International signings

[Major League Ready]

 

The first couple of years after the CBA I was all about taking the high road and staying within the spending cap. Once you have this many teams ignoring the cap you have to rethink your position. Ethics are great to have, but putting yourself disadvantage to follow a rule the rest of the league does not care about is not wise. I thought this was the year to spend big since we would not have to compete against a lot of the big market teams. The Twins thought otherwise.

It looks like a big missed opportunity to me and could be seen at the ownership being cheap. As much as I'd like to jump the Twin's ass and get mad about it, I just can't do it. The Twins have had too much success in International free agency and I see the results on the field every day. Due to that success I'm going to have to assume they know more about this than me. Perhaps giving multi-million dollar contracts to sixteen year olds (excluding obvious elite talent e.g. Sano) is not a good idea since you have to project so far into the future.

 

A couple years ago I was curious and took the top 20 International signings of all time and documented their status/performance.  I posted that document here.   The results were very poor.  Its hard to draw a conclusion from a group of 20 but I came away thinking I would very rarely consider the top dollar International prospects.   It looked to me like a much better strategy was to take (4) $1M prospects instead of (1) $4M prospect.