ashbury

I was somehow thinking the FO could pick the best time to DFA Canterino (assuming, as you say, the process even allows it), for instance Opening Day when every team is trying to trim down and finalize their working set of players. But then it dawned on me, some bottom-feeder team could just cut a low-talent player, add Canterino to the 40, and then immediately put him on the 60-day IL themselves. No, I expect that as long as the Twins paid the "price" to carry him on the 40 all off-season, they will continue to carry him on the IL as needed, and then see what his post-surgery progress is and decide something about him after the World Series. Service time (accrued during IL-60) surely is not a driving issue for a pitcher of his age anyway - we should be so lucky, if 6 years down the line it's even a tiny issue. I do not know if there is some minor financial aspect during 2025 for the team.

60-day IL versus not comes down to 1) how soon they can't fill needs from the current 40-man and thus need an open spot on the 40 and 2) who else goes down with a serious injury in the meantime.

WTF Pablo?

My father-in-law, RIP, raised his daughter right. Took her and her twin brother to Opening Day at Wrigley every season, back when it didn't cost a middle-class family the year's entire entertainment/vacation budget. So, this year, just have your dad come to the principal's office and sign you out from work. Easy peasy.

As well as in the comments section. "Your name is Inigo Pohlad. You killed my team. Prepare to die."

If the idea is good then the Twins need to play along. These are not long bus rides, and freeway miles are part of a minor leaguer's lot anyway. I'll give slack if the Twins say someone was held back due to a nagging injury, but not every single good prospect. Besides that, I wouldn't be confident that Raya for example would have shown any better command than Nowlin did today. I'm really bothered by the guys they've invested time in, where it's highly unclear it's going to pay off.

Base Inches Per Game At First is the analytics stat that finally wins over the average fan!

One of my nagging concerns is that essentially none of the "sweeteners" that are obtained as part of bigger trades seem ever to work out. I keep meaning to do a thorough bit of research on Twins trades during the FalVine era, to document (or disprove) this. When they specifically target a prospect, such as Joe Ryan, it's worked out, but I'm talking about different guys than that. We didn't just get Pablo Lopez for Luis Arraez, we also got Jose Salas who was a well-regarded infield prospect, and Pfffft, he has fizzled. Gabriel Gonzales came along in the Jorge Polanco trade, and some touted him as the real reason for the trade, and now we are seeing some major red flags in his skill set, apparently on display in this game (I tuned in late). There are some others (not in today's game) who aren't coming to mind at the moment so, like I said, I need to be systematic and write it up. Some of the guys are still young and their final page hasn't been written yet - but instead of shoring up the farm system with gems from other organizations, the trend has seemed like accepting trade capital that other teams didn't have use for. I would love it if they could package up this assortment of prospect capital into a massive trade for someone's major league player, but it seems to me that these prospects have lost what trade value they may once have had, and the only chance to salvage their value is if they somehow do develop into something the Twins can put to use themselves.

Management is a delicate task, but IMO Falvey would be justified in asking some very pointed questions down his chain of command as to the seeming lack of preparation, particularly of some players with multiple seasons in the Twins system by now. Any individual player could be just an aberration, but this display today of some touted players has a feel of Total System Failure.

Game announcers making excuses for the Twins being a lot younger than the Jays breakout players. I'm not going to invest the effort to check their statement, but it's hard to dig up enough excuses to explain away today's clown show.

Sweet looking swing. Gotta be someone with a career .300 BA!

I assume he makes Andruw Young look like Andruw Jones, as well?

As implied elsewhere in the thread, a slow start isn't welcome for anyone. Still, I would put Brooks Lee near the top of the list, assuming he is brought north in the first place - or, I guess, whoever else such as Gasper or Julien who is perceived as barely making it as the 25th or 26th man on the roster in place of Lee.

It's an interesting topic, and a broad one. You are looking at it from the perspective of both the pitcher and the batter, not to mention the managers who have to think these things through. A batter who isn't a defensive whiz needs to survive through his bat, and that means this: murderize the pitches that come from the opposite hand, and be at least playable when the pitches come from the same hand. Wallner's career splits are extreme but one can view his 2024 as representing progress of a sort, with an OPS of .611 against lefties. That's not good, and at age 27 it's not clear how much additional growth he's capable of, but even a little further improvement against LHP will make him "not unplayable" when the average lefty takes the mound. That's all he needs. A walk instead of a meek putout, against a lefty during a rally, makes all the difference, for example. (Wallner is also know for HBP but I don't really recommend this as a conscious strategy.) Larnach is in a less favorable position - his 2024 didn't give evidence to feed him more PA versus lefties. It's a big assumption that more and more chances will improve matters - it might, or it might lead simply to losses. On the other side of the coin, nothing is more maddening to me than to bring in a lefty, say with two outs and men on base, to face the other team's LHB, and for that pitcher (*cough*Thielbar*cough*) to then fart around trying to lure swings at pitches out of the strike zone, eventually walk the batter, and then have to face the righty because league rules no longer allow the LOOGY. YOU HAD ONE JOB, lefty, and that's to attack the left-handed batter. If he beats you when you gave him your best stuff, so be it - you're in this to compete, right, so sometimes he gets you, more often you get him. It would be interesting to extract statistics of how pitchers do when facing alternating handedness. I have no way to develop that data myself.

And, with strikeouts. He even led the entire American League in strikeouts one year. Why, did you know, he struck out in fully 17.3% of his plate appearances during his career! Intolerable! If Matt Wallner did that in the present day, who knows how the fan base would react.

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, uh, your opinion, man.

Those eyes. Like he just disembarked from the spaceship.

I found the quote attributed variously, but if it's indeed Mauch, he certainly had plenty of experience losing. 😀

I don't want him on the infield dirt either. There was that ball he fielded at second base but then hesitated, one-hopped the throw to the catcher, and failed to get the dead duck at home. I don't know how to use the site you linked to find that one. The poor guy is an indecision/bad-decisions machine out there. He's Jake Cave. I kind of feel sorry for him, but you just can't have him out there like that.

Was it Gene Mauch who said, "most close games are lost, not won"? Or Casey Stengel, or John Wooden. Anyway it's a common philosophy.

Fact-checking isn't really a thing at Spring Training, but I'm still gonna say it was 15-3.

Wait. We are to accept that a 1.346 OPS isn't sustainable? 😀 BTW, this thread turned into a referendum on Joey Gallo so gradually, I almost didn't notice.

Calling Gasper a catcher reminds me of the riddle Abraham Lincoln was said to like: "How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg?" (I'm sure most here know the answer. Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.) You didn't provide a link, but I think one of them is this: FanGraphs . There, I see also their projection for Aaron Sabato as an OPS of .269+.325 = .594. Considering that his AA OPS last season was .653, it makes me question their methodology - maybe that's what they think he'll do if given a chance at AAA. Mind you, I'm an old-time Bill James acolyte (I was in attendance at the committee meeting where he launched Project Scoresheet) and I do believe that minor league numbers have a lot of predictive value. But I don't worship at the altar of FanGraphs and I'm not at all persuaded by this table that it's likely for multiple catching prospects to out-hit Vazquez at this time, and the ones who might are not in Vazquez's category for defense even at his advanced age. And this isn't the place for a deep-dive into projection systems so I'm going to leave it at that.

Took me several days to go back and review the early comments, but this is exactly how I feel. There was a similar issue over in the Vikings thread a few days ago, concerning whether to place a Franchise tag on Sam Darnold and then trade him. Weighing against was that maybe no one would trade for him at that salary (a fear that looks borne out with the contract he actually signed). But the bigger issue was the salary cap. While Darnold was on their books, they could miss out on signing about $40M worth of other talent. Those were crucial days, in the NFL version of free agency, and the Vikings look like they did well to not put the tag on Darnold. MLB payrolls and free agency and everything else work differently than the NFL. But I still can't help seeing the parallel with Vazquez. His relatively piddling $10M stood in the way of some different use of those funds, during the off-season. Now in Spring Training, rosters are much more locked in. Getting salary relief from the Mets wouldn't have the same effect. We already paid the price, in terms of roster construction, by hanging on to Vazquez all off-season. Now, the one exception could be this: they save $10M for the coming season, and apply that to a real star at the trade deadline, paying the remainder of someone's expiring $30M contract. I could support that, if the FO would promise to actually do it when the time came. "Ugh, nothing quite fit for us" - that would be my expectation come August, unfortunately.

People seem to assume that ".575" represents some sort of lower bound on what a catcher might OPS as a backup. That's not true. Last year Tampa put up with Alex Jackson's .439 in 46 starts, and Cleveland suffered with .422 in Austin Hedges's 46 starts. And this reflects selection bias in that the team does have some say in whom they stick with - if you do a Stathead search with a lower criterion on games played, you get some pretty ghastly offensive numbers to weed through. Maybe if given the chance, one of Cartaya/Camargo comes through. What's the plan when both lay eggs at the plate, though?