ashbury

Byron and Eddie on deck, about to start the game against the Peoria Javelinas, October 10.

SF is closer to a rooting interest for this Pacific time zone boy. Took me a while to warm up to Hunter Pence but I actually enjoy his style now.

Some are, maybe not all 29. I've seen it speculated that prospects are an overrated commodity in general and represent the current market inefficiency to exploit if you're brave enough (and agree with the assessment).

I don't think I'd make wholesale changes. Paying heed to my bullet item 4, the new coaching team needs time to acclimate and form their direct opinions about the players. With no Parmelee or Colabello, some of the logjam of slow 1B/OF fielders disappears. I think one more change will be enough, and it can come from one of three ways I have in mind: a) the coaching staff determines they can work with Arcia to get him up to snuff in right; b ) the coaching staff believes Pinto can be (developed into) a catcher on a World Series team; or c) trade Pinto late in Spring Training. Any of these removes the "well, we can always DH him" argument that works against Vargas getting enough playing time due to 3 guys being in the mix. And with that, I think the logjam is broken for the time being, leaving it to the manager's creativity to work the DH position.

"Admitted"? Bragged a little, maybe. It's possible that payroll on the books topped out around that figure. But in terms of paychecks actually written, when you take into account that Morales, Correia and Willingham were traded, the amount was probably closer to the $86M that ESPN shows. As GM I would be much closer to $100M spent than that.

They are if you do them compatibly. Acquire a FA that is in actual demand, which means outbidding others, which means you have acquired talent that is arguably overpriced. But as regards your own budget, you decide not to care. Then, if and when this player is blocking a younger one, mid-2015 or later, work out a trade of this overpriced but talented and in-demand guy, in which you, The Twins Of All Teams, actually provide cash to make it more palatable for some other team to hand over a prospect or whatever. That's the whole idea of having a wave of young talent coming up, isn't it? Not to run continually under budget, but to use that budget room creatively to make the team better. Oh, and if no younger player winds up being blocked, hey, you filled a hole with a good player. This is what the Tigers did regarding Prince Fielder. They added talent to their roster, and a year later they wound up with Ian Kinsler, a 5-win player for them in 2014, at lower cost. Not a bad outcome. You can't take a cookie cutter approach, so I don't know which player (probably a pitcher) the Twins should target, nor what the eventual outcome would be in terms of return. There's a risk of a good player turning into a pumpkin, a la Nolasco, but again it's only money, in a period when the team is running under budget. I like the general direction of the rebuild since 2011, but trading Span and Revere and getting 3 (soon to be 4) high draft picks isn't sustainable when you start winning, and I'm trying to think through what a sustainable pipeline might look like. To me, this is an avenue to consider.

Less to explain to pater and mater than the Gentleman's C.

I'd say 'B' is slightly generous for the Twins that year. The grade is solely dependent on two players, as besides them only Herrmann has seen any major league time for the Twins at all. And both are a near thing; Gibson is still more about promise than having actually established himself, and Dozier was nearly a washout at age 25 until they decided he could handle 2B. I'd give them a C-; particularly for a team that has to do the low-budget thing well, they can't sustain themselves with drafts like that one.

If I play GM, I imagine myself having access to all the subjective player evaluation information I can muster, quantified into ceiling and floor values using my own in-house Jack Goin variant of WAR or whatever, both for 2015 and for careers... I don't have this, obviously. So I'm not going to lay out specific actions. Main themes I'd have for this off-season and into early season 2015: transition from our DH/1B/CornerOF heavy roster to one with better defense remain in talent acquisition mode, making no 2015 moves that mortgage the future spend for the sake of spending, if that's what it gets called, up to my budget, on desirable talent integrate the new manager and coaching staffYou can never have too much pitching, we have a hole in LF, and we need an additional option in CF for the time being. FA acquisition, or a trade that supports theme #1 above, are both good options, where a FA costs nothing but money being unspent anyway, and a trade can better allocate our resources (if the new manager says "this guy can't be my catcher", for example). I'm tired of getting guys about whom it's said, "we can always DH him".

I'd lean toward a FA option for LF, with the idea of trading that guy if someone else (Rosario is the flavor of the month right now) forces the issue in 2016 or even in 2015. There's money in the budget to get someone Pretty Darn GoodTM, for 3 years say, and somebody like that should be tradable even if not for seemingly equivalent value - we still come out ahead unless he pulls a NolascoTM. For CF I'd try for a smaller FA signing or a small trade - somebody with a skillset like Fuld's for instance, or a little better, preferably with minor league options so he can be stashed in Rochester. CF is a premium position but TR is pretty good at working at this end of the spectrum - I'm not a big Schafer fan but he and Fuld were good gets.

I took at look at 2013 AFL stats, and several guys who raked got a taste of the majors this year. If anyone broke camp with the big club in April, I missed it. Rosario would face very long odds of this happening. But his performance so far this October has certainly opened some eyes, even if a .455 BA isn't sustainable, and it would not seem terribly long odds for him to see time in Minneapolis in 2015.

It happened some. I don't know if it was a "lot". But even a few of these tends to raise the run total from below average to above average. But... it happens to other teams too. Someone with 'leet stats skills needs to define some things, and then run the numbers for me.

Moderator's Note: ftfy Folks, when in disagreement with someone, please stick to the facts as you see them, and don't try to characterize the people with whom you disagree. When in doubt, choose to not make it personal. (I chose to be concrete this time by providing an alternate version of someone's post, not to limit the observation to that one person, or to this particular thread. It's been cropping up lately. And please don't divert this thread to the tangent of moderation, instead take it to the appropriate part of the forum if you feel the need to discuss.)

Kidding aside, it actually would be a great question to start an interview. Different organizations will split the presidency and other roles (owner, GM, maybe others) in different ways.

It depends on the makeup of the team around him. Picture a team with a lot of low-OBP sluggers (doubles and home runs); replace the worst one with a crafty guy who can get on base but has absolutely no power at the top of the order, and scoring may take a big jump upward, seemingly out of proportion to that one guy. But on a team that already has a lot of guys getting on base with scratch singles and walks, getting another guy like that to replace the worst guy might not improve matters a whole lot, with 3 or even 4 baserunners per inning still needed to score one measly run. On an average team with average OPS made up of some on-base guys and some sluggers, I'd guess that you want to look at OPS or other "runs created" kinds of numbers for the new guy too, and not just OBP.Rules of thumb like adding up OPS work in middle of the road scenarios, but I think there are some non-linearities that crop up when you get away from the median. Extreme outliers, either of a team or (particularly) of a player, make the analysis harder. I would guess that a team can handle having two high-OBP but empty-SLG hitters. Adding a third starts to be a problem in lineup construction, having more is bad. If you already have two, find someone else.

I rambled. Let me say it again this way. I would not like to take the offense we had in 2014 in to the post-season, had we been so lucky. It would have gotten shut down by the caliber of pitching seen in October, to a greater degree than the offenses we do see competing now. Game 162, a shutout against Price, sealed that emerging opinion for me.

In addition to the other responses to this, it seemed to me that the offense was more feast-and-famine. Anecdotally, they could score runs against starters who didn't have it that day, or once the bullpen was reached. What is needed is not just the mean (runs/game) but the standard deviation, which would be easy to calculate if anyone (me included) took the time; I don't know what the league average for this would be but it wouldn't surprise me if ours was high, due to the total runs being padded in several laughers. Of course every team has laughers, which is why I wish a number was handy. Our offense scored some runs, better than I expected back in March, but still overall seemed soft to me, and it wouldn't take much to have a dropoff. It could also solidify in 2015, or even improve, as the youngsters have a chance to improve. I don't feel confident predicting which way things go. We're near some kind of turning point but things right now are in a big state of flux.

That probably answers the question I was going to ask, why does every thread with RB involve ChiTown saying Ish?

Moderator's Note: <clears throat>

If you can remember the 60's, then you weren't there.

The '87 Twins were a magnificently crafted roster including two stud starters to carry you through short series and a catcher who will nail runners at third base at the drop of a hat.

I'll acknowledge, this probably is more of a winning strategy for you, than for players like Koskie, Morneau, Mauer, and Buxton, for whom some of their talent resides above the neck.

I once attended a talk given by Benoit Mandelbrot, the dude who is associated with Fractals. A point he made that has stuck with me through the years is that we deal with random numbers when we don't yet have a good enough grasp of the underlying process. I'm fine with viewing playoffs as a crapshoot, but at the same time I wouldn't want to discourage someone from trying to identify characteristics that make for a World Series winner, even if it remains somewhat probabilistic.