ashbury

None really. Castellano is the one who might raise the FO's off-season grade if he performs well. Everyone else is close to a known quantity, within narrow bounds.

Better than that, about a week ago there was a story about how no one is coming off of surgery or rehab this off-season. IOW, every player is arriving in THE BEST SHAPE EVER™.

What, and shine a light on the vaunted Pitching Pipeline™ being a tad thin?

Pssst, Seth, Friday the Thirteenth came on Thursday this month.

Give Zebby a first-baseman's mitt and see if he's any good.

/ edit - I checked after posting and you used this exact idea last year. Oh well, I thunk it up on my own and I'm leaving it. 😀

According to sources, TD executives have been looking for ways to cull the herd here anyway. Ty France Fever can only help with this goal.

See, that's where I have the advantage: I've been told many times that I know bupkis. Anyway I go back and forth on whose draft was better. I'm not a big believer in either Prielipp or Eeles, so I guess I give the nod to Cody, but only by a hair.

I started out replying to someone referring to 3-base errors, so I discussed on the terms presented. It's not really how I judge defense, but was fine for conversation's sake. Still, for one of the two players on the Twins who managed to put in a full season's worth of plate appearances, Santana's counting stats on offense don't really stand out versus the league. His glove is what made him arguably a slightly above-average player in 2024, and I give him credit for it, but it takes multiple bad plays to amount to an actual run scored in most cases, while an HR is guaranteed to score 1 and might knock in 1 or 2 or 3 others. It's virtually impossible for any player who isn't up-the-middle to prevent enough runs to make up for so-so offense.

I offer my condolences to the player. I offer my condolences also to the team

So now they're trolling fans of all other teams, with a player who is booed everywhere.

With most of these guys, you're looking at a below-average glove at SS. highlighted by verbiage that's variations on the theme of "can play multiple positions." Culpepper is about the only one I can feel a little excitement about.

Which, as I looked up the photo, was apparently somebody's idea of a joke, as a takeoff on her shirt that said Stop Being Desperate, which maybe was also dumb but not as moronic as Stop Being Poor.

Literal minded TD poster replies literally:

That's the moment he descends into "Why guy" territory. I really liked your "why not" category.

Fielding percentages are far higher than batting averages. Rare is the Dick Stuart (Dr. Strangeglove) type who screws up enough to lose his first base job if he's hitting homers, and of course now there's the DH to bail such a player out. Yours is a much poorer comparison.

I've never woofed for Headrick and I'm not going to defend him now. He's lefty and he's breathing, so he'll continue getting chances, and another poster aptly characterized him as a "why not?" 40-man choice. The Yankees, far from a joke team, apparently saw the same value since they seem to be light on lefties at the moment, so now he's the Yankees' why-not guy. He hasn't yet regressed into a "why?" guy. 😀 But that doesn't mean there was any trade value before Headrick was put on waivers. Still, 40-man spots have value and the team liked France enough to give him one in preference to whoever they were considering, in a situation where the contract usually is MiLB with a Spring invite and then the $1M commitment if he makes the 26-man roster. I suppose the 40-man spot was some kind of sweetener to induce France to agree, since being on the 40-man does confer certain perks. All I'm saying is that there is more of an investment by the Twins than the potential $1M. Which makes me question the investment on a guy like him, unless their talent evaluation is better now than when they plucked guys like Margot. He's simply a slightly more expensive why-not guy. Why?

How many errors of any kind were first-basemen charged with last season? 222. How many home runs did first-basemen hit last season? 670. One of these is of more importance than the other (not every error leads to a run, while every home run does), and is also more frequent. Of course a slick-fielding first baseman is valuable, but if he doesn't hit home runs at a pace which keeps up with his peers, he's dragging his team down, one plate appearance at a time. Elephant-rabbit stew, and we keep wanting to talk about the rabbit.

Contract-wise, specifically, yes. But they like him well enough they risked, and lost, so-so lefty Brent Headrick. Would I have traded Headrick for France even-up last Trade Deadline? Probably not. Has France improved in the meantime, by getting healthier? Seems to be what the Twins FO is thinking, because they made this "trade."

Nitpick: I expect Rick would want you to know it's "The Ohio State University", with a capital T. I never went there, but the graduates have burned this into my consciousness.

Heh, not to beat a dead horse, but your question amounts to asking where on the efficient frontier you are willing to sit. Or, if some choices are significantly far from the frontier. Oh, and in your other reply to me, where you mentioned the Tetris board clogging up: now you're touching on the field of Constrained Portfolio Optimization. Okay, I'm done. This isn't a Quant class in MBA school and I'm not qualified to teach one. 😀

Mostly agree. But aside from Buxton, the Twins have no one else anywhere in their system with CF skills close to Bader's. Not even in the low minors, where defense is more about potential. Maybe they decided that's a major lack. (To which I would ask them why they've not developed anyone.) If you substitute Keirsey for Bader, you (probably? maybe?) gain some offense but at the cost of some defense. If you are familiar with the idea of "efficient frontiers" in investment portfolios, I see this as somewhat similar to comparing investments. In a nutshell, many opportunities (whether financial investments or baseball players) are clearly better than others, but among the best choices available, it's often still a question of tradeoffs. For example, expected return on a bond, versus its risk. You can draw a curve of all the good opportunities (where worse ones in both dimensions lie elsewhere below the curve), and then choose the spot you want to be, on that outermost curve. Replace Risk and Return with Offense and Defense, and hopefully the parallel is clear. (Offense, Defense, and investment Return are all positive things, while Risk is a negative attribute, so for baseball players that X-axis would be defensive ineptitude, I suppose.) Among baseball players in general, guys like Buxton are on the efficient frontier while Bader is not. But players like Buxton aren't available since they are under contract to other teams. In terms of backup players who are actually available, Bader might actually belong on the efficient frontier of players the Twins could have added. For some situations (e.g. Buxton down for a lengthy period), you might want to choose him simply because of the unique skillset. Weighing against that is Bader's salary compared to Keirsey, and the inability to shuttle him down and up to St Paul as you can with Keirsey. Efficient frontiers are hard to wrangle by hand, when you go above 2 dimensions, and you need a computer. I still find it a useful way of generalized thinking, and I see Bader as actually somewhere close to the efficient frontier one could draw of Twins talent under current control. That's not the same as saying he's my choice, but he's not a crazy choice. He's close to unique. BTW, I mentioned last year that in August at the SABR convention, I had the opportunity to informally chat one-on-one with each of Derek and Thad, who were both very gracious with their time. I mentioned portfolio theory to them, and it didn't seem to resonate as a tool they apply to their "investments" in players. Top analytics guy Josh Kalk knew what I was talking about, though.