jimmer

and like I wrote earlier: They were 14-15 in June and 10-15 in July. They were 50-53 at the trade deadline. At the break they were 9th in the AL in runs scored and last in the AL for pitching. If that is considered as a lot of stuff going right, its got to be comparitive. Like maybe compared to the Twins 2016.

SYFY Channel has a show called Ghost Wars. It's a pretty good show. I'm enjoying it a lot.

It was always obvious that was the case, especially if you removed the word slim.

The Twins were 9th in the AL in scoring at the break while being last in pitching and they went 10-15 in July after going 14-15 in June. Stands to reason that the Twins FO should have known that the team would make the playoffs when they were 50-53, and then they should have acted accordingly. Nothing outrageous about that kind of thinking ;-)

Is there NOTHING Trump's minions won't do for Trump? https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-lawyer-offers-new-defense-of-tweet-president-cannot-obstruct-justice/ar-BBGbvNg?li=BBnb7Kz

Well, LAST year was the 2016 season, THIS year was the 2017 season :-)

why NL? He gets to bat and could very well be a PH.

I would wait until he signs before we speculate on how much he wants to win.

why is that?

This can probably move to the forum titled: 'Other Baseball' now. He has nothing to do with the Twins.

I never got my hopes up even a little bit, so it's no surprise we wont be signing him (though I dont think Heyman is anywhere near a reliable source on anything)

San Francisco (which I visited a lot growing up) and London are my two favorite major cities in the World.

I'm always impressed when people can tell who the MVP should be based on the eyeball test. I think about how many games of each team I'd have to watch to get a good enough sampling of how everybody plays and think there's no way I could find the time to watch THAT much baseball. It's impressive some people can do that.

yeah, I mentioned that earlier. But, I still can't figure out why it's so controversial when a stat shows that when a shortstop hits the same way a 1B does that the shortstop is more valuable than the 1B.

It will effect families who make something like 65K to like 150K, going from 12% to 25% (the new tax brackets). Of course, they make sure to make this take effect after the next general elections. In the meantime, the people who would likely vote for Trump will get tax breaks and praise his name and then if he gets re-elected, THEN the tax rates kick in and it's like 'Uh, Der, what happened Gomer.' Of course, the genius of it is the medical rates probably go up for the people who are getting tax cuts now, and then Medicaid, medicare and Social Security benefits will go down in the future along with their tax rates going up in the future. So Yay, Republians! And goodbye to the middle class. “The beating heart of our plan is a tax cut for working families,” Trump said this week. “That’s what it is. We’re going to make sure that you keep more of your hard-earned money. We’re going to make sure, also, that you have a job that you want.” This is not true. Indeed, families in the middle of the income distribution would on average see no benefit from the plan as of 2027, whereas families at the top would be paying far less in taxes and many families at the bottom would actually be paying more. One reason is that the legislation changes the way that the tax brackets get adjusted year after year to account for the effect of inflation. More families would get pushed into higher tax brackets sooner under the Republican plan, so they would end up paying more in taxes, even though the marginal rates would be lower. In addition, Republicans have gone after a number of provisions in the current code—the state and local tax deduction and the medical expense deduction, for instance—that help many middle-class and upper-middle-class families.'

To help pay for the rich people's tax cuts, the middle class will have their taxes more than doubled in five years. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Oh, and since it will add 1 trillion to our debt over the next 10 years, now they are going to make cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to try and offset it. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gop-eyes-post-tax-cut-changes-to-welfare-medicare-and-social-security/ar-BBG1mXp?li=BBnb7Kz Trump becoming president is even more of a nightmare than I thought it would be.

I want to offer a word of caution. Many people were saying we had become contenders after the 2015 season (praising Ryan for a super quick rebuild). Then 2016 happened. With our pitching, I am not sure we can say we are out of the woods yet because we had a good season. We could EASILY end up in the 70 win area next season.

Sorry, I shouldn't have butt in.

And Porcello. ERA of 4.65, FIP of 4.60. The worst of all the 200 or more IP. 46th in WAR out of 58 qualified MLB starters.

Do they play with the same defense behind them? :-) I enjoy debating you, BTW, you are respectful at all times even when you disagree and are truly open to many trains of thought.

But again, that belief assumes ERA is the true indicator of performance, right? We get phrases like 'pitchers out-perform' or pitcher 'under-perform' their FIP. ERA is too dependent on things out of the pitcher's control to be the indicator of performance.

I swear when I first read that, I thought you said Twins instead of Wild :-)

It doesn't assume an infallibility in FIP at all, it assumes FIP tells a BETTER story about how a pitcher pitched than ERA or RAA does. Not a PERFECT story, just a better story. DRS and UZR aren't infallible either, but they are better than errors and fielding %. WAR isn't perfect either, but I like it better than, say, looking at BA, HR, RBI, Stolen bases and errors/fielding % stats. I'm not going to hold on to old stats until the mythical PERFECT stats replace them. Now, what I have noticed is that for a lot of starters with long careers, the FIP and ERA stats come very close to each other. That's why I don't mind looking at, say, ERA (well, really ERA+) when comparing pitchers who have finished their career. That and because it keeps the FIP haters at bay :-)

FTFY :-) Hosmer, who is a good player but no star, will likely get a 18-20M a year deal for 4 or 5 years. A top of the line pitcher in FA will cost a ton. Kershaw is due something like 98M over the next 3 years and he can opt out after next year (and likely will). Prices have gone up.

Yeah, it's not a problem. Different opinions should be explored and shown. Some people are completely sure a pitcher should be judged a lot on ERA (or RAA, which is closer to the ERA way) some say FIP instead. Who is going to say which one is the truth? Who gets to decide that? Hence bWAR and fWAR for pitchers. I, for one, don't care at all for ERA. I almost never look at it when we're talking about how well a pitcher did in any given season. So truth gets a bit shaky.