ashbury

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.

Depending on what you mean by "offset," Twins fan-favorite Joey Gallo made a career of that - an OBP that was around league-average on a sub-.200 BA. platform Of course, he could draw the walks because of his HR power. Kyle Schwarber has had a similar profile at times. Jesse Winker, Tommy Pham, and Mark Canha are less-powerful batters who have at times achieved very good OBP with below-average BA. But maybe those aren't quite the "poor" BA you have in mind. Your overall point is sound, but baseball is a very large tent and words like "anyone" are likely to turn up funny cases.

Concur, even if we we can't predict precisely how it all plays out. If there is a stoppage, it might get settled in July or earlier, leaving time for a brief "spring training" and at least as long a season as was in 2020, leading to a relatively normal post-season which is a great deal of the value assigned to acquiring talent at the trade deadline.

Surprised this narrative keeps popping up because it's wrong, and it was documented. Gray not only was open to returning, he even pushed for it a little. Sonny Gray told the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Bobby Nightengale that the Twins didn’t make much of a push to re-sign him when the veteran righty entered free agency last winter. “They were very transparent from the get-go, saying, ’Listen, we do not have the resources to give you a contract, as much as we would like to.’ So, I kind of knew that,” Gray said. “Even though we did come back a couple of times and try to work on some things, I kind of knew early on that it wasn’t [happening].”

I don't disagree, but I also feel as if the quick hire reflects an explicit message to the ones they'd like to retain, "we've eliminated the uncertainty and hope you'll stay."

Is Maki under contract? Perhaps he has his feelers out for a new situation.

Exactly. There are fallacies with going after free-agents and other established players, but the fallacy with relying on youth is the idea that you get "6 years" when you develop from within or trade for MLB-ready players. You laid out why you lose a couple years at either end. Add to that the fiction, when Target Field was being sought by ownership, that a brand spanking new ballyard would allow them to sign their own stars - just a little public funding, please..

I'm going to have to go through my collection and see whether I have any Hank Allen cards. Was it just his 1967 card that is valuable, or is every year of his worth soliciting bids on?

If a veteran is worth $1-3M ... he probably isn't worth it. 😄

Rojas? Best utility infielder in the game IMO.

Taking the hittable curveball for 0-2 was the key moment for Kirk. I thought he was gonna hammer it.