You have to be kidding me! Gut is the best pitching prospect for the Twins…better than Swarzak, Hunt, anybody. We could get buy back Santana if we wanted to trade Gut. This is a really stupid idea!

We have a surplus of guys who, at best, project as #3 guys in the rotation. Perkins, Blackburn, Swarzak, Mulvey, Manship, etc. These guys have value, but we’re not going to a 7 man rotation…

I’m guessing two players gets it done.

In all fairness they’ve been a little unlucky as well … BABIP = .226 … which would also rank last in MLB.

I just looked them up on FanGraphs, and I’m not entirely sure that they actually are unlucky. In addition to the lowest BABIP in the league, they also have the lowest line drive rate. As of today, that shows up at .233 BABIP and 12.7% LD. You generally expect BABIP to be LD%+.120, which brings them to a still-wretched .247, which would give them an extra three hits. Beyond that, they have the third-highest infield fly rate and the sixth-lowest HR/FB – they hit a lot of balls that are caught in the air.

From an individual perspective, Tolbert has a BABIP of .227, but his LD% is a shade under 10%, so he’s at just about what you’d expect. Casilla looks like he might have been unlucky (.222 BABIP, 14.7% LD), but he has a ridiculous 24% infield fly rate, so I don’t know that it’s really luck – pop-ups are probably the least-likely balls in play to become hits (NOTE: does not apply to outfield flies to Nyjer Morgan at the Metrodome).

I’d guess the percentage of IFFB that become hits is pretty much zero, so I’m wondering if outliers like Casilla present a limitation of the “LD%+.120” guideline. I’m guessing that "LD% + ((120+LgAvgIFFB%)-IFFB%) would be more accurate for guys who pop the ball up especially frequently or rarely.

Joe Mauer has an IFFB% of 0, which I believe is further evidence that he is not fully human.

Swarzak is a mid-rotation starter. That’s his upside. Robertson is a number 2 or a number 1. Think Liriano with better control. I don’t know if I would trade Robertson for Sanchez straight up.

Makes sense to me.

But it didn’t require surgery—just rest. Meanwhile, he’s a big strong 21-year-old lefthander with a 55% GB% and a 16% K percentage. He’s my third-best pitching prospect in the org (behind Gutierrez and Gibson). Swarzak is good, but he doesn’t have the upside of Robertson. Absent that upside, a young pitcher is not likely to break into the rotation for the Twins in two or three years.

He looked pretty good when he played here earlier in the week. His UZR/150 numbers are all over the map in his career. If you normalize them, he’s an average defender range wise. But he’s good around the bag and has a great arm. So I’d rate him an above average second baseman defensively. No other second baseman fits this team better than Sanchez offensively.

I see a lot of fluctuation in UZR across the league, except among elite defenders. It would be interesting to find out why in general.

One hypothesis is that it gets worse with worse pitching and better with better pitching. It’s a lot easier to defend if your pitcher is executing on his pitches. For example, if the pitch is called on the outside part of the plate for a right-handed batter, you’re thinking the hitter is more likely to shoot the ball the other way. As a second baseman, you can prepare for that first step if you know the pitcher will execute the pitch as called. If a pitcher is all over the place, it’s tougher to get a good first step. To test this hypothesis, you could just overlay a player’s UZR against team xFIP and see if there’s a correlation year to year. It would be pretty crude, but it might point to a reason..

ubelmann had a post over at SBG last week pointing out that second basemen and shortstops appear to have fairly strong effects on each other’s defensive stats. For example, both Derek Jeter and Michael Young saw their defensive numbers go way up after Alfonso Soriano (a notorious defensive butcher at second) departed, and Ian Kinsler’s numbers at second improved after Young (who was also terrible, just not quite as terrible as being next to Soriano made him look) was moved from short to third.

… and, after I wrote that paragraph, I realized that Jack Wilson’s been a fixture at short for the Bucs for about a half a decade now – that’s probably not it (although it might still be interesting to check whether Wilson’s UZR correlates at all with Sanchez’s.