One thing we learned from Torii Hunter's occasional forays into the broadcast booth is that he calls Eduardo Escobar "Mighty Mouse."
Escobar helped save the day Friday night with a home run. He helped save the season with 21 homers, which is power output nobody expected when the Twins got him from the White Sox in exchange for Francisco Liriano in 2012.
Fifteen of those 21 homers have come while playing third base, which is supposed to be the property of Miguel Sano. (Three have come when at short, and three as the designated hitter.) Sano has had two lengthy stints on the disabled list, and Escobar has gotten the heavy majority of his playing time at third as a result.
Sano has hit 28 homers, 23 of them at third. So the Twins have gotten 38 homers from their third basemen, which basically sounds like Sano got a full season in there.
But only in terms of the power. Sano draws walks and Escobar does not. While their batting averages are similar, the Dominican has a far superior OBP to the Venezulean. Give credit to Escobar for producing in Sano's absence, but know that Sano is the more productive hitter.
Sano returned to the active roster Friday and got an at-bat late in the game, grounding out meekly to the pitcher. He's expected to get at least one start as the designated hitter in these final two games as he tries to wrangle his way onto the playoff roster.
If he does, he's not going to step back in at third base; there's no indication that his leg is ready to play the field. If Sano is in the lineup, it will be as the designated hitter.
So Escobar's status as the third baseman seems secure as the wild card game approaches. The guy who might lose out is Robbie Grossman, who has himself been strictly a DH since returning from his thumb injury.
Grossman has nine homers on the season with a slash line of .248/.364/.383. He's sort of the reverse image of Escobar -- big on walks, light on the power. (His September slugging percentage, .484, has been sharply higher.) Fourteen Twin have more than 100 plate appearances; only Joe Mauer has a better on-base percentage than Grossman.
Don't underestimate the importance of the ability to reach base. Escobar's big flies are valuable and startling. Grossman's walks are mundane -- but just as valuable.
But the choice really isn't between Grossman and Escobar. It's between Grossman and Sano, and the real question is, is Sano ready to hit against playoff caliber pitching?
A secondary question might be: Is Grossman able to play outfield? He hasn't in weeks. And if he can't, is there room on the playoff roster for two bat-only "position players"?
The Twins have a few days to draw their conclusions and make their decisions. At thp point, I'm skeptical of Sano's return.
Saturday, September 30, 2017
Friday, September 29, 2017
Three reasons the Angels lost out on the playoffs
The geography-challenged "Los Angeles" Angels (they apparently dropped the "of Anaheim" from their official name this season) missed out on the playoffs this year. Again. A decade ago, much like the Twins of the same period, they were pretty much an annual fixture, but they've reached the tournament once in the previous seven seasons, and this makes it eight.
Three specific reasons the Angels failed to surpass the Twins:
* Mike Trout, aka the Best Player in Baseball, missed more than six weeks with an injury. His absence included both series against the Twins.
Trout played 159 games each of the previous two seasons, and he's at 111 entering the final weekend. Let's say the injury cost him 45 games, which probably isn't precicely accurate but serves our purposes.
Baseball Reference credits Trout with 6.2 WAR: roughly 0.056 Wins Above Replacment per game. Multiply the missing 45 games by that rate, and we get about 2.5 WAR lost to the injury.
We'll be conservative and round it down: The Angels lost, by this estimate, two wins because of Trout's absence.
* Ricky Nolasco.
The starting rotation had a high attrition rate. Three men who combined for 31 starts (J.C. Ramirez, Matt Shoemaker and former Twins prospect Alex Meyer) are currently on the 60-day disabled list, and Garrett Richards -- expected to be their top starter -- was limited to six starts.
Few rotations make it through the season unscathed, of course. But the one member of the rotation who made it through the entire season was another former Twin, Ricky Nolasco. And he was terrible.
BR has Nolasco's WAR at 0.7, which means he's still marginally better than the "free" talent available at Triple A. So we won't go overboard in this What-If experiment in which Nolasco doesn't pitch for the Angels.
Imagine that they went 12-20 in those starts, just two games improvement. Coupled with a healthy Trout, they've gained four games on the Twins
* Albert Pujols.
Pujols is, as mentioned a few times this season, an flash point in the still-festering split between old-school and new-school stats.
Old school: Pujols has 100 RBIs! He's a run producer!
New school: Pujols's WAR is -1.7. He's limited to DH, his OPS+ is 18 percent below league average, he leads the majors in grounding into double plays. He is the worst regular in baseball.
No surprise: I side with the new school thinkers on this. Once a week or so Phat Albert will run into a pitch (23 homers). And he did hit better with men in scoring position than without.
But the gaudy RBI count is largely a product of spending the entire season hitting third or fourth and behind Trout when Trout was in the lineup. He gets that prime lineup real estate because he's ALBERT PUJOLS, arguably the greatest first baseman in major league history, and he's getting paid $24 million a year.
And the contract has four more seasons to run.
Anyway: Let's be conservative again and say that Pujols only cost the Angels one win. This brings my total to five games. Remember: We've rounded down on Trout and Pujols and didn't get aggressive in dumping Nolasco.
That is exactly the margin by which the Twins lead the Angels this morning.
Three specific reasons the Angels failed to surpass the Twins:
* Mike Trout, aka the Best Player in Baseball, missed more than six weeks with an injury. His absence included both series against the Twins.
Trout played 159 games each of the previous two seasons, and he's at 111 entering the final weekend. Let's say the injury cost him 45 games, which probably isn't precicely accurate but serves our purposes.
Baseball Reference credits Trout with 6.2 WAR: roughly 0.056 Wins Above Replacment per game. Multiply the missing 45 games by that rate, and we get about 2.5 WAR lost to the injury.
We'll be conservative and round it down: The Angels lost, by this estimate, two wins because of Trout's absence.
* Ricky Nolasco.
The starting rotation had a high attrition rate. Three men who combined for 31 starts (J.C. Ramirez, Matt Shoemaker and former Twins prospect Alex Meyer) are currently on the 60-day disabled list, and Garrett Richards -- expected to be their top starter -- was limited to six starts.
Few rotations make it through the season unscathed, of course. But the one member of the rotation who made it through the entire season was another former Twin, Ricky Nolasco. And he was terrible.
Angels have a higher winning percentage (.540) than Twins (.526) if Ricky Nolasco starts are removed, but they're 10-22 when Nolasco starts.— Aaron Gleeman (@AaronGleeman) September 26, 2017
BR has Nolasco's WAR at 0.7, which means he's still marginally better than the "free" talent available at Triple A. So we won't go overboard in this What-If experiment in which Nolasco doesn't pitch for the Angels.
Imagine that they went 12-20 in those starts, just two games improvement. Coupled with a healthy Trout, they've gained four games on the Twins
* Albert Pujols.
Pujols is, as mentioned a few times this season, an flash point in the still-festering split between old-school and new-school stats.
Old school: Pujols has 100 RBIs! He's a run producer!
New school: Pujols's WAR is -1.7. He's limited to DH, his OPS+ is 18 percent below league average, he leads the majors in grounding into double plays. He is the worst regular in baseball.
No surprise: I side with the new school thinkers on this. Once a week or so Phat Albert will run into a pitch (23 homers). And he did hit better with men in scoring position than without.
But the gaudy RBI count is largely a product of spending the entire season hitting third or fourth and behind Trout when Trout was in the lineup. He gets that prime lineup real estate because he's ALBERT PUJOLS, arguably the greatest first baseman in major league history, and he's getting paid $24 million a year.
And the contract has four more seasons to run.
Anyway: Let's be conservative again and say that Pujols only cost the Angels one win. This brings my total to five games. Remember: We've rounded down on Trout and Pujols and didn't get aggressive in dumping Nolasco.
That is exactly the margin by which the Twins lead the Angels this morning.
Thursday, September 28, 2017
Magic number: Zero
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| Party time in Cleveland, where the Twins celebrated early Thursday morning after the Angels were eliminated. |
That's less impressive than it sounds, because it took expanding the playoff field to one-third of MLB teams -- 10 of the 30. The Twins will almost certainly have the worst record of the 10.
Still, the improvement is genuinely worthy of celebration. Most of the roster is the same as the 103-loss squad of 2016. It's a long season, the front office went into sell mode at the trading deadline in July, and they got into the playoffs anyway.
The day may come when this core can shrug aboiut a wild card berth. I hope so. This is not that day.
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Contemplating Bartolo Colon
Whether because Bartolo Colon was ill (the official explanation) or ineffective (mine), "Big Sexy" got just three outs Tuesday.
Colon has now made 14 starts for the Twins. He has worked 73.2 innings and allowed 45 earned runs, a 5.50 ERA. More alarmingly, he has allowed 18 runs in his last 12 innings, spread over four starts.
Maybe he will start the season finale; with the magic number to clinch the second wildcard spot now at 1, that game doesn't figure to matter. But I can't imagine that anybody has much confidence in Colon right now.
At the start of the month, Colon figured to be the Twins third starter should they get that deep into the playoffs, and it was entirely plausible that the Twins would bring him back for 2018. Today it seems more likely that he just made his final appearance on a major league mound.
If so, it was one impressive career.
Colon has now made 14 starts for the Twins. He has worked 73.2 innings and allowed 45 earned runs, a 5.50 ERA. More alarmingly, he has allowed 18 runs in his last 12 innings, spread over four starts.
Maybe he will start the season finale; with the magic number to clinch the second wildcard spot now at 1, that game doesn't figure to matter. But I can't imagine that anybody has much confidence in Colon right now.
At the start of the month, Colon figured to be the Twins third starter should they get that deep into the playoffs, and it was entirely plausible that the Twins would bring him back for 2018. Today it seems more likely that he just made his final appearance on a major league mound.
If so, it was one impressive career.
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Passed balls, wild pitches and pitch framing
If you don't have a catcher, you have a lot of passed balls.
The one position at which the 2017 Twins are truly different than in 2016 is catcher. The new front office got rid of all three of 2016's backstops. And with the Twins on the verge of becoming the first team to go from 100-plus losses to the playoffs, I thought it worth looking at the difference.
Last year's backstops were Kurt Suzuki, Juan Centeno and John Ryan Murphy. They caught every inning in 2016.
Jason Castro and Chris Gimenez have done the bulk of the 2017 catching, with Mitch Garver getting a handful of starts behind the plate so far and Eduardo Escobar picking up one inning.
The new front office was explict about seeking to improve "pitch framing" in particular and, presumably, defense in general and was willing to sacrifice some hitting to accomplish that.
Last year I commented, either here or in the Monday print column, with some frequency on the number of passed balls and wild pitches the Twins were giving up. The 2016 Twins allowed 83 wild pitches and nine passed balls: 92 in 1,443 innings, or 0.57 per nine innings. In essence, the Twins last year gave up one (or more) bases every other game.
This year, Gimenez alone has been charged with 10 passed balls. But the wild pitchers have dropped from 83 to 51. and the total (WP plus PB) is down to 66, a rate of 0.42 per nine innings.
What to make of this?
The difference between a passed ball and a wild pitch is artificial, a binary parsing of blame between pitcher and catcher. A pitch is uncaught, a runner (or runners) advance(s), and one individual is blamed by the official scorer for the event. Some wild pitches are truly the pitcher's fault; some come because the catcher failed to block a pitch that was exactly what the pitcher intended to throw (a slider in the dirt with two strikes, for example). Meanwhile, the catcher who leads the league in passed balls is almost always the guy who catches the most knuckleballs. (That's not the case this year.)
This is why I tend to combine WP and BP. I'm interested in the result less than the blame.
That said, the artifical difference in this case may be illuminating. Mike Berardino of the Pioneer Press noted when the Twins signed Castro that, while his pitch framing stats were very impressive, his passed balls were relatively high.
What may be going on, particularly for Gimenez: The perfect can become the enemy of the good. In attempting to perfectly receive a marginal pitch -- that is, catching it with a still glove at the edge of the strike zone -- the catcher miscalcuates and misses the pitch entirely. It's a trade off, and presumably the Twins are willing to accept a few more passed balls for more called strikes.
Castro and Gimenez have hit about as well (or poorly) as we should have expected. They have also been what was expected behind the plate as well -- a defensive upgrade from Suzuki and Centero.
Suzuki, who was the Twins' regular catcher for three seasons, re-signed with the Atlanta Braves for 2018 last week. He's had a rather impressive season as a half-time catcher in Atlanta, popping 18 homers in less than 300 plate appearances (he tallied 16 total with the Twins).
And good for him. I doubt the Twins regret the change on their end.
Casey Stengel
The one position at which the 2017 Twins are truly different than in 2016 is catcher. The new front office got rid of all three of 2016's backstops. And with the Twins on the verge of becoming the first team to go from 100-plus losses to the playoffs, I thought it worth looking at the difference.
Last year's backstops were Kurt Suzuki, Juan Centeno and John Ryan Murphy. They caught every inning in 2016.
Jason Castro and Chris Gimenez have done the bulk of the 2017 catching, with Mitch Garver getting a handful of starts behind the plate so far and Eduardo Escobar picking up one inning.
The new front office was explict about seeking to improve "pitch framing" in particular and, presumably, defense in general and was willing to sacrifice some hitting to accomplish that.
Last year I commented, either here or in the Monday print column, with some frequency on the number of passed balls and wild pitches the Twins were giving up. The 2016 Twins allowed 83 wild pitches and nine passed balls: 92 in 1,443 innings, or 0.57 per nine innings. In essence, the Twins last year gave up one (or more) bases every other game.
This year, Gimenez alone has been charged with 10 passed balls. But the wild pitchers have dropped from 83 to 51. and the total (WP plus PB) is down to 66, a rate of 0.42 per nine innings.
What to make of this?
The difference between a passed ball and a wild pitch is artificial, a binary parsing of blame between pitcher and catcher. A pitch is uncaught, a runner (or runners) advance(s), and one individual is blamed by the official scorer for the event. Some wild pitches are truly the pitcher's fault; some come because the catcher failed to block a pitch that was exactly what the pitcher intended to throw (a slider in the dirt with two strikes, for example). Meanwhile, the catcher who leads the league in passed balls is almost always the guy who catches the most knuckleballs. (That's not the case this year.)
This is why I tend to combine WP and BP. I'm interested in the result less than the blame.
That said, the artifical difference in this case may be illuminating. Mike Berardino of the Pioneer Press noted when the Twins signed Castro that, while his pitch framing stats were very impressive, his passed balls were relatively high.
What may be going on, particularly for Gimenez: The perfect can become the enemy of the good. In attempting to perfectly receive a marginal pitch -- that is, catching it with a still glove at the edge of the strike zone -- the catcher miscalcuates and misses the pitch entirely. It's a trade off, and presumably the Twins are willing to accept a few more passed balls for more called strikes.
Castro and Gimenez have hit about as well (or poorly) as we should have expected. They have also been what was expected behind the plate as well -- a defensive upgrade from Suzuki and Centero.
Suzuki, who was the Twins' regular catcher for three seasons, re-signed with the Atlanta Braves for 2018 last week. He's had a rather impressive season as a half-time catcher in Atlanta, popping 18 homers in less than 300 plate appearances (he tallied 16 total with the Twins).
And good for him. I doubt the Twins regret the change on their end.
Monday, September 25, 2017
After the hurricanes
A little "real news" with our baseball:
* Neither the Twins nor Red Sox, both of whom have their spring training/minor league facilities just outside Fort Myers, will hold formal instructional league this year. Both facilities are still being used as staging areas for storm relief after Hurricane Irma.
As of Sunday, there were still more than 1,000 customers in Lee County without electrical power some two weeks after the storm.
* The Pioneer Press' Mike Berardino talked with Kennys Vargas, one of four Twins who played on the Puerto Rican team in this spring's WBC (and doesn't that feel like a long time ago?), about Hurricane Maria. Vargas doesn't believe the Twins' scheduled games with the Cleveland Indians for San Juan next April will be played there:
---
The Twins magic number for wild card No. 2 is three. But their next three games are against Cleveland, which doesn't lose very often any more, while the Angels play the lowly White Sox. There may not be a lot of trimming of the magic number before the weekend.
* Neither the Twins nor Red Sox, both of whom have their spring training/minor league facilities just outside Fort Myers, will hold formal instructional league this year. Both facilities are still being used as staging areas for storm relief after Hurricane Irma.
As of Sunday, there were still more than 1,000 customers in Lee County without electrical power some two weeks after the storm.
* The Pioneer Press' Mike Berardino talked with Kennys Vargas, one of four Twins who played on the Puerto Rican team in this spring's WBC (and doesn't that feel like a long time ago?), about Hurricane Maria. Vargas doesn't believe the Twins' scheduled games with the Cleveland Indians for San Juan next April will be played there:
“It will be canceled, I think,” Vargas said. “I would say there won’t be baseball in Puerto Rico for one or two years. Not even winter ball. The stadium got destroyed. The community can’t worry about baseball now. It has to take care of everybody. They have to fix people’s lives first.”
---
The Twins magic number for wild card No. 2 is three. But their next three games are against Cleveland, which doesn't lose very often any more, while the Angels play the lowly White Sox. There may not be a lot of trimming of the magic number before the weekend.
Sunday, September 24, 2017
Pic of the Week
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| Andrelton Simmons makes a barehanded catch of a popup after bobbling it Wednesday. |
There are few, if any, shortstops who can match Andrelton Simmons in the field. And that's saying something.
Simmons figures to draw some MVP support this year. He is, as Baseball Reference figures WAR, the fourth best player in the American League. A lot of that value is in his glove, of course, but he's also having his best season at the plate.
But this is truly a golden age of shortstops. Twenty years ago we had Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Nomar Garciaparra all breaking in more or less simultaneously. Today we have an even bigger wave of young star shortstops: Francisco Lindor, Corey Seager, Carlos Correa, Xander Bograrts, Trea Turner, Addison Russell -- all 24 or younger. More than a third of teams (including the Twins with Jorge Polanco) have a regular at the position younger than 25.
Simmons is 28 now. That makes him something of an old man in this crowd.
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