Doomtints

If you want to be really confused, throw in the Baseball Prospectus version (3rd): Dozier: 3.7 vs 3.4 vs 3.8 Buxton: 3.2 vs 5.3 vs 4.5 Berrios: 2.6 vs 1.7 vs 3.2 Santana: 2.5 vs 4.1 vs 4.2 Sano: 2.4 vs 2.6 vs 1.9 Rosario: 2.1 vs 1.6 vs 1.5 Mauer: 2.0 vs 3.3 vs 1.1 Escobar: 1.3 vs 0.9 vs 0.7 Polanco: 1.3 vs 1.5 vs 0.8 Often BPs version of WAR looks like it came from Mars.

Not having Sano has not helped.

If the Twins make the playoffs, it will be as a WC against the Yankees, burning up their "ace" before they face Cleveland. It is poetic that the team most likely to beat the Indians in the playoffs is the team that has Jaime Garcia, as marginal as he is, and how the Twins had him for a brief moment.

He was more dominant than the Cardinals staff which was stacked with a bunch of 11 game winners. And yeah, 15+ wins would put a pitcher in the upper tier for wins in a season in the current era.

You *can* buy the book with the breakdown, if you like. 1988 Baseball Abstract, pages 45-47. I bet you could find a used copy for a couple bucks. Some highlights: W% top 2 pitchers: .593 W% rest of team: .491 Difference: .102 Percentage of team wins from top 2: 38% Historical difference between top 2 and rest of the staff: .106 (87 Twins were better than average!) Historical percentage of wins from top 2: 41% (Twins had more wins from the non 1-2 than average!) The 1908 Cubs are often considered the best team in MLB history. The difference between their top 2 and rest of the staff: .227. The difference between .102 and .227 is substantial! James doesn't stop there, he notes that every team has a weakness and he identifies the Twins weakness as missing a #3 pitcher. He does this by throwing away all wins by 1-2 pitchers for championship teams and finding the Twins were under .500 with the rest of the starters. Although not unheard of (and the Twins were far from the worst), the difference maker then became the lack of a #3. James concludes that the 1-2 v. the rest of the staff was "absolutely normal" for a championship team. He goes on to state that the losing team, the 87 Cards, had 5 great starters but comparatively bad 1-2 starters! The key to a championship is 2 dominant starters.

If Rosario isn't the Twins best hitter this year he is in the top 2 or 3. This is just more proof that going with the herd mentality is tomfoolery. Always ignore all noise from anyone wanting to ditch young, promising players, regardless of how loud it gets. Now if he can just get his defense back on track....

To address the OP, the Twins can make it to 84 wins if they keep doing what they are doing. This will probably be enough to make the playoffs this year. With a bit of luck or a hot streak, they can make 85 or more. Detroit and NY will play the Twins hard. Cleveland might too. Even still, the Twins should be able to play ~.500 against these teams, I don't see a collapse coming. I'm not worried at all about the teams behind the Twins. The AL is not going to produce many +.500 teams this year. The two-win cushion they have now should hold.

The 87 Twins were good. They had power and enough pitching to win in the playoffs. I have to say, which will be unpopular, that it's impossible to watch the 87 world series today and think they weren't juicing. They were giants compared to the Cardinals. Anyway, Bill James was particularly interested in the 87 Twins, and he found that the Twins pitching was relatively normal for a world series winning team. The 87 Twins lacked a #3 pitcher, but the #1, #2, #4, #5 pitchers were all in line with regular season stats for other championship teams. Jeff Reardon clearly learned how to do Blyleven's nasty curve near the end of the season and opposing teams really could not figure him out again until 1989.

So you are going with the "that's silly" narrative. OK.

If you are implying they never had a conversation, that's silly. The connotation is they "had a conversation" but the conversation was about how he has to do a better job. I doubt that happened because his job status was out of their hands. In that situation, you play nice.

The owner of the team declared any Molitor discussions out of bounds.

Molitor gave up on this game before it even started, declaring before the game that everyone good in his bullpen was "spent" and that he had no idea how they were going to pitch a complete game, all but conceding the loss before the first pitch.

He surprised me this year but there is some major streakiness going on. His value is his ability to field any position, albeit not spectacularly, and his bat can surprise from time to time. He is a net plus to the team.

Yes, in fact this comes up often in "Is this player HOF-worthy?" conversations. Even below average players can have a positive WAR. If a guy sticks around at the end of his career for 7 years with 1-2 WAR each year, he has padded his WAR 7-14 points along with all of his other stats. Take a look at Pete Rose's WAR v. WAA. Rose lost 14 WAA over his last 6 years, but only about 1 point of WAR. Nevertheless he padded his other stats a lot over those last 6 years, in spite of being useless. Or look at it this way. If a serviceable infielder puts up 2 WAR a year but is very popular and plays for 20 years, he has 40 WAR. Kirby Puckett had 50 WAR. Switch to WAA. Puckett drops to 25 WAA but the "serviceable infielder" drops to the single digits. But if you don't want an uberstat and only want to go by peak WAR years, JAWS exists for you. JAWS looks at the best 7 years of WAR and then compares it to players at the same position. However, we can ignore the "same position player" part and just look at 7-year peak WAR. WAR in peak 7 years: Carew: 49.7 Oliva: 38.6 Mauer: 38.5 Killebrew: 38.1 Puckett: 37.5 If we want to go full-on JAWS, here are the numbers: Carew: 65.4 Killebrew: 49.2 Mauer: 45.8 Puckett: 44.2 Oliva: 40.8 Killebrew was great, the first Twins player in the HOF and it was well deserved, but it's really hard to find a way to slice the data that says that he was better than Carew.

I did not include Carew's WAA outside of the Twins organization because it is even higher and I figured it would not be fair to the other players. Carew's Career WAA is 46. Carew's "decline" -- where he kept playing in spite of being a below average player -- was to the tune of -1.8 WAA and lasted a mere season and a half.

WAA will more accurately reflect a player's entire career, both peak and decline years. Let's take a look: Carew (in a Twins uniform): 39.9 Killebrew (in a Senators/Twins uniform): 28.1 Mauer: 27.6 Puckett: 25.5 Oliva: 20.1 You are right about one player being head and shoulders above the others, but you are wrong about which one. It's OK, this is a common mistake. People have figured out that players who have incredibly long careers have inflated WARs along with other stats. Use WAA to determine the truly elite players. If Mauer's WAA had not been flat for the past 3 years, he would be well into the 30s by now and be a HOF lock. Even now, HOF is not out of the question.

Mauer has had strong 1-2 month stretches since his injury. It would be great if he's back in top form forever, sure.

If the defense is unprepared for a bunt, bunt without mercy. Full stop. The bunt conversations on this website are 100% noise.

It doesn't matter. None of the defensive systems used today consider errors in any meaningful way, and unless a run scores on that play, who cares? I don't buy the whole "the rest of the runs are not charged to the pitcher based on # of outs" philosophy. If the pitcher wants to control the outcome, he can strike the guy out.

This will make some people scoff, but the entire pitching staff is better since Colon arrived.

I never felt that Gibson was as bad as we were seeing, but yes I can't explain or defend his seemingly eternal struggles. It doesn't surprise me that he is pitching well. It doesn't change the fact that he is gone at the end of the year. The Twins should use him while he is pitching well, and I hope he has a good career in another uniform from next year on. Maybe the Twins win a playoff series or two and he is lights out in the playoffs, then they can consider keeping him. Beyond that, I wish him well. I expect he will have an OK career post-Twins.

Nevertheless, GGs have been awarded to players who played less than 30 games at the position. Which brings us back to what I said, it's a popularity contest. Feel free to take your argument up with the people who voted for Rafael Palmiero in 1999. You are shooting at the messenger because you don't want to admit that the GG is worthless.

Some of those ranks are incorrect which you can check on your own. This was a down year for AL 1B defense, Moreland's rank in the MLB last year was 15th. The best 1B defenders in the AL last year were Byungho Park and Travis Shaw, neither of which were going to win the award over Moreland. So yeah, popularity contest. Remember, there is no minimum innings qualification for the Gold Glove, but a decent sanity check would be to use the pitching qualification of 162 innings at the position.

It's not as tragic as all this. Buxton will be fine. If Twins fans still don't understand that it takes a while for most players to figure things out, that's their problem, not his. Did I ever entertain the idea that Buxton might not work out? Sure, but I also thought he just needed more time. He is zoned in and having fun right now, we should enjoy it too. Before the season started I thought it would take him a couple of months to get rolling, and I think starting him at the top of the order in April slowed him down. We can have this conversation during the offseason when someone plays the "regress" card.

No clue, but he must be since he won the award last year in spite of being an average defender.