John Bonnes

Nick just found this tidbit from Alden Gonzalez, the Angels beat writer: http://aldengonzalez.mlblogs.com/2012/09/25/question-of-the-day-925/ That's one more pretty big name on the market. Even after a pretty mediocre year in which he had back problems, the 32-year-old is going to get a multi-year deal if he wants it. That's another $20M guy on the market to push names down to the Twins level. I would LOVE to see his offers dip to the point where the Twins would consider him.

I'll interrupt the BA/OBP/OPS discussion for an update. Mauer is still in second (.3232), but he's just a smidge ahead of Trout (.3226). Cabrera (.3266) still leads the race, still essentially two hits ahead of Mauer. The Twins don't play today, but Detroit has a noon game. Cabrera would need to go 0-7 to slip behind Mauer in the race, but going 0-6 puts them nearly in a dead heat (.3234).

That would be a nice way to knock a couple of million dollars off the payroll, if they dan do it. It sounds like the Twins would likely need to eat some of that money, but if another team is intetersted in Nishi, and he wants to go to them, the TWins might not need to pay a good chunk of the $3M they owe him next year. (Think we can find a Japanese team interested in Blackburn, too?) :-)

Actually, batting average is FAR from useless. It's been years since I crunched the numbers, but as I recall, the correlation between team's batting average and their runs scored is something like .95. It's just tht with OPS it's like .99.

Sorrry. It's $12 & ou can buy it here: http://astore.amazon.com/sabrwebsite-20/detail/1933599227

Seth, that's not true. Revere and Span get credit for getting themselves to 3B.

I wonder if the Reds would be open to trading SS Zack Cozart? Can Billy Hamilton play SS in the big leagues?

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And as soon as I write that, I find one.... The Blue Jays are tired of Yunel Escobar's antics, it appears. (He's "a goner.") He has a $5M contract next year and team options for $5M for the next two years. Seems like a decent target to me. He had a bad year this year, but no more terrible than any Twin will have, and he's 29, and his career OPS is 744. OK, who else comes to mind...

One thing we write for the TwinsCentric Minnesota Twins Offseason GM Handbook are possible trade candidates, which usually includes names that have been rumored to be available or somehow make sense for the Twins to attempt to acquire. The toughest part is coming up with realistic names. Any ideas out there? Or guys you woudl like to see profiled in that section? One idea I had while talking with Jason Collette of DRaysBay last weekend was Rays pitchers. According to Jason, the Rays are going to need to go hard after some offense after a dismal offensive season from their lineup. Span would make a lot of sense for them, as might Willingham (or Parmelee?). So some Rays pitchers or pitching prospects might be in play. What other teams or players come to mind? I'm not talking about dream players - I'm talking about realistic targets.

Stupid survey template title that I pay no attention to......my bad.

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Oddly, a lot of sabrmetric geeks I know don’t like the Win Probability Added (WPA) statistic. I don’t want to speak for them as to why, but the comment I hear that drives me the craziest is something like “All you have to do is see that Erik Komatsu was more valuable then Ben Revere to understand that it is worthless.” It drive me crazy because 15 years ago, I would hear the same question from baseball traditionalists when I’d suggest that an on-base machine like Bobby Abreu was more valuable than a guy with 20 more RBI. And I would say “Yes, that’s exactly what that means.” And I felt confident because: wins for a team correlates closely with run differential and the runs a team scores mirrors closely their On-base Plus Slugging (OPS) and a team’s OPS built is on their players’ OPS and Bobby Abreu has a crazy good OPS. And they would say, “That’s nice that you have all those correlations and stuff, but Abreu only had 79 RBI last year!” They might agree with the method, but couldn’t accept the results. To me, that’s just being closed minded. Similarly, I believe in the method of computing WPA. Here’s how it works: Analyzing dozens of years of baseball, you compute every game situation and how often a team in that situation won or lost the game. So, for instance, a home team that has runners on the corners and one out and is down by a run may have won games 55% of the time. Give the batter and the pitcher credit for how much they change those probabilities. So if the batter bounces into a double play, and the percent chance drops to 30%, then the batter loses .25 points and the pitcher gains .25 points. Do this for every play of every game throughout the year. It’s not perfect – it doesn’t take into account fielding. If also isn’t especially predictive. And a player who plays a lot has plenty of opportunities for negative scores as well as positive scores. However, it also is not dependent on other players; the player who is on third isn’t affected by the batter who grounds into the double play. And it rewards players who make big hits – hits that change the course of the game. Finally, if you look at the players with the highest and lowest WPA at the end of the game, it is almost never a surprise. It lines up with who you, as a fan, thought the heroes and goats of the game were. In fact, I have rarely heard anyone criticize the method. It’s fairly simple to understand and, though it means handling a lot of data, the logic is straight-forward and elegant. But the results…that’s a different story. And that will be the case when you see the Twins WPA this year. Today we’ll start with the hitters and get to the pitchers next time: [ATTACH=CONFIG]2394[/ATTACH] I suspect few people have trouble with the top two names on the list. Willingham not only had an enormous positive impact in games amongst Twins, his is one of the highest in the majors. It is the 2nd highest, right now, in the American League, sandwiched between Mike Trout and Miguel Cabrera. (Actually, Cabrera is fourth. Edwin Encarnacion is in 3rd, .05 points above Cabrera. And fifth in the AL belongs to the next name on that list – Joe Mauer. He’s currently above Prince Fielder but a few percentage points. For all the talk about how “clutch” Mauer might not be and how many double-plays he grounds into, Mauer has had an enormous positive impact on the Twins this year. Statistically, it’s not debatable. On the other hand, I suspect some folks are going to have trouble accepting that Ryan Doumit and Ben Revere have, offensively at least, cost the Twins several wins. Statistically, both have been fairly strong, but overall, they’ve had a lot more negative impacts on games than positive impacts so far this year. Because of that, they rank lower than subs that aren’t even with the team any more like …. well, Erik Komatsu. That doesn’t mean the statistic is worthless. It just means Revere (and Doumit) didn’t have the offensive impact that we would have like to have seen. Of this, I’m confident.

Meow, that's a shame. Your answers were supposed to go straight to Ilsa, a buxom Swedish masseuse. Better luck next time.

No. But your answers were fine.

That must be what happens after you have too many Tickle Me Pinks.

snepp is right. :-) That's how we track our page views, etc. Thanks again to everyone that take the time, however little, to fill this out. It's very important to potential partners, and is the kind of small thing that can really help the site reach more people.

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Aaron sips a pink libation. John begs their listeners to take a quick survery for recruiting sponsors. Then they chat about whether Sam Deduno belong, whether the Twins can and should re-sign Scott Baker, how one characterizes the starting pitching market, Liam Hendriks first "W," the MLB television deal and what it means for the Twins payroll, the switch from Beloit to Cedar Rapids, and honors bestowed by Baseball America on some Twins prospects. Then they answer mailbag about the Minnesota Twins and compare blogging to podcasting. the podcasts the rss feed if you want to subscribe and the podcast on iTunes.

Aaron sips a pink libation. John begs their listeners to take a quick survery for recruiting sponsors. Then they chat about whether Sam Deduno belong, whether the Twins can and should re-sign Scott Baker, how one characterizes the starting pitching market, Liam Hendriks first "W," the MLB television deal and what it means for the Twins payroll, the switch from Beloit to Cedar Rapids, and honors bestowed by Baseball America on some Twins prospects. Then they answer mailbag about the Minnesota Twins and compare blogging to podcasting. the podcasts the rss feed if you want to subscribe and the podcast on iTunes.