What Do Early Moves Across MLB Tell Us About the Twins and Their Capabilities?

6 minutes ago, sweetmusicviola16 said:

Other than dumping salary what do we actually gain by trading Paddock? A minor league flyer that we don't need? For 7.5 mil this is one of the lowest risks on the team. I would gamble with him and move him in late July.  You never know he may give you 20 starts and 115 quality IP. If things are so tight for our ownership group that we have to be at 130mil instead of 140 mil then the Pohlads shouldn't be owning a team at all. Just my 2 cents on the trading of Paddock and Castro. Might even apply to Vazquez as well.

It's not my money so as far as I'm concerned the payroll should 160+ million. But everything I've seen is that the Pohlads say it has to be 130ish. So, what is gained by trading him is that it gets you to your payroll mark. That's not exciting or encouraging for us fans, but it's important for the people whose jobs it is to hit their payroll mark. No, they wouldn't bring back anything more than a low-level flier, but this is the situation they've placed themselves in. Or the Pohlads have depending on what your belief is on what Falvey knew about future payrolls when he signed Buxton, Correa, and Lopez to their deals.

10 minutes ago, bean5302 said:

You mean like all those innings Paddack pitched? Boyd has huge upside. Paddack does not. 

I provided the innings they've each pitched. Paddack has thrown more since 2019 than Boyd has. Huge upside based on 40 innings? He's 34 and has never performed like that over a full season. You're arguing that a 34-year-old who hasn't thrown a full season's worth of innings in 6 seasons has huge upside despite him never having done it even when he was younger. Yeah, sorry, going to go ahead and disagree with that. His 10.4 K/9 is the 2nd highest of his career. At age 33. And, again, it was in 8 starts and 39.2 innings. Nothing about his career says that's sustainable over a full season. Nothing. In 2019 he had a complete outlier of a season with an 11.6 K/9 but still a 4.56 ERA and 4.32 FIP. Other than that he was a 7.5 to 8.5 K/9 pitcher. Do you have a lot of other pitchers you can tell us about who went from 8 K/9 to 10.5 in their mid-30s after missing the majority of 6 straight seasons?

None of that is to say Paddack has huge upside. But Boyd doesn't either. It's why they're comparable.

28 minutes ago, Doctor Gast said:

That's probably the same attitude that Falvey has & he doesn't give trading Dobnak a thought, he's just an albatross around our necks. It's easier to trade players we need to obtain players we don't so we don't have to use redundant prospects to help unbloat our farm system. We can easily move redundant prospects (players) capital to move Dobnak. A team like CO could use him, if incentivized they could take him on. LAD didn't even in any way want Margot but took him to acquire Glasnow. So what purpose am I defeating? Saving $4M? Trading away redundant prospects/ players that a different team needs?  Is anybody coming knocking on the door for Dobnak with $4M price tag? no. Can we be actively creative to come up with a trade that is mutually beneficial? the answer is yes. The choice is do we want to be active or passive? So far Falvey chooses to be passive. Passive you are left behind.

First off, there's no such thing as a redundant prospect. Prospects fail at far too high a rate to think the Twins, or any team, have redundant prospects. If the Twins had redundant prospects they wouldn't need to worry about anything because they'd winning constantly by just replacing each injured or struggling player with the next prospect sitting around waiting to succeed because they have so many redundant prospects. People have been talking about log jams and too many infielders and outfielders around here for years. It wasn't true then and it isn't true now. There's no such thing as a bloated farm system. Moving prospects just to clear Dobnak's 3 mil off the payroll this year is an awful idea.

Second, Dobnak isn't a major league quality player. Colorado couldn't use him. Could they be "incentivized?" Sure, by giving them a legitimate prospect. Trading a legitimate prospect to get off 1 year of Dobnak's contract is horrible asset management. Giving up legitimate prospects to save money you can't spend on legitimate help for the 2025 team defeats the purpose of trading Dobnak because all you've accomplished is weakening the system without improving anything. Margot is a bad player, but still better than Dobnak, and who's the Glasnow type player the Twins are trading away with Dobnak in this scenario? You keep talking about not breaking up the core of the team, but now they're attaching somebody of that caliber to Dobnak just to get out of the "albatross" that is his 3 million in 2025? A Glasnow level prospect is Jenkins, Rodriguez, or Keaschall. You dropping a top-100 prospect to save 3 mil in 2025? That's the kind of proactive creative you want Falvey to be? The Twins need their prospects. They're their life blood. Should they never trade them? Of course not. But are they overflowing with them so much that they should be moving them to drop 3 mil of a non-MLB caliber pitcher? Absolutely not. Paying a prospect premium to get out from the last year of Dobnak's deal would be awful asset management. What a waste of a prospect.

17 minutes ago, Doctor Gast said:

A worthless player on one team can be an asset on another. I won't debate who's better Dobnak or Margot. Dobnak fits into their ballpark. Is he going to light the world on fire? probably not but he can be an asset. What you are saying is ridiculous. We are not offering a Jenkins or any other high prospect just to unload Dobnak in a minor deal. Dobnak is insignificant to us as we are blessed with a few SPs better than him yet an unfortunate budget deficit & CO has poor SP depth and GB pitcher fits better in Coors. 

I agree with you that the farm is the life blood. But I prefer quality over quantity. That means very good player evaluation, drafting & development. I strongly disagree with you that no prospect (or player) is redundant & should not be traded. The great majority of MiLBers never make it to the MLB & even less when hoarded (that's why we have the Rule 5 draft). Each team has different needs, One of our needs is overcoming a budget crunch. And that means moving a trade value difference lotto ticket in order to take $3M off the books w/o trading a player we need, then so be it. I can't understand why you want to keep an insignificant lotto ticket difference & willing to trade a needed player to try to resolve our over-budget.  

Good ground ball pitchers fit well everywhere. The key word there is GOOD. Dobnak is not good. He's not an asset just because you want him to be. The Twins can't call Colorado and tell them they should have groundball pitchers so take a non-MLB caliber pitcher for 3 million and have them just say "ok." No, we wouldn't offer Jenkins with Dobnak, but the Rockies wouldn't buy a nothing prospect for 3 million. That's the point. You had to dig for Glasnow and Margot to prove your point but you think the Twins can just dump Dobnak with some random minor leaguer to get out of 3 million. It took Glasnow to get rid of Margot in your example, but it takes a random minor leaguer to dump Dobnak? Nonsense. That's not how it works. If the Rockies wanted Dobnak for 3 million they could've taken him multiple times over the last couple years when the Twins have DFA'd him and worked out a deal. They didn't. Because he's not an MLB caliber pitcher and there's no prospect the Twins reasonably put with him that the Rockies would want for 3 million. $3 million buys you a late first round draft pick. That's the level of prospect you're talking to dump Dobnak. Are you willing to trade Kaelen Culpepper or Kyle DeBarge to dump Dobnak? Cuz that's what it'd take. That's an absolutely awful trade for the Twins.

The rule 5 is a good example to prove my point. Hardly any players are taken in it, and even fewer are actually kept. 6 total prospects kept last year. Because teams aren't just overflowing with MLB talent. Guessing which player you need because the other guy at their position is going to succeed is a fools errand. Thus there's no redundant prospects. I never said prospects shouldn't be traded. In fact I actively said that wasn't the case. What I said was that in order to get out from under 3 million for Dobnak you're going to have to give up a much better prospect than would make it worth it. It wouldn't be some low-level flier lotto ticket. It would be a legit prospect. And that is awful team management. Because that prospect isn't "insignificant." Your misevaluation of Dobnak is skewing what you think he's worth. No team would put him on their 26-man roster. He had a nearly 1.5 WHIP in AAA last year after having a 1.65 WHIP the year before. He'd be pitching in Japan or Korea now if it wasn't for the horrible extension they signed him to. Colorado has no use for him.

2 minutes ago, IndianaTwin said:

@chpettit19, I'm not disputing the $130 million, but where have you actually read anything using that number? All I've seen is the end of the year statement saying, "We won't slash payroll any further" and a later statement to the effect of "We have to be creative," which I'd like to think any FO would say.

Beyond that, the things I've seen have all been other people (mainly on TD) interpreting those two statements, making declarative statements the max is $130M, necessitating a reduction from the $140M that is projected by (smart, but without all the information) people on the internet.

I'd open this to anyone. Are there actual statements from the FO saying things like, "We're hoping to be about where we were this past season?" 

Pretty much all the beat writers are reporting that their sources are saying that the "no further reduction in payroll" was in reference to what it was last year and that the team intends to have the payroll be what it was last year at about 130. I would think they'd be smart enough to word things as a payroll increase if they're willing/able to move up to 140ish this year, but that hasn't been the messaging at all. That may be giving them too much credit, but since it'd very clearly be an increase I'd hope somebody around there would get that messaging out instead of having another offseason of fan moral being very openly negative about payroll being around 130.

6 hours ago, bean5302 said:

If you're arguing Boyd's performance year didn't matter to teams, knock yourself out.

It mattered to 1 team, and that's all it takes cuz it got him paid. And Profar's will get him paid. O'Neill's got him paid. Outlier platform years get guys paid all the time. And those contracts got bad all the time.

But if you're going to bash Paddack for his lack of innings and performance since 2019 and call out the people on this site for having faith in Paddack based on the 2019 version while ignoring everything since then throw Matthew Boyd out as the rebuttal their lines since 2019 shouldn't look like this:

Boyd: 263 innings 4.65 ERA, 4.38 FIP, 8.9 K/9

Paddack: 283 innings 4.90 ERA, 3.99 FIP, 8.4 K/9

Boyd went on a heater for 8 starts and got himself paid. Good for him. You threw around a bunch of pre-2020 Boyd numbers while bashing other posters for their Paddack stances then got mad at me for pointing out that you were using pre-2020 Boyd numbers. Boyd got paid for 8 starts. I hope it works out for the Cubs and he has his first full season of starts ever with an ERA under 4.39 or FIP under 4.32. Cuz if it was a Twins pitcher putting up those numbers you'd be calling them a number 5 starter, not telling us they have "huge upside."