38 of these inherited runners were put on base by the starting pitcher, and 24 of those have scored. The other 29 inherited runners, and 19 scores, were originally put on by other relievers.

Quoting myself, I missed the part about the Twins including $15 mil cash. That would satisfy Baseball Trade Values but obviously makes the deal even worse for the Twins.

According to Baseball Trade Values, the Brewers would reject this trade. Hard to believe Donaldson's salary would drag him down that much, given that ZiPS still forecasts 2.4 WAR over the rest of the season (for a 2021 total of 3.7 fWAR). Another 3 WAR in 2022 would make it 5.4 WAR for the Brewers at $42.7 mil, or $7.9 mil per win. Compared to Bradley's rest of season forecast of 0.8 WAR, for a 2021 total of 0.4 fWAR, that doesn't seem too shabby.

I thought Mark DeRosa trade proposals were banned at Twins Daily.

I wasn't making any equivalency, I just shared one specific example. There are obviously different degrees of errors, and the most benign errors may not be any worse than simply failing to record the out. (FYI, I edited my post above to show the error breakdown of UZR at Fangraphs, if you are interested.) Errors are judged by the official scorer, which is an entirely different system than DRS/UZR/Statcast judging probability of outs. Not sure anything is wrong with that, but they tell us different things and they may not always line up. If the superhero fielder drops everything, obviously he's worthless. But what about a superhero fielder who only drops a few more than the average player? Then the superhero may have, say, 5 more errors by the official scorer, but you wouldn't replace him based on that if he was responsible for a net reduction in baserunners/advancement compared to the average fielder. In reality, with non-superhero players, these seem like marginal concerns compared to offensive outcomes. But when 90% of plays are routine like you say, the marginal concerns around the remaining 10% are magnified. And it takes a lot longer to amass a meaningful sample from those 10% of plays too.

DRS and UZR are both defensive metrics that include errors. OAA is just one that doesn't. They tell us different things, just like AVG and SLG, etc. Fangraphs even breaks UZR down into component parts Range Runs ("RngR") and Error Runs ("ErrR" -- that's a lot of R's!) and Double Play Runs (DPR) (plus ARM for outfielders). Indeed, Simmons is doing much worse in ErrR than RngR so far this season, although it's still a pretty small/unreliable sample: https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=ss&stats=fld&lg=all&qual=220&type=1&season=2021&month=0&season1=2021&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&startdate=2021-01-01&enddate=2021-12-31&sort=25,d Also, not all errors are equal. If a player makes an 1-base error on a ball that only 10% of his peers can normally convert into an out anyway, then it's not remotely close in impact to either of Celestino's errors last night, for example.

Oh man, I hadn't even thought about this yet. Unless some guys get healthy quick, we might be one of those teams with a token all-star selection again, huh?

Yankees gave up 3 decent prospects to Oakland to get Gray in 2017 -- all 3 were ranked in top 100 overall lists either before or after the 2017 season. Two have moved on to other orgs already but Kaprielian is in Oakland's rotation now. Yankees got some value back in the Gray trade to Cincinnati too -- primarily the #38 overall pick in the 2019 draft.

That's what defensive metrics already do. Notice that the metric here is "Outs Above Average" -- the average is the ~90% of plays converted into outs.

Yes, that sounds about right. The higher K% reduces the benefit of a higher BABIP. And on the other splits, the high K% and low BABIP are kind of a double-whammy.

Sano's trade value is indeed negative at the moment. I was commenting on the willingness of other teams (and not just contending teams) to pick him up if the Twins were to release him. Although I could see some club giving us a marginal prospect if we'd eat cash in trade too, just to jump the line.