IndianaTwin

Looks like today was game 173, but thanks for digging this up. It just seems like 180 rbi. Or maybe I'm thinking of Sal Perez. Interesting -- by both that number and the tOPS+, the Twins have actually handled him considerably better than other teams, including the White Sox, Royals and especially the Tigers, whom he has crushed. Most of the teams who have done better than the Twins are in the National League with sample sizes of 20 games or less. But he's still really, really good.

Yes, he would have. Which contributes to the reason to steal him in that situation. Be successful and you're much more likely to score on hit. Get thrown out and it least gives you a small head start in the 11th to have Bader there rather than Vazquez. (Though letting Vazquez hit would have (almost) guaranteed Buxton getting a bat in the 11th. This way he would have batted fourth.) But alas... (And that said, radio guys said the first throwover was clearly a balk, scoring Gasper and moving Bader to second. True? If so, that changes the inning. Same thing happens and Bader goes to third on the Bride fly ball. Still Vazquez hitting, but with a runner on third rather than first. But alas...)

And of course the only Kodai in MLB history is currently on the Mets' 40 (and 26) man.

(But yeah, that does seem high.)

Chief, I think you're better than this. Seems "spreadsheet management" would have taken Ober out after five or six innings on Monday instead of letting him pitch into the eighth. Seems "spreadsheet management" would have pulled Ryan after five or six on Sunday, instead of letting him go seven. I wasn't able to watch/listen last night, but what I see is Paddack having gone 99 pitches last outing (and it seems "spreadsheet management" wouldn't have let him face six batters three times in that game, which he did, by the way), his having already given up hits to two of the three guys he would have faced in the sixth, his having put the first two batters on in the fourth and a bullpen that was about as rested as could be. And there's stuff that none of us can see and none of us have access to. For example, it sounds like the decisions made around the rain delay were screwy, so who knows how many starts and stops there were to his prep during a three-hour rain delay. (And why don't people complain when guys get pulled early when they are struggling, when "spreadsheet management" would say that they need to get a full five innings out of that day's starter?) The Twins didn't lose last night because Rocco's "spreadsheet management" didn't let Paddack come out for the sixth. They lost because they only scored one run. The winning percentage when you score only one run is pretty low. (I'd give you the exact percentage, but it would have to come from a spreadsheet. 😀)

Darlin' Varland? (Sorta)

You're looking fine, CRF. Very natural.

Definitely -- networking is as significant in MLB as it is in other professions. Sometimes it's more about who you know than what you know. Being in the right place at the right time is huge. He didn't want to go back to the minors as a coach, so he didn't pursue that, but he felt very connected. Those connections certainly helped him get picked up as a player, given that he had a positive reputation as a good guy to to have in the organization. A person who was a finalist for a managerial job (but didn't get it) told the friend that if he got the job, he wanted the friend on staff.

Have a friend who was a backup catcher, the other common spot for roster churning, particularly in response to injury. His baseball-reference.com has 33 lines of transactions and he ended up in more than a dozen systems, several on multiple occasions. From talking to him, I very much get the toll that it takes on family, etc., but he recognized the rules are what they are and seems to be grateful that he had the chance to keep turning a boyhood dream into what ended up being a little over five years of service time. (I also suspect that in the big scheme of things, this "problem" is going to be somewhere outside the top 20 on the list of MLBPA negotiating issues for the next CBA.)

Hopefully it's brought to us by even more than 4 Ks.

I assume that's Kolby's cousin at lower right in picture No. 2? There can't be too many Allard jerseys in circulation.

I know there isn't supposed to be math in a Game Thread, but hear me out. SWR has a career WHIP of 1.335. That means in four innings, on average, he allows between five and six baserunners. Since you can't have a partial hit, let's call it six. Add the 12 outs and he pitches to 18 batters over four innings, meaning he starts his personal fifth inning with his "leadoff" hitter. So, if he starts the game, his fifth inning on average is starting with the leadoff hitter and his sixth inning with the No. 5 hitter. But if you give the effective Topa the first inning and let SWR start the second against 4-5-6 (hopefully) or 5-6-7, it's more likely that SWR is facing the bottom half of the lineup when he gets to the fifth. And if he's more effective than usual and is facing 1-2-3 or 2-3-4 in his fifth inning, that's a good thing, since he's been more effective. And if he gets through that unscathed, it's more reasonable to send him out for inning No. 6, because by then he'll be at the bottom of the border. Meanwhile, pushing SWR back an inning gives an additional inning to figure out whether it's best to use the high-leverage relievers or the low. I figured this all out on a speadsheet. Spreadsheets can be really handy. 😀

Went to the transaction list to see who they sent down/ILed. Not yet listed, but there was this: Thought, what's up with that, then realized that on the 15th, there was a similar list with everyone changing to 42. ----------------------------- MLB.com intern arriving to work on Tuesday: "Okay, boss, I made the copies you asked for. What do I do next?" Supervisor: "Go through every roster and change all the uniform numbers to 42." MLB.com intern arriving on Wednesday: "Okay boss, I picked up doughnuts and made the coffee. What do I do next?" Supervisor: "Remember how you changed all the uniform numbers yesterday? Now go through the rosters and change them back."

Twins just traded for Jonah Bride. Solid OPS last year in 71 games for the Marlins, but weak in 2022, 2023 and 2025. Has played 1B, 2B and 3B in the minors. I suspect he’s left-side insurance.

Radio guys said he got hurt in the top of the eighth. And speculated that Correa was able to play defense but not hit, resulting in the Gasper PH.

I was intrigued, but then I saw WARs of 1.1, 2.0 and 0.5 the last three seasons, including a 106 OPS+ last year as a 36-year-old. With only 12 innings of defense in that time, it's hard to see them using a roster spot for a full-time DH when they have so many people at less than 100 percent. With four-man benches across the majors, I can understand why he's had a hard time getting a job.

I predict Lee will be the first called up. 😀

Agreed. Add in that no position player seems to be banging down the door and it seems more likely they would go to nine in the pen before five on the bench. But either way, they can go to four I. The rotation after tomorrow.

Matthews is on the 40-man. Did you mean 26-man? I think the understanding is that they will send Festa down to create a spot for Matthews. And then, with a couple off days coming up, they could pretty easily send Matthews down after Monday and get a nine-man bullpen for a while (or an extra bench player)…. 8-Lopez 9-Ryan 10-Ober 11-Festa 12-Paddack 13-SWR 14-Matthews 15-Ryan (5 days rest) 16-Ober (5 days rest) 17-Off 18-Paddack (5 days rest) 19-SWR (5 days rest) 20-Ryan (4 days rest) 21-Off 22-Ober (5 days rest) 23-Paddack (4 days rest) 24-SWR (4 days rest) (also, first day Lopez is eligible to return) 25-Ryan (4 days rest) 26-If Lopez is not back yet, this is the first day they need someone else. If one of the starters has gone on IL, Festa can take his place. If not, he still has a couple days before he can be recalled, so it could be Dobnak or a bullpen game. 27-Ober (4 days rest) 28-Paddack (4 days rest) 29-SWR (4 days rest) 30-Ryan (4 days rest) 1-And by now, if Lopez isn’t back, either Festa or Matthews can be recalled. Or they can be recalled a couple days early to give people an extra day.

Duran going from a 6.6 BB% last year to 13.3% this year seems pretty concerning. Until you check and see that it means he has given up 3 walks this year compared to the 1.5 that last year’s rate would suggest. And two of those three walks were in the “let’s get him some work because he hasn’t thrown in five days” second game of the season when they were already down 4-1. Percentages mean very little in SSS.

Thanks. Separate from this particular discussion, I've been intrigued by WPA as a stat, but I hadn't thought about it being contextual based on a team's offense. The 1927 Yankees, for example, may well have had low WPA numbers for their pitching staff.

The Twins have to be leading the league in No. 8 guy in the bullpen performance. 😀 Dobnak, McCaughan and Blewett have combined for a 1.38 ERA and 0.846 WHIP in their 13 innings. And that doesn't even count the scoreless inning from Castro.

Actually, Gray was quoted several times as saying he would have been glad to come back. As others have noted, the Twins (wisely, as I would add to others) chose not to offer him three years at $20M+. He wisely took the offer he was able to get from the Cardinals. Other than a couple of out-of-context quotes, he seemed to have had a positive experience pitching for the Twins.

Oops. Didn't finish my comments. My response was mostly directed at people's comments, though I think there's plenty of it in the articles as well. Perhaps you were focusing on the articles themselves. Those are more certainly more balanced than the comments.

My statement was "Sometimes it seems like most articles on TD are devoted to the job Falvey has done in distributing the payroll dollars." I didn't put a value judgment on whether people think he's done a good or bad job. I was saying that it often feels like payroll distributions are overanalyzed to death. There's only so many ways one can dissect a trade/non-trade of Vazquez/Paddack/Castro in exchange for salary relief to sign XYZ. ------------- That said, I'm remembering things differently than you. I don't think that by and large Twins Daily has been "very supportive of this front office." Certainly not the resulting comments. By and large I'm remembering the signings of France, Bader, Coulombe (less so), Thielbar, Okert, Jackson, Staumont, Solano, Taylor, Santana and Gallo as being met mostly with disdain from the beginning. I'm remembering immediate panning of picking up the option on Farmer and to a lesser extent picking it up for both Kepler and Polanco and then trading Polanco for a deal that only netted Margot. And this offseason it was, "Gotta trade at least one of Vazquez, Paddack, Castro or even Lopez for salary relief." If I went back further, I'd pick up the grumbling about signing Bundy, Archer, Shoemaker. And all those don't count the angst of the front office not having done multiple signings by November or at least December and certainly by early January each year. --------------- In rereading the string, I'm wondering if we may have been talking about slightly different things.