Twins MVB on Game Three
Posted by Dan on October 30, 2009 under Dan | 
4 Comments to Read
MVB Welcomes Dan Wade
Posted by John on under John | 2 Comments to Read
You’ve now already read his great article about Wilson Ramos yesterday or perhaps his Fan Friday column from a few months ago, but Mr. Dan Wade is the newest member of the Twins MVB crew.
I’m really exited to add Dan who’s detailed and SABRmetric posts bring a unique view to TwinsMVB.com. Although Dan is currently a Chicagoan, he is native to Minnesota and we’re happy to welcome him. Learn more about Dan below or check ou the entire crew on the MVB Team page.
A prodigal son far away from the Teflon skies, Dan is a life-long Twins fan currently residing on Chicago’s South Side, where he was once refused service in a cafe while wearing a Twins jersey. A graduate of the University of Chicago in Political Science with a focus on International Relations (specializing in ethnic genocides), Dan is currently a database drone for the University and an editorial intern for Baseball Prosepctus. In January, he’ll begin a one-year masters program in Journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
His favorite Dome memories include seeing Dave Winfield’s 3000th hit, Jason Kubel’s walk-off grand slam against the Red Sox in 2006, the Twins’ first play-off game in 2002, and every Pedro Munoz at-bat from 1992-1995.
He’s very excited to join the MVB team and hopes to provide a balance between SABRmetrics and more traditional tools in player evaluation. You can reach him at Dwade@uchicago.edu or @Dwade on twitter. His favorite thought-experiments are Zeno’s paradox and Schroedinger’s Cat Paradox.
Solid off-season reading for #…
Posted by John on October 29, 2009 under John | 2 Comments to Read
Solid off-season reading for #Twins fans: http://tinyurl.com/cxjhv3 Kevin Slowey’s blog is back up and running. (via @Dwade)
What to do with Ramos?
Posted by Dan on under John | 11 Comments to Read
File this one under good problems to have.
Joe Mauer’s impending free-agency may be the biggest issue on the minds of Bill Smith and the rest of the Twins’ front office, but there’s another catcher in the organization that’s generating a fair amount of buzz on his own.
Coming into this season, Baseball America had Wilson Ramos ranked as the third best prospect in the Twins’ system, while Baseball Prospectus’ prospect guru Kevin Goldstein had Ramos a tick lower at fifth. Goldstein noted that Ramos had a plus arm and that the Twins’ staff loved his work as an on-field leader and his rapport with the pitchers. The piece that was missing was offense, Ramos was a free swinger whose prowess was more or less batting average driven.
2009 expectations for Ramos were high, but were sundered almost as soon as the season began as Ramos broke a finger on his glove hand in May, then missed two months with a hamstring injury. Once he got back on the field, Ramos hit fairly well for AA New Britain, .317/.341/.454 with an above-average EQA of .282. That’s a little low on the OBP, but a 23/6 K/BB rate will do that to a player. While 2009 wasn’t a complete loss, it wasn’t the season a lot of people had hoped Ramos would have as he progresses towards the major league level.
The 22-year-old was commended back to Venezuela for the winter to join the Tigres de Aragua for the Venezuelan Winter League, and all he’s done since arriving is mash. Even taking into account his 1-for-6 night on Wednesday, Ramos is hitting a robust .375/.434/.771 in 11 games. A .771 slugging percentage, fueled by 4 HR, 5 2Bs, and a triple is pretty good. And by pretty good, I mean as good as you could possibly ask for. It’s the second best mark in the league, and Michael Ryan, the slugging leader, spots Ramos 10 years of development time (though, a .917 SLG is good no matter what).
ESPN’s Jorge Arangure ranks the VWL as somewhere between AA and AAA, still a step up from where Ramos spent most of this year, which makes his performance all the more remarkable. It’s worth noting the small sample size, as 10 games don’t provide a full set of data (See: Rodriguez, Alex and Playoff Performance Prior to 2009), but that his K/BB rate is down to 9/4 is another encouraging sign.
So, to quote disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, “We’ve got the ****ing thing, and it’s ****ing GOLD!” and the question is what to do with him.
Assuming this trend continues, Ramos will enter next year as a front line catching prospect, perhaps not Buster Posey quality, but certainly one of the better catching prospects in baseball, especially given his proximity to the majors.
And almost completely useless to the Twins big league club.
Ramos is a very good catcher, he might even be a great catcher, but Joe Mauer may be one of the best catchers of all time when all is said and done. Three batting titles, a likely MVP, even if he doesn’t hit 25+ HR next year, he’ll still enter the year as the second best player in the game behind Albert Pujols. If Mauer were, say 32-33, coming out of the prime of his career with free agency on the horizon, perhaps the Twins would let him walk and take their shot with Ramos, knowing that, worst case scenario, Danny Rams and Josmil Pinto would be coming along in a few years. Unfortunately for Ramos, he’s only about five years younger than Mauer.
This leaves the Twins in an interesting position. There are those who believe the presence of Ramos gives the Twins a reason to play hardball with Mauer, believing that if Mauer walks, he could be replaced. I like Ramos fine, really I do, but that strategy is like playing Russian Roulette with a bullets in five of the six chambers. Is there a chance Mauer gets hurt and Ramos excels, making the Twins look like geniuses? Sure, but it’s far more likely that Mauer continues to be excellent and Ramos never reaches that level.
Is there room for both?
Ramos, even in the Twins system, is probably going to be major-league ready by 2012 and has a great shot at being ready in 2011. Assuming Mauer gets a 7-year deal (the first length floated by either side) that leaves Ramos as a backup until 2016 at the earliest. He’ll be 29 that season, with 2-3 years left before the rapid decline that tends to hit aging catchers. For the next couple of years, this is a problem the Twins are willing to “suffer” through. If Ramos doesn’t make the bigs until 2012, he won’t get arbitration until 2015 and won’t be an FA until 2018 making him a cost-effective solution for the Twins’ back-up catcher problem. Mauer has never played more than 146 games in a season, and never more than 140 games behind the plate. Having an effective back-up is a good idea, especially as he logs more and more innings on those knees.
But is that where Ramos is best utilized?
Even with Mauer missing the first month of the season, Twins catchers other than the besideburned one had just 206 PAs and appeared in just 73 games. Having a backstop with a plus arm and a solid bat has its virtues, but Ramos just won’t have a sizeable impact unless Mauer is injured.
The Twins’ other option is to move Ramos for someone big-league ready. Catching prospects aren’t prized the same way that power-armed pitching prospects are, but are still more valuable than most other positions. Since 2008, three major catching prospects have been traded:
1) Carlos Santana from the Dodgers to the Indians in exchange for Casey Blake
2) Lou Marson from the Phillies to the Indians as part of the Cliff Lee deal
3) Tyler Flowers from the Braves to the White Sox as part of the Javy Vazquez trade
Blake was just under a three win player in 2008, but it’s fairly well agreed upon that the Dodgers got hosed in that trade. The Lee and Vasquez trades included a lot more pieces, so it’s difficult to know exactly how the receiving team valued the individual pieces; Flowers was the key piece in the Vasquez deal, but Marson was probably the second piece at best in the Indians mind when they were giving up Lee.
Irrespective, we can see that well-respected catching prospects can be dealt for front line pitching, something the Twins could use. On his own, I’m not sure Ramos brings back enough to make it worthwhile. I could see him perhaps keying a trade for Dan Uggla, who will be dealt with subsequently, but he could be perhaps better utilized as the front piece in a deal to bring in a top-of-the-rotation arm the way Tyler Flowers was. Roy Halladay is still beyond reach, but someone like Josh Johnson might not be. These are the things the front office has to ascertain and move on if they smell blood.
Lastly, even if the Twins decide to deal Ramos, there’s a question of timing. If he’s moved before the season, the Twins could capitalize on Irrational Exuberance [get used to this term, it's going to come up...a lot] related to a strong winter league showing. However, if the Twins feel Ramos is still on an upward swing, they could wait till midseason, show teams he’s healthy, and then move him if they can identify a clear weakness they’re trying to fill. Both sides have their downside: move him too soon and they risk not getting full value, wait too long, he could fall victim to another injury or could simply regress. There’s no such thing as a can’t-miss prospect (see: Miller, Andrew) and the tools of ignorance aren’t with their risk, so it’s hard to say for sure what the best solution is.
For my part, I’d like to see the Twins move Ramos as part of a package to bring in a young ace, and my feeling is that this is more likely to happen before arbitration, since the whole point of trading someone like Johnson is as a cost-saving move. If no one seems available, I’d rather see the Twins pocket Ramos and wait to see how the season unfolds. There’s every reason to believe that next July will find the Twins exactly where this July did: in the hunt, but needing a piece or two to be truly competitive. If 2010 goes pear-shaped the way 2007 did, having retained Ramos will be seen as a positive. There’s no timetable on which the Twins need to move Ramos, his service clock hasn’t even started yet, so even if he played every game of 2010, the Twins would still have years to trade him while he was under team control (read: cheap).
Perhaps this is the best reason to shop him now. The Twins have no incentive to move Ramos and he offers enough upside to the team that they’ll almost certainly be glad to have him if he stays around. However, trading Ramos could help the Twins get over the hump if he brings back the right return, which the Twins can sit back and wait for. It’s a virtual certainty that Ramos’ name will pop up in discussions this winter. The question will be what the Twins believe he can bring them back and whether they feel it’s worth moving on before one of their best prospects plays a single inning of his age-22 season.
2009 World Series Predictions
Posted by John on October 27, 2009 under John | 3 Comments to Read
Although it’s nearly November and the NBA season has already tipped off, the World Series is finally here. I rounded up the entire MVB crew, including a newcomer (more to come on that later), to give me their predictions on who will win, in how many games they will win, who is the series MVP, and why that team will win.
Last year, Dain TePoel was the only one to predict the Philadelphia Phillies and made all of us Tampa Bay Rays fans look silly. Did we learn not to count out the Phillies?
Winner: New York Yankees – 7 games MVP: Mark Teixeira
Major League Baseball is lucky to get the best matchup possible. This series showcases the two best clubs in baseball and I believe it’ll be a 7 game epic battle to determine a winner. Offenses are high powered, pitching staffs are solid, and both clubs play smart baseball. The difference maker for me comes down to the bullpen. The Yanks pen has struggled coming into this Fall Classic, but Mariano Rivera is legendary in October and I’d be nervous about Brad Lidge if I were a Phillies fan.
Alex Rodriguez has been great throughout these playoffs and Derek Jeter is still the captain of this team, but the MVP will go to Mark Teixeira, the best player on this Yankee club. Game 1’s matchup between C.C. and Cliff Lee will be a gem and I’m excited to watch Pedro Martinez try to break Yankee hearts one more time. Opposed to last year, I’ll be rooting against the team I’m predicting to win, so go Phillies but congratulations Yankees.
Dain TePoel
Winner: Yankees – 5 games MVP: C.C. Sabathia
I said it back in spring so why change my tune now? This Yankee team is killer. It took them all of 30-40 games to get it together and they haven’t looked back since. The new stadium, the new free agents, A-Rod putting steroids and all the other crap behind him, and here you go. Nearly unbeatable. The Angels had to scratch and claw for two wins against this team. No way is there a team that can win four.
The Phillies are a solid club and have some big guns themselves but they won’t get it done this time around. I see the Yankees imposing their dominance in a convincing series win, 4 games to 1. Look for CC Sabathia to continue his outstanding postseason numbers. He’ll earn wins in Game 1 and 4, go about 15 and 2/3 innings, garnering no less than 14 K and yielding 3 or less earned runs. He’ll join elite company earning both LCS and World Series MVP honors in the same postseason. The Yankee offense will average 4 to 5 runs a game in this series.
Winner: Yankees – 6 games MVP: Derek Jeter
I have the Yankees winning in 6, no matter how much I wish it were otherwise. I think that the Phillies are a good team that are a year older than last year (and in this case, that’s not a good thing), and they’re facing a really tough Yankees team (probably the only team that’s deeper than the Phillies this year, though the Angels were close).
I’m going to say they give Derek Jeter the MVP because everyone will realize that he’s (again) not going to win the AL MVP again (because Mauer will). Even with two good offenses, I’m going to say games 1, 3, 4, and 6 are low-scoring, and the others higher (3 being the only blowout).
Mark Werner
Winner: Yankees – 5 games MVP: C.C. Sabathia
I’ll take the Yankees in 5. I see Arod shrugging the final limp limb of that playoff monkey off his back. I see CC carrying his weight which is substantial by any measurement, metric, or standard. I see Manuel regretting skipping Hamels for game 2 as Cole’s season ends after securing their only World Series win. I see Burnett’s curve stifling Howard. And despite forecasts for an unhelpful easterly wind in NYC, I see Texiera hitting a couple bombs early in the series on his way to World Series MVP.
Of course, I’d love to see none of this. I hope the Yankees get pummelled. I hope Howard goes hulk all over the Yankees relievers. I hope Joba compensates with a massive eating binge. I hope Jeter tests positive for steroids, Swisher for cocaine, and Damon for h1n1. And I hope a revitalized Pat Neshek starts dating Madonna as the playoff moneky returns to Arod’s back.
Winner: Philadelphia Phillies - 6 games MVP: Ryan Howard
Cliff Lee is the first pitcher to give CC Sabathia a real run for his money and while he may not beat him in Game One, he’ll give the Phillies a better chance than any of the Yankees’ opponents thus far to put the Bronx Bombers on their heels right from the get-go. Ryan Howard and a short porch is a deadly combination; expect to see at least one in the black as well. The Yankees seem to be the better team on paper, but the Phillies’ bullpen has been better than they should have been and the Yankees’ pen has been worse. Expect a lot of close games, but another parade down Broad Street when all is said and done.
Twins MVB Talks Playoffs and Steroid Perception
Posted by John on October 26, 2009 under John | 4 Comments to Read
As I’ve been watching the playoffs a few things have bothered me as I watch fans celebrate the success of players like Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez. I know there isn’t a great way to solve this sticky situation that is steroids, but I don’t think Major League Baseball could have done much worse. In the short history of known performance enhancing offenders two things have changed our perception 1) Current players vs. former players and 2) On field success. Hear the Twins MVB’s thoughts and make sure to leave your own in the comments.
Your 2009 World Series is set:…
Posted by John on October 25, 2009 under John | 2 Comments to Read
Your 2009 World Series is set: New York Yankees vs. Philadelphia Phillies. Game 1 on Wednesday.
Salary Caps, Yankees, and Baseball
Posted by Brett on under John | 6 Comments to Read
This is a special article from Brett Werner about baseball thoughts here in the month of October.
A little over a week ago, responding to the Yankees-Twins ALDS series (but also having pondered this for a while), Nick Nelson wrote a blog post on the need for a salary cap in Major League Baseball, and then wrote a follow-up where he clarified his position and chose his two favorite comments that represented part of the spectrum of responses. Both articles were quite interesting to me, since this is something with which I’ve been trying to reconcile for a while, and something I thought Nick did well to address in a clear-headed way.
This topic came back to me quite unexpectedly Thursday night as I was getting frustrated with the umpire’s ball/strike calls in the Angels-Yankees game (quite another topic for another time)–in particular, the strike that Lackey didn’t get called when it “should” have been on Posada–and then the manager’s decision to pull Lackey for relief. I thought back to Nick’s post, and the first comment posted in his follow-up (copied and pasted below), and then about the reasons people could offer that Mauer should elope in free agency to Boston or the NYY (similar, but also different to the argument with the NBA and King James leaving Cleveland for NY). Here’s the comment that Nick emphasized:
***
The beauty of baseball is that the very best teams (regardless of payroll) end up playing .630 ball, and they end up playing a bunch of .530 – .600 teams in the playoffs. Unlike the NBA or the NFL, the best teams don’t make it to the championship series every year simply because their advantage of the other teams in the playoffs is marginal, and baseball is a game of funny bounces.
Yankees / Twins was hardly a walkover, and it ultimately came down to the Twins making Little League baserunning mistakes and their $11 million closer spitting the bit. Yes, the Yankees had a better team top to bottom and a larger margin for error, but just by the nature of baseball the lesser team had a legitimate chance to win.
In the big picture, MLB wants NY, Boston, LA, etc. to have the very best teams. Successful teams in the largest, most affluent markets = maximum ticketing, concessions, merchandising, TV, and radio revenue + greater global branding opportunities. Common business sense says you probably want 20 million happy fans in New York than 1 million in Kansas City.
But for those niche markets, devise the “AL Central” and “NL Central” where you let a less talented team with a worse record into the playoffs every year. That way, every fan can dream every spring.
But make sure you institute a “Wild Card” so that you get an extra large market team into the playoffs every year while giving niche market teams another hope to grab onto.
The only way to guarantee that this works and to maximize MLB revenues is to make sure you DON’T have a salary cap. What’s wrong with that?
***
One thing that is supposed to be important to players (and their legacies) is winning the world series (and it’s important to me, too–it’s not enough to just make the playoffs more often than not, which has happened in the Gardy-era–it’s nice to win the whole thing every so often). In fact, for some analysts, a WS championship should factor into someone’s Hall of Fame portfolio, to go along with personal accolades and stats.
But something that can taint a player’s personal accomplishments relates to his use of performance-enhancers (HGH, etc.). It says that they may have come by their personal accomplishments on an unfair playing field (they were using, and the background assumption is that others were not, either historically or contemporarily). So great performances with a stacked deck may be less meaningful (or more meaningless). Barry Bonds’ use of drugs made him more able to beat Aaron and Ruth, and thereby tainted his legacy.
Yet how is this any different from teams like the Yankees who have a stacked deck, not stacked by steroids, but by an enormous payroll? These teams don’t guarantee themselves wins any more than a player on steroids guarantees himself the single season HR record. There is still skill and actual performance involved. But it does change probability distributions (the front end of statistics), and thereby “stack the deck.”
So given these considerations, the argument follows that any World Series victories (or pennants, etc.) with “stacked teams” should be treated similarly to individual accomplishments made by players who used steroids. It might therefore follow that
(a) players like Mauer who make the postseason with a “non-stacked” team like the Twins should be given more respect for making the postseason than players like Jeter/etc. who don’t just make the postseason but also win the World Series with teams like the Yankees;
(b) if the MLB allows Hall of Fame bids (or more generally, a player’s legacy) to be judged based on team success, especially in the postseason, then there is a prima facie reason for the MLB to adopt a salary cap and “fair deck of cards” for all teams and all players; and
(c) players like Mauer (or Santana, or Greinke) should have a prima facie reason for sticking with the Twins (or KC) based on the importance of winning with a decent team rather than winning with a great team because it is a damn lot more meaningful (and the fact that the NYY players have to deal with more public scrutiny and press does not absolve them of the stacked deck advantage).
If nothing else, I think that the comment pasted above deserves a public comment from the MLB, and either a defense of, or a dismissal of, such reasoning and analysis. It’s not good enough that NYY fans suspect or know this implicit truth of baseball (that the MLB wants BOS/NYY/NYM/LAA/LAD/etc. to be the most successful teams, and therefore doesn’t institute a salary cap), and for Twins fans (or KC or Tampa or Pittsburgh fans) to be frustrated all the time. And if the MLB wants to stack the deck in favor of big market teams, then honestly, I think that’s a legitimate reason to hate professional baseball for all of its pleasures. It’s just not good enough for me to want someone, anyone, to beat the Yankees every year (the “Yankees against the world” syndrome), or to decide to support the lowest payroll team in the playoffs (which is what my family always does). That might go along with my midwestern underdog values just fine, but it definitely seems like the NBA has this a little more figured out (where Cleveland can be a better team than the Knicks, and the remaining motivation for LeBron to leave is the increased opportunity for advertising money).
Like Nick, I would argue that the MLB should address this issue because that is the locus of such systemic issues. It is not (necessarily) true that certain teams (Yankees) should handicap themselves, or that players who are good at baseball should somehow choose to make less money and have a worse chance at winning (the hometown discount, and the concern of players like Mauer that his team won’t be able to field as successful of a team), and that’s really the point: the MLB needs to address this (not the Yankees, the Twins, the Mauers or the Jeters).
Though I have used them as examples, I’m also sure that this isn’t just about the Yankees and the Twins (in the same way that complaining about the coin flip late last season was not about the Twins and White Sox, but the way they do things in baseball). This is about the league and the system. The MLB is messed up in their logic for the mere fact that they have not instituted a salary cap, and I can go further and say “the MLB is wrong.” Is there a stigma related to playing for the Yankees like there is for playing under the influence of steroids? No, and there probably should not be one (though I definitely stigmatize Yankees players in my mind right now). But the players, managers, and fans need to recognize the team-scale competitive inequities of the MLB that rivals the individual-scale competitive inequities of steroid use. And honestly, if Congress is going to launch an investigation of steroid use in baseball (particularly something like HGH, which may not do much harm to someone’s body, and is therefore mostly about competitive equity), then maybe Congress needs to investigate a salary cap, too.
This is a really cool graph. A…
Posted by John on October 16, 2009 under John | 2 Comments to Read
This is a really cool graph. A visualization of teams that win the World Series. http://bit.ly/3fOjzJ
I suggest you check out what m…
Posted by John on October 15, 2009 under John | 2 Comments to Read
I suggest you check out what my buddies over @TwinsCentric are doing! http://www.twinscentric.com/
