Jham

I've never understood the hate for Duensing. I think he gets punished for coming into the game when the fans are already frustrated. Reminds of Jesse Crain-wreck. To me, Thompson has been so much worse and he still has options.

Yeah, I mean, I think we're basically agreeing. I just see the Twins as trying to do things the way you want them to (developing power bull-pen arms) and so far that isn't working. I would rather see them draft and develop Burdi's and patch together with Breslows and Nesheks when needed. Perhaps Nick is right, and the Twins are tinkering for the worse. I haven't seen that the Twins precipitated that switch. Maybe they did, and that is blame worthy. My point is, whether you're looking at statistical results or mechanical, I haven't seen enough to conclude that the organization is mismanaging the young man. Few prospects dominate each level with no rough patches. I'm not panicking yet. I expect Burdi to find his groove again, and be quite good eventually, just not as soon and not as strongly as I once did...

I guess I don't see how the Twins could have handled the situation differently and definitely ended up with a better outcome... But I'll definitely agree that the Twins have scrapped a bull pen together for decades, usually with good results. Still, our best reliever, like many top relievers, was a mediocre starter, in this case, homegrown. Perk was up and down a few times, took things personally, got in and out of the dog house on a number of occasions, finally found himself and now he's a perennial all-star. Twins management, or Perk finally maturing? Speaking of mediocre starters, we have some. Now which one is Wade Davis...?

I mean, his OPS sits at .588 which would be a career low by .17 and almost 100 points below his career average of .684. Ideally he's a back up, but given his defensive limitations, the year he had at the plate last year, and his career norms, he needs to pick it up. I was also stating that players need to play better as a rhetorical premise of "if we are to build a winner..." I don't think a trade for a catcher would work out better short or long term than crossing our fingers and hoping Zuke has a good 2nd half in him. He seems to managing the staff extremely well, and he's tough as nails. I'm willing to wait it out with him instead of going to get a catcher and paying a premium.

I'm not saying everything has gone according to plan. I just think it's a big jump to say the reason things haven't gone according to plan is that the player was mismanaged. Perhaps the Twins saw past the results in keeping Burdi down last year. They say the biggest jump in talent comes between A and AA. If the Twins tried to get Burdi to work on mixing his pitches and hitting his spots, and he wouldn't, and this year he paid the price, then a demotion makes sense. Every player responds to different motivators. Some need the carrot, some need the stick. Some are fueled by success, others by failure. Big time relievers are constantly under pressure and necessarily have to bounce back from failure. Hopefully this kid responds. If anything, it appears we moved him up too soon and should have started him in A ball again. You can imagine how that would have gone over.

I mean, I understand some of the standing pat. Our solution in some cases relies on some of our key components simply playing better. Zuke has struggled mightily this year, but he's a better player than what he's shown. He needs to play better. It's nice that Mauer is starting to sting the ball a bit, but in general, he just has to play better. Dozier picked a bad series to go cold. Hicks keeps getting chances. Vargas, Arcia, Tonkin all failed in their opportunities. Fien, Boyer, Hughes, Duensing all need to pitch to their abilities. We could try bringing Fryer up for Herman, but this year's stats aside, I feel like Fryer is known to be an even worse hitter. The one guy I don't get is Thompson. Thielbar has shown some ability in stretches. Other than that, there aren't a lot of suitable replacements. Guys just need to step up and produce.

I understand the disappointment from a fan's perspective in not seeing Burdi dominate like he did last year. I'm disappointed. However, I fail to see any evidence that Burdi's career or preparation is somehow being mismanaged. The analysis can't be simply based on results. It sounds to me that the Twins have a perfectly reasonable plan. Burdi has been given some exact pieces of his game to work on. I get the impression that the Twins have been urging this from Burdi for awhile. Let him work on tinkering where he is under less pressure and more likely to succeed with a new approach. Agree or disagree with the approach all you want, but there's a plan there, and I don't think you can say that he's automatically say he's been mismanaged. A, AA, He'll be fast tracked when he shows he's ready

Maybe I'm not remembering right, but I feel like Caleb Thielbar has never been as bad Aaron Thompson has been for the last 2 months. Thielbar has experience. He'd be my call. Thompson has been garbage, and needs to go back to AAA and find his April form.

I really like the idea of Santana as a super utility player. I think he's probably a better outfielder than Escobar, and gives us a pinch runner in late game situations. I think it was inevitable that his BABIP would drop, but I can't believe how his power has disappeared. Normally that jumps up. I still trust him more than Hicks. May seems to be getting by being effectively wild. I don't know if that's sustainable. It took Garza several years and a trade. He's going to have to start hitting some spots or getting the ball down or the league will catch up quickly. I'm fine with rotation or pen for May. He's far from a finished product. We should not be looking to get younger just for the sake of getting younger. Prospect development and experimenting needs to happen in the minor leagues. You owe it to your fans. If you can't trust your scouts to tell you when a player is ready, then you need new scouts. Hunter is one of our best players this year. His age is irrelevant. If none of our prospects are better than a declining Torii Hunter, then I don't want to see them out there. In fact, we should have probably deal some of those prospects while they still have value instead of proving their limitations to trade partners. Duensing is our only lefty right now. Thompson has been an absolute train wreck for two months. Meanwhile Duensing has quietly been solid for a month. I'm not sure we can trade for significant upgrades in CF, SS, or Catcher. At least not with a better chance of success than hoping for rebounds from our current guys. I think the roster, with the exception of Thompson needs to stay where it's at, with Pelfrey or May going to the pen.

This was my thought as I read through the thread. Is Span worth more or less now than he was 3 years ago? Could we have held Span, made Hicks work his way up, then perhaps move him at one of the trade deadlines? Or kept him? It seems like the use of the metrics which show Span to be a superior player are more widely accepted now than they were then. As such, I imagine his value may have been higher. On Gomez and Ortiz, I don't think anyone could have predicted their other worldly success. Ortiz at least had shown an ability to hit for power and average. Gomez, not so much.

I'd disagree on Boyer. He went from out of the league, to struggling mightily early, to being at least serviceable, and occasionally downright nasty. Thompson started great, but has been an absolute mess of late. But overall, I'd say the bullpen is a net positive surprise. I hate to say that Buxton and Sano are "disappointments" but both have slipped down prospect rankings in their returns from injuries. They have both had nice years, but both seem to have some significant question marks. Particularly, the idea that Buxton has Trout upside and Sano, Cabrera upside seems extreme. Austin Jackson and I dunno, Trevor Plouffe, may be a more apt comparisons, and the thought of waiting like we have for that is disappointing to me.

DH's don't cost their teams any defensive runs. They don't even play defense. A DH costs their teams less run than half of the starting defensive players in baseball, and more than the other half with the guy in the middle being the definition of average starter at his position. Replacement defensive players aren't really of much use since many non-starters are great defensive players who can't hit or horrible defensive players with no position. I don't think you should knock a guy who doesn't cost his teams runs on defense. Nor do I necessarily think you should praise a guy who costs his teams runs at shortstop (on avg) over a right fielder who saves runs. Is every AL pitcher less valuable to their team because they don't hit?

I disagree with the notion that we don't need more pitchers in the NL parks. It seems like we almost always bring our starters out early to get a bat into the game. Then we rarely stretch our relievers in response. I think we are more likely to need to scramble for outs at the end of games then to need to scramble for runs. Considering the options, we have pitchers ready for call more likely to help us than hitters. I'll take Nunez over Arcia to get a big hit right now. Alex Meyer should have been in the MLB pen from the beginning of the year. He needs to be the call.

I heard Neil Allen talking about Duensing a week or two ago. He says he's fine. His velocity is good, his slider is biting, his main problem has been falling behind in counts. Duensing seems to be bouncing back. I don't advocate releasing him considering our other LHRP options. Meyer and Thielbar are obvious options, though I can understand Oliveros' frustration. I was not too impressed with his call up last year, and my thought was that if he can't clearly jump Tonkin, his usefulness may be limited. I've been saying Thompson needs to go down for about a month. He's costing us games right now.

My whole point is that Pelfrey has seemed to have made some significant changes this year. He has a new splitter which has proven fairly effective for one. He also seems to be attacking more and nibbling less (haven't looked up stats to verify). He appears to be a much more effective pitcher, which is why I'm wondering why his FIP doesn't reflect it. It doesn't appear to be luck. I'm not sure which aspect of FIP is holding his number up. Regarding clutch being repeatable. Once again a proponent of metrics tries to make his case with anecdotal evidence and conjecture. Clutch is proven to exist. I'll agree that we don't have a metric for it. I'll agree that we don't have a stat to predict who will be clutch or who will remain clutch. Nevertheless, your efforts to minimize the variables of clutch as it applies to baseball is way off. Maybe if we replaced live pitchers with hitting machines... Clutch (and yips) exists in labs. It exists in our own personal lives, as well as in baseball. You can say we can't measure it or predict it. That doesn't mean it isn't there or that it can't mess with data or stats that don't account for it. There is no metric for confidence. Are you saying that confidence doesn't affect performance? The mental side of the game can change from pitch to pitch let alone season to season. There are thousands of variables that aren't accounted for in any stat, any of which might skew the results.

There are numerous studies of how pressure effects individual ability. Actual controlled studies where variables are minimized. They show that both choking and clutch exists. Baseball is a nuanced game with many variables. It's no surprise that a scenario that effects different players differently would be hard to measure. You're missing the point though. If you think your latest favorite metric can accurately predict the success of a team or player without accounting for the hundreds of thousands of variables that your stat doesn't account for, then you are misunderstanding proper usage of statistics. If you really want to utilize money ball principles you should actually be focusing on the outliers, as they are more likely to be "undervalued" in the market. Is Pelfrey an outlier re: FIP? Possibly. Maybe he regresses. Maybe his FIP comes down, maybe he's an outlier. Doesn't matter. His value is pitching for this team.

1. Sorry about the credits. I bet the author gets that a lot though, and probably gets pretty mad. 2. Re: clutch. You made my exact point. Perhaps it is not a quantifiable trait. That is not the same thing as saying that it doesn't exist. But you can't justify its theoretical non-existence with anecdotal accounts and theory like "well any hitter would just try to be clutch more often" and then discount other posters who justify their positions on anecdotes, theory, or (gasp) watching players play. For the record "clutch" and "choking" have been proven by empirical data if you insist on use of stats. http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-1304701.pdf provides one study. Ignoring a factor of performance that is proven to exist because we don't have a metric for it is incomplete scouting in my mind, especially when practically all of our metrics are based on a series of statistically significant correlations rather than factors of causation. I remember learning in a psych course at the U of M that there was a strong correlation with success in upper management and being a white male. But being a white male was not the cause of their success. They were more likely to have had education, training, grooming, and other advantages that would cause their success. Companies that received 500 applicants for a position might be able to cut their hiring process and expenditure by 50-75% if they limited their interviews to white males, and they'd still most likely come up with a perfectly suitable hire. Measuring for causation would be far less efficient than working from the simple correlation, but, in their search for efficiency, they might miss a non-white male candidate who would have been the best hire available. What things cause pitchers to limit runs? Are we so sure Pelfrey doesn't have those things? I'm not 100% either way, but I see a better pitcher this year, and the fact that this isn't reflected in his FIP makes me question its accuracy in this particular case. Maybe someone who knows the ins and outs of its calculation can show which figures are keeping it at his career levels. I suspect it's the K's, which I actually think will go up.

I strongly disagree. You're proposing a race to the bottom. You can't just keep reaching at unproven and hope to have 9 guys reach their potential simultaneously. Some of your prospects will bust, others will level out. You might not have anyone better than the guy you just let go. Give yourself the best chance of winning, and most often the rebuild will take care of itself. Imagine how much different this season would be if we DFA'd Pelfrey, traded Milone, and put Meyer in the rotation this spring. I categorically disagree with any organizational move that is predicated upon a belief that we have the power to tell the future. Furthermore, I don't think it's productive to assume that the team will lose either way. Either of these fallacies in logic will tend to lean toward an over-valuation of young talent instead of a realistic evaluation of how to make the team better. Boredom in the known and infatuation in the unknown is what landed us Gomez and Humber instead of Lester and Crisp or Melky and Hughes. As it turned out, it's also what lost us Gomez, lost us Hardy, and got us that flame thrower we got for Hardy. Almost every average and even below average MLB player was once a touted if not highly touted prospect. We may lose, but we should try to win.

Seriously, if we would have DFA'd Pelfrey after spring training, I would not have been mad at all. I'm certainly not going to be mad if he goes back to the old Pelf after giving us a stellar first half. He's already provided more than I ever expected anyway. Regarding luck: I think this term gets thrown around too much by sabermatricians who can't explain why their predictive stat isn't correctly predicting. No metric can correctly account for every variable in the game of baseball. Calling the variables we can't quantify "luck" is not only an incorrect description, it's willfully ignorant. If we bet on Pelfrey's ERA for each start this year and you based your guess on his FIP and mine on his current ERA, I'd have most of your money. Which has been the better predictor? No stat is perfect. Maybe it will even out. Maybe his FIP is inflated and will drop. Maybe he's doing something FIP doesn't even account for. I remember reading Bill James' Moneyball and his statement that "clutch" doesn't exist, and thinking, "Really? He's trying to bring science to baseball, and his way of trying to explain something he doesn't understand isn't to study it, it's to deny that it exists?" :Let's say perhaps Pelfrey is striking out fewer and getting "lucky" double plays is because he's trying to replicate his success and get double plays instead of strike outs. At what point are all the double plays not "luck"? I'm not going to look up the stats, so perhaps I'm wrong. It seems like Pelfrey has much better command, equal or better velocity, and vastly improved split-finger change. His stuff is better. His results are better. I would guess the K's will come and the FIP will start to edge down.

Seriously? He was with the big league team almost the whole year last year. He got sent down this year because of his bat. He looked hopeless and confused at the plate. The fact that he was also less than stellar on the field just made the call easier. He's been given his shot. It's up to him to earn another shot. You don't just give away big league at-bats as part of a roster experiment without a pretty strong hunch? Otherwise you're just hoping and guessing. Look at Hicks. Three years later and people still don't know what to think of him. Good players will dominate lower levels. Santana needs to rake and get his confidence back. His defense won't win gold gloves, but he's good enough to play short in the big leagues. He really really really needs to take some walks though. No one was throwing him a strike when he was up.

If you consider having "too many pitchers" an actual problem instead of a leverage point or strategic advantage, fine. But I don't think the correct solution is to trade away one of our better pitchers only to replace him with someone worse. Pelfrey has not only been better, but significantly better than the rest of the staff who have also thrown well. In a previous Pelfrey thread, I said keep throwing him til his arm fall off or the wheels fall off. Why not extend him at an affordable K? If his trade value is low, how would his free agent value be any higher? Last year, we had a couple injuries/underperformances and had to wade through like 7 failed below-fringe starters. Let one of those teams to come to us with an offer. Don't trade away depth just for the sake of clearing space for a) Santana who may or may not come back and pitch well, or Berrios who was shelled in his one start above AA, and frankly projects as a middle rotation type in his prime.

And maybe another one when his replacement shut down the best team in baseball tonight?

Yikes. At this point, if that's your plan A) you better have a super strong plan B. I'd probably take another year of Hunter, moving Mauer to right, or moving Plouffe or Sano to right over a Hicks/Arcia platoon at this point. We're supposed to contend next year.

Hey, the old Duensing is back!

Plouffe would have have been out by a mile if Jay throws home, but discretion is the better part of valor I suppose.