Brock Beauchamp

And 2010. Liriano in 2006 and Morneau in 2010 make those rosters look WAY different going into the postseason. Lots of teams are injured heading into the postseason but few win it all with one of their top 3-4 players off the roster.

But if we're going to discuss value versus true talent level (ie. "better player"), one can't ignore Puckett's home/road splits any more than we can ignore Trevor Story's home/road splits when evaluating how good he is at baseball (which is literally a $100m question around baseball right this moment). Story's splits are even more extreme than Puckett's but a .148 split is bigger than any I can recall seeing outside Coors so that must be factored into Puckett's evaluation. Pure results don't tell us the complete story, which is why it's also important to try to compare players of different eras to their own peers. While it's obviously a more extreme era split, we can't compare someone like Carew to someone like Cobb without trying to put each of those players into context of their own era and peer performance.

The posters’ names are obfuscated to avoid bias in reading and polling.

This isn't an unreasonable take IF the Twins can pick up someone like Stroman for Berrios-type money. Obviously, I'd rather have Berrios over Stroman straight up but Stroman + Austin Martin + Simeon Woods-Richardson for Berrios money becomes a much harder decision, at least for me. (I'm only using Stroman as a placeholder name here, insert your pitcher of choice) What bothers me is that if Berrios was willing to sign for that kind of money, the Twins should have wrapped up a deal long before July of 2021. The fact he was willing to sign for a rather reasonable price but the front office traded him anyway is what irks the hell out of me, particularly with the exact same decision looming over Buxton this offseason.

Huh, I never even considered that as a thing to think about.

Puck obviously has the postseason advantage but I think catchers need to have expectations adjusted for them (which is probably why so few are in the HoF because voters don't make those necessary adjustments). Catchers simply cannot play as many games over a season as a regular every day position player. Going back to the last "normal" season where some key catchers didn't take a year off and come into 2021 fully healed and ready to play at a level they normally wouldn't... In 2019, 12 position players played 160+ games. Filter that down to catcher only and the top catcher played 153 games but if you scroll all the way down to 12 on the list, that games played number drops wayyyy down to 114. Another thing to consider is that, as a whole, catchers just get the snot beat out of them over a season. Looking to 2019 again, here is the catcher OPS line for halves of the season: First Half 2019: .721 Second Half 2019: .703 If you filter down to only September, the number drops to a really ugly .694 OPS. For all position players, the same numbers: First Half 2019: .762 Second Half 2019: .761 Filtering out only catchers proved to be too annoying so I left them in the second number. If you remove catchers, the OPS of position players likely climbs as the season progresses while catchers take a significant .018 OPS hit as the season progresses. It's really hard to be an MLB catcher and I think the public at large - including many writers and voters - do a really bad job of adjusting what should be the expectation of a MLB catcher comparative to MLB players at other positions.* *this could also be used as a damned good argument why moving Mauer off catcher in the minors may have been the right decision

I'm talking open market free agent money. They'e either retained guys for pennies or let them walk in free agency. They don't hesitate to pay the likes of Castro, Pineda, Cruz, Donaldson (which is great) or even the likes of Happ (not so much) but they won't give Berrios Donaldson money and they let the likes of Trevor May go to the Mets for not much money.

Sorry, I meant at anything approaching market value. They’ll give free agents large dollar sums but not their own players.

I honestly don't understand what the hell is going on over at 1 Twins Way right now. While I was mildly in favor of the Berríos trade at the time, that trade is a lot harder to swallow in light of Jose signing on through most of the rest of his career for $120m. This front office didn't hesitate to give an obviously aging Josh Donaldson $95m so what the hell was the holdup with giving Jose, a hometown star, $25m more over a bunch more seasons that will see him exit the contract at roughly the same age Donaldson was when he signed his contract? Never mind the apparent cluster**** with Buxton right now. We've heard rumblings over $100m being a sticking point, which is only $5m more than they gave a mid-30s Josh Donaldson. Don't get me wrong, I'm not blasting the Donaldson contract, I'm only wondering why that was able to get done with little theatrics while Berrios and Buxton seem to face insurmountable hurdles while both are still well shy of 30 years old, never mind their already-existing attachment within Twins Territory. Now that I think of it, this front office hasn't signed a single hometown player to a multi-year deal, as least that I can recall. Again, what the hell?!?!?! I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this front office is willing to pay for "their guy" but become obsinate about any existing Twins player that fans know and actively enjoy watching play. We've bought jerseys of these players, we have emotional connections to them, there are a dozen reasons to keep any number of them over constantly washing laundry via free agency. This is not a good look for a spectator-driven sport that makes its money from fan engagement.

True, it really depends how big the Angels plan to go this offseason.

Initially I thought this was a great upside play by the Angels but forgot Syndergaard had a QO hanging on him so the Angels paid $21m and a second round pick for one year of Syndergaard. Holy moly, no effing way do I make that deal. I'm not a person who thinks draft picks should be held onto at all costs but I don't believe in throwing them away, either.

There's still a lot of offseason left to go but after the Berrios extension in Toronto and its relatively reasonable dollar figure, let's just say it's unlikely I will support this front office remaining in control if they trade Byron Buxton. The Minnesota Twins are not the Cleveland Guardians or the Tampa Bay Rays and I'm gonna be mad as hell if they try to operate that way.

Rodriguez and Gray were my personal bang for the buck choices. Rodriguez is off the table, now I hope the Twins are strongly considering Gray.

I thought they could receive bonuses for official trophies/awards but not informal things like a home run crown. I could easily be wrong, though.

I don't mind opt-out deals for the team. If the player is good, it sucks to lose him but also, it means you received a great performance value for a few years and aren't on the hook for the decline years. I take that trade-off almost every time, especially in pitchers where decline often comes suddenly and sharply and injury is a persistent concern.

Good point. It's like the NFL when they covered players from 1993 forward. It was such a **** move on their part, negotiated and accepted by the player's union. As a result, we have (or had, unfortunately) a slew of NFL players from the 60s-80s with massive CTE and health-related issues that were left completely unprotected by the NFL and its player's union. Many of those players literally died in poverty from health issues caused by playing football as young men. We need to demand better from our sporting leagues and their unions.

See, and this is where I believe the issue has gone awry. Why are we so eager to sacrifice the pay rate of MiLB players, which in the aggregate add up to a few million dollars, over the single paycheck of a middling free agent? And that's why minor leaguers should have a seat at the negotiating table.

On top of whether that success is repeatable, there's a better than 50% chance I would no longer watch baseball if I was a Rays fan. I have very little interest in cheering on laundry as ownership puts roughly the same amount into payroll that they RECEIVE FROM MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL. I've come to openly dislike the Rays. Who here knew their TV contract was slightly more than what the Twins receive? Or that their entire payroll is covered by what MLB gives them through national TV revenue, profit sharing, and competitive balance subsidies? Eff the Rays, frankly,.

I think it's more likely this front office would have seen the potential in Hendriks but it's definitely not a sure thing. He didn't only bounce through Minnesota, he also bounced through Toronto and Kansas City (one of the years they made the World Series) before becoming the Liam Hendriks we see today.

While I’m skeptical of the pitching pipeline we were promised in 2017, the pandemic threw literally everything sideways in this organization. Everyone, and I mean damned near EVERYONE, was injured in 2021. It’s basically impossible to build a pitching pipeline if you start in June of 2017, everything in the world flips on its head in 2020, and then injuries ravage your org in 2021. We’ll see what happens in 2022.

See, and I think that's a bit backwards from how the Twins likely view the situation. If the Twins get that 10 win season from Buxton, I doubt they care all that much what they pay him in that singular season; it's the other years they primarily care about. Wiggling over what is likely $5-7m a season on what is a superstar player going out of his mind is probably not the problem; it's the fact whether you have invested $25m in a player for four more years when he's a $5m player. Which is why I think the problem is possibly escalators versus incentives.

I can't think of a player like Buxton so it shouldn't be surprising if his contract is quite a bit outside what we've seen in the past. While it's not unheard of to see a great pitcher perform otherworldly but go down with injuries constantly (Rich Hill), have we ever seen the same from a position player? A guy who can perform at a 10 win level but can't stay on the field for more than 70-90 games a season? What I think is the real hangup with Buxton's contract is not the incentives but I suspect he wants escalators; instead of every season being a discrete event that pays him based on that single event (140 games played, 6th in MVP, etc), I suspect Byron is trying to negotiate escalators where if he hits certain milestones in a single season like 2023, it permanently escalates the rest of his contract. For example, his base is $17m per season but if he hits 500 PAs in 2024 and is third in MVP voting, his remaining contract vests at $26m per season. And THAT becomes a lot more difficult to negotiate from the Twins' standpoint.

My point isn't to compare Buxton to Trout but to compare a Buxton MVP season to Trout, which is what I think Byron will (deservedly) ask for. If we're going to negotiate incentives, the top tier incentive should be the pay rate of the perennial MVP winner.

I think it's going to take over $30m peak to seal the deal if we're talking MVP involvement - Mike Trout is making just over $37m a season - but you're probably right that more base and easing off the incentives is a more likely route to make the deal possible. Maybe a $17m base with incentives up to $35m.

I offer him a six year, $15m per year base with PA incentives that can take him to $30m per year at 550 PAs. On top of that, I offer $5m for MVP votes and $5m more for an MVP. He could peak at $40m in a single season.