I tried running a little bit the other day and my ankle didn't explode, so I'm going to try again today.
26 thoughts on “May 18, 2023: On The Trail”
This is why I beat the cycling drum. Not only did my ankle not explode when I started biking, it got better!
I understand it completely, but I came to the conclusion that I don't like biking very much. I mean it's fine, I get why people do, but every time I'm biking on a trail I think that I'd rather be running.
I prefer the thrill of the open road where I have to worry each time that some coal rolling dickwad or someone fiddling with their infotainment touch screen will run me down.
You’d enjoy my bike commute to work….
I don't think it was from a commute, but that is how a co-worker's brother was killed in Wisconsin: cycling on a county road and hit by an SUV.
Its absolutely a regular fear of mine, but I have to ride somewhere. I try to stay on as low traffic roads as possible.
hard to get hit by a car out here (though i did almost run into a deer today):
man, i have missed this. gotta love some shinrin yoku over a lunch break.
I just like how much quicker a run is. It takes me at least three times as long to get the same workout riding a bike.
That's one of the main things for me: no equipment. I mean, yeah, you need your gear, but the apparatus is you.
that's all fair. Of course, I got the initial equipment for free and refurbishing it was also a very satisfying hobby to engage in (I really need to find a decent mountain bike frame).
I saw that English horn extraordinaire Tom Stacy died; he put out one of my all-time favorite Christmas albums.
I bought my first-ever dash cam last night. What I wanted was basically a GoPro-style action camera (specifically l, the DJI Action 2) on a mount, but I settled for a Garmin dash cam when I realized using an action cam like this would require anyone driving the vehicle to ensure it was powered on/off and removed from the vehicle on high heat days. I’m the sort of person who likes a preflight checklist; others are not wired that way.
What I don’t understand is why the action cam crowd wouldn’t see this market as a natural place to expand; frankly, they seem more innovative than the dash cam manufacturers that all use the same ISP and one of a couple SOCs.
Living down in this part of the state with FIB drivers everywhere, I too finally got one a few months ago after getting passed on the shoulder of the interstate by a plumbing company's van.
One might have helped me understand how Mrs Runner hit a curb and blew out the front passenger tire the other day...
My SIL did that recently, also to the right front. Was due to hitting a curb at an angle and being on the gas. (Don’t ask why, not a good driver, IMO.)
I've noticed some corners being less "cornered" than I'd prefer, but this one was a mystery.
My daughter hit a pothole in Minneapolis so hard it cracked the lower A-frame on her suspension and the right front axle pulled so far out of the transmission the wheel wouldn't turn anymore.
Damn, that is a serious pothole.
To be fair to the pothole, that A-frame had a fair amount of deep rust that was partially at fault.
I've seen tons of humorous dashcam videos (mainly from Russia), so please upload any good ones.
If the past 17 years are any indication, my local excursions will feature a lot of unsafe cycling practices (no hands, talking on phone/texting while riding, wearing dark clothing & not using lights after dusk, blowing through 4-ways, etc).
I hate how we have a whole off day to stew over yesterday's loss. It seems like at least half the time when there's an off day this is the case.
I wish xERA was referenced more these days. It's basically FIP on steroids, since in addition to considering the three true outcomes, it also considers the types of batted balls that you allow (by exit velocity, launch angle, etc.) So two pitchers with the same three true outcomes, but different batted balls can be ranked differently, but it's not all down to how the defense played those specific balls-in-play either. It helps to separate fly ball pitchers from ground ball pitchers and such.
I find this kind of thing especially important for evaluating relief pitchers, who might get 250-300 total batters faced, as compared to starting pitchers, who can have 500-600 batters faced in a season, or hitters, who can get 500-600 plate appearances in a season.
Here's where I would project the Twins' bullpen arms (*big caveat* when healthy *big caveat*):
2.00 - 2.50 xERA
Duran
2.50 - 3.00 xERA
--
3.00 - 3.50 xERA
Moran
Thielbar
Jax
Lopez
Stewart (tentatively)
3.50 - 4.00 xERA
Pagan
Alcala
4.00 - 4.50 xERA
Sands
4.50 - 5.00 xERA
De Leon
What's replacement level for relievers these days? Going by fWAR of 0.0 for full-time relievers in 2022, it seems like having an FIP/ERA around 4.22 is replacement level.
I find that somewhat unsatisfying, though, because there are so many relievers coming and going every year. There were only 152 qualified relievers in 2022 given roughly 240 roster spots for them to fill. To get at least 240 relievers in 2022, I have to go all the way down to a minimum of 30 IP.
Using relievers with at least 30 IP in 2022, we get rough ranges for what a "#1" reliever or "#2" reliever would be.
Pagan is the reliever in the socials these days, and he has a career ERA of 3.95, and an ERA closer to 4.50 for 2020-2022. If you believe that the change to his pitch selection last September has improved his game, I'd put his projected ERA closer to 3.25. So based on the ranges above, that puts him at something like a #6 reliever, a #7 reliever, or a #4 reliever. With teams carrying 8 relievers on their active rosters, it's really hard for me to imagine letting him go, despite some prominent Twins media types cherry-picking stats to make him look like the worst reliever of all time.
Further thoughts on the Twins bullpen, especially regarding their xERA:
Brock Stewart is interesting. TJ reclamation project. He had a 3.13 xERA in 2017, his first full year as a reliever. Everything went to shit in 2018, and given that he eventually went under the knife, I'm tempted to attribute that to playing injured and hoping he could avoid TJ surgery. His xERA of 3.25 this year is in a very small sample size, but aligns with his 2017 xERA. And he struck out 49% of the 35 batters he faced in AAA this spring, which is pretty damn good. He could have pitched another 9 innings with zero strikeouts in St. Paul and still been averaging a strikeout per inning. And he only walked 2 of the 35 hitters.
Alcala has only seen 49 batters in AAA, spread across two seasons. But he had a 4.4 BB/9 there, and he had a 3.7 BB/9 in AA, and a 3.9 BB/9 in A+. Usually I consider that kind of walk rate death to pitching prospects, but he spent significant time as a starter all the way through 2019, so you can't always draw great conclusions from that. (Though I've just discovered bb-ref has limited minor league split data, and in 2019 as a reliever, he had roughly a 4.5 BB/9 rate, so it didn't seem like relief pitching did much to help his control.) Somehow, in 2020, though, he wound up doing great in the bullpen when he was promoted to the big club, and averaged around a 3.55 xERA in roughly 65 innings between '20 and '21. His poor results in 2022 and 2023 seem injury related.
Thielbar's xERA regressed somewhat from 2022 to the 10.0 IP he's had in 2023, and we might be able to attribute some of that to injury, since he's been on the IL.
Sands has promise, but he seems to be a ticking time bomb based on his peripherals so far this year. He's got a shiny 1.29 ERA, but 6.4 K/9 as a reliever is low in the first place, but 6.4 BB/9 on top of that is pretty yikes. Still, it's only 7 innings, so I'd expect him to project out to the 4.50-ish xERA he had in 2022, though that was combined between starting and relieving, so presumably he's got a bit of room to improve over that.
De Leon seems like roster filler to me. Bounced around a lot, but only 49.2 IP in MLB over 5+ seasons. He's got something like a 4.30 FIP in AAA in 37 innings between 2022 and 2023. I could believe he's more like a 4.50-5.00 FIP guy in the majors than the 5.77 FIP he's been so far in the majors. It also helps that his MLB xFIP is 4.68 and falls in that 4.50-5.00 range.
I'm hoping Moran's going to revert more to 2022 than he's been so far this season.
Earlier this year, Tangotiger looked into when ERA becomes more predictive over FIP in a pitcher's career. Turns out, it never does. ERA does eventually match FIP and they trade off some, but on average they're the same after 138 (nine inning) games. That's 1242 innings before ERA catches up. Now that's ERA and not xERA, but FIP is so good despite being so simple. Even stripping out the home run part of FIP to leave only strikeouts and walks still creates a surprisingly accurate predictor.
Random off-day thought: Run differential (slightly) favors teams that win on the road versus teams that win at home. Arguably, for tie-breaker purposes, only runs in the first 8 innings should count.
Related: A team with a great pitching staff will (slightly) decrease their team's runs scored per game, as the team will have fewer opportunities to hit in the bottom of the 9th inning.
This is why I beat the cycling drum. Not only did my ankle not explode when I started biking, it got better!
I understand it completely, but I came to the conclusion that I don't like biking very much. I mean it's fine, I get why people do, but every time I'm biking on a trail I think that I'd rather be running.
I prefer the thrill of the open road where I have to worry each time that some coal rolling dickwad or someone fiddling with their infotainment touch screen will run me down.
You’d enjoy my bike commute to work….
I don't think it was from a commute, but that is how a co-worker's brother was killed in Wisconsin: cycling on a county road and hit by an SUV.
Its absolutely a regular fear of mine, but I have to ride somewhere. I try to stay on as low traffic roads as possible.
hard to get hit by a car out here (though i did almost run into a deer today):
man, i have missed this. gotta love some shinrin yoku over a lunch break.
I just like how much quicker a run is. It takes me at least three times as long to get the same workout riding a bike.
That's one of the main things for me: no equipment. I mean, yeah, you need your gear, but the apparatus is you.
that's all fair. Of course, I got the initial equipment for free and refurbishing it was also a very satisfying hobby to engage in (I really need to find a decent mountain bike frame).
I saw that English horn extraordinaire Tom Stacy died; he put out one of my all-time favorite Christmas albums.
I bought my first-ever dash cam last night. What I wanted was basically a GoPro-style action camera (specifically l, the DJI Action 2) on a mount, but I settled for a Garmin dash cam when I realized using an action cam like this would require anyone driving the vehicle to ensure it was powered on/off and removed from the vehicle on high heat days. I’m the sort of person who likes a preflight checklist; others are not wired that way.
What I don’t understand is why the action cam crowd wouldn’t see this market as a natural place to expand; frankly, they seem more innovative than the dash cam manufacturers that all use the same ISP and one of a couple SOCs.
Living down in this part of the state with FIB drivers everywhere, I too finally got one a few months ago after getting passed on the shoulder of the interstate by a plumbing company's van.
One might have helped me understand how Mrs Runner hit a curb and blew out the front passenger tire the other day...
My SIL did that recently, also to the right front. Was due to hitting a curb at an angle and being on the gas. (Don’t ask why, not a good driver, IMO.)
I've noticed some corners being less "cornered" than I'd prefer, but this one was a mystery.
My daughter hit a pothole in Minneapolis so hard it cracked the lower A-frame on her suspension and the right front axle pulled so far out of the transmission the wheel wouldn't turn anymore.
Damn, that is a serious pothole.
To be fair to the pothole, that A-frame had a fair amount of deep rust that was partially at fault.
I've seen tons of humorous dashcam videos (mainly from Russia), so please upload any good ones.
If the past 17 years are any indication, my local excursions will feature a lot of unsafe cycling practices (no hands, talking on phone/texting while riding, wearing dark clothing & not using lights after dusk, blowing through 4-ways, etc).
I hate how we have a whole off day to stew over yesterday's loss. It seems like at least half the time when there's an off day this is the case.
I wish xERA was referenced more these days. It's basically FIP on steroids, since in addition to considering the three true outcomes, it also considers the types of batted balls that you allow (by exit velocity, launch angle, etc.) So two pitchers with the same three true outcomes, but different batted balls can be ranked differently, but it's not all down to how the defense played those specific balls-in-play either. It helps to separate fly ball pitchers from ground ball pitchers and such.
I find this kind of thing especially important for evaluating relief pitchers, who might get 250-300 total batters faced, as compared to starting pitchers, who can have 500-600 batters faced in a season, or hitters, who can get 500-600 plate appearances in a season.
Here's where I would project the Twins' bullpen arms (*big caveat* when healthy *big caveat*):
2.00 - 2.50 xERA
Duran
2.50 - 3.00 xERA
--
3.00 - 3.50 xERA
Moran
Thielbar
Jax
Lopez
Stewart (tentatively)
3.50 - 4.00 xERA
Pagan
Alcala
4.00 - 4.50 xERA
Sands
4.50 - 5.00 xERA
De Leon
What's replacement level for relievers these days? Going by fWAR of 0.0 for full-time relievers in 2022, it seems like having an FIP/ERA around 4.22 is replacement level.
I find that somewhat unsatisfying, though, because there are so many relievers coming and going every year. There were only 152 qualified relievers in 2022 given roughly 240 roster spots for them to fill. To get at least 240 relievers in 2022, I have to go all the way down to a minimum of 30 IP.
Using relievers with at least 30 IP in 2022, we get rough ranges for what a "#1" reliever or "#2" reliever would be.
2.25 or less -- #1
2.25 - 2.72 -- #2
2.72 - 3.05 -- #3
3.05 - 3.41 -- #4
3.41 - 3.83 -- #5
3.83 - 4.37 -- #6
4.37 - 5.08 -- #7
5.08 or greater -- #8
Pagan is the reliever in the socials these days, and he has a career ERA of 3.95, and an ERA closer to 4.50 for 2020-2022. If you believe that the change to his pitch selection last September has improved his game, I'd put his projected ERA closer to 3.25. So based on the ranges above, that puts him at something like a #6 reliever, a #7 reliever, or a #4 reliever. With teams carrying 8 relievers on their active rosters, it's really hard for me to imagine letting him go, despite some prominent Twins media types cherry-picking stats to make him look like the worst reliever of all time.
Further thoughts on the Twins bullpen, especially regarding their xERA:
2022 - 2023 -- Player
2.22 - 2.10 -- Duran
2.28 - 3.54 -- Moran
2.53 - 3.13 -- Thielbar
3.17 - 2.92 -- Jax
3.31 - 2.90 -- Lopez
3.91 - 3.17 -- Pagan
N/A - 3.25 -- Stewart (9.2 IP)
4.43 - 6.86 - Sands (SP+RP combined '22, 7.0 IP '23)
4.91 - N/A -- Megill
5.28 - N/A -- Joe Smith
5.53 - N/A -- Duffey
N/A - 6.57 - Alcala
Brock Stewart is interesting. TJ reclamation project. He had a 3.13 xERA in 2017, his first full year as a reliever. Everything went to shit in 2018, and given that he eventually went under the knife, I'm tempted to attribute that to playing injured and hoping he could avoid TJ surgery. His xERA of 3.25 this year is in a very small sample size, but aligns with his 2017 xERA. And he struck out 49% of the 35 batters he faced in AAA this spring, which is pretty damn good. He could have pitched another 9 innings with zero strikeouts in St. Paul and still been averaging a strikeout per inning. And he only walked 2 of the 35 hitters.
Alcala has only seen 49 batters in AAA, spread across two seasons. But he had a 4.4 BB/9 there, and he had a 3.7 BB/9 in AA, and a 3.9 BB/9 in A+. Usually I consider that kind of walk rate death to pitching prospects, but he spent significant time as a starter all the way through 2019, so you can't always draw great conclusions from that. (Though I've just discovered bb-ref has limited minor league split data, and in 2019 as a reliever, he had roughly a 4.5 BB/9 rate, so it didn't seem like relief pitching did much to help his control.) Somehow, in 2020, though, he wound up doing great in the bullpen when he was promoted to the big club, and averaged around a 3.55 xERA in roughly 65 innings between '20 and '21. His poor results in 2022 and 2023 seem injury related.
Thielbar's xERA regressed somewhat from 2022 to the 10.0 IP he's had in 2023, and we might be able to attribute some of that to injury, since he's been on the IL.
Sands has promise, but he seems to be a ticking time bomb based on his peripherals so far this year. He's got a shiny 1.29 ERA, but 6.4 K/9 as a reliever is low in the first place, but 6.4 BB/9 on top of that is pretty yikes. Still, it's only 7 innings, so I'd expect him to project out to the 4.50-ish xERA he had in 2022, though that was combined between starting and relieving, so presumably he's got a bit of room to improve over that.
De Leon seems like roster filler to me. Bounced around a lot, but only 49.2 IP in MLB over 5+ seasons. He's got something like a 4.30 FIP in AAA in 37 innings between 2022 and 2023. I could believe he's more like a 4.50-5.00 FIP guy in the majors than the 5.77 FIP he's been so far in the majors. It also helps that his MLB xFIP is 4.68 and falls in that 4.50-5.00 range.
I'm hoping Moran's going to revert more to 2022 than he's been so far this season.
Earlier this year, Tangotiger looked into when ERA becomes more predictive over FIP in a pitcher's career. Turns out, it never does. ERA does eventually match FIP and they trade off some, but on average they're the same after 138 (nine inning) games. That's 1242 innings before ERA catches up. Now that's ERA and not xERA, but FIP is so good despite being so simple. Even stripping out the home run part of FIP to leave only strikeouts and walks still creates a surprisingly accurate predictor.
Random off-day thought: Run differential (slightly) favors teams that win on the road versus teams that win at home. Arguably, for tie-breaker purposes, only runs in the first 8 innings should count.
Related: A team with a great pitching staff will (slightly) decrease their team's runs scored per game, as the team will have fewer opportunities to hit in the bottom of the 9th inning.