SB Nation User Blog: dwintheiser

New blog with old, tired writer

dwintheiser — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:07:47 -0000

New blog with old, tired writer

Hey, guys -- I've been asked to uphold the honor of the Twins in a new AL Central group blog, and the first post is up.

I'll try to swing by for comments and criticism, and to chime in on the occasional game thread, but obviously I'm going to try to put a good effort in over on the other blog as well, so you might not see as much of me here. (And that's not necessarily going to be seen as bad news by everybody, I'm sure. *grin*)

Feel free to drop in, leave some comments, and tell me I'm full of crap, especially when I try to do things like defend Ron Gardenhire as a good manager...

St. Louis Cardinals' Kelvin Jimenez regroups as Pittsburgh Pirates' Luis Rivas circles the bases ...

dwintheiser — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 06:29:20 -0000

St. Louis Cardinals' Kelvin Jimenez regroups as Pittsburgh Pirates' Luis Rivas circles the bases after hitting a grand slam in the third inning of a MLB baseball game Saturday, May 31, 2008 in St. Louis.(Photo/Tom Gannam)

Better Than Expected, or Just Better?

dwintheiser — Sat, 31 May 2008 20:11:06 -0000

We're one-third of the way through the 2008 regular season, and the Twins are still performing better than expected. At what point does 'better than expected' turn into 'better'?

I was tempted to start off this essay by writing that the Twins have shown themselves to be a better team than I expected at the start of the season. After all, it's getting close to mathematically impossible that I'll actually be able to collect my beer from cmath on the 20th, given that the Twins would have to go 3-13 over their next 16 games to reach the 'eight games below .500' mark I predicted for them on June 16. The more I think about it, though, the more I wonder how confident we can say that the Twins are really better -- there are more than a few people (including Howard Sinker and John Bonnes) who would certainly argue that they are, but I still can't shake the feeling that something's not right. After all, very few pre-season projections gave the Twins much if any shot of winning the AL Central or, honestly, even being an average ballclub, in the sense that one can call a .500 ballclub 'average'. Should we really abandon our pre-season projections based on just one-third of the games played in the year?

I'm going to ask and try to answer a few basic questions about the Twins in the hopes that I'll clarify my own thinking and either be able to join the bandwagon with a clear conscience, or conversely be able to stick to my guns that the ballclub will not effectively compete for a 2008 playoff spot.

1. Is the Twins offense really this good?

As of the start of play on May 31, the Twins are scoring 4.63 runs per game -- that's the fourth-best scoring offense in the AL, and an improvement of about half a run per game from their scoring rate at the end of April, when they were among the AL's worst offenses. Yet the Twins still are among the worst in the AL in doubles, home runs, and walks. It's possible to argue that the Twins scoring totals don't really reflect their actual offensive ability.

A simple comparison will help demonstrate why:

		 Runs	   Avg	  OBP	  SLG	 OPS

Minn	   	 250	 .267	 .324	 .380	 .704

Toronto	        233	.263	.339	.379	.718

The Jays are hitting just about as well as the Twins, yet have scored seventeen fewer runs, which makes Toronto the fourth-worst offense in the AL while the Twins currently sit at fourth-best. There's no obvious reason, just looking at these raw numbers, why the Twins should have so many more runs.

The biggest reason, of course, is situational hitting: the Twins are hitting .311/845 with runners in scoring position, which is far and away the highest average and OPS in the league in those situations. The Jays, meanwhile, are hitting just .244/647 in those same situations, which is the lowest OPS (but not lowest average) in the AL in those situations. I'd guess nearly all of this difference is luck, for two reasons:

- The Twins batting average on balls in play (BABIP) in RISP situations is .338, also far and away the highest total in the AL, while the Jays BABIP in RISP situations is .274, second-lowest in the AL; differences from the mean in BABIP are usually attributed to random chance.

- If players had the ability to improve their hitting in RISP situations, why wouldn't they try to find a way to use that to improve their hitting in all situations? We're talking about players who've taken steroids, stimulants, and any other swallowable that might enhance their performance; hitters sometimes try to sneak a bat filled with cork or super-balls into the box with them, while pitchers sometimes try to sneak a tack, piece of sandpaper, or slug of Vaseline on their person when they head to the mound. If a batter knew that he could make an adjustment with a runner on second that helped him hit 80 points higher, why wouldn't he try to do it all the time?

And before you say 'well, maybe they do', keep in mind that taken as a whole, players do hit slightly better in RISP situations than they do overall, but not by all that much:

2007 - overall = .271/761; RISP = .275/780
2006 - overall = .275/776; RISP = .276/792
2005 - overall = .268/755; RISP = .273/780
2004 - overall = .270/771; RISP = .272/790

While I'd prefer to see a formal study before drawing conclusions as to why this is true, my guess would be that there are two factors involved, neither of which has anything to do with the batter 'trying harder'. First, pitchers throw from the stretch with runners on, which likely makes them slightly less effective. Second, defenses often position themselves so as to attempt to prevent the runner from scoring as much as to prevent the batter from getting a hit. Given those two situations, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find a typical batter gaining about 20-30 points of OPS in RISP situations.

1a. So if the offense isn't really this good, how much worse should we expect it to get?

Well, let's get one thing straight right off the top -- I think the Twins overall numbers in terms of batting average and OPS are actually sustainable. Morneau's hitting really well right now, but he was better in 2006, as was Mauer. Everybody else who's playing regularly is either right around where his career average predicts, or is actually significantly below his career average (Everett, Cuddyer). About the only player I'd suggest is playing over his head is Carlos Gomez, yet a .286/738 hitting line isn't that outrageous for a talented youngster -- Lew Ford hit significantly better than that in his first full season with the Twins in 2004 (.299/827), and Ford was never considered a top prospect.

What is likely to happen is that you'll notice the Twins are stranding more baserunners instead of pressing the rallies the way they have been thus far. While it would be a fallacy to expect the club to fall equally below the mean in June and July as they've been above it in April and May (the gambler's fallacy, to be precise), it would not be at all a fallacy to suggest that the Twins are more likely to end June having hit closer to the league-average .266/760 RISP performance in that month than they are to match their current RISP performance -- this is called 'regression to the mean', and while it's not guaranteed, it's where to put the smart money. And if they do that, they'll finish June scoring closer to the 4.0 runs per game that Toronto is currently scoring than the 4.6 runs per game they're scoring now.

2. Is the defense really this good?

Let's get another thing straight -- the defense isn't really very good at all. The pitching staff has been reasonable thus far; they're middle-of-the-pack with a 4.32 ERA, though it should be noted that the Metrodome has been a pitcher's park since 2006 and thus this ERA is lower than it would otherwise be. Add in the effects of defense, however, and the Twins are allowing 4.83 runs per game, better only than Detroit, Seattle, and Texas. They're dead last in hits allowed per game, allowing a full hit per game more than the Angels and Royals are (and they're tied for 10th place allowing 9.0 hits per game), and just one strikeout ahead of dead last in the AL, which wouldn't be so bad if it didn't mean that the Twins are relying less on their pitchers and more on their defense to record outs than nearly any other team in the AL, which for a team with the second-lowest defensive efficiency, second-most errors, and second-largest number of unearned runs in the league can't be all that good. Then consider that the Twins pitching staff has allowed more home runs than any other staff in the AL -- it's true: the Twins have allowed 57 homers, while the Royals have allowed 55, the Orioles 53, and the Yankees and Red Sox 52 apiece.

The only saving grace is that the Twins pitching staff has allowed far and away the fewest walks in the AL, more than twenty fewer than the Royals, A's, and White Sox. Even so, they're allowing so many more hits that even the small walk rate still leaves the staff among the AL's worst at baserunners per nine innings.

A lot has been made of Boof Bonser's slow start, but the truth is that the Twins starting staff as a whole isn't as good as it looks: Glen Perkins is 2-2 with a league-average ERA. Scott Baker is 2-0, but his 4.09 ERA is actually higher than the league average, and has been helped an awful lot by the Metrodome:

Baker at home: 16.2 IP, 13 H, 2.16 ERA
Baker on the road: 16.1 IP, 18 H, 6.06 ERA

Yes, it's a small sample size, but it's only unrepresentative in the size of the home/road split:

Twins pitchers at home: 268 IP, 1.35 WHIP, 3.66 ERA
Twins pitchers on the road: 217.2 IP, 1.49 WHIP, 5.13 ERA

And yes, that difference in innings is also a harbinger -- the Twins have pitched much better at home than on the road thus far this season, but they've also played an extra four home games (and will play two more before the current series is up); as the season goes on and the club makes up those road games, odds are the pitching won't perform so well.

So I've reached my conclusion: though I'm unlikely to enjoy a free beer on the 20th, I'll be a lot less disappointed than those fans who've decided that a hot start to the season is reason enough to climb onto the bandwagon, just before the axle starts getting wobbly.

And one last observation: if, despite all this, the Twins do still manage somehow to steal the AL Central without making a signficant free agent move? Then Ron Gardenhire is the best manager in the AL, period. There would be no other explanation.

Buster Olney strikes again

dwintheiser — Sat, 24 May 2008 21:47:35 -0000

Joe Christiansen passes along a tidbit from Buster Olney's ESPN blog, where Olney wonders if Johan Santana, at age 29, is already past his prime.

Personally, I've never been much of a fan of Olney, despite his very high standing in the baseball writing community. Even so, I can't take much offense at his conclusion, as passed along by Christiansen:

This question remains: Will he be worth to the Mets what they will pay him over the duration of the contract? We’ll see.

Well, for starters, I can't really take much offense because there isn't much here to take offense to -- Olney doesn't even have the confidence in his analysis to make a definite statement that Santana either will or won't be worth his contract at the end of his seven year deal. The strange thing is, though, if Olney did say that Santana wouldn't be worth his contract at the end, I couldn't really argue with him: while we're able to project careers better than we have at any other time in baseball history, and we're in an era where ballplayers are playing effectively much longer into their careers than they normally have, it's impossible to say with any confidence precisely how Santana will be pitching six years from now, which is the main reason why the Twins were so reluctant to sign him to the long-term deal he wanted. It doesn't matter who'd make that argument, be it Olney, Aaron Gleeman, or Stephen A. Smith -- if you have to choose 'will he or won't he be worth the money at the end', the odds are he probably won't.

The problem I have with Olney isn't so much his writing, or even his conclusions -- it's that he sometimes tries to be a newer-model sportswriter, aware of and even able to use statistical and sabermetric analysis in his work, yet he almost always ends up botching the analysis because Olney tends to use statistics, to borrow a phrase, the way a drunk uses a lamppost -- for support, not illumination. (For example, consider Olney's season-and-a-half long quest to get Productive Outs accepted in the baseball and sabermetric communities, despite almost universal disdain for the stat in the latter community.)

Olney provides two pieces of information -- one traditional, one sabermetric -- to back up his assertion that Santana ain't what he used to be. The traditional information is that Santana's fastball is slipping in velocity; an observation that Olney notes has been confirmed by other major league scouts who have written him since he first published that Santana was losing zip on his fastball. I can't argue with that observation; I'm not a big-league scout and I don't have access to a radar gun (unless you count the one on Gameday webcasts that seems to be ridiculously out of calibration at times).

The other piece of information Olney supplies is a comparison of Santana's numbers from this season as compared to previous seasons, and that's something I can make an argument against. Olney shows the following numbers...

With that said, here are the primary indicators:

Opponents’ OPS over the past six seasons: .607, .642, .564, .594, .616, .678. This year: .723.

His ratio of strikeouts per nine innings over the past six seasons has been 11.38, 9.61, 10.46, 9.25, 9.44, 9.66. This year: 7.79.

His strikeout-to-walk ratio over the past six seasons: 2.80, 3.60, 4.91, 5.29, 5.21, 4.52. This year: 3.87

...and clearly wants you to believe that they are conclusive. They certainly look damning, to say the least. Of course, if you're a Twins fan who's watched Santana over the past few years, you may have a tickling little doubt at the back of your brain, as I did: hasn't Santana historically been less than himself in April and May, and wouldn't quoting this season's numbers be just quoting numbers from April and May and comparing them to full seasons' worth of numbers where we know Santana has pitched better?

Yes. Yes it would be. In Santana's career prior to 2008, he's been 25-19 with an ERA of just over 4.00 from the start of the season through May 31; from June 1 to the end of the season, he's 73-28 with an overall ERA of less than 3.00.

So how do Santana's numbers so far this year compare to his overall numbers in his career, looking just at April and May?

Opponent's OPS:
This season - .723
Overall April/May, not counting 2008 - .747

Santana's K/9I:
This season - 7.79
Overall April/May, not counting 2008 - 9.4

Santana's K/BB:
This season - 3.87
Overall April/May, not counting 2008 - 3.59

So, this season's OPS is actually better than his career average for this time of year, while his K/BB ratio is better than his career average. The K/9I ratio is clearly down, which might be related to the observational drop in Santana's velocity; on the other hand, the overall numbers include all of Santana's relief appearances, where a pitcher's K/9I ratio tends to be higher. (In the interest of fairness, it would take a lot of work that I'm just not up to right now to separate all of Santana's relief appearances from the overall numbers, and removing every season where Santana made no more than one start in a month actually causes his career K/9I ratio to go up, not down.)

So Olney's watered-down conclusion is impossible to argue with, but would be hard to argue with even if he took the obvious stance, and his observation that Santana's velocity is down does seem to be validated by his K/9I numbers compared to his career numbers during the same period of the season. On the other hand, Olney's statistical argument that this means Santana may be in decline at age 29? Much less credible. After all, Santana's ERA in 2008 is also lower than his career average in March through May (though ideally you'd adjust both sets of numbers for park effects and league effects and possibly even use a defense-independent ERA measure, it's still clear that Santana isn't pitching significantly worse by an ERA measure).

It seems much more credible that each of the following is true:

- As an East Coast writer, Olney never really paid much attention to Santana until it was clear that Santana was in the Cy Young race, and thus either never noticed his tendency to start slowly or never made much of it.

- Olney looked at the numbers, found a few that supported his argument,
and simply stopped looking.

Have I ever made an argument, looked for a few numbers to support my position, and stopped looking? Sure -- I'd guess we all have. Then again, most of us aren't being paid to write credible opinions, nor are we likely to be quoted by Joe Christiansen even if we do.

Then again, it is his blog, not an essay for the Journal of the Society for American Baseball Research, so maybe I should cut him some slack.

A Trip to the What-If Ball

dwintheiser — Wed, 21 May 2008 20:01:22 -0000

Howard Sinker passes along a comment from Seth Stohs, proprietor of SethSpeaks.net:

Has Carlos Gomez already helped the Twins to more wins than Johan would have been able to? I would argue that when Gomez is in the lineup, the Twins have done better and in several cases, he has had a very direct effect on the Twins wins.

Questions like this fall under the unofficial category of trips to the 'What-If Ball'; unsolvable hypothetical questions about what might have been if history had been different. They're fun questions, and can occasionally be illustrative questions as well, but it helps when the questioner actually goes all the way to the ball.

First, let's restate Seth's premise, paraphrasing Seth himself, to get a more complete picture of his hypothesis:

Had the Twins not traded Santana to the Mets, they would not have had Carlos Gomez to play center field and would instead have gone with Denard Span, a much less exciting player. In addition, the Twins would likely not have started the season with Nick Blackburn in the rotation, who has turned out to be arguably the Twins best starting pitcher thus far in 2008. If you undo the trade, and incorporate the other factors resulting from undoing the trade, the Twins don't look to be any better in the win column than they are now.

On the surface, that seems a fairly compelling argument. Looking a little more closely, however, shows that a few of the premises in this argument can be legitimately questioned.

First (and I won't take credit for this one, since a commenter on Howard's Strib blog noted it first), while it's true that Gomez has directly contributed to a number of Twins wins (Opening Night at the very minimum, plus some others depending on how you measure such things), it's also true that a regular player not only gets more opportunities to contribute to a win, but also gets more chances to contribute to a loss. While I'm not a fan of Win Probability Added as a measure of player value, I do think WPA has something to contribute to this specific argument -- has a player contributed more to winning than he has to losing over a given period of time? And Gomez's current WPA, according to fangraphs.com, is a -0.19; Gomez's errors, struggles at the plate, and other young player woes have basically combined to negate the good things he's done in Twins wins, resulting in an effective net balance in the negative (and a balance that's the second worst such balance among AL outfielders, behind only Emil Brown of the Athletics). It's impossible to say if Denard Span or Jason Pridie would have been as electric in Twins wins as Gomez has been this year, but it's reasonable to assume that neither Pridie nor Span would likely have been much worse overall.

Second, and I will take credit for this one, it's actually possible that Blackburn would still have started the season with the Twins in the rotation even if the Twins had held onto Santana; had the Twins actually signed Santana to an extension, guaranteeing that he wouldn't just leave as a free agent after 2008, it's very likely that the Twins would not have worried about signing Livan Hernandez to fill the top of the rotation slot -- though whether that would be because they didn't feel the need for another innings-eater or because they wouldn't have wanted to spend the extra cash after committing so much to Santana is debatable. If we assume that Santana thus would have started the games that Hernandez has actually started in 2008, it would be Santana, not Hernandez, who would be the beneficiary of the best run support in the AL, and it would be hard to imagine that Santana, given that kind of run support, would be anything but unbeaten at this point.

So the simpler premise, that Gomez has helped the Twins to the same won-loss record they'd have had if they'd retained Santana, doesn't look quite so defensible given these thoughts: Gomez hasn't contributed anything in a win-loss sense that any other outfielder in the AL couldn't have done, at least according to WPA, and Santana arguably would have won at least one if not both of the games Hernandez has been charged with losing in his ten starts thus far.

On the flip side of the coin, the larger issue likely stands: the Twins might well have been better off, but they wouldn't have been hugely better off -- they'd most likely be a game or two above their current record, if that much -- and given the size of Santana's contract, they'd likely be in a much less flexibie position to adapt to team needs to pick up necessary pieces to continue to contend while Santana remained a Twin.

Just because I disagree with Seth's specific premise here doesn't mean I think the trade won't end up working out long-term.

Best Value?

dwintheiser — Sun, 18 May 2008 18:15:42 -0000

Recently I've come to the realization that fans have a tendency to grant a value premium to players who qualify in some way as the 'best' at what they do, even in situations where a value premium isn't really justified.

The specific situation that got me thinking about this is a friend's question about the likelihood that Barry Larkin, the longtime Cincinnati shortstop, will be elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame when he enters the BBWAA ballot for the first time next year.

Larkin's biggest challenge in getting into the Hall of Fame is likely going to be the same challenge he had at being recognized as the best shortstop in the National League during his career -- for a number of years, Larkin was a contemporary of Ozzie Smith, who was named to the Hall of Fame in 2002. Larkin and Smith aren't quite as contemporaneous as I remembered -- when Smith finished second in the MVP vote in 1987 for helping the Cardinals win the NL pennant at age 32, Larkin was finishing his first full season in the major leagues at age 23. Still, Larkin and Smith played in the same league -- in the same division, even -- for about a decade until Smith retired after the 1996 season.

There was nothing wrong with Barry Larkin as a player -- he finished as a career .295/815 hitter with a career OPS+ of 116, and in over 2000 career games at shortstop he had both a range factor and fielding average above the league average. Unfortunately, he was continually compared with Smith, who played the same position and was considered one of if not the greatest defensive shortstops ever to play the game.

Now there's certainly a reasonable argument to be made in favor of the premise that Smith was the greatest defensive shortstop ever; that's not the problem. The problem is, if you look at Larkin and Smith without taking into consideration that Smith was one of the greatest defensive shortstops ever, you find that the two men were of surprisingly comparable value:

- Both men played 19 major-league seasons, and were full-time players into their late-30s
- Both men were frequent All-Stars: Smith was named to 15 All-Star rosters, playing in 14 games and starting 11 straight; Larkin was named to 12 All-Star rosters, playing in 9 and starting 5
- Smith probably should have won the MVP award in 1987 (Andre Dawson won it in his first season playing in Wrigley Field after a career to that point in Montreal); Larkin won one MVP award in 1995 as the Reds advanced as far as the NLCS before being beaten by the Braves.

Here's the kicker, though: Smith, in 19 seasons, amassed a total of 320 Win Shares, a tremendous number.

Larkin amassed over 330 Win Shares in his 19 seasons.

If you're a 'believer' in Win Shares, that right there should cinch it. Perhaps you're not, though, and you want to know how Larkin could be considered at least as valuable if not more valuable than the greatest defensive shortstop in baseball. Let's take 1992 as an example:

In 1992, Ozzie Smith hit .295/709 and amassed 72 Runs Created. His OPS+ tallied out at 105, which compared to his career average showed that '92 was one of Smith's better seasons with the bat. in the same season, Larkin hit .304/831, amassing 94 Runs Created with an OPS+ of 132, also an above-average season with the bat. That 22 run difference is not insignificant -- as a comparison, the difference between Nick Punto's 2006 batting numbers and his 2007 batting numbers equals 23 Runs Created.

So if you're going to argue that Smith was not just more valuable but significantly more valuable than Larkin in 1992, you have to be able to argue that Smith's fielding was worth significantly more than 22 runs over Larkin's fielding.

- Smith made 232 putouts and registered 420 assists in just over 1150 defensive innings while committing just 10 errors. He won his 13th consecutive Gold Glove for this performance
- Meanwhile, Larkin made 233 putouts and registered 408 assists in just over 1200 defensive innings while committing just 11 errors.

Smith's defensive numbers are clearly better than Larkin's, but are they over 22 runs better? I think that's a hard thing to argue. Win Shares has a comparison between the two men -- Smith is listed as having put up 20 Win Shares for the Cardinals in 1992, while Larkin led the Reds with 32 Win Shares that year. Of course, if you didn't believe the Win Shares analysis for their respective careers, you're not necessarily going to believe this single-season analysis, but the question stands: if you think Smith was a better all-around shortstop than Larkin, in 1992 or in his career, how do you justify that without giving Smith what amounts to a 'bonus' for being the best at what he does?

The key here is that being the best at something doesn't, in and of itself, provide any value to a ballclub, though fans will often assume that there is some bonus value involved in being the best.

Take, for example, the expectation for the Twins in 2007. They had just come off a magical season where they rallied from far back in the division to win on the final day of the season. On Opening Day 2007, the Twins performed a ceremony where they awarded the league's batting title, MVP award, Cy Young award, and Gold Glove in center field to their own players.

If we have all of these players who are the best at what they do, went the argument, how can we not be the best team in the division?

Well, we weren't -- not anywhere close to it based on the end-of-season standings.

The point where this really strikes home, though, was in some folks' reaction to the signing of Adam Everett as a free agent. Everett was known not to be a hitter, but his reputation as an 'elite' defensive player, arguably the best shortstop in the National League (despite not having won even one Gold Glove) convinced some folks that even if his bat was no better than Nick Punto's, his glove would help the team's bottom line.

Let's ignore, for the moment, Everett's injury troubles that have markedly reduced his defensive prowess thus far in 2008. If Everett was the defensive wizard that he was alleged to be, would that really have helped the Twins in the win column? Let's do a Player A/Player B from 2006, the last season in which Everett was fully healthy, as an example: (all stats courtesy of the Hardball Times)

Player A: 1292 defensive innings, 202 putouts, 479 assists, 104 double plays (44 started, 60 turned), 396 balls in zone, 60 plays out of zone, RZR .891
Player B: 1356 defensive innings, 241 putouts, 493 assists, 111 double plays (59 started, 52 turned), 458 balls in zone, 53 plays out of zone, RZR .819

Other than that RZR rating, these guys look pretty close, don't they? The biggest difference between the two players that accounts for the RZR rating is that player A -- Everett -- committed 6 errors in 2006 while player B committed...14 errors. Player B had an extra 62 balls hit into his zone, but he also made 53 more plays than Everett. Player B committed eight more errors, and allowed 9 other balls hit into his zone to go through, ostensibly for hits. (Player B also made fewer plays out of zone, but the idea behind tracking the zone in which the ball is hit is not to penalize a player for not making plays that arguably aren't his responsibility, so we'll ignore them for this comparison.) How many runs does that add up to? I'd say 20 runs would be a very generous estimate and the actual number would likely be less than that.

Player B is Michael Young of the Texas Rangers, who hit .314/814 and made over 100 Runs Created for the Rangers that year, while Everett hit .239/642 and created just 53 runs. The difference between Michael Young's bat and Adam Everett's bat was well over twice as valuable to the Rangers in terms of runs than the difference between Adam Everett's glove and Michael Young's glove was to the Astros, even using the generous estimate we arrived at above.

If I may be allowed one more visit with Win Shares before this essay ends: Everett's 2006 season was rated as worth 12 Win Shares to the Astros. Meanwhile, Jason Bartlett's 2006 season was rated as worth 13 Win Shares to the Twins.

There is no additional player value that comes from simply being 'the best' at something.

Twins Insider: Tolbert to DL, Mauer hurt?

dwintheiser — Fri, 16 May 2008 23:36:31 -0000

Twins Insider: Tolbert to DL, Mauer hurt?

LENIII is reporting that Matt Tolbert injured his thumb sliding into first in the final game of the Toronto series at the Dome. Also, there's concern that Joe Mauer may have strained his neck during early BP and may be scratched from the lineup.

When I wrote that this 40-games-in-41-days stretch would likely turn into a Bataan Death March, I certainly didn't expect the baseball gods to take me literally.

"Twins win totals, 2002-2006: 94, 90, 92, 83, 96. Four division titles in five years. You're tell...

dwintheiser — Mon, 12 May 2008 06:32:22 -0000

"Twins win totals, 2002-2006: 94, 90, 92, 83, 96. Four division titles in five years. You're telling me that a team that won four division titles in a five year stretch ending in 2006 is the seventh worst franchise in all of sports?

Fire Joe Morgan's Ken Tremendous, refuting a claim by Fox Sport's Dave Golokhov.

I have a cold...

dwintheiser — Mon, 12 May 2008 02:53:48 -0000

...and the only prescription is...less Kubel!

When it seemed in the early season that Ron Gardenhire wanted to play veteran free-agent signee Craig Monroe over Twin-developed Jason Kubel, the blogosphere responded with a "Free Jason Kubel" campaign. Kubel got his chance, doubling in his first at-bat of the season as a pinch-hitter against the Angels, then sharing time in right field with Denard Span after an early-season injury to Michael Cuddyer. At one point, Kubel and Justin Morneau were the only Twins to have hit homeruns in 2008 as the Twins went nearly three weeks into the season before getting their first right-handed homer of the year.

At the time of Kubel's third homer, a comparison of the numbers between Kubel and Monroe seemed to justify the blogosphere's demand for Kubel to be given the primary DH role

          AB     H     HR     RBI     AVG/OPS

Kubel   36      9      3       9       .265/837

Monroe 18      2      0       2       .133/545

Since then, each player has had at-bats in close to the same proportion: Kubel 81, Monroe 49, but the difference between them has almost completely reversed:

          AB      H     HR     RBI     AVG/OPS

Kubel   117     26      4      18       .222/597

Monroe 67      19      4       13      .284/852

Monroe has fewer RBI than Kubel, but in nearly half the plate appearances -- normally that would suggest that Monroe has been hitting in more RBI opportunities, but the numbers on baseball-reference.com show that's not actually true: BBR says that the typical major leaguer in 2008 with 118 PAs has hit with 74 runners on base, resulting in 13 RBI; Kubel has hit with 81 runners on base resulting in 18 RBI, which is an above-average rate.

Monroe, not counting the 9-8 win in which he hit 2 homers, had 9 RBI while batting with 39 runners on base, while the typical major-leaguer with 65 RBI has 7 RBI
with 41 runners on base. Monroe was ahead of both the league average and Kubel's rate even before counting the 4 RBI on two homers he hit on Sunday.

Jason Kubel may end up being a better hitter than Craig Monroe over the course of his career, but right now Craig Monroe is hitting far better than Jason Kubel.

What's the opposite of "Free Jason Kubel!" "Put Jason Kubel Back In The Box?"

"There were so many times over the course of the last 20 years - when we had Greg Gagne, he was s...

dwintheiser — Sun, 11 May 2008 19:36:15 -0000

"There were so many times over the course of the last 20 years - when we had Greg Gagne, he was so fast, and people said, 'Why doesn't he steal more bases?' And Tom Brunansky, 'Well, he hits for power, but he's only a .270 hitter,' " he said. "I've kind of quit looking at what (players) can't do and how you wish they could do this or that and kind of appreciate them for what they (can) do."

Twins Assistant GM Rob Antony, in reference to Joe Mauer not yet hitting for power.