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PDX Twin

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Everything posted by PDX Twin

  1. PDX Twin
    It would be interesting for comparison's sake to know what the average WAR per team per draft is, both in those years and in general.
  2. PDX Twin
    Bravo!
  3. PDX Twin
    And Chicago in January would be upackerable?
  4. PDX Twin
    Looking at your list reinforces the impression I had during the season: the Twins were unusually, phenomenally, unreproduceably lucky in terms of injuries. Except for Sano (briefly), Buxton (more frequently), and (at the end) Kepler, almost all of them were to players who weren't really any better than their replacements. Maybe the Twins have a lot of durable players who are simply not going to get injured. Or maybe they were very lucky. We won't ever know what would have unfolded had there been a 2020 season, but to expect a repeat of this good fortune seems optimistic.
  5. PDX Twin
    Dean Chance came to the Twins from the Angels in a trade for Jimmie Hall and Don Mincher after the 1966 season. He was selected by Senators in the expansion draft, but only stayed for a matter of hours (according to BR):
  6. PDX Twin
    And also a highly competent hitter in an era when that mattered.
  7. PDX Twin
    Whoever did the ratings for the game must have been a Red Sox fan. Such success seems improbable...
  8. PDX Twin
    I was privileged to be at that game as an 11-year-old in 1965, sitting in the sun down the left-field line. That was a truly amazing NL team with Mays, Aaron, Clemente, Robinson, Banks, etc. Among the NL stars who didn't make the team were Curt Flood and Lou Brock! And of course they had Koufax, Drysdale, Gibson (not Kyle), and Marichal to throw the ball.
  9. PDX Twin
    Among all the positions, statistics seem the least useful at first base. Most of the variation in errors that results from a good vs. bad firstbaseman are other infielders' errors. Plus, the firstbaseman gets so many routine chances that fielding percentage drifts irrelevantly close to one. Are there any defensive metrics specific to first base that measure the difficulty of each throw he must catch and how well a player does on difficult throws? That would seem like a better metric than fielding percentage or coverage of zone on ground balls.
  10. PDX Twin
    Does he talk about the financial and social segregation aspects of new ballparks? At the Met, everyone was essentially together. Some tickets were more expensive than others, of course, but it was a communal experience and if you put up the price of a box seat you could be sitting next to a CEO. The Metrodome allowed for private boxes, which created huge revenues for the club(s) and allowed the privileged to drink better liquor, eat better food, and avoid mingling with the masses. Target Field extended this model to include not only private boxes, but segregated the entire section behind home plate. Again, more revenue and more tiers of social segregation. Attending baseball games, like so many other activities, has become much less of a "shared social experience" in the last 50 years. Perhaps a small cause, or perhaps a small result, of the polarization that is so apparent in our economics and our politics.
  11. PDX Twin
    This seems almost absurdly optimistic from where I sit. I don't think we have any season at all and the impact may extend well into the fall, cutting into fall and winter sports next year.
  12. PDX Twin
    And beyond this, apart from first-base-open situations, intentional walks work best when you have one threatening hitter in the middle of a bunch of weaklings. The Twins' lineup, if healthy, has no weaklings. If they decide to walk Cruz or Donaldson, the next hitter (who might even be Cruz or Donaldson) is likely to make them pay.
  13. PDX Twin
    If a club like the Twins (or Cleveland) is not going to be able to retain top stars beyond 6 years, it makes sense to grab guys who already have the extra years of development in college. If we draft a collegian and he joins at 22, he makes the majors at maybe 26 and is a free-agent at 32. (Gibson followed roughly this model.) We've gotten at least the early part of his best years. Contrast with Berrios who makes the majors at 22 and potentially leaves at 28 with some of his best years ahead of him (in another shirt).
  14. PDX Twin
    Didn't Blankenhorn play a lot of 3B coming through the system? He seems like a more realistic short-run possibility than Cavaco and Miranda.
  15. PDX Twin
    Unpopular sentiment, but I'm prepared for disappointment. A couple of nagging injuries in spring training, a couple of bad bounces, and a couple of ineffective starts could leave us 0-10. There's a lot of luck in the game and the Twins were very lucky last year. I'm hoping it continues, but it might not.
  16. PDX Twin
    I fear that Polanco will lead the league in (throwing) errors.
  17. PDX Twin
    No doubt the new tech has its place and can improve performance. But so do these "old-fashioned" concepts. It doesn't matter how hard you throw or how much spin you can put on the ball if it's not a strike. Advancing runners surely has its place and contributes to runs. Working counts is crucial, as we know from watching a player like Arraez and how his patience improves not only his own success, but those of the batters to follow him who get to watch lots of pitches. I want the Twins to use every legal and ethical method to get better, but that means using the new technologies AND “throwing strikes”, “advancing runners” and “working counts”.
  18. PDX Twin
    Seismic shift, indeed. Reducing MLB to rubble! Just no, no, and no! Sorry, this would cause me to completely turn off.
  19. PDX Twin
    How can we ever hope to predict this? It will depend on his effectiveness, the effectiveness of many other pitchers, and the health situations of both him and others. About all we could possibly say now is that he will have a chance to be in the rotation as long as he is successful and healthy.
  20. PDX Twin
    I'm not sure to which Slavic country his ancestry belongs, but in all of the ones I know the ending "c" is pronounced "ts" if there is no accent and "ch" if there is an accent (whose shape varies among languages). And the "o" is always what we would think of as a long sound. It seems certain (to me) that his family has changed the pronunciation to fit the spelling rather than the other way around. Based on very little analysis and only limited observation, it seems like changing the pronunciation and keeping the spelling is more common with languages that use the Roman alphabet (Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, and Croatian). This would make sense because their immigration documents would have that spelling and (apart from the annoying American/English habit of simply dropping accent marks) they would have to go through legal hassles to change the spelling. Changing the spelling seems more common for those that use whose native languages use the Cyrillic alphabet (Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian). This also would make sense because the names on their immigration documents would have to be translated across languages, so it would be natural to, for example, substitute "ch" or "tch" (or "tz") for the ending "c." Any linguists out there who can verify or correct this?
  21. PDX Twin
    Question: Is there any hope left for the late "great prospect" Romero? Was he just not good enough? Or did the Twins' coaching staff not do what they needed to do to allow him to develop? Or is there still hope that he could be refined into something useful?
  22. PDX Twin
    They didn't do very well last year, and they won't do very well this year either. I've studied predictions in economics for years and two things are very clear: 1. Predictions look more like the past than the future they are predicting. 2. Everyone's prediction looks pretty much alike, and they look much more like each other than they look like what they are predicting. It seems like baseball predictions are pretty much the same.
  23. PDX Twin
    On my one and only trip to Target Field (so far) a few years ago, they were giving out Dozier shirts. They had S and XL (nothing in between), so I got an XL. It was too small. (I normally wear an L comfortably.) I'm not sure if this was mislabeled, if it was a children's size, or if their sizing is carried over from the 18th century.
  24. PDX Twin
    Red Sox = Yankees + Beards
  25. PDX Twin
    A lovely sentence (except for the presumably missing "to" before "rue"). My compliments!
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