Minny505

I'd put Donaldson & Buxton at 1/2. Losing one of them is likely a 3-4 win drop in production (over 162) with whoever replaces them. Losing Polanco, Kepler, or Berrios would probably be a 2-3 win drop (maybe I overestimate Adrianza), so they are on that next tier. I might put Rich Hill in that category as well. And while Cruz's production is replaceable with just a 1-2 win drop off, what he brings to the clubhouse and dugout is difficult to quantify. I'd give him another win or two for that leadership. So, my list would be: 1-Donaldson 2-Buxton 3-Polanco 4-Kepler 5-Cruz With Berrios and Hill being honorable mentions.

Is it Friday yet?

From the article: Is there any video of this? It sounds simultaneously fascinating and counter-intuitive. But baseball broadcast production teams are not in the habit, much to my constant chagrin, of showing anyone other than the pitcher, batter, catcher & ump as the pitch is hurling toward home plate. I'd love to see this in action!

Anyone know if and how to stream this after the game?

That 37 games in 38 day stretch looks rough. But if this actually goes down, it's going to be super fun for the rest of us!!!

That does seem to be the only real training camp question at this point: Dobnak or Bailey for the 5th spot in the rotation? I don't think it will matter much at the start of the season. Even if the stated 5th SP keeps his spot all season, I expect the 6th SP pitches to the tune of only 30% less innings than the 5th guy.

If we go six deep on the rotation, I'd rather the 6th be Dobnak than Smeltzer.

Can we make the fan experience in MLB more like the KBO? That looks like so much fun!!! Because, let's face it, MLB games are rather boring to be at. I'd rather watch amateur baseball in person.

I like the Joe Posnanski idea of running a full College World Series style tournament at the end. All teams in it, best of three, double elimination tourney, until the final four, then we go to seven games and single elimination. Best record to that point gets home field for all three games of matchup. If we end up with no agreement though, the playoffs will likely be the same as the last couple years with three division winners and a game 163 for the two wild cards. I'm also onboard with Vanimal. Let's make this season an outlier for how the competition is conducted. It would be so much fun.

I'd put Mauer in. I also think Posey is deserving. Molina is a hard no. That's like voting for Omar Vizquel. Those people are voting by reputation, not reality.

I support scaling salaries up the ladder to help owners pay for the massive influx of MLBPA players that are expected in the 2020 season now. That should only be something like 5% at the top. Those are unexpected labor costs that benefit members of the MLBPA. I do not support this concept with 47%ish cut from the top. You assume the risk of owning a business when you become an owner. All businesses owners do, whether investing in a publicly traded company or a privately held business. Contracts are honored regardless, unless settled in a court of law. That said, this is an initial offering and is fully understandable as such from the owners perspective, regardless of how ugly the optics are to the public. There does need to be negotiations though as the original agreement in March was to renegotiate pay should games be played with no fans. The MLBPA needs to honor that agreement and renegotiate, which I suspect they will. There seems to be a bit of overreaction by fans that this is some sort of final proposal when it is a starting point, albeit a one-sided proposal. Still, when I negotiate out large contracts for my business, I will often start with something extremely beneficial to my company and move down from there. The team owners are business people first and foremost. This one-sided rough draft should not surprise anyone.

If the DH is in play, the Cubs look to arguably get the biggest boost of any NL team, putting Schwarber at DH and replacing him with a better fielder. The Brewers also get a fairly substantial bump by having Braun in the daily lineup at DH, replacing him with a better fielder. The Reds, not so much. They are kind of like the White Sox: a lot of upside, but need a lot to go right. The Cardinals have that devil magic, so they probably bring up Jose Martinez 2.0 and have the best NL DH of them all. I'd confidently slot the Brewers at #5. I think the drop off after them is fairly noticeable, with the ChiSox and Reds chasing the top half of the Centrals.

This is so cool! Thank you for sharing.

Due to the season being projected to start right at the beginning of North America's hottest two month stretch, I expect offensive numbers to be off the charts at the outset. On top of that, hitters are always in front of the pitchers at the start of the season, further compounding that inflated offense. The only wild card here is the ball that MLB puts on the field. Even so, I still expect 10 run averages on games...and may invest on this theory. As such, here are my prop wagers you have on the board: 1: Buxton 60.5 GP - OVER This is pure optimism. The only reason to believe this is that my perception is he largely has missed games at the MLB level due to unproductive play, not to injury. Here's to hoping that unproductive play is a thing of the past. 2: Cruz 21.5 HR - OVER 22 or more is not outlandish and with my inflated offense theory, 21-25 HR's seems reasonable. 3: Arraez .320 BA - OVER While I think the league will adjust to him, I don't think it will be enough to hold him down that much in an inflated offensive environment. 4: Twins Cy Young Winner - UNDER Huh? The Twins are built on depth, not high end talent. I hope I am wrong here, but this one seems like the most obvious bet that cannot be even odds. 5: Garver OPS .888 - PUSH (Have you ever even ran a sports book? You can't use an attainable number. You need to go something like .8885 here!!! Just playing bud. I'll take the) OVER I expect Garver to play 50 or so games at catcher. His approach and swing seem like the kind of combo that is hard to pick apart, since pitchers will have to throw fastballs for strikes at some point. In an inflated offensive environment, I don't see .889 or higher as all that unlikely. Obviously, if I am wrong about the scoring environment, I'm losing my entire bankroll here...

I gotta admit, I am shocked that Bieber was taken so low for a pitcher. I would think him solidly in the top 10 pitchers for the next decade, maybe even as high as #3. I took him in the MLB decade contest as the player to win the most Cy Young awards, so you can see where I stand on him. And in an effort to be objective, I would also think Clevinger gets taken in front of Berrios. I strongly believe that the Indians have the four best players in the AL Central right now. This is not to say Berrios should not be in the top 10 pitchers taken as well, just that I think he is probably in the 8-10 range while Bieber is in the 3-5 range and Clevinger is in the 6-8 range. And also, I hope that I am wrong. Dead wrong.

I want the highest level of tension in every AB of a baseball game. A DH delivers that desired experience. Pitchers hitting lowers the tension for, sometimes significant, periods of the game. This lowering of tension makes a baseball game less interesting. Baseball, and all forms of entertainment, need more tension, not less. In the game of baseball, tension creates drama. Drama creates a better baseball viewing experience for the observers of that game. To use a Gleeman-esque terrible analogy of the day, it's like having an automatic garage door opener. We all take it for granted that we'd prefer an automatic garage door opener, but back when they came out, some people probably didn't want one, thinking it's so unnecessary and even diminishes the experience of garage & car ownership. But once you have one and no longer need to expose yourself to the procedural drudgery of leaving your car to park it safely away in your garage, you realize you love it. That is what the DH will be like for NL fans. Ultimately, I am happy for the fans of NL teams that will get to experience the heightened tension and added drama that the DH adds to an observed baseball game. Especially being the I just moved to Phoenix and would like to have more tension in those games I will be watching in the future. The only downside will be that there are less opportunities to go hit the can while at the ballpark watching a game.

As MikeLink pointed out, I think the Dbacks deserve a spot in the Top 15...arguably at #12. I would probably drop the White Sox out. I'm probably a little low on them, but, with the exception of Grandal, they seemed to have a quantity-over-quality offseason. It established a floor and they have the most variance on this list, but I just don't see enough breakthrus for them to be noticeably better than .500. You could talk me into dropping the Angels or Padres as well. Just get the Dbacks on this list already!!! ;o)

First, thank you for introducing Pitch Type Liner Weights to me. That is a stat I was not familiar with. Very cool!!! And now, with that said, I feel like wPT/C would be better for an exercise like this, since it is a rate stat while wPT is a counting stat. I doubt it changes any of the leaders except maybe the changeup. It would like demonstrate further just how good Trevor May's fastball really is. Cuz damn, that is a dominant pitch! This was a super rad article. Thank you!!!

I can't believe no one has said it yet. It's probably because we are the small sliver of the fan base that did not feel this way, but the correct answer is... Joe Mauer It makes me sad that Joe is the answer to this question, but he is. It seems the plurality of Twins fans could talk about nothing else regarding the Twins during the dog years of the 2010's except how they were terrible because of the Joe Mauer contract. How he was not worth the money, as if he took it from them himself without asking. I have never noticed a player the Twins general fan base absolutely loves to hate. In fact, if I sat down at a bar outside of Twins Territory and started chatting with a complete stranger about MLB history and brought up Joe Mauer, I would describe him exactly like this... "He was one of the five best players to ever wear a Twins uniform. I loved him. Most Twins fans loved-to-hate him. I still don't really understand why."

I would love if you put ERA+ in the stats for context. Eyeballing it: -Radke is around a 120 -Baker is around a 110 -Silva is around 100 -Milton is around 90 -Santana is more of a guess. Maybe 160? That's kind of sad that we can't come up with better SPs than Milton and Silva for a decade that saw so many division championships. It's not a surprise they got bounced in so many playoff series. Not that I think pitching is the remedy for playoff losses per se, but league average pitching is. If this is the best team was running out on the bump to start each game, that means the team was likely starting league average, at best, SPs for most games. That is something I did not realize at the time. I understood we had worse pitching than the opposing team, but I always chalked it up to the opponent having really good SPs, not the Twins having below average SPs. The things you learn...

I love it! Baseball could use a harmless shake-up off the field that spurs some other changes. Having three 10-team divisions is so fun!!! That is something no other pro sports league I have ever heard consider. Way outside the box, especially for MLB. I'm in favor of this being a trial run for new alignment in 2021 and beyond as well.

Trevor Bauer and Zack Greinke are my two favorite personalities in baseball today. Bauer has stated that he will only be taking one year deals in FA. If he sticks to that, he will likely cost $30mil or more, provided he gets back to even career numbers in 2020. That seems like a much more important discussion point and may price him out of the Twins budget. He would not create a media circus in any way possible. This is not signing someone like Aroldis Chapman, AJ Hinch or, from other sports, Colin Kaepernick or Lebron James. From listening to current and former teammates of Bauer's talk on podcasts and YouTube with other MLBers, they absolutely love him...especially the pitchers. I mean, Mike Clevinger, who I'm going to guess is about as far to the other side of the political spectrum, based on his publicly stated values and philosophies, as you will find, calls Trevor Bauer his "best friend". That's the kind of player I want on my favorite team. If he can be had on a reasonable deal, hell yes, sign him up.

I feel like this was written for me I constantly espouse the greatness of Shane Mack when in deep conversations with fellow baseball fans. Mack was arguably the best player on the Twins during my formative Twins years of 1990-94. A true 5-tool player who did not have any standout strengths, but no glaring weaknesses either. His career is so strange. He is one of only 2 players to put up more than 20 brWAR without getting a chance to reach 3300 PAs. (remarkably, the other player also spent the bulk of his career with the Twins) For those five years, he was essentially the same age as, and out-brWAR'd, players like, David Justice, Bobby Bonilla, Mark McGwire, Cecil Fielder, Jose Canseco, and Will Clark. Most of those guys were perennial all-stars in that time while Mack never even seemed in the discussion. He matched the OPS of Will Clark, Bobby Bonilla, and Cecil Fielder while playing much more valuable defense. Bobby Bonilla, roughly the same age as Mack, will make about 2x more money on his final MLB contract to not play...than Shane Mack made his entire career from MLB contracts.

Funny how different readers are. My absolute favorite section of The MVP Machine was Lindbergh describing his coaching session. I'm not sure if it's because I have played amateur ball for years, and still do in my late 30's, but I get goosebumps reading about an amateur, who has no idea how to properly swing a bat, find incredible success in a brief session with a modern professional. I was once just like that until I worked with THE guy here in Albuquerque, New Mexico who tutored Bregman, Garver, and almost every other pro player from the area. The elation of crushing pitch after pitch with true consistency after just 30 minutes with a coach like that is something every baseball fan should experience once in their life.

As stated, this has little-to-no value in measuring discipline. The headline was rather misleading That's on Ben Clemens, not Patrick Wozniak. There has to be an algorithm just waiting to be discovered that aggregates swing rate on pitches in the zone and out of the zone. That is what I was expecting when I clicked on the article and was super excited to read. This was a bit of a letdown.