LaBombo

Trying this now with butter pecan ice cream sprinkled with Hostess Ho Ho's. Normally this wouldn't appeal to me, but the civil defense sirens are going off here in the 'hood, and if the dog and I are fated to go Dorothy and Toto into the great beyond, it's not going to be while I'm eating a g.d. rice cake...

Normally you'd be right, but Lawrie went Paleo on it and just smashed it with a rock.

Greeley's Army Surplus and Social Club down on Larpenteur. Just ask for Alice and tell her you want a game of billiards. Yes, even if you don't really wish to play. http://s.mcstatic.com/thumb/7727870/21658013/4/flash_player/0/1/unforgiven_1992_giving_english_bob_instructions.jpg?v=4

Suzuki proving that small catchers can be glacially slow too. A's 3b had time to bobble ball, bat it like a kitten with yarn, make and eat a turkey and avocado sandwich, check his email, and get a good start on an Eckersley 'stache before his throw, and it was still just a step behind the Zukester, albeit in the wrong zip code. Seeing him gather himself for the trip to second on the throwing error was like watching a wagon train prepare to move out. And yes, maybe that's overly negative at the end of a nice win, but it's taking my mind off of Duensing's pitching.

Do you mean like, during the game? 'Cause if you've ever seen them in their natural habitat after the game, there's cause for concern there too.

I'd be happy with .500, but your optimism is agreeable.

Ok, then. [*Lowers Javelin man-portable anti tank missile launcher*]

Hughes, and it's not even close. Using small samples of ERA just doesn't work very well when grading pitchers. Career trends and peripherals tell a more complete story, and they both point toward Hughes and May being more effective. Milone and Gibson are having nice seasons, but they could regress at the drop of a hat unless their 6-ish K rates hold up. In the mean time they're relatively young and cheap, so the Twins might as well ride their hot streak while they can. That leaves the older, more expensive, low-K Pelfrey as the odd man out. It's great that he's a nice guy and all, but complaining about going to the pen when you're lucky to be in the majors at all somewhat nullifies that for me. Take away the good guy stuff and you're left with a guy who's 31 and has an ERA that's very likely unsustainable given his very low K rate and his other mediocre peripherals. May to the pen long term is a mistake. May to the pen instead of Pelfrey just makes it a bigger one. There is virtually no chance Pelfrey contributes much to a winning Twins team, especially in the long run beyond 2015. If the Twins weed out the weak rotation link in July while May helps win a couple in the pen before returning, great. Anything more than that and the franchise is likely the worse for it.

Had to look it up myself. Knew one was righty and one was the crazy flailing spin like your grandma batting in the family reunion softball game, but couldn't remember which was which. They were both terrified. And yes, if Stairs never actually took an at bat like either of theirs against Johnson, you know he probably thought about it. The Wonder Hamster is on my top ten list of non-Twin MLB players I'd like to have a beer with.

He's also working on a faster-than-light no seam fastball that can go back in time and strike you out three games ago.

Spin-o-rama, or retire? There's also the Larry Walker option... http://enquirer.com/editions/1997/07/09/walker_450x407.jpg

Not quite true. May can hit 98 as long as the catcher knows which hemisphere to set up in.

My guess is that the Reds would still overtake them down in Juarez Mexico... or in Mauer's case, just outside the employee entrance to the stadium.

Pelfrey's sounds like a good guy from what we've heard, and we're pulling for him because Twin. But when he was openly grumpy about being assigned to the pen in spring training, my mental image was of Terry Ryan being played by Maverick's gruff, foul-mouthed CO in Top Gun, helpfully explaining to Pelf that "You're just lucky to be here, @$$h*!e!" http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_FfXkHFSe-m0/SkKS78_3AUI/AAAAAAAAA9w/hf3pVy2Nc3Q/s400/jim.gif

http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g240/lizcoolmompicks/Mom101%2008/UniversalFrankenstein-angrymob.jpg Do whatever you were doing in the 6th inning for the rest of the game and we'll call it even...

Good thing it's not a home game. It's raining hard enough in my neighborhood that my dream of owning a houseboat may be about to come true. Re: Pelfrey, has there been any mention by D&B tonight about how his start might affect the "Third prize is you're fired" musical chairs rotation shakeup when Ervin returns?

Quantifying the skill of staying healthy is even earlier in its infancy than applying metrics to defense. And it will probably lag behind most other forms of empirical sports analysis even when it's been studied more. In the mean time, we'll just have to go mostly by what we see on the field. And in that regard, one reassuring thing about Buxton is that it's extremely unlikely that his injuries are the product of his body carrying twice its natural muscle mass like Jose Canseco. It appears almost equally as improbable that Buxton's injuries are arising from his playing the game with the supple grace of a donkey basketball power forward like David Justice. That leaves the potential of being both blessed and cursed with an athletically gifted body composed mainly of soap bubbles, like perennially frustrating All Star talent J.D. Drew. But so far Buxton at least subjectively does not seem to be that sort of player either. Instead, it looks like the injuries are more likely just the product of bad luck and a lack of polish with his self defensive skills, as several posters have mentioned. The head-first slide is the most obvious and easily correctible, but situational awareness near the wall and his teammates, along with some other improvements to his game, should go a long way toward keeping him healthy. In any case, it's awfully early to make any judgments about BB yet, let alone one as subjective as whether he'll be able to avoid injuries. At this point the concern seems to be much more a product of what he potentially means to the future of the franchise than being due to an alarming trend. Put another way, Trevor Plouffe has quietly become a fairly valuable yet somewhat fragile ballplayer, but how much handwringing has there been about his ability to stay healthy?

If Meyer's best shot to contribute is in the pen, so be it. Just please, please nothing from FSN or any other cheerleaders about the starting pitching depth of the Twins organization having anything to do with the decision. Please. Pretty please. With sugar on it.

I get that!

Threw a deuce, dropped a deuce, tomayto, tomahto. The important thing is that Pelfrey can reclaim the rotation spot he's due by the divine right of his half dozen nice spring training innings.

At the risk of incurring the wrath of TD mods, here's my visual album of the torid but brief love affair between Twins fans and Ervin Santana: December 12, 2014 signing: http://ak-hdl.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr06/2013/8/29/19/anigif_enhanced-buzz-4623-1377817997-14.gif April 3, 2015 suspension: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/08/07/article-2385908-1B2FD065000005DC-279_634x345.jpg http://www.themotorreport.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/ferrisbueller-2-thumb.jpg http://www.houses.com/SiteNewsArticles/Ben_Rose_Ferris2.jpg Note to mods: Sorry for the excessive use of images in a non-game thread. If it helps, consider the images withdrawn from the excess pixels accrewed in my account during my four month winter hibernation...

Very good take on the overall pluses and minuses of the deal itself and what it means to the big picture. As an aside probably several people have wondered if that small step backward was perhaps very small, if not a net sideways. The 2014 walk rate was up from the 2013 rate, but that 2013 rate was his career low, and conspicuously lower than his career average. And while higher the 2014 rate was right in line with his career average. Meanwhile the strikeout rate rose as one would expect with the transition to the national league. But it was not only much higher than 2013's, it was a full K per 9 higher than his career rate. There's no exact formula for perfectly predicting added K rate in the AL to NL switch, but it seems to me that most of the stuff out there says that starters tend to gain about .5 K/9 going to the NL. So that would account for only about half of the increase. At the very least, the switch didn't mask a decline. The ERA increase to nearly 4 in 2014 is what jumps out at most people initially, and it shouldn't be disregarded purely as anomaly, but it's more or less upside down from both the FIP and xFIP in that both markedly improved in 2014. Then there's the fact that Santana endured a 2014 BABIP spike of over 30 points above his career average. The 2013/2014 contrast looks even more favorable, with an inevitable 2014 ERA increase coming with along with the whopping 50 point in increase in BABIP Haven't seen Santana throw a ton of innings and the pitchFX stuff will always be a mystery to me. But a few things jumped out at me. Having thrown his changeup right around 7% of the time in his career, Santana roughly doubled that in '14. It only graded/fx'ed average, but the net result was that Santana quietly went from being what effectively amounted to a two pitch starter to a three pitch one. Velocity of all three equaled 2013. Plate discipline numbers are harder to get a bead on. Swinging strikes were up, but how much of that was opposing pitchers flailing away like a kid at a pinata? Overall, it seemed that the numbers were consistent with 2013. Where there were small changes, improvements appeared to outnumber declines. Although the small trends I've noted are pretty trivial individually, taken together they tell me that to the extent you can determine with the league change, Santana seems to have pitched pretty much as well in 2014 as he did the prior year. It's not revelatory, but it's pretty good to know when you commit $55M/4 to a pitcher who just pitched through the beginning of the expert slope portion of the aging curve.

Lagging on likes for your posts I've been trying to get caught up on, as well as some of the other great regular contributors here. Well done. And your point about the Twins' tapping of the metro area's food-monikered baseball talent is well taken. This year Mark Hamburger, next year... Mike Carp!!! Meant Trout. F#@%. I hate getting rusty.

Not in the bathroom, unfortunately, which is where I mostly do my best TD'ing. Ok in the war room if I wave the iPad around in the air, especially if I act like I just don't care. But if my role as an occasional and ineffectual Twins analyst were on the line, I'd p!ss on a spark plug if I thought it would help. Happy holidays!

If Nolasco is "entrenched", then Gibson is in a heavily fortified CP bunker. Hughes is here, playing Wargames with WOPR until pitchers and catchers report. http://www.imfromdenver.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/cheyenne-mountain-complex-colorado-springs-colorado.jpg Meanwhile, Pelfrey is jumping up and down in plain sight of enemy lines wearing a bullseye T-shirt and holding a 'Shoot Me' sign above his head. If the Twins are counting on him to make any contribution whatsoever, let alone hold down a rotation spot, it will be very disappointing. Give the guy a shot at a bullpen role and see what he can do. Maybe the lesser workload and the ability to let it fly, combined with potentially improved health, will do him some good. By all accounts he is a good guy who is highly motivated and respected by his teammates, making him easy to root for. But if the Twins are even considering handing Pelfrey a rotation spot based on a few meaningless spring training innings, there are at least two problems that come to mind. First, it's an additional sign (the Hunter acquisition being the most discouraging) that the Twins are planning on mailing in the 2015 season. Second, it's further evidence that they steadfastly refuse to stop the doomed practice of microsample exhibition games as a primary tool for player evaluation and roster construction. Having been a bit of a pessimist (watch for me at the Understatement Awards) about the Twins recently, the first issue is neither surprising nor a huge letdown to me. So the second is the more troubling. Aside from the admirable toils of Jack Goin, this franchise has exhibited an attitude toward modern metrics that spans a range from casual disdain to lukewarm interest to shocking ignorance to outright contempt. It's not surprising that the Twins have been strongly influenced by a running 25+ year narrative about a David out-scouting, out-hustling, and generally out-contrarian-ing MLB's Goliaths. If people keep telling you you're great at something because of how you do it, how hard would you try to tell yourself they're wrong? But baseball metrics have evolved from the age of alchemy in the late 80's to the Newtonian physics phase they're in now. And the Twins are having a tough time adapting. Based apparently almost solely on the eye candy scouting tests administered in spring training, they've brought players north who could probably be improved upon with guys in the Twin Cities who have never played in the majors. There's probably a '25th man irrelevancy' slant to this discussion that I'm missing. That being said, if Pelfrey gets a spot in the rotation because he whiffs some washup three times in one start who was cut from the Nippon Ham Fighters or the Lansing Lugnuts in a game that the big wheel in the Twins scouting machine happens to be watching, it's going to be challenging to get behind some of their upcoming personnel moves.