DSzymborski

ZiPS still gives Mauer a 40% chance at .300 - one has to remember that for very high achievers, there's more downside than upside. If you start with Mauer's .317 4-year average, knock a few points off for age, and then just stick that as the middle of neat bell curve, you're going to tend to overrate great players. There are a lot more scenarios in which a 31-year old Mauer hits .300 than ones in which he hits .340. A lot more in which he hits .280 instead of .360. And even more in which he hits .260 rather than .380. ZiPS does consider Mauer differently as a 1B than as a catcher and generally has Mauer's bat lasting longer and playing more games long-term than as a C.

I put the post together earlier this week. It wasn't meant as a dig at Terry Ryan, but as I tend to do at 3 AM, I have bizarre musings on Twitter and it developed into a fun conversation. Essentially, I suggested that it would be very entertaining if one year, a team taht knew they were going to be pretty lousy, did a whole tongue-in-cheek dictatorship theme year, in which they do stuff like simply declaring wins and announcing that people should ignore MLB's official propaganda. Some of the other baseball writers still up chimed in and we had all sorts of cool ideas what a team could do in this vein, like introducing players with fictional achievements and announce that they plan to annex the Tigers and liberate Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander from the imperialists. So I made a little poster to commemorate the occasion. The pitcher strikeouts are decadent references Bull Durham, but it also is a reference to the communist theory of decadence, which was very popular early on. Essentially, the belief was that capitalist countries had taken capitalism as far as it could go and were descending into a mire of moral decay and self-indulgence. Since the Twins haven't been the biggest pitching strikeout team, I imagined a bizarro dictator version of Terry Ryan, fuming about the obsession that other teams have nowadays with K rate thanks to FIP and the like and wanting to bring pitch to contact back to the proletariat.