Friday, August 14, 2015

Notes, quotes and comment

Catching up on a few items from the past week:

Mike Berardino of the Pioneer Press had this piece on Kurt Suzuki's skepticism about pitch-framing stats. The Twins catcher had so much skepticism about sabermetric evaluation that Berardino couldn't fit it all into that story and spilled it over into this blog post.

And you know what? I don't care that Suzuki hasn't read up on WAR or walked through the math that insists that the very best players (Mike Trout for example) account for only a handful of wins. That's essentially useless information for a player. It will matter if he harbors ambitions of someday having a baseball job that involves player evaluation, but for what he's doing now, it's immaterial.

---

Lynn Henning of the Detroit News had this analysis of the challenges facing the Tigers' new general manager, Al Avila.

Noteworthy in my eyes is his assertion about who would replace Brad Ausmus as manager should Avila make a change:

The expectation would be Avila and owner Mike Ilitch will opt for 57-year-old Ron Gardenhire, the former Twins general who wants to manage again, and who knows the division intimately.
Gardy would certainly (as Henning says in the piece) represent a return to the old-school approach to managing -- more seat-of-the-pants, less use of analytics. It would certainly run counter to the overall trend.

---

Josmil Pinto, sidelined for much of the season with concussion issues, is playing again. He's getting some at-bats as a designated hitter in the Gulf Coast League, the Twins' lowest stateside affiliate, and he's not expected to get behind the plate again this year.

I don't expect to see him in the majors this year.

No comments:

Post a Comment