PDX Twin

Ryan's getting shaggy again. I hope it makes him pitch better.

In case any of you missed it, this wonderful story aired yesterday on All Things Considered: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/30/1120126846/the-story-behind-the-longest-baseball-game-ever I would have been one of those still there at 4am probably (unless my wife had gone with me).

Cave actually had one over 0.550 last week. Key hits from unexpected places!

Back just in time for the last inning. Way to go, y'all. (And good job, Twins, too.)

I think that humans had moved out of caves before they developed bows and arrows, so I'll go with Cave. (Chief might remember...) Off to dinner. Don't let the Red Stockings off the floor!

It wasn't I who did the running...

Might run into the character limit on replies?

And on this day in 1974, I was getting married! Consequently, I won't be staying with the game or the thread very long as we make a superannuated attempt at celebrating!

To me, he really looks disinterested and distracted. I wonder if something else is going on in his life that makes it hard to be excited about baseball.

You're probably just intimidated by the pitcher with the 7.36 ERA. They always dominate the Twins!

Yup. They should have won 3/4 from Texas and at least 3/5 from Detroit earlier in the year, but they didn't.

I have a naïve hypothesis about Pagan, so let me share it and then you all can shoot it down. Given his shaky control, he throws 4-5 pitches in most at-bats. The metrics other than actual contact ones are decent. Maybe this is because in each at-bat he throws 3-4 really good pitches, and they count in many of the non-contract metrics (velocity, spin rate, etc.) but all too often he gets behind in the count and mixes in a meatball that gets killed. Batters know that they can wait for the hittable pitch and then crush it, or maybe take a walk, Does this make sense to anyone except me? When I was teaching budding economists, I always stressed the need to look beyond any single summary statistic about the economy to try to interpret what was consistent with the multi-dimensional data available. (Great current example: GDP is stagnant but the labor market is very hot.) This seems like a similar case of needing to look at exactly what each metric is saying rather than just seeing a lot of blue or a lot of red on the chart.

Since they know more than we do, I'm interpreting this as a signal that Buxton WILL be out for a long time.

Good question. (Though you're a young whippersnapper to me!) I'm not much of an expert on modern metrics, but WPS is one that I think is quite useful in measuring "clutch hitting." Win Probability Added measures how a player's at bats changes the estimated probability of his team winning the game. To take an easy example, starting the bottom of the ninth tied, the probability of the home team winning is, maybe, 0.6. (It's greater than 0.5 because the home team still has the 9th to score but the away team does not. It would be 0.5 at the beginning of the top of the 9th.) If a player hits a lead-off homerun, that probability rises to 1.0---the game is over and the home team has won. By increasing the win probability from 0.6 to 1.0, the batter gets credit for 0.4 win probability added. (And the opposing pitcher gets -0.4 because he allowed the home run, lowering his team's win probability from 0.4 to 0.0,) I find it a very useful statistic because it gives credit for hit that are important to the team rather than first-inning solo homers that don't change the probability much. In the case of Cave, his at-bats in the last two games have increased the Twins' win probability by nearly one, which is huge. Crudely, without his at-bats the Twins would have on average lost one of those two games. I don't know the origins of that particular statistic, but 20 years ago I came up with the concept on my own. I had no access to the probabilities required (0.6 in my example) to put into into practice, but I was excited to find that someone with time and access had done so. I use the numbers from https://www.fangraphs.com/, though I believe there are alternatives. I hope I've been clear. No one statistic is a complete representation of a hitter's value, but I think WPA does tell us something important.

WPA over 0.9 for the last two games. There are some highly paid Twins who are not much above that for the season...

And 40 minutes elapsed. On pace for a 4 hour game.

Interesting that the catcher version has the accent on the a on the back of his uniform, but the pitcher version does not.

This game feels like major-league pitching against minor-league hitting.

And that was ball three! Ha!

Yup. The plate ump is "Culp-a-bull."

Tried to double-post on me. Sorry!

That was during the period where I also rooted for the Giants. After the year he played for them, they would have paid to get rid of him! "Cancer in the clubhouse" was one comment.

Every time I think about AJ, it reminds me of Liriano and Nathan, and I just smile. ?

Maybe it was the plate ump. He seems to be miked.

Leon and Gray seem to be using finger signals tonight. ???