Three Bagger: Darvish, Marte & Otani

I count myself on the optimistic side of this offseason and go along with the first two sentences, but boy, I'm not sure I see this ownership as quite so hands-off.

 

It's probably a given that any franchise has ownership sign off when the contract is above a certain total value; franchises will vary on what that threshold is, and how close to a rubber stamp the process is.

 

Chances are that our ownership has a relatively low threshold, and that they look through the due-diligence in very careful detail.

I'm sure they have final yay/nay input but I haven't seen any evidence they really get involved with contractual matters.

They better not if they want to field a winning baseball team. Leave the roster decisions to the people who know how to build rosters. Of course, if there's a PR conflict of some kind, then maybe you get involved but that's not the case here.

Anyway, I'd put the Twins chances of signing Darvish very low but I don't think the Pohlads will be the people making that decision. It'll likely come from Falvey and Levine, as it should.

But, for all we know, they have zero interest in actually signing Darvish. We really have no baseline for how those two plan to operate a baseball franchise. We can evaluate their Cleveland/Texas moves but even then, we don't know which decisions were theirs and which came from their bosses.

This is not even remotely close to being true. If you look at ALL of Nishioka's stats then you would see that he was a very good Japanese player that would project as a borderline starter or bench player. And that is what the Twins paid for him. If he was the star that you say he was then they wouldn't have signed him so cheap. 

Otani is an absolute star in the Japanese league. He is possibly the best pitcher that has come to the US. Better than or equal to Darvish, Tanaka or Matsuzaka. Whoever signs him is getting an absolute steal.

Yeah, there was a ton of concern and discussion about Nishioka's ability to play in MLB at all, much less at short.

You can look at the year preceding his move to MLB and say he was a great player but you're ignoring how much better he was in that single season than he was previously in his career.

50 games a year doesn't equal 4/5 games. I have doubts about his hitting ability also but I think it is unlikely that he is DH'ing much after 2-3 years so I am willing to put up with the experiment for a year or two if that means landing him for 6 cost controlled seasons.

There are certainly doubts about Ohtani's ability to hit MLB pitching but Nishioka comparisons should be tossed out the window.

Nishioka was a slap hitter who played in a league where artificial turf is common.

Nishioka came to the US after his age 25 season.

Nishioka never hit for power.

Nishioka was coming off a season where he OPSed .080 higher than any previous season.

I don't see a lot to compare between the two, any more than I'd judge Buxton's ceiling based on Ben Revere's career because they're both black and play centerfield.