Revisiting Nunez vs. Solarte vs. Sulbaran

Eduardo Nunez started three straight games at shortstop
against Kansas City this week.

Back at the start of the season, I was not impressed with the maneuvers that brought Eduardo Nunez to the Twins.

Half a season and 82 Nunez at-bats later, his addition looks a lot better than I reckoned it at the time, which means that he not only hasn't fallen on his face but has thrived in a superutility role. Nunez has seen time in the outfield, third base, shortstop and designated hitter for the Twins — and has hit.

I remain skeptical about his bat. Eighty-seven plate appearances don't outweigh the previous 827. He was a below-average hitter with the Yankees, and I don't know of any real reason to think that's changed.

Meanwhile, Miguel Sulbaran, the Class A lefty the Twins gave up to get Nunez, has a 2.86 ERA in the Florida State League (11 games, nine starts, 56.2 innings). He remains a long way from the majors, but this trade still has a chance to look really bad for the Twins someday. (Or Sulbaran could go the way of most A ball pitchers and never amount to anything.)

One point I made in April was that, in a very roundabout way (there's a gap of a couple of years), the Twins and Yankees essentially traded Nunez for Yangervis Solarte. Solarte spent years in the Twins farm system, but even after he hit .329/.367/.466 in Double A in 2011, the Twins didn't deem him worthy of a spot on the 40-man roster.

Solarte then spent two years in the Texas organization without a sniff of the majors, signed with the Yankees as a minor league free agent, beat out Nunez for an infield job in spring training, took over third base in April with a hot start ... and fell off a cliff in June. He hit .303 in April, .296 in May and .164 in June, and he gets to start July in the minors.

Nunez, who spent most of April in the minors with the Twins and two weeks of June on the disabled list, is suddenly seeing considerable action at shortstop. He started all three games against Kansas City at short, and had a couple starts there last month just before his injury.

I'm even more skeptical of Nunez as a shortstop than I am of him as a hitter. His defensive shortcomings were notorious among Yankees fans, and they were comparing him to the rangeless aged Derek Jeter. But Eduardo Escobar's hitting has slid in recent weeks (predictably), and Danny Santana is injured. The Twins are going nowhere in the standings; it doesn't hurt to take a look at Nunez as a shortstop, even if we should already have a pretty good idea of what we'll see.

Foreign players: Ready set, sign!

Wednesday was the first day the 2014 class of non-draft eligible players could sign, and there was quite the rush.

The Twins had two fairly prominent signings:

Huascar Ynoa, a right-handed pitcher from the Dominican Republic who Baseball America ranked as the No. 14 prospect in the class and  Jean Carlos Arias, left-handed hitting outfielder, also of the Dominican Republic. They are both 16 years old, so there's no point in expecting anything immediate out of either.  That's the general rule with the non-draft signings. They are typically very young and very raw. Ynoa has an interesting background. His brother Michael holds the record for largest bonus given an undrafted free agent; Michael Ynoa hasn't come close to the majors yet, but the Oakland A's put him on their 40-man roster to keep him from getting snatched up in the Rule 5 draft. He has, for the second straight season, an ERA above 7.5 in high A ball.  We can guess the Twins hope little brother can do better than that.

Ned Yost and the mysteries of time

Ned Yost tries some deep thinking.

The Twins had the U.S.-Belgium World Cup game on the outfield video board Tuesday afternoon, and somebody asked Royals manager Ned Yost if he was following the giant global futbol tourney.

He came up with an answer so breathtakingly inane as to call into question his capacity for logic.

#Royals manager Ned Yost refuses to watch soccer because "the game's too long." Of all possible complaints, this is probably least popular.
— Alex M. Smith (@asmiff) July 1, 2014

"The game's too long." This of World Cup soccer — a game whose regulation length is 90 minutes of running time — from a major league manager whose team seldom completes a regulation game in less than 180 minutes. Seriously.

There is no requirement that Ned Yost care about soccer, of course. But nobody connected to major league baseball — or any other big-time American sport, for that matter — has any right to claim soccer games take too long.

Big-time American sports are all about finding, even creating, interruptions in the contest and exploiting them to sell stuff on the broadcasts. The gap in baseball between innings has been stretched to the breaking point, particularly on nationally televised games. Football invented a superficial automatic timeout for ads, the "two-minute warning." (What, the coaches are so absent-minded they don't know how much time is left?)  The last "two minutes" of basketball games can take a half-hour to complete in the hands of expert coaches.

Ned Yost thinks soccer games take too long? All the glass in his house deserves to be stoned.

Polanco post 3.0

Jorge Polanco turns a double play pivot Sunday
against the Texas Rangers.

The Twins did indeed bring Trevor Plouffe and Eduardo Nunez back off the disabled list Monday and option out Pedro Florimon and Jorge Polanco.

Polanco returns to Fort Myers (high A) with two extra base hits and two walks in seven plate appearances. He started Sunday at shortstop and had a double and a walk and was involved in turning three double plays. He also messed up a rundown.

Florimon returns to Rochester (Triple A) with a major league batting average on the season of .092. He was 0-for-11 during this callup (with a walk).

I beefed here Saturday (and to a lesser extent Friday) about Florimon being in the lineup over Polanco. Now that Polanco's emergency tenure in the bigs is over, I have to concede that Ron Gardenhire didn't bury him on the bench. The 20-year-old got some playing time in each of the four games he was active for.

My real beef isn't so much that Gardy eased Polanco into the majors, but that Florimon was involved at all in filling the injury gap. I doubt I would have grumbled at all had it been Doug Bernier or James Beresford getting those starts. I fully realize that Polanco was only on the 25-man roster because, with Nunez, Plouffe and Danny Santana all on the DL, the Twins were just a sprained ankle away from Eric Fryer playing third base.

Neither Bernier nor Beresford is on the 40-man roster however, and Florimon and Polanco are. That's why they got the callups when the Twins infielders started filling the disabled list.

And as long as Florimon and Polanco are the only minor league infielders on the 40-man roster, Florimon is going to be the first choice for a return to the majors when infield reinforcements are needed.

That's a problem I'd like to see rectified.

The quality start

Kyle Gibson had his ninth quality start of the season
Sunday. It was his 16th start overall.

Colby Lewis started Sunday's game against the Twins for Texas. He went six innings, allowing two runs. It was his first "quality start" since 2012, which sounds a bit worse than it is (he missed 2013 with injury) but still isn't good for a a guy with 13 starts coming into the game.

This got the radio boys, Cory Provus and Dan Gladden, talking about the merits of the quality start stat. (I spent most of the game in deadly battle with the weeds in the backyard garden spaces; it's probably the most time I've spent with the radio broadcast this season.) Provus had a fairly good, nuanced take on the value of the stat; a bit flawed, but mostly on target.

Distilling Provus's opinion: He doesn't care for the quality start as an individual stat, because six innings/three earned runs is an ERA of 4.50, and that doesn't impress him. But on a team basis, if the starter gives up three runs in six innings, he's kept the team in the game, so if the team is getting lots of quality starts, that's good.

There are two flaws in that. First is that the team getting lots of quality starts is getting them from individuals. If the QS is valid on a team basis, it's valid on an individual basis.

Second -- and to me more important -- as so often happens, the criticism of the stat is based on the minimum requirement. Six innings/three runs is the worst QS. Most are better than the minimum. Lewis' was. His "game ERA" Sunday was 3.00, which is plenty good. Kyle Gibson's was even better: Eight innings, two earned runs, 2.25.

The value of a quality start fluctuates from year to year. In the heart of the Steroid Era, when runs were plentiful, a quality start meant that pitcher's team won about 70 percent of the time. With scoring down in recent years, the correlation between quality starts and team wins is down a bit, but it's still better than 60 percent. (Obviously there's not going to be a perfect correlation; see Sunday as an example. Two quality starts opposing each other, but only one team could win.)

Were I dictator of stats, the Quality Start would be tightened up a bit. Six innings as a minimum, yes. But make a game ERA for under 4 the criteria. Six innings/ two runs, that makes it; six innings, three runs would not. For a pitcher to give up three runs and get a QS, he'd need to work at least seven innings.

Given the decline in scoring since the quality start state debuted, a stiffer standard is probably appropriate.

Pic of the Week

Chelsea Baker throws from behind the batting practice
L-screen at Tropicana Field.

Chelsea Baker is a high school junior who pitches for a high school baseball team in the Tampa, Florida, area. Baseball, not softball. According to this piece from the Tampa Bay Times, the late Joe Niekro taught her the knuckleball in her Little League days, and she's stuck with it

Baker's knuckleball grip, fingertips up
against the seams.

She met Joe Maddon, the Tampa Bay Rays manager, at some event, and he invited her to come pitch some batting practice. Which she did on Monday, throwing her knuckleball to Evan Longoria, Jose Molina and David Price. (With the Rays' reputation for looking for minor edges, I figured he lined her up for BP before a game against R.A. Dickey and his knuckleball, but that wasn't the case.)

I have no idea if Baker's flutterball is anywhere near good enough for pro ball, but I have theorized that if/when a woman plays major league baseball it will be a knuckleball pitcher, because that specific pitch might level the competition.

Men, as a rule, are stronger and faster — better athletes — than women. I have no doubt that a truly elite female athlete — Serena Williams, let us say — is faster and stronger than me, but a Serena Williams trying to play second base in the majors isn't competing against a run-of-the-mill man for playing time, but against the likes of Robinson Cano or Eric Sogard. Cano's a star, Sogard's a platoon guy, but they are both pretty elite athletes in their own right.

The knuckleball, however, is a bit less about physical abilities and a bit more about emotional stability. At risk of sounding overly mystical, the good major league knuckleballers seem to surrender to the pitch. There is athleticism involved, certainly, but at the heart of it seems to be a resignation to the unpredictability of the pitch. That aspect wouldn't seem out of reach for a woman.


Again, I don't know if Baker's the one to challenge the gender barrier, but I'm open to the possibility.

If Polanco is here, he should play

Jorge Polanco drills a two-run triple in the
ninth inning Friday for his first major league hit.

Jorge Polanco is in the majors because Trevor Plouffe, Eduardo Nunez and Danny Santana are injured.

He's not in the lineup because ... ?

Apparently because Pedro Florimon and his .093 batting average have some sort of squatters rights.

This is a temporary situation. Plouffe and Nunez remain on the DL, but both will likely be reinstated when the Twins return home on Monday. (Santana was placed on the disabled list Friday with a bone bruise in his knee; Yohan Pino, who never left the club after being officially optioned out Thursday to make room for Polanco, has been reinstated.)

When Plouffe and Nunez return, I assume it will be at the expense of Polanco and Florimon.

Which is fine. Neither Polanco nor Florimon really belongs in the majors. Polanco should be in A ball, and Florimon ... I don't know what level he belongs at, but it ain't the bigs.

I heard Ron Gardenhire on the radio pregame say he didn't intend to start Polanco this weekend, that it wouldn't be fair to the kid. I take Gardy's meaning as: He'll get carved up by major league pitching, and he didn't look good in the field during spring training.

Polanco is, without question, raw. But I cannot see how he could be more inept at the plate than Florimon is, and he has supposedly stabilized in the field after several months of playing shortstop at Fort Myers.

Polanco has come off the bench for three plate appearances in two games since his callup, and he's gotten a triple and a walk, scored a run and driven in two. We may wait a very long time for Florimon to do any of those things.

Neither Polanco nor Florimon are the present. But Polanco might be part of the future, and Florimon should not be. If Polanco is on the big league roster, he should play.