ashbury

Happy you made a deal with my close personal friend Sid Hartman. I think your goal of more than 2 WS is possible. There were some really good teams down through the years.

At the moment I count 17 position players and 19 pitchers on the 40. And this includes the two prospects recently added, Severino and Camargo. So they can add 4 more prospects if they wish, before needing to move someone already on the 40. However there are rules about the young'uns once they are added, so if they want to leave room for free agents they may not add too many more - again as you say they can certainly treat Gordon (or someone else they deem expendable) via trade/dfa when that time comes, but I wouldn't expect this week. Ronny Henriquez could conceivably be on thin ice rosterwise too, if they find they need a spot.

I would love it, finances permitting. Maybe "finances permitting" shall be my off-season disclaimer to every transaction proposed here, just as "barring injury" was my get-out-of-jail-free card for pre-season predictions. I.e., I would love it, but we'll be outbid by several teams, true any off-season but especially so when the FO is letting it be known that the TV situation is the deal-breaker for them.

Don't think that's true. He has to show up. If he gets a team doctor to certify he's injured and belongs on the IL, then that's a different thing. To allow players to say "nah, I think I've played for long enough" in the middle of a contract would open things up to terrible abuse.

Many still feel burned by Tsuyoshi Nishioka and ByungHo Park. These two disastrous signings came from multiple causes: failure of scouting, failure of projection, and failure of vision. The scouting is apparent only in retrospect, to us outsiders anyway. Nishioka showed little ability at shortstop, and it was said that his major injury was due to improper technique during a double play attempt, which is definitely adding insult to injury - bad news when he hit like a glove-first AAAA guy at best. Park, the bat-first one, showed flashes of power but not often enough. The projection of stats maybe was foreseeable. Neither of the Asian leagues they played in are at the major league level overall, so stats there must be translated in order to be meaningful. Both players went back to their respective leagues and put up batting numbers about like they had before they left. So it's not like they suddenly got worse when they came to the US, and conventional wisdom that those leagues were about like our AA should have been scrutinized by the analytics groups in the FO - oops, back then (2012 and 2016 respectively) those groups aren't like they are now. Were these players both outliers in some way, or was the translation of stats too optimistic? The vision thing amounts to reaching contract agreements in the $2-3 million dollar range, and not stopping to wonder why other teams weren't trying to outbid them. You have to trust your own scouting department (though, see above), and maybe they've spotted someone no one else has (so, hush-hush until the ink on the contract is dry), but it can't hurt to listen to what 29 other teams' departments are trying to tell you implicitly - especially the successful ones. It's like the proverbial dog that didn't bark. The past is past, and the Asian leagues may be different and perhaps better now. Our FO is different too, and hopefully better. I pray they have completely cleaned house in all these respects. What's needed now is scouting of players' fundamentals, accurate projections from past stats that hopefully confirm the assessment of fundamentals, and then context within what rival MLB teams are also trying to accomplish. Aim high, i.e. the ones mentioned in the article that won't come cheap. If the information is true that the Twins are scaling back their roster budget, that's going to be nearly impossible to achieve. If we sign one or two off-shore guys for key positions, and the salaries are bargains like Nishioka and Park were portrayed as, I'm going to be really skeptical.

OOTP is a video game, and even they won't let me try to trade Correa.

Because I like this point so much, I want to go even farther. Players get 4 or 5 pitches per plate appearance to demonstrate their skill, by picking and choosing, and then giving the ball a ride if they can. Usually defenders get to demonstrate their skill just one or two ways on a ball in play - go get the ball, maybe make a contested throw. Fewer Total Chances than Plate Appearances. Fewer granular actions within. We'd call a batter's 100-PA resume small sample. That's kind of what every defender's full season is. You can draw useful conclusions from small samples, but there's a lot more art to it. It's been a long while since I looked at how the variations on defensive stats are arrived at, to remember what I think is the most artful approach of teasing out information from small samples.

I'll make Kenta Maeda my benchmark. Whatever he ends up getting on an annual basis, the Twins won't exceed that. If they get him, that's their limit for anyone; if they don't get him, it will be because they weren't willing to go even that high for anyone. Depending on whether you look at the TD handbook or MLBTR, that could be anywhere from $12M (1 year) to $18M (times 2 years). I'm prepared to be surprised of course.

"Payroll is 100.00% over budget " You broke the system. Seven million million dollars is an overpay for Bader.

You left out the list.

For me that's backwards. I want my backups to be ready to go when called on. That's why most backups are less talented, it's the tradeoff in return for more solid health.

Satire is a risky genre because you have to play it straight and readers may take you at your word.

If the lack of credible competition within the division dissuades the Twins' FO from making moves that strengthen them for a post-season run, I'll be very disappointed. So this insight into the Guardians' plan really doesn't move me.

I'm waiting for the North Stars' season to start.

Yeah, can't quite put my finger on it but there could be some form of statistical bias going on there. But yeah, nothing wrong with what others prefer, at least in this one single solitary regard.

True. And if RF is properly covered already, as it is, there's nothing wrong with throwing out an arrogant runner at the plate from LF too.

I was skeptical at first but I looked deeper into this and the math checks out. Great to see a summary like this, all in one place.

What would we be compensated for, in that scenario? Allowing that would be opening the door to all kinds of front office shenanigans.

I agree with the logic, but him signing somewhere else at that value would be a disappointment, because I believe the draft pick associated with the rejected QO will be lower if the player signs below a certain threshold. $50M or so? IMO the Twins should make him a serious offer that is at least as high as this threshold, and if he comes back to the team then great, and if he moves on then they get compensated at about the level of a Chase Petty, assuming they draft well.

It's definitely a tangent for this thread, but I agree. Gordon's glove doesn't play, in the skill positions up the middle. Gordon's bat doesn't play, at the corners such as LF. He's a tweener, making him a backup at best, and those types of player are usually obtained easily, as witness our pickup of Willi Castro. You mentioned that he hit well in July and August 2022. I checked and in those two months his BABIP was .394. For his career he's almost exactly at league average with .304. By contrast, his blighted 2023 was brought down by a really low BABIP; presumably it would trend back up for 2024. The real Gordon is somewhere between these extremes. Any player who reaches the majors can have his moments - a Twins game I happened to be able to watch at Comerica Park resulted in a lot of laughs with my family as Gordon had the game of his life* and put my disparaging pre-game comments to shame - but all in all he's not in the LF discussion as far as I'm concerned. Not a hill I would die on, especially in this thread about Kepler and Polanco. But you don't replace Kep with Gordon and say, "okay, we're good." * edit - I went back and looked, and actually he's had better games than that one in his major league career, it just stuck out for me as unexpected

Concur. As the old saying goes, I don't care about left-handed pitchers, I care about getting left-handed batters out. Looking at OPS-against by our top 6 by games started, Lopez/Gray/Ryan/Ober/Maeda/Varland.... Lopez and Gray really stifled right-handed batters. Gray didn't have much of a platoon disadvantage, while Lopez's was pretty significant in the normal direction. Weirdly, all four of the others had a reverse-platoon split in 2023. Ryan and Ober were sort of league average against right-handed batters, Maeda* and Varland were pretty terrible against righties. But against lefties all managed to hold the opponents under .700 OPS, much better than MLB average. Surely not a repeatable outcome, unless pitching coach Maki has some kind of voodoo no one else knows about. Still, unless and until something changes, finding a lefty starter is pretty low among the priorities, as opposed to just locating a top arm, period. * Maeda's season was split between trying to tough it out before finally going on the IL, and then being pretty effective when he came back, so I am a bit skeptical about slicing and dicing his data without taking that into account.

For many purposes, such as roster construction, WAR is the sort of thing I like, at least for rough analysis. But when considering who is among the best of the best, such as HoF discussions, I prefer WAA, Wins Above Average*. The benchmark oughtn't to be random AAAA players, instead at the very least the midpoint of major-league competence. On b-r.com Tony outpaces Nelson by a healthy margin when WAA is the measuring (boom)stick. Which, I think, is more in line with what one really should expect. I guess I'll go there, and say that Win Probability Added, which IMO usually tracks well with WAA moreso than WAR because like WAA its baseline is also something akin to a .500 team, likewise rates Tony better. Nelson Cruz is a shoo-in for the mythical Hall of Very Good. And that is not to demean him - great career. But I don't want to demean Tony Oliva either. * I suppose if the discussion were to turn to Inner Circle HoF, I want something even more stringent than WAA. I just don't know what it would look like.

The 2019 Bomba Squad wouldn't have been the same without him. Congrats on a great career. The question is stated here and other threads, how about bringing him back to the Twins organization. Nelson has a "big" personality, and in a positive way. Is that personality type a plus as a coach, though? No reason to believe he's not smart enough to adapt, much the contrary, but it's worth thinking about. And some of it might be outside Boomstick's control - say the media chalks up every improvement in hitters' performance to the popular new coach and throws the player himself under the bus if performance slips - will that wear well over a long season? Maybe this is no more than the normal clubhouse chemistry challenge every manager faces, but Rocco will want to think this through since he'll have a lot of say on the coaching staff. Most major league coaches are less renowned than this when they come in. And he has no formal coaching experience - it could be nice to make him a roving instructor for the first season and see what comes of that, but will he want to revisit the minor-league lifestyle? More complicated than "he was great, hire the guy." He was great, no question.

To me the 40-man roster spot is more valuable than a million or three dollars, plus or minus. If the price starts to be the deciding factor, at the level being discussed here, I have to ask myself again if I really want him. Does Rocco trust him? That's the key question for roster construction. A guy you're paying veteran money to, should not be a guy you have to carefully pick the moments for, so as to hide him. In 2023, first half, Rocco didn't use Pagan much in high leverage situations. In the second half, he did - not like Duran of course, but in close games and not simply mopup. If that's the usage in 2024, he's worth it. If not, then not. A guy you have to hide, might as well be a rookie making rookie money. Of course, I want better than that for my roster, period. A bullpen full of guys you have to hide isn't a useful bullpen.