At least it can't be Hoey again. I'm actually guessing a low level catcher. The Rox seem pretty stocked in that department.
Jose Morales?
I hope he wins the NL Cy Young this year.
This.
Squared.
At least they softened the blow by re-signing Cappy last night, right guys?
🙁
Well, by resigning Capps, they got rid of a draft pick that would probably just have flopped, anyway.
Slowey was my favorite player on the active roster, non-Mauer division. I am super bummed about this. Not only for the obvious reasons of losing a player I enjoy watching pitch, be interviewed, etc, but this doesn't really speak well to the front office in my opinion. Trading Slowey coming off of this season is kind of a bone headed decision.
I believe I read somewhere that the Dunce is heading back to the bullpen this season. This gives us the following starters for 2012: Baker, Pavano, Blackburn, and F-Bomb. Are we going to have Smokeracks as the number five starter? Is Manship going to be the long man/sixth starter? This doesn't fill me with confidence. At the same time, this move pretty much assures us that Lirano won't be traded during the off season, right?
I'm in agreement here. I think trading Slowey is a bad move right now, and he too is one of my favorite players on the Twins. I assume they're working on signing another starter, and unless they're going to pay for the Buehrles or Jacksons of the world, they're likely going to pay more for the same type of production they're getting from Slowey.
If they're going to trade a starter at their lowest point, why couldn't it be Blackburn?
Because Blackburn's owed $10.25 million over the next 2 years, with an $8 million option for 2013?
I too am super bummed that Slowey's been cut loose.
All the more reason to trade him for peanuts.
Dido what buffalo & Zack said, I really liked having Slowey around, if only as a counterpoint to the rest of the blandness that is the Twins' clubhouse.
If they're going to trade a starter at their lowest point, why couldn't it be Blackburn?
Because that would make too much sense. I'm really interested to learn who the PTBN is.
This is the worst Twins news I've heard in at least 12 hours.
Shipley's igniting a twitter feud w/ Gleeman over this; entertaining reading.
Keeping Slowey would have been nice, but is Colorado really the best place for him to wind up? Even with the humidor, I could see him struggling there. If I'm completely dispassionate about it, a 5-4-3 weighting puts Slowey at an expected 1.25 fWAR next year, and I'm guessing arb. will put him in the $4-5M range. Yeah, he has upside, but the Twins are likely turned off by: 1) how he handled the bullpen situation last year and 2) Slowey's never really pitched that many innings in one season. (Which was surely a consideration when they wanted to put him in the pen last year.) That's not to say that Slowey couldn't put up a big innings total the next couple years, but you'd probably expect him to be a pretty big injury risk having done so. So he's got upside, but you can also argue a couple of points against him, and he's probably getting something close to a "fair value" contract, in which case the Twins should be able to prudently spend that $4-5M to similar effect.
As much as I like Slowey, I feel that he probably could have found a better way to deal with his demotion to the bullpen last year, and had that happened, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now. That's not to say he's most at fault (if anyone's at fault at all, in the end it's an internal matter to which I have little insight), just that most of the time when a starter gets moved to the bullpen it doesn't become such an issue.
Yeah. I like Slowey and I like the Rockies, but that's not a match made in Heaven for a flyball pitcher.
I'm not inherently opposed to trading Slowey, but I am opposed to getting nothing for him. Granted, he wasn't very good in his limited innings last year, but he'd been roughly an average pitcher before that. That may be as good as he'll ever get, but that's not nothing.
The one bit of hope I have is that Terry Ryan used to be pretty good at finding players in other teams' farm systems. Maybe that magic is still there, and in a few years the PTBNL will turn out to be somebody we really like.
A PTBNL may have more value than it sounds. I suspect that TR is waiting to choose a player to avoid displacing someone from the Twins' 40-man before the Rule V draft and will pick someone after the draft.
Taking a night to sleep on it, I'm not really too beat up about the lost Capps draft pick. Taking a look here, it's reasonable to value a 60-80th pick in the draft at about 1-2 WAR (although maybe less, because IIRC, that series of articles was done back when BP was using a replacement level much lower than is commonly accepted today.) Obviously there is going to be upside in any draft pick, but once you get past the first 30 picks, you're talking about an asset that is worth about what Nick Punto is worth.
Not that the Capps contract was brilliant or anything, but it seems mostly like a neutral-value contract to me rather than a good or bad contract.
There's an old article at BtB that briefly touches on draft pick value. It has a pick in the 46-60 range worth $0.8 million.
once you get past the first 30 picks, you're talking about an asset that is worth about what Nick Punto is worth.
I would think that we would be thrilled to get someone who would generate 12.8 fWAR over his career in return. 😉
Punto's also been paid about $15M for his performance, so while he's still had plenty of surplus value in his career (more than a typical 60-80 pick for sure), it's not quite as straightforward as looking at his career WAR.
I haven't really thought about the subject in a while, but I'm convinced that the NHL should do away with fighting. I'm not against (reasonably regulated) fighting as a sport, but if someone wants to fight for a living they should have to make a very conscious choice to do that, and they should have their fight schedule managed, rather than being on call for whenever a game gets physical. What seems to happen in many cases is that guys want so badly to be a hockey player, they'd do just about anything for it. This quote struck me in particular:
“If you’re playing pond hockey, 6 or 7 years old, and somebody said, ‘Hey Brantt, the only way you’re going to make it to the N.H.L. is fighting your way there,’ you think I would have done it?” the former N.H.L. enforcer Brantt Myhres said. “No way. I would have done something else.”
Looking back at Boogaard's career, the thought that at the age of 16 he was put through multiple bare-knuckle fights in practice is pretty frightening. I'd say a large majority of kids in that situation are going to see fighting as a way to stick around in the game until their coach finally realizes their potential and puts them on the ice for something more than mere intimidation.
I haven't really thought about the subject in a while, but I'm convinced that the NHL should do away with fighting.
This. Go to the bigger ice that is/was common in Europe, and move the puck.
This is brought up occasionally on The Book Blog, and every time Tango points out that there are fewer penalty minutes in the NHL than European hockey because of fighting being allowed. I don't know if there are any other rule differences that could affect the discrepancy though.
Can such a causal link really be drawn? I'm skeptical. Are there fewer penalty minutes in the WHL than there are in European hockey? The NHL isn't the only hockey league with fighting, but it is the hockey league with the most talent. It seems to me that European hockey is more likely to be like minor league hockey, where it is difficult to fill full teams with skillful players and some teams have some hacks on the team.
On top of that, if you look at different soccer leagues in different countries, even playing under the same FIFA rules, there are persistent differences in the frequency of fouls, yellow cards, and red cards. Surely some of this is due to differences in the way the rules are enforced, but it is likely also due to differences in the way the game is played in different places. Perhaps if the Europeans played under the NHL rules there would still be more penalties.
And even then, so what if there are more penalty minutes without fighting? Perhaps that just means that the penalty for (some) minor infractions should be increased. My impression of enforcement of NHL rules is that nearly every penalty is a two-minute minor, almost regardless of the severity. If we're worried about keeping the players in line, then why have the same punishment for cross checking as for too many men on the ice?
I think that back in the day, before video replay, maybe you could advocate for frontier justice as a way for the players to police themselves and cut down on dirty plays not seen by the on-ice officials, but given that everything is on tape now, those matters should be left to officials in the position to dole out multi-game suspensions as the punishment for dirty plays not seen at first by the officials on the ice.
I'll admit while typing the response about what someone with way more more hockey knowledge than I'll ever have (he is Canadian after all) thinks about it, I wondered if perhaps having more penalty minutes is an acceptable price for players not dying with massive brain trauma. Without knowing the exact differences, I'm leaning yes.
I've never really bought into the whole thing about fighting helping the game. It seems more like a backwards rationalization for people who like to see fighting in the game.
I'm not sure penalty minutes are at all a good indicator of what's best for the game, either. In a league where penalties were never called, there would be zero penalty minutes, but that doesn't make it good. On the other hand, if checking were made illegal, then penalty minutes would go way up, but injuries would drop significantly. It seems like more of a "how violent to we want it" kind of thing.
Yar. Penalty minutes are not indicative of the nature of play. In equilibrium -- assuming all players on a team are like-minded -- the players should skirt the rules to the point that the expected benefit of cheating equals the expected cost (the prob. of being penalized X the value of the punishment).
So penalties should be called, but the level of penalties isn't self-evident from the given information. The threat of fighting can be seen as an endogenous policing mechanism that substitutes for penalties called on hooking, etc. If you harshly penalize fighting, you need to call hooking, cross-checking, charging, etc. more tightly or you are gonna get Broad Street Bully Hockey Gone Wild instead of classic European-style puck possession hockey.
Another point which we haven't brought up yet is that fights these days seem to mostly be goon vs. goon, not goon vs. culprit. If the goons are supposed to be policing the game, they are doing it in a very roundabout way. Generally speaking, if a police officer finds evidence of criminal wrong-doing, he tries to arrest the criminal, not some other police officer.
If the enforcer realizes that it's just part of his job to go out there and pound on the other enforcer, is he really encouraging his teammate to stop cheap-shotting the other team after he is done fighting? I'm guessing no, not really.
Yeah, I've noticed this too. I think this is actually a good argument against fighting in the NHL. Basically, the fighting doesn't do what its proponents say it does.
I decided to finally drop by and see if Tango had a more recent take, and he does. Reading through the comments, he comes off more anti-enforcer/anti-fighting than in his blog entry. One interesting point he has is that the enforcers tend to get very few minutes.
It sure would be refreshing for the Twins to just flat-out admit this and act accordingly rather than whatever half-baked plan they're currently employing.
How often does full-out Rebuilding work? The Indians have been rebuilding forever and have had two decent seasons in the last decade. The Royals have been rebuilding forever and haven't even finished second in the division in over 15 years. I would argue that the Tigers have made some big moves, including some trades to get younger at a few positions, but haven't done a full-out Rebuild. Look back at how the Twins got to be good in the early 2000s--it wasn't through some grand rebuilding process, it was mainly through drafting well and making some shrewd trades.
Where I think that most teams go wrong when they (internally or externally) declare a Rebuild is that it first necessitates a tear down. And the tear down too often turns into a fire sale, where teams aren't able to get full value in return for the assets they have on hand. And they often tear down so much that the team is abjectly terrible in the near term, which is demoralizing for fans and players, and seems to rarely lead to significant improvement.
I don't mind not having a fire-sale, but there is no reason to overpay players entering their mid-thirties and turning down supplemental first round picks (a lottery pick that likely won't fizzle out, but with a higher probability of being with the next competitive team than Matt Crapps).
Capps isn't overpaid by more than $1-2M. I'm not going to start rending my undergarments over small stuff like that. A huge problem with the Rebuild philosophy is that near-term sacrifices can become long-term sacrifices if you lose fans and lose future revenue, limiting your ability to make moves in the future. Maybe Capps won't be part of the next competitive team, but the Twins need to have a better season next year to keep ticket sales high so the next competitive team doesn't start the season with an $85M payroll and a half-empty Target Field for the first half of the season.
Keeping Matt Capps around doesn't help keep fans. No matter how well he succeeds from this point forward, fans are going to be waiting to jump on him for failing.
Capps is better than a lot of other options for our bullpen, and at the end of the day the fans care more about W-L than they care about Capps particularly. Fans hate half the effective relievers in the league anyway.
But just look at how well it's worked out for the Timberwolves? Right? RIGHT? I mean, they haven't lost a game yet this season!
The NBA is a bit different in that I think the situation in the NBA is even worse. The perceived incentive to do poorly in the short run for long-run gains seems to be huge, but it seems like very few teams every succeed with tear-down/rebuild in the NBA. I think they ought to do something different with the lottery (to discourage the rags-to-riches strategy), but I don't know what would work exactly.
The most elegant thing I can think of is to more or less do away with the lottery and just order the non-playoff teams by the number of seasons since they last made the playoffs. Then it wouldn't make any difference whether you finished 22nd or 30th, and the only thing that can help you is missing the playoffs...but who in their right mind would pass up a playoff spot for a better slot in the draft? This may also make future draft picks a little easier to value, which is probably a good thing.
I really like the idea of including information from more than just one season in determining draft order. But that would really ruin Ewing Conspiracies, so it would never happen.
Jim Souhan just said on 1500 ESPN that Slowey is the "biggest jackass" he's ever covered. I think this makes me like K-Slow even more.
I'm sure Slowey thinks the same of Souhan and has treated him accordingly. Souhan has gone out of his way to bash the guy for no reason.
I'm with Zack.
My dislike of Jim Souhan just grew exponentially.
If he wants to change that, he should write an autobiography.
Nice, spoons. I had to read it twice to catch your meaning, but that would be my problem.
If it makes you feel better, I had to read it twice and read your post twice to catch his meaning, and that is also my problem. (been a long day and a long three months with little sleep. I'm going to milk this new baby, no sleep thing as long as I can.)
@jonmorosi Jon Morosi
Agent for Jeff Francis plans to meet #Pirates, #Mariners, #Twins this week.
junkballer- check
throws strikes- check
can eat innings - check
left handed and breathing - check
sounds like a Twins slam dunk
First name starts off sounding like Jeremy - check
Here's a sentence I would have liked to have written:
Among the towering intellectuals of his era, Trevor-Roper was perhaps the least dull
That's an interesting little anecdote. Thanks for linking it, bS.
P.S.- Sheesh, even the comments on that simple, enjoyable story devolve into intellectual poo-flinging. A fairly well-known sci-fi author even shows up, though I don't think he does himself many favors with his nit-picking.
yea, I wondered if that was THE S.M. Stirling. The handle maps to "smstirling.com", which whois tells me is owned by one "Bo Johansson".
I went to "smstirling.com"- it looks pretty legitimate, and the whole cheeseburger and related minutiae dovetails pretty nicely with Stirling's alternate history/historical sci-fi genre leanings. I wonder who "Bo" is.
Gross. That's a good example of why the internet sucks, I think. An article where I think the reaction should probably be, "Neat, and hey, Thanksgiving is a pretty sweet holiday." its, "LOLZ!!@11! YOUCAN GET AL THOSE THINGZ WHERE I LIVE!11!!!one!11!"*
*May not be 100% accurate in writing style of commenters.
I think meat may have been there:
U MEEN I CANT HAS CHEEZBURGER?
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
I love Carl Sagan.
Indeed.
The 2012 ZiPS projections for the Twins are pretty sobering. On the bright side, it's projecting Butera to improve dramatically.
Well, they can't possibly be much worse than that!
🙁
every reliever projected below league average, even the ghost of Ramos
December
Mon 26 vs Oklahoma City 7:00pm
Tue 27 @ Milwaukee 7:30pm
Fri 30 vs Miami 7:00pm
January Opponent
Sun 01 vs Dallas 6:00pm
Mon 02 vs San Antonio 7:00pm
Wed 04 vs Memphis 7:00pm
So yeah, some big home games right out of the gate there. Also, a serious chance to start the season 1-5/0-6.
I'm really curious how many games will be on FSN North. I would really like to watch them this year.
Wolves only play three teams from the East twice this season, those teams? Charlotte, Detroit and Indiana. That is legit good news.
And rather than the three back to back to backs that Kevin Love predicted the Wolves only play three consecutive games once in the season, January 8-10, @Washington, @Toronto, v Chicago.
The Bulls might be favored by 20 points that game.
Yikes, how did they get Toronto in the middle of that triple-header? Not only do they have all the normal airport time, but they'll have additional time getting through customs, too.
Especially with Beasely.
guess who it dawned on that they can watch feeds from the current incarnation of AT Dat HEzzie through his PS3zzie? this guy. first wild game i've watched this year.
hmm, t-wolves games too, i suppose...
Rubio's coming out party starts against Westbrook/Jennings/the Heat/Kidd/Parker. This season is going to be awesome.
I told you that I bought a knock off Rubio jersey, right?
It's been in the 70s this week and I'm going on a picnic for lunch today! The south is a strange place.
It's in the 30s here this morning....
It was (barely) below freezing this morning when I had to jump my wife's car. (Always remember to turn off the lights, kids.)
It was 12 degrees here on the way to the bus stop. Looks like the high will be above 20.
Kevin Slowey has been traded to the Rockies.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
PTBNL = Tulo?!?1
Probably Jason Giambi.
I would also accept CarGo, I guess.
At least it can't be Hoey again. I'm actually guessing a low level catcher. The Rox seem pretty stocked in that department.
Jose Morales?
I hope he wins the NL Cy Young this year.
This.
Squared.
At least they softened the blow by re-signing Cappy last night, right guys?
🙁
Well, by resigning Capps, they got rid of a draft pick that would probably just have flopped, anyway.
Slowey was my favorite player on the active roster, non-Mauer division. I am super bummed about this. Not only for the obvious reasons of losing a player I enjoy watching pitch, be interviewed, etc, but this doesn't really speak well to the front office in my opinion. Trading Slowey coming off of this season is kind of a bone headed decision.
I believe I read somewhere that the Dunce is heading back to the bullpen this season. This gives us the following starters for 2012: Baker, Pavano, Blackburn, and F-Bomb. Are we going to have Smokeracks as the number five starter? Is Manship going to be the long man/sixth starter? This doesn't fill me with confidence. At the same time, this move pretty much assures us that Lirano won't be traded during the off season, right?
I'm in agreement here. I think trading Slowey is a bad move right now, and he too is one of my favorite players on the Twins. I assume they're working on signing another starter, and unless they're going to pay for the Buehrles or Jacksons of the world, they're likely going to pay more for the same type of production they're getting from Slowey.
If they're going to trade a starter at their lowest point, why couldn't it be Blackburn?
Because Blackburn's owed $10.25 million over the next 2 years, with an $8 million option for 2013?
I too am super bummed that Slowey's been cut loose.
All the more reason to trade him for peanuts.
Dido what buffalo & Zack said, I really liked having Slowey around, if only as a counterpoint to the rest of the blandness that is the Twins' clubhouse.
Because that would make too much sense. I'm really interested to learn who the PTBN is.
This is the worst Twins news I've heard in at least 12 hours.
Shipley's igniting a twitter feud w/ Gleeman over this; entertaining reading.
Keeping Slowey would have been nice, but is Colorado really the best place for him to wind up? Even with the humidor, I could see him struggling there. If I'm completely dispassionate about it, a 5-4-3 weighting puts Slowey at an expected 1.25 fWAR next year, and I'm guessing arb. will put him in the $4-5M range. Yeah, he has upside, but the Twins are likely turned off by: 1) how he handled the bullpen situation last year and 2) Slowey's never really pitched that many innings in one season. (Which was surely a consideration when they wanted to put him in the pen last year.) That's not to say that Slowey couldn't put up a big innings total the next couple years, but you'd probably expect him to be a pretty big injury risk having done so. So he's got upside, but you can also argue a couple of points against him, and he's probably getting something close to a "fair value" contract, in which case the Twins should be able to prudently spend that $4-5M to similar effect.
As much as I like Slowey, I feel that he probably could have found a better way to deal with his demotion to the bullpen last year, and had that happened, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now. That's not to say he's most at fault (if anyone's at fault at all, in the end it's an internal matter to which I have little insight), just that most of the time when a starter gets moved to the bullpen it doesn't become such an issue.
Yeah. I like Slowey and I like the Rockies, but that's not a match made in Heaven for a flyball pitcher.
I'm not inherently opposed to trading Slowey, but I am opposed to getting nothing for him. Granted, he wasn't very good in his limited innings last year, but he'd been roughly an average pitcher before that. That may be as good as he'll ever get, but that's not nothing.
The one bit of hope I have is that Terry Ryan used to be pretty good at finding players in other teams' farm systems. Maybe that magic is still there, and in a few years the PTBNL will turn out to be somebody we really like.
A PTBNL may have more value than it sounds. I suspect that TR is waiting to choose a player to avoid displacing someone from the Twins' 40-man before the Rule V draft and will pick someone after the draft.
Rumour has it the Twins have offered Cuddy 3 years/25 million.
wow. that rumor's really on the QT.
You could almost say that FTLT is trying to make something out of nothing here.
It makes for a nice blanket eventually.
Lets hope so, not sure Cuddyer with a three year contract would be my favorite thing ever.
I can throw an assist here. Unfortunately, he didn't make it up.
http://twitter.com/#!/Jon_Heyman/status/144088286007275520
Yeah... I was snarking about the broken link.
Oh, I got the joke! I was just providing a link, too, in case people wanted to see the rumor.
Money's about right, years are too many. I hope someone swoops in and offers him more and the Twins don't match.
at least its not a 10 yr deal with a no trade clause
I see somebody's been spending time in Fort Erie.
I hear they have a wonderful ballet there.
maybe Cuddyer was waiting for this before decision on a contract (twitter)
Photo Op. This is the best line:
If this isn't a sign for who he should sign with, then I don't know what is.
In better news, FanGraphs received accreditation from the BBWAA. I think this means that FanGraphs writers are now eligible for BBWAA membership.
Does that mean they have to start bashing themselves and their fancy statististics?
Roid rage! Just say no.
Taking a night to sleep on it, I'm not really too beat up about the lost Capps draft pick. Taking a look here, it's reasonable to value a 60-80th pick in the draft at about 1-2 WAR (although maybe less, because IIRC, that series of articles was done back when BP was using a replacement level much lower than is commonly accepted today.) Obviously there is going to be upside in any draft pick, but once you get past the first 30 picks, you're talking about an asset that is worth about what Nick Punto is worth.
Not that the Capps contract was brilliant or anything, but it seems mostly like a neutral-value contract to me rather than a good or bad contract.
There's an old article at BtB that briefly touches on draft pick value. It has a pick in the 46-60 range worth $0.8 million.
once you get past the first 30 picks, you're talking about an asset that is worth about what Nick Punto is worth.
I would think that we would be thrilled to get someone who would generate 12.8 fWAR over his career in return. 😉
Punto's also been paid about $15M for his performance, so while he's still had plenty of surplus value in his career (more than a typical 60-80 pick for sure), it's not quite as straightforward as looking at his career WAR.
good point.
The NYT wrapped up their three-part series on Derek Boogaard's life and death today. I thought it was well done.
I haven't really thought about the subject in a while, but I'm convinced that the NHL should do away with fighting. I'm not against (reasonably regulated) fighting as a sport, but if someone wants to fight for a living they should have to make a very conscious choice to do that, and they should have their fight schedule managed, rather than being on call for whenever a game gets physical. What seems to happen in many cases is that guys want so badly to be a hockey player, they'd do just about anything for it. This quote struck me in particular:
Looking back at Boogaard's career, the thought that at the age of 16 he was put through multiple bare-knuckle fights in practice is pretty frightening. I'd say a large majority of kids in that situation are going to see fighting as a way to stick around in the game until their coach finally realizes their potential and puts them on the ice for something more than mere intimidation.
I haven't really thought about the subject in a while, but I'm convinced that the NHL should do away with fighting.
This. Go to the bigger ice that is/was common in Europe, and move the puck.
This is brought up occasionally on The Book Blog, and every time Tango points out that there are fewer penalty minutes in the NHL than European hockey because of fighting being allowed. I don't know if there are any other rule differences that could affect the discrepancy though.
Can such a causal link really be drawn? I'm skeptical. Are there fewer penalty minutes in the WHL than there are in European hockey? The NHL isn't the only hockey league with fighting, but it is the hockey league with the most talent. It seems to me that European hockey is more likely to be like minor league hockey, where it is difficult to fill full teams with skillful players and some teams have some hacks on the team.
On top of that, if you look at different soccer leagues in different countries, even playing under the same FIFA rules, there are persistent differences in the frequency of fouls, yellow cards, and red cards. Surely some of this is due to differences in the way the rules are enforced, but it is likely also due to differences in the way the game is played in different places. Perhaps if the Europeans played under the NHL rules there would still be more penalties.
And even then, so what if there are more penalty minutes without fighting? Perhaps that just means that the penalty for (some) minor infractions should be increased. My impression of enforcement of NHL rules is that nearly every penalty is a two-minute minor, almost regardless of the severity. If we're worried about keeping the players in line, then why have the same punishment for cross checking as for too many men on the ice?
I think that back in the day, before video replay, maybe you could advocate for frontier justice as a way for the players to police themselves and cut down on dirty plays not seen by the on-ice officials, but given that everything is on tape now, those matters should be left to officials in the position to dole out multi-game suspensions as the punishment for dirty plays not seen at first by the officials on the ice.
I'll admit while typing the response about what someone with way more more hockey knowledge than I'll ever have (he is Canadian after all) thinks about it, I wondered if perhaps having more penalty minutes is an acceptable price for players not dying with massive brain trauma. Without knowing the exact differences, I'm leaning yes.
I've never really bought into the whole thing about fighting helping the game. It seems more like a backwards rationalization for people who like to see fighting in the game.
I'm not sure penalty minutes are at all a good indicator of what's best for the game, either. In a league where penalties were never called, there would be zero penalty minutes, but that doesn't make it good. On the other hand, if checking were made illegal, then penalty minutes would go way up, but injuries would drop significantly. It seems like more of a "how violent to we want it" kind of thing.
Yar. Penalty minutes are not indicative of the nature of play. In equilibrium -- assuming all players on a team are like-minded -- the players should skirt the rules to the point that the expected benefit of cheating equals the expected cost (the prob. of being penalized X the value of the punishment).
So penalties should be called, but the level of penalties isn't self-evident from the given information. The threat of fighting can be seen as an endogenous policing mechanism that substitutes for penalties called on hooking, etc. If you harshly penalize fighting, you need to call hooking, cross-checking, charging, etc. more tightly or you are gonna get Broad Street Bully Hockey Gone Wild instead of classic European-style puck possession hockey.
Another point which we haven't brought up yet is that fights these days seem to mostly be goon vs. goon, not goon vs. culprit. If the goons are supposed to be policing the game, they are doing it in a very roundabout way. Generally speaking, if a police officer finds evidence of criminal wrong-doing, he tries to arrest the criminal, not some other police officer.
If the enforcer realizes that it's just part of his job to go out there and pound on the other enforcer, is he really encouraging his teammate to stop cheap-shotting the other team after he is done fighting? I'm guessing no, not really.
Yeah, I've noticed this too. I think this is actually a good argument against fighting in the NHL. Basically, the fighting doesn't do what its proponents say it does.
I decided to finally drop by and see if Tango had a more recent take, and he does. Reading through the comments, he comes off more anti-enforcer/anti-fighting than in his blog entry. One interesting point he has is that the enforcers tend to get very few minutes.
It sure would be refreshing for the Twins to just flat-out admit this and act accordingly rather than whatever half-baked plan they're currently employing.
How often does full-out Rebuilding work? The Indians have been rebuilding forever and have had two decent seasons in the last decade. The Royals have been rebuilding forever and haven't even finished second in the division in over 15 years. I would argue that the Tigers have made some big moves, including some trades to get younger at a few positions, but haven't done a full-out Rebuild. Look back at how the Twins got to be good in the early 2000s--it wasn't through some grand rebuilding process, it was mainly through drafting well and making some shrewd trades.
Where I think that most teams go wrong when they (internally or externally) declare a Rebuild is that it first necessitates a tear down. And the tear down too often turns into a fire sale, where teams aren't able to get full value in return for the assets they have on hand. And they often tear down so much that the team is abjectly terrible in the near term, which is demoralizing for fans and players, and seems to rarely lead to significant improvement.
I don't mind not having a fire-sale, but there is no reason to overpay players entering their mid-thirties and turning down supplemental first round picks (a lottery pick that likely won't fizzle out, but with a higher probability of being with the next competitive team than Matt Crapps).
Capps isn't overpaid by more than $1-2M. I'm not going to start rending my undergarments over small stuff like that. A huge problem with the Rebuild philosophy is that near-term sacrifices can become long-term sacrifices if you lose fans and lose future revenue, limiting your ability to make moves in the future. Maybe Capps won't be part of the next competitive team, but the Twins need to have a better season next year to keep ticket sales high so the next competitive team doesn't start the season with an $85M payroll and a half-empty Target Field for the first half of the season.
Keeping Matt Capps around doesn't help keep fans. No matter how well he succeeds from this point forward, fans are going to be waiting to jump on him for failing.
Capps is better than a lot of other options for our bullpen, and at the end of the day the fans care more about W-L than they care about Capps particularly. Fans hate half the effective relievers in the league anyway.
But just look at how well it's worked out for the Timberwolves? Right? RIGHT? I mean, they haven't lost a game yet this season!
The NBA is a bit different in that I think the situation in the NBA is even worse. The perceived incentive to do poorly in the short run for long-run gains seems to be huge, but it seems like very few teams every succeed with tear-down/rebuild in the NBA. I think they ought to do something different with the lottery (to discourage the rags-to-riches strategy), but I don't know what would work exactly.
The most elegant thing I can think of is to more or less do away with the lottery and just order the non-playoff teams by the number of seasons since they last made the playoffs. Then it wouldn't make any difference whether you finished 22nd or 30th, and the only thing that can help you is missing the playoffs...but who in their right mind would pass up a playoff spot for a better slot in the draft? This may also make future draft picks a little easier to value, which is probably a good thing.
I really like the idea of including information from more than just one season in determining draft order. But that would really ruin Ewing Conspiracies, so it would never happen.
Jim Souhan just said on 1500 ESPN that Slowey is the "biggest jackass" he's ever covered. I think this makes me like K-Slow even more.
I'm sure Slowey thinks the same of Souhan and has treated him accordingly. Souhan has gone out of his way to bash the guy for no reason.
I'm with Zack.
My dislike of Jim Souhan just grew exponentially.
If he wants to change that, he should write an autobiography.
Nice, spoons. I had to read it twice to catch your meaning, but that would be my problem.
If it makes you feel better, I had to read it twice and read your post twice to catch his meaning, and that is also my problem. (been a long day and a long three months with little sleep. I'm going to milk this new baby, no sleep thing as long as I can.)
junkballer- check
throws strikes- check
can eat innings - check
left handed and breathing - check
sounds like a Twins slam dunk
First name starts off sounding like Jeremy - check
Here's a sentence I would have liked to have written:
We live in the best of all possible times.
That's an interesting little anecdote. Thanks for linking it, bS.
P.S.- Sheesh, even the comments on that simple, enjoyable story devolve into intellectual poo-flinging. A fairly well-known sci-fi author even shows up, though I don't think he does himself many favors with his nit-picking.
yea, I wondered if that was THE S.M. Stirling. The handle maps to "smstirling.com", which whois tells me is owned by one "Bo Johansson".
I went to "smstirling.com"- it looks pretty legitimate, and the whole cheeseburger and related minutiae dovetails pretty nicely with Stirling's alternate history/historical sci-fi genre leanings. I wonder who "Bo" is.
Gross. That's a good example of why the internet sucks, I think. An article where I think the reaction should probably be, "Neat, and hey, Thanksgiving is a pretty sweet holiday." its, "LOLZ!!@11! YOUCAN GET AL THOSE THINGZ WHERE I LIVE!11!!!one!11!"*
*May not be 100% accurate in writing style of commenters.
I think meat may have been there:
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
I love Carl Sagan.
Indeed.
The 2012 ZiPS projections for the Twins are pretty sobering. On the bright side, it's projecting Butera to improve dramatically.
Well, they can't possibly be much worse than that!
🙁
every reliever projected below league average, even the ghost of Ramos
The Wolves schedule is out:
So yeah, some big home games right out of the gate there. Also, a serious chance to start the season 1-5/0-6.
I'm really curious how many games will be on FSN North. I would really like to watch them this year.
Wolves only play three teams from the East twice this season, those teams? Charlotte, Detroit and Indiana. That is legit good news.
And rather than the three back to back to backs that Kevin Love predicted the Wolves only play three consecutive games once in the season, January 8-10, @Washington, @Toronto, v Chicago.
The Bulls might be favored by 20 points that game.
Yikes, how did they get Toronto in the middle of that triple-header? Not only do they have all the normal airport time, but they'll have additional time getting through customs, too.
Especially with Beasely.
guess who it dawned on that they can watch feeds from the current incarnation of AT Dat HEzzie through his PS3zzie? this guy. first wild game i've watched this year.
hmm, t-wolves games too, i suppose...
Rubio's coming out party starts against Westbrook/Jennings/the Heat/Kidd/Parker. This season is going to be awesome.
I told you that I bought a knock off Rubio jersey, right?