Moe Berg (1902)
Woody English (1906)
Jack Knott (1907)
Mel Ott (1909)
Mort Cooper (1913)
Jim Konstanty (1917)
Jim Nettles (1947)
Pete Broberg (1950)
Larry Wolfe (1953)
Terry Steinbach (1962)
Ron Gant (1965)
Glen Perkins (1983)
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Cy Perkins (1896) Honus Wagner (1874) Today is also the birthday of Twins' farm director Jim Rantz (1938) and minor league player Chris Parmelee (1988). Bill Klem (1874) It should be noted that Sparky Anderson was born in Bridgewater, South Dakota. So here are the CHONE projections for 2B in 2010. You could break it down in different ways, but I'll try to roughly group them such that players within each group are more or less interchangable. In Group A, we have Chase Utley at 6.1 WAR. No one is close to him. In Group B, we have Dustin Pedroia, Ian Kinsler, and Robinson Cano, between 4.2 and 4.7 WAR. In Group C, we have Zobrist, Hill, In Group D, we have Kelly Johnson, Dan Uggla, Jose Lopez, and Howie Kendrick, between 2.6 and 3.1 WAR. Group E gets a lot bigger: Between 1.9 and 2.4 WAR, we have Rickie Weeks, Brandon Phillips, Orlando Hudson, Sean Rodriguez, Felipe Lopez, Martin Prado, Akinori Iwamura, Maicer Izturis, Eric Young, Clint Barmes, and Jayson Nix. Some of those guys are actually backups (the Angels have ridiculous middle infield depth), but I'm sure they're not untouchable and if someone was in need, they could probably trade Group F, between 1.2 and 1.7 WAR, has Tony Abreu, Tug Hulett, Alberto Callaspo, Skip Schumaker, Mark Ellis, Luis Valbuena, Chris Getz, Jamie Carroll, Ryan Roberts, Mike Fontenot, and Luis Castillo. And then there are even more players lower than that. Essentially, we've got about 11 players above Orlando Hudson, about 10 players roughly interchangeable with Hudson, and about 10 players one notch below Hudson. I think this mostly explains why the market for Hudson has been pretty soft--Hudson is solid, but not so good that you couldn't get a close replacement on the cheap. If you go the cheap route, you're probably going to take a 0.5-1.0 WAR hit, but you can use that money elsewhere. And you could certainly wiggle the defensive numbers around somewhat to get a slightly different view, but I don't think that the big picture changes much. Hudson looks like he'd be a good acquisition for the Twins because the Twins have pretty awful middle infield depth: 2.5 WAR -- Hardy *Not to jump the gun on Punto Day, but at that value, he'd have been worth roughly $8M over 2009-2010 by fangraphs' valuation. His contract's obviously not a huge bargain, but the Twins have beans for middle infield depth, so I guess I don't mind reaching a little bit in an area of weakness. **That's at SS with a -12 runs below SS rating. If he's an average-fielding SS, CHONE would have him pegged at about 0.8 WAR. Daring to dream and inserting Hudson into that list gives the Twins two legitimately league average players in the middle infield, relegating Punto and Tolbert to the bench, which gives the Twins reasonable options should Hardy or Hudson get injured or slump badly. 2.5 WAR -- Hardy For comparison, in 2009 Punto/Cabrera/Tolbert/Casilla combined for 0.1 WAR.  ubelmann  February 1, 2010, at 4:07 pm  13 LTEs  Delmon Young, Drew Butera, Minnesota Twins, Tall Tales Catching up on reading the beat writers, I saw this:
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. 1) It's kind of funny that this should happen right after Brett Favre comes to the Vikings. Thome has been playing against the Twins for so long between the Indians and White Sox, it has a similar feeling to it. 2) Last year, AL teams averaged 85 pinch hitting plate appearances, while the NL averaged 262. (The difference being essentially one extra PA for a pinch hitter per game for NL teams, which more or less makes sense.) The Twins had 82 PH plate appearances, broken down roughly like so: 22 -- Brian Buscher (L) That's 42 PA for lefty hitters, 21 PA for righty hitters, and 19 PA for switch hitters. (Of note, 8 of Jose Morales' pinch-hitting appearances were after September 1st, when the Twins had 3 catchers on board.) Who did the switch hitters come in to hit for? Redmond (4) So except for Tolbert hitting for Kubel in garbage time one game, Gardy never used his switch hitters to hit for a left-handed hitter. This shouldn't be all that surprising, since most of the team's good hitters are left-handed hitters. (How often do you really want to pinch hit for Mauer, Morneau, Span, or Kubel?) And I would guess that most of the appearances for the right-handed pinch hitters were subbing in for Kubel, who admittedly has a pretty large platoon split and I don't necessarily trust that much to hit left-handed pitching. If we think of Thome as strictly a bench acquisition, I think he mostly fits. He fits at least in that we don't have anyone on the bench who does what he does--hit right-handed pitching. On top of that, a lot of managers are going to burn their LOOGY facing the top of our order (and rightfully so), so their ought to be opportunities for Thome to enter the game when the other team can't counter with a LOOGY. Obviously, like pretty much every bench player, Thome would fit better if we carry a 5-man bench instead of a 4-man bench (which would require a 11-man pitching staff.) With 5 position players on the bench you could conceivably have something like: Backup C If anything, it seems like the Twins might go with 12 pitchers because they have a lot of them under contract right now and might be unwilling to let one go in exchange for nothing, so in that case, they would either drop the backup OF since Kubel could be an outfielder some of the time and Punto could go out there in a pinch, or drop the backup 1B/3B since Thome could cover 1B in an emergency and the backup MIF could cover 3B if Thome hit for whomever is manning 3B. But if the Twins can man up and go with a 5-man bench, Thome can essentially hit for any outfielder or infielder and then come straight out of the game for a defensive replacement. That could be pretty useful since this team still employs Nick Punto, Matt Tolbert, Brendan Harris, Delmon Young, and potentially Alexi Casilla. Plus, J.J. Hardy's bat might not come around. It's looking like the price tag is about $1.5M plus up to $0.75M in incentives, which isn't too bad for a bench guy. I'm still curious whether or not they'll actually sign another third baseman, but I'd really like to see them pick up a 4th OF who can cover CF in case Span gets hurt or needs a day off. Because right now, Jason Pridie is our second-best option in CF and that's kind of disgusting. Of course, on the bright side, now if Kubel gets hurt, we've got a decent option at DH. ubelmann January 20, 2010, at 2:46 pm 9 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) Joe Mauer, Minnesota Twins Right now, I have them at: $88.96M for 27 players And that's with no money yet committed towards the draft and no raise for Mauer. (And no potential bonus payouts, though we don't have any highly incentivized contracts at the moment, like we did last year with Crede and eventually Pavano.) The Twins have averaged about $4.5M/year in draft spending over the last seven years. So figure they are probably going to go around the $3M mark unless they pull another 2007 draft on us. Do the Twins have any money left for next year? I am beginning to wonder if they really are going to be able to pick up another infielder, and pitching is probably out of the question. (Except for NRIs and minor league signings.) One thing we know is that they don't have any extra 40-man roster spots at the moment, so someone has to go for anyone to get added to the roster. In 2009, I get: Does anyone have info on the Twins' international free agent signings from last year? Also, does anyone have solid info on what Humber made last year? (Baseball-reference reports him at $1.125M, which we would have been on the hook for if true.) I note here that my figure for the 2009 payroll is about $8-9M (or what I like to call two Puntos) higher than the commonly reported $65M figure, mainly because that was the opening day number, they increased spending down the stretch, and from counting salaries for bit players who got shuffled in and out of the lineup as the year went along. Jeff A January 16, 2010, at 6:53 am One LTE - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) ex-Twins, Happy Birthday, Minnesota Twins Art Whitney (1858) ubelmann December 31, 2009, at 3:20 pm 10 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) Corey Koskie, Justin Morneau, Minnesota Twins May not be who first comes to mind. Rally has a good breakdown of the comparison in these comments:
I don't like to talk much about who or what gets overrated, but Morneau has a lot of things going for him which make it easy to see why his perceived value might be greater than his actual value. His greatest skill--hitting for power--is both obvious and flashy. His first-half OPS is better than his second-half OPS by about 100 points. And by being a great first-half hitter, he has good counting stats below his name on television broadcasts for the large part of the season. First impressions matter, and he essentially makes a good first impression each year and then peters out. He plays a position that the media loves to promote. Every year it seems that there are roughly 10 first basemen on each All-Star team and half of the MVP candidates are first basemen, despite the fact that the vast majority of these guys couldn't possibly play any other position on the field because they don't have that much defensive value. That 2006 MVP win seems to have really gotten Morneau off the hook for any sort of criticism in the local media. He was supposed to have tons of power, but over the last four years, he's only hit maybe 4-5 more home runs per year than Hunter did in most of his healthy years. He has routinely faded in the second half of the season and at least so far, no one has really raised doubts about how his injury may affect his performance going forward, even though back injuries seem to become chronic more often than not. Anyway, I think Morneau has been a very good player, but I tend to agree that Koskie was better, at least during the arbitrary period of 2000 to 2009. sean December 21, 2009, at 9:54 am 9 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) 2010 Projection, Minnesota Twins, Target Field Part 1 and the more boring part 2. I get it, weather is only exciting the first time. Concluding the series, I have some insights about that lack of foul territory. Gameday conveniently has hit location data available for every ball in play. Unfortunately it does not note whether a ball was foul or fair, nor the number of pitches in the plate appearance. Gives me something to do I suppose.
Colors are mostly self-explanatory. Purple is foul territory unique to Some numbers:
I split apart home and away results in case there was some bias from familiarity of the Dome by the Twins. Turns out there might be. Away teams had shorter plate appearances, ball in play or not. Not entirely sure why. Non-BIP plate appearances were much closer in length (4.57 versus 4.54) while BIP plate appearances had a greater delta: 3.47 compared to 3.33. I suspect the former is just random variation (a bit less than 3000 events each for home and away) while the latter is due to the Twins' fielders having more familiarity with the quirks of the field. For foul outs, I ignored foul bunts. Since those are dependent on the stupidity of the batter and not any park, I opted to not count them. To determine whether an out was foul or not, I relied upon the description given to me by Gameday. Relying on trig failed since the point recorded is where the ball was fielded, not where it landed. So I had several foul doubles and triples until I changed my method. Here are the results of whether a foul ball would remain catchable or not in Target Field.
The method I used to estimate catchability is rather crude, but should provide a ballpark estimate. Not a very large number of events. Maybe I should have crunched 2005-2009, though I think I really need ten years or more worth of data to get a decent sample size. Anyway. We can start by assuming a worst case scenario that those 163 foul outs no longer end in a foul out. So, we have 3.765 pitches per plate appearance instead of 3.307, for ~77 more pitches in total. Over three years. There were 12,929 BIPs (loosely using "play" here) over the three years, resulting in ~37 more BIPs per year. If we instead assume that some percentage of these foul outs will still end in a foul out, but with a lower probability, then ~1-2 will end in a foul out with the other 35-36 a BIP. But, at least one and probably a few more of those former foul outs would/could be home runs instead. If the wind was blowing out, definitely home run. Blowing in, not a home run. I recorded 459 home runs over the three years, for a rate of 0.0245 HR/PA. Multiplying by 163 and we have one PA ending in a home run instead of an out per year. Not something to worry about. While the decreased amount of foul territory will increase the run environment of the field slightly, the majority of foul territory in the Metrodome remains for Target Field. Eye-balling the purple in the diagram above I would guess two-thirds of the foul territory remains; a number backed up by the percentage of foul balls still catchable. Finally, most important are the fence distances and wind patterns of the field, both of which favor Target Field to suppress the run environment. I think Target Field could very well be the AL version of Petco. Again, much thanks to Andrew Clem for his meticulously drawn fields. This simply would not have been possible without his work. sean December 15, 2009, at 8:00 am 3 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) 2010 Projection, Minnesota Twins, Target Field This is a day later than I wanted, but Tuesday is okay too right? To do this, I grabbed 14 years (1996-2009) worth of daily weather records for the period April 1 through October 10 from KMSP at weatherunderground.com and parsed it. I recorded average temperatures for a 1 PM and 7 PM game (I assumed a three hour game) along with the average wind speed and wind direction for every day. I then coalesced them into a single average for every calendar day; i.e. April 1 from 1996 through 2009 into a single April 1. I actually had the data early in the project but chose to do other things because I thought it would be challenging to get all the data crunched. Nope. It turned out to be quite easy and fast.
ubelmann December 10, 2009, at 1:05 pm 11 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) Minnesota Twins, Rule 5 Draft Complete results. No activity even in the minor league portion. There didn't seem to be too much hype over the available picks this year, so it's tough to say that the Twins missed out on anything. It's weird to see the Yankees trade up for a pick in the Rule 5 draft. Will they really let a Rule 5 pick stick around on the 25-man roster all season? I'm thinking no. ubelmann December 7, 2009, at 7:26 pm 18 LTEs - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) Carl Pavano, Minnesota Twins Everything seems to be pointing towards Pavano accepting salary arbitration tonight. I think that'll work out fine for the Twins. It seems unlikely that they'll actually stand in front of an arbitration hearing, but will probably reach some compromise on a one-year deal with plenty of incentives (maybe an option?) or maybe a two-year deal that has a pretty low per-year value. It's really hard for a one-year deal to significantly hurt a team, and when Pavano's been healthy, he's been pretty good. He hasn't been healthy all that often, which is why a one- or two-year deal is even an option, but such a short-term deal decreases the Twins' exposure to risk greatly. Last year, Pavano made $1.5M in base salary and $3.1M in incentives, if I counted the incentives correctly. So the arbitration starting point would probably be somewhere around $4.6M. Say that Pavano has a roughly equal chance of any of his last seven seasons looking like his 2010 season. That's fairly pessimistic health-wise--4 of 7 years of less than 1 win above replacement. Well, he still managed to average about 1.9 WAR per season over the last seven years, because when he's been healthy, he's been pretty good. It's early this offseason, but I'm getting the impression that marginal wins on the free agent market are going to be valued at something closer to $3M/win than the $4.5M/win they have been recently. That would make Pavano worth something like $6M on a one-year deal in the current economic climate. And I have a hard time seeing him getting more than $6M in arbitration. It's possible, but with three unhealthy seasons before this year and less-than-stunning totals in traditional stats like ERA and wins over that period, I think he'll have trouble getting a huge boost over that $4.6M he made last year. In Bill Smith's position, I'd try to get Pavano to agree to a $6M/1yr deal or maybe a $10M/2yr deal, hopefully less, and hopefully not all guaranteed. And I think it'd be worth it because our starting pitching depth is suspect and the free agent options are just as suspect. Given his history, there seems to be a good 30-50% chance that Pavano will give us next-to-nothing next year, but there's also a significant chance that he'll stay healthy and turn in a performance that would be worth $12-13M/year if he had a better health track record. That's why I'm mainly in favor of keeping Pavano around on a short deal--we need players to outperform what they are getting paid, and Pavano has a reasonable chance of doing that, just like Crede did last year. ubelmann December 4, 2009, at 2:04 pm One LTE - (Sorry, but the time to add LTEs has expired) Joe Mauer, Minnesota Twins Just a quick thought after reading this at fangraphs. If I'm a pitcher, and I see how Mauer stays back on the ball so much, would I want to throw him an off-speed pitch that gives him time to come around on my pitch? Mauer's career numbers show that he doesn't hit particularly well against off-speed pitches, so maybe there's nothing to this, but maybe he is seeing off-speed pitches from pitchers who are disproportionately confident in not hanging their breaking pitches. Also, I'd guess that Mauer is ahead in the count a lot, forcing pitchers with sub-par control to throw him a lot of fastballs. |
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Recent Letters to the Editor
In Response to Cup of Coffee: March 15, 2010,
Whiffers wrote: The Twins should have had a series of auctions to sell tickets--why let the secondary market get some/most/all of the benefit from excess demand?
Algonad wrote: I imagine there will be a few sold out games this year with plenty of empty seats. I agree. I tried to get tickets on Saturday and failed. I think my plan will be…
Beau wrote: What's pissing me off is that the scalpers are already in full force. Scores of tickets already on E-bay and StubHub for these games. It seems to me there should be some sort…
SBG wrote: Hollinger has the Wolves rated dead last -- 30th -- in the NBA. You might be aware that there's a team out there with only seven wins, but even they are playing better than…
SBG wrote: The thing about bloggers is that they come up with unsubstantiated stuff and publish it. And hey, I think the Twins should kick around proposing trading Justin Morneau to the Cardinals for Pooholes, because…
SBG wrote: Ah, crap. Well, maybe no convention this year.
twayn wrote: I ordered tickets yesterday for my birthday (April 21) and my daughter's birthday (May 29). The seat selection was severely limited, so we ended up with upper deck behind home plate for the first game…
freealonzo wrote: D'oh!! August 21st Sold Out! You're gonna be hard pressed to get any tickets during the summer months, and I think September weekends are pretty much spoken for.
Rhubarb_Runner wrote: :) … the trip to Ft. Myers was our anniversary gift to each other, so this is just icing
SBG wrote: I didn't do it yet. Sigh. I hope that there are some left.
In Response to Happy Birthday--March 15,
Rhubarb_Runner wrote: until you're summarily thrown off ESPN for undisclosed reasons
CarterHayes wrote: . Happy Birthday to Mickey, my very first favorite Twin.
FirstTimeLongTime wrote: The Freshest Man on Earth is quite a wonderful nickname.
In Response to The Fiery Furnaces - Blueberry Boat,
E-6 wrote: see above.
E-6 wrote: I saw them when they toured behind BB. Was it a disappointing show? Yes, but not because they were bad, per se. More so that they were willfully obtuse. I think they enjoyed messing with…
FirstTimeLongTime wrote: Yeah, I gave my own video a 3. It is criminal what they do at their live shows.
E-6 wrote: 10 stars. (Not that it deserved it, but if people can hand out 1's, I can hang 10.) Actual score a 7.
FirstTimeLongTime wrote: I doubt anyone made it to this point of the video but there is a second song the band begins. Do not feel as if you missed out on anything by not watching to…
In Response to Cup of Coffee: March 13-14, 2010,
brianS wrote: Minnesota native Jim Phelps dead at 84. You youngsters may know him better as Clarence Oveur. But the real Mission: Impossible was da bomb.
New Britain Bo wrote: Estes Park I definately recommend. Ringed by a slew of 14K'ers.
New Britain Bo wrote: No mention of Underwear Model?
socaltwinsfan wrote: My four-year-old son just pointed at your Avatar and exclaimed "That's for Simpsons!"
Rhubarb_Runner wrote: She used to cover the Red Sox, so don't feel bad about it.
brianS wrote: don't forget Wynkoop in Denver. I thoroughly enjoyed their offerings (skip the Chile Beer). And they are located very near the old Union Station building, which looks architecturally interesting (although I haven't actually visited it).…
In Response to Cup of Coffee: March 12, 2010,
Rhubarb_Runner wrote: Thankfully, the family graduated to Macaroni Grill long ago. I can't remember the last time we went to OG.