chpettit19

That is the conundrum the league faces. They keep watching star arms fall, but there's no chance the players or teams change their pitching strategies because they'd turn every lineup into Betts-Ohtani-Freeman on repeat. No idea how they fix it.

It's just so hard for guys that size to succeed at baseball. Such long levers to get under control consistently. Chances are he never even sniffs the majors, but it's a fun story. If he can't make contact with AA pitching he certainly isn't going to do it with major league pitching.

You have to have a bad starter in the 5th spot. It's in the CBA I'm pretty sure.

Have they really had anyone under this regime who was worthy of being called up at 21? I think the bigger reason they keep guys in the minors these days is their misguided effort to sustain depth at the cost of taking a shot at more talented players.

If it's mid-May and he hasn't slowed down and they are still struggling with corner outfield offense he should absolutely get the call. Michael Harris debuted for the Braves on May 28th in 2022 with a jump straight from AA where he'd just debuted at the start of that season at age 21. He played 43 AA games before debuting and ripping off a .297/.339/.515/.853 slash line in 114 MLB games in 2022. I'd sign up for that route from Emma in his age 21 season in a heartbeat.

Not sure he really got more over the top. At least not drastically. He sat pretty consistently between 1.5 ft and 2 ft of horizontal release throughout the appearance. Between just under 6' and about 6.5' of vertical release the whole game as well. His release points from the catcher POV from innings 1 through 6 below. Some slight fade towards the middle, but I don't think it was anything crazy. The important thing with his change in arm slot is about getting more velo and he maintained that just fine throughout the start. Last fastball clocked at 93.8 MPH on pitch 77 will play just fine for him.

I really hope this isn't right. Not saying it isn't, just hoping it isn't. If he's as important to their future as it appears people think he is they need to sacrifice some reliever depth to call up a Kiersey or Helman or Prato type if Emma isn't ready. Don't mess with his development because you don't want to DFA Matt Bowman or Daniel Duarte. Shoot, DFA Severino or Larnach if they're not an answer before you mess with Emma's development. His 'readiness' needs to be factor 1, 2, 3, and 4 if he's someone you're expecting to be a franchise cornerstone. I fear you may be correct, but I really hope you aren't. Or that he just proves to be ready when needed and none of this is even a concern. That'd be ideal.

I'd say through May if he doesn't slow down. If he goes through a cold spell then a month after he gets back to crushing.

I expect Varland to get 2 or 3 more starts before they make any rotation moves. SWR looked good for sure, but it's still very early. He has plenty more proving to do of his own. I'd bet they give them each another 2 weeks and 3 starts to see where they're at and then it may be a switch that's made to put Louie in the AAA rotation and give SWR a shot with the big club. Can't imagine they put Varland back in the pen before late August or September, though. Simply can't take another pitcher out of your rotation depth without being forced to. If Louie goes back to the pen at the end of the year (I expect that's how it turns out) he's more than likely there for good. His rotation clock is ticking. The silver lining is that he looked like he could be really, really good out of the pen. It's not the end of the world, but I'm sure he'd be a little bummed. Easier to survive HR problems in the pen. I expect his BB% to come back down as the season moves forward, but suppressing the HRs is going to be a harder development for him.

Isn't the last year of Polanco's contract. He has a team option for next year as well.

I know they weren't 2 of the three or four best hitters on the team, but they got the 3rd and 4th most PAs. The point is that the 26/27th (they both started in the majors so it'd be the 25th/26th, but that's splitting hairs) guys still get a ton of at bats so purposefully filling those spots with short side bats or guys you don't expect to be much above average is a bad strategy. Even without injuries the Twins love to rest guys and get everyone playing time to "stay fresh." There is no position on the Twins 26- or 40-man rosters that should be marked for a guy they don't expect to play often. They actively attempt to play them all often, and they've built around a core of walking injuries. I have no problem with the Arraez trade. The Polanco trade is horrible for the 2024 Twins. Absolutely garbage. Paying Farmer and Santana is a terrible strategy. Kyle Farmer has publicly, on the record, stated that he expected to be non-tendered because of his price tag and was surprised when they offered him that deal. When a player is openly admitting you paid too much for him it's terrible team building. DeSclafani wasn't some throw in on the Polanco deal. They gave him a rotation spot. When you put that in the ever growing list of injured pitchers, and injury prone position players, this team collects in the name of "cheap" talent acquisition and see what it's actually cost it's a highly questionable strategy. When you back up your "cheap" injury filled top line talent with over paid, short side platoon bats, or utterly replaceable league average talent you don't get to then play the "well Solano and Castro weren't supposed to play that much" card. Their team building strategy is based on 2 conflicting ideas. Pay less for higher injury risk players (Correa, Buxton) and actively injured pitchers (Paddack, Mahle, DeSclafani) paired with extreme platooning so they can acquire/pay cheaper players to fill short side platoon positions. When you add in the unfortunate fact that Lewis and Kirilloff also can't seem to stay healthy (which they've known for years now) you get a team filled with short side platoon bats and cheap veterans trying to carry the team with everyday at bats for much of the season. And, so far, it hasn't worked at all. When you actively plan to use all of your guys frequently it is a bad strategy to prioritize lesser players who you hope only have to play lesser roles.

The bolded part is the point. When combined with your previous statement that they prioritize those guys over Steer it is 100% the point. They are prioritizing worse players in the name of depth. Steer provides just as much depth as either Solano or Castro does (1 player's worth) while being better. They prioritize short side of a platoon bats over better players in the name of depth and ideal, on paper lineups. They're sacrificing skill for perceived depth and wishful thinking that their lesser players will play less. That'd be all well and good if Solano and Castro put up 110 and 105 OPS+ as part-time depth pieces, but they weren't part-time depth pieces they were full-time starting pieces. If the guys with the 3rd and 4th most PAs on your team have 110 and 105 OPS+ you can't be shocked when your offense is inconsistent at best. Injuries happen. All the time. Especially when you build around 3 guys with long injury histories (Buxton, Lewis, Kirilloff) and sign a guy who failed 2 physicals (Correa). They end up playing Solano, Castro, and now Santana types every day, and seem to be confused as to why the offense isn't very good most of the time. Prioritizing weak depth over actual talent while pairing it with injury prone stars is exactly how you get league average guys, or short side of a platoon guys, playing everyday while your offense struggles. It shouldn't be surprising that continuing to follow that strategy is continuing to have the same results.

And that's the problem. Donavon Solano was 3rd on the team in PAs last year. That's the role he played. He walked to the plate more times than anyone but Correa and Kepler. Castro was 4th. They're sacrificing ceiling for floor then they're shocked when they can't win playoff games for 20 years. If you think Solano and Castro had good years for the guys taking the 3rd and 4th most trips to the plate for the Twins we'll just have to agree to disagree. They had good years for the roles they were supposed to fill on paper. But, as some of us are trying to point out, paper roles don't mean anything. The roles they actually played were full time players on a team with deep playoff run aspirations. They aren't the guys you want stepping to the plate more than all but 2 guys on your team. Just like Santana shouldn't be, but will be. Margot was acquired as CF depth. I assume you're talking about Emma as the top prospect, but comparing him to Steer who almost immediately made his big league debut after being traded is a bad comparison. Emma hadn't stepped foot on a AA field before this season. Counting on him over a Margot type is very different than counting on Steer over Solano. Whether you want to say depth or logjam, it's the same to me. It's all fake news. They don't have real depth if your major league depth to start the season is made up of easily replaceable pieces you hope are simply league average, or only hit against lefties. It's the same thing for the logjam. There's no logjam if all you're looking at is the 8 starting fielding positions on opening day. Their definition of depth and/or a logjam is why they're never a real threat in the playoffs.

Solano likely never would've even been signed had Steer been here. But, even if he were, prioritizing Solano types over Steer types is the problem. Them not giving a chance to Steer is a flashing neon sign of a problem for this FO. Prioritizing Solano, Gallo, Castro, Farmer, and Santana types over Steer types is how you end up with this fake logjam of guys who's ceilings are "average, utterly replaceable MLB player."

Santana hitting 2 hole against righties and 8 hole against lefties summarizes your stance pretty well. Literally the opposite of how you'd want it. Actually, worse than that because you don't even want him hitting 8 against righties. Just brutal.

Emma is on the 40-man already. Jair Camargo was called up today.

Ippei was the only person in the room with the agent, bookkeeper, and financial advisor who spoke Japanese. He told them Ohtani wanted them to track all of his accounts except for that one. On one occasion he's accused of telling the agent and his team that Ohtani was sick and having a meeting with them alone where he told them Ohtani wanted that account to be private. The affidavit suggests that Ippei used the language barrier to his full advantage.

https://theathletic.com/5409393/2024/04/11/shohei-ohtani-interpreter-affidavit-takeaways/ Pretty good breakdown of the affidavit here for anyone with an Athletic account. Sounds like Ohtani really never even accessed that account and Ippei just turned it into his own personal account.

Come on. There's a vast difference between team wins and losses and pitcher wins. They're really not comparable at all. You can like the stat and defend it without comparing it to team wins.

There won't be any real update on him until May. He's doing no activity for a month before they re-evaluate him. So likely a minimum of a month and a half from time of injury to earliest return.

Kepler is an interesting case in any discussion. He was just the lefty they gave ABs to last year and he did well so I just wanted to use him and their main RH platoon bat (Farmer) as the examples. It's all small sample size stuff (97 PAs for Kep) so there's certainly going to be some noise in there. My main point is that being worse against lefties than righties doesn't automatically make you unplayable against lefties. That's what Gleeman's article was mostly pointing at. Lefties are almost universally worse against lefties than righties so it makes sense to platoon, but worse doesn't have to equal bad. Freeman, Soto, Harper, Alvarez, etc. are truly very good hitters against lefties still. Not as good as against righties, but still very dangerous. If you think you have a truly great lefty hitter there's real reasons to believe he can be pretty good against lefties. At least they can be good enough to not be blindly platooned. Agree, the future lineup potentially requires multiple of these guys to turn into better than 100 OPS+/wRC+ bats against lefties or they'll get sliced up by lefties. Will be interesting to see how they approach that. The Orioles are awfully lefty/switch heavy right now, with more on the way. They let Henderson leadoff verse lefties so they clearly have a different philosophy than the Twins. Hopefully the Twins are keeping an eye on them.

I also read Gleeman's article and it softened my stance on the obsessive platooning, but it also got me wondering if there's been any improvements over time. What tools did Tony Oliva have at his disposal to improve against lefties? For that matter, what did Mauer and Morneau have available to them? Is it swing style/type differences between righties and lefties that cause the struggle? Is it exposure to lefties? Likely some combination of both of those, plus other, factors. But we're smarter now. We have better tools at our disposal (Trajekt machine type technology for example). There's only so much you can do about swing differences, but if it's exposure we can do that pretty easily. Video boards aren't the same, and practice isn't the same, but there should be some room for growth and improvement by attacking the exposure problems if that's the driving force here. There were 54 lefthanded batters who faced lefthanded pitchers in at least 90 PAs last year. I chose 90 because that's how low I had to go to get a Twins hitter in the list. But of those 54 batters, 29 of them had at least a 100 wRC+. Are lefties worse against lefties than righties? Absolutely. Almost universally. But worse doesn't always equal bad. Jazz Chisolm was legitimately bad with a 29 wRC+ against them in 94 PAs. Freddie Freeman was legitimately great with a 174 wRC+ against them in 218 PAs. Max Kepler was the only Twin on the list and he had a 108 wRC+ against lefties. If Julien can get to a 108 wRC+ against lefties while maintaining something in the 130+ wRC+ range (he was at 151 last year) against righties does it really make sense to ever pinch hit Kyle Farmer and his 117 wRC+ against lefties and 93 against righties before what's likely to be that spots last time up in the game? If you have a legitimately good to great lefty hitter who can OPS+ or wRC+ 100 or better against lefties I find it hard to see any situation where you'd be pinch hitting for them before the 8th or 9th.

I'd say the Trajekt machine is lightyears more useful than generic batting practice. Live batting practice with a major league, or upper minors, pitcher legitimately trying to get you out would probably be better. But live batting practice with some indy ball pitcher you pick up because you're not going to use your legit arms for that is probably not as useful, and certainly not significantly more useful than a Trajekt machine. Being able to go put in Chris Sale's slider and release point is more useful than a 55 year old lefty on the mound spinning you balls that don't really break significantly or anything before a game against Chris Sale, no? These aren't your typical pitching machines anymore. Julien was legitimately facing balls that moved exactly like Sale, Kershaw, Valdez, Snell, Luzardo thrown balls. I find it hard to believe that's not more effective than any batting practice he was going to get outside of having Thielbar and Funderburk up there throwing him 100 pitches. Obviously nothing matches game action, but when it comes to work done outside of a game it's pretty hard to beat facing pitches thrown with the exact release point and spin characteristics of the best pitches in the game. These aren't your same old pitching machines.

I do know that the Twins, and many other teams, do matchup based groupings based on the types of splits you were talking about, plus pitch angle for swing angle analysis, and more. They have an incredible amount of insane data that tracks which pitch types an individual player's swing is best suited to hit. Julien, for example, has a very steep vertical bat angle. The Twins know that that's likely a large reason why he swings and misses at breaking balls so much. The good news for Julien is that his bat angle is pretty similar to Freddie Freeman's, and Freeman is very good against lefties so there's a chance for him to make some adjustments. The data they have now is insane. Vertical bat angle is 1 data point, but they have so many others that they can piece together to breakdown swings and how likely they are to be successful against different individual pitcher's pitches. They have all that, but I'm not sure they've really figured out how to deploy it all best yet because the game dictates what moves they can make and when so while you can want to get a certain hitter against a certain pitcher the game situation may never allow for it.

For Julien's sake, I hope you're wrong on this. He spent the offseason using the Trajekt machine to learn to hit lefties. The machines these days are pretty fancy. That machine has a video screen that shows a pitcher winding up and throwing the ball from any release point, and the ability to mimic the spin of actual MLB pitches. It's pretty impressive stuff, and I'd think it could be quite effective in allowing lefties to get as many reps as they want/need against "lefties" to improve their abilities.