ashbury

We're obviously coming at things from a different point of view, and we had a similar discussion a few weeks ago. Yours is that Larnach isn't the squeakiest wheel, so he's not first in line to have something done about. Mine is that when a lot of things need to be done, the exact ordering is less important than the imperative that they all get done. Even with that said, I'm not quite sure why Larnach is some kind of hill you want to die on for 2026. Baseball-reference.com has an entertaining feature called Similarity Scores near the bottom of most veteran players' pages - it's derived from a Bill James idea from around 40 years ago and is just a toy, but fun. I looked at Larnach's list - here are his 10 most similar players through their age-27 seasons (that's Larnach's 2024 and apparently they haven't updated yet): Gavin Sheets (974.6) Kyle Blanks (973.4) Pavin Smith (972.2) Aaron Altherr (970.2) Steven Souza Jr. (970.0) Ken Wood (970.0) Willie Calhoun (969.9) Joe Hague (968.8) Dante Bichette (968.6) Chris Parmelee (967.9) The numbers aren't important except to illustrate how easy it is to find matches for a given player (with 1000 being someone's virtual clone). The 10th best match for Willie Mays, a much more unique kind of guy, at age 27 is teammate Orlando Cepeda with a similarity score of only 851. Carlos Correa is fun to look at - his age 27 list brings me to Vern Stephens, a really good and sadly forgotten shortstop from the 1940s/50s, and... whoops, that's a rabbit hole I'll have to not dive any further down. Anywho, Larnach has a pretty common set of skills and/or results, leading to a lot of matches in major league history. Which in turn means maybe we can learn something from history, though I'm lazy and will look at only the players this toy gives me. I took a quick glance through the careers of these 10 guys. What jumps out at me is this: 6 of them were out of the majors before age 30. That is to say, they were in the majors at age 27 and matched up closely enough to Larnach (considering the full arc of their careers up to that point) to be on this list, and then *poof* *fizzle*. Blanks, Altherr, Wood, Calhoun, Hague, and our own Parmelee. Of the remaining four, two are currently active players: Sheets has amassed WAR of -1.0 and +0.7 in his age 28 and 29 seasons. Smith likewise has 0.6 and 0.4 to show for his hard work at age 28/29. As to the final two, Steven Souza had a really good WAR of 3.6 at age 28 and then the bottom fell out - he hung on to age 33 but was never again a valuable player. Dante Bichette finally made good on his promise as a prospect and after his rough start he blossomed at age 29, only to sink back into mediocrity, though to his credit he kept finding work until the ripe old age of 37. This is hardly a scientific sampling, nor is the forecasting infallible. Still, it's systematic, and not cherry picking of guys I happen to remember. I was prepared to see evidence in either direction. But if I'm looking for evidence that Larnach was likely to be an asset to the Twins at age 28 (spoiler alert: his WAR in 2025 was 0.1) and going forward, it isn't here. Guys with resumes similar to Larnach's don't last too much longer, or if they do they don't amount to much. Is it worth a 1-in-10 gamble that he turns out as good as Dan Bichette? (The ship has already sailed on an age-28 season like Souza's.) The odds seem better that Larnach's poised to fall off a cliff, and you'll have to do something about him sooner than you think. (And need I belabor the point by saying that the top comps for true stars like Mays and Correa do not fit this fizzle-after-27 pattern? Not that either of us is calling Larnach a star - just, this makes it clear we haven't misjudged Trevor's hidden potential.) Larnach's going to need replacing soon. Rip the bandaid off now. Okay, enough about that. Perhaps your POV also is that removing Larnach from an impending 90-loss team might turn them into a 93-loss team or something like that - or even just that he's a reasonably popular fellow. If I were actually employed by the Twins I might have to take this angle - it's important not to crater so badly that attendance takes even another step downward. But I'm not employed by the Twins. And armchair-GMing a 90-loss team bores me. Like I said, we're coming at things from a different point of view. Whew. I don't know how you do all the typing you do. I'm tired. Maybe I need to use ChatGPT to compose my messages. 😁

From b-r.com: You could try looking there. RIP Albie. You were one of my first baseball cards.

Since the Reds finished with a better W/L record than the Twins, and thus have a lower right during waivers claims, it appears that our FO felt that Ben's not a better backup catcher than the sparse and motley group we already have in-house. He was of course a hold-over from the old Terry Ryan regime, which by now is down to basically Byron Buxton and Michael Tonkin unless I'm forgetting someone.

A team with 12 guys better than Larnach will not need Larnach on the roster with them to serve as their benchmark.

It is doubtful I will find this excellent tool to be of actual entertainment to me this off-season. I keep telling myself I have no interest in playing armchair GM for a bottom-feeding 90-loss team.

I've said before, in the context of Buxton, that you build around players of high talent and great character - and that to have such a player tell the team he wants out should be a firing offense for the FO. I'll modify that a bit to say that if Buxton's dissatisfaction is with ownership too, then the owners and the FO deserve each other. I hope none of this comes to pass.

I made it through most of one episode.

Also known as Rizz - wait, what? Are we seriously not doing Rizz anymore?! Huh, just when you've got game with the opposite sex? Okay fellow boomers, I'll see myself out.

Brooks Lee is 24 and everyone at Twins Daily still thinks he's this young prospect who needs a few more years of seasoning before he emerges as a star. 😁 (Nobody asked, but my actual opinion on Lee is probably between the two extremes.)

When would you say the team started running? In the final 20 games of the season, I count 83 runs. 4.15 runs per game For the entire months of August and September combined, i.e. after the trade deadline, they scored 227 across those 54 games, or 4.20 per game. Pretty much in line with the paltry 4.19 they scored across the season as a whole. MLB average in 2025 was 4.45, and the good offenses in the majors scored more like 5. I don't see any evidence of "success" in terms of actual run-scoring.

But, but, but, but, Brent Rooker! 😄

We old timers have watched the Eephus pitch morph into the 2-seam sinker, and mutter wisely to ourselves about a rose by any other name.

The Twins are "letting" Watkins interview? Is that similar to how they're letting Baldelli interview?

After repeatedly investing first-round draft capital at the position - Lewis, and Cavaco, and Miller, and (yes) Lee - this FO needing to go out and acquire a stopgap SS, so that one of Culpepper, Debarge, or Houston can develop at the position, is nothing short of galling. I thought very highly of Rojas in a super-utility role, well before the WS. But does he want to go back to starting for a 90-loss team, versus being a non-starter for a team with legitimate championship aspirations? Not everyone has the same outlook on life as that one notable character in Paradise Lost who proclaimed, "better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." The OP certainly throws cold water on the idea of him signing with the Twins.

Tell me you're not an old-timey Twins fan, without saying the words "I'm not an old-timey Twins fan." 🙃

I'm in favor of tying revenue sharing to some measure of "success", to keep owners from pocketing those funds instead of making the team better. But, one of my periodic refrains is that "success" needs to be defined carefully. It shouldn't be simply Win/Loss records, because that's a zero sum game among all the teams. Much more important to me is the health of the game, which is not zero-sum among franchises. What if filling ballparks to near-capacity every day was one of the criteria? That's inherently good for the game, even if you have to drop the price of the bleacher seats to $5 for a few years until families get back in the habit, and even if it requires financial subsidy by the bigger teams who can charge more per ticket in their wealthier markets. The pricing of tickets at Target Field looks pretty accurately set for maximizing total revenue - but that's short-sighted, and if instead prices were lowered to entice fans to come have a good time, in conjunction with (for example) short pre-game concerts by local bands, in the long run the price of the seats will drift upward because you now have a solidly viable product and repeat customers. I don't know how the formula should look that achieves this - special cases like sad-sack Tampa and Athletics will be nettlesome because they could lower their price to $0.01 and perhaps still not sell out - also the differences in ballparks have to be taken into account (e.g. Target Field was purposely built small to keep prices high). But I'm happy to see the Pirates owner get a nice payday at the end of each year if he just succeeds in filling his ballpark, and I begrudge him his money when he doesn't - ditto for low-attendance ballparks in Kansas City, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and yes Minneapolis.. Sure, putting a winning product on the field every now and then should be rewarded too.

That is the high-end aisle they'll be shopping in. And, a "bunch"? No, one or two. It's so cute, people clinging to the notion that the Twins plan to compete this coming season. Sure, if a bunch of players have careers years or some prospects simultaneously break out, it could happen. But that's not a plan. New manager Shelton made it pretty clear when he was asked a question that included the word "rebuild" - given the opportunity to say "rebuild? that's preposterous," he instead said "I'm not using the term rebuild. People are always gonna go to a certain term, but I think we're gonna develop young players." It doesn't take a fortune-teller with special skills in reading tea leaves to decipher that code. When they traded Jax the day after they traded Duran, the die was cast. Well, I mean for public consumption; the die was cast in internal discussions sometime before, surely.

I've heard of him so this is a good choice.

Kinley: His breakthrough at Atlanta was on a foundation of a .156 BABIP, so I wouldn't expect that kind of outcome to be repeatable (soft contact or not). Still, if he's no longer tied to a $5.5M pricetag, I would consider him worth bidding on. So will other teams. Milner: He showed even more extreme platoon splits than Funderburk, so if they go after him they'd better have a plan for his usage, in an era where LOOGY is pretty hard to choreograph. Armstrong: It's not that BABIP is the only thing I look at, LOL, but as with Kinley, will you be paying a premium price for a .196 BABIP that probably won't be sustainable? If I were GM I'd put in a bid and expect to be outbid, in which case "oh well." Three interesting candidates. It could turn out that none are quite the fit for a bottom-feeding 2026 Twins squad.

Don't blame Batman for showing up when you shine the Batsignal. 🙃 By my reading of MLB's explanation of waivers, teams in the same league no longer get first crack, it's just winning percentage across all 29 other teams. https://www.mlb.com/glossary/transactions/outright-waivers Your point is still well taken. Not many teams turned down the chance to snare this prize.

The waiver process isn't an exact art. Looks like the FO thought this was the time in the off-season to sneak someone through. Among the list of players they did waive, Laweryson seems clear cut as one the Twins might regret (Miranda maybe but he's now in Outman territory as somebody else's fixer-upper). The waiver process isn't an exact art. The loss of a middle reliever probably isn't a big deal in the great scheme of things, but still goes into the negative ledger - I continue to look in vain for any sign of something Falvey is especially good at. It's 20/20 hindsight now, but with the 40-man being so depleted now, it would have made sense to wait until a roster spot was actually needed due to new acquisitions and prospects they need to protect from Rule 5, before placing Laweryson on waivers. But the waiver process isn't an exact art.

Then they may have guessed wrong on Laweryson. But maybe "speculative interest" by one bad team is not quite the same as "trade value" for better-off teams. (As a side note, who knows how long Laweryson will remain on the Angels' 40-man either, as further moves come down the pike in their off-season. Currently their 40-man has lots of room too but that will change.)

I count 14 pitchers on the 40-man roster after dropping these 5. Lots of moves to come. The exit of Miranda leaves 19 position players. That's quite an imbalance. Probably several moves are on the horizon for them too. I keep telling myself I have zero interest in playing armchair GM for a 90-loss team, and yet here I am, counting roster spots.

Welcome to another episode of Are You Smarter Than A Billionaire?

Sounds like the opposite of a straight shooter.