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Otto von Ballpark

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Everything posted by Otto von Ballpark

  1. Otto von Ballpark
    See my thread on this subject in the "Other Baseball" forum: http://twinsdaily.com/topic/21810-fox-sports-go-wtf/ Mods, feel free to merge, and Mike, feel free to ask anything more specific in that thread.
  2. Otto von Ballpark
    Wouldn't they just move the game to the Tuesday off day then?
  3. Otto von Ballpark
    John Bonnes, this article is fully credited to you on the forum view -- I didn't realize Matt wrote it until he started commenting! I think Brock has said there is a way to change forum authorship when you create a new article...
  4. Otto von Ballpark
    Not true. He signed a major league deal with Boston for $1.25 million. His next deal with Boston was for 1 year, $4.6 mil the following winter. He didn't get his first multiyear deal until partway through 2004, signing for 2/12.5 covering 2005-2006. http://www.baseballprospectus.com/card/card.php?id=1499 Also, while his playing time didn't pick up until he heated up that summer, he was hardly a strict bench player at the outset, starting 4 of Boston's first 6 games that season, for example. I find it odd that people keep trying to dismiss Ortiz's gripes by trotting out falsehoods about career. And you wonder why he might still feel disrespected...
  5. Otto von Ballpark
    I obviously wasn't trying to completely disprove it with a one-to-one comparison. I just picked the Thome comparison at random as an illustration to cast some doubt on the theory. Frankly I think the burden of proof lies with Seth and others who constantly trot out this assertion that Ortiz's success took special advantage of the ability to go the other way that the Twins tried to teach him. Have you seen any evidence to support that? We can toss my little Thome exercise out the window if you like, but that doesn't mean there is any more evidence to the support it. Without evidence, it just sounds like creating our own sour grapes to combat the perceived sour grapes from Ortiz on the subject.
  6. Otto von Ballpark
    If the player has major surgery, generally the service time issue is the least of team's concerns later. It certainly didn't matter for Kubel, Liriano, etc.
  7. Otto von Ballpark
    What about the other examples that I provided? Or even the example of a last place team that won 78 games last year, a fair and popular proposition for this year's central division? That was *my* point, not that the 2014 White Sox single-handedly refuted your point. The Twins could get some of that White Sox star power in Sano and a rookie, and best those 2014 Sox by 5-7 wins in depth, and still finish near last in a tough division. Again, no it doesn't, not really. In most years, "predicting" RoY is actually more about predicting opportunity first and foremost. No AL rookies probably project to get more or better chances to perform in 2016 than Park and Buxton. At season's end, Park or Buxton will probably still be the favorite for the award with rather pedestrian numbers even if someone like Berrios comes up for a couple lights out months later in the year (and even that doesn't seem too likely, most of BA's top "ETA 2016" prospects are in the NL). THAT is why Park and Buxton are popular picks right now for RoY, even among analysts who predict the Twins to finish last. Not that these predictions are science, but that is certainly a more plausible explanation than accusing all of these analysts of not realizing how individual performances contribute to team performance.
  8. Otto von Ballpark
    Depends. Sanchez certainly has a lower floor, as demonstrated by last season, but he also probably still brings an upside that Santana and Gibson don't right now. He's not the safest pick, of course, but given that he is "healthy" at the moment and set to start next week, for projecting 2016 performance (the context of this thread), he's probably no worse than even with them.
  9. Otto von Ballpark
    I didn't mean those are the only numbers we should be interested in, or that it should trump qualitative evaluation. Only that it was more informative than his inherited runner numbers from the same sample, which was the context of my post.
  10. Otto von Ballpark
    A couple things: 1) I don't think it's as unlikely as you claim. The AL Central is expected to be very even, very competitive. A "last place" finish there was worth 74 wins last year and could be higher this year -- last place in the competitive east was Boston at 78 wins, who had a competitor for the HR lead (Ortiz) and would have had a RoY contender in Betts if he had fewer at-bats in 2014 (and if Correa and Lindor weren't in the same class). Further eyeballing 2014, but the White Sox had the RoY (who was near the HR lead too) and a real Cy Young contender and only won 73 games. The Mets had the RoY and a 30 HR season from Duda and won 79. 2) Rookie of the Year "predictions" are especially sketchy because there are usually only a handful of names you can realistically choose from. Park and Buxton are probably getting "default" nods as the notable names, not necessarily as a prediction of their 2016 performance level.
  11. Otto von Ballpark
    Thanks John and Parker, I was too young for the 1987 team so it is fun to read some context around Gladden's arrival.
  12. Otto von Ballpark
    I wonder how Gladden the announcer would describe that home run.
  13. Otto von Ballpark
    Hmmm... how much distinction is there between enough "tightness" to shut you down, and "pain"? It's a little weird from a fan's perspective too -- while most of us can understand general athletic maladies like sore legs, hamstring pulls, sprains, etc., pitchers are a weird breed. The extent to which they rely on one arm (or two, for Pat Venditte ) makes it really hard to understand what they go through physically. Their arms must feel some level of soreness all the time. What's a tolerable level of soreness, tightness, pain, etc.? When do you report it? When do you get shut down for it?
  14. Otto von Ballpark
    Raw inherited runner numbers are pretty suspect. But you can adjust each opportunity based on a run expectancy matrix. I think Baseball Prospectus used to publish this, and Fangraphs has RE24 which is sort of similar, but they might be more trouble than they are worth -- there generally exist much better indicators of reliever effectiveness. In Tonkin's case, he allowed 8 of 22 inherited runners to score last year, basically 1 more than team or league average. For his career, he's exactly at league average - 30% - the same as Kevin Jepsen's career mark. Maybe a dissection like I described above would add some separation, but it's still not going to mean a whole lot. I'm more interested in Tonkin's 5.02 FIP last season, especially considering he was working in low-leverage situations.
  15. Otto von Ballpark
    I don't know if Rochester usually has a strictly defined closer. Sometimes a guy like Tonkin, Achter, or Slama gets more saves than the rest, but not for long, and they usually get spread around pretty well. I could see Graham and Kintzler getting a few at the start, with a sprinkling of chances for the LHP, then whoever gets there first among Burdi, Reed, Chargois, etc.
  16. Otto von Ballpark
    I don't know about that. We pretty much hear about all of them that require the player to be shut down for any length of time. It's not like guys like Ervin Santana, Trevor May, etc. all get shut down with forearm tightness from time to time. It pretty much never happens unless the guy is hurt. That said, I am sure there are some cases of pitchers, particularly young pitchers, improving with rest, so I won't jump to any crazy conclusions and say he is doomed. But I think it's fair to downgrade Burdi's chances of appearing in Minnesota this season -- the team probably won't want to promote him until this is safely in his rear view mirror.
  17. Otto von Ballpark
    That's fair. That is how a lot of small colleges operate, offering free streaming of their athletic events. I don't think quite the same thing applies to pro sports, obviously, although I do think that pro teams in publicly funded arenas should have some obligation to publicly televise occasional events. And the present day Twins, who might get a couple Saturday games on FOX this year, probably fall short of that, so I'm not going to lecture anybody who might pirate the occasional game. I liked their old "one free game of the week" model -- if I was wiser, I should have lobbied for that to be included in the original stadium bill. It wouldn't make much of an impact on the team's or the cable network's bottom line, and it would be a nice little bone to throw to the local cord cutting taxpayers. Now, to the folks that pirate streams daily because they don't want to pay the modest fee for MLB.TV plus a proxy, to them I say: let your streams forever be pixelated!
  18. Otto von Ballpark
    Interesting in light of our decisions with Trevor May: http://www.ohio.com/blogs/cleveland-indians/cleveland-indians-1.282227/indians-moving-trevor-bauer-to-the-bullpen-cody-anderson-no-4-starter-josh-tomlin-no-5-1.672539 Of course, Bauer has 64 MLB starts under his belt, has never quite harnessed his control as May appeared to be doing over the first half of 2015, and the Indians have a pretty stacked rotation (although a case could definitely be made for Bauer over Cody Anderson this spring).
  19. Otto von Ballpark
    He had TJ midway through his first pro season in 2005, returning midway through 2006. I think we were still looking for some "stuff" to return to him in 2008 but it never really did. The Twins sorta tried him in relief -- he never actually started a game in MLB for us, just 13 relief appearances. Interestingly, he had a decent season for the White Sox, and then was lousy in his perfect game season. The perfect game was against a rather depleted Seattle lineup.
  20. Otto von Ballpark
    Again, it's not a worry about injuries. It's about a tough division. Any "worry about injuries" could easily mean Cabrera, Sale, Kluber, etc. NOT getting injured, as much as any Twins like Sano getting hurt.
  21. Otto von Ballpark
    Not sure where you are getting "career .687 OPS minor leaguer" -- Shaw has a career .803 OPS in the minors, was .813 last year as a MLB rookie, and .898 this spring. And they still have "all star" Brock Holt they could shift to the position too, not a star but a career 94 OPS+ (Plouffe 99).
  22. Otto von Ballpark
    The division is wide open. I don't think he is saying injuries could doom us, so much that it will be a close race and health could provide the thin margin between those teams (and not just injuries for us, but if other teams avoid injuries -- i.e. White Sox rotation, Indians rotation, Tigers big bats, etc.). Also, notably absent from your injury list is Sano. Yeah, we'd have bodies to take his spot, but probably no one to come close to his 146 OPS+ from last year (and hopefully an even better mark this year). That alone could have a "losing Mauer or Morneau in 2011" type impact. As gunnarthor noted, Reusse is pretty optimistic in this piece, I think it's wrong to characterize it with any suggestion of "doom."
  23. Otto von Ballpark
    I'm not quite sure that is so obvious. Guess we'll see.
  24. Otto von Ballpark
    Huh? Not sure where you are getting that, he doesn't seem to say that in this article at all.
  25. Otto von Ballpark
    The White Sox would probably object to this statement!
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