Cris E

Dave Winfield, 15 minute King of the GWRBI. Long Live the King!

Coaching major league players is hard because it takes a high level of achievement and a high level of confidence to reach an MLB roster, and both of those things make it hard to yield control of what works to an outsider to make changes. I have no idea how coaches, especially the younger ones or outsiders, can get through to players who have had success in the past but need to make changes today. Breaking through has to be an exercise in psychology as much as anything.

I was kind of hoping he'd get it at first base, like the gold glove nomination. Those 8 hr would have looked sweeeet up there next to all those stats from previous winners.

If he was staying in a similar role you can say all that crap, but he left pro ball to join an industry on a completely different seasonal schedule. He had been a college guy before, he tried the pros, and then he returned to his roots where he'd had success and was making a boxcar load of cash. I don't think he owes you anything, and I don't think anybody else is holding him to your noble standards, and by all accounts that includes the pitchers he'd been working with. They all said the supportive and encouraging things, and there was no hint of anonymous sources bitching about it when he left.

Even if Colome and Pagan had been effective and stayed in the Closer With A Captiol C role in 2022 it was the smart play because Duran was the better pitcher and was moved around to the hot spots rather than relegated to the ninth.

This is great work, and not just because I agree with your underlying premise. If I'm Falvine I spent all my time since last spring digging into injury risk factors and trying to figure out how to keep the guys I have on the field and how to identify the individuals or types of players that are likely to have trouble. This was ridiculous, but it'll happen again if we have the same guys do the same things. For every freak HBP injury there were a bunch of recurring things that felt kind of avoidable: hamstrings, core, weak shoulders, etc. It's not related to us either, as many teams lost a lot of time to injury this year. NYY were a hot mess for a bunch of the summer, to name just one. Some of this might have just been poor prep due to the lockout, but that's not what you hang your hat on after a year like 2022. And in a way you can tell they were thinking this way since they did fire and hire the trainer about as quickly as possible once the year ended. It'll be interesting to see what they do for new acquisitions. Correa has a history of injury and Bogaerts has been a rock, for example. (And they both have Boras as rep so it'll be easy to work with both of them. Ha!)

I have been pretty easy on the front office regarding 2022 because of the preposterous number of injuries. Most of their plans were shredded early and the year devolved into patching and promoting pretty quickly. BUT they did plan a rotation around Bundy and Archer and at least one youngster (Grey, Ryan, Archer, Bundy, kids) and that was always going to put a load on the pen. Even in a world where Archer and Bundy slowly grow strong and healthy there should have been a lot more structure around the swing role for the first half of the season. Those guys never improved, just kept slinging 4+ innings of decent starts, but the pen never changed to cover that many innings. The Falvine can wear that part of the outcomes as a direct result of not designing innings 4-6..

People don't get pressed into starting without being stretched out first. Otherwise you just get a bullpen game and they don't need to go to the minors to find that. Winder has always been a starter, and a good one, but he's had some injury problems recently. I think they should let him start until he proves he can't before making him into a reliver. It's harder to find good starters than relievers and he's been on a great path so far, so let him grow.

+ The Twins were not doing what the others were doing regardless of what they had planned. The Twins had 14 different people start games, including seven who made between 1 and 5 starts. Many of them were not MLB-quality guys, either callow youth or waiver wire refugees, who were covering for an injury hole. Even their good starters all hit the DL at one or more points and needed to work themselves back to full strength. The plans were in tatters by April 1.

Hedges hits like me, and I bat sixth on our softball team. He cannot be an option. Find someone who can pretty much play both ways but don't insist on outstanding in either. Jeffers is OK doing what he does well and we need someone who can cover for what he doesn't do well. That means find someone who can hit RH pitching and control the running game a little. These people exist: Murphy, Jansen, Vasquez to name a few. Just go get one, and don't dilly dally or they'll all be gone.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2022-starter-pitching.shtml The MLB-wide IP/GS was 5.2 innings. The Astros led everyone at 5.9 and the Twins were below average at 4.7, but not as far below as some seem to imply. That half inning below average is two outs, so not a ton different from the rest of baseball. What was really different was that we had our 12th and 22nd and 33rd best pitchers out there more than just about every other team and anyone's 30th pitcher is almost always going to be terrible or unprepared. There were plenty of arms in the plans for 2022 that were largely missing: Maeda, Alcala, Stashak, and big acquisitions Mahle and Paddack only made a hand full of starts. They have the bones of a good bullpen: Duran, Lopez, Thielbar, Jax and Moran are good pitchers. Pick through some of the kids, only use Pagan before the seventh and maybe re-sign Fulmer and you could be a swingman or two away from adequacy without changing too much. Mostly things hinge on being able to limit your staff to the top 15-20 guys in the org rather than finding 38 arms to run out there.

Sano is a DH and pinch hit candidate, not a full player anymore. If he can get his bat back and stay healthy he may get to put on the big glove again, but I'm not holding my breath. If he doesn't have a huge spring training he should expect to spend some time at AAA before he gets a chance at wearing a varsity uniform for anyone any time soon. Pagan sounds smart, is upfront and honest when interviewed, has had success in the past and still throw mid-90s, He will get more chances. I'm with @weitz41 and would sign him to a sixth inning contract and let him try to work his way into later inning roles. He was over-exposed last year but is still better than a lot of those nameless itinerants that appeared in 2022. (ChiChi who?) My question is about Maeda. He was sent away from the Dodgers because he wanted to start and they thought he wasn't healthy enough to handle to the load. We got him and let him start, and everyone was right because he was very good and promptly broke down hard. His contract is still based around a lot of starting incentives so he's going to hate moving to the pen, but I think he'll be more effective and more likely to finish the season if he stays in the 7th-8th inning role.

I'm with the others: teams that are tanking have different agendas from teams trying to compete. There's no shame in it anymore, you just need a high tolerance for how little your fans care to see your face in public. If you want to want to force more teams to compete then you have to make it less lucrative to suck. That might take the form of reducing your rev sharing if your payroll stays low for too long or reducing other rewards like making the draft less secure. That stuff seems to be on the table already. I guess my question back is after decades of revenue sharing and consistent payroll patterns anyone expects anything to change unless changes to the fundamental rev sharing rules are considered. Dancing around the top draft pick is nonsense, as those guys just turn into trade bait in 4-6 years for the small-rev teams anyway. I think the salary floor idea is probably the best way out of this, but I'm unclear how to entice owners to spend more money. How do you get them to vote against the interests of one of their own? It's no more money in the pocket of the rich teams, and it costs the little/terrible/cheap ones more cash to finish last. Maybe the metric should be percentage of revenues returned to the field, and you can't be below some ratio (40% ??) for more than three years in a row, or two in five. They have the rev numbers used for sharing, so either use gross or shared revenue only, but make a certain chunk appear on the field or lose it next year. Say what you want to about the big playoff teams, but they are spending to win. There has to be a little temptation to just take home $200m+ instead of spending like the Dodgers.

Where did all this negativity about the FO's rigidity in bullpen design come from? They are trying a ton of things to get effective arms out there, and it still ended up a lost season. The list below from the article doesn't include Fulmer (trade for good performer) or Joe Smith (FA signing that worked until he suddenly stopped being effective (hurt?) and was cut) or the swarm of anonymous minor league soldiers that shuffled through the roster this summer. That said, I am disappointed that we haven't moved to a different pitching coach. I am usually one of the most forgiving people you'll meet when playing the injury card, but after a year where we were having such difficulty I hoped they'd make a move to shore up the coaching.

Ever since his first injury in 2016 he's had only one year where he's been healthy and taken the ball every start (2019 31 GS, 175 IP.) Other than that he hit 162 IP one time and then it seems you're only going to get about 130-135 IP in a couple dozens starts, much like this past season. They are pretty good starts, so that's great production if you price in the fact that he's going to miss 20% or more of a full season. The Falvine were able to get that type of contract with Buxton, and they should extend Sonny as well if he's willing to meet them out there in the middle, land of Games Started incentives.

It's like buying baseball cards. For someone else.

All of this x 2. Jeffers isn't terrible, he's just bad against the running game and doesn't hit RH very well. But you don't dump a guy like that, you play him against lefties to rest your starting catcher. Oh, and you get a catcher to play against righties. But when shopping for catchers you have to balance a bunch of stuff in ways you don't for other positions. Catching beats the heck out of a body, meaning that these guys can't play their position 140 games a year, and that even when resting they are often diminished at the plate, and they get hurt at crazy rates. So while you can ty to build around a catcher, you really do need a couple of them to anticipate the inevitable DL trips and leave room for their offensive sag. With that in mind I'd try to grow my own Mauers whenever possible, but while working on that I'd pick up a lot of glove-first platoon guys since they're cheaper and more available. We just need a guy that can hold his own against RH pitching and catch a good game and hopefully stay on the field for 100-115 games a year.

I don't think it's going to suddenly be 1985 any time soon. Most teams are still going to demand a 75% success rate even if running conditions are improved. And most players today are not taking a real lead and drawing throws over to first, much less getting to second with only 2.5 inches to spare. You may see more action from the Base Stealers but I'm not sure it'll spread to many others.

The font change doesn't even register, but I'm not a fan of the gold. Not sure why, it just seems muddier or something.

Counter-counterpoint: 210 innings would be even better. Maybe 280 innings like it's 1974. Realistic point: 70 Duran relief innings or 70 starting Duran innings and then the 60 Day until winter. He was a starter, his fastball wasn't this big, his supporting stuff wasn't good enough and he got hurt. He blossomed outside the rotation, don't screw around with it.

It's hard enough to find a good defensive catcher that can stay healthy and isn't terrible with the bat. Trying to reach past that to get one of the very few that are excellent offensive players seems expensive. Taking on that expense at a position where guys are hurt or resting as much as catchers do seems risky. That makes it expensive and risky, which is not my first choice. Find a merely good catcher and spend big dollars for a big hitter that's likely to be on the field 140+ games.

All I want is a well-considered "we tried", not a "Correa at all costs" rager. They could afford a 8/320 deal for the next few years, but it would be dumb. The Falvine know that they can fit him in, but they have other obligations coming due soon and things are going to get tighter when all these awesome kids hit arbitration in the next 2-4 years. So you want to keep Duran and Ryan and Miranda and two or three others? If Duran stays good he's going to cost a fortune. It doesn't take a lot of $11m paystubs to get to $150m. Pick something we can live with (7*35=245? 8/280?) and let it fly. It only takes one team saying "This is the most important thing we will do this decade" to blow away all other offers, and given our depth in young SS I don't think we should be that team.

We had far too many CF and 2B injuries last year, but we had pretty good stability at 3B. So I think for 2023 we should play a lot more guys at 3B and reduce playing so many games CF/2B. This goes double for pitchers, they get hurt at a crazy rate so we should play all of them at 3B as well. Ahem. Some guys get hurt, others don't. Maybe it's a body type (skinny fast guys placing huge strains on slender frames vs monster slow moving masses on heavy frames) or maybe it's personality (Jimmy Piersal hitting the wall every year because he never gave up on any ball) or maybe it's luck or stupidity or Aztec curses. Doesn't matter, you teach broad skills to all your guys to avoid getting hit by pitches, not run into walls, improve flexibility to make baserunning safer, etc. Then you talk to them individually about how to mitigate problem behaviors like wearing better pads if you want to hang in the strike zone like that, or playing deeper to make it less likely you run into the wall, or move to DH if you can't stay safe in the field. Worrying about injury prevention is a bigger deal for some guys than others. I honestly believe it's a skill that some guys master and others don't. Cal Ripken wasn't lucky he never got hit in the hand, he got hit just like everyone else. But he took pains to not get injured when it happened. You do that by identifying pitches earlier, not standing in when things look dangerous, and keeping your hands, arms, face, etc hidden behind your back and shoulder. Same with not running into walls or other guys, same with sliding into bases: situational awareness is something to develop and weigh into your choices on the field. But like strike zone discipline, it's easier to say than do sometimes.

A player can be coached to avoid crashing into the wall, or to do it safely, but player collisions are usually very bad. I think part of the higher risk for CF is how many more players he might run into (LF, RF, SS, 2B) versus a corner where walls don't make surprising bad choices. EDIT: I think James was also the one who said you play as far up the defensive spectrum as you can to leave room below you for less gifted players to contribute.

You seem to have access to the BP data. With the lockout and access to training staffs cut off last winter, were injuries up across the league in 2022? I'd think a good differentiator between training staffs might be how they prepare off-season programs for the guys and how well they work with their personal trainers, so removing that influence could reflect on how helpful training staffs were when they could influence behavior. Perhaps this collapse shows that Salazar was good at parts of his job? Who knows. Also, I might guess that team age could play into those health numbers. Both the As and Twins tend to run young and cheap (with a couple exceptions like Nelson Cruz) and that would make 2022 look particularly bad for MN. But I'm not sure how true my hypothesis is (maybe some "type" of guys get hurt more often? Maybe the super-intense tweaked out hardcore guys get more ab injuries than the lethargic fatsos? Maybe cigarettes/weed are good for you?) so it may be chasing coincidences. Last point: I believe Rocco's approach to resting everyone and trying to avoid injuries is rooted in his wreck of a career. A good player, he just couldn't stay on the field. He's going to err on the side of caution rather than just playing a guys into the ground like they used to. Arreaz only saw as much time as he did down the stretch because of the batting title race. I really think Baldelli would have benched him with his legs like that without the compelling reason to keep playing. I wonder if we have a problem not sitting guys when things are serious but sitting them too often for nothing. In other words, how good are our diagnosis skills in the face of his tendency to sit everyone?