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Doesn’t that make Butera utterly useless?

ubelmann February 1, 2010, at 4:07 pm 13 LTEs , , ,

Catching up on reading the beat writers, I saw this:

Heard that there are some concerns about Drew Butera's catching skills. That's why some people want Wilson Ramos up if Jose Morales isn't ready.

With a bat in his hands, Drew Butera makes Nick Punto look like Barry Bonds. If Butera's catching skills are being questioned, he should never have been put on the 40-man roster. I mean, for crying out loud, he's hit .214/.296/.317 in the minors and it's not like he's going to be a better hitter in the majors than he was in the minors. He needs to be at least as good as Henry Blanco behind the plate to be considered even a backup for a major league team. The fact that someone is questioning his glove is extremely concerning since everyone knows he's not going to hit.

I'm mildly intrigued by the idea of Delmon Young losing 29 pounds. If that could help his mobility in the field a little bit, I might be able to tolerate him. Somewhat. Still, most of these "Joe Smith reports to camp in the best shape of his life!" reports turn out to be a load of crap, so I will believe it when I see it.

Projecting Delmon Young 2010

ubelmann November 10, 2009, at 12:00 pm 16 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) , ,

In the sake of fairness to Delmon, and since Bill Smith is 99.9% likely to keep him around, I figured I'd take a full look at how he figures to play next year. The 2010 ZiPS projections have been out for the Twins for a while now. This is where they have Delmon compared to his last couple of seasons:

.290/.336/.405, 91 OPS+ -- Delmon '08
.284/.308/.425, 102 OPS+ -- Delmon '09
.286/.324/.426, 97 OPS+ -- Delmon '10 ZiPS

So he basically gets the walk rate from '08 and the "power" from '09. That seems fair. It's hard for me to wrap my head around Delmon improving much more than that, considering that he still stubbornly insists on spinning the bat in his hands, wood grain be damned, Harmon Killebrew's advice be damned, and he has a plate approach as refined as a preschooler's finger painting, but I suppose it could happen.

Anyway, figure Delmon has about a league average bat next year.

In LF this year, by UZR, Delmon was just as much a disaster as he was the year before, maybe more. And to the naked eye, he looked every bit as awkward, slow, and lost out there. Over the last two years, he's got a -17.9 UZR/150G. When he was with Tampa, he somehow managed a +6.0 UZR/150G in RF. So I'll still even grant that he might still possibly improve, or at least regress to the mean somewhat, and maybe he was just really bad at fighting the Dome lights in LF or something. I also don't think that it's necessarily fair to Delmon to hold his CF numbers against him, given the small sample size and the fact that he obviously has no business roaming CF.

Projected Delmon's defense in 2010 to be equal to his average performance over the last three years, he'd be a -9 UZR/150G fielder in a corner OF spot. That would be a pretty drastic improvement on what he's been the last two years, but that's what he's averaged over what essentially amounts to three years of data. It's tempting to look at his UZR data and say that we've spotted a pattern of him getting worse year after year, but I think there is too much noise for us to firmly say that there's a pattern there yet. (I still have trouble getting over just how slow he looks on the field, but he can't be that much slower than he was in Tampa, right?)

Delmon seems like a reasonable bet to be healthy enough for 150 games and 600 PA next year. A player's value for staying healthy for a year is about 20 runs. The defensive adjustment for playing a corner OF position is -7.5 runs.

So here is how it all shakes out:

+0 runs -- offense
-16.5 runs -- defense (UZR + position adjustment)
+20 runs -- durability

That gives us a grand total of +3.5 runs above replacement level over the course of a full season, which is roughly 0.4 WAR. I think it's an instructive comparison to consider that the position adjustment for DH is -17.5 runs, so a DH hitting league average for a season would be about +2.5 runs above replacement level. And that's about what Delmon seems like--a nondescript DH forced to play in the field because we a DH with balky knees and his own questionable defensive abilities.

Delmon's been an average of roughly -0.5 WAR/year over the last three years. So an improvement of 0.9 wins would certainly be welcome, though it's not the sort of thing that might inspire Bernard Malamud to write a novel. Regression to the mean is tough to avoid, and Delmon's not old enough where we ought to expect him to go backwards.

As I discussed yesterday in the bigger picture for Twins roster construction, it would be nice to have a right-handed hitting, good-fielding corner OF to push Delmon to DH on days where we face left-handed pitching, and also to come in as a defensive replacement for Delmon when the Twins are protecting a small lead. And in the case where Delmon regresses or gets injured, it would be nice to have someone to take over for him without needing to make a trade.

This has made me a little less bitter about keeping Delmon around, but having seen him botch plays left and right in the field, I'm wary that I'm being overly optimistic about his defensive projection. And even with what I consider an optimistic defensive projection, he's still miles away from being a league average player, let alone the perennial All-Star he was once touted to be.

I Have Mixed Feelings

ubelmann November 6, 2009, at 3:39 pm 57 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) , , ,

There was a real honest-to-goodness thunderstorm in Seattle last night. This pretty much never happens in Seattle, and the low rumble of that thunder was music to this Midwestern boy's ears. I should have expected something major was changing...

To cut to the chase, I think that swapping Carlos Gomez for J.J. Hardy is perfectly reasonable in and of itself, but I can't stand what this means about Delmon Young's place on the team.

First off, J.J. Hardy vs. Carlos Gomez. Both are up-the-middle players, so at least Bill Smith didn't totally hose us again by ditching up-the-middle talent for some corner players. And playing league-average SS is actually worth about 5 runs more than league-average CF over a full season (say 150 games and 600 PA.)

I don't know that either player is really more likely to miss time due to injury than the other, so I'll estimate their team-controlled playing time as follows:

2010 - 145G/550PA
2011 - 140G/525PA
2012 - 135G/500PA (just Gomez, Hardy is a FA in 2012)
2013 - 130G/475PA (just Gomez, Hardy is a FA in 2012)

Those are rough, but right-now-at-this-very-moment, we have to figure their expected playing time to drop off because each next season makes it more likely that they've developed a chronic injury or had a freak catastrophic injury in the past.

Defensively, by UZR, Gomez has been worth +14 runs/150G in his career and Hardy has been worth +11 runs/150G in his career. Both have likely peaked defensively*, so I figure their future performance might be something like:

Gomez:
2010 - +13 R/150G
2011 - +12 R/150G
2012 - +11 R/150G
2013 - +10 R/150G

Hardy:
2010 - +10 R/150G
2011 - +9 R/150G

*Defense tends to peak a lot earlier than hitting does.

That's mostly guesswork, since I don't know much work done on defensive aging, but it's generally difficult to get around regression to the mean. If anything, I would guess that both players should probably be projected to regress more towards the mean.

Now, how are they going to hit? Well, here are some career numbers:

.286 wOBA, -39.4 wRAA, 1102 PA, -21.5 wRAA/600PA -- Carlos Gomez
.325 wOBA, -6.6 wRAA, 2298 PA, -1.7 wRAA/600PA -- J.J. Hardy

So Hardy has been a much, much, much better hitter than Gomez. 2 wins/year on offense is nothing to sneeze at. I'm inclined to give Gomez the benefit of the doubt to some degree, because he seems to have good bat speed and is no less lost at the plate than Hunter was at his age. If someone got him to totally ignore the bunt game, I think it's not unreasonable that Gomez could eventually evolve into a .260/.300/.410 hitter. That ain't great, but it's only a touch worse than Hardy has been. Of course, I see that more as Gomez's ceiling and a reason to believe that he could improve greatly, not that he will improve.

I tend to think that Hardy has more or less shown us what he can do at the plate and is equally likely to do better or worse than his career numbers over the next couple of years. Was last year an awful sign? Well, let's look at his PrOPS line (which adjusts a hitter's line based on his batted ball types--line drives, pop ups, etc.--to see what he "should" have hit) from last year against his actual line and his career line:

.229/.302/.357 -- Hardy, 2009
.251/.321/.394 -- Hardy, 2009 PrOPS
.262/.323/.428 -- Hardy, career

I look at those numbers and more or less figure that Hardy was kind of unlucky on his batted-ball outcomes last year and is pretty likely to bounce back to his career hitting numbers, especially since he's 2-3 years away from age 30.

So my rough hitting estimations for these two guys go like:

Gomez:
2010 -- -20 wRAA/600PA
2011 -- -18 wRAA/600PA
2012 -- -16 wRAA/600PA
2013 -- -15 wRAA/600PA

Hardy:
2010 -- -2 wRAA/600PA
2011 -- -2 wRAA/600PA

We'll put replacement level at 20 runs per 150 games, SS at +7.5 runs per 150 games and CF at +2.5 runs per 150 games. Throw it all in a blender and we get the following:

Gomez
Year Fielding Hitting Positional Replacement Total WAR
2010 12.6 -18.3 2.4 19.3 16 1.6
2011 11.2 -15.8 2.3 18.7 16 1.6
2012 9.9 -13.3 2.3 18.0 17 1.7
2013 8.7 -11.9 2.2 17.3 16 1.6
Hardy
Year Fielding Hitting Positional Replacement Total WAR
2010 9.7 -1.8 7.3 19.3 34 3.4
2011 8.4 -1.8 7.0 18.7 32 3.2

That gives us 6.5 WAR for Gomez over the next four years and 6.6 WAR for Hardy over the next four years. Of course, Hardy's projection kills Gomez's in yearly value, 3.3 WAR/year to 1.6 WAR/year.

Now we need to talk dollars and cents, because as we were unkindly reminded (again) this year, the Twins operate with a finite budget. Projecting future salaries, I figure roughly:

Gomez $$$ (based somewhat on what Cuddyer's made so far):
2010 -- $0.5M
2011 -- $1.0M
2012 -- $3.0M
2013 -- $5.0M

Hardy $$$:
2010 -- $7M
2011 -- $10M

At $4M/win*, 6.5 wins is worth $26M. So in net value while under team control we have:

Net Value -- Dude
+$16.5M -- Gomez
+$9.5M -- Hardy

*It has been more like $4.5-5M/win on the free agent market lately, but I expect the recession to reduce the total number of dollars chasing a fixed number of free agent wins.

In terms of net value per year, we have:

2010: +$6.0M -- Gomez, +$6.5M -- Hardy
2011: +$5.5M -- Gomez, +$3.0M -- Hardy
2012: +$3.5M -- Gomez
2013: +$1.5M -- Gomez

Now, maximizing wins/dollar isn't everything. It's really important, but if you're going to win a championship, at some point you're going to need some above-average players. J.J. Hardy is above average and Carlos Gomez is not. The Twins have essentially invested $7M in concentrating 6-7 wins over two years instead of four. That strikes me as a reasonable sum to spend on that trade-off, although it would be a lot harder to justify if the Twins had any kind of depth at all in the middle infield. As it stands, the Twins now have two middle infielders above replacement level: J.J. Hardy and Nick Punto. So I think that this is a fair deal for the Twins, but I'm not exactly doing cartwheels in the street, either.

Personally, I thought that having Gomez around made the game a little more fun than it should have been, so I'm going to miss that, but at some point it seems that the Twins kind of gave up on his odds of improving at the plate, so I'm happy to see him move to an organization where they'll hopefully give him a full-time job to improve as a hitter.

Of course, a big part of the reason I'm not doing cartwheels in the street is because we have committed to playing this guy in LF for the foreseeable future:

DelmonOMGNOTMYBALLS

Take This For What You Will

Andrew August 19, 2009, at 6:05 am 6 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) , , ,

Last night, _elm_n hit his 7th homerun of the season, and his 5th of the month of August.  For starters, here is the game in which each home run was hit [number of games since previous games in brackets]

Game 4: April 12
Game 46: June 20
ame 51: July 3
Game 67 Auggust 9
Game 68 Augus 11
Game 72 August 16
Game 74 August 18
  • Game 4: April 12 [--]
  • Game 46: June 20 [42]
  • Game 51: July 3 [5]
  • Game 67: August 9 [16]
  • Game 68: August 11 [0]
  • Game 72: August 16 [4]
  • Game 74: August 18 [2]

As you can see, the home runs have come with more frequency as of late.  Here's his line since home run #4 on August 9th:

BA OBP SLG OPS
0.281 0.382 0.750 1.132

With 3 doubles, 4 home runs, and 10 RBI. 10 RBI is 27.7% of his total for the year (36), in just 10.8% of GP.

For comparison, his overall 2009 and overall career numbers, respectively:

2009

BA OBP SLG OPS
0.265 0.292 0.388 0.680

Career

BA OBP SLG OPS
0.288 0.321 0.409 0.730

I'll leave it to greater statistical minds than myself to delve further into the advanced numbers. But since August 9th, he's been hitting decently well it would seem. Hopefully this either:
a) Keeps up and he becomes a useful member of the offense, or
b) Keeps up long enough to increase his trade value a bit.

Game 70: Houston Astros at Minnesota Twins

spookymilk June 20, 2009, at 5:00 pm 140 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) , , , , , , , , , , ,

What I love first and foremost about baseball is that on any given day, history can be made in any of the games going on.  Tonight, the Weaver brothers will be facing off.  Yesterday, Delmon Young hit two doubles.  Today, the "Civil Rights" game is being contested between a team once owned by Marge Schott and a team with the word "White" in its name.

Scott Baker is no stranger to history...or, at any rate, near-history.  Nearly every time out, Baker goes on a long streak of outs and occasionally gives every indication that he'll be throwing a no-hitter...until the third time through the lineup.

Baker has been strong lately, while his opponent, Brian Moehler, can politely be described as "groin-grabbingly awful."

Scott Baker: 4-6, 5.30 ERA, 4.54 xFIP
Brian Moehler: 3-4, 6.66 ERA, 5.12 xFIP

So, to be fair (yeah, me neither!), Moehler looks worse than he is, and currently sports a probably-unsustainable career-high .357 BABIP.   Still, he's right-handed, and he pitches for a team that doesn't score a lot of runs or hit a lot of balls out of the park, so bundle that with Baker's recent improvement, and it seems the Twins are set up to stay over - to stay over!!!! - the .500 mark for the moment.

The Twins have taken seven of nine from the Astros since 2000, although your friendly neighborhood Milkman managed to catch one of the losses in person, and none of the wins.  For dumb.

The Twins press pass sends along this fun little note:

Dating back to 1957, only eight players have posted back-to-back months with a .400-or-better batting average: Rico Carty (1970), George Brett (1980), Rod Carew (1983), Milt Thompson (1987), Paul O'Neill (1994), Larry Walker (2002), Ichiro (2004) and Chipper Jones (2008).  Joe Mauer hit .414 in May and is hitting .431 in June.

Breathe every moment of it in, friends...we may never see this again.  Go Twins...we've almost caught the Tigers.

Out of Curiosity

ubelmann June 15, 2009, at 5:42 pm 6 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) ,

Brendan Harris, in the '07-'08 offseason, posits:

"What impressed me the most is that Delmon's so aggressive at the plate, yet with runners on base he's a very tough out. He's phenomenal with runners in scoring position. To me, that comes from his overall competitiveness."

Delmon essentially never walks, so I'm going to assume that Harris means Delmon was good at getting hits with runners on base. Was that true?

First, some averages that I looked up in the off-season:

.261/.324/.412, 3128 AB/team -- 2008 AL, none on
.297/.362/.452, 749 AB/team -- 2008 AL, RISP, <2 outs
.245/.350/.386, 659 AB/team -- 2008 AL, RISP, 2 outs

And then how did Delmon do in 2007 with the Devil Rays?

.250/.275/.344 -- Delmon, 2007 TBD, none on
.409/.410/.462 -- Delmon, 2007 TBD, RISP, <2 outs
.280/.330/.366 -- Delmon, 2007 TBD, RISP, 2 outs

Harris' statement largely holds up. Delmon was at his worst when pitchers had the bases empty, for whatever reason. That's definitely a small sample size in terms of projecting for the future, but if you take Harris' statement as an observation of what happened, it looks pretty accurate. What do his career numbers look like?

.276/.306/.375 -- Delmon, career, none on
.352/.378/.500 -- Delmon, career, RISP, <2 outs
.246/.299/.322 -- Delmon, career, RISP, 2 outs

So with a larger (but still relatively small) sample, Delmon's splits start to look more normal. Worse with RISP/2 than with no one on base, and best in the RISP, <2 outs situation.

If anything, this fits my intuition of how someone would do with Delmon's approach. With runners on and less than 2 outs, the pitcher is probably going to feel the most pressure to throw strikes, so as not to get himself in even more trouble, and swinging away at pretty much every offering is going to give you the best results when the pitcher is around the plate.

Also, consider this split from his bb-ref splits page:

.207/.246/.263 -- vs. Power
.279/.322/.391 -- vs. avg P/F
.387/.400/.558 -- vs. Finesse

With power and finesse defined as:

Power pitchers strike out or walk more than 28% of batters faced, Finesse pitchers strike out or walks less than 24% of batters faced.

Upon observing this split, I said aloud "holy shit." Delmon's career isn't all that long, but that's a huge split and it again follows my intuition that a hitter with no plate discipline/pitch recognition is going to do best in situations when the pitcher is going to be in the zone a lot.

(As an aside, yes, power pitchers on average do better than finesse pitchers, but the first link I could find on OPS splits has NL power pitchers at .707, avg P/F at .757, and finesse at .791, so there's a difference, but not anywhere close to the difference that we see with Delmon.)

Also, and I don't have as much founding for this conclusion, I don't think that Delmon has very good bat speed, and against true right-handed power pitchers, he seems to have zero chance at the plate.

I tried looking for players with an approach similar to Delmon's. Then I grabbed their career tOPS+ against Power and Finesse pitchers. Given the .707/.757/.791 splits above, I'd expect typical splits for this to be something like 93/104.

Power/Finesse -- Dude
42/163 -- Delmon Young
52/131 -- Carlos Gomez
57/117 -- Bo Jackson
70/122 -- Jeff Francoeur
80/117 -- Carl Crawford
81/138 -- Alfonso Soriano
81/118 -- Adam Jones
86/92 -- Andres Galarraga
86/109 -- Jacque Jones
87/104 -- Torii Hunter
87/104 -- RonDL
91/104 -- Jose Guillen
93/117 -- Juan Gonzalez
94/103 -- Adrian Beltre

I didn't check everyone, and these aren't necessarily the closest comps you could possibly find for Delmon, but he still has by far the biggest split here. And Delmon reminds me more of the guys on the top of the list than the ones on the bottom of the list.

Anyway, consider this another episode in an ongoing series aimed at understanding one Delmon Young.

Big League Stew on _elm_n

Andrew June 15, 2009, at 5:55 am Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired

Big League Stew takes a look at the continuing troubles of our end of the Garza/Bartlett trade.  You know things are bad when this doesn't necessarily sound like a bad idea:

Best of all would be if they could find a way to DL him, because then he could effectively return to the minors on a rehab stint, away from the pressure and photographed failure of the big leagues. It might not be strictly honest, but it would be strategically perfect.

Great Expectations

ubelmann June 10, 2009, at 1:07 pm 7 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) ,

Question: Based solely on his 2007 season, how should we have expected Delmon Young to do from 2008 through 2012? (After 2012, Delmon has the option to test the free agent market.)

Not many players have played full seasons at such an early age, but let's look at the ones who did in order to get an idea not so much of how impressive this feat is, but rather what we ought to expect from someone who has accomplished such a feat.

Thanks to BB-Ref's amazing Play Index service, we can take a look at the OPS+ for all player-seasons that happened at age 21 (or younger), in the retrosheet era ('54-present, to keep the dinosaurs out of our little study.) The first thing I would note is that Delmon is 81st out of 113 player-seasons. So amongst ultra-young players, he wasn't especially impressive offensively--about 28th percentile.

Now, there's more to the game than hitting, and corner outfielders tend to hit better than up-the-middle players. If I limit the search to players who played at least 50 games in LF, RF, or 1B, we have only 41 players who played at age 21 or younger and qualified for a batting title. Delmon placed 33rd in OPS+ amongst these players, or about 20th percentile.

Now on that list of 41 player-seasons, we have a few guys with multiple seasons. For those, let's get rid of their age 19 and 20 seasons and trim the list back to include only their age 21 season. Now that we've eliminated some repeaters, we're down to 32 players, and Delmon ranks 27th amongst those players.

Conclusion #1: Playing in the majors at such a young age is certainly impressive, but compared to that group, Delmon was not impressive.

Now let's take a look at the players who were closest in Delmon in performance. Remember, these are all players who were 21 (or younger for Bell and Staub), and played significant amounts of time at a corner position, so that their defense was not especially an asset. We'll take the five players above and below Delmon on this list and call them his top comparables, accepting that this is a pretty small group of people to begin with so the comparisons aren't necessarily going to look exact.

Click here to continue reading Great Expectations...

_lm_n, Movie Star

brianS June 7, 2009, at 1:48 pm Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired , , ,

I am growing to love Doug Glanville. I hope the NY Times has the sense to keep him on for the long haul. Yesterday his column reviewed the documentary We Are Young, featuring our very own Placement Director. Great review.

Mugshot Purgatory: Corner OFs and Rays

AMR May 29, 2009, at 8:30 am 10 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) , , , , , , ,

Today, we start off with our two leftfielders (D-SPAN2 was considered a centerfielder for my purposes). Jason "the Dude" Kubel is typically the DH, while Delmon "_elm_n" Young has no D and no O.
kubel_jason_2009kubel_jason_2008kubel_jason_2007kubel_jason_2006
young_delmon_2009young_delmon_2008young_delmon_2007young_delmon_2006
(Kubel '09, '08, '07, '06; Young '09, '08, '07, '06)
I don't know how the Dude got his nickname. Could anyone fill me in? I don't know what's up with Del's 2008, it's clearly a photoshop, but I don't know of which year. And it's not like he was traded after '08 pictures were taken, or missed spring training.

Click here to continue reading Mugshot Purgatory: Corner OFs and Rays...

Six Word Player Evaluations: Delmon Young

SBG March 13, 2009, at 7:04 am 24 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) , ,

Our Six Word Player Evaluation series continues with the erstwhile Devil Ray Ironman Delmon Young. He's not exactly become a fan favorite in Minneapolis since Tampa Bay traded him to Minnesota as part of a six player deal that included future HOFer (heh!) Jason Bartlett (or at least future league MVP, right?) and Matt Garza. Here's my entry:

Don't tell Will, but he's Young

Remember you are free to add up to four entries of your own.

Yesterday's poll on Carlos Gomez had a clear winner. In the "ain't it true?" department, WGOMers voted Lucky Jim's (man, he's got some good entries, the Nation wants you in the game logs!!!) "If only he could steal first" as the winner. Second was E-6's "Sets up Morneau, catcher, other guy". Third was "Baseball's berry to good to him" by Will Young.

And now for today's poll. You can vote for up to FIVE entries.

Select your Favorite Torii Hunter Six Word Evaluations (Max 5)

  • Amazing how quickly Twins moved on. -- 16%
  • Sore back sleeping on those moneybags. -- 2%
  • Left trail of Twins under bus. -- 10%
  • League Leader: HR prevented and allowed. -- 2%
  • 저를 무십시오 Torii. -- 1%
  • Who the hell is Torii Hunter? -- 7%
  • "I be drinkin' a Coors Light!" -- 2%
  • Justin Morneau could have taken him. -- 20%
  • Shouldn't have dove for that one. -- 12%
  • Mark Kotsay liner, October 4th, 2006 -- 5%
  • He's gotta feed his family, too... -- 4%
  • The Face of the Franchise, indeed -- 10%
  • Gomez more fun, less back stabby -- 23%
  • Loves Tommy Watkins, Hates Jim Mandelero -- 1%
  • Great smile. It is for himself. -- 5%
  • Always wanted to play in ________ -- 35%
  • Missing filter between brain and mouth -- 10%
  • The WGOM improved when he left -- 4%
  • A million dollar smile. Matching ego. -- 9%
  • Mentored by Kirby. It didn't work. -- 11%
  • Wrote checks his body couldn't cash. -- 1%
  • Thought Gold Gloves were Golden Gloves -- 5%
  • Almost superhero status; lacked spidey sense -- 4%
  • Loved throwing teammates under the bus -- 5%
  • Never missed single inning in life -- 4%
  • The most durable anything anywhere ever -- 5%
  • It was fun while it lasted -- 15%
  • Real clubhouse leader. Just ask Morneau. -- 6%
  • Torii: what is a "G" anyways? -- 2%
  • Keep him away from the pinata. -- 1%
  • Torii, better clubhouse leader than Jesus -- 2%
  • Fenway fence says, "Bite me, Torii" -- 7%
  • Team: No "I". Torii has two. -- 32%
  • Plays through pain. Just ask him. -- 12%
  • When he talks, BS meter pegs. -- 4%
  • Only Jacko’s gloved hand pleasured more -- 6%
  • Playoff misplays: Durham '02, Kotsay '06 -- 2%
  • Hit by Baez? Throw fastball back. -- -202%

Total Voters: 82

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Fun with Upper Deck: 2008 Documentary, Game 69 (redux)

Rhubarb_Runner March 9, 2009, at 5:30 am 3 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) , , ,

2008_69_b2008 Documentary: Twins Game 69

Card #1969/MIN69


Click here to continue reading Fun with Upper Deck: 2008 Documentary, Game 69 (redux)...

Anchorman Gets Max Allowable Pay Cut

ubelmann February 12, 2009, at 7:58 pm 18 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired)

Delmon and MN have come to an agreement on a 2009 contract. Basically, last year he made $700K, but his salary counted as $1.44M because of the prorated bonus from his 5-year contract that just expired. The Twins are only allowed to cut his salary by 20%, so he'll get $1.152M. (If you're having trouble getting the articles numbers to add up, 3.7/5 = 0.74, not 0.77 as claimed.) I hope he makes significant strides forward this year, but I'm not holding my breath.

Presented For Your Amusement

ubelmann December 12, 2008, at 2:12 am 5 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) , ,

Introducing the comedic stylings of Geoff Baker:

As for the Twins, the one outfielder they could possibly make available -- besides the expensive, underachieving Michael Cuddyer -- is former top-pick Delmon Young. Young would be an interesting left field addition for the Mariners, with the ability to play either right field or center as well. He would give them the power they are looking for. The question is whether the Twins would want to deal Young, who had issues with Twins coaches after his trade from the Tampa Bay Rays for Matt Garza and Jason Bartlett last year. As good as Beltre is, the Twins know they'd only have him for a year.

Q: Has Delmon Young hired Geoff Baker as his agent?

Looking Back At The Delmon Debacle

ubelmann December 11, 2008, at 2:30 am 15 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) , , , , , , , , , ,

While responding to greenmachine's thoughtful comment to my look at the Santana trade, the issue came up about whether or not the Twins should have played for this year and a Young/Span/Cuddyer/Kuble OF-DH situation was proposed. My big problem with this is that it would have required us to make the Delmon Young trade in the first place, which I also really didn't like in the first place.

Click here to continue reading Looking Back At The Delmon Debacle...

 
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