d-mac

How's that drafting reliever strategy turning out? It's hard to imagine that any front office could fail as miserably at nearly every aspect as the Twins have.

The flip side to that is Santana should return more than in a normal year since the FA market is so thin. The Twins aren't contending this year, nor next year. Santana will be 35 in 2018, when maybe we are possibly contending. His value isn't likely going up, so why not trade him now?

Well, they are delusional enough that they think they are going to compete next year.

Dead wrong? Pearly Gates? I see what you did there.

Will he? That's not this braintrust's MO.

I have a hard time trusting the Twins' player development team, especially the pitching development team at this point in time.

If only I wasn't out of likes for the day. I would like this post so hard. Edit: Spelling

But still, once a player turns 26, that prospect shine goes away.

My bad, I thought Palka was a year older. He is 24 though, 10/28/91. Turns 25 in october.

Agreed, but they will all get their looks before Palka. And time is not on Palka's side.

Which is why I remain unconvinced Buxton will ever figure out how to be a productive hitter in the majors.

So.... has anybody figured out how Palka is going to find playing time in the majors? He's not going to supplant Kepler. Rosario will likely be given quite a bit of leash in LF. And Grossman has been pretty good. At DH/1B we have Sano (long term), Mauer, Park, and Vargas. Palka is already 25. An astute GM would recognize this back-log and try to flip Palka in the offseason.

Opportunity cost, bingo.

Well I was trying to explain why I did what I did. And have been trying to, repeatedly. I've already spent way too much time on this.

ERA almost has zero predictive ability. We might as well be comparing pitcher wins. We've already been over this. It's completely useless for trying to make projections.

Uh, because those were the first 10 starts Gibson made in the majors. Including a pitcher's most recent 14 starts when making a comparison seems much more fair. I could have eliminated Miller's 10 first starts of his career too, but people would find a way to be butthurt by that too.

Which I did, right there in the post you quoted. But you ignored it since it doesn't fit your narrative.

True, It'd be nice if there was a way we could compare how other pitchers, i.e. not Twins have done going from the NL to AL. Although, I'd argue in terms of peripherals Worley and Nolasco's 2 prior seasons before coming to the Twins were better than what Miller has done in his two prior full seasons. Worley's xFIP- in '10 and '11 was 85 and 95. Nolasco's xFIP- in '11 and '12 was 107 and 95. Miller's xFIP- was 121 and 105 in '14 and '15. When Worley went back to the NL with the Pirates in '14 he threw up a 96 xFIP- after a 120 the year prior with the Twins. If I had to guess, I'd imagine #1 and #2 NL starters transition fairly easily, but #3's turn into #5's in the AL and #4 and #5 in the NL are pumpkins in the AL. Of course, there I'm sure we could find plenty of exceptions both ways, but it is hard to argue Miller has been anything better than #3 in the NL.

Ok. I compare Miller's numbers from the start of 2014, through the end of 2015 to Gibson's 2014 through today. Now we're talking about different seasons with different run environments, so xFIP- is probably the best comparison. Miller had xFIP- of 108 and Gibson had an xFIP- of 101.

All of them were NL pitchers. If we want to be objective, we need to compare apples to apples.

You were complaining about me cherry picking stats by not including Miller's 2013. Your solution was to discount his 2016 season, which, because of recency, is much more valuable information than his 2013. If I limit the comparison to just 2014 and 2015, Gibson still has the better xFIP and SIERA in both of those seasons. If I include their entire careers, Gibson beats him in xFIP by .09 and Miller beats Gibson in SIERA by .03. We are really splitting hairs. Btw, Gibson also has the better career swinging strike rate- 9.2% to 8.4%.

At the same time you can't penalize Gibson for being unlucky. He has underperformed his peripherals by similarly wide margin. I'm sorry Dave, but you are just not being objective here. We agree on a lot of things, just not this. Both Gibson and Miller have quite similar peripherals over the last few seasons and yes, Miller is younger and was a former top prospect, which is why I like him as a buy-low candidate. But, Gibson has pitched in the AL and is cheaper and has more team control left than Miller. It makes little sense to me to swap out a known quantity that is under team control for the next few seasons for an unknown quantity with less control, that has slight chance of being better. And we cannot discount the NL to AL transition. When was the last time the Twins were able to transition an "established" NL starter into our rotation? Nolasco? Nope. Pelfrey? Nope. Correia? Nope. Worley? Nope. Marquis? LOL nope. Livan Hernandez? Nope. Carlos Silva? Silva was a reliever for the Phillies, I wouldn't call him an established starter. He was basically Nick Blackburn, version 1.0- he was Nick Blackburn before it was cool, the hipster Blackburn. You have to go all the way back to Rick Reed in 2002 to see a NL pitcher come over and put up an ERA- of below 100.

And Gibson has 71.1. You can't b*** about someone cherry picking stats and then do the same. I decided on the start of 2014 since both pitchers have been in the majors, starting full time since the start of that season and made a similar number of starts over that time period. Gibson didn't make his ML debut until the second half of 2013 as he was recovering from TJ surgery, so it seemed like a natural break to do a head to head comparison. I could have included Miller's 2013 and 13.2 innings of relief in 2012, but since Gibson was toiling away in the minors, that seemed ridiculous to me. Plus, 2.5 seasons is a large sample size and recency has to weigh heavier when making forward looking projections- neither Gibson or Miller are the same pitchers they were in 2013.

Agreed. Differences for bWAR and fWAR are much smaller for position players since offensive WAR, and positional adjustments are essentially the same.

Miller has one- one season which he had a sub 4.00 xFIP. Gibson has two. And don't go quoting ERA. We are talking about a potential trade here. We need to make some kind of projection about how these pitchers are going to perform going forward. Stats like xFIP, SIERA, etc, are about the best predictive pitching stats publicly available since they are measurements of how a pitcher actually pitched based on what a pitcher can control, not what happened which includes variables a pitcher cannot control.