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”.

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

I ran across this nice article in the English-language Slovak Spectator about former-Twin Tom Johnson (pitcher from the late 1970s), who is now teaching baseball to kids in Bratislava. https://spectator.sme.sk/c/22326085/american-baseball-homebase-bratislava.html I must admit that in 6 months living in and exploring Bratislava, I never happened on a baseball field! They are huge into hockey, with soccer and individual sports such as cycling and skiing also popular.

Given the recent trend of politicians getting personally involved in immigration issues, maybe it's easier to get a visa if you play for the Yankees...

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.

Relegation would solve the tanking problem. Three 10-team divisions. Bottom 2 (or 3) teams get relegated each year and top 2 or 3 promoted. Lower divisions get less TV/advertising money, so there is a strong incentive to avoid the bottom spots. Could add a firm salary cap to mitigate the "rich get richer" implications. Playoffs would have a few teams from the first division, plus the champions of divisions 2 and 3. If division 3 champ wins the World Series it gets a double promotion to division 1.

Not to mention having the World Series even closer to Christmas.

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!

Aren't we getting ahead of ourselves? We have to beat the Indians and the White Sox enough times to get a chance at the Yankees. We had a bunch of players having career years last year. Some will not replicate that this year. I think on paper we have the best roster in the division, but games aren't played on paper...

But maybe Graterol's son wins the Super Bowl some day!

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

The fact that he has not yet signed *could* mean that he and the Twins have essentially agreed terms and are waiting for Hill's 40-man roster spot to come open to make it formal, no?

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.