Brock Beauchamp

Stewart and Jay were "top 100" due to draft position and both had failed before this front office was hired. They were terrible draft picks and that's not the fault of this front office. Calling Gonsalves a "top 100" is stretching the definition a bit. He never made a few top 100 lists and BA put him 99 and 97 in consecutive seasons. Fernando Romero? You mean the guy who couldn't get into the country for an entire season and torpedoed his own career? This front office actually received a really good performance from Gibson before he became ill and then entered free agency. Graterol turned into a reliever and was moved for a nice piece in Maeda. Berríos improved under this front office and was traded for a really nice package. Your list looks a little bit different once we break it down piece by piece, doesn't it?

That "top 10" system was almost entirely bat-driven, which is part of the reason we're still seeing the results in Minnesota we are today. The previous front office literally threw away three top six picks in a row, two on *badly needed* pitching. I mean, they didn't just fail in their picks, they failed in epic fashion, with two top five picks never even playing in Minnesota, ONE OF THEM OUT OF COLLEGE. How is that even possible? Let's stop pretending like they handed this front office a dozen golden-plated roses. Never mind that the center piece of that farm system - the piece that cemented the system as top ten - can't play more than 60 games a season. Has this front office failed? Yes, absolutely. They're doing a piss-poor job of evaluating their own talent and that alone has cost the 2021 team several wins. They can't develop a reliever, which is absurd at this point. But you''re sugar-coating the colossal failures of a front office that was literally fired because they made so many blunders.

He has a position, it just may not be a great fit for Minnesota. But let's not confuse Rooker with Martin. Rooker has no position, Martin maybe isn't a shortstop. Grand Canyon-sized difference there, for sure. And while the front office hasn't done themselves any favors by drafting bat-first players, the Ryan regime left them in a bad spot defensively. Kirilloff is decent defensively but at first base, where no one cares much. Arraez is walking wounded. Then there's Sano. Hell, even the likes of Miranda squeeze the corner spots more and they're all products of the previous front office. And this is why it's so damned hard to judge a front office in four seasons, doubly so when the cluster**** of 2020 is plopped in the middle. This front office has done themselves so few favors but where does their failure start and the previous regime's failures end? It's bloody hard to say but there sure is a lot of failure going around right now.

If these four players are traded, they should trade literally every player with over one year of service time because the team has no hope of being good for several years. Come on, it doesn’t feel like much thought was put into this piece.

Since being recalled, going into today Rooker had a .931 OPS and had struck out more than one time in a game only once.

A year ago, I was probably 70/30. Now I’m 50/50 because, as you said, 2020 really stunted our ability to judge the farm system and we’re still seeing the after effects of that today. Maybe next year, I guess.

Arraez is so much fun to watch when he has at least one and a half functioning legs.

Now that I've tuned in, watch the weak pop-ups begin to fly.

They're running a promotion right now that's a little under 50% of the regular price, which was really handy for me because my subscription expired about ten days ago and I was debating whether to re-up. https://theathletic.com/checkout2/standard/60offpm?source=fbads&ad_id=23847968656390092&fbclid=IwAR26KWUfwWELKB2jjHz1auwl_G-Y6rgt-TT0St6BMB1PDE2kE4Q97dCVyLE $29/year for Gleeman and Hayes is a hell of a deal, never mind all their MLB-wide content such as Law and Rosenthal.

It was only about seven baseball months but there were zero signs he was going to rebound in 2020 and he looked to have the same issues to start 2021. Whether the 2020 season was a week long or six months long, it appeared Polanco was going to be a pretty bad hitter. And, as I said, I'm thrilled to see the early 2019 Polanco back but I'm not ready to declare him the model of consistency quite yet. We've seen a lot of ups and downs with him over the past three seasons, which was my overall point.

While I'm thrilled to see Polanco hitting, let's not forget just how awful he was for quite a long time. He opened 2021 with this performance: Months Split G GS PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS TB GDP HBP SH SF IBB ROE BAbip tOPS+ sOPS+ April/March 23 23 97 87 12 18 4 0 1 10 2 1 6 15 .207 .268 .287 .555 25 0 2 0 2 0 2 .233 42 61 May 25 23 99 87 14 22 7 1 4 11 1 0 12 22 .253 .343 .494 .838 43 1 0 0 0 0 2 .295 109 133 June 23 23 103 93 18 27 6 0 4 10 3 2 8 10 .290 .350 .484 .833 45 0 1 0 1 0 0 .288 109 125 July 26 25 112 104 16 34 5 0 6 20 3 1 6 16 .327 .366 .548 .914 57 0 1 0 1 0 1 .337 128 144 August 2 2 9 9 2 2 0 0 2 4 0 0 0 1 .222 .222 .889 1.111 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 .000 157 195 Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table Generated 8/4/2021. And that's after he posted the following line in 2020: Season Totals Split G GS PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS TB GDP HBP SH SF IBB ROE BAbip tOPS+ sOPS+ 2020 Totals 55 53 226 209 22 54 8 0 4 19 4 2 13 35 .258 .304 .354 .658 74 7 1 2 1 0 1 .292 100 79 Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table Generated 8/4/2021. And then he finished up 2019 this way: Months Split G GS PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS TB GDP HBP SH SF IBB ROE BAbip tOPS+ sOPS+ April/March 26 25 113 100 15 32 7 3 5 10 0 1 11 18 .320 .389 .600 .989 60 1 1 0 1 0 1 .346 133 164 May 27 27 124 110 21 39 9 2 4 17 1 0 14 17 .355 .427 .582 1.009 64 1 0 0 0 1 2 .393 140 168 June 26 26 129 118 19 34 7 0 2 12 2 2 6 17 .288 .320 .398 .719 47 2 1 1 3 1 1 .314 72 89 July 23 23 110 100 11 23 6 0 5 13 1 0 8 20 .230 .291 .440 .731 44 4 1 0 1 0 4 .237 73 89 August 27 27 126 110 24 34 5 1 4 16 0 0 15 23 .309 .397 .482 .879 53 1 1 0 0 0 2 .361 111 128 Sept/Oct 24 22 102 93 17 24 6 1 2 11 0 0 6 21 .258 .297 .409 .706 38 2 0 1 2 0 0 .306 68 90 Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table Generated 8/4/2021. Again, super glad he's back and I hope his injury issues are behind him but he was a pretty bad baseball player for almost two full years.

Definitely possible, for sure. It’s also possible teams were aiming higher and Pineda simply fell through the cracks.* *except for the Cardinals but god only knows what they were doing at the deadline

He has definitely had his ups and downs but I can't recall him being as bad for as long as he was this season. Without looking up the exact numbers, though, I could be wrong.

Yeah. The gift that keeps on giving. Sigh.

I'm not sure about that, but it's definitely possible. We might see Strotman and/or Ryan, which would be fun... but I'm not holding my breath, as I suspect the team is eager to shut down one or both of them after 2020. I CANNOT WAIT to put 2020 in the rearview mirror permanently.

I'm a bit baffled by Sano, to put it lightly. The moment the team truly went into the toilet and the season became irrevocably lost, he turned the corner. Maybe that's just coincidence, maybe it's not. But there's a real possibility that, for whatever reason, he has been pressing all season, to disastrous results.

They have a few interesting decisions to make in Rule V but I wouldn't call their position "in trouble". There are so many bad players they can drop without hesitation that it shouldn't be a big problem, *if* they make the right choices this offseason, which they definitely did not do last offseason. I doubt the new CBA is going to change the Rule V draft much, if at all. The players seem to be generally in favor of it and I don't think ownership cares enough to make a fuss about it when there are so many bigger fish to fry.

Another thing that deters me from any straight-up Santana comparisons is the fact that Ervin was in his age 35 season when he attempted to come back from that injury. Santana was a decent, but not great, starting pitcher in his age 35 season. While the finger may have played a role in his inability to return to MLB as a productive player, age 35 is exactly the time when you expect a pitcher of Santana's ability and performance to start tailing off in a big hurry. Most pitchers with his profile don't even make it to their late 30s in MLB, seeing Santana tank in his age 35 season was not a surprise, with or without the injury. In fact, a decent comp to Santana is Happ, who last posted an acceptable season in 2019 with a 92 ERA+ (50 IP in 2020 don't count in my eyes). That was his age 36 season. So I guess we shouldn't have been surprised when the 38 year old, 2021 version of JA Happ turned out to be a giant dumpster fire.

Looks like Park tweeted this a couple of days ago. When I heard what kind of injury this was, I became a little more concerned. As you said, fingers are kinda important to pitchers.

A bit of an aside but the analysis on Berríos is pretty terrible there: 1. Target Field has been roughly neutral for years, as far as I'm aware. 2. Using Berríos' career ERA is just lazy. 4.08 career ERA. If you remove that atrocious rookie campaign, it drops to 3.82. If you look at only the last three seasons, it's 3.61 (which is a 120 ERA+).

With Bryant not moving until the eleventh hour and the general squishiness of the position player market, I wonder if there was a real opportunity to move Donaldson at all. I don't have any real problems with them keeping any specific player but I would have liked to see them move one more bigger name, probably either Kepler or Donaldson.

The September rosters are very different this season. Teams can only add two players for a total of 28.

There is more than one way to win in baseball. The 2014 Royals had a decent rotation (12th best ERA in baseball) and lost the World Series. The 2015 Royals had a bad rotation (22nd in ERA in baseball) and won the World Series. Having the best pitcher in the world helps but it's far from a guarantee of anything. How many rings do deGrom and Cole have? How many did Santana win?

The Twins had the best pitcher in baseball in the 2000s and still never won.