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And I would say that when it comes to that kind of money, you might as well live where you want and play with a team that's a likely contender. I guess an Occam's Razor's beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I agree,The Twins are going to have to do a lot just to get a wild card. At least we'll get to watch Spring Training games pretty soon..

Ahh, the first use of Occam's Razor that I've seen in the forum. Seems like you're making quite a few assumptions yourself. I don't think it's properly used. I'd say you've created a Straw Man.

Actually, not bad until Mauer's contract.

How do you know that the Twins didn't offer more? Yes, I think Mauer kinda crippled the Twins for 4 years, and he seems like a perfect example of contract slacking. The longer the contract, the bigger the slack. A recipe for disaster.

Yes, I know. You were talking about a front end starter. I was thinking you probably meant 2.9 to 3.2, and that's close to acey numbers. I was more making the point that a team of 3.6 to 4 starters would be very competitive, and I'm not seeing Darvish as anything more than that. I want Lynn and Cobb for $50ish mil a year for 4 years. I don't think that's too far off, and I think it helps the team more than Darvish with less risk.

If Darvish wanted more $ from the Twins than the Cubs, which is likely, the Twins were right not to sign him. The trouble with an FA is you're competing against teams that won't be crippled if they sign someone that doesn't work out. The Twins came very close to putting all of their eggs in one basket. I'm happy that they didn't.

I don't think there were any aces out there. I'd love to have 3 3.6-3.8s, especially if the relievers have improved.

I bet they may have backed off Darvish a bit when Santana had surgery. They need 2 pitchers now.

Everything I read was that he wanted to go back to LA, but predictions were that he'd go to the Cubs. I wouldn't be surprised if the Twins made as good an offer. If they didn't think they were in competition, they would have signed someone else by now. I think Darvish was stringing them on. Who knows. Anyone that watched the Super Bowl would have second thoughts about playing games at 25-30 degrees. How have the players from Asia done at Minnesota? We'll know if the Twins want to sign someone in the next couple of weeks. The logjam should be broken now. Please Twins, don't sign a bum.

I think Santana's injury causes the Twins big problems. He'll miss a good part of the season, and even when he returns, he's not likely to be what he was last year. That's a big hole for a team with an ERA that was 9th in the league and got into the wild card with an 85 win season. I think if the Twins add Darvish, a lot of things have to go right just to get the wild card. If Cleveland and Houston don't win all of those games again next year, an 85 win season isn't going to do it. The Twins need 2 good pitchers. Not placeholders. What are the real odds that Gibson will be good? Right now we only have Berrios as someone that we might be able to count on, and he threw 145 innings last year. I don't see a good year ahead if we only add Darvish.

Thanks for the link!

Ha ha.Yeah, mainly us. I'm sure the designers like them. If I was them I'd like them too.

Yes, statisticians and actuaries have their hands full, how can we understand and apply? The more complex a stat, generally the less useful if becomes. People use them incorrectly, and the weighting of the calculations are subjective. I liked Sabermetrics when it discovered that bunting, stealing bases, switch hitting, and having enough LHP and hitting in the rotation generally hurt more than they helped. Most Managers and GMs still overvalue that stuff.

Phew, I thought this thing was headed south fast. Thanks for your takes, they're very insightful. Bill

I hate the single space after too. I'm also not great at the quotes. sorry

Thanks for the info on SIERA, I'll take a look. Each pitch doesn't tie to a runner advancing. WPs and SBs do. In addition to his WPs, he gave up 30% of the Rangers' stolen bases. Together, they make a significant impact on his ERA. It could easily be 15%.

The prior year's FIP is a projection, and the formula bears that out. I don't know how Steamer uses FIP, but his projection is pretty much Lynn's 2017 FIP with little or no correlation to previous years. I was pointing out that it's not a valid comparison between Darvish and Lynn. It's not, because it doesn't account for Darvish's SBs and WPs, and their affect on his earned runs is projectable. They will likely cost 7+ runs every year unless he improves dramatically. The only things that would make Darvish more valuable last year are more subjective than objective.

Well, the only way to figure out why something doesn't make sense is to do a little digging.The only defense I've ever seen you use is to say something doesn't apply (without much support, and in a flippant way) or just to say that X stat is better than Y stat because that's what Statcast/Steamer or Teams use to determine value. I'm pretty sure that MLB teams are much more sophisticated than Steamer is, but I realize there are probably some really dumb GMs out there. I think that the Steamer gang would probably tell you that they aren't very good, relatively speaking, at accurately predicting an individual player's numbers. I've seen no comparisons of Steamer to the 2016 or 2017 projections that they made other than they were generally better than the other 7 or 8 prognosticators, however they don't give the method they used to rank them. For instance, what percentage of their WAR projections are within 25% of the actual WAR? A somewhat sideways BAPIP IS considered in FIP. FIP is an attempt to eliminate defensive players from the picture, but it does it by weighing things that may or may not do what it tries to do. To assume that every batted ball is hit in the same way is not really a great way to do it.I freely admit that it would be a very hard thing to do, but because it's hard to do, and SOs are very heavily weighted, it doesn't really reflect what makes a pitcher effective. It would be a better stat if it made an allowance for the deviation from the player's BAPIP to the league BAPIP, because that WOULD give pitchers credit for being more fieldable. Your example of an average from career BAPIP doesn't work because it doesn't look like FIP considers more than the single past year. So, apples to apples, only the single year BAPIP should be used to compare Darvish and Lynn to the projected FIP that was being discussed My points were to show why FIP wasn't a good measure for these two pitchers in this current year. Once again I'd bet Steamer would agree, because so many of Darvish's singles turn into doubles, and doubles to triples because Darvish can't hold people on base and he throws a ton of wild pitches. One other thing, I think Santana did have a BAPIP that was pretty high as a rookie. How do you suppose his WAR from that year looked compared to the following year's projection? Maybe you could take some time to give us your take on why Darvish's ERA was 15% higher than Lynn's. Dig in to the stats a bit. It might help us understand why Darvish is clearly more productive than Lynn.

I'm not sure it does when comparing Lynn and Darvish, here's why. Darvish had more SOs than Lynn, and that's a big factor in FIP, but these aren't: BABIP: Darvish .284, Lynn .248, and both teams had identical FPs. I think most of us would agree that some pitchers are easier to field, and I think this is a big enough difference to say it's a factor here. Wild Pitches Darvish 12, Lynn 2 SB Darvish 20, Lynn 4. You could say that the catcher determines the SB numbers too, except for that Darvish accounted for 30% of all Rangers SBs (pre all star because Darvish went to the Dodgers) while Lynn accounted for 7% of St Louis'. I think it would be more than fair to say FIP doesn't account for a lot of Darvish's shortcomings. In this case I don't think FIP is a better indicator, and I'm not saying ERA is perfect, but I don't think the FIP difference is justified in this case.

I wish I knew how they project ERAs. I've looked, but I haven't been able to find any Steamer projections for 2017. It would be interesting to see what he projected for other pitchers in 2017. I just think it's weird that he projects Cobb's and Lynn's ERAs up a point from 2017. They're both another year past TJ surgery, and they both threw really well last year.

The scary part of Santana's surgery is that he's not likely to be effective for a while after his return, maybe even the entire season. Yesterday I saw in Puckett's Pond that Cobb's and Lynn's expected contracts were. Together it was less than Darvish, and it was for 4 years. If it's true, I'd love to have both. Here it is: https://puckettspond.com/2018/02/05/minnesota-twins-if-not-yu-darvish-who/

Ok, I'll bow out. I've enjoyed talking to everyone though.

You really think no one's been discussing age risk and how it should be valued?