Jham

I was hoping for more of a Weekend at Bernie's style extension with him wearing sunglasses and a sideways batting helmet and maybe just like strapped to Kenneth Vargas' back or something.

Hitting corners repeatedly different breaking pitches is extremely difficult to maintain. Feel comes and goes. Duffey needs to go back to the studio and write a few more songs or he'll be a 1 hit wonder.

See, I can say I have a different opinion or stance without accusing those with opposing views of mismanagement. Realistically, what could Arcia have shown in those few weeks that would have saved him from a DFA? He may have bought a few more weeks, but in all likelihood, it would have delayed the inevitable. Should the Twins have waited out Valencia's 5 bad years for his less than 1 full good year? Or should we have just signed him as a cheap FA last off season if we were afraid we'd lost something great. I sense a lot of the frustration is misguided. We're all frustrated by seeing all these players we're excited about fail. I think that's what made Sano's run last season so much fun. But the failure of the prospects seems to be poor preparation by the team and players to get them ready for MLB action. Kepler cited crowd noise for his early struggles. Crowd noise. I've never heard that before, and I wonder how someone could come to the Show and be surprised by crowd noise unless we're failing in preparing our players, veterans and prospects alike. Was Arcia mismanaged? Probably. But more like gradually over the last 3-4 seasons and off seasons.

Well, Arcia isn't pinch running for anyone late in a game, can't come in and put down a bunt in the bottom of the tenth, and isn't nearly as versatile as Santana on D. If I'm using my bench to just fill in here and there, I'll take Santana over the pinch-hitting option of Arcia. Both Arcia and Santana had fluke years, apparently. For some reason Arcia is seen as more likely to get back to those levels than Santana. I like Arcia. I wish we could have kept him. I would have sent down Kepler to give Arcia a 2 or 3 week trial to save his job. But I'm not going to say he was mismanaged. The guy is a little too up and down, and maybe he'll settle down like Gogo did, but chances are he'll always be a jumpy, nervous hitter who can't hit an elevated fastball.

Santana's BABIP was an issue. But I'm sick of people calling that bounce completely BABIP related. He went from 7 HR in 430 PA to 1 in his next 417. The drop in BABIP was somewhat more predictable, but he appeared to be a young kid with wheels just learning to drive the ball. IE someone you'd expect to have a high BABIP. I would guess that players at his stage who post a breakthrough season like that are more likely to take another step forward power wise then a step back, and that should have countered the BABIP. Instead he's taken several giant strides backward which effects both his BIP and balls not in play (HR). I liked Arcia simply because he tried hard, almost too hard a lot of times. He cared, he supported his teammates, and he played with fire even on losing teams. Everyone complains about the team handing out scholarships. Arcia got one this year out of camp. I would have liked to see him play more, but I wouldn't have bet on better results. Now, the season as it is, I can't justify keeping his one-dimensional bat on the team over Park, Plouffe, Kep, Buxton, Grossman, Rosario, or even D San. He's not a better player than any of those guys other than maybe Santana who's an adequate 25th man on the roster type guy. You don't get better by giving a 5th chance to a worse ballplayer. I hope Ozzie goes and tears it up for someone. Seems like a good kid, but he just wasn't a fit here.

I almost started a thread about modern moneyball and traits might be undervalued by the current market. Of course, the market is so stats-based now, that you'd have to come up with something not being measured, like leadership or intangibles, or something overlooked. I couldn't come up with anything, so I never started the thread. However, your approach of reviewing traits the market has given up on is very intriguing. We'd have to see if things like stealing bases or covering ground on D have shifted in $$ and changed their value in generating or eliminating runs. Of course, the review would have to be post-moneyball era only and would require searching out the correct base for comparison since poor-throwing catchers and plodding power hitters would be negate each other. On the other hand, if the league has changed that much, the few speedy players left like Dyson or Billy Hamilton should steal 150 bags a year. It bears looking into. Some teams probably already are. Some probably already have. And if teams are researching it or implementing it, they wouldn't release their stats. So we'll see if anyone tries it. Worth looking into.

I'm not sure if that makes me feel better or worse...

Santana is a much better pitcher than he's shown. One way or another he'll be in the rotation. Berrios will be up next season for the full year. If Gibson isn't traded he'll be here. Duffey should stick. May will likely find his way back to the rotation out of necessity. If we're not bringing in anyone else, we should probably tender a contract to Tommy Milone again. Can't imagine his passing through waivers and getting demoted will help his Arb value very much this off season. A cheap, serviceable, and disposable option is probably a good thing. We may well be stuck with what we've got. For everyone who says we should expect this season again next season, I would ask what makes this season so much different than last season? Milone? Pelfrey?

Great points. Leads also lead to low leverage innings. Scoring 2 runs a game adds a lot of undue strain as well...

And I want to see your original Twinsdaily Fan Certificate. There are allegations that your father was a White Sox fan and that your mother once visited Cleveland. Twinsdaily deserves answers!

Initial anarchy, cautious alliances, eventually leading to 2 opposing parties who will disagree out of principle on ever free agent, draft pick, and roster move, mostly out of spite for the other. The Torii Hunter Party will advocate for no batting coaches and free swinging plate approaches as team founders Kirby Puckett and Harmon Killebrew had wanted. Also no gays in the locker room. The Joe Mauer party will advocate for mandatory walk rates, a team-wide ban on swinging at first pitches, and a paid day off every Sunday when the kids come watch. Mauer Party will suggest that the highest paid players on the team each give back some of their salary to the young players to incentivize player development. Of course Mauer would be exempt from this because he's Joe Mauer and he always gets a free pass. The Torii Hunter Party will advocate signing and retaining every vet in the organization in the interest of team security and to establish culture and leadership. They'll oppose each other at every corner and propose ludicrous trades to each other just out of spite. Hunter will suggest building a wall around the entire Twins organization to keep our players here. Mauer will refuse to hand over a bunch of private emails detailing god knows what after BALCO accusations, and pretty soon both sides will be making plans to move the team to Winnipeg. Eventually, Jesse Ventura will end up as GM somehow.

Remember when the Twins wouldn't give up Kepler for Lucroy? What would Kep fetch now?

As Yogi would say, it gets late awfully early when we're touring the west coast... Come on Duff. Happy Bday sBarky Anderson, hope the beer's cold in Bark's Lounge tonight!

Then I would also argue that our fascination in drafting toolsey HS outfielders and relief pitchers also helped us build one of the top 2 farm systems in baseball as ranked as recently as last season. Why isn't the ranking translating to more big league wins? Either the rankings are wrong. (I would suggest they were too strongly based on prior rankings and the Buxton/Sano effect). Or the players are poorly developed. (I tend toward this explanation). Or the prospects aren't ready yet and we need to wait for them to develop. (We've seen too little progress from other players up several years ago to believe this). I do think Buxton and Sano were overrated by many despite fairly glaring holes in their games. Sano has never hit for average, and according to scouts who watched him play more than a handful of games at third, was no where near good enough to play third. Buxton is a gangly herky jerky hitter with a less than classic swing and front foot hitting style. Buxton loses bat speed and timing when he tries to shorten up. Meyer is wild. May is inconsistent. Duffey is good but is surviving without a third pitch. Rosario swings at everything. Arcia bicycle kicks baseballs in the outfield. Kepler looks over-matched. At some point it's not about patience. It's about better coaching, scouting, and development. And IF the rankings are indeed inflated, we should have known that more than anyone and looked to trade for more and better while we could. The team hoards mediocre prospects because we can't tell them from busts and stars. So we have out-of-option guys clogging the roster, back-up plans having to play every day, and bad contracts because our pitching prospects aren't ready yet, and anything better than Mike Pelfrey requires over-payment.

It's tough for me to be too hard on Ryan for the pitching contracts. You don't usually get quality starting pitching without overpaying in dollars, years, or both. Of course you might predict some drop off, but it has been much much more precipitous than anyone would have predicted. I believe Ryan thought we would have an influx of young pitching by now. If we didn't have the expensive veteran arms, whose innings are we badly missing? If Meyer, Berrios, May, had torn it up and progressed I have no doubt they would have supplanted the vets. But virtually no one other than Duffey for 2 months last year have stepped up. He should have gotten a catcher? How far would that get us this year? If he knew our prospects weren't ready, he should have brought in another outfielder, but it's clear they want to give Buxton a good run if he can be halfway competent at the plate. Too much is made of the Sano to right field thing. He's been poor. Not every experiment will work, but our best shot to repeat or build on last year's success was to have Plouffe, Sano, and Park in the line up. Pricey vets and guys hitting option limits is the price of horrible talent evaluation and preparation. The fact that we still have no idea what we have with Arcia and Santana is tough to swallow. Both could have brought decent returns a few years ago, and neither was a blue chipper. An unnerving thought is that we can differentiate between our top prospects and AAAA guys because none of them will be great major leaguers. If that's the case, Ryan does deserve much of the blame. But if we're preaching patience with the prospects, we should be patient with the office that brought them in. For the record, I'm not preaching patience for either. I think it's past due that our prospects make an impact, and it's absurd that our scouting and coaching can't get more out of and differentiate between true prospects and average minor leaguers without ridiculous major league auditions that plummet the trade value of the prospects we should be looking to move.

Dude, apparently Buxton has 100 mph heat. http://m.twins.mlb.com/news/article/184094462/twins-byron-buxton-throws-99-mph-to-nab-trout There is your closer.

But you forgot to add in Kepler MLB, Sano, MLB, Buxton, MLB, and even JR Murphy and Juan Cento have to be considered some sort of prospects given their position. Zack Granite is tearing it up. Add them in, and you're looking at a decent pool of players to move forward with. No one home-grows a championship. You develop a nucleus. If we can't make a nucleus out of that talent, we've gotten really unlucky, our players have failed, or our development has failed. Terry Ryan's rightfully taken a lot of heat for some of the issues with the MLB team, but we're not so short sighted to go from "this team has one of the best farm systems in the game" to "cupbord is running pretty empty" in a single year based on seemingly slow progress are we? Especially when we're simultaneously making a case to be patient with the young players? If we want to be patient with the talent, should we not also be patient with the guys coaching the talent and the one who assembled it? By the way, I strongly disagree that as an organization, the only way or best way or even a good way to evaluate talent is just to throw kids in for a season and hope for the best. The so called "see what we've got" argument is lost on me since a lot of other teams seem to be able to bring players up when they're actually ready. I also don't think perpetual losing or going full on youth movement is a great way to develop players. I think it puts too much pressure on each young player to be "the guy" rather than letting them relax and find their role. I think it's human nature to want to see the guys we've followed for years in box scores play in person. That's where MiLBTV comes in. But the fact of the matter is we need a much better system of evaluating when players are ready and much better process for getting them ready. Also, Tyler Jay, reliever turned starter, is probably the closest thing to an Ace the Twins have in their entire system. Duffey has been by far our best young arm to come up. The problem isn't the relievers we draft to be starters. The problem is the relievers we draft to be releivers.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/159622132/twins-miguel-sano-ends-time-in-winter-ball "I appreciate him playing," Ryan said. "I kind of like the fact he's got some loyalty and got some at-bats. We have some things here we've got to accomplish for him making the transition from infield to outfield. However he thinks it's best for his interests, I'm in." "He can do it wherever he chooses," Ryan said. "Wherever he wants to do it, I'm OK with it. I think the player should have that ability and freedom to make the decision to get his best interest in his mind." So some of the frustration might not be the weight, or not putting in the work, it might be Sano telling them one thing, then doing the other, wait actually doing the opposite.

I had pretty serious doubts about exactly how good May was last year both in the rotation and the pen. IE he was far better in both roles than he ever had been. Overnight success usually isn't super sustainable. Some time in AAA to further develop in either role is probably a good thing. At this point, I'd like to see him start, but if the team is convinced he will never be a consistently reliable starter and has a chance to be an above average back of the bullpen arm, I'm fine with him staying in that role. I think the team thought we'd compete, and he could refine his craft in the pen and help us win games and start later in his career. Either way, he needs to pitch better. AAA should help. I personally think the idea that pitching from the pen is more likely to lead to injuries, back or otherwise, is at best an unsubstantiated guess, and I feel like I'm meeting more than half way on that.

Hey i appreciate the counter points, but you're the only one arguing causation. Everyone else is considering Hunter's influence. Metrics are a useful tool for evaluating performance, particularly if you can't see the games or are otherwise clouded by congestive bias. Regarding Buxton, he credited Hunter in the article which provides anecdotal evidence in support of a positive influence. Many other players have offered similar praise and sought his advice. Will his advice and leadership style help everyone? Obviously not. Is it helping Buxton? He says so. Please remember the following: the fact that we don't have a way of measuring something doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Even our best metrics don't eliminate close to enough variables to allow them to mean much on their own. As such you should never use stats as a substitute for impiracal data from controlled environments, or for common sense. The numbers guys who say pressure doesn't influence performance or that mentorship doesn't matter ignore their own experiences and the experiences of virtually every other human being out there. If you don't have a way of measuring it, that's your problem, but don't go off and belittle anyone who still might try to understand that mysterious human element that honestly is just as important as, and to many folks, more interesting than, the latest fad stat in understanding player performance.

Hopefully that gets Brian going a little bit. Maybe the whole team. The team straight needs an energy boost. It's a long season for the team to look so tired.

Yeah, I think we're making the same point. There's no harm real harm in bringing him up, and no real harm in leaving him down. A tad more seasoning vs a dfa of a player we probably won't miss. Maybe I'm overly gun shy about calling players up on limited aaa success. I'm momentarily satiated with watching the guys who put up good numbers in aaa try to find their way through the mlb. I'm ok with being patient take than risk another aaa stage coach turning into an mlb pumpkin. Been that sort of season.

I want to see the science behind that... although I think I get your point if you're just being figurative. I saw Tonkin go up and down and be average to horrible out of the pen. Chargois seems more legit and has risen quickly. Some posters pound the organization for using full seasons of AA and brief stints in AAA before throwing guys into the deep end of the pool. So if we accelerated him through AA and want him to get a good and established grip on AAA, what is the problem? What is the rush? If your premise regarding finite innings is true, it hurts no one to have him in AAA all season. I don't think I'd hastily DFA anyone just to bring him up. Someone will eventually be hurt or traded, and he'll be in line for the call, but to me, I'm not reorganizing my pen and 25 man for Chargois just yet. There's just no need.

Exactly. I mean, is the state completely out of Mauers?

I say bring them up now! Fans want to see these guys. The season's lost anyway. They can't be any worse than what we've got. The players need to face big leaguers in order to get better. And how else will we know what we have unless we play them in televised baseball games? *snark I agreed with the first part of your post that we're miles ahead of the teams that lost but had no glimpse of future hope. We should have been better this year even. A lot of players are having career worst seasons at the same time. Unlikely to continue or repeat, and many will be replaced. I would also disagree with the notion that people who actually pay money to attend games, drink beer, and eat mini donuts would rather watch prospects struggle to make contact than watch journeymen take professional at bats. Think about it. Winning is always more fun than losing. Always.