ashbury

Ha ha. I can imagine the consternation of those bigger-time owners if a lawyer who negotiates the roster/salary rules spots this loophole and proposes, "when a player is released, the remaining payments are spread out over the time the player was actually on the active roster, and Luxury Tax computations are redone and underpayments assessed." BTW, do you really think someone will pay $120M for the 2 good remaining years of Gray's career, plus a WAR or two across the remainder of the contract?

Well. That's very different then. Never mind. (Something, something, Brian Duensing.)

Now I wish I had found the time to take part when the call went out to TD membership weeks ago. A day or two ago I applied some effort and came up with a few names to go after. Then this was published, putting my meager ideas to shame. My thinking was, in an environment where adding payroll is a non-starter (no pun intended since I want starting pitching), to find a few under-the-radar guys who might cost less in trade than better known assets. My benchmark for success is to find someone who will likely perform better in 2024 than Louie Varland, who I consider a work-in-progress and not a sure thing, and also be more than a one-year bandaid. The Trade Values site disabuses me of that notion; nobody any good is under the radar anymore. And I'm super unwilling to trade most of the top prospect names among the hitters in the Twins system, and just about any of the pitching prospects we have. In other words, if I'm GM, odds are against my being able to reach agreement on a trade, and almost certainly one trade will be the limit I could achieve. Being an organization man, I also defer to my scouts, who may think too little of the pitchers I want to consider. It's also completely likely that these players' current teams like them so well that you can't interest them except if you overpay massively. Why would we trade Joe Ryan for someone else's lesser-tier talent package, for example? Anyway, with apologies for repeating myself from Saturday, here is my target list, with the addition of a starting point for a package of talent to offer. PIT: Johan Oviedo caught my eye. I see Mitch Keller suggested in the published summary, and BTV suggests Oviedo might command less in trade, though not dirt cheap. Does 2B/CF Austin Martin, SS Jose Salas, and SP Alejandro Hidalgo pry him loose? LAA: Griffin Canning. Looks like his trade value is higher than Oviedo's. Would the addition of Polanco the above package interest the Angels? CIN: Brandon Williamson. Similar package of four players as for LAA/Canning? None of these is envisioned as an ace. They would be obtained to provide competence, start after start, while we wait for someone else in the organization to step up to fill the #1/#2 slots, and others in the Pitching Pipeline™ to emerge and fill the rotation. I don't think it's feasible to trade for an ace without draining the farm of the top talent, and for me the economics of doing that are unappealing. instead i want to package second-tier prospects for a lower return that still is above the Archer/Bundy tier that is way too easily available every off-season.

Then that's not a good takeaway. Correlation doesn't mean a guarantee. In 2023, of the top 8 MLB teams in HR, 6 are in the top 8 in runs per game. Seems strong to me.

I believe in order for the Twins to get full draft-pick value from their QO, Gray needs to sign for at least $50M total contract value, which always seemed pretty likely but now I'm thinking he'll come closer to the $100M mark than 50. / edit - after reading the mlbtr link provided afterward, it looks like my forecast is way light in this marketplace. He could nudge past $100M total value.

In my analytic daydreams I run a stats group for a MLB team, and I task a tiger-team within it to develop best-in-breed analytics concerning pitcher health and longevity. They bring me a trial version, I challenge every assumption about which pitchers are the best candidates and what the proper techniques are for preserving talent, they go back and rework it, I put it through the wringer again, they go back and fine tune it, and eventually it's ready for prime time. I use their model to identify pitching trade targets, I trade for Mahle before it's too late and save his career, and I trade for Gray and get him to produce to maximum potential. That's the dream anyway. I think in reality we're pretty far from that point. Yes it's interesting to compare two pitchers on one team who migrated differently to the same other team, but I'm skeptical that solid conclusions can be drawn. But yes, Gray owns thanks to the Twins, and the Twins owe thanks to Gray. Win-win. And unfortunately, Mahle had worrisome shoulder woes, and then the elbow is what got 'im. Lose-lose.

Multiple journalists with reputations to uphold are reporting it in details beyond just rumor. Physical passed, presser tomorrow. https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2023/11/phillies-reportedly-sign-aaron-nola-to-seven-year-deal.html

Concur. When I try to project a prospect, his age matters a lot, until he stops improving. At age 20 I think his chances look very good considering three solid seasons in the pros by now.

I bet Joey Gallo could sign a contract with a team in the Midwest League and compete for MVP.

I think it's possible to prove that if Walter Johnson had pitched one season more, or one season fewer, we never would have gotten Mitch Garver. So add him to the chain at the front end. I think.

Fast-paced business, this sports writing is.

Does TD have a Best Article of the Year award? This one needs to be nominated.

Non-tendering Henriquez doesn't quite close the books on the Mitch Garver trade, but close. We still have Alejandro Hidalgo, who is young but pitched unimpressively at high-A yet maybe turns into something someday. Otherwise we got a year of Urshela and Sanchez, and (probably most importantly) disposed of the remainder of Josh Donaldson's contract. Pretty high price paid.

I always enjoy RandBall's Stu's scouting reports. 😊

Trey had better never go to the elusive spot near that one Cracker Barrel in Terre Haute, Indiana, where US 40 and US 41 intersect. Mind. Blown.

Yes, I ran across that after a while; I had just scanned thread titles. Kind of buries a good story for the '23 Twins, but I guess everyone is just taking it for granted. "What have you done for us lately?"

This is a good counterpoint, and by no means do I claim Nick can't play the game. But the manager can't spare a batter completely from facing same-handed pitching - 13 guys on the typical roster means you can't sub for him at will. And the plate appearances versus lefties do count in the stat line (and the team's success), even if the favorable-handed splits are intriguing. Rocco probably did the best he could to spare Gordon from lefties, as his percentage of PA in those situations was smaller than fellow lefty Max Kepler, for example; said another way, a player with a profile like Gordon's ties the manager's hands at times, unless and until he improves somehow. The righties-only BABIP corresponding to the above numbers is .364, even farther above the norm as overall. So I still don't see that .793 OPS as sustainable. All in all, I can't see him as trade bait, nor a reasonable candidate for lots of LF duty.

I didn't see this mentioned here yet, so apologies if I'm duplicating, but Sonny Gray finished as runner-up for this year's AL Cy Young award. Gerrit Cole was a runaway unanimous first-place winner, but Sonny was solidly in second place on most voters' ballots. Congratulations to our guy, even if I'm putting this in Other Baseball because at the moment he really isn't with us anymore.

Build on? His 2022 was itself built on a BA on balls in play of .340. Unless you think he is Roberto Clemente, Derek Jeter, or Rod Carew, who did sustain high BABIP, it's unlikely Gordon can sustain even what performance he showed then. His 2023 was way in the other (wrong) direction and isn't representative either. But he hasn't got the bat for left field, unless a cellar-dwellar team wants to gamble that a 28-year old has an extra gear he can somehow kick into.

What price would you pay, to get some other team's second-ranked utility player, coming off an injury and a bad two months at the plate, with a questionable arm for the left side of the infield and no remaining minor-league options? Call that price "X". Yeah, if the FO can trade Gordon for more than X, call them miracle workers.

The other direction worked well that one time.

I know it must have looked like nitpicking, but I latched onto your word as simply a rhetorical device in my reply. Including Keirsey on the 40-man adds less in my view than it obviously does in yours, whether that metric be "certainty" or "value" or "wins". His ability to contribute is not at all certain, for me. Maybe DaShawn's got some more growth left in him, but he'll turn 27 years old pretty early next season, and the odds are that he is what he is, as a hitter. He was drafted as a 21-year old from college, and while his first year in the minors was okay, he had a disastrous 2019 and then of course had no 2020. From 2021 on, he's been kind of a poster child for my rule of thumb with hitting prospects - up to a certain age they gain about .100 of OPS due to experience plus physical maturing, while each league level gets about .100 harder. Strictly an empirical observation I've tucked away for many years now, but in his case it matches up almost eerily, when he moved up from high-A to AA in 2022, then repeated AA in 2023 and was later promoted from AA to AAA. His AA OPS of .850 and AAA OPS of .739 suggest he might have been somewhere around .650 if he'd been brought up for a cup of coffee in the majors. (Such numbers would have been Small Sample Size so I would not have discarded my rule of thumb had he OPS'ed .400 or 1.000 of course.) I don't know his defensive skills except that he's supposed to be a pretty good center fielder, but the bar is set pretty high at the major league level to be better than average on defense in CF. And would an average/good CFer who OPS'ed .650 be any kind of difference maker, or would he be on a par with someone like Andrew Stevenson, who was easily obtainable for AAA when the need presented itself, and who had actually better batting numbers than Keirsey did at St. Paul? Keep in mind that MAT OPSed .720 this season with splendid defense, and we're still looking for an upgrade over him. Keirsey looks like a notch below MAT, if my rinky-dink projection is anywhere close. The 40-man roster is a difficult constraint for a good team. In a world where the limit was instead 50, Keirsey might be one I'd protect. I've followed him since draft day, and I like him. He's got skills, which is to say he may wind up slotting in as a AAAA player or better, for a few years. But there are 38 names on the Twins' roster, last I heard or checked. Suppose the budget allows signing Kevin Keirmaier (never noticed the name similarity before). I'd rather have him for 2024 than Keirsey. Would you? If they don't sign any kind of experienced and good defender for CF, and if they lose Keirsey, I'll be real disappointed in the FO's judgment. I don't expect either outcome though. Most teams have someone like DaShawn in their systems, and could just promote them, without the constraints that drafting a rule-5 player puts on them. One other angle. Suppose the Twins did add Keirsey to the roster, and then needed to replace him after signing a veteran like Keirmaier. I believe roster rules hold a special case for that, and they must actually keep Keirsey on the 40-man, or else DFAing him is not simply putting him on the waiver wire but actually offering him free agency. I think that little wrinkle is true until Opening Day, or maybe the start of Spring Training. I'm shaky on the exact rule but there is something like that involved. It adds a bit of complexity to the decision, and is why you don't see a bunch of shuffling of marginal prospects on the 40-man like you do with waiver-wire pickups. A team drafting him in Rule-5 must keep him all season, or return him, or work out some other mutual agreement; but a team signing him to a free-agent minor-league contract could just keep him in reserve at AAA free and clear, off their own 40-man, much as the Twins can do now if he doesn't get drafted away from them in a few weeks. All in all, adding Keirsey to the 40-man is a riskier move than it first appears. There, that's the long version of my reply to you. Since you asked.

"When you shake the Baseball Tree, about 9 gloves fall out, for every 1 bat." Miller's still just a baby, 21st birthday earlier this week. Too soon to decide the bat won't play and give up hope. Too soon to forecast success, either. Maintaining the stats as he moves up the league levels is a form of progress and development that can escape notice. Though, the team might need to burn a couple of minor-league options after they have to add him to the 40-man, before he's really ready to contribute to a contending team. Meanwhile, kudos on getting the recognition for defense, so that he can work toward being at least one of those 9 gloves that falls out.

"Ash, buddy, you okay, buddy?" Yep, doin' fine.