CCHOF5yearstoolate

Because the point is that the Twins are not interested in him regardless of anything else - including the veracity of those allegations. The veracity of those claims is not relevant to the Twins not wanting to bring him into the clubhouse. I don't think it's a good faith interpretation of that sentence to assume someone wants to ignore whether or not Clevinger was falsely accused.

This is clearly not what was being said. Regardless of the allegations, the Twins do not appear interested in bringing him in. Nothing about ignoring whether or not he was falsely accused. Not everything has to explode into a culture war.

Read up on Clevinger's baby momma. That's likely the reason the Twins won't sign him.

Given Julien's production as a rookie & how that matched up with his projections the last year or so, I highly doubt it. And though it's unlikely he stays at 2B because Brooks Lee will be a very good defender, I wouldn't necessarily call him 'defense-challenged'. He was significantly improved by the end of 2023.

AJ Pierzynski, we hardly knew ye!

A veteran will get hurt at some point, that is guaranteed. The formula for getting to the majors hasn't changed. Play your butt off in AAA, take advantage of a spot when it opens up for you. That didn't change because they spent 4 or 5 million on a bench player.

It may stink for those players, but it's also up to them to prove they're worthy of that roster spot.

UZR is basically a decrepit metric by this point, and even before it fell out of any serious use it had pretty significant limitations like not accounting for any shifting. I have not considered UZR for years now, and I learned recently that prominent sabermetricians such as Tom Tango and Mike Petriello have done the same. Total Zone Runs and Range Factor are even more primitive measures of defense, and while they're basically the best we've got for players who played before 2003, these kinds of box-score metrics are too far removed from the game played on the field to be worth considering in my opinion. DRS is the main competitor to OAA (now FRV) in the space of advanced defensive metrics. Personally, I find too many large discrepancies between my own eye test and the general baseball media rating of fielders to really believe in it. Additionally, it uses a similar methodology to UZR - breaking down fielder responsibility by bucketing where balls are hit into zones and, in my opinion, not accounting for fielder positioning all that well. For instance, DRS graded Bobby Witt Jr. as one of the worst defensive SS in the league last season, Javier Baez was graded as worse than Corey Seager and Bo Bichette, Francisco Lindor has been around the 10th best defensive SS each year of his career, and Nolan Arenado's platinum glove 2021 season was the 8th best season from a 3B by DRS. There's also a fairly significant element of human judgement built into the metric. Somewhat infamously, Trea Turner commented that he'd "turned around" his defensive metrics during the 2022 season by standing a few feet closer in which gave him more favorable grading. Anyway, this got long-winded quickly, Defensive metrics are better than they were 10 years ago, but it's hard to really lean on any of them as definitive "proof" of defensive ability - OAA would have you believe Jonathan Schoop was the most valuable defender in the entire league in 2022. My eye test, along with input from Twins coverage that I trust, said that there was very clear defensive improvement from Julien last season - to the point that he'd become at least an average defender at 2B by September. Polanco was prone to flubbing too many easy plays, and Arraez has very limited range and a wild arm.

I have to completely disagree. Arraez is the worst defender of those 3 and it's not particularly close. Julien improved significantly as the season went on and was better than Polanco by the end of last year. I don't think Julien will be the long-term 2B, but that's only because Lee should be a very good defender and not because of Julien's skill. By the end of the season no one was talking about Julien's defense, which is a good thing.

One last thing, here are the Padres season records leading up to them handing Ozzie the starting job. That '78 Padres team was in a much different spot than the Twins to absorb a black hole in the lineup to see what might develop. And putting him out there didn't really help them win outside of his aforementioned rookie season where he was just below average and not horrible at the plate.

Ozzie Smith also played at a time in baseball where he only played 1 year in Low-A ball and then they just decided to give him the job out of spring training the next year. In that one year in the minors, Ozzie Smith hit .303/.391/.362. Also, that first season at 82 OPS+ is basically the year-adjusted production Noah Miller has put up in the low minors so far, except in the majors. In 1978 the average OPS in the National League was .692. In 2023, the average OPS in MLB was .734. Lastly, I don't think it's a realistic assumption to think that Noah Miller would immediately become a Gold Glove contender if they just threw him out there like San Diego did with Ozzie. Bobby Witt, Jeremy Pena, Anthony Volpe are all very good defenders already and only getting better as they get experience.

If Noah Miller were as good as Ozzie Smith, he wouldn't have been ranked in the 20's on Twins prospect lists. Ozzie Smith's career MLB batting average is 42 points higher than Noah Millers rookie ball/low-A/high-A batting average. From 1982-1993 he was essentially a league average hitter with an OPS+ of 96, and all he did on the diamond in that time was win 11 consecutive Gold Gloves. Miguel Rojas seems like a more apt comparison, and Miguel Rojas is a fine player! I've never said that good defense at short is a bad thing, but you've also got to look at the long term Twins roster. They're already full in the infield for the next 6 years with Lewis/Correa/Julien/Lee, which is not to mention the plethora of middle infielders who are further along than Miller. Even if Correa needs to be moved off short in the next few years, which I'd consider pretty unlikely, you're just not going to play Miller every day over one of Lewis/Julien/Lee.

You can't just try to bury emotional arguments that are completely detached from any real scouting report in between 2 obvious truths and act like it's also a fact. That might only be effective on middle schoolers. Your personal belief in Noah Miller does not change the fact that he's done nothing but show a very poor ability to hit professional pitching in 3 full seasons. You've yet to support that belief with anything other than blind faith. Wanting to believe that he'll be a "1st class hitter" isn't proof that it will happen.

You're trying to pass off your emotional attachment to the players as facts. That doesn't do anything for me.

Sorry Doc, that's just not the reality of the situation. An astonishingly small group completely lost faith in Royce Lewis to the point of saying he should be traded, and 1 year of bad results from Austin Martin while they were trying to maximize his potential is not an apt comparison to Noah Miller's 3 consecutive years of terrible production. Plus, it's not like Martin has actually proven anything yet. A few disproportionately loud voices do not mean their opinion is held by the majority.

Miranda is the #1 guy who needs to prove himself, in my opinion. Larnach would be a close second. Certainly feels like this is their last year to prove they can hit enough to warrant a roster spot.

If you're interested, here's his explainer https://medium.com/@thomasjamesnestico/modelling-tjstuff-d9a451765484

I chatted with the guy who's tweet I posted earlier in the thread, and yes changeups do actually have rise - they just have less rise than a fastball and our eyes have been trained to see that as "drop". Thanks for the clarification on actual downward movement with gravity vs. IVB. Additionally, SWR has a pretty outlier changeup in terms of IVB.

This is simply not true.

I guess I'm probably one of the people referred to in the last paragraph here, but stuff like "Miller has promise to become a very good hitter and should become our future SS" is just completely detached from reality, man. It could happen, sure, but at this point it is very unlikely and you have to completely disregard his actual play to say what you said. Baseball history is littered with low percentage could have been guys. If you want to say that every good move they made was luck and it fell into their lap, that's your prerogative. But I simply do not not view that as a serious commentary on the moves. I view that as someone who is completely unwilling to give any credit but rather is choosing to view every move in the most negative light possible.

I loved Miller's glove too, but I can't get Jermaine Palacios out of my head. He was supposed to have a good enough glove to stick in MLB regardless of his batting ability and he showed a lot more potential at the plate in the minors. He flamed out after 30 games. I just don't see a .627 OPS in low-A and a .644 OPS in high-A as significantly more impressive than .600. You have to be an Andrelton Simmons level of fielder to make a difference if you hit like that. On Margot, he's 29 years old and from the reporting I have read last year he was still recovering from a pretty nasty knee injury sustained in the middle of 2022. I'm not sure it's fair to say he's "clearly slowing down". In 2021 he was nearly as valuable as Kiermaier for the Rays in the outfield. He won't be MAT in the field, but he's a good fielder and he gets on base more than MAT does - I wouldn't bet on MAT repeating last year's outlier power surge either.

Crazy that one exchange got in your head so badly all you do here now is try to troll me. Cool if that floats your boat, but this site has a very convenient ignore feature.

You're overexaggerating the difference in walk rates, particularly if you were to compare their careers, and even considering that small difference and that Margot had a down year (at least partially due to injury which also affected his defense) Margot's OBP was 32 points higher last season. A 96 wRC+ compared to a 93 isn't some gulf of production, and I don't think it's smart to count on MAT to replicate what was an outlier season from a production standpoint. I must have missed where Noah Miller and his .600 OPS in the lowest levels of professional baseball was making this team better. You're doing an awful lot of rationalization to call him a future MLB-caliber shortstop who would play enough to be eligible for a gold glove, and conspicuously glossing over the prospect they got in return.

This is a very interesting analysis! While I agree that the more granular data of by-pitch and by-batter shows a more beneficial result with 2 or more LHB, there's not much of a difference but actually a slight increase in team production with 1 LHB in the lineup. For example, if you start with with 7 RHB and 1 LHP in the lineup and compare that last spot I would choose a 0.336 wOBA righty over a 0.262 wOBA lefty even if the rest of the lineup gets a little stronger. A 0.336 wOBA is still around 10% better than league average and 0.262 is basically 2023 Javy Baez - I'd prefer to have fewer essentially guaranteed outs. I also agree that conceptually the theory makes sense as to why this is effective - forcing a starter to use more of their arsenal would prevent them from dialing in on the gameplan for opposite-handed hitters. Which makes me think that if you're going to start a LHB for the Strategic Platoon Disadvantage™, I'd imagine you would ideally choose a batter with good contact skills who can work a count. In the Twins' case, that batter is seemingly Alex Kirilloff. This also makes me think that a LHB with minimal platoon splits might be an area of market inefficiency that the Twins could then target - if you can find that rare lefty who doesn't drop off the table against left-handed pitching you're propping up the rest of the lineup by playing them. Kepler does fit this bill to an extent - since 2018 he's got a wRC+ of 92 vs LHP which is #51 out of 150 LHB batters with 150 or more plate appearances against LHP. Just behind guys like Arraez (96), Devers (95) and Mullins (94). Joey Gallo up at #23 in that list with a wRC+ of 105 might make some people gag, though!

If I am understanding this graph correctly, the vertical axis is actually "Induced Vertical Break" - or how much a pitches location differs vertically from where you'd expect a ball thrown with no magnus effect to end up. For fastballs, this is a measurement of how much the pitch "rises". So 0,0 would be a ball thrown with no magnus effect. That being said, I don't understand why a changeup would have nearly the same rise as a fastball, and how a gyro slider would only just barely end up below a ball thrown with no magnus effect.