ashbury

Attendance figures would seem to bear that out. Mission Accomplished?

You're the author. Pirates or Royals might also be instructive. But it's not my place to put more on your plate.

Now do the Cardinals, Rays, and Dodgers, as a compare/contrast.

I don't think a simple metric can be devised. A team should target wisely and then succeed more often than not on their key targets. Correa is a big fail. Gallo is a big meh. Vazquez is a medium success. That's all.

Much will depend on what further moves get made. If a corner outfielder with many years of team control, such as Wallner, departs in favor of having this one-year wonder who will absolutely move on if he has any success, I really will question the front office's strategery.

"To say Joey Gallo was bad last year would be like saying a turd isn't particularly tasty... it hardly describes the full truth." Is this observation from experience? I always have to ask, when people say things like this. At least, nobody can accuse you of burying the lede. In fact I can't remember anything you said after your opening sentence.

You forgot Fishing in the Ocean. Also, the courtesy shopping trip to Dior where you depart empty-handed and shaking your head at the idiocy of Other People

I might have been in the minority by thinking Taylor Rogers was a reasonable trade chip; his finger injury in 2021 worried me. What I didn't like was that the return represented an even bigger injury risk based on track record, whose worst case came to fruition almost immediately, plus a reclamation project that didn't really pan out. So, it was a lose-lose trade, but I see the Twins coming out the worse of the two trading partners, because their trade chip was the more valuable and they wasted it. Even if Paddack comes back after the surgery, too much time will have ticked off of the team-control clock on him.

Nice synthesis. Now do Gallo for us.

It's the off-season. Everything's on paper or is opinion. Check with me again at the end of the 2023 season and I'll give you my revised forecast, too.

"Where does Gallo play? RF is his best position. but we have Kepler. He could be DH, but didnt we want to get away from having a primary DH? " Gallo moved to LF when he joined the Yankees and remained there with the Dodgers - for reasons that are probably pretty obvious in both cases. It's not like he's inexperienced and we're pushing him out of some comfort zone. I don't expect Kepler (if he stays) to get bumped to LF, so Gallo surely knows the possibility he'll see time there at minimum, by signing the contract. "batting average is not the biggest thing, but making contact and getting on base is!! " His .160 BA this year is impossible to defend and the FO surely thinks there is reason to expect him to come back to his career norms. But the guy walks a ton, so that his on-base percentage is routinely more than .100 points above his BA, and that OBP is actually above league average. His career OBP, bad BA and all, is also (slightly) above Kepler's career log. Walks aren't as good as singles, but whatever else you say about the guy, he gets on base. I think his game, which consists of strikeouts and walks and homers, leads to boring baseball unless he's the only such slugger in the lineup. I think it's a big gamble that he does bounce back. He seems redundant to this roster rather than addressing a need. $11M for a guy who needs a "prove it" year seems way high. For all these reasons I'm less than lukewarm about signing him. But as Yogi said, in baseball, you don't know nothin'. Maybe it'll work out. "solid, coherent defense that says this signing is anything but horrid. " Maybe it'll work out... is the best I can do.

I don't want attendance to drop to zero, so I am grateful there are fans who will accept business as usual, in Twins country.

Even if he bounces back to previous production, he's a Three True Outcomes guy (SO/BB/HR) and that is boring baseball. Joe Pohlad needs to put his big boy pants on and insist that Marketing have some say. ... wait. What if Marketing thinks HR is the best and only way to publicize the team. Joe P has some housecleaning to do in that case.

That's definitely a reference worth including.

Your example is certainly true. As a second-order effect, the years (when it's that many) probably would matter. Two offers of $350M, but one at 10 years, would be more attractive than 13. Not because of "average annual value," but because it commits the player to less work. At that level of pay, the issue likely is more about the charitable foundation the player wants to fund. Getting out of bed at age 40 to go do strenuous physical activity with 25-year olds trying to beat you, grumbling "I'm too old for this ****, but I'm doing it for the needy kids," is all well and good, but he'd rather have that final grumble at age 37 if he's permitted.

I look at it more as execution*. They seemed to have believed they had invoked logic and planning and strategy. They couldn't execute. The off-season's not over and maybe that blunt assessment will turn out to be premature. * I'll save everyone the trouble, "wait, the front office's execution? Yes, I'm in favor of it." Har.

One more year and $3M more in AAV and pretty soon you're talking big money.

They spread the cost across 6 years instead of 5.

Slightly. And I hope my wording, at least in conclusion, indicated I don't take reports like that entirely at face value. It's preposterous they would really stop in their tracks to reassess, rather than pivot to an already-planned Plan B or C. But the signal coming out from that writer doesn't add any reassurance, does it.

What? Reassessing? Now, in the heat of battle, as it were? They didn't war-game this in September-October, following obvious pairs of scenarios such as "Correa signs with us" and "Correa doesn't sign with us" to their logical conclusions? I'd be... ahem... unimpressed to learn that. Reassessing would have been for if Cincinnati had asked too much for Farmer...

Thanks for putting together this concise summary of the way things look from the inside. I'll limit my response to one thing you said: "They aren't cheap - they are disciplined." Disciplined can overlap with rigid, and can be the opposite of dynamic. In the last few weeks, the market for the very top end of position players, shortstops in particular, exceeded all (public) expectations. Were the Twins disciplined, or unwilling to adapt? The concept of an s-shaped curve is well known (to you I'm sure) and IMO applies to free agent salaries: I couldn't find a great visual so ignore the numbers on the two axes, and imagine salary paid on the horizontal, and value received (I'll think in terms of WAR) on the vertical. Pay major league minimum (lower left hand corner) and you receive essentially zero in value; pay a little more and you still get zero, keep paying more and you start to receive value better than a minor-league free agent, keep paying more and you get somewhat linearly increasing value, but eventually your additional payment starts leveling off and every extra dollar nets you less and less. When you go after top end talent, in this case Correa, you know in advance that you're at that upper-right corner of the chart. You've committed to "overpaying" in terms of price-performance. Everybody, literally everybody, wants the difference-maker players on the right of this chart, and the big market teams will pay what it takes. All of a sudden, the curve changes right from under you. Where you thought you were one place on the curve, now you are way insufficient; way to the left on that graph than you thought. What do you do now? I am bothered that the Twins FO apparently thought they were committed going in, but then didn't adapt. You call it disciplined, I call it rigid.

If there's a rebuild, I'm first entertaining trade offers on Falvey and Levine themselves.

Rename the team as the Yankees, because the rumors are that's where he wants to go. Deal with the trademark infringement at a later time.

I didn't read your post - I stopped after "If" - but I'm pretty sure I didn't like it. ?

"You should smile more." Always a great ice-breaker for a conversation!