biggentleben

Cannot release where the info comes from, but the word on Kimbrel is that his knee is a major question. He had some major issues a couple years ago and came back way too fast, and it's never healed right. He was encouraged to get full reconstructive surgery this offseason after things were done on a wing and a prayer last year with the Red Sox training staff, and he chose to wait until after he'd signed. Oops. Teams don't want to commit over $15M per season for 3+ years to a guy who has a good chance that he'll miss a full year of that contract and is no sure bet to come back at full strength once he does return. He's had many 1-year offers and even 2-year offers for plenty more than the qualifying offer, and he turned them down. The one thing I'm reading here is discussing his clubhouse demeanor because he's unsigned...that's hogwash. Kimbrel is an amazing clubhouse guy, and if it were based on presence in the clubhouse, he'd be worth every penny of what he's asking. That sort of comment is definitely unfounded. Another point to consider is that the Twins currently sit with 11 picks and a draft pool of $9.9M. Signing Kimbrel would remove their 2nd round pick, which would remove roughly $1.34M from that pool. Coming into negotiations with your picks at #13 and #39 with $9.9M is a whole lot different than coming in with $8.25M.

Hoese discussed with a chance to stick at short early on in his career by the Fangraphs podcast, and that's something I've been hearing more as more have gotten eyes on him. He's a guy that I could see absolutely exploding up the board from where people "expect" him to go to somewhere in the 10-15 range.

Busch is an excellent athlete. He's just played first with the Tar Heels. He's done a lot of work in the outfield this spring, but mostly in practice, and scouts are reporting that he's looked very comfortable, especially in the corners. Misner's not hit since the SEC season began. Unless he's signing well below slot, he shouldn't be in consideration at 13. Two guys that I've heard a lot of tie to the Twins on have been finishing well. One Jeremy mentioned here in Langeliers, and the other is Josh Jung of Texas Tech, who's slugged nearly .900 since the first weekend of April, spanning 72 at bats, with nearly twice as many walks as strikeouts, and he's been getting a lot better grades on his defense as the year goes on at the hot corner.

I've mocked Wallner to the Rays more than once this spring. He's not getting a ton of traction in first/comp discussion, though. I think he'll be a first-day pick, with the Rays a big fan (which makes sense), and a range of 35-75 for his draft area, but there are a lot of guys who fit in that range this year.

My brother works as a John Deere salesman and store manager. He's been trying to explain to his pro-Trump wife that the policies going on in DC are causing them to have less money in the household due to farmers having less money because of less markets to sell to and the cost of equipment going up so much as Deere has used up their steel backups in house and now have to buy at a much higher rate, raising the already incredibly high cost of new equipment.

I've loved Harper since his days in the Braves system. He's a guy who doesn't have huge stuff, but he's a great guy, and he simply gets outs. Heck, he has a 2.56 career ERA in just over 450 minor league innings, all tossed in relief.

I had some scholarships. Interestingly, the scholarships I had were most likely going to be similar to what a college baseball player had as well. Over 2/3 of all college baseball players in the Division 1 level receive the majority of their scholarship money from non-athletic sources.

In all seriousness, Doc, I’d wager that the Blue Jays will have a lot better chance of bringing in a JuCo guy in the 26th round with upside rather than see him go to a four-year and turn into a first day pick. It could also help them in a market they’re already making huge strides in, the second-tier Latin market. Once you get beyond the six figure guys that are obvious, oftentimes there are a few guys who get way more than you’d project simply because they were a $100K valuation that 4 teams liked, so they bid each other up over him. Below that six figure market are a whole lot of guys who end up mostly failing out, but often times are where you find the big upside, super low ceiling types. If they know you’re spending more along the way, you’ve got a big in-road there. That is a huge market. I suggested that the Braves could counter their punishments by paying minor leaguers significantly more. Yes, they’d still be stuck to $10k max signings in 2019/2020, but you’d likely be able to get the cream of that crop.

I commented on the blog rather than on the article post, but I did bring together Emily's piece and Dirk Hayhurst's piece on the topic today on my site: https://videobaseballscout.com/2019/03/18/minor-league-baseball-pay-large-issue/ The basics...even if the Jays were on the high end of the AAA scale before, adding 50% to that still would not put them at a yearly wage equal to a year's income at minimum wage in Toronto ($11 in 2018, moving to $11.50 on April 1). With dictated offseason activities making an offseason job nearly impossible, players are rarely going to be able to find something to work with their workout schedule that they need to keep up all offseason.

I've got a piece on my site that came out today that discusses that even with this, not a single Toronto minor league player makes what would have been minimum wage in Toronto in 2018...and minimum wage went up .50/hour in 2019. https://videobaseballscout.com/2019/03/18/minor-league-baseball-pay-large-issue/

It's basically a car crash that you cannot look away from right now. I finish an episode thinking there could be so much more there...but then I tune back in the next week.

Oh, you have no argument from me on the pitch clock. You seriously don't notice it at all. It's just like netting. Once it's there, you don't notice it's there.

I was taught to watch how a catcher is leaning or a fielder is moving as the pitch is delivered. Every play, there are tons of little things going on to watch that indicate what is about to happen. Same with football. Tony Romo's no genius, it's simply watching indicators that make things fairly predictable. Part of the fun of the game is trying to guess ahead of the action. When you start looking for that, there's a LOT of movement between every pitch.

That's just it. There's plenty of moving and shifting going on between pitches, even with no one on base, but between plays in football, it's a constant loop of the last play. With baseball, the coverage immediately cuts off replay the moment the pitcher goes into motion, so unless they know they have a moment, they don't throw a replay up.

This is the case in the minor leagues. You barely notice the pitch clock at all. The extra inning rules, on the other hand....

Nah, teams put enough value into their draft picks that if you threaten the draft picks, international pool money, AND revenue sharing money for teams that don't spend to a certain level, you'd get a pretty universal response.

Then no one should ever watch football. The ball is in play for roughly 7-12 minutes of an average 3 hours on a Sunday. There's more than just the "lack of activity" as any baseball fan knows there's constant activity between pitches going on, just like there is between plays in football.

The two I'd talk on would be the DH. I'm very anti-DH, but I'd like to see one rule across the league. I do think you could see where Jerry Crasnik's influence in the MLBPA begins to show up here. Crasnik once proposed an option that would be interesting where he suggested the DH be tied to the starting pitcher. Once the starter goes out, the team either has to remove the reliever when the DH spot comes up in the lineup to retain the DH or let the reliever hit/use a pinch hitter.

I love how he mentions DiMaggio. Joe D was not even put in on his first ballot.

Multiple reports at the time he was banned were that Rose bet on his own team. That would absolutely change how he may manage the team. Some of those reports have been called into question, but nothing has ever completely removed suspicion of Rose betting on the team he was managing. That's a major no-no. There's also way more than an "everyone else was doing it" to the 1990s. I put out a piece about a year ago with a lot of research on the offense in the 1990s, and many did similar last year on the 30th anniversary of the home run chase. The basic underlying theme: there were a lot of things going on beyond PEDs. Two expansions within 5 years, all but a handful of the league changed stadiums into smaller stadiums in about a 10 year time span, the ball changing, change in the wood used in bats, first real introduction to free weight strength training league-wide (the first full-time strength coach wasn't hired when the Twins won their last World Series for perspective), changing strike zone, and emphasis on velocity in pitching leading to a much higher average pitch velocity across the league. There are smaller factors as well involved, but those are the biggest ones as I asked around the game.

Bonds notably made his changes after the 1998 home run race. At that time, he had played 13 seasons with 411 HR, 445 SB, and a .290/.411/.556 career line, good for a 164 OPS+. He'd won 3 MVP awards, finished in the top 5 in MVP voting four other seasons, won 8 Gold Gloves, and was widely considered the most dynamic player in the game. Just for mark on his line...at the time, the 400/400 club was an exclusive club. He's still the only member of it, and he's extended it to the 500/500 club, something we may never see another player ever do, and something he likely would have achieved without any additional substance. You want to get into performance enhancement, we can start discussing the shots Mickey Mantle was getting from his doctor. We can discuss animal testosterone shots being utilized before Babe Ruth ever stepped onto a major league field. Acting as if players of that era were the only ones that have ever done it and/or should be shamed for partaking in something as common as the greenies and cocaine in the clubhouses at other times in baseball history is just absurd. FWIW, no one ever died in the game due to PEDs. The same can not be said about amphetamines, and the player that passed can thank a certain revered HOFer that may be the last player that the media ever gave full clubhouse protection to, as that HOFer hooked him up with someone who could get him the best uppers available. Not a coincidence that so many players of the heavy greenie era have passed from heart attack. Gaylord Perry is in the Hall, and he is well-known for doctoring baseballs on the mound. The HOF is full of racists that refused to allow men of another race into their league for nearly 100 years. Those players with failed tests once the league started testing (and I do mean legit, punishable tests, not the Mitchell report leak, which has been found to be inaccurate on many of the names implicated as having failed the initial round of testing) are a tougher sell, and I can respect that. Manny Ramirez having little HOF traction in spite of his numbers makes perfect sense. Guys who never failed a test are no different from players in the 30s, 50s, or 70s who put up gaudy stats at certain times, but also had readily available PEDs in their clubhouses. Why suspicion of one is acceptable and not the other?

My wife, who has come in and out of the last few seasons, watched a couple of episodes with me and asked, "so when do we find out Zoey isn't actually dead as some sort of twist?" I laughed, and then I realized that the current writing was absolutely in line with that being a plot line point.

I know I keep harping on Mason, but that's one thing he did. He kept on a couple coaches from Wacker who he knew were very highly regarded. He had already found a gem in Kansas in David Gibb and made him the D-Coordinator by bringing Gibb with him to Minnesota. It's okay to have guys smarter than you on your coaching staff. In fact, that should be a sign you have a competent staff. If you could drill each position group and coordinate all three facets better than anyone under you as a head coach, you're bound for bad things.

From someone who was part of that transition, there's been no coach handed a worse hand in the last 20 years than was Glen Mason. Mason brought the program farther than any coach has really since the 1960s. He struggled, however, to get the team from the second tier to the first tier in the Big 10. Folks thought that was on the coach, disposed of him, and since, plenty of work has been done to try to improve the edges of the program while not addressing that a competent coach was a huge issue. I truly believe that without his health issues, Kill was on his way there. The University ponies up for basketball and hockey. Instead of looking for the young, trendy coach...instead, why not go the route done with Mason and Kill, guys who took over programs at lower levels and showed sustained success (Fleck's quick rise is not sustained). Mason had built up Kansas before coming to the Gophers. Those are the guys who can walk in the door and coach. You want to recruit? Call in Tony Dungy, Ben Hamilton, Darrell Thompson, Eric Decker, and Marion Barber to walk into living rooms with you. Moreover, call in someone like Ben Utecht to come into a living room with you. Frankly, it's filtering more and more back to high school how insignificant the facilities you see truly are. Most impressive will be proper training facilities and medical facilities, not the lounges and oversized video rooms that were the focus of the most recent upgrades for the Gophers. You want to know why a number of smaller schools haul in some surprising recruits, look at the number of their strength coaches and/or athletic trainers that end up moving on to the NFL or other pro leagues. That's a significant piece for young people who know they are sacrificing their bodies for the betterment of a millionaire coach with no return for them most likely. Shiny toys attract the type of players who go out on Saturday and are not focused, cannot execute, and simply don't put the time in where it should be (the weight room and practice field rather than a lounge), so they fall apart whenever pressure is applied or they run into even comparable talent. One of the hallmarks of both Mason and Kill was the commentary about how obvious it was that their team was the less talented team on the field, but typically either right in the game or winning it. The raw talent complaint is not one that can be made right now. As far as I'm concerned, that goes to one spot...

Scott Frost