Five Takeaways for the 2021 Twins

I would cautiously add Rooker to that list as a promise to come. He is hitting well at this point. If he can keep the K's down, he would be a valuable DH/OF.

Takeaway #6. The Twins were not prepared to play this year. To have the manager say mid-season that they need to work on fundamentals and get back to playing fundamentally sound baseball, especially after winning 2 consecutive division titles really chaps my backside. What the heck were you working on, walk-up tunes and interviews?

Great list.

Agree with most of this article. I would add a couple things.

1. The front office needs to do a better job of evaluating talent. Biggest questionmark is keeping a hopeless/hapless Jake Cave over a Akil Baddoo. Baddoo hitting .275 for the Tigers would be the best hitting outfielder on the Twins roster with Buxton on the sidelines. As highly touted as Baddoo was, how can anyone let him slip away in the rule 5 while holding onto to Jake Cave who has gotten worse every year since he started his career in 2018.

2. Waiting until the end of Free Agency to sign players, particularly Pitchers that you NEED is not a winning formula. If Terry Ryan taught this organization anything is that you can't go Dumpster Diving and have it make a difference. If the Pohlads say that the checkbook is open and Falvine can't get the best talent available signed then they are NOT doing their job. Start getting players in their prime instead of signing good veterans on the verge of the end of their careers hoping they still got it isn't a recipe for success. There aren't that many Nelson Cruz's out there. Quit expecting every older FA you sign to be like him. It isn't going to happen.

26 minutes ago, Dodecahedron said:

To be fair, it's easier to sit in the batter's box and swing.  Who the heck wants to chase down balls and have to run quickly around the bases?  Ugh.  That's for the birds.  Swing for the fences and pray!  The nachos in the dugout are getting cold, after all.

They got nachos?

Again with the Falvey pitching whisperer bit?  Our pitching staff is an abomination and he has developed exactly zero mlb pitchers. 
I do like the Gordon recognition 

It is just lazy to say the team wasn’t prepared to play. If the bullpen’s ERA wasn’t 5 what would the record be? And the narrative would be drastically different.

25 minutes ago, rv78 said:

1. The front office needs to do a better job of evaluating talent. Biggest questionmark is keeping a hopeless/hapless Jake Cave over a Akil Baddoo. Baddoo hitting .275 for the Tigers would be the best hitting outfielder on the Twins roster with Buxton on the sidelines. As highly touted as Baddoo was, how can anyone let him slip away in the rule 5 while holding onto to Jake Cave who has gotten worse every year since he started his career in 2018.

Bit revisionist history, yes? Baddoo was coming off a significant injury and the missing pandemic minor league year and in his last organized play year hadn't actually done anything of note (slash line of .214/.290/.393) and hadn't taken a single AB above A-ball. The decision was never "protect Cave or Baddoo"; Cave was someone who had 2 years of success at the MLB level for the Twins (and a poor pandemic year) and was well-suited to be a 4th OF...and broke his back this season. How can you let Baddoo go? Because you're betting that no team is going to be willing to keep a completely unproven player on the roster for a full season when he missed 1 1/2 seasons of development. It's the same kind of bet that they made on Miranda, and it went well. But the choice at the time was keep Baddoo or keep one of Celestino/Rortvedt, both of whom were more likely bets to be taken in the Rule 5. (backup catchers who can field and call a game can be stashed on a roster even if they can't hit, and proven defenders in CF are easier to hang onto as well because both can still add value even if they're not ready to hit at MLB)

I'm happy with Gordon's development so far and pleased to see him get the  chance with the Twins. He's never going to hit for power, but he's got a good feel for the strike zone and if he can get on base at a good clip, give speed and positional flexibility off the bench, then he'll be a nice utility option.

27 minutes ago, Linus said:

Again with the Falvey pitching whisperer bit?  Our pitching staff is an abomination and he has developed exactly zero mlb pitchers. 
I do like the Gordon recognition 

This is the winning post in this thread.  We need to once and for all end the falacy that Falvey is some kind of pitcher whisper.  He has been here 5 yrs and identified as many quality pitchers as I have - zero (at a much higher salary I would add).

The other fact is there are many folks on here who routinely criticze (and rightfully so)  this FO for there inability to evaluate their own talent.  There are constantly posts about eliminating dead weight/wood to evaluate what the team has in the wings and these guys routinely tap cast-offs and has-beens instead of our own young talent which has unfortunately sprouted in other organizations periodically (whilst I have yet to see them identify and develop any of these cast-offs).

"Trevor Larnach joined Kirilloff sooner than expected, but it’s hard to pick apart much of what he’s done this season. Even while slumping of late, the 24-year-old owns a .322 OBP and has shown plenty of power potential. He’ll run into more baseballs as his career progresses, and the discipline in the box has been a sight to behold."

Huh? Sometimes he looks, almost, as lost as Sano at the plate.

41 minutes ago, chpettit19 said:

I'd argue the Maeda trade has been an unquestioned win to this point. 

How about the Odorizzi trade?  I am more upset about Nick Anderson and Tyler Wells then Baddoo.  Baddoo had very limited playing time in the previous 2 years and had a handful of ABs above high A.  It was not exactly reckless to expect he would not get picked up or that if he would not be ready for the MLB level.   It's also easy to point to keeping Jake Cave because fans tend to be very critical of this type of role player but they are valuable to staying in contention.  

3 minutes ago, Mike Sixel said:

that was in the post he quoted.....

Nick Anderson is the biggest fail for me......

Every team passed on Miranda this year, right? Every single GM was wrong about him, it appears....

Miranda has to be the bright spot of the season.  Winder has been good but in terms of elevating a players ranking, wow!  Where doe everyone think ends up in terms of ranking?  Is he top 50 if he keeps this up the rest of the year?

3 minutes ago, gunnarthor said:

Falvey took over a team littered with an incredible nucleus of top 100 talents, that was a year removed from nearly making the playoffs. The farm system when he took over was arguably in better shape than it is now.

But the question is what do we want from him. The answer was simple - he was hired to recreate the Twins pitching pipeline that they relied on through 01-10. He hasn't done that yet.

I would argue he has created the pipeline.  Balazovic / Duran / Canterino / Ryan / Ober / Winder / Enlow / Sands / Ober / Strotman / Valimont / Varland.  I would say the 1st 10 have  good shot at being MLB starting pitchers.  Valimont and Varland are too far off to tell.  That's a better pitching pipeline than when Falvey got here in my opinion.  You seem to be saying he has not created MLB players yet which is true.  The difference is that the pipeline he inherited produced very little.  It's going to take another couple of years to compare the current regime in terms of developing a pitching pipeline.\

BTW ... There might be 2 or even 3 more guys added to that list in the next 24 hours and 13 minutes.

9 minutes ago, Mike Sixel said:

around 75 I'd guess. His defense is still a question for sure. 

I have watched 7 or 8 games now but he has been at 1st for half the games.  He looked good at 3B in the limited number of plays I have seen but you make a good point.  He is going to rank quite a bit higher if he projects to stick at 3B although I don't mind the flexibility of him being able to play 3 infield positions.

Larnach is not as good as any one who came before him, slow afoot with a weak arm -- IF, if Kirilloff and Rooker do not turn into flash in the pan rookies as Cave did, they have a good future.

Willie Mays Hays Gordon is Willie Mays Hays Gordon, they can use him as Kansas City did in the past, a quick base runner when needed.

I do not know what happened to Simmons batting, but watch he lets SO MANY down the pipe go by without swinging makes me think he has vision problems but without his fielding ability the Tw(ins  will be in a world of hurt and NO ONE they have is even close to as good at that.

The more raw rookie the replacement outfielders were, the more like raw rookies the looked like; keep Refsnyder and Garlick and get rid of Cave. (Trade him to Detroit for Grossman.?

Pitching, sell , trade or dump all but Maeda, keep Pineda and shoot craps, cannot be worse than this year.

Biggest takeaway of this year just may be the blockbuster Berrios trade. New post at mlbtraderumors sounds like the offers on the table are exceeding expectations. We can only hope for a best case scenario and we may have come upon one. Multiple teams, bidding war. It all sounds like a perfect storm. Oh boy. I'm a little nervous. And maybe excited. Not sure.

No doubt the free agents were not good but a lot of people here speak as if the FO failed to bring in the right guys.  Who were the right guys?

Were we going to get Wainwright away from STL?

James Paxton pitched 1 inning

Garret Richards’s ERA is 5.15

Drew Smyly has been decent with a 4.3 ERA but he certainly would not have made a difference

Corey Kluber pitched 50 innings and is now on the 60 day IL

Charlie Morton has been good but his geographic preference is well known so that was not going to happen.

Mike Minor has an ERA of 5.32

Jake Odorizzi has been decent with an ERA of 4.3 but how much difference would he have made.

The guy I wanted (Taijuan Walker) has been great but I got no support here when I floated him as a good option.

We could have traded for Blake Snell like so many here insisted was a no brainer.  We could have given up a bunch of prospects for a near replacement level player.  We could have traded for Darvish.  He was great the first couple months but he has given up 16 runs in his last 20 innings.  We would still be talking about a horrible season even with Darvish so there is a lot more to this failure than our free agents SPs, one of which was a $2M depth play.