tobynotjason

I was a huge Twins fan as a kid, but also sometimes glanced at the Pirates' box scores on accounta family ties. I came back to baseball six-ish years ago (after a good decade and a half of following no sports other than, occasionally, mma and football/soccer) as a fan of the sport in general first, the Twins second. Really, I just realized how much I enjoyed watching ANY major league baseball game, regardless of rooting interest. But the Twins were certainly the no-question-about-it hook to hang my baseball-in-general hat on. Approaching the game more analytically - or at least with far better tools, for obvious reasons - than I did as a 10 year old, and with an admittedly jaded worldview and time-heightened loathing of yah-you-betcha mainstream Minnesota culture, it was probably inevitable that my would-be Twins fandom renaissance didn't stride unproblematically onward. Indeed, the Pirates supplanted them as my first rooting interest a couple years ago. They're currently run in a less... frustrating manner and don't continually insult me with a unique brand of organizational kool aid marketing, but I also wonder if it's not in part because they my face isn't constantly rubbed the wrong way by their "average" fans by dint of geography. It doesn't hurt that two decades of failure mean Pirates forums like these are populated by relatively knowledgeable diehards. (For similar reasons, I tend to enjoy reading the banter on Royals boards more than on Twins boards. Those are tendencies, not rigid laws. There's good stuff and bad stuff everywhere.) Regardless, while I spend as much or more time watching and thinking about the Pirates, I doubt I'll ever have the emotional connection with any baseball team most fans seem to have. It just doesn't carry over into my real life. When I see people crying over losses or totally losing their **** over a win, I don't fully get it. It's only entertainment, and while I can get caught up in a game while it's happening, when it's over it just doesn't affect me. That said, enough of me will always remember what it was like to love the Twins in the 80's that I doubt I'll ever actually stop following them. If they ever totally reengineer the field staff and front office and for the love of god fire dicknbert, who knows? Maybe my gut will kick back in in an unexpected fashion.

He ain't gonna take ANY more balls to the face if he oles every hard hit ball the way he did his first E.

Surly is funny about new restaurant being allowed to put Furious on tap; I wonder if the policy applies even to a venue the size of Target Field. Basically, if you haven't had it forever and don't have a personal "in", they're happy to give you everything that ain't Furious. They say it's a supply issue, but I suspect it's fueled by a desire to pimp their other beers in the public's mind.

Ed literally took the words (re: Gardy phone call) out of my mouth/fingers.

Good call luckylager. The 100 pitch limit IS a great thing to bring up. Depending on how his performance in 2011 ended up, Gardenhire was poised to be around #2 ALL-TIME in terms of "quickest hooks" on his starting pitcher among managers with more than 10 seasons (compared to contemporaries). He's a slave to the pitch count to the point of comedy. The dude credited with bringing them into vogue points to ironclad pitch count rules like Gardenhire's as pretty much the opposite of what he recommended when he did the research that initially prompted clubs to pay some attention to pitch counts. While it's eminently hateable that he's also a slave to the save rule, given that every other manager in baseball is just as bad it doesn't make me hate him nearly as much as the bunting-by-numbers, lineup-by-positions and pitch count do.

Brain transplant. Seriously, I'm not sure whether it would lineup-by-position (i.e. weak hitters in the most important [#2] slot in the order) or PREDICTABLE early [1st inning] sac bunting. Mikewantswins analysis of the sac bunt is wrong inasmuch as there's a difference between run expectation in PAs in which a sac bunt is attempted and run expectation in PAs in which a sac bunt "succeeds". (It doesn't always go down in the former case like it does in the latter, given errors, base hits, hits when the bunt is taken off with 2 strikes, etc.) But with Gardenhire, he's so by-the-numbers other teams clearly expect the bunt, position (or at least mentally dispose) their infielders accordingly and thereby make most of his sac bunts attempts far worse than an "average" sac attempt. If he'd change it up, bunt a LOT less for a while (to change expectations), then be less predictable (including crucially: be willing to take a sacrifice OFF and hit away in a 1-0 count, put it back after it goes 1-1, encourage tweener bunts that could lead to base hits when the bunters is good/fast etc.) he'd be a much improved, less frustrating in-game manager for it.

I'm surprised by Bashore and Tootle. Pearce will catch on somewhere. He can hit.

Watching people overreact to a tiny sample of Parmelee is getting farcical. Is there a non-zero possibility that he's turned some sort of corner and is the sort of hitter he was in 88 PAs last year married to (I'm guessing here) 40 PAs in Spring Freaking Training? Sure. Is it significant? No. It's like people might even know (or have the sense) that in a sample of 100 players whose true talent is to hit, say, .230/.270/.330, one or two of them will put up awesome numbers in a given 100 PA sample - that's just how random variation works - but they refuse to believe that could possibly be this Parmelee guy - who did nothing in the minor leagues to suggest he was MLB ready - because BY GOD they've seen him crush a few balls. What is lost by sending him to AAA? You remove a massive risk of non-production at a key position and of lost or even regressed development for Parmelee. And 6-8 weeks of tearing it up in Rochester (because that's what he's likely to do if his bat is truly ready to carry first base or an outfield corner) will tell you if he has somehow hit the developmental lottery. Realistically, he needs a season in AAA if he's going to be a viable major leaguer. *sigh* It could be REALLY ugly when teams start pitching to him with book in hand a month or so in.

I'm not a doctor or a physical therapist or whatever, but it is categorically BAFFLING to me that they are running him out there while his wrist is still a problem. Let it heal. Completely. What is the rush? When will this team learn that players playing hurt is not a formula for success and that "toughness" doesn't lead to wins? (On the bright side: it's heartening that he stated his struggles are 100% not concussion related.)

FWIW: I'm pretty sure Hit Tracker does "true landing spots" which include temperature, wind, etc. As for the gnashing of teeth, grating hyperbole and calls for the fences to be moved: there was a series of studies on park factors (same guy on BTBS and Fangraphs) that found that you always would rather have a pitcher's park than a hitter's park, long term. Park effects cut both ways on a per game basis, but if your team is throwing half its innings in a place that suppresses run scoring, your pitchers consequently face fewer hitters on average and the "good end" of your bullpen therefore stays fresher, which is a good thing if you're interested in making the playoffs.

People who follow the Twins just don't get exactly how UTTERLY HORRIFIC at 1B for the Pirates. All anybody talked about when they played him there was what a gigantor clusterfbomb it was. At least he's astute enough to realize he has no bid'ness there.

This just isn't true. From 2006 through 2009 Morneau was 12th in wRC+ among qualified 1st basemen. If you want to throw out Nick Johnson since he only had 342 games, ok. Throwing out Votto for coming up in 2008 seems like cherry picking, though, and would in any case only get Morneau to 10th. He was indeed 3rd in UZR. He was very good, but not as good as most Twins fans believe. Lots and lots of first basemen hit. Morneau was awesome in 2010 pre-concussion, but it's unlikely he would have sustained those rates for the full season. (Possible, but as w/any SSS, regress, regress, regress.) The odds that Parmelee's Sept. was an outlying fluke far outweigh the odds that it was a developmental turn-of-the-corner, but time will obviously tell us more.

"Nishioka," he said, ever so tentatively.

This will be my 3rd or 4th year. I work evenings and don't mind watching the Twins on delay. I follow the Pirates as much or moreso than the hometown club these days, and I watch a fair amount of other games depending on pitching matchups and whatnot. I feel like I get my money's worth and then some. I haven't had cable TV in almost a decade.

Obfuscation and dissembling. He starts off sounding like there's nothing at all to The Twins Way: [OF COURSE] "We definitely tried to get him to use the pull side." But what does that really mean? Well, as everybody knows you have to "use [the opposite field] to get [your] pull side back". See, it's just a matter of perspective. Hardy's perspective was that they wanted him to hit the other way. Vavra has helpfully clarified that all that hitting the opposite way was just the secret path to pulling the ball. Riiiiight. (Of course he's correct that LCF in target field didn't help Hardy, but straightaway LF isn't going to hurt anybody, either.) Mackey using a SSS (one season's worth) of Ortiz's field-splits as if it in any way meaningfully offsets a career's worth of numbers leading to the well-established opposite conclusion (DESPITE the presence of the green monster) is just kind of silly.

Gut is a groundball guy. 58% in Rochester last year.

Re: Fien, he's had major gopher ball issues and has hardly established he's throwing the "basic MLB quality stuff" from which you can expect an ultimately average HR/FB number to emerge. (1.16 HR/9 in AAA 2010 and 2.59 HR/9 in AAA 2011. 4 HR in 14 MLB innings.) His 2010 AAA K% was a mediocre 17.9. He missed more bats last year but got hammered with the long ball. I'm guessing from the numbers: decently hard thrower but poor movement on his fastball, maybe especially when he tries to ramp it up and miss the better hitter's bats. He fails one way (not enough missed bats) or the other (fastball flattens out and it's ding-dong time). The only hope is he's been the victim of bad luck, but his AAA BABIP numbers have been bad 3 times, and there is some predictivity for MLB performance there. Pass.

I wonder if Gardenhire's would-be big league managers called him out publicly when he was failing miserably to succeed at major league baseball, especially during the first not-even-an-actual-game of spring training? I certainly hope they did. Maybe they still do in his nightly nightmares, so we get this.

Guerrier took a full year of repeating AAA for the second time as a starter (and showing improvement in his peripherals) before he was an asset to the MLB bullpen. He was acquired prior to his age 25 season - hardly past the point of no return. Reyes had been decent in 2004 before developing extreme control problems in 2005. He had a multi-year track record of good to very great K rates and good groundball rates. His control returned with the Twins and he was effective again. Young, failed MLB starters like Guardado and Hawkins and Romero - pitchers once perceived by scouts to have the stuff to succeed as starters, who were accordingly given significant playing time by their big league clubs as starters - regularly turn into effective bullpen arms. This is a truism. And Guardado pretty much just sucked for two full seasons after going to the bullpen, had a good season, then posted mediocre peripherals for a looong time. It was 2001 - 7 years after his second failed starting stint - before he became a reliable, effective guy. Breslow had fantastic K rates and was effective overall in both 2006 and 2007 at Pawtucket and with the Red Sox. Willis is one guy for whom there is no blueprint: his minor league journeyman time between 88 and 91 looks like just that: a guy who wasn't even AAAA. His peripherals with the Twins FAR outstrip anything he'd done the last two years in AAA. Presumably they saw something they thought they could fix and did so. Or he juiced or something. That one's a stumper. My question is: what do you see as the analogs to these guys among this year's crop, and how does the fact that some of the historical guys succeeded only after significant time had passed help assuage naysayers of the off-season bullpen handling? Understand, I have NO problem with the idea that Swarzak and Duensing might be effective relief pitchers. They both pretty much fit the "failed starter" mold, although Swarzak got his MLB reps more from need than perceived MLB starter stuff/MiLB track record. Likewise, I have no problem with the idea that Gutierrez or Waldrop or Guerra or Bromberg might be worthwhile out of the bullpen at some point. Waldrop is probably at make or break time. I'm just not seeing how your historical examples correlate with the list of names the Twins have brought in. Most of these guy just appear to just not be very good at major league baseball. Bulger is 33, which makes a Reyes analogy tenuous, but at least he still struck out guys last year in AAA. The reason these guys are cast-offs becomes apparent. You can see that many of them once had some promise, and I it's certainly possible somebody could figure something out or have it figured out for him by Randerson or whatever. But to conclude "The Twins are correct to have signed the arms they did and passed on the other proven stuff" just does not follow.

@StormJH1: I would qualify the last paragraph slightly to have it read something like "I do feel like disproportionate numbers of black and LA players...", but you pretty much nailed my problems with the org. "An almost religious personality" is gold, and the (often angry) blindness of many serious (almost always white) Twins fans to the subtle institutional racism is unfortunate. The fact that a handful of players of color are held up as paragons of Twinsness is more an indictment more than mitigating evidence.

It means nothing, nadda, zilch. Which in this case means "nobody", I guess. I'd love it if Waldrop, Guerra, etc. could make it work in MLB. I wouldn't bet on it, but I'd love it. I don't think that's a very sound strategy if you're not in rebuild.

But yeah: the risk wasn't Zumaya. The risk was Zumaya and bupkis.

You always say this. But WAR absolutely does give relievers credit for half their leverage premium (since the chain of relievers would move up one slot, the closer hardly deserves credit for every tick of leverage). That is the opposite of "completely ignor[ing] the context of the innings in which they work." I think the actual reason WAR strikes you as "wrong" is because you underestimate the quality of replacement level relief pitching. WAR assumes different FIP/ERA performances for starters and relievers. If the pitcher on the mound for "Team A With Average Offense" always performed to the level of MLB replacement relief pitching, Team A would have a W% of .470, which ain't too shabby at all. Once you consider that as the baseline, it makes a lot more sense. (Remember, this is relief quality pitching pitching AS A RELIEVER. The exact same guy pitching as a starter would like pitch to a level below STARTING pitcher replacement level, which is pegged at a .380 winning percentage.) BTW, this is not unrelated to your overestimation of Carl Pavano for 7 innings vs. Scott Baker for 6 innings. You assume replacement level is worse than it is and accordingly value mediocre innings more. (A cynical individual might lay the blame for this at the doorstep of the Twins' F.O., given the sub-replacement players they've actually signed to fill out the back end over the past few seasons.)