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Cap'n Piranha

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Everything posted by Cap'n Piranha

  1. Cap'n Piranha
    Eddie played a total of 14 games, for 98 innings, in a position other than left field; let's not pretend he's a poor man's Marwin all of the sudden. The throw in Fenway was great, but if we're going to start picking individual plays, you have to mention all the times he chased pitches and made outs in key situations as well. If he was playing on a sprained ankle, then that would explain his reduced mobility on defense, but it would not explain his complete lack of plate discipline. Further, if that injury was so debilitating, it would have been better for him to sit--after all, in the second half of last season, Eddie was 106th out of 140 players in OPS at .750, which is only .007 ahead of Pujols, and behind players like Kevin Newman and Anthony Santander. His wRC+ in the second half was 89, which means he was 11% WORSE than the average player. Not for nothing, but Jake Cave had a .964 OPS in the second half and a 150 wRC+, while playing more innings in right and center than Eddie; if those trends continue, it's Eddie that can't hold Cave's jockstrap, not the other way around.
  2. Cap'n Piranha
    Sure, but only after several rounds of ultimately fruitless negotiations with the players where neither side is willing to budge.
  3. Cap'n Piranha
    So for almost 42 years, we disliked Griffith's widely known comments, but didn't care enough to downplay his history with the team; quite the opposite, it was ensured his history with the team was preserved (or so it seemed). If this statue truly makes black people uncomfortable, my question would be if it has always made them uncomfortable, or is that just happening now. If the former, I would then ask if the Twins were told that, and chose not to act, or if it was just not brought up. If the latter, I would ask why there are now uncomfortable feelings when none existed before. Applying the current cultural lens to the past is a very good way to support the erasing of the past, which is well on the way to repeating the past.
  4. Cap'n Piranha
    From the context, it appears he called Carew a fool for accepting a $150k salary, implying that he thought Carew should have looked for more money--I'm not sure why that's so terrible. If I'm missing something or misunderstanding the context, I reserve the right to change my take.
  5. Cap'n Piranha
    Does this include statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom owned slaves? Should one of our states, and our nation's capitol city, be renamed? Should the Declaration of Independence be removed from display?
  6. Cap'n Piranha
    As a student of history, I don't think removing history is ever a good idea. I'm not super familiar with Calvin Griffith, so I don't know if this speech in 1978 was a bad day, or par for the course for him. I do think it's interesting to realize that these comments probably didn't just come to light a couple of weeks ago--that means for years we could recognize the wrongness of what he said, but judge him as a whole, not for a moment in time; we seem to have lost that capability of discernment as a society in the last 4 weeks.
  7. Cap'n Piranha
    Prior to the draft, yes, I'm sure they had talked with a number of players, including these 4, about expectations around signing. That being said, with so little margin for error, it doesn't take a whole lot for everything to blow up. If both Sabato and Soularie all of the sudden decide they want slot, or they'll go back to school, the Twins probably can't sign Raya or Rosario. If the demands for either Raya or Rosario go up as well, could be a problem. I believe the front office did it's homework, and I have no reason to believe they won't be able to sign all 4, but it's far from a guarantee, and I won't feel confident about all 4 signing until they all actually do.
  8. Cap'n Piranha
    As long as Sano continues to make hard contact, he will be fine. The Prince Fielder comp is only a problem for the Twins if they give Sano a Price Fielder contract.
  9. Cap'n Piranha
    I'm intrigued by this idea, but I would tweak a couple of things; I wouldn't put Berrios and Hill back-to-back during the regular season. A piggyback game should yield 7-8 innings from your "starters"; allowing each "starter" to face 18 batters means they could give up a WHIP of 1.5 and still cover 8 innings. Therefore, the bullpen should be needed less on days with piggybacks, so why not space out the rest for the pen? It's also possible the Twins could go to a six-man rotation, and still have two piggybacks, or alternatively, use Dobnak/Thorpe/Smeltzer to be "finishers". I would define that as letting them pitch 2-3 innings to finish out a game the Twins are winning comfortably. Finally, the Twins could also give each pitcher an "IL stint" at various points in the season, where they let them skip a start in order to stay super fresh. The upshot is that the Twins will have myriad options to manage the health and productivity of their pitching, which is something I'm not sure any other team can realistically say at this point.
  10. Cap'n Piranha
    I used to work for Delta, and worked a couple of charter flights. The team is on a coach bus with their equipment and luggage underneath, that rolls right onto the tarmac--no one goes through security (at least not at the airport). I was also speaking exclusively about MLB; whether or not an MiLB season can happen due to a desire to avoid air travel has no bearing on whether or not the MLB season can happen.
  11. Cap'n Piranha
    Your point is exactly the point I'm making; the more teams in the playoffs, the greater the odds of a lesser team advancing, and that includes if the number of teams in the playoffs is 2. If the goal of the playoffs is to crown the "best" team, having any more than 1 team reduces the chance the "best" team wins, and is therefore counterproductive to the point of the playoffs. Logically, it follows that the point of the playoffs (at least from a competition standpoint) is NOT to crown the "best" team, but rather to provide a reduced ecosystem of only the top tier of teams in order to provide a way to adjust for injuries and uneven schedules that might otherwise obscure the identification of the "best" team. As such, expanding the playoffs is completely fine, as long as it doesn't include everyone, which the current proposals do not. You also wouldn't need to shorten the regular season or extend the playoffs into November--simply play 3 game series in the first round, 5 in the second, and 7 for the LCS and WS. That's a maximum of 22 games to win the title, compared to 20 right now.
  12. Cap'n Piranha
    But neither of them can be on first base without their spot in the lineup having first come up in that half inning. You cannot run the bases without first having your lineup spot hit--as such, baserunning is dependent on, and therefore a subset of, hitting. There is not other baseball activity a player needs to perform in order to pitch, field, or hit; that's why those are the only 3 aspects.
  13. Cap'n Piranha
    If the negative part of the playoffs is that it can potentially prevent the "best" team from winning, due to unpredictable hot/cold streaks, shouldn't we just do away with the playoffs all together, and award the trophy to whomever has the best record after the last day of the season?
  14. Cap'n Piranha
    This seems to suggest to me that when you were 10, the internet essentially didn't exist. Does this mean we will never see you post again, in pursuance of your "frozen-at-10" agenda?
  15. Cap'n Piranha
    All MLB teams exclusively fly charters, where the only people on the plane are members of the organization (and the flight crews). This seems like a fairly low-risk proposition; simply require the flight crew to wear masks and remain in designated areas whenever not actively performing necessary duties--with the airlines hurting for revenue, I'm sure they will be more than happy to implement almost any requirement MLB can come up with, assuming it doesn't impact safety or contradict FAA regulations.
  16. Cap'n Piranha
    Baserunning is completely dependent on hitting, as it can only be performed by someone who has come up to hit in the current half-inning, or was subbed in for someone who came up to hit in the current half-inning; therefore I categorize it under the hitting aspect.
  17. Cap'n Piranha
    I've never understood people who oppose the DH because they think it's ridiculous that a pitcher not be required to hit, but don't think it's ridiculous that hitters aren't required to pitch. In fact, if the concept behind baseball is that there are three separate aspects to the game (hitting, pitching, and fielding), shouldn't each spot in the lineup be required to do all 3?
  18. Cap'n Piranha
    Ok, you misunderstood. The .0002% chance is not the chance of dying if you contract the illness, it's the chance of dying from the illness if you live in the United Sates (assuming the rates of infection and deaths are identical to the reported numbers from China). 760 divided by 330M is .0002%. It's the same rate as one person in the entire city of Minneapolis dying. I'm fully in support of people being careful, limiting or eliminating contact with others, self-quarantining when necessary, and forcing the quarantine of people who won't self-quarantine, but to pretend like coronavirus is Ebola or Bubonic Plague, or even the Spanish Flu is hysterical and breeds panic, which is the greater danger in the current climate.
  19. Cap'n Piranha
    I'm confused--you're saying my numbers are false and that I'm downplaying the severity, yet the number I gave (based on actual news reports) is higher than the number you quoted. Therefore, if anything, I'm "upplaying" the severity.
  20. Cap'n Piranha
    Or it could be like China, which is now (if Chinese sources can be trusted, which I'll grant is a big if) in steep decline--only 24 new cases for the entirety of mainland China yesterday. China had to keep things under lock for about 6 weeks to get this result, but it's a good result--80k total cases and 3.2k deaths; the US equivalent would be 19k cases and 760 deaths. That would be a 0.005% chance of a US citizen being infected, or one out of every 17k people, and a mortality chance of 0.0002% (1 out of every 434k people). The coronavirus should certainly be taken seriously, and suspending sporting events is part of that, but from an infection/death standpoint, the coronavirus is likely to be of far less impact than the annual winter flu is every single year.
  21. Cap'n Piranha
    "Quantity has a quality all its own" -Napoleon Bonaparte
  22. Cap'n Piranha
    An amazing "Bad Ball" hitter is likely to still be worse than an average "Good Ball" hitter. The beauty of baseball, distilled to it's simplest level, is that the pitcher has to put the ball where he least wants to put the ball. Therefore, swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone (which is what "bad balls" are), helps the pitcher. There are times where a batter can succeed in hitting a pitch outside of the zone, but over the course of a season, the odds are heavily in the pitcher's favor. In the second half of last year, Eddie Rosario swung at 49.1% of pitches "outside" the zone (3rd highest out of 140 in baseball). As a result, he saw the 10th lowest percentage of pitches "in" the zone. This insistence on chasing led him to post the 35th lowest rate of hard contact and 61st highest rate of soft contact. This directly degrades his power--Eddie had 12 homers in 266 PA's in the second half, compared to 21 from Sano in 271, 18 from Garver in 183, and 15 from Kepler in 231.
  23. Cap'n Piranha
    I have to concur with the majority of the posters here. In looking at Almora's defensive stats on fangraphs, he was below average last year, albeit slightly above average in 2017 and 2018. As such, I think what you would be adding is a league-average fielder. At the plate, he swings at 40% of pitches outside the zone, and as such, has really bad rates of both soft and hard contact (6th highest soft contact rate out of 241 players with 350+ PA's, 17th lowest hard contact rate). Add in that he's now arbitration eligible, and plays at a position group where the Twins are 5 deep in MLB-quality regulars, and where at least 2 and possibly 4 of our 5 best hitting prospects play, and I have no idea why the Twins would add Almora for free, much less give something up for him. The floor for this Twins team, thanks to a killer lineup, deep bullpen, and broad collection of decent starters, is quite high. Therefore, if the Twins are making a trade, it shouldn't be to try and win a couple more games in the regular season; it should be to win a couple more games in the postseason.
  24. Cap'n Piranha
    Ummm, last year the Twins bullpen had only .2 WAR less than the Yankees, with a better FIP and essentially identical xFIP. The Twins bullpen had a better k-bb%, an identical WHIP, and a better SIERA. The only real advantage the Yankees pen had was in giving up less hard contact, and getting more soft contact. That being said, if you look at only the second half of the season (which more closely resembles what our current bullpen will hopefully look like), the Twins pen was better in WAR, FIP, xFip, k-bb%, WHIP, and SIERA, although the contact disparities remained. I think it cannot be said with any amount of certainty that the Yankees bullpen is better, much less a huge advantage. The pens seem likely to be a wash.
  25. Cap'n Piranha
    Since the schedule is not equal, it's entirely possible for an inferior team to win more games. Fangraphs projections show the Yankees to be in a division with 2 other teams essentially as good as the Twins (Rays at 90 wins, Twins at 88, Red Sox at 87). The Central is projected to have the worst champion, worst runner up, and worst 3rd place team, while the 4th and 5th place finishers are each 2nd out of the three divisions. Put more succinctly, the Twins are likely to play nearly half their games against a markedly easier schedule than either the Yankees or Astros.
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