Kanonen80

I'd rather regular season games end in a tie than have them decided by a groundout-sac-fly competition

Look what you did. ?

Radio Broadcast says Arraez had "upper GI discomfort". Not COVID related and they claim not related to what Buxton has.

I wasn't listening at the time - did Kepler get hurt or did they just wanted to let Garlick play too?

I stumbled across a really neat baseball YouTube channel that focuses on history and stats. "Outta Here Baseball" had an interesting breakdown of Graterol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRso_YBzBA8

Would be interesting if someone had the time and went back through all the fly-outs, looked at their launch angle and exit velo, compared to in-season batted balls with the exact parameters, and then compared to the dimension of the parks the ALDS games were in. Would be interesting to see how many more HRs the Twins and Yankees could have had, and if that would have made the series any more entertaining (or if it would at least make us feel a little better about the team's ALDS performance )

Is Rooker okay? He took a line-drive to the groin in the OF, right? If he's not been heard from since July, I worry something terrible happened...

Have they said on the broadcast what Pineda is doing with his pitching hand? Seems to be shaking it out and stretching it a lot between pitches.

I think after serious head injury, it's possible there were complications (blood clots, etc).

I wonder how feasible it is to just bump Perez (or Pineda) to the bullpen. Would they try to use them as a conventional RP at that point? Or would they take the place of Thorpe/Smeltzer of pitching several innings? Because normally 'converted starters' can't work back-to-back right away, right? Wonder if they could have Thorpe/Smeltzer open and pitch once through the order, and then bring in Perez or something like that.

Do we know what they are doing right now? Does the front office? Right now the bullpen is: Taylor Rogers Tyler Duffey Ryne Harper Trevor May Cody Stashak Carlos Torres Lewis Thorpe Devin SmeltzerHalf of them are rookies (and/or starting pitchers) or Carlos Torres - which means they are all pretty much supposed to be used in lower leverage situation, one would think. Are they forcing Rocco to use Rogers/Duffey/Harper/May as his go-to guys in close games? Were they just trying to stop him from using Magill/Parker/Morin in high leverage situations? If so, they picked a bad time to hamstring bullpen depth and paid the price. On a positive note, you gotta think this means they are GUARANTEED to be bringing in multiple arms to help in some capacity. While we might be worried they thought Magill and Parker would be 'good enough' down the stretch and in October, I feel pretty confident they don't think the bottom 4 guys in the current 'pen are good enough for a playoff hopeful team in a knife fight for the division title. I'm thinking they are looking to at least add two arms to the bullpen. So maybe down the stretch it would look like: Taylor Rogers MLB Veteran Set-up Trevor May MLB Veteran LHP Tyler Duffey Ryne Harper Cody Stashak AAA Express Fresh-arm-manNot super exciting and would need one of May/Duffey/Harper to go on a run, but would be an improvement over what they've been working with up until this point... Of course, this is assuming Rogers wasn't ruined over the last two series. When they DFA'd the three guys before the Oakland series, but then only replaced them with Stewart and Thorpe, I had a thought that maybe they thought they had a deal in place for some arms, but then something happened at the 11th hour and the deal fell apart. Why else would they DFA those guys and only have AAA SP as replacements?

My interpretation of that was that they might get a SP a little better than Perez/Pineda, and then move one of them to the bullpen. Hope I'm just being pessimistic. I'm wondering if they struck out on getting established RP (asking prices to high, etc), so now they are trying to convert starters into relievers on the fly. They already seem to be doing that with Stewart, Thorpe, Littel. So maybe they are going to pick up a mid-level SP and put him in the bullpen or something...

Did anyone else ready the headline as "Twins Trade Rumor Recap: Team Pondering Selling" and get concerned for a split second? Or was that just my pre-coffee brain?

Yeah, my follow up researching looking at his 2009 values seems to support that it maybe doesn't have as big an affect as I first thought. But now that he's no longer otherworldly on pitches in the zone it looks to me like maybe he needs to make some adjustments to shore up a weakness. I mean, that's easy to do, right?

Update: I did look back to some of his charts from 2009 and they aren't that much different (he actually seemed to roll over more up-and-in pitches some how), so that seems to poke holes in my "pitchers found a weakness" theory. Though it is still interesting to see what pitchers are doing to him and makes me wonder if he can make some sort of adjustment to be more effective down-and-away that maybe it can make up for some of whatever is responsible for his decline.

I noticed that Joe Mauer took a few pitches just below the knees for strikes last night, so I was curious as to whether this has been happening a lot and if maybe it's related to Joe having a down season. Here's is his chart for "Called Strikes": http://pebabaseball.com/wp-content/pictures/Joe%20Mauer_called_strikes.png That seems like an awful lot of pitches low and away OUT of the zone being called strikes. Joe has a reputation for having good strike zone control (which seems to be reflected in the relatively low numbers everywhere else. Perhaps Mauer has a weakness low and away that opposing pitchers have found and are pounding, while getting some help from the umps? All pitches: http://pebabaseball.com/wp-content/pictures/Joe%20Mauer_all_pitches.png Looks that way. Here are his swinging strikes: http://pebabaseball.com/wp-content/pictures/Joe%20Mauer_swinging_stikes.png Doesn't seem to be many, but the 'hot' zones are him trying after those balls low and out of the zone. How about balls he hits, but are turned into outs? http://pebabaseball.com/wp-content/pictures/Joe%20Mauer_in_play_outs.png Again, a lot of those low balls out of the zone. Is it because those balls are hard to elevate? http://pebabaseball.com/wp-content/pictures/Joe%20Mauer_ground_balls.png (Ground Balls) - probably. So it appears that Joe Mauer knows he had a weakness low and away so isn't offering at a ton of pitches thrown there. However, there is a LOT of pitches thrown there. The perception in the past seemed to be that Joe Mauer didn't have any weak zones at the plate, but it certainly seems like he does now. And the umpires aren't helping either. Here are "called balls", just for fun: http://pebabaseball.com/wp-content/pictures/Joe%20Mauer_balls.png Definitely looks like the umps are erring more in favor of pitchers than batters, no?

Is it just me or did Glynn look kinda upset with Rosario for teasing him?

Personally, I like to look at K/9, BB/9 (or K%, BB%) and then HRA and maybe consider inherited runners scored. My thought process is that if I need to bring in a guy in a jam to get out of it, I'm going go for the guy that won't put anyone on base for free, best chance to get outs without the ball getting put in play (an maybe advance runners), and if he does allow contact it should be weak. I find ERA over 30 days for RP to not be overly helpful. A guy could have a sparkling ERA (lets say, only two ER on the month) and good K/BB ratio. But he came in with bases loaded twice and gave up two grand slams. His ERA only gets dinged for two ER, but he's allowed much more damage than that.

Uh oh, why is Morneau being pinch-hit for in the middle of the game?

How about: "The Pohlads are so cheap!!" The family runs the team as a business, and I don't think it's fair to expect more than that. Other owners might play fast and loose with their money and treat their team as a play-thing to waste money on, but in my opinion it's totally acceptable to dedicate a certain percentage of projected revenue to payroll. We don't want them spending money just to spend money.

While they won't be hitting a ton of home runs, the will be getting on base and slashing doubles. That formula seems to have been successful for the Twins in the past and I think they are making a conscious effort of going back to that style of offense. Then again, it's exactly that style of offense that failed to come up with big hits in the play-offs (while being downed by Yankee home runs). So I think it will be okay during the regular season.