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MeleMouth

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Everything posted by MeleMouth

  1. MeleMouth
    Itemizing companies that spend lavishly to improve the customer experience - besides the ones you listed, I can think of several others - does not negate the central point: MOST (I did not say "MANY," as you rewrote the statement, although that is true, also) companies seek to spend the least amount necessary to maximize profits. Interestingly, you conclude your paragraph with examples of companies whose business model and even branding is exactly that: spend the least possible. A corollary is that most companies pay their employees the least necessary to get their best work. If you want to say that most companies spend more than the least necessary to maximize their profits, or that most companies pay their employees more than they need to, you are being oppositional for the sake of being oppositional in defiance of basic economics.
  2. MeleMouth
    For several years, the strategy has been to squeak into the playoffs by taking advantage of playing in the weakest division in baseball and then hope for the best. This is actually relatively sane behavior, because most businesses try to pay the least possible to develop the products they need to make get results in their market. This is basically what the Twins do, because they have a monopoly in their market. The problem, of course, is that many market monopolists in MLB have more resources and many other monopolists with resources similar to the Twins compete in more difficult divisions so competition forces them to be smarter in managing their resources in order to maximize their revenue. Then, once the playoffs come around, the Twins monopoly loses to these wealthier or smarter monopolies.
  3. MeleMouth
    It's short-term thinking, like a poker player who has a strategy for the immediate hand but doesn't really think about playing this hand in consideration of later hands. They'll have a multi-year macro strategy strategy one year, but it runs into some bumps or short-term facts change, so they then pivot to reverse the previous strategy and implement a new one. Of course, OTOH, for many years in the Falvey era, they did seem to follow certain micro strategies long after they were proven not to work, like giving Joey Gallo chance after chance and pinch hitting Manny Margot enough to set a record for futility. Thankfully, after several years of trying, they learned not to treat closers like fungible parts you could get off the scrap heap (Belisle, Robles, Parker, Colome, Pagan).
  4. MeleMouth
    Buxton should have surgery now instead of risking his hip getting worse. They should also end the magical thinking that he will play better with an injury if he just rests it a little while. It's never worked for him in the past and this injury could be worse. You just can't play baseball well with his hip injury.
  5. MeleMouth
    Agree completely. Would add that they are compounding their mistakes last year into this year, like they compounded their mistakes in 2023 into 2024, and their mistakes of 2024 into 2025.
  6. MeleMouth
    The idea that a CEO isn't involved in deciding who plays and has delegated it entirely to his hired management is based on (1) generalizing among all CEO's and owners, based on an assumption, but not knowledge, of how the world works; (2) having never heard of Jerry Jones and Hal Steinbrenner, among other sports team owners; and (3) ignoring TP's comments about involvement with the team. To elaborate on #1, imagine that the Twins are a widget business and Buxton accounts for 15% of the company's sales or value. Assume further for the sake of this example the Buxton product had a major defect, for which the choices are to pull the product off the market to fix it for the future, risking a portion of current sales, or to leave it on the market, with a good but not certain chance that the defect could get worse, requiring additional time off the market. The CEOs of most, but not all, companies will be very heavily informed and probably involved in the key decisions about whether or not to take that product off the market for a while. Now, some CEOs actually do care more about their golf times and don't want to be responsible for major product decisions, but most CEOs, particularly most good CEOs, do. It is actually highly unlikely Byron Buxton suffered a major injury and Tom Pohlad just said to Zoll, "hey, you run the team and do whatever you think is best." It is also highly unlikely that a GM like Zoll on a short-term contract who wants to keep his job is not doing his best to ensure that his decision aligns with what the CEO wants, and "doing his best" means "having multiple conversations with the CEO that are as direct as possible."
  7. MeleMouth
    Buxton had an excellent game at the plate last night, but he is still at .194 with .250 slugging for August after a similar July. Now, he often seems to start slow after returning from injury, so maybe this was the start of his return. But you can't ignore that he did it against pitchers who ended the night with 6.08, 9.00, 10.66, and 6.35 ERAs, and that Springs, the starter, has some of the lowest velocity in the league. To me, Buxton still looks like he's dealing with a serious injury that will make it very hard for him to maintain even league-average performance over an extended period, particularly against better pitching.
  8. MeleMouth
    Fair enough opinion, although I'm not sure why you persist in wanting to make comments personal. We all hope that Lewis will continue hitting well. My points have always been that projecting his early August streak forward is a mistake.
  9. MeleMouth
    I would like to know more about him. Some of his stats suggest he is selling out for power and getting lucky in AA, but does he have the skill to make his swing succeed at higher levels?
  10. MeleMouth
    Quentin Young is still on the list? A year from now, he's more likely to be DFA'd than to be promoted to AA. He has a 57% contact rate in low A and, after many experiments, the Twins haven't demonstrated the ability to improve a player's strike zone control. Plus so many errors! I guess the top value he brings is that with him in the field low A pitchers get more opportunities to work on their skills in game conditions.
  11. MeleMouth
    Fun exercise. You may have too many on the 40-man. Do you want to wish happy trails to anyone else? Without going too deep into your proposal, one I would call out is Wallner: unless a player is a total masher or still developing, the Twins need to be done with poor defenders with bad contact rates. There is no future in Wallner and the present is pretty poor, also.
  12. MeleMouth
    Two more comparisons for Royce Lewis. Tl;dr: as a hitter, he's less like Joey Votto and more like a lesser version of Junior Caminero. In 2012, Joey Votto had a .404 BABIP and 30.2% LD rate in a 5.3 WAR season. He also had only 14 HRs to go along with 44 2Bs, for a good 58 XBHs (although only 56 RBIs, if that's your bag). He again exceeded a 30% LD rate in 2018, at 31.4%, but with just a .333 BABIP, during a 3.1 WAR season, perhaps because he lost a lot of power, with only 12 HRs and 42 XBHs total (and again with only 67 RBIs). Votto was totally geared for line drives, but he didn't hit the ball hard, usually having hard hit rate in the 30-39.9% range. Votto was also one of the greatest hitters of the decade and he used all three fields, whereas Royce Lewis is an extreme pull hitter and swings much more like Junior Caminero, but with lower levels of bat speed, hard contact, and squared up contact. Caminero typically is around 15% for LD% and sub-.300 for BABIP. Lewis will probably settle in as a pretty good hitter, but not great, and to expect him to have Votto's career-high BABIP and LD% while also maintaining anything like Caminero's power, while swinging more like Caminero, is extremely unlikely to occur.
  13. MeleMouth
    It would also have been consistent with some kind of long range plan. "We've got a logjam of left-handed platoon outfielders and some great left-handed outfield prospects coming up, this isn't really our year, Larnach's going to be a short-timer so let's trade him while he is at his peak in value" is a much more coherent long-term plan than "we have a chance to back into the playoffs right now and Larnach is at his peak, so let's keep riding his bat as long as he can and then just non-tender him if we need to this winter, even though we can probably replace right now most of what he brings to the table."
  14. MeleMouth
    You can have the best locker room atmosphere possible, but it may not matter much if a player is stuck in his own head for whatever reason - injury, family issue, on-field struggles, or learning that the team tried to trade him.
  15. MeleMouth
    His line drive rate in August is 26.8%, the highest of his career. That stat just reinforces the idea that he is on a hot streak that is unlikely to continue. It's an outlier from history - not just Royce's, but every major league hitter's. Only three hitters in the last 6 years were around a 29% LD rate: 2023 Arraez, 2021 Adam Frazier, and 2020 Freeman. It's rare. Rod Carew had a .400 BABIP only twice in his career, and once was in an injury-shortened year. Here are hitters who never had a .400 BABIP: Tony Gwynn, Wade Boggs, Willie Mays, Aaron Judge, Ted Williams, Barry Bonds, Luis Arraez, Rickey Henderson, George Brett, Willie Wilson, Paul Molitor, Freddie Freeman, Jose Ramirez, and Mookie Betts. Lewis is nowhere near the quality of hitter that these players are or were. As I write, his August BABIP has already come down to .375; you can't project that he'll keep a .400 BABIP when he already hasn't. Lewis also has one of the highest launch angles in the league, meaning that he is generally a flyball hitter, such as when he hit five home runs in June with an 18.2% LD rate. If you think a 29% LD rate and .400 BABIP is "not that lucky" or that Lewis has something that will enable him to maintain rates that no notable hitter ever did, we'll just have to agree that we look differently at history and Royce's place within it. You may consider the last few games as a rough patch, but I look at it as normal regression and perhaps as the league realizing that they needed to pitch to him differently. Lewis was just below replacement level in July and had a hot streak in the first half of August. It would be a mistake to consider his hot streak a permanent, projectable level for Royce.
  16. MeleMouth
    "What happens to a hitter when they lose their conviction? What becomes of the extreme beats when they're tamed by their own self-doubt? You've heard that answer a hundred times, over the years: guys get caught 'in-between'." Being caught 'in-between' summarizes strategic planning for the entire team in a nutshell. "We're doing a fire sale! We're keeping our veterans! We're rebuilding and competing - at the same time! We're going big in free agency! We have to get rid of the expensive, disappointing free agents we signed! We're developing pitching! We're trading for pitching! We don't want to sign pitchers to expensive long-term contracts! This pitcher is a good member of the team, so we're going to sign him to an expensive long-term contract! We're collecting assets for the future! We're selling future assets for today! We were building for the future two weeks ago, but we're pivoting because it's a down year and mediocre teams have a 25% chance of backing into the playoffs!" None of these strategies by themselves are wrong, but if you mix too many strategies, particularly close in time, and also if you poorly execute several of them, you end up repeating 75-85 forever, with occasional bottomings and short periods of contention in the weakest division in baseball.
  17. MeleMouth
    I was curious so looked it up. Larnach had three games with 2 HRs in his MiLB career.
  18. MeleMouth
    Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
  19. MeleMouth
    Thinking about this distribution of players: Toronto: Varland, Dasan Hill, Klein Minnesota: Hoffman (with much bigger contract), Roden, Rojas The Twins sold low on Varland and bought high on Hoffman. Anything you can say about Rojas you can also say about Hill, except that he is about two years behind. In that time, Varland is probably going to lap Hoffman while making much less money. I guess if you value Roden, who looks like a back-up part-time corner outfielder, you can add that to the Twins side of the ledger, but it's hard to see much value there, and probably not much more than what Klein provides as an up and down reliever.
  20. MeleMouth
    Yeah, that struck me as well. These two sentences seem to contradict each other, as well as 2/3 being based on pie in the sky. I mean, sure, if you have Buxton, Lewis, and Ryan, and you go out and get "legitimate stars" like Skubal as a free agent and Nick Kurtz in a trade, they could be a good team, but they could also be a good team without Buxton, Lewis, and Ryan, if they sign Skubal and trade for Kurtz. Or, of course, they could keep their aging core of 1-3.5 WAR "stars" and go out and get "legitimate stars like Josh Donaldson and Carlos Correa while also featuring "emerging young players" like Miranda, Julien, and Wallner. "A roster built around Byron Buxton, Royce Lewis, Joe Ryan, emerging young players and a legitimate collection of stars could do that. A team that spends a significant portion of every summer fighting to stay around .500 will have a much harder time doing it. " The Twins need to pick one strategy and stay with it. As long as they keep vacillating, perhaps more than once a year, and sometimes running out two strategies at once like "competitive rebuild," which sounds really good but has never worked for them, they will "spend a significant portion of every summer fighting to stay around .500."
  21. MeleMouth
    Absolutely, and this was of critical value at the time, but replacing an obsolete system does not mean the new system is excellent. Bill James used to say that baseball management usually gets hired for good reasons and gets fired for good reasons. In 2016, what Falvey brought to the team was necessary and beneficial, but by 2026 his way of doing things was no longer providing an advantage.
  22. MeleMouth
    I agree and I don't. It would have been great to get more for Berrios and a team like the Twins needs to maximize those opportunities. OTOH, if you look at other deadline trades of pitchers similar to Berrios, the usual outcome isn't much different. My largest quibble about the deal is that they might have been better off trading for one player who was closer to a sure thing, instead of two players whose prospect status was already declining. But the Twins of that era seemed to have been operating under the belief that they could take raw hitters like Martin and teach them how to hit with more power, so they might have thought they got a steal in getting Martin.
  23. MeleMouth
    That home run by Tinney didn't even look particularly well-hit, as he appeared to be a little under it, but he has such power that it was a gigantic home run for that stadium. Jenkins and Rodriguez had good days, but IMO it's hard to read too much into a 15-11 game.
  24. MeleMouth
    I looked at this a few months back and found that, at that time, the Twins were in the top 10 in terms of fWAR from draft picks during the Falvey era. Jeffers was #1. Unfortunately, #2 and #3 were Steer and Rooker, who produced all of their WAR for other teams. I have to give them credit for converting Petty into Gray, also, although I wonder if Petty's career would have gone better had he gone to an organization other than the Reds, in which case that trade wouldn't appear to be quite as lopsided a success. Also unfortunately, the Twins generated almost no WAR from international signings made during the Falvey era. The #1 selling point for hiring Falvey was the patented "Falvey Pitching Pipeline," which was assumedly his unique skill in identifying raw talent and molding it into good cost-controlled major league pitchers, so that the team could spend money in other areas and not be locked into expensive, long-term contracts with pitchers at constant risk of major injuries that could cost them more than a season and put a big percentage of the team's payroll onto the IL. However, the FPP seemed to develop a big leak around the AA portion of the funnel, e.g., Balazovic, Winder, Enlow, Festa, Culpepper, Zebby(?), in contrast to Cleveland, which year after year seems to still produce good starters for the major league team, such as Messick (taken 6 picks after Prielipp) and Williams this year, two drafted and developed starters who are better than any of the Twins' starters. Also, as somewhat of a kick, Cleveland's excellent closer, Cade Smith, who took over almost without a hitch after they lost their all-world closer, Clase, was drafted by the Twins in the 16h round of Falvey's first draft, but did not sign. IMO: Falvey was overall good at identifying talent, but poor to mediocre at developing talent, among other things.
  25. MeleMouth
    Unstated is that the White Sox and Guardians will face a similarly weak strength of schedule. Note also that the Rangers, who the Twins play at the end of the season, are classified as a "losing" team in the strength of schedule table, but as well as also competing for the wild card, they recently got Corey Seager back after he was injured for most the prior two months and he is heating up.
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