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Following a season in which the Twins finally turned the corner and set their long-awaited contention blueprint into motion, the lack of aggressiveness on the market this winter has left many fans scratching their heads. An article by Jack Moore for Baseball Prospectus this week discussing Minnesota's misapplied label as a "small market" rankled plenty of folks, as evidenced by the nine pages of discussion on the topic in our forums.
Personally, while I have been critical of the front office's timid approach at times in the past, I'm not too riled up by the sparsity of moves, for a couple of reasons.
For one thing, there was Park's posting fee. At $12.85 million, it was very large, in the contexts of both this organization's past and the Korean market standards. While you might not technically construe this as a payroll expense, for all intents and purposes it is. They spent many millions of dollars to add immediate talent to the major-league roster.
So if you prorate that money over the four years of Park's contract, the 2016 payroll figure jumps to about the exact same level it was at a year ago. That number ranked the Twins 18th in baseball last season, and while it might rank a bit lower this time around, it'll still be fairly close to the middle of the pack. It's not unreasonable for a club that falls on the lower end of the mid-market category in terms of revenue.
The other thing is that the Twins seem to be committing to a more youth-focused approach. While it's difficult to have absolute confidence in the present bullpen array, I'd much rather allow the younger internal options to take jobs and run with them, as opposed to seeing them blocked by mediocrities like Tim Stauffer. Last year, he came in and had just about the worst spring you could possibly imagine, but still made the club and received a relatively long leash, on the basis of his guaranteed contract and veteran status. No more of that.
But while we're on the subject, let's talk about Stauffer for a moment. Last offseason, he was Minnesota's most expensive bullpen addition, with his $2.2 million commitment ranking as the 23rd-largest given to a free agent relief pitcher by an MLB club (per MLB Trade Rumors).
There is a "you get what you pay for" dynamic in play here. Nearly every reliever who signed a bigger deal than Stauffer last offseason performed better than he did. Given that the Twins missed the playoffs by only a few games, and given that Stauffer performed miserably almost literally every time he took the mound, you could certainly argue that aiming a little higher with their veteran bullpen upgrade might have made a big difference.
But instead of aiming higher here in an offseason where the bullpen is an obvious area of need, the Twins haven't so much as set their sights, at least not with any urgent intention of pulling the trigger.
We're getting the same explanatory arguments as usual: Terry Ryan and the Twins simply don't like any of the free agents that much. Tony Sipp? Too many years. Antonio Bastardo? Overpaid. This is about evaluation, not spending. It's a line that's being echoed by media members.
But of course this overlooks the fact that, so many times in the past, those players that the Twins "haven't liked" ended up having successful seasons in which they could have been difference-makers for the club. Meanwhile, many of the players that they liked enough to sign, who invariably ended up being on the second or third tier in terms of monetary commitments, panned out as poor investments.
These payroll arguments that come up every year (usually around this time) are tedious and frustrating in part because they become so repetitive but even more so because people on opposite sides tend to cling to outrageous extremes.
The fact that the team isn't spending aggressively and adding big contracts does not necessarily indicate a lack of desire to win, nor is it a surefire sign that ownership is interested only in hoarding cash.
At the same time, nobody is arguing that the Twins should "spend money just to spend money," and to dismiss the reality that it costs more to acquire more established and coveted players is ridiculous.
So if we're going to have these discussions, let's at least try to be reasonable and realistic. I'm on board with what the Twins seem to be doing, but I'm also running out of patience with watching the same conservative strategies come up short. If the front office's decision to eschew the open market and look inward while their competitors pile up relief talent backfires, there needs to be some accountability.
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