Whammy

The Detroit lineup he faced in his first start was pretty close to their regular season lineup (as close as you're realistically going to get in Spring Training). It was much much better than the Atlanta lineup he faced https://www.mlb.com/gameday/twins-vs-tigers/2026/02/23/831658/final/box

If the Twins are going to hit their 75th percentile outcome in 2026, that very likely involves significant contribution from Mick Abel (and Taj Bradley). Maybe that makes the 30th percentile outcome more likely, but I'm just not worried about that, since our 50th percentile outcome looks like a 75 win team. Gotta shoot for the upside.

There is zero chance that teams let players treat challenges like this once games start to matter. Having those challenges is just too valuable to be wasting them as pseudo timeouts.

The argument I'd make against that point is that the person most equipped to consistently make correct challenge decision (the catcher) is on the side of the pitcher. That advantage (of catcher/pitcher vs hitter) MIGHT be so stark that teams don't even really want their hitters triggering ABS challenges because of the much higher likelihood that they are wrong and they don't want their catchers to lose that ability going forward in the game. It could be that they only allow the hitters to challenge in truly extreme leverage positions, whereas, as the catchers prove out their ability to be correct a high percentage of the time, they have a much longer leash in terms of when teams allow their catchers to challenge. Said another way... Just because, if looking back at old data, the misses that umps make tend to be more likely balls that were called strikes (calls batters would challenge), doesn't mean that those are the calls more likely to be correctly challenged. It could be that catchers would also be really good at identifying those calls, but they are, of course, not going to challenge calls that have benefitted the pitcher.

I like the direct effects of the ABS challenge system. Adding a layer of strategy. Getting more calls right. And probably adding a little bit of time to the game length in order to have those things happen. But its the secondary effects that I think are WAAAAAY more interesting and something I've been thinking about a lot. If there's an advantage to be gained players will try to gain it. If there's a new thing to be measured, people will try to measure it. Here are the big ones in my mind. I'd love to hear other thoughts and ideas on this. 1. Length of game – I think this has maybe been overstated a little. The actual time it takes to do the challenge is 10-15 seconds. We are, at most, adding like 2 minutes to game length, directly from the time it takes to perform the reviews. HOWEVER… we don’t yet know if it is the pitcher or the hitter who is going to end up with an advantage over a large sample. If the pitcher ends up with the advantage, then offense will trend down slightly, and the games will shorten. If the batters end up with the advantage, then the opposite will be true. It's hard to say which way it’ll go at this point and it might be a little bit team dependent, depending on how they allow their players to deploy the challenges 2. The strike zone – There’s a lot here. All players have been physically measured and so now they all have their own unique strike zone within the ABS system. They’ve all theoretically had unique strike zones up to this point, but that relied on the umpires to make adjustments on the fly and I suspect that they didn’t fully account for the size difference between, say, Jose Altuve and Aaron Judge. Do smaller players now get to fully realize the strikezone advantage they should’ve been getting this whole time? Does Emmanuel Rodriguez's small stature and good eye at the plate give him and even larger advantage that he's been seeing in the minor leagues up to this point? How does digging into the box affect things? It doesn’t take long into a game for there to be a hole in the batters box. Given that the strikezone will be based on the height of the plate, not the height that the player is standing at, is there an advantage to be gained by “digging in” an inch or two below the level of the plate. The new measured strike zone would go from the top of the knee, to now higher up the leg. This would help players that struggle with low strikes and have the opposite effect on players that struggle with high strikes. Will MLB regulate the amount of digging into the batters box that players are allowed to do? What about cleat length? 3. Catcher metrics – Pitch framing is no longer quite as important, but will there be a new metric of “Catcher Judgement?” I think most people agree that the catcher is in the best position to accurately judge whether a pitch was incorrectly called a ball. I’m envisioning two new measurements. A) challenge accuracy. This one is simple. How many challenges did they call for and how many of those were correct, but B) one more layer deep we will be able to analyze how many calls they SHOULD have challenged and the leverage of those pitches. You’d love to correctly challenge every missed call, but a missed 0-0 pitch that just clips the corner isn’t nearly as impactful or as big of a miss as a missed strike 3 call that caught a lot of the plate. "Catcher Judgement" feels like it's going to be a massively impactful statistic. Also, Catcher receiving position has been a hot topic the last few year. Mostly, I believe, catchers have tried to get lower behind the plate, in order to get more low strikes called. Does that matter as much any more? Will catchers go back to a more traditional crouch because it gains them back a slight advantage in throwing out runners? All of these things are very interesting to me. I'm sure there are other ones I'm not thinking of and I look forward to the answers we get over the course of a full season.

It'll be really interesting in early 2027, if Buxton, Rodriguez, and Jenkins are on this team, whether they keep Buxton at CF. That's the easy thing to do, but I'm not sure it the right thing to do. My eye test paints him in a better light than the advanced metrics did in 2025, but even if the decline is being exaggerated by the metrics, it's obviously coming to some degree.

I enjoyed the 2025 Clemens story, but my worry is that the fun story and a couple hot stretches to pull his overall numbers up to borderline acceptable is going to buy him a far longer leash in 2026 than he probably deserves.

Why exactly is empty seats and low TV viewership worth mentioning here? You're down on the lineup, that's a perfectly valid opinion. Talking about the Seats and TV just feels like piling on for the sake of piling on.

Ken says the obvious thing, without actually saying anything.

Congrats on your ability to use filters, which completely lack context, as evidenced by your "Polanco debuted at 20" silliness.

You lost me at "Polanco debuted at 20" It's one of those "I'm going to say it because I can point to it being factually true and it helps my argument" statements. It's the kind of thing people do when they are worried their argument is weak. You add some fluff that is technically true, but with any sort of context, isn't really true. Polanco's MLB debut was in June of 2014, 10 days before his 21st birthday (called up from from high A) because he was on the 40-man roster and the Twins had an injury crunch. He was up for one road trip (5 games and 8 PA) and then was sent back to the minors. A similar thing happened in 2015 (4 games and 12 PA). For all intents and purposes, Polanco debuted in April of 2016, at age 22. He got 30 plate appearances before being send back down to AAA, then he got called up for good at the trade deadline that same year, at age 23.

Piggybacking this... After getting called back up, he went 5 innings or more in 10 of his 15 starts

Maybe Bill Smith sold the Minnesota Twins soul to the devil for that 2009 International signing success.

Never underestimate the ability of several Twins Daily posters to find a reason to tell us how much the Twins suck and how unhappy they are, no matter how innocuous the original article's topic was.

The beauty of having a bullpen full of gaping, obvious holes is that these reclamation projects see the Twins and having a ton of innings opportunity. Did Zoll invent “no-moneyball”

It's really easy to look at the rotation and see how it could be a top 10 rotation. It's also not too hard to look at this lineup and envision a 60th percentile team outcome that's above MLB average. BUUUUUUUT This defense and this bullpen. Woof. You need to squint REALLY hard to see anything not in the bottom quarter of MLB. The only regular I feel like is above average is Buxton, and even HIS defense, I think we need to start recognizing, is approaching average. And the bullpen, there is ZERO path to averageness outside of 2-3 starters being converted to the bullpen and having good seasons.

We're all just getting through the offseason, pal. If it doesn't add to the conversation that YOU want, then don't click on the very appropriately titled article link. I personally like that type of conversation. I like thinking about the reasons why it would make sense to do things that don't immediately seem to make sense. I like thinking outside the box. Nobody is predicting that it will happen. We're all here killing time until April.

For the people that like the move but not the timing.... How many more bad moves (or non-moves) do you want Falvey to make before the "right time" comes along? Is this timing ideal? No. But whatever. Tom felt a change needed to be made, so he made it.

The Vikings couldn't even let the Twins lead the local sports news for 2 hours. Kwesi fired

I stand by this thought after Tom's initial press conference:

The writing was on the wall when Falvey wasn't around for the initial Tom Pohlad presser. The Occam's Razor in my mind is that Tom Pohlad thought Falvey was doing a bad job on not only the business side, but also the baseball side, he didn't like how he talked for days without really saying anything, and there were a couple moves that once Tom settled in a little bit, he felt were pretty hard to forgive (the fire sale and probably Correa). So he fired him.

I'm with the "optimists" feeling that over is the play, but if I was going to argue the other side... If the Twins were on track for 74 wins on August 1st, I believe there would be players traded away, which would push us towards the under. Said another way, if this team doesn't trade anyone away, "over" feels like a good play, but obviously projecting trades is difficult and will play a big part in the over/under.

With the release of ESPN's top 100 prospect list today, we have at least 4 players eligible for PPI (Player Promotion Incentive) this season because they appear on at least 2 of the 3 "major" top 100 ranking lists (ESPN, BA, MLB.com) Jenkins Rodriguez Culpepper Prielipp Two players could become eligible if they appear on MLB.com's not-yet-published top 100. Tait Soto

I'm trying to squint hard and find a way that a potential lockout could affect this option/buyout and I just can't see it. So, I'm officially with everyone else in that this is a complete and total 100% chance that the option is not picked up and it's pure silliness related to MLB's "file and trial" preference. They can be like "no. no. no. we worked out a multi-year deal. This is totally different that just coming to a one year agreement," and anyone with half a brain can see exactly what happened. And also, who cares? "Yeah, it's a 1-year deal. It's what we wanted to do. If you've got a problem with it you can pound sand, MLB."

I usually expect one unexpected inclusion per year from Law. Didn't get one this year. His Twins rankings seem pretty in line with other outlets, but maybe just a touch lower on average.