I will still defend the Arraez trade, but yeah, it’d be pretty sweet to have someone on the team that can hit.
38 thoughts on “June 20, 2023: No Regrets”
The way the team is playing currently, I'd just feel bad for Luis hitting and subsequently not scoring.
Still, he's back over .400. That would be pretty sweet.
That's awesome!
I believe I am on record as never liking the trade. I held my nose and swallowed the medicine but I want to regurgitate it more and more every day.
League bullpen stats for perspective. In this crazy world where teams carry 8 relievers, there are only an average of 6 qualified relievers per team.
Keeping in mind that we need 240 relievers in the whole league, the 120th-best ERA for qualified relievers is 3.98.
Also, fWAR for relievers seems way off base to me. There are currently only 134 qualified relievers with a positive fWAR. Where are the innings coming from actual above-replacement relief pitchers?
I copied in a bunch of the fangraphs data and had a little data party. In 2022, pitchers classified as relievers threw 17,998 innings. Depending on how exactly fangraphs filters that, it might include some innings as starters, but by and large it's right (there aren't any bizarre-for-2022 cases of relievers going over 100 IP or something.) So each team basically needs 600 innings from the bullpen, or 75 innings from each of 8 guys spread evenly, if you had some kind of mythical perfect 8-man-always-healthy egalitarian bullpen.
To get to 240 relievers in the league, you have to set the IP cutoff to 35 innings pitched. That itself is way short of the 75 innings each team basically needs from a reliever, but it goes to show how much these guys get shuffled up and down between injuries and the whims of management.
If you order by innings pitched and plot IP versus rolling ERA, you see a general pattern that pitchers with more innings pitched have lower ERAs than pitchers with fewer innings pitched. So while there are some outliers of good pitchers who got injured, by and large, teams allocate their resources efficiently and have the better pitchers pitch more innings.
So then if you sort by innings pitched and look at those bottom 2,250 innings pitched, the ERA is 5.41. If you look at 250 innings pitched above and below the cutoff, you get an ERA of 5.29. Probably we should leave out the extreme tail end of things, so I'm putting forth that a 5.29 ERA is a reasonable replacement level for relief pitchers.
But if you look at the qualified relievers that are at replacement level, it is clear that fangraphs is setting a replacement-level FIP (which is on the same scale as ERA) at about 4.25. What seems most shocking to me about this is that the average ERA for all innings pitched by relievers in 2022 was 3.84. It doesn't really make any rational sense to me that replacement level would be that close to average.
So basically what I'm saying is that fangraphs is setting the replacement-level for relief pitchers at something like an entire run per nine innings too low. This has a drastic effect on WAR for basically all relievers, but it can especially change your view of relievers who might be near that 4.25-5.25 FIP or ERA range.
One of the important things about measuring versus replacement level is the value of being average. It used to be talked about more when replacement level was a new-ish concept 15-20 years ago, but these days 'R' is mostly just the last letter of WAR. Measuring someone's value versus average really underrated the player who could produce at an average level and stay healthy all season.
Adjusting for this different replacement level adds about 1 win to someone who pitches 72 innings in a season and 0.5 win for someone pitching 36 innings.
How do Manfred Man innings affect this?
My understanding was that the international runner doesn't count toward anyone's ERA -- it certainly doesn't count towards anyone's FIP.
Ultimately this comes back to Emilio Pagan, because doesn't everything about the 2023 Twins come back to Emilio Pagan?
Fans ask questions like, "why would the Twins sign Pagan to a $3.5M contract when I've seen him blow the lead so many times?" Or alternatively, "if I look at this guy's fangraphs page it shows that he's been at or below replacement level for the three years leading up to 2023, and 4 of his 6 years in the majors leading up to 2023 -- why do the Twins feel it is necessary to keep Pagan rather than rummage through the discount bin of minimum-contract players?"
And the answer just turns out to be that it's actually hard to find relief pitchers to throw 60+ innings these days, and fangraphs has a totally unrealistic replacement level for relief pitchers. If you change replacement level from a 4.25 FIP to a 5.25 FIP, Pagan has no years where he's below replacement level and one year where he's at replacement level (2021). It changes his career fWAR from 2.1 to 5.4.
It's not that teams are totally irrational -- Pagan doesn't have 362 career IP completely on hopes and dreams -- he keeps getting innings because very few relief pitchers can consistently throw better and stay healthy. Teams need innings and there aren't 240 guys better than Pagan, not even close.
It would be cool if fangraphs would update their relief pitching replacement level to something more rational, since I'd rather not have to roll my own (and I assume they account for park factors, which I've not done here.) I'm not even being as extreme as ordering the pitchers from worst to best by ERA and taking the 12.5th-percentile (representing roughly the borderline between the 7th and 8th pitcher in the bullpen), which would give you a replacement level of 5.64.
I haven't taken the time to read any of the Twins Daily for quite a while, and I certainly haven't given any time to Twins Daily Community, but there was one headline in my email where someone proposed the Top 5 Twins at each position, and I was shocked to see He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named the #5 reliever (ahead of so many better representitives) -- I'd take a half dozen Pagán's over him.
In WAR, I give pitchers 43% of the value and nonpitcher 57%. And among pitchers, I give 33% to starting pitchers and 10% to relievers.
I recall BR and FG settled on 1000 wins per season, so that's 100 wins for relievers. Does the positive side sum up to more than 100?
Oh yeah, it sums up to a lot more than 100 -- I'm getting 386 for the above-replacement relievers (with no rounding). -35 wins for the below-replacement relievers. But the original fWAR values are 165 for above-replacement (with rounding to the nearest tenth) and -53.4 for below-replacement.
If that's too many wins, then I'd adjust the number of wins per run before I'd adjust the replacement-level performance bar away from 5.25 FIP (or ERA). Because to me the fundamentally important thing about replacement level is that it's the level of play that can be easily replaced. And based on performance from the 2022 season, I don't think you can easily replace a 4.25 FIP reliever. Or just generally I would relegate that to the "converting runs to wins" discussion and fall back to runs above replacement for relievers. (So maybe Pagan, for instance, is a career 3-WAR reliever instead of a 5-WAR reliever using a 5.25 FIP replacement level, but he still only has one season of 0 WAR and otherwise has had positive WAR seasons.)
The leverage topic is interesting, but I would still prefer to separate a player's value from his deployment/teammates as much as possible. If you would be the 2nd-best closer in baseball, but happen to be on the team with the best closer in baseball, I don't think you should be devalued because your leverage index is lower than it might be otherwise. Also, opportunities for high-leverage situations can be limited (or expanded) based on how the hitters perform, or how good your starting pitching is.
However, something like a non-linear value for wins-per-run could make sense for relievers, in that the best relievers would *generally* be deployed in higher-leverage situations and the worst relievers would *generally* be deployed in lower-leverage situations. This would actually be kind of interesting to implement. It would have an interesting side effect of making the rare -1 WAR reliever even more rare, because on a "typical" team, they should be deployed primarily in low leverage situations where giving up runs doesn't really translate to lost wins. But also it might make a #4/"innings eating" reliever regress from, say, 2 WAR to 1.25-1.5 WAR, but the elite relievers might go from 3 to 4 wins, or 4 to 5 wins or something.
I think this kind of non-linear value is sort of pre-baked into hitters, because the better hitters generally get to hit higher in the order, so they get more plate appearances combined with high rate statistics. Although, it might be interesting to see a system where your "time played" is based just on games played, and your plate appearances are inferred from your games played and your rate statistics, because (although it's probably a small effect and generally only impacts a few players) you can wind up getting more or fewer plate appearances depending on the performance of your teammates.
One thing that's interesting from a "zero-sum" standpoint, is that if we know that better relievers are deployed in higher-leverage situations, and we're giving them credit for that, then should there be a sliding scale for a per-inning replacement level for starting pitchers? The difference between a starter going 7 innings or 9 innings is generally not that important, because if the game is close, you typically have some great relievers to pitch the 8th and 9th innings. But the difference between going 5 innings and 7 innings could be really huge, because when you get to the 3rd, 4th, 5th guys in your bullpen (especially since injuries happen and they are probably more like the 3rd, 5th, and 7th guys in your bullpen), you're a lot more likely to give up runs.
That is, when you are in the first, say, three innings of your start, it definitely makes sense to compare you only to starting pitchers. But the deeper you are into the game, the more it makes sense to compare you not just to a starting pitcher, but to the relief pitchers who can come in for you. At say, a 3.75 ERA, going 9 innings for 7 games likely isn't as valuable as going 7 innings for 9 games.
I'm at a CPA conference today. There are more 70 year olds than 40 year olds here. They are complaining that no one is joining the profession since they started requiring 150 college credits (instead of 120) to take the CPA exam.
How can CPAs be so dumb when it comes to supply and demand?
They made us all download an app and scan a QR code to check in to each session. I'm pretty sure it has taken more hours for the workers to help with the app than it would have taken to manually check people in. These are people that still haven't silenced their phones and it is 3pm.
Heh heh -- and every time our Tech department still has a percentage of developers who fall for the internal security's periodic phishing emails.
Even aside from increasing the requirement for the number of college credits, how many 70-year-old CPAs were there 25 years ago? 45 years ago? The world only needs so many CPAs (or members of any profession) -- the more 70-year-old CPAs you have, the fewer openings there are going to be for new CPAs.
Yes. And they'll all drop at once with no one to step in for them.
And they'll be hired back at a big premiums to fill their own vacancies
We heard "Heat Waves" on the radio yesterday, and Honest Abe said, "This is the other Kyle, not Farmer's, song" so he'll always have that going for him
Last night I learned about Immaculate Grid. A daily game where you have 9 guesses to find 9 baseball players who fit in the grid. This will definitely be a new daily game for me.
I was pretty happy getting a 7 for my first attempt.
I don't think I can come up with more than a few players on Arizona. I got a five.
8 for 9. Apparently Octavio Dotel was never a snake. I was among the 0.01% to list Gary Gentry for Atlanta/Met and i got Billy Beane's great white whale
I've been playing for a week now, best was 8 for 9.
I just learned this today talking to another friend - it's not "Did [X] while on [Y]/Did [X] and [Y] in the same season". It's 'Did [X] . Was on [Y]. /Did [X] at least once, did [Y] at least once. Maybe both at the same time, maybe not"
For example, it tested today's 100+ RBI/Gold Glove answer (bottom right) and found that
DJ LeMahieu is a valid answer. He won a GG in 14, 17, 18, and 22, but his only 100+ RBI season was 2019.
I think team and activity have to be simultaneous. I had a 100+ rbi guy who did it for a different team and got it wrong.
If a cell is for a team and an award, the player you select must have won that award while on that team
If a cell is for a team and a season stat, the player you select must have recorded that stat while on that team
Based on that text, I would've expected stat and award required the player to earn that award the same season as satisfying the stat.
You guys make the weekly post.
A weekly games post maybe. Wordle and Immaculate Grid. Or any other games.
The way the team is playing currently, I'd just feel bad for Luis hitting and subsequently not scoring.
Still, he's back over .400. That would be pretty sweet.
That's awesome!
I believe I am on record as never liking the trade. I held my nose and swallowed the medicine but I want to regurgitate it more and more every day.
League bullpen stats for perspective. In this crazy world where teams carry 8 relievers, there are only an average of 6 qualified relievers per team.
Keeping in mind that we need 240 relievers in the whole league, the 120th-best ERA for qualified relievers is 3.98.
Also, fWAR for relievers seems way off base to me. There are currently only 134 qualified relievers with a positive fWAR. Where are the innings coming from actual above-replacement relief pitchers?
I copied in a bunch of the fangraphs data and had a little data party. In 2022, pitchers classified as relievers threw 17,998 innings. Depending on how exactly fangraphs filters that, it might include some innings as starters, but by and large it's right (there aren't any bizarre-for-2022 cases of relievers going over 100 IP or something.) So each team basically needs 600 innings from the bullpen, or 75 innings from each of 8 guys spread evenly, if you had some kind of mythical perfect 8-man-always-healthy egalitarian bullpen.
To get to 240 relievers in the league, you have to set the IP cutoff to 35 innings pitched. That itself is way short of the 75 innings each team basically needs from a reliever, but it goes to show how much these guys get shuffled up and down between injuries and the whims of management.
If you order by innings pitched and plot IP versus rolling ERA, you see a general pattern that pitchers with more innings pitched have lower ERAs than pitchers with fewer innings pitched. So while there are some outliers of good pitchers who got injured, by and large, teams allocate their resources efficiently and have the better pitchers pitch more innings.
So then if you sort by innings pitched and look at those bottom 2,250 innings pitched, the ERA is 5.41. If you look at 250 innings pitched above and below the cutoff, you get an ERA of 5.29. Probably we should leave out the extreme tail end of things, so I'm putting forth that a 5.29 ERA is a reasonable replacement level for relief pitchers.
But if you look at the qualified relievers that are at replacement level, it is clear that fangraphs is setting a replacement-level FIP (which is on the same scale as ERA) at about 4.25. What seems most shocking to me about this is that the average ERA for all innings pitched by relievers in 2022 was 3.84. It doesn't really make any rational sense to me that replacement level would be that close to average.
So basically what I'm saying is that fangraphs is setting the replacement-level for relief pitchers at something like an entire run per nine innings too low. This has a drastic effect on WAR for basically all relievers, but it can especially change your view of relievers who might be near that 4.25-5.25 FIP or ERA range.
One of the important things about measuring versus replacement level is the value of being average. It used to be talked about more when replacement level was a new-ish concept 15-20 years ago, but these days 'R' is mostly just the last letter of WAR. Measuring someone's value versus average really underrated the player who could produce at an average level and stay healthy all season.
Adjusting for this different replacement level adds about 1 win to someone who pitches 72 innings in a season and 0.5 win for someone pitching 36 innings.
How do Manfred Man innings affect this?
My understanding was that the international runner doesn't count toward anyone's ERA -- it certainly doesn't count towards anyone's FIP.
Ultimately this comes back to Emilio Pagan, because doesn't everything about the 2023 Twins come back to Emilio Pagan?
Fans ask questions like, "why would the Twins sign Pagan to a $3.5M contract when I've seen him blow the lead so many times?" Or alternatively, "if I look at this guy's fangraphs page it shows that he's been at or below replacement level for the three years leading up to 2023, and 4 of his 6 years in the majors leading up to 2023 -- why do the Twins feel it is necessary to keep Pagan rather than rummage through the discount bin of minimum-contract players?"
And the answer just turns out to be that it's actually hard to find relief pitchers to throw 60+ innings these days, and fangraphs has a totally unrealistic replacement level for relief pitchers. If you change replacement level from a 4.25 FIP to a 5.25 FIP, Pagan has no years where he's below replacement level and one year where he's at replacement level (2021). It changes his career fWAR from 2.1 to 5.4.
It's not that teams are totally irrational -- Pagan doesn't have 362 career IP completely on hopes and dreams -- he keeps getting innings because very few relief pitchers can consistently throw better and stay healthy. Teams need innings and there aren't 240 guys better than Pagan, not even close.
It would be cool if fangraphs would update their relief pitching replacement level to something more rational, since I'd rather not have to roll my own (and I assume they account for park factors, which I've not done here.) I'm not even being as extreme as ordering the pitchers from worst to best by ERA and taking the 12.5th-percentile (representing roughly the borderline between the 7th and 8th pitcher in the bullpen), which would give you a replacement level of 5.64.
I haven't taken the time to read any of the Twins Daily for quite a while, and I certainly haven't given any time to Twins Daily Community, but there was one headline in my email where someone proposed the Top 5 Twins at each position, and I was shocked to see He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named the #5 reliever (ahead of so many better representitives) -- I'd take a half dozen Pagán's over him.
Some extremely quick searching for Tango's site doesn't show anything for reliever replacement level. He did recently post his side of a conversation with Bill James about WAR. There was this quote:
I recall BR and FG settled on 1000 wins per season, so that's 100 wins for relievers. Does the positive side sum up to more than 100?
Oh yeah, it sums up to a lot more than 100 -- I'm getting 386 for the above-replacement relievers (with no rounding). -35 wins for the below-replacement relievers. But the original fWAR values are 165 for above-replacement (with rounding to the nearest tenth) and -53.4 for below-replacement.
If that's too many wins, then I'd adjust the number of wins per run before I'd adjust the replacement-level performance bar away from 5.25 FIP (or ERA). Because to me the fundamentally important thing about replacement level is that it's the level of play that can be easily replaced. And based on performance from the 2022 season, I don't think you can easily replace a 4.25 FIP reliever. Or just generally I would relegate that to the "converting runs to wins" discussion and fall back to runs above replacement for relievers. (So maybe Pagan, for instance, is a career 3-WAR reliever instead of a 5-WAR reliever using a 5.25 FIP replacement level, but he still only has one season of 0 WAR and otherwise has had positive WAR seasons.)
The leverage topic is interesting, but I would still prefer to separate a player's value from his deployment/teammates as much as possible. If you would be the 2nd-best closer in baseball, but happen to be on the team with the best closer in baseball, I don't think you should be devalued because your leverage index is lower than it might be otherwise. Also, opportunities for high-leverage situations can be limited (or expanded) based on how the hitters perform, or how good your starting pitching is.
However, something like a non-linear value for wins-per-run could make sense for relievers, in that the best relievers would *generally* be deployed in higher-leverage situations and the worst relievers would *generally* be deployed in lower-leverage situations. This would actually be kind of interesting to implement. It would have an interesting side effect of making the rare -1 WAR reliever even more rare, because on a "typical" team, they should be deployed primarily in low leverage situations where giving up runs doesn't really translate to lost wins. But also it might make a #4/"innings eating" reliever regress from, say, 2 WAR to 1.25-1.5 WAR, but the elite relievers might go from 3 to 4 wins, or 4 to 5 wins or something.
I think this kind of non-linear value is sort of pre-baked into hitters, because the better hitters generally get to hit higher in the order, so they get more plate appearances combined with high rate statistics. Although, it might be interesting to see a system where your "time played" is based just on games played, and your plate appearances are inferred from your games played and your rate statistics, because (although it's probably a small effect and generally only impacts a few players) you can wind up getting more or fewer plate appearances depending on the performance of your teammates.
One thing that's interesting from a "zero-sum" standpoint, is that if we know that better relievers are deployed in higher-leverage situations, and we're giving them credit for that, then should there be a sliding scale for a per-inning replacement level for starting pitchers? The difference between a starter going 7 innings or 9 innings is generally not that important, because if the game is close, you typically have some great relievers to pitch the 8th and 9th innings. But the difference between going 5 innings and 7 innings could be really huge, because when you get to the 3rd, 4th, 5th guys in your bullpen (especially since injuries happen and they are probably more like the 3rd, 5th, and 7th guys in your bullpen), you're a lot more likely to give up runs.
That is, when you are in the first, say, three innings of your start, it definitely makes sense to compare you only to starting pitchers. But the deeper you are into the game, the more it makes sense to compare you not just to a starting pitcher, but to the relief pitchers who can come in for you. At say, a 3.75 ERA, going 9 innings for 7 games likely isn't as valuable as going 7 innings for 9 games.
I'm at a CPA conference today. There are more 70 year olds than 40 year olds here. They are complaining that no one is joining the profession since they started requiring 150 college credits (instead of 120) to take the CPA exam.
How can CPAs be so dumb when it comes to supply and demand?
They made us all download an app and scan a QR code to check in to each session. I'm pretty sure it has taken more hours for the workers to help with the app than it would have taken to manually check people in. These are people that still haven't silenced their phones and it is 3pm.
Heh heh -- and every time our Tech department still has a percentage of developers who fall for the internal security's periodic phishing emails.
Even aside from increasing the requirement for the number of college credits, how many 70-year-old CPAs were there 25 years ago? 45 years ago? The world only needs so many CPAs (or members of any profession) -- the more 70-year-old CPAs you have, the fewer openings there are going to be for new CPAs.
Yes. And they'll all drop at once with no one to step in for them.
And they'll be hired back at a big premiums to fill their own vacancies
you were fun , Kyle Garlick
We heard "Heat Waves" on the radio yesterday, and Honest Abe said, "This is the other Kyle, not Farmer's, song" so he'll always have that going for him
Last night I learned about Immaculate Grid. A daily game where you have 9 guesses to find 9 baseball players who fit in the grid. This will definitely be a new daily game for me.
I was pretty happy getting a 7 for my first attempt.
I don't think I can come up with more than a few players on Arizona. I got a five.
The two I left blank were AZ ones too.
I shared the bottom right with you.
I've been playing for a week now, best was 8 for 9.
I just learned this today talking to another friend - it's not "Did [X] while on [Y]/Did [X] and [Y] in the same season". It's 'Did [X] . Was on [Y]. /Did [X] at least once, did [Y] at least once. Maybe both at the same time, maybe not"
For example, it tested today's 100+ RBI/Gold Glove answer (bottom right) and found that
I think team and activity have to be simultaneous. I had a 100+ rbi guy who did it for a different team and got it wrong.
Based on that text, I would've expected stat and award required the player to earn that award the same season as satisfying the stat.
You guys make the weekly post.
A weekly games post maybe. Wordle and Immaculate Grid. Or any other games.
i can dig it.
8/9