ashbury

His 2022 at AAA looks like he's on the cusp. Too old to be a prospect, but sometimes old dogs learn one more trick. Good luck to him.

The ump calling "too much arc" must have been frustrating to him. 😘

Nothing wrong with signing a AAAA player to a minor league contract. His resume looks like he's THIS close to being a productive major leaguer. Maybe the coaching staff unlocks the one needed tweak to his game at the plate. It's his first change of scenery.

Nah, just kidding. If these events come to pass, have to like our chances. A playoff series win, or even two, so much the better. I'm all in for 93 wins, and just like our FO I'll backtrack on this if there are significant injuries.

We acted like it was a never-ended supply when we disposed of two of them in a connected series of trades just under a year ago.

Looks like they didn't send a lot of anticipated starters among the position players, but the pitchers were for the most part the types where I'd like to see how they're doing, and none of them apparently had a bad day.

Nature's Most Perfect Food™

Somehow I never caught on before just how short Sonny Gray is for a modern day pitcher.

Up the middle talent is hard to acquire. I'd be very leery of trading him away for needs elsewhere on the diamond, and would hang onto him to see whether he can finish development into a solid player.

Careful there. You were one transposition-error typo away from a month-long ban.

I didn't like Mahle's injury history when the trade was announced or how it flared up for us, either. But let's not go overboard with terms like crappy. First game he went the first 4 innings facing the minimum 12 batters. He gave up a solo homer in the fifth, and if the knock on Rocco had been true that would have been the end of his day. Instead he pitched the sixth and gave up two more homers but retained his composure enough to finish the inning, and was the pitcher of record for the win. Next game, he threw six shutout innings. This performance for the Twins through two games is not crappy - an ERA of 3 on the nose. Next game, he pitches 2 no-hit shutout innings then comes out due to injury immediately after striking out a batter. He misses a start or two. When he comes back in September, he has a terrible bottom of the first, and completes another inning without a score, and then is shut down for the rest of the season. I'm disinclined to view that final game as having any predictive power whatsoever. Even if you do, that amounts to exactly 2 crappy innings out of those 16, plus one additional inning with a solo homer. Emilio Pagan should be green with envy. View the trade however you like (I remain skeptical) but let's not exaggerate, in the evaluation of what he produced.

As one who may have started this tangent through a bit of snark, I feel bad about that. It was marginal and if I'd known you'd take it badly I probably would have held off.* I count myself as on the analytic side of the aisle at TD, but I do like knowing if an experienced scout looks at a player and says, "he reminds me of a young ____ _____." Qualitative observations can be used analytically quite well, IMO. So comps are good with me. I don't know Ty France that well, but with a quick look at a source or two, he does seem like a pretty solid comp for our Miranda - height, weight, handedness, and the basic skillsets according to scouts. Nice find. I'll note that the two players are almost exactly 4 years apart in age, but France being born in July puts him in a different arbitrary cutoff for age during a season on b-r.com, and I think when doing a comp it's reasonable to keep that in mind. In that view, Miranda has come up to the majors almost exactly a full year younger than France did, and on average there is some forecasting value to that, though not a game-changer. Your article's headline might not have needed alteration if you had used France as the comp instead of Manny, but perhaps you'd have felt the message was less compelling. For me? I'd have liked it better. France is a valuable player and it's good to know our guy could track like that. Your article as it is contains more caveats than I like in a comp between players. Doesn't mean it was a bad, bad article, so again, I'm a little sheepish over my snark. * Which is perilously close to the non-apology apology, "I'm sorry you feel that way." Sorry for that too, but it does summarize that my reason for regret is impure. "Mistakes were made."

There's unfair, and then there's probably pointless.

This is a true statement but I don't find it the most useful. A calendar breakdown such as the monthly summary provided by b-r.com gives more texture, and confirms my memory that the trendline was heading downward long before even mid-season. It felt to me a lot like an Indy race car that runs out of fuel on the final stretch - "they may finish but they ain't gonna win, are they." September-October was a disaster for the Twins no doubt, but they needed to turn the June-August trend around if they were to remain in first at the end Injuries that occurred near the moment they actually fell out of first were merely the final nail in the coffin. The Twins were 67-62 the morning of Sept 1 and the Guardians wound up winning 92, so the Twins needed to find a way to go 25-8 just to force a tie, even though they were nominally still in first place - they had essentially thoroughly blown it already. It was a great start but this was not a strong first-place team by mid-summer and they were running on fumes by September.. Month by Month Split W L RS RA W-L% April 12 9 85 68 .571 May 18 12 137 120 .600 June 13 15 134 124 .464 July 10 12 102 120 .455 August 14 14 117 105 .500 September 10 18 102 127 .357 October 1 4 19 20

PS, I impressed Mrs Ash momentarily by making a similar call on Tyler Duffey at a game one time in Pawtucket - can't locate his curveball to save his life - walks a guy - 3 and 1 on the next batter - 'watch this,' I sez. / edit - I was able to locate the game at b-r.com and of course I totally misremembered the details but hey whatever - there were two HR involved, one to blow the save and one to lose on a walkoff, so it's arguably better than my version of the story, though I know I called one of the HR, probably the last.

Babe Ruth called his own shot. Gallo relies on a fan. Weak sauce there, Joey.

Gah, another of Manfred's made-up rules, to speed up the game?

Yes, that is exactly how injuries on a roster work.

"This week, on Spell-Correct Software Gone Wild..."

Now ask it to construct the counter argument.

Is there any real evidence that a pitcher's build correlates with injury? They say you pitch with your legs, but a massive lower body could thus translate into higher stresses on the joints in the arm. I'm not an engineer though, and certainly not a biomechanics guy. Berrios isn't a big man really, and he's held up, for example. It could be that wiry guys who can bring the heat are the ones to bank on.

First, Oliva wasn't in the HoF at the age where Knoblauch is now. So the latter can wait quite a while longer before the former should be a benchmark. Character counts, when considering HoF qualifications - it's officially stated so in the ballot that goes out each year. Allegations about domestic violence, and admitted use of HGH, are black marks against Knoblauch that have no parallel to Oliva that I know of. Finally, in that light, a comparison of Knoblauch to Puckett would be a more fruitful topic, though it's all been hashed out to death by now. Things came out about Kirby after his HoF induction that quite possibly could have kept him on the outside looking in. Sentiment goes for a lot in HoF candidacies, and when you lose that, you may not get in.

It's like, he has been the party in the arrangement who has control.

I'm with you on this. I started to make some kind of allusion to Royce Lewis hurting himself in the outfield last year, but thought better of it because it amounted to satire and I'm best advised to leave that to RandBalls Stu. But the irony is just too rich and I find myself at least laying the outline of it here.