Matt Braun

Thank you very much, I'm awfully flattered.

That's a very fair thing to consider but is pretty difficult to track in actuality considering the amount of nuance that such an idea takes. Trying to track an individual player's impact beyond the first season they came in can get kind of messy. It would be another interesting article if I could think of a way to standardize such data. But yeah, the point was mainly inspired by so-called "offseason winners" and how often that title was actually true.

How often does spending big in free agency actually result in winning more games the next year? Thank you for asking this question, voice in my head, because I was wondering the same thing. What I want to look at are the teams that spent the most money in the offseason and then how they did the year following with their new toys.Given that we’re Twins fans here, payroll has never been a topic of discussion. No one has ever been annoyed at the lack of big spending in free agency and is always perfectly OK with how the front office allocates their resources, especially this year. Free agency is supposed to be an opportunity to right the sinking ship through veteran additions to a low-talent roster (Texas), to fortify a good roster to take their team over the top (Boston), or to sit around and talk about how good the farm system is (San Diego). Every year, we see the offseason as a chance for teams to flex on small market franchises by throwing money at players like drunken pirates. Nowadays it isn’t as prevalent, but teams are still paying players for their services for the next year or beyond. But is that a recipe for success? The process is quite simple: Find the top 10 spending teams in an offseason over the last five years and then see where they ended up the following year. I’ll rank them by total money spent so that the Padres’ brilliant Eric Hosmer contract screws them over a lot because they deserve to be ridiculed. Information will be used from Spotrac, let’s see what it says! 2018 offseason shopping sprees Download attachment: Spending1.png A few things are already looking interesting here! The Cubs slide into the top spot because they handed out contracts to pitchers like Yu Darvish and Tyler Chatwood who both probably are sleeping in their beds of money, grateful for their agents, while the Ricketts continue to try to print money in order to scrape together a hitting coach that they won’t throw under the bus. Other than that, a great number of the top teams are up there because of financial promises to a single player. Some were great (J.D. Martinez with Boston), some were very good (Lorenzo Cain with Milwaukee), and some were terrible the second they were signed (everyone with the Rockies). Altogether, the top 10 in spending netted +6 wins overall or +34 if you want to ignore Baltimore, which is a good plan for just about everything. Only 3 teams went negative in wins the year after spending like a redneck at a gas station with one of them being, of course, the Twins... great luck there. Let’s go back one more year now. 2017 offseason shopping spree Download attachment: Spending2.png Ah, 2017, a simpler time, a time where Dexter Fowler received the third-most expensive contract of the offseason and Ian Desmond got the fifth. I have to say, I like seeing the spread of typically smaller spending teams here like Miami, Cleveland, and Colorado. It really just warms my cold, frozen heart. Overall the top ten spending teams netted a whole -1 more wins than the year prior but that number becomes +22 if you throw out the massive outlier in the Giants. The Dodgers were by far the biggest spenders but most of it was them keeping players they already had like Kenley Jansen, Justin Turner, and Rich Hill, leaving Sergio Romo and his $3 million payday as their highest paid free agent who came from another team. All in all, this list translates fairly well to success when considering the context of which players were brought in for which team. Houston added a few veterans who turned them into a World Series champion, Cleveland added Edwin Encarnacion to legitimize their lineup and lead them straight into and out of the playoffs after the first round, and the Yankees added back Aroldis Chapman after swindling the Cubs into trading yet another top prospect for pitching. Although, someone should have told St. Louis not to invest over $110 million into Brett Cecil and Dexter Fowler, yikes. 2016 shopping spree Download attachment: Spending3.png The first obvious thing to note, what the hell was going on in this offseason? Are you guys seeing the amount of money that teams were spending here? We talk about the horrible offseason in 2018, but it looks like free agency actually started going downhill a year before that. Maybe it was a fluke year, but teams were dropping money like upper-class toddlers at Toys R' Us on their birthday. All for elite names like Chris Davis, Jason Heyward, Ian Kennedy, and Jordan Zimmermann. Freakin' Jeff Samardzija got $90 million this offseason. What was going on back then? Luckily, there isn’t some massive outlier team, so adding up the wins gained/lost results in a cool +9 overall. I do love how the Twins biggest signing that offseason was David Murphy, who decided that he would rather not play baseball the rest of his life than play for the Twins. And this was after an 83 win season! The next biggest acquisition was Carlos Quentin who you definitely forgot was technically a Twin, leaving the only impactful addition being Fernando Abad who was signed to a minor league deal, great stuff Terry Ryan, it’s a wonder that it took him that long to be canned. Despite that Heyward contract looking like the albatross to end all albatrosses, the Cubs dropping nearly the GDP of the Republic of Palau that offseason brought them to the promised land thanks to other veteran signings like Ben Zobrist, Dexter Fowler, and John Lackey. 2015 shopping spree Download attachment: Spending4.png We finally reach the infamous 2015 offseason where Max Scherzer and Jon Lester got paid handsomely and actually provided good value for their team while Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez also got paid well and did whatever the opposite of providing value would be. Overall, the top spending teams netted +38 wins overall which still stays a +14 even if you throw out the outlier Cubs. There isn’t too much to really report here, spending was about what it typically is. The Royals added some garnish to their eventually World Series-winning club with the signings of Edinson Volquez and Twins legend Kendrys Morales. Hell, they even gave Alex Rios $11 million that offseason to kind of just hang around and do Alex Rios things. This was also the year where the Twins handed out their biggest contract ever to Ervin Santana which went pretty well and they also decided to bring back Torii Hunter for old times sake, which went less well, but who cares? Torii was back! 2014 shopping spree Download attachment: Spending5.png What a strange offseason this was, the Mariners absolutely shocked the world when they gave a 31-year-old Robinson Cano a 10 year, $240 million contract and then later shocked no one by not keeping him through the whole deal. The Rangers gave Shin-Soo Choo $130 million and then lost 24 more games than the year prior. The Yankees decided to back the dump truck of money up for veterans like Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, and Carlos Beltran and I’m sure that they would still do that Ellsbury contract again if they could. The Twins slot in as the fourth-highest spending team mostly thanks to the elite three-headed Nolasco-Hughes-Pelfrey starting trio. They also tried to bring back Kubel, Bartlett, and Guerrier, all of whom failed miserably and proved that you do in fact become the villain if you live long enough. Kurt Suzuki was a nice cheap find here who made the All-Star Game despite being signed for less than $3 million in the offseason and is still kicking after getting a nice deal from the Nationals this offseason. Overall the top 10 spending teams netted +16 more wins than the year prior and there is something kind of hilarious about the second highest spending team going +26 while the third highest went -24. Interestingly enough, the Giants won the World Series that year despite their biggest signing that offseason being a Tim Hudson who was collecting social security at that point and needed a walker to get to the mound. All right, that’s a lot of information, but what narratives can we draw from this? Overall, through five years of data covering 50 individual team seasons, the top 10 spending teams netted 68 more wins or an average of 1.36 more games won than the year before. Throwing out any season that ended in a +20 or -20 to control for outliers brings the number to 93 more wins total, or an average of 2.07 more games won than the prior year. So, there is a very slight positive correlation between spending money and winning more games than the year before. Let’s get even more specific here: The top spending team over each offseason overall won eight more games than the year before, or an average of 1.6 more games won. Teams that were top three in spending in a given year won 41 more games than the year before overall, or an average of 2.73 more games. Teams that spent more than $200 million in an offseason overall netted 45 more wins the next year, or 4.5 more games on average. For me, this data is certainly interesting, but nothing really groundbreaking or astonishing. Spending more does indeed have a general slight positive correlation with winning the next year, but the numbers weren’t exactly eye-popping to me. Just an average of one to two more games won than the year prior. That total is certainly an improvement, but not such an incredible one that spending becomes such an obscene advantage over other teams that it isn’t even fair. I also find it hilarious that the top spending team on average barely won more games than the year before... so much for a competitive advantage. I suppose if I had any other major conclusions, it would be that spending more than $200 million in an offseason without being the highest spending team would be the best plan of attack for teams who are inclined to do such things. As it pertains to the Twins, spending more would improve the team, but context is more important when considering how much a team spends. Yes, in general spending more will win a team more games, but it has been and will always be about how that money is spent more than how much of that money is spent. Spending will never save a bad team from the depths of irrelevance, but it can certainly lift a team up into the glories of the Postseason. Click here to view the article

Given that we’re Twins fans here, payroll has never been a topic of discussion. No one has ever been annoyed at the lack of big spending in free agency and is always perfectly ok with how the front office allocates their resources, especially this year. Free agency is supposed to be an opportunity to right the sinking ship through veteran additions to a low-talent roster (Texas), to fortify a good roster to take their team over the top (Boston), or to sit around and talk about how good the farm system is (San Diego). Every year, we see the offseason as a chance for teams to flex on small market franchises by throwing money at players like drunken pirates. Nowadays it isn’t as prevalent, but teams are still paying players for their services for the next year or beyond. But is that a recipe for success? How often does spending big in free agency actually result in winning more games the next year? Thank you for asking these questions, voice in my head, because I was wondering the same thing. What I want to look at are the teams that spent the most money in the offseason and then how they did the year following with their new toys. The process is quite simple, find the top 10 spending teams in an offseason over the last 5 years and then see where they ended up the following year. I’ll rank them by total money spent so that the Padres’ brilliant Eric Hosmer contract screws them over a lot because they deserve to be ridiculed. Information will be used from Spotrac, let’s see what it says! 2018 offseason shopping sprees A few things are already looking interesting here! The Cubs slide into the top spot because they handed out contracts to pitchers like Yu Darvish and Tyler Chatwood who both probably are sleeping in their beds of money, grateful for their agents, while the Ricketts continue to try to print money in order to scrape together a hitting coach that they won’t throw under the bus. Other than that, a great number of the top teams are up there because of financial promises to a single player. Some were great (J.D. Martinez with Boston), some were very good (Lorenzo Cain with Milwaukee), and some were terrible the second they were signed (everyone with the Rockies). Altogether, the top 10 in spending netted +6 wins overall or +34 if you want to ignore Baltimore, which is a good plan for just about everything. Only 3 teams went negative in wins the year after spending like a redneck at a gas station with one of them being, of course, the Twins, great luck there. Let’s go back one more year now. 2017 offseason shopping spree Ah, 2017, a simpler time, a time where Dexter Fowler received the 3rd most expensive contract of the offseason and Ian Desmond got the 5th. I have to say, I like seeing the spread of typically smaller spending teams here like Miami, Cleveland, and Colorado. It really just warms my cold frozen heart. Overall the top ten spending teams netted a whole -1 more wins than the year prior but that number becomes +22 if you throw out the massive outlier in the Giants. The Dodgers were by far the biggest spenders but most of it was them keeping players they already had like Kenley Jansen, Justin Turner, and Rich Hill, leaving Sergio Romo and his $3 million payday as their highest paid free agent who came from another team. All in all, this list translates fairly well to success when considering the context of which players were brought in for which team. Houston added a few veterans who turned them into a World Series champion, Cleveland added Edwin Encarnacion to legitimize their lineup and lead them straight into out of the playoffs after round 1, and the Yankees added back Aroldis Chapman after swindling the Cubs into trading yet another top prospect for pitching. Although, someone should have told St. Louis not to invest over $110 million into Brett Cecil and Dexter Fowler, yikes. 2016 shopping spree The first obvious thing to note, what the hell was going on in this offseason? Are you guys seeing the amount of money that teams were spending here? We talk about the horrible offseason in 2018, but it looks like free agency actually started going downhill a year before that. Maybe it was a fluke year, but teams were dropping money like an upper-class toddler at Toys R Us on their birthday. All for elite names like Chris Davis, Jason Heyward, Ian Kennedy, and Jordan Zimmermann. Freakin Jeff Samardzija got $90 million this offseason, what was going on back then? Luckily, there isn’t some massive outlier team, so adding up the wins gained/lost results in a cool +9 overall. I do love how the Twins biggest signing that offseason was David Murphy, who decided that he would rather not play baseball the rest of his life than play for the Twins. And this was after an 83 win season! The next biggest acquisition was Carlos Quentin who you definitely forgot was technically a Twin, leaving the only impactful addition to be Fernando Abad who was signed to a minor league deal, great stuff Terry Ryan, it’s a wonder that it took him that long to be canned. Despite that Heyward contract looking like the albatross to end all albatrosses, the Cubs dropping nearly the GDP of the Republic of Palau that offseason brought them to the promised land thanks to other veteran signings like Ben Zobrist, Dexter Fowler, and John Lackey. 2015 shopping spree We finally reach the infamous 2015 offseason where Max Scherzer and Jon Lester got paid handsomely and actually provided good value for their team while Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez also got paid well and did whatever the opposite of providing value would be. Overall, the top spending teams netted +38 wins overall which still stays a +14 even if you throw out the outlier Cubs. There isn’t too much to really report here, spending was about what it typically is. The Royals added some garnishing to their eventually World Series-winning club with the signings of Edinson Volquez and Twins legend Kendrys Morales. Hell, they even gave Alex Rios $11 million that offseason to kind of just hang around and do Alex Rios things. This was also the year where the Twins handed out their biggest contract ever in Ervin Santana which went pretty well, they also decided to bring back Torii Hunter for old times sake, which went less well, but who cares? Torii was back! 2014 shopping spree What a strange offseason this was, the Mariners absolutely shocked the world when they gave a 31-year-old Robinson Cano a 10 year $240 million contract and then later shocked no one by not keeping him through the whole deal. The Rangers gave Shin-Soo Choo $130 million and then lost 24 more games than the year prior. The Yankees decided to back the dump truck of money up for veterans like Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann, and Carlos Beltran and I’m sure that they would still do that Ellsbury contract again if they could. The Twins slot in as the 4th highest spending team mostly thanks to the elite three-headed Nolasco-Hughes-Pelfrey starting trio. They also tried to bring back Kubel, Bartlett, and Guerrier, all of whom failed miserably and proved that you do in fact become the villain if you live long enough. Kurt Suzuki was a nice cheap find here who made the all-star game despite being signed for less than $3 million in the offseason and is still kicking after getting a nice deal from the Nationals this offseason. Overall the top ten spending teams netted +16 more wins than the year prior and there is something kind of hilarious about the second highest spending team going +26 while the third highest went -24. Interestingly enough, the Giants won the World Series that year despite their biggest signing that offseason being a Tim Hudson who was collecting social security at that point and needed a walker to get to the mound. Alright, that’s a lot of information, what narratives can we draw from this? Overall, through 5 years of data covering 50 individual team seasons, the top 10 spending teams netted 68 more wins or an average of 1.36 more games won than the year before. Throwing out any season that ended in a +20 or -20 to control for outliers brings the number to 93 more wins total or an average of 2.07 more games won than the prior year. So, there is a very slight positive correlation between spending money and winning more games than the year before. Let’s get even more specific here, the top spending team over each offseason overall won 8 more games than the year before or an average of 1.6 more games won. Teams that were top 3 in spending in a given year won 41 more games than the year before overall or an average of 2.73 more games. Teams that spent more than $200 million in an offseason overall netted 45 more wins the next year or 4.5 more games on average. For me, this data is certainly interesting, but nothing really groundbreaking or astonishing. Spending more does indeed have a general slight positive correlation with winning the next year, but the numbers weren’t exactly eye-popping to me, just an average of 1-2 more games won than the year prior. That total is certainly an improvement, but not such an incredible one that spending becomes such an obscene advantage over other teams that it isn’t even fair. I also find it hilarious that the top spending team on average barely won more games than the year before, so much for a competitive advantage. I suppose if I had any other major conclusions, it would be that spending more than $200 million in an offseason without being the highest spending team would be the best plan of attack for teams who are inclined to do such things. As it pertains to the Twins, spending more would improve the team, but context is more important when considering how much a team spends. Yes, in general spending more will win a team more games, but it has been and will always be about how that money is spent more than how much of that money is spent. Spending will never save a bad team from the depths of irrelevance, but it can certainly lift a team up into the glories of the Postseason.

Relievers are weird. Not only because they do strange stuff like play video games on the side, but they are probably also the most volatile position in baseball. Go look up the best relievers of 2015 and have a good laugh at some of the names that appear. Liam Hendriks? Kevin Siegrist? Luke Gregerson? Josh Fields? The top 10 or so names have been relatively consistent and are still playing at a high level now, but after that, there is little to no guarantee that production will be sustained at all. Contrast that with the best position players the same year and it seems that relievers are about as dependable as the current economy. Or even just consider the Twins bullpen this past year, who would have predicted that Taylor Rogers would add a slider and become the Terminator basically from July until the end of the season, or that Trevor Hildenberger would continue his great 2017 season for the first half or so until the ghost of Matt Capps took control of his body and he struggled from August until the end of the season, or how about Addison Reed starting off en Fuego and then losing velocity as the year went on until he couldn’t even strike out my grandmother. The point is, relievers are unpredictable, but what if we could predict them? More importantly, if we could predict if a reliever will bounce back? Ignore the snake-oil-salesman-style question and let me explain my thought process. I want to be able to identify how likely it is for relievers to bounce back, so I looked at data from 2016, 2017, and 2018 to see how many relievers came back from a poor season and how many didn’t. To be exact, I am looking for relievers who had good/great 2016 seasons, noticeably poor 2017 seasons, and then how they fared in 2018. I want a solid basis of talent first, a season that can tell me that this guy has the potential to be legit, which is the point of the 2016 season data. Then I want a poor 2017 season. Since what is “poor” is debatable, I’ll say that if a reliever had either an ERA, FIP, or xFIP that was .75 points higher than the year prior, I will consider that a “poor” season in context with their body of work. I will leave a little wiggle room if the numbers are close enough to give me a bigger sample, but generally, I will stick to the .75 rule. Then I want to see how they performed in 2018 so that I can draw my conclusion and make my closing statement. I will be using their pitching “slash line” of ERA/FIP/xFIP. I also will not be including pitchers who did not pitch in 2017 or threw a fraction of innings that they usually do because there is not enough sample size to draw from. These are the first 10 players who fit my criteria and we have some interesting information already! About 4 players rebounded in my mind; Dellin Betances, Aroldis Chapman, Seung Hwan Oh, and Jeurys Familia (5 if you include Herrera’s ERA but not his peripherals), while 6 players had 2018 seasons that continued their downward trend (or 5 if you think peripherals are for schmucks). Interestingly enough, these were 10 of the top 11 pitchers by fWAR in 2016 with Kenley Jansen being the only player in the top 11 who had a great 2016 and 2017. Let’s continue! This list of players requires a bit more nuance than the previous one and I really need to stick to the peripherals to draw a solid conclusion. I see 5 players who bounced back in a significant way through their peripherals; Edwin Diaz, Will Harris, Brad Ziegler, Zach Duke, and Hector Neris. But the interpretation of this data can vary depending on the reader, if you value ERA, then you might see different bounceback players than me, but I believe that the 5 players I mentioned here had a noticeably better 2018 season compared to their 2017 season. Alright, let’s continue! I’m just going to throw Buchter out of here because he doesn’t seem to really care about what his FIP or xFIP says he should be doing. After that, I see Shawn Kelley, Alex Colome, Sam Dyson, Hansel Robles, Alex Wilson, Ryan Pressly, Tony Barnette, and Jeremy Jeffress as guys who bounced back in significant ways in 2018. That’s 8! The only guy here who didn’t really bounce back was Justin Wilson. These 30 pitchers were among the top 50 relievers from 2016 and 17 of them rebounded after a poor 2017 season in my eyes, good for a 57% success rate. How can this apply to the Twins? Well, I see this as good news for Trevor Hildenberger, who is looking to have a 2019 season that is more in line with his 2017 campaign, but I see this as bad news for Addison Reed who saw his numbers decrease heavily thanks to another drop in velocity. I also see this as good news for Cody Allen, the player who inspired this article, as there’s a better than average chance that he can have a better year than his awful 2018 campaign. This could also be somewhat neutral news for Taylor Rogers, who had the most dominant season of his career so far but needs another one to really cement himself as a top relief arm. An interesting thing to note is that a fair amount of these players who had bounceback years did so on a different team, so maybe there is some credibility to the idea that sometimes a player just needs a change of scenery.

We, as fans, have an interesting relationship between the franchises we support and ourselves. The bottom line of why we support these teams is usually because we enjoy doing so (although it seems like some Twins “fans” on Twitter don’t enjoy anything that has to do with them, but that’s another story). And this vested interest in the team leads us to want our franchise to acquire the best talent available in order to possibly win the championship at the end of the season. But, there are parameters set up by the team that we also must accept in the form of payroll. We understand the limitations which are laid out to us and then theorize events that can occur within them because our teams have shown us what the limits are. In MLB, not all franchise is created equal as there are consistent patterns of spending among the teams which split them up into either “big markets” who can land the big free agents and “small markets” who have to settle for less. Now, let me get one thing clear, I am not whining about if this system is unfair as I personally believe it really is not much of a problem. Nor am I damning the teams such as the Twins who operate under stricter rules than others because I also understand that payroll is correlated to profit and this is a business after all. Teams who spend more generally have a better chance of making the playoffs but there is little to no correlation between spending and actually winning the championship. To put it simply, it’s pretty much just dumb blind luck whether or not a team wins the World Series once they make the playoffs. No, instead I want to comment on the fascinating position fans find themselves in when it comes to theorizing roster moves and creating scenarios in their mind with a certain limit that they must consider. It’s easy for us to disconnect ourselves from the money that the players we root for are making, we don’t see the total in terms of “how much is that player making” as much as we see it in “how will how much that player is making affect the teams ability to make moves”. We squabble over how many millions can we reasonably offer to a free agent along with coming to terms with the fact that teams will keep MLB ready prospects down in the minors in order to keep them around for cheaper for longer. Hell, we just saw this happen with Byron Buxton when the Twins didn’t call him up when rosters expanded party because it would give the Twins an extra year of team control. Of course, the decision required more nuance than that, but the end result was that Buxton will now be stifled in the amount of money he will be making in the future because of the limits set up the team. In a perfect world, he would have been called up in September because it would not matter that the Twins would be forced to pay him more money sooner because it would not be an issue to do so, they could offer him whatever 6 year contract he pleased and both sides would go frolic in a garden somewhere, but that isn’t the baseball world we live in. I rationalized this decision, like most others did, with the reasoning I laid out before, but in doing so I sided with the team and owner who is worth billions of dollars instead of the player worth a fraction of a fraction of that. And now, that doesn’t sit right with me. Along with this, I think of the numerous players who were non-tendered because their arbitration totals were probably going to be higher than how much their teams thought they were worth and those players were cut to save a few bucks. This would be fine if the teams spent more on free agents in return but this hasn’t been the case for a lot of teams as it seems some franchises aren’t aware that they are allowed to sign players right now. There’s also that statement that follows every question about whether a team should sign a player: “sure, as long as he’s cheap”. The easy response is that these players, while worth way less than their owners, will still end up making far more money than any of us will and it becomes hard to feel bad for a player who ends up making only 3 million dollars instead of 4 million dollars because the difference is negligible for us. But again, we’re looking at their salary from the point of view of someone who has a vested interest in them making as little money as possible in order for our favorite team to have more flexibility for future acquisitions. At the end of the day, should teams really be this concerned with cutting miniscule costs in the name of efficiency? Should how much money C.J. Cron is making affect whether or not the Rays DFA him? And should we be infuriated when Andrew McCutchen signs for 5 million dollars more than we think he’s worth? I don’t believe so, but hey, it isn’t my money.

Thanks for the help Tom! Yeah, I'm with you as far as the opportunity with awful teams in the AL, but I still think it's just a little too early to take the plunge and go all in. I think that will happen next off-season or possibly this trade deadline if the season goes well enough.

A profound philosopher once proclaimed that “it just takes some time” and that while you might be “in the middle of the ride”, “everything, everything will be just fine.” “Jimmy Eat World lyrics? That isn’t philosophical.” Well, when I’ve been drinking a little on Friday nights, it starts to sound like Socrates to me so lay off of it. The name of that song is “The Middle”, a little diddy you may have heard of, and it was the inspiration for this article about where the Twins happen to find themselves in MLB’s landscape. The Twins are of course quite a bit better than the trifecta of teams underneath them who have no interest in winning games but are still a fair bit worse than the Indians even if you squint really hard. The Indians also apparently are not very interested in winning more games considering the moves they have made this off-season and the fact that Jordan Luplow is currently one of their starting outfielders. Did I make that name up? Honestly, I checked Fangraphs and I’m still not convinced he’s a real player. But until there is a trade of either Trevor Bauer or Corey Kluber, the Indians will remain favorites for winning the AL Central again which leaves the Twins in the middle. The Wild Card remains an opportunity but considering the Balrog that is the AL East along with a few strong contenders in the West like the Angels and the Athletics, that path may actually be harder than winning the division for Minnesota in 2019. Regression is prime for both the Athletics and the Rays, the former potentially following in the footsteps of Minnesota as the “performed better than everyone thought only to get moped up by the Yankees in a Wild Card game and then fall off the next year” team. But many things will have to go right for Minnesota to see the playoffs again. Is this a bad place to be in? I don’t think so. Every year it seems that the MLB season is as much of a battle of quality players as it is a war of attrition, it comes as no surprise that the teams which make the playoffs are usually teams that avoided major injuries and were able to get consistent production from their major players. While betting on specific injuries and regression is not a good idea, betting on general injuries and regression among the contending teams is not necessarily a bad play. Just look at the 2018 Twins, who would have thought that Brian Dozier would forget how to hit a fastball, Jorge Polanco would get caught with too much O.J., Ervin Santana would lose a finger in the war, Jason Castro would bump knees with Teddy Bridgewater, Byron Buxton would be kidnapped at sporadic parts of the season, Miguel Sano having a metal rod shoved into his leg would be the 4th worst thing to happen to him that year, Logan Morrison would turn into a baked potato, and Lance Lynn would try to eat that potato. The point is, there sits a bevy of teams who are perfect candidates for smiting by the baseball gods and if the Twins just outlast those teams in 2019, they could make the playoffs in a similar fashion to the 2017 team that was able to coast to a surprise Wild Card spot. The 2018 Oakland team saw this happen also when the Mariners fell off as they always do and when the Angels partnered with the local sports hospitals of the greater Anaheim area like they also always do. Once they were out of the way, the only other competition was a Rays team which was the sports equivalent of a Monty Python sketch. After the addition of a boomstick, the 2019 Twins project by Fangraphs to be the 13th best team in baseball by fWAR at 36, .9 ahead of the 15th team (the A’s ironically) who are at 35.1, 2018 Josh Bell is the difference between them. The current free agents left are fairly uninspiring and will probably not make up enough of a difference to launch them into the upper echelon of teams. The farm system, while very very tasty, is probably a year away from having the major prospects grace the major league team. So the plan should be to put together a solid squad in 2018 which includes a reliever addition or two and then hope that things happen to fall in place to allow the 2019 team reach the playoffs while the prospects continue to develop and then hopefully cultivate in a 2020 team ready to take down the champ.