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2wins87

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Everything posted by 2wins87

  1. 2wins87
    Well there is Alcala, but I don't think we should hope that he'll make that big of a difference. Can't base too much off one game. Duran is still really good. The bullpen as a whole is...ok. they shut down the Yankees Wednesday and imploded yesterday, so they are somewhere in between. Definitely an area that they should try to improve before the trade deadline. The pitching staff as a whole is still at least another year away from actually being good. The first month where the humidor probably suppressed offense a ton gave a bit of a false impression. When healthy, this pitching staff might be marginally better than what we thought of it coming into the season, but it's going to be frustrating at times.
  2. 2wins87
    It helps also that Larnach has been a solid enough defender that the downgrade from Celestino to Larnach in the field is not so massive. I wanted to comment yesterday after his nice sliding catch but the loss was kind of overshadowing everything. Now, I'm fully aware that he still doesn't have great range, but looking at baseball savant, he seems to have significantly improved the components of his jump from last year. That's probably something he's worked hard on with the coaches and he seems to have made some significant improvements over the offseason. When he does get to the ball he looks smooth, has good body control, and seems to have good hands, which was true even last year. We've also seen that his arm is an asset. Put it all together and you've got a guy who's not going to be the most rangy outfielder but does everything else well enough that he's not going to be a liability in the corners. I remember scouting reports being pretty dismissive of his defense prior to his debut, so it's a nice revelation that he's actually a solid average fielder.
  3. 2wins87
    Miranda played mostly 2B and 3B in the minors. Both those plays were results of getting out of position and being late to the bag. That is the kind of thing that can be improved with experience. I think he looks good fielding and scooping. It's also just very hard to field a team where everyone is a defensive wizard. It's still better to have the least defensively proficient guy at 1B rather than another position, as long as the offense is there.
  4. 2wins87
    Looking at the pitching matchups at the beginning of the week, I thought this game would be their best shot. Archer has looked pretty good at other times this season, but he's had a tendency of falling apart a bit after a few innings. Lets hope tonight was a sign that he's gotten built back up a bit more and might be able to go deeper in the future. On the other side, Cortes has been great the last two seasons but it seemed like he might have been pitching over his head a bit. The Twins' hitters have just been very good the last few games though. They seem to have had good advance scouting reports and have been able to execute on their gameplans. Even without walking early on they were just grinding out at bats and driving up the pitch count. After getting a first hand look the hits started coming the second time through the order. Gerrit Cole will be the toughest challenge yet, but the way the offense has looked maybe there is a chance tomorrow.
  5. 2wins87
    Yeah sure probably. I'd have a few others ahead of him but I think I missed a couple appearances when he looked his best so probably I'll need to watch him more closely. My bullpen hierarchy right now would probably be: Duran Smith Jax Thielbar Pagan Moran Megill Cotton, or whoever else is filling out the bullpen Duffey Spots 5-7 are pretty interchangeable.
  6. 2wins87
    There's plenty of negativity around here so I'm not gonna pile on. First off, the fact that Duffy was in the game is not exactly a sign of lots of trust from Baldelli (and come on, you can't actually expect him to go out to the media and say that one of his players sucks, that'd be a great way to lose the confidence of all of his players). The guys that had pitched the previous innings were Minaya and Cano, who have not really inspired trust from anyone yet this season. In the regular season, when the team is behind, Baldelli is going to go to his lower leverage relievers. He's not alone, a lot of other managers use their relievers pretty similarly, even when their team is close behind like it was last night. It makes sense to keep the best guys ready for close leads and tie games in the future. It would be a lot worse to find yourself with a one run lead tomorrow and to only have your unproven and untrustworthy guys available. I do think there are times to make minor exceptions though, and yesterday could have been one. The way the offense is was battling back and the very uninspiring pitching matchups to come did make me think he should have at least tried a bit harder to keep it close. I would have considered going to more medium leverage guys first. If they couldn't keep it close then the mop up guys would have still been available to close out an ugly loss. It's tough with such a short start though, they really don't have the depth not to use someone pretty shaky with that many innings to cover. I will also say that the ejection was lame. It seems like maybe the idea was to fire up the team a little bit but Baldelli is just not that kind of manager. He really didn't have much of an argument to make after he had chosen to use guys that struggled with control. There were probably as many strikes called below Judge's knees as there were missed calls on strikes by Twins pitchers. I didn't really like it and I don't think it inspired anyone.
  7. 2wins87
    The -17 OAA is for the infield only. It probably wouldn't surprise you to learn that Arraez at -7 (basically from his time at 3B) is the biggest negative contributor. Then it's Urshela -5, and Sano, Miranda, and Correa at -2. The Correa one seems most likely to be a small sample that will change. As far as I can tell most every one else in the infield has been rated about average. And actually, OAA probably shouldn't be used too heavily as a team stat like Petriello does because of the way that it does take into account player positioning. I added up the DRS and OAA for the infield positions on Fangraphs at got -1 DRS and -16 OAA. There is probably some noise in both stats that accounts for some of that big gap, but the other likely explanation is that the Twins infield as a whole has been a lot better than OAA says due to relatively better positioning than other teams. On an individual basis, DRS has Urshela at 0 rather than -5 for OAA. Again, the gap is probably not entirely positioning, but it's hard to argue that he's been a positive defensively. It seems weird from the eye test but the article puts forth a pretty good case for why it's probably true, including a few examples where Urshela was not good using the eye test.
  8. 2wins87
    Just some league adjusted context for Rodriguez. The league OPS is .675. His wRC+ is 203, so 103% better production than league average. I'm looking forward to seeing some more scouting based mid season reports. It would certainly appear from the stats that they've significantly shored up some holes in his swing. In lieu of being able to see broadcasts, I've been looking at the GameDay pitch locations for his at bats lately, which I assume are based on pitch tracking. He seems to pretty consistently just spit on anything near the edge of the zone. He'll get some called strikes on pitches near the edge of the zone, but it looks like an incredibly mature approach overall.
  9. 2wins87
    I think when DFAd he would immediately go on waivers, all teams would have a chance to put in a claim, but there is also a time period while he is on waivers that they can still trade. This only happens when there are multiple teams interested, and the team with the lower waiver wire position wants him enough to offer something in return rather than let him go to the team in the higher position. Usually it doesn't take much for the DFAing team to accept the trade, since the alternative is nothing. I'm not 100% on the details but that's my understanding. I really don't think making up an injury is a possibility at all. Teams have gotten a little loose with using minor issues to create roster flexibility, but there has to be at least some buy in from the player. If they came to Duffey and said "You're injured", he would have a slam dunk labor violation case against the team. I know he still gets paid on the IL but players have incentive to be on the active roster to maximize any potential future earnings, or to at least get a shot with another team if the current one has decided they're not worth playing. I'm sure there is something in the CBA that prevents that kind of egregious behavior from teams.
  10. 2wins87
    Thoughts on Martin... I actually have often been impressed by his speed and overall athleticism when I've watched some AA games. He's not a shortstop though. It seems like with his speed the outfield might make the most sense, though with his burst speed maybe moving to second would cut down on the errors enough and he could be very rangy there. He's also not really like Arraez, no one else is. He does have a very low K rate and solid walk rate (and HBP rate) for someone who isn't hitting for average well. But he's not really a slap hitter which would probably lead to a higher empty batting average. There is probably some bad luck in his BABIP, but he also needs to gain strength and/or tweak his swing mechanics to drive the ball better so his flyballs aren't all caught at the edge of the warning track. Personally I still see enough to think they should continue to be patient. I think just adding a bit more power could help him quite a bit, adding not just to his HR total but also to his BABIP. Where should he be in a prospect list? I think he's been worrisome enough to get knocked out of one of the highest tiers. In my mind his tier would be something like Martin, Canterino, SWR, Rodriguez, Miller, and Steer. I think the athleticism is still too good to move him too far down that tier but it has been discouraging that he just hasn't been able to get going better at the plate, particularly in a league with a very high offensive level.
  11. 2wins87
    They can't simply IL him. There needs to be documentation from the team doctor of an injury and the MLB medical director needs to sign off. Can they find some phantom injury as teams often do? Probably, it would be pretty suspicious though, maybe even enough that the league would actually step in. He's never been on the IL in his major league career so it's not easy to point to an old injury flare up or anything like that. It's hard to point to anything drastic in his pitches that have changed. The fastball has continued to slow slightly, though he lost the most velocity from 2019 to 2020. The curveball characteristics aren't too different either, though it has gotten closer to the league averages as the leaguewide movement has increased somewhat. Probably his control has been just a bit farther off too. I don't know exactly what it is, its probably a combination of a lot of small things. But those statcast hard hit numbers paint a very clear picture. He's been hit very hard. He's had a few short stretches of relative success but I think even within those there were some well hit outs. He's not always going to implode as bad as he did yesterday. I think he can fill a low leverage role while they try to work out who among guys like Moran, Megill, Cotton, etc. are ready for a bigger role. It's not like the bullpen is overflowing as it is. If a few guys step up and he hasn't made much progress in a month or two then maybe we can have the DFA conversation again.
  12. 2wins87
    I do have a theory on the general pervasive angst. I remember a few years ago there was a Nielson study that found that the Cleveland team was the most hated franchise in baseball. This seems odd, until you see there methodology was measuring negative sentiment on the internet. Sure a lot of fans of other teams express negative attitudes about the Yankees and Red Sox and Dodgers, but most fans are talking about the team they root for most of the time, and no other fan base was as self-loathing as Cleveland's. There are probably many reasons for that, but part of it has to be the general futility of Cleveland sports franchises in general. Now the Cavaliers had already snapped the city's overall championship drought several years before the study, but it had been an incredibly long 52 years before that happened. And the baseball team has had it's own issues of being pretty good for most of a 30 year span, but never winning it all. Now, I would bet that most of the fan negativity comes from fans of Minnesota sports in general, not specifically Twins or baseball fans. Many probably are truly more invested in the Vikings than the Twins. And now, after the Cav's win, the Twin Cities might be in the worst championship drought of any city depending on how you look at it. Certainly one of the worst looking at this handy tracker. And the Twins have their own terrible playoff streak going as well, so I get it. But if you can't at least enjoy the wins there might be better hobbies. Let's not be Cleveland.
  13. 2wins87
    I don't know about catcher but he was playing all over in AAA since Lewis was the regular SS most of the time, so he already is sort of getting ready for that role. He has taken pretty good at bats too but so far his batting line says "defensive specialist".
  14. 2wins87
    I'm not sure Megill will be coming back given what we saw from Cotton and I don't want to see him or Pagan in a high leverage situation anyway. Agreed on the W though.
  15. 2wins87
    The lead was 3 runs when he started getting loose and against one of the best lineups in the league, idk, it seems fine to me. The way they have used Duran this year is different from other high leverage guys. He never goes back to back days and usually they try to give him at least 2 days off, but he does frequently go 2 innings. I'm pretty sure that's not a Baldelli invention, rather the front office/training staff have decided it's the best way to transition him to the bullpen. Given those parameters, since he had already started warming up it seemed like a fine plan to me.
  16. 2wins87
    That's fair, I also had that thought and even expected it a little, though I thought bringing in Smith was fine too. Jax will definitely be good to go on Tuesday this way, where maybe he's a little more of maybe if he goes two innings and runs up the pitch count in the second inning
  17. 2wins87
    I think the Twins may have been very lucky there was no rule 5 since Palacios was left off the 40-man and certainly could have been taken as a good defensive backup at SS. We should be realistic that in all likelihood he will only be a defensive backup SS/utility player though. After all he's only got a .450 OPS in the majors. Not to be negative, I actually thought he deserved a spot on the 40-man coming into this year, and I think if given a chance he'll produce enough offense to be a good backup/utility guy as well. I don't think Lewis nor certainly Palacios should prevent them from discussing an extension though. It'll probably be a moot point since I don't think they will offer anything close to Correa's desired contract. And Lewis could at least make them feel less urgency to really try.
  18. 2wins87
    Feels like a lazy take in this case. All the moves worked great until Duffey, and it's pretty clear that Duffey wasn't supposed to be part of the plan. Duran would have gone 2 had he not been hit in the leg. It was a 5 run lead going into the 9th, so Rocco reasonably thought it was probably best not to push Duran too hard on a probably very sore leg. Even 5 runs proved to be a small lead for Duffey to protect today, though I don't think that we can blame Rocco for thinking that literally anyone in the bullpen should have been able to hold the lead. I have sometimes been critical of Rocco's feel for the bullpen. I think today we were starting to see the bullpen roles changing though. Jax was brought into the set up mix to face the heart of the Jays' lineup and Pagan and Duffey were nowhere in the plans. I think this is good, and I think we have seen the nail in the coffin for Duffey as a high leverage reliever. Unless he really starts to look like his old self in his new low/medium lever role. He's just been giving up so much hard contact though, I don't have too much hope. I hope we will see the top of the bullpen coalesce around Duran, Smith, and Jax now, which seems to be what's happening. It's pretty unclear who should be next on the list right now, I would probably put Thielbar who has actually been very solid over the last month+ now.
  19. 2wins87
    Cotton's changeup was dancing last night. He's now looking pretty good on the season in a not insignificant sample. I wonder if he can stick around to try to prove it this time. There will be a big roster shuffle and I can't even remember who is actually on the 40 man and who is only there because of the COVID breakout/restricted list. I think he could replace Megill after this weekend, but I'm not sure Megill even has a 40-man spot once Correa, Ryan, and Celestino start coming back. Moran has also been pretty good in his infrequent appearances, though walks continue to be his enemy. Seems to be a bit of a trend forming in the last two years. They always seem to have the makings of a good bullpen, but between the young guys being a bit unproven and the veterans being shaky at times, you're never sure who they ought to be trusting in the high leverage spots.
  20. 2wins87
    With Camargo's recent promotion, Wichita now has 5 guys on their roster who have handled some catching duties this year. With a few promotions the Saints should easily be able to put 5 or 6 catchers on the field.
  21. 2wins87
    No, it's not inaccurate. Vaccines have been shown to both reduce the likelihood of infection and reduce forward transmission to others in those who do get infected. Just because they aren't perfect in those areas doesn't mean they don't work. Here is some science: https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/20210722/gold-standard-study-mrna-vaccines-prevent-infection https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o298
  22. 2wins87
    There is some room for debate about the efficacy of different measures, but there is still logic behind the vaccination requirement. The point of the vaccine is to lower transmission rates. While visiting a country a person is going to be a part of the population. As long as there is still some virus circulating in the population everyone is at risk of getting it and continuing the spread further. An unvaccinated (or less vaccinated) person will be a higher risk to the whole population. Could they make a special rule for athletes who are undergoing routine testing anyway? Probably. Should they? I don't know, people don't generally like rules that are selective.
  23. 2wins87
    There are cardiac complications associated with getting COVID as well. Here is a Link to a report on a study in particular looking at cardiac arrest in the period before vaccines were available. I can't speak to all potential side effects, but many of the potential bad outcomes that have been associated with the vaccines are much more likely to occur from getting COVID itself. The risk calculation shouldn't be whether there is any tiny chance of an adverse effect from the vaccine but whether it will lower your overall risk of having adverse health effects (including getting COVID). Not to mention whether getting it will reduce the risk of bad health outcomes to those around you. I don't begrudge anyone for making decisions that they think are right. But I don't believe the evidence taken as a whole supports the decision not to get vaccinated for the vast majority. I don't really expect to change anyone's mind, but I would hope people would take the effort to learn about all of the risks, not just those associated with the vaccine. And also consider that we don't know any more about the long term effects of COVID than we do about the vaccine.
  24. 2wins87
    Not really shocked by any of these names. I supposed I wouldn't have been totally surprised by any name, there are vaccination stances that cut across politics even if it has gotten more polarized recently. Kepler seems to keep quiet about his personal politics but I kind of had a feeling. I hope both the Twins and Jays are in the playoffs and at least one or two change their minds before then.
  25. 2wins87
    In addition to the potential lack of durability, the fact that he doesn't have a true changeup is probably a big part of the reason that his stats as a starter last year weren't nearly as good as they are as a reliever this year. His unique splinker is the result of them trying to develop a changeup (splitter). It doesn't have a big velo difference from his fastball, and at its worst he's probably basically just getting sinker action, and not enough vertical drop that you see from a good splitter. The splinker has basically been his only weakness, and he's mostly gone away from the pitch after the Orioles hit back to back home runs off of it. I think it could still be a good pitch when mixed in more sparingly as a reliever, and hopefully he can still refine the movement/velocity. I think he is probably one of those guys that is just much more effective as a reliever.
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