Otto von Ballpark

TR looking out of his office window overlooking Target Field: "One day, lad, all this will be yours." Rob Antony: "What, the curtains?" TR: "No, not the curtains!"

Schmidt was almost a league average hitter his rookie season, and an above league average defender at 3B. No, ballplayers with that level of performance don't get cut to pump gas. And if you are reading "firm conclusions" into what Chief or I have posted, you might be misreading us. The only "conclusion" I've drawn is that the start of Buxton's MLB career has been worse than any elite hitter's. Which probably lowers the odds of Buxton becoming an elite hitter. If Buxton does become an elite hitter, I guarantee it will referenced as one of the great early career turnarounds of all time, and that his special talent and pedigree helped him overcome a disastrous start. Which sort of proves my point about the challenges he is facing.

To add insult to injury, we had a quick hook for Meyer in part to turn the ball over to Milone while the game was still close -- and Milone put the game out of reach, and two days later was waived and outrighted to AAA in favor of everybody's favorite fringe 40 man guy, Pat Dean. Who the heck is making decisions right now for the Twins? They are all over the map.

I am pretty sure no one would have said Meyer was rushed if we promoted him late in 2014, when he was 24.5 years old and was very successful in AAA. For example, no one said May was rushed under similar circumstances, or Gibson, etc.

Promoting him to be an emergency reliever, or Kepler to be a bench player, is almost the definition of not giving someone a chance. And pulling him early in his debut start, at the exact point you let Berrios work through it the night before, is also a pretty poor effort a giving someone a chance.

I think you are reading too much into most of these recent complaints. I for one am not necessarily blaming management for Meyer's results. Just that the results would be easier to swallow if they weren't accompanied by completely nonsensical management decisions like promoting Meyer to park him on the MLB bench. Or promoting Kepler, starting him once against a tough lefty and refusing to pinch hit for him while he gets embarassed by said lefty in a game defining at bat, then parking him on the MLB bench. As the recent wave of waiver/DFA moves should indicate, we were nowhere near a 40 man roster crisis to warrant this handling of top prospects.

The players are to blame. Specifically, Murphy, O'Rourke, and Graham, apparently.

91 degrees here right now, perfect for watching a ballgame on TV.

In case you didn't catch it on the other threads, no, Milone and Fien are not gone. They are just on waivers, but still part of the 25 man roster. And even if/when they clear waivers, they will still be part of the 25 man roster until we outright them to AAA. We just won't have to pass them through waivers again to outright them, at least through August 31. (Fien could reject the outright assignment too, although I think with less than 5 years service time, he would forfeit his salary by doing so.) So I expect them to remain with the club for the immediate future, at least.

This isn't that difficult. Danny Santana's good batting line was due in large part to great luck (as evidenced in part by an extremely high BABIP). Byron Buxton's poor line has little to do with bad luck (he has a normal BABIP, bad luck would generally be considered a low BABIP). Sorry if that doesn't fit your "water good, fire bad" view of statistics. Both could still be good MLB hitters, but it will take some work to cut their K rates to get there. Neither can count much on better luck on balls in play to make up that ground.

Not from Allen either, who was on the bullpen phone when he should have been visiting the mound. I have no idea about Allen's overall effectiveness as Meyer's coach, though.

I think you and I have had this discussion before. Being league average in BABIP is actually a negative indicator if your overall production is poor. It means you are getting "normal" results on-contact -- you just aren't making much contact, which for MLB hitters is generally a harder problem to reverse than making outs in the field. And again, BABIP is not really a metric or anything to be "hyped" it is just a shortcut for gauging the relationship between batting average and strikeouts, something that looking at average or strikeouts alone won't necessarily tell you.

In Hughes' case, I am not sure the limitation is simply financial. Given their respective histories and the reasonable terms of the original deal, it is likely that Hughes signed with the Twins with the promise that he would be a starting pitcher. The contract extension was likely just the Twins backing up that promise with money. Evidence suggests that the Twins also gave a similar promise to Kevin Correia, and they stuck to it. It would probably take another DL stint for them to ask Hughes about pitching out of the pen.

What? Since when is a promising pitcher, in the midst of re-establishing himself as a starter after a trying season, a "logical" choice to be called up exclusively to be an emergency reliever? Especially with Graham and Dean on the 40-man roster? Meyer could have made his Tuesday April 26th start in Rochester, then been recalled for Milone's next turn Sunday on regular rest. It made no sense to skip his start so he could sit unused in MLB, then squeeze in a mop-up bullpen tune-up, then give him one start but limit his pitch count because you skipped his last start to sit unused in MLB...

It would NOT have cost the Twins an option year to call up Meyer in 2014, unless they called him up and sent him back down for more than 20 days that year. If a player spends less than 20 days on "optional assignment" they don't use an "option year". And Meyer would not have been on "optional assignment" until after we called him up (added him to the 40-man roster) and demoted him again. With expanded rosters on Sep. 1, we could have even called up Meyer and demoted him around August 12th and still not have used an option year on him in 2014. I understand with his shoulder, they probably wanted to end Meyer's 2014 around Sep. 1, but knowing that in advance was all the more reason to get him some looks in August or even July. Allocating innings late in a lost season to guys like Pino, Deduno, Swarzak, and Burton is rather foolish -- all four of those pitchers were lost, for nothing in return, before November that year.

But the 2014 Twins needed those innings to evaluate Yohan Pino, Sam Deduno, Anthony Swarzak, and Jared Burton!

That sounds like Meyer's enthusiasm for a relief role is just him identifying his clearest path to making the Twins. Not necessarily what he is most comfortable with, or where he believes he can succeed. I suspect Trevor May would have said similar things if we tried him in the pen in 2013-2014 when he was just trying to get promoted. But we didn't do it until after he was already promoted and had a half season of MLB starts under his belt, at which point he has been clear he prefers starting. Give Meyer the same opportunity and you might hear a different preference expressed too.

Going off on my WPA/LI correlation noted upthread... For 2016 so far, the Twins have 64.5% of relief appearances resulting in positive (or more accurately, non-negative) WPA/LI. MLB as a whole is at 67.1%. The Twins rank 14th out of 15 AL teams (ahead of only Toronto), and 23rd out of 30 MLB teams. All four of our division mates are in the top 11. Also, here are the results for 2015, where the Twins ranked 19th, and 6 of the top 7 teams made the playoffs: I don't know if it's worth diving in any deeper, but at least this gives Seth's numbers some context. Also, how does this measurement compare to, say, reliever WAR? Here are the Twins recent MLB ranks in "doing their job" by WPA/LI, followed by their ranks in reliever RA9-WAR at Fangraphs: 2010: 15th in "doing their job" / 7th in RA9-WAR 2011: 27th / 28th 2012: 9th / 17th 2013: 13th / 8th 2014: 27th / 22nd 2015: 19th / 13th 2016: 21st / 24th Actually, it appears RA9-WAR should be combined with LOB-Wins to account for runners stranded...

It appears this still doesn't work, correct? I just tried to post a table using the "Paste Rich Content" link and copying and pasting from Word, and it looks perfect when I paste it into the editor, but it gets completely messed up when I save the draft. So instead, I am trying to upload screenshots of the tables, but that hasn't worked for me either in my blog entry. I keep getting the error "The server returned an error during upload" when I click "Attach This File", although the same procedure works perfectly in regular forum posts, just not the blog entries. Case in point: I have tried it on multiple systems (Mac, Windows) and browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox), with multiple file types (JPG, PNG), all well below the file size limit -- all return the same error when trying to attach files to a blog entry. It's the exact same error you get when you try to attach without selecting a file with the "Browse" button first, although I clearly do select a file and the filename is displayed next to the "Browse" button when I attempt to attach. I finally found the gallery option, and was able to upload my image to a gallery album and insert it via My Media. A little wonky, but it works. Would be great to simply be able to post tables, though, for stats.

The more accurate comparison would be number of games rather than date. The Twins have played 27 games, and are 11 games out of first and 7 games out of the second wild card. After 27 games, the 2015 Rangers were 11-16, 6.5 games out of first and 3.5 games out of the second wild card (interestingly enough, the second wild card spot was shared by the Twins at that point in the season!). I'd guess some team in a more comparable position to the Twins has also bounced back to make the playoffs. Obviously the odds are long, and it would be interesting to research. Of course, back to the topic at hand, I don't think sitting Meyer in an emergency reliever role for a week, and then subbing Milone for him, don't really make a meaningful difference in our 2016 competitiveness.

Hopefully, but yeah, the disparity seems pretty extreme. Although his hitting success wasn't quite so immediate at AAA this year -- as noted, through 7 games at AAA, he had a .608 OPS and a 32% K rate down there. Good to see him have a few solid games in a row now. But the disparity does sort of complicate his re-promotion schedule. Not quite as simple as posting a good stat line down there for X amount of time...