PDX Twin

Seismic shift, indeed. Reducing MLB to rubble! Just no, no, and no! Sorry, this would cause me to completely turn off.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

Red Sox = Yankees + Beards

A lovely sentence (except for the presumably missing "to" before "rue"). My compliments!

I like Graterol's potential enough that I fear the Twins Maeda mistake.

The end of your comment reminds me how much I miss Sunday double-headers!

Well, in the Midwest the obvious one would be "North," ... or "South."

This successful move also makes me more confident that the actually DID make a move for the pitchers they lost this year and last. The Donaldson move was rational, as you point out in the article, and I suspect that their moves for the lost pitchers were also rational, as must be the case for a team with a binding budget constraint. Sometimes the rational offer is not enough. But we as fans can never know what that offer was, so we are left to wonder whether the team actually made an offer at all.

Chopin's "Raindrop" Prelude?

I like these solutions. The only one that would likely work for this season is #4. An alternative might be to blur out the catcher's signal as they do for "indecent" exposure on newscasts. That would keep Dick & Bert in the dark, which might actually be a good thing. Broadcasters of American football somehow manage to do the job without knowing what play is being called.

Here's how I look at the Twins starting pitching situation, assuming things go to form and there are no unexpected injuries (which, of course, there will be): The suspension and injury-recovery to Pineda and Hill are a uniquely useful opportunity. We have at least four starting pitchers who are ready for auditions. We NEED to learn more about whether they are MLB capable. The two MIA veterans give us 20+ starts for these youngsters to make their cases in early-season games where there's not a lot of obvious pressure (though every game counts in the end). No doubt there will be additional opportunities for these kids with injuries later in the year, but those are often just single-game patches rather than an actual run in the rotation. Then, in May/June, when the pennant race starts to take shape and the pressure begins to build, we have two excellent veterans coming in to fill any holes. Sounds like a perfect fit to me: young pitchers getting a chance to prove themselves at the beginning and solid veterans ready for the stretch run (and, if applicable, post-season). Based on the youngsters' performances, we know much more about the situation going forward. Do we need to add a starter at the deadline? How many starters do we need next off-season and how aggressively should we pursue extensions for Odorizzi, Hill, and Bailey? Without the early-season void created by the MIAs, we would still have the same lack of information about in-house prospects that we have now. I'd prioritize learning over buying a fill-in, unless the fill-in is obviously better than the expected performance of the best of whichever of the four youngsters turns out to be best.

For me, that was because of low expectations rather than high achievement. Mauer's defense at first was Gold Glove quality for his last years. Cron's defense was, maybe, above average. I'd be interested to know how many throwing errors Polanco committed last year vs. 2018 and how many of these were throws in the dirt. My imperfect memory says that happened a lot.

I wonder how much of Polanco's apparent decline in 2019 is the Mauer effect. He had Cron catching the sinkers and stinkers that he threw to first last year instead of a Gold Glove catcher who had spent most of his life learning to block balls in the dirt.

Do we have evidence that Buxton is going to be fully recovered by ST, or even by opening day? I remember reading that there was some question about that.

This is a bit off topic, but my prediction is that launch angle will be much less important this year than last. The softer ball will transform home runs into fly balls and fly balls into pop ups. Exit velocity is crucial because hard hit balls are more likely to be successful regardless of angle.

This is useful, but how about an analysis of how many home runs were more than 15 feet beyond the fence? That would, I think, tell us more about the likely transformation of homeruns into outs for each player, under the (invalid) assumption that they hit the ball equally well next year.

In case there was any doubt before, this season is now destined to be an Odyssey!

Well, things have consistently happened when the Twins have made the post-season. And those things have consistently started with "L."

I know it's just a typo, but this made me laugh. An image popped into my head of a 280-pound Sano trying to stab an incoming throw with a dagger.

I like the comparison to Morris. He's a long way from that right now, but that would be his ceiling. And if he were to reach it, he would be near the top of the Twins' rotation.

I'm sorry, but that's just silly. Payroll is the cost of getting what we want, not the metric by which we should measure its quality. If the Twins can improve by spending $120m or $110m, then that's what they'll do. Spending more money *might* buy more quality, but as the premise of your article suggests, nothing is anywhere close to certain. I will be satisfied if the 2020 Twins contend to win an improved division. Given so many players who are likely to regress and the likelihood of a greater burden of injuries, anything more will be a surprise, whether they pay out for a big free agent or spend $30m less. Washington seems to have done pretty well after unloading last year's mega-bucks star, who went to a Philadelphia team that only managed to improve from 80-82 to 81-81.