ashbury

His baseball-reference.com page shows his nickname as The Doof. (He went to Rice University so the term is surely a fond one - he's not a doofus.)

The off-season begins the day after the World Series is over, and those initial roster decisions have to be made by then.

Ditto on the kudos.

I appreciate the analysis and the attempt to locate value in our player, but I feel the bar is set too low. A bat-first player who costs you runs when on defense is basically only breakeven if his OPS is .800. He needs peripherals more like in the Nelson Cruz range, to be an asset. Our 40-man roster is kind of thin with outfielders, once you discard the 30-year old placeholder corner guys, so I'm not eager to likewise discard Rooker for a bag of balls or similar. But I'm not very high on him and it's mainly the sad state of our roster that makes me open to investing further in his development.

Yeah. Pointless understatement. How about, THE most disappointing result in the history of human endeavor.

Swagger is all well and good, but how about command, and also consistency? Too many times I've seen him come out there with no ability to put the breaking pitch where he needs to, and then the hitters sit on the fastball. Some days he looks like he's found it, and then the next time out, zilch. I haven't seen him often enough lately to know whether I still feel the same; but consistency is partly about not getting too enthused about any individual outing. He's had a good September, fantastic really and nearly spotless except for one outing, but I'm uneasy that it's built on a BABIP of .111 - and the one blemish was against a top team. I'm going to withhold judgement about him being at a new and permanent level of elite achievement at least through next April, and against top teams when those opportunities roll around.

Any team with the Doof as closer probably is looking at 90+ losses. Not because he will personally blow 20 saves, but because the rest of the bullpen must be really mediocre and there won't be too many leads to save.

The front office went to great effort to provide "depth" in the pitching department this year. Three of the arms acquired during the process stunk it up tonight. Sammons at least has come up through the ranks, and he acquitted himself well, but at age 26 his time may be about up. Not many bright spots in this game.

Hey, look! Someone painted the word "gullible" on the ceiling.

Did you know that the word "gullible" doesn't actually appear in any dictionary? Look it up!

That's the idea. Starve the team of resources.

It's OK to say ass at this site, you just can't say **** or **** or especially ************.

Keeping Jake Cave isn't a hill I would die on. I've been on record a long time for not liking his game very much. If you or someone else want to keep Garlick as the OF place holder instead, it's not terribly consequential, but IMO we have an oversupply of options for the corners. Celestino is on the 40-man and I would of course keep him, but I'm not confident he'll be ready on Opening Day - his good AAA numbers are built on a rather high number of hits dropping in. I drop Refsnyder and Garlick because their bats aren't any better than Cave and they do not have his range - Refsnyder hurt himself trying to play CF, after all. Dropping Cave too, brings the OF count down to 5 and that's too thin. The acquisition of someone better than Cave in center will make his departure assured and painless. We are short on up the middle talent.

Two aphorisms come to mind: For every complex human problem, there is a solution that is neat, simple and wrong. – H. L. Mencken Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Albert Einstein So I'm kind of trying to thread the needle here, between two smart guys.

In trying to get down to 40 players to begin the off-season, I start from a similar point as others have stated. 40-man roster management is hard, but becomes at least a little less intractable by partitioning it into playing positions. The coarsest such partition is simply hitters and pitchers. A 20-20 split between them isn't how it's done anymore, but for this stage of thinking I'm going to aim for 19-21 rather than radically overweight toward pitching with 18-22 or even 17-23. According to MLB's 40-man roster for our Twins, there are currently 20 batters either on that roster or else temporarily shielded by being on the 60-day IL. (That same logic comes to 29 pitchers, so the next part of the decision making process is going to be more difficult). So now I further partition into 3 groups. Catching: we have 3 guys on the roster (not counting Astudillo), and I keep all 3. Gee, this is easier than I thought. Infield: In this group I include Arraez, Astudillo, and Rooker (1B for lack of a real position) which gives a count of 9. I let Simmons walk, and DFA Maggi. Replacing them are Royce Lewis and Jose Miranda who are rule-5 eligible, leaving the total at 9. Still fairly easy. I'm missing a true shortstop but that probably has to come from free agency - I don't prematurely cut someone else in anticipation, but when that time comes, there will be candidates remaining - we're not an all-star squad. Outfield: Counting Kirilloff (whom some might think debatable in the OF) there are 8. I am happy to mark for disposal Garlick and Refsnyder who are mediocre hitters with no outstanding defensive talent to help make a case. That leaves only 6, which is a little light, but several of the nominal infielders can fill in, in left. CF remains the most critical to have coverage for, and Cave seems to remain the best range if Buxton is unavailable and Celestino's bat isn't ready next spring - and Lewis among the infielders might be capable in CF but is right now too much of a question mark - so I am not quite as eager to be rid of Jake. Anyway, that brings us to 6. Huh. 3+9+6=18, so I came in with 1 fewer than I expected. Maybe I protect Maciel in CF, but he had a mediocre year at high-A so I don't think Baddoo Lightning will strike again. No, I'll hold off on adding him (conceptually) to my 40-man planning until the pitching side of the question is sorted out better. In summary, Simmons walks, and I explore quick trades involving Maggi, Refsnyder, and Garlick, planning to DFA them if nothing like that pans out (it probably won't in each case) before 40-man rosters are locked in for the off-season. Next up, the hard part: pitching. / Those who know me will assume that my thinking is heavily influenced by having played dozens of off-seasons using Out Of The Park. The above does indeed reflect how I go about it, but no one wants to read me wax eloquent about that aspect. Suffice to say that I have been burned too many times by allowing my roster to be unbalanced and thus too small in one area of need during the course of a long season.

A team option is a huge perk for a team, and is not agreed to lightly. If 2/$22 plus incentives is about fair, then probably the agent would ask at least for those incentives to be turned into guaranteed money, in exchange for including the option - e.g. $13M guaranteed plus an option on the second year for $13M with a $2M buyout. That works out to $15M actually guaranteed, which is still less than the $22M guarantee in the other plan, but some chance for Mike to sign with someone else that second year that make up the $7M difference or could be greater or could be smaller. Basically more risk borne by him than by the team, so I might be a little light on what the agent would ask for - maybe some innings incentives added back into one or both years, after all. There may be tax implications for the player, doing it one way versus the other, too.

I have close to zero interest in trading away any of our catching. We don't have a surplus, and it's very quick and easy for that position to become a liability. If a trade would bring blue-chip starting pitching, that would be a different story, but even then the FO would have the challenge of securing some additional catching depth that is better than the AAAA talents of Tomas Telis.

Colome has to be the unluckiest pitcher on the planet. He always seems to be on the mound when the other team is scoring runs.

Yeah, I don't think this award is meant to crown the best prospect, but merely to reflect in absolute terms who had the best year.

If he's raised his trade value then he's also made his case to stay on the team. He now has 3 consecutive months with OPS in the low 800s. That's above-average hitting across the entire league. But 1B and especially DH demand something a little higher than that, to be an actual asset at those spots in the lineup; it's not above-average among those players. You can live with Average-ish at any given position, but to be competitive you want something more than that for several of your players. Otherwise you are looking at a .500 team (if your pitching can also achieve Average-ish). His salary isn't outrageous, but also is not an inducement for a team to take him on. So, no, I wouldn't say Sano has any particular trade value. What team will say, yeah, that's the guy who can help solidify our .500 aspirations, so let's give up some elite prospects to nab him? But he's at the cusp of having value, if he could turn it up a notch, to say a .900 OPS. That's why two months of Nelson Cruz brought back something of value at the deadline. And again, that would be an asset you wouldn't trade away, unless looking at a lost season. It's somewhat counter-intuitive just how nonlinear are the calculations of player valuation.

Expected salary through arbitration was the drag on Rosario's trade value. An Eddie Rosario being paid what Brent Rooker will make would be a much different matter.

Depth arms need to still have a minor-league option remaining, and not have sufficient service time to refuse a demotion. Pitchers who lack the flexibility to be sent down must be viewed in other terms than "depth", i.e. are they actually good. Maybe you can put up with one pitcher who must be up all season, in a long-man role, but even that's very far from ideal. I'm really at a loss to how to manage this ragtag assortment, which seems to need a 50-man roster and infinite options to burn.

Probably you or I wouldn't use Colome in the ninth, regardless of how long Ryan went.

Don't you think if Ryan goes that extra inning, Minaya is the one who is bypassed, and the late innings are covered exactly the same as it played out?

I want to believe this would help, but I think the FO has a philosophy in place for both hitting and pitching, and a coach who tries to go against it wouldn't last very long. It goes beyond any one coach.