ashbury

I'm on the Prospect-Hoarder end of the spectrum, but I would not actually count on any of these players being major league contributors yet. It's fine to have a plan for when they go beyond knocking on the door, and actually kick that door in through their performance at AAA - a plan as to who else to demote or who else to trade or who else to cut. But none of them can be who you plan 2025 around. That courts disaster, of 2024 ChiSox proportions. Debuts in 2025? Maybe some of them. Game-changing? That's wishful thinking.

Derek Falvey's profit-sharing check from the Pohlads depends on getting out from under $21M+ of payroll. Simple as that.

Wow, this is actually promising. Expectations haven't been met. Change is called for, expertise moreso than loyalty is my preference at this time. DSP has a seat on the board of directors, so this news raises the likelihood of a sale of the club, in my own mind anyway and lacking insider information. New owners will bring in their own board. More than ever this is Falvey s team. The buck stops with him.

When they start hoisting pennants at the ballpark for a 90- or 93-win season, I'll make sure to pay special attention to your tables. Nor did any other WS-winning team. Because those teams had high enough payrolls. You aren't even listening. Yes and I corrected that oversight for you. You're welcome. Your focus on 25% is mean-spirited toward players in the first place, but I explained why it's misguided as well - because only a failing team pays 25% to anybody. See the Nationals for the past few seasons as an example. The Twins likewise weren't paying anyone 25% until they right-sized their payroll. 25% is effect, not cause. It's the effect of dropping payroll. Selling off those players will not improve a team's chances at the WS. What you are consistent about is trying to sell us on lowered expectations. And you're outraged that I'm not buying. You can't deny the fact that a WS has been out of the reach for below-average payroll teams for the past 20 years, so you set a new expectation of maybe 90 wins every now and then (elusive for the Twins since 2019). Yes you do. Who won the Beancounters League pennant this year? Whoever it was, it's boring.

Nice try but I did not say that. What I presented was a clear and precisely defined benchmark. You want to use mushy terms like success. Were the 2023 Twins successful? I would say so, but that's partly influenced by personal experience I've talked about previously. I would not call the 2024 Twins successful, even though they would rank only slightly lower in your spreadsheet of win totals and whatever else - but they did exceed my own pre-season estimate for wins so maybe I should be pleased with them. Neither team reached 90 wins, but different people would react differently to a 90-win team too. And the standard for success will vary by franchise; my son in NYC is amused by the angst of his Yankee-fan friends right now. So your 90-win standard misses some successful teams like our 2023 Twins and overvalues others. A World Series win, by contrast, is unassailable. No one hates that. And the data I provided is likewise clear cut. No team since the 2003 Florida (sic!) Marlins has won a WS while carrying a below-average payroll. Your post which I responded to specified a 20-year window, and that team is outside that. The team's change of name is a reminder that reaching for events that far back may not carry much relevance to today's marketplace for players. Still, let's be generous and say that 1 time in the past 22 seasons, such a payroll won the WS. That's not 1-in-22 odds for one particular team - that's 1-in-22 for 15 different teams each season, half the league, so if your rooting interest happens to be for one team, it's more like 15 times 22, or one in every 330 years. Not the simple "once every 30 years" you suggested if every team in the majors had an equal chance. Once every 22 years, a Hunger Games team wins the lottery, and the other 14 Hunger Games teams are supposed to take heart from it. Once every 330 years, that team might even be yours! The teams in the bottom half of payroll have vanishingly little chance. Meanwhile the top 15 payrolls have won 21 out of 22. Indeed several of those winners were only barely over the dividing line and I am not saying $200M is a guarantee of success since it obviously is not. So if you root for one of those teams, in a vacuum your odds are more like 1 out of 15 teams with a chance, times 21 over 22, thus... let's call it 1 out of 16. A good deal more competitive than the simple one-out-of-30, and a huge distance better than the 1 out of 330 bottom half. Trying to win it all with a sub-par player payroll is close to an impossible task. 15 teams try to do it every year, thinking this is the year, the year that they can thread the needle to play their young and inexpensive prospects. It hasn't been done since 2003. Nothing makes sense but you can get additional insight, and then you go on to disparage the insight. Good one. No one should care about payroll capacity. Mark Twain is (probably incorrectly) credited with saying "a person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read," and I feel the same way about payroll capacity. An owner with deep pockets who doesn't reach down into them has no advantage over an owner who can't. Ranting about 25% for one player is a subtler form of player disparagement for ownership/management apologists, when it's the small payroll itself that is the cause. The team that's in the top 15 payroll, and thus has some legitimate shot at winning it all, has very little chance of paying 25% for any player. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Don't trade the player, up your game. I can't close without commenting on this gem. Apparently Derek Falvey reads the news in order to learn what his budget constraints are. Nope, Falvey is on board with it all. Of course, when his contract is up, he may look at the same analyses you and I are trying to discuss, and depart for greener pastures. Unless perhaps he is being given a significant profit-sharing arrangement already, or is offered even something like whatever longtime-and-loyal employee Dave St Peter currently has, a seat on the board. New ownership, if it's not just a smokescreen, could shake everything up, of course. The distinction between Falvey and the current Pohlad ownership group is practically non-existent. “Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favor.”

The easiest way to pay one player 25% is to have a small payroll in the first place. The large-payroll teams were above $200M, ten of them now, and no player this year earned a quarter of that. Turn the question around more usefully, based on that insight. The interesting question is, when is the last time a team won the World Series while being in the bottom half of the major leagues in total payroll? That's a clear-cut metric, not some nebulous "mid-market" or "succeeded" concept. While you look that up (hint: your beloved 2015 Royals are NOT the answer to the question, because b-r.com shows them as top-half payroll that year), I will mention that our Twins were not in the top half of payroll last season, they were not in the top half this season, and it seems pretty clear they won't be in the top half of payroll in 2025 either. It's pretty fair to assume they aren't going to win the World Series. Since it's hard to find a team in the past 20 years who succeeded by winning the WS, period, while spending less than MLB average on payroll, one is of course not going to find any team that succeeded in that regard while paying 25% to one player. In other words, whether you intended to or not, you asked a trick question. There's a statistical bias to the framing of the question, and a cause-and-effect fallacy, on top of flexible definitions of terms. Said another way, the 2024 Washington Nationals didn't fail because they paid Patrick Corbin 25 percent, they paid Patrick Corbin 25 percent because they were failing. Somehow disposing of Corbin would not have saved their season.

It is imperative to have at least two, preferably three, deep-pockets teams all wanting to get Correa. While sites like Baseball Trade Values can sometimes give close estimates of what a prospect or average veteran would be worth in trade, when it's an above-average veteran the range of possible trade values is extremely wide. That is to say, BTV isn't "wrong" on such a player, but the exact value not only isn't knowable, it isn't even a thing. (And to their credit, they do list ranges of value.) In addition to dollars per WAR, and remaining contract value, for such a player there is also the "yeah, but we have him and you don't" factor. Possibly the Yankees were the only team who wanted Josh Donaldson, and so the return on him (plus other assets we gave up) was basically a couple of guys the Yankees didn't have room for anymore. That may or may not be the case for Correa, a much better player at the moment. If luck is with you, you can add the "and one of your rivals might get him" factor. You need at least two teams "in" on Correa to take from a pure salary-relief trade to a trade between relative equals. The number of rich enough teams is small, and the subset of those who are lacking good up-the-middle defense is smaller, so I'm not holding my breath. BTW I'm not against trading Correa for good prospects, if the next step is to trade from that expanded prospect pool to obtain meaningful help for the 2025 edition of the Twins. If it winds up a salary-relief deal with the only team who will take him, then yes, I hate it too.

Concur, because I vehemently disagree.

That's simply not how the major leagues define the term. These players would not have been eligible for the Rookie of the Year award, had they excelled. BTW I think Carlos Correa has never been sent down on minor league options, so all three of his are intact. Do you consider him a rookie too?

I take issue with the assumption built into this article. Buxton does not enter this off-season healthy. Watching him in the outfield during the dozen games he played after coming off the IL, I believe he declined to attempt plays that any CFer is expected to make now and then. He was favoring something, and as a result he was only a fraction of the Byron Buxton that we know. It could be that the missing fraction is never coming back. But in any case he wasn't healthy at season's end. He played through it because the team needed him.

Can't speak to Camargo, but Jeffers had almost identical success in holding down the running game as Vazquez.

IF they're good enough to play everyday. Lee needs to prove it (my preference being at St Paul), and Castro is an everyday player only on a team lacking championship aspirations.

Your 5 guys threshold is a good and instructive one. I took a look at all of the AL teams for 2024, and ranked their players by number of PA. Our 5th most PA were taken by Trevor Larnach at 400. Only one other team, the Tigers, had a #5 guy with a lower number of times up (Spencer Torkelson, 381). Only two other teams, Tampa Bay and the Lowly White Sox (yes that word is now officially part of their name), tied at 425, had a #5 especially close to the Twins. Injuries can happen. Or some players flame out beginning the season while others step up. But if the off-season plan works, you ought to have a top 5 that racks up lots of PA. The Yankees' #5 guy had 621 PA. Now that's a plan that came together. Conversely, the Tigers managed to survive this, and even made the playoffs - kudos to them for adapting. But a team's utility infielder should not lead the team in PA. It happening means something went very, very wrong. Identifying your everyday players, and having them play well enough to do so - that probably is every FO's plan during the off-season. Last off-season's plan for the Twins didn't pan out AT ALL. Let's hope good planning and better luck are with Falvey this time. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm suddenly and unaccountably hungry.

I'm not a player, but I'm pretty sure that average annual value is only one criterion they go by. Of greater importance is the total guaranteed value over the life of the contract. Giving up $21M in the interest of locking up, say, $60M across 4 years, might seem like a better gamble for a player than taking the $21M in hopes of getting a future contract (or series of them) totaling $39M over the remaining 3 years, in view of the chance of career-ending injury or simply declining performance with age. Of course if a player is in the echelon that will attract multi-year offers above $21M per year, the decision to turn down the QO is trivial - that's a win. But if a player turns down the QO and doesn't get $21M per year, it doesn't mean he lost, or is even being punished for his foolish greed. Fans enjoy the morality-play aspects the off-season has to offer, but really this is just a business decision by all parties, eyes mainly wide open.

Speed and energy guys who get on base are expensive. I presume this article is grounded in the reality that large outlays of cash simply aren't planned, this off-season.

I'll use these snippets from two posts as a starting point (and to acknowledge those who touched on the ideas first). Even with the recent expansion to 13-man pitching staffs as a defacto standard, bullpens are strained, with the solution being a constant shuttle from AAA to the majors, making for 14 or even 15 guys essentially on call during any two week period (minor league stays being regulated by league rules). If an 8-man bullpen is strained when you have a 5-man rotation, a 7-man bullpen isn't going to fare even as well when 6 pitchers are deemed exempt from entering the ballgame in the middle innings. IMO the philosophy with the bullpen has to change, if the starting rotation changes even a little in this direction (and maybe even if present usage patterns continue). The veterans Ryan, Lopez, and Ober averaged long enough starts (in this day and age, anyway), but SWR is a good example of what the manager and pitching coach had to deal with. Look at his splits by inning. In each of innings 1 through 3, he delivered very good performance - a far sight better than league average, with ERA under 4.00 in each one. In inning 4 his performance faltered, and by inning 5 he was frequently terrible (or no longer in the game). In a minority of his starts he pitched in the sixth inning and resumed good results - those are easy to argue as being days when he was "on". In summary, most of his starts were effective for 3 innings but usually the bullpen had to cover 4 or often 5 innings. The usage patterns for the other inexperienced pitches who started games aren't too much different in overall character. But look at the 2024 bullpen. There were 6 pitchers whose appearances were more numerous than any of the starters: Jax, Sands, Thielbar, Duran, Alcala, and Okert. Okert and Thielbar averaged fewer than one inning per appearance, probably because they are lefties trying to survive in an era where LOOGYs are nearly useless. Jax and Duran also averaged just under one inning per appearance, for good reasons since they are late-inning specialists. Only Alcala and Sands were used on average for more than one inning at a time, and just barely. If the team wants a 6-man rotation, the bullpen needs to be remade and the philosophy of its use needs to be reconsidered, with a lot fewer one-inning pitchers. The idea of converting failed minor league starters to relief, emphasizing max-effort, needs to be toned down, toward higher-effort but also multiple inning stints. Current stalwarts Alcala and Sands could for instance be stretched out a little, hopefully without impairing their effectiveness too greatly or else this will all fail. Other players added, such as waiver-wire pickups, need to be told at the outset to plan on pitching 2 or even 3 quality innings when called for. There's a limit to how well this can possibly work: if these guys are good for 3 quality innings, they're in Simeon Richardson Woods territory already, and likely weren't available for pennies in the first place. But that's what's needed if the 6-man rotation idea is pursued. The potential role for one-inning shutdown guys becomes very limited - two guys such as Jax and Duran for example. Everyone else needs to be a long-man - in an era of 4 or 5 inning starts, 2 or 3 innings IS a long man. And then with a rebuilt bullpen, the usage philosophy needs to shift. The rotation can be choreographed, but bullpen usage is by nature completely ad hoc. The starter you counted on to stop a losing streak? He has a bad start and you need to bring someone in earlier than you wanted. The philosophy has to be more in the direction of "next man up" among your bullpen choices, and as long as he is getting decent results, leave him in to begin the next inning too. Treat him like a starter, almost, and watch his spin rates or whatever metrics you use, but as long as he's got the fundamentals working in his favor, leave him in - maybe even if he gives up a run or two, since nobody keeps their ERA at 0.00 indefinitely. It's a long season, you have to be pragmatic, and you can't manage like it's the 7th game of the World Series. All of this is setting aside that, almost by definition, you are taking away innings from your best starters and giving those innings to arms that are, to be charitable, unproven. Maybe they can all be like SWR and show effectiveness when used in moderation. tl;dnr: Going to a six-man rotation is intriguing but hard.

I thought both Severino and Winder, if exposed, would be picked up as "waiver wire fodder". Possibly Duarte too. Some years there are repeated rounds of musical chairs for the 41st and 42nd men on various rosters. All have at least 1 minor league option remaining, so another team could have added them and still planned to send them to AAA next spring. Kudos to Falvey and the FO for picking the right time for these waivers, even if presumably every other team is paring down too. The players themselves aren't super-important, but roster stewardship is. If no one took them for free, via waiver, then there's not much worry about Rule 5 since the rules there are more stringent. Yeah, the plan for first base includes someone other than Severino.

Dilemma seems like the wrong word in the headline. It's a decision. And the answer is yes. If the Twins don't want him, he's got trade value even with a slight bump in salary.

Seattle was looking to shore up a weakness, but spent nearly nothing in acquiring something. Kind of a waste of effort but net-net is just a zero. Minnesota gave up an asset that at the time still had some trade value, and at the moment it looks like they got nothing. - two major league arms that wound up injured for all but a handful of innings, and two prospects who both took giant steps backward in 2024 - if Bowen doesn't turn it around in 2025 he'll be out of baseball, while Gonzalez will likely continue to get chances but even at age 20 a stumble at high-A makes his ever being a star suddenly pretty much a longshot. Unless things change, Minnesota got a net negative return, and thus came out behind on the trade. A trade I was in favor of in principle, especially for the potential of salary savings, but not for these pieces. Talent evaluation for Minnesota continues to be a hit or miss affair, in a market niche where they need to be more hit and less miss.

I did. Just, not for another 10-15 years. 😊

Perhaps. The dropoff in demand can be pretty rapid though. He was quoted as expressing surprise that his contract was tendered this past off-season, and his stock dropped further with his output this year. Minor-league offer with a spring invite was what I had in mind when I said he could try to continue. A guaranteed major league contract of any size will surprise me. He seems like a good guy and if he wants a role in the game he can probably have one but as a non-player.

The Dodgers can beat you in so many ways: pitching, hitting, base running, and letting the other team fritter the game away.

Shocking news. I was also taken by surprise that the sun rose a little later this morning than yesterday. Good luck to Kyle. Like most major leaguers, he has memories that most of us would die to have. He can probably hang around as a player for a while, if that's his desire. Or he can move on to the next phase of his life, inside the game or outside of it, just like every other player who reaches the end of the line.