Over the Baggy

After a slow start in the season’s opening week, Joe Mauer was once again cracking line drives – right on schedule – but has more recently found himself in one of the worst stretches of offensive baseball of his career and quite possibly the worst since he was a fetus.

Pardon the arbitrary endpoints, from April 6 to April 20, Mauer had collected 18 hits in 35 at bats (a whopping .514 batting average). In that time, the Twins catcher was blistering the baseball ...

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Catcher framing is extremely popular in baseball research circles right now. Go over to Fangraphs.com or BaseballProspectus.com and you will find several studies and articles on the subject. It’s Hansel hot right now.

While we can determine which catchers are better at getting more out-of-zone pitches called strikes than others, we still do not have a full grasp on what it means to a team’s bottom line. In some ways, it feels like a butterfly effect. If ...

Updated 04-17-2013 at 02:05 PM by Kevin

Tags: catcher framing, joe mauer, low strike

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Technology is amazing, isn’t it?

Sure, we’re missing the flying cars, moon colonies and hover boards but the fact that we all basically carry around personal computers/television sets that can make phone calls in our pocket is pretty mind-blowing.

Baseball, while it may seem archaic with the bats made from trees and game play which doesn’t involve a time clock, is actually progressive and embracive of new technologies off the field. Not long ...

Tags: baseball america, hit f/x, joe mauer, josh willingham, matt eddy, minnesota twins

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Joe Mauer hit just one infield fly ball all year making his 1.0% infield fly rate the second lowest in all of baseball. That’s a significant increase over his totals last year when he did not hit a single fly ball to anyone in the infield. See, there is still plenty of reason to boo him.

Mauer is often credited with having the perfect swing, and the fact that he is not popping pitches up to the second baseman is telling how square he hits the ball. That said ...

Tags: denard span, joe mauer, justin morneau, scott diamond

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Joe Mauer’s noble effort to obtain his fourth batting title was thwarted when those cyborgs known as Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout were unrelenting.

That notwithstanding, this has been an outstanding rebound season for the Twins catcher.

Considering the slow start by his standards, his .320 average heading into the last day of the season is impressive nonetheless. At the beginning of May, his average was down to .270 before he checked into the ...

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Concerns over Joe Mauer’s defense has grown exponentially as the number of opposing kleptomaniacs have continued to accumulate more and more bases.

A one-time Florida State quarterback recruit, earlier in his career Mauer had thwarted over 30% of would-be base-stealers but has seen that number drop to league average as injuries and age have taken a toll on him. This year, however, that rate has dropped to a league-worst six percent – stopping just three runners with his own arm. What’s ...

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Each spring fans are entertained by non-news news from the southern camps in Florida relating to how great of shape a player is in, how re-dedicated they are, etc, etc. Early February brings a lot of "I feel great" moments from players who were injured the previous season and, of course, wealthy catcher Joe Mauer is one such player who draws this kind of attention from the media.

In January, right around TwinsFest when Mauer made a quick circuit of local appearances, reports spread that the catcher had put on nearly 30 pounds ...

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