ashbury

I have a remarkably similar tale to tell. The main difference is that the woman in my story married me.

Ober was pretty darn good last year too - in fact he hasn't reached last year's WAR total yet. So if he has replaced Gray in the rotation, I am grateful that SWR might be seen as replacing Ober this year.

1999 (As stated earlier.) A Martinez did finish second in '97: Tino.

This really gets at the challenge for the front-office when building the roster heading into the season. Ideally, you have this giant pool of 40 MLB-ready youngsters from your farm system, and they all have minor league options remaining and fewer than (I think) 5 years of major-league service time If one scuffles, then you send him down to AAA and bring up his replacement. When you don't have 40 such players, then you have to supplement with other players. Those players generally are older and can't be sent to the minors in preference to a younger hotshot, due to the CBA and other roster rules. Our FO surely understood this loss of roster flexibility when they traded for Margot; the player has definitely disappointed me, and I would guess also our FO, but the certainty that a replacement from St Paul would be more productive is a gamble that can't be undone if they cut him. I know I'm repeating myself but I can't emphasize enough, also, that Keirsey bats lefty, and is simply not a direct replacement for Margot anyway. He'd be a replacement for Wallner, Larnach, or Kepler, the way our roster is constructed, and that's much more of a stretch to believe he'd be markedly better than any of those three. You don't have room for 4 lefty outfielders on your major league roster. So Keirsey is blocked and I continue to wish the FO had figured out a way to cash in his value for something else - someone with CF skills (even if not outstanding there) should be worth something to another team.

The switch to Joe Pohlad is IMO way overhyped. It seems clear to me that he takes direction from higher up than himself. He doesn't have a stellar track record with previous business ventures (a radio station is one that I recall), so the training wheels are still on for this nepo-baby. The recent right-sizing of the payroll didn't look to me like Joe's idea at all. Joe was announced as the executive chair on November 28, 2022. Pablo's contract extension happened in 2023. Ditto for the re-signing of Correa. Buxton's extension was indeed agreed to in 2021. I see a steady-as-she-goes attitude for having a few marquee players at high contract value for them to do marketing with; you're surely right that another such contract at that magnitude probably won't happen until one of these expires. I thought this seems qualitatively different than Tampa, but it seems that the Rays do have several players locked up with contracts, though more in the $10M range - in one case very favorably with team options to protect themselves, Brandon Lowe. With guys like Kepler and Vazquez coming off the books periodically, the Twins do have latitude to offer similar deals if they choose to. And if Dave St. Peter's scolding of the fan base last year finally delivers the necessary increase in attendance and revenue, as scoldings so often do, then there will be payroll room to do more in the coming seasons. It all depends on keeping the prospect pipeline, with its relatively cheap labor pool, flowing - a concept that is shared to varying degrees by approximately 28 other franchises besides just Minnesota and Tampa Bay.

Signing Correa, Buxton and Lopez to significant contracts is one major thing that comes to mind that is un-Tampa-like.

And Miranda in for Lee at DH, at minimum. If Lee's not playing defense he doesn't belong in the lineup.

I would have thought that too. But across the majors this season, pinch-hitters have combined for only a ;205 batting average. The overall batting average is .244. So somehow, managers are getting worse results than if they didn't put the new guy in at all! (No, the analysis can't be that simple. The guy on your bench probably isn't as good as your starters, so that's a bias right from the start. And the guy you take out probably isn't your best hitter, so that's another bias. But the end result is still weird, isn't it? And, spot checking through the years, the trend has always been that way.)

Kirilloff's OPS last season was .793, in injury-shortened duty. Santana hasn't had an OPS that high since Kirilloff was in AA in 2019. Health is always hard to forecast but it's a stretch to call Kirilloff "bad" at the time the decision had to be made on Santana. "Risky" is more descriptive, although it's slightly odd to sign a declining 38-year old to mitigate the risk. It's worked out, in a Plan-B sort of way giving slightly above-average results - not bad at all. The chance of someone muddling through the season successfully was higher with Santana. The chance of someone truly leading the way with a 100-RBI season was higher with Kirilloff (something Santana has never done in his career, BTW). Santana leads the Twins so far with 54, mainly by default because no one else has stepped up. (Two guys in the majors are already at 100 and several more are knocking at the door.)

But that is. You could have left it at that.

The remaining option-year increases his trade value. I'm an admitted prospect-hoarder and trading him scares me more than the typical prospect, except he's not technically a prospect anymore. I suspect we don't get much back for him, but the upside remains multiyear-all-star, multiplied by his low chances for health. That's hard to assign the probabilities to. I guess as part of a package to get a good starter, always the coin of the realm, I'd do it. I don't know how much he contributes to that package, unfortunately. FalVine know the conversations they've had with other FOs, and I don't.

Thanks for the correction - I have edited my less-than-emakulit post to reflect it.

Don't understand this combination. If it's win or go home, I'm absolutely paying attention to the opposing pitcher. But with Miranda and Lewis both in the lineup, I've got Miranda on defense at 3B. He's just a little less likely to surprise me negatively by punting a makeable play; I'll give Lewis the benefit of the doubt by speculating he's not right physically at the moment.

Did you use your immaculate spell-checker or an off-brand one like Rocco prefers?

Of course. DaShawn Keirsey is a prime example. I was making the point that neither Martin nor Richardson was actually any such thing, despite the label placed on them. They both had plenty to prove (more precisely, to learn) down on the farm. Both would have been humbled, no humiliated, had they been brought up right after the trade.

Seriously, you're going to question a HoFer's courage while at the same time punching a young talent? Nice combo there, Mike Tyson.

I'd leave this alone but you circled back to it again to close the article, so I just have to say that if $7.5M is fifth highest on this pathetically small payroll, there are bigger topics to talk about for next year than just Chris Paddack. Anyway as another poster noted, we'll forget about the timeline the rest of this season if Paddack comes in and makes an impact mid-game in the post-season. Hopefully again and again, as the team makes an extended run this time. I think he's got what it takes as a closer, even; it was enjoyable last year to watch the Sheriff come into the game going all-out.

Good analysis. You can't choreograph a season, and there will be black-swan events every now and then. But a benchmark like this is good to have in mind - the odds are against them and every so often we'll have to hold them up to a benchmark like this to see whether we (and they) are just kidding ourselves. Exceed the benchmarks as we go, and we're comfortably away from the Dumb and Dumber meme, "so you're telling me there's a chance." Lag even a little, and it's "let's see about Plan B - the wild card."

MLB-ready is often an oxymoron when I hear it. If someone's so darned "ready", why ain't they using him themselves instead of trading him? I take it with a grain of salt and am prepared for either a lower ceiling than advertised (Martin) or else a longer gestation period (Richardson). I'm patient when prospects are acquired at a young age - Richardson wasn't yet 21 on the day he was traded to us, just a baby*. My only requirement is that they pan out. (Pretty low bar I set, eh?) * mixing metaphors is just one of the many fine services I offer the discriminating reader

Two years ago I was seriously concerned about the franchise. FalVine had been running things for almost six years and the vaunted Pitching Pipeline™ was producing a trickle. Even last year's success at the major league level was more about stopgap acquisitions like Sonny Gray and Kenta Maeda than a real development plan (and at the cost of valuable pitching prospects). A down year in 2024 would have had me seriously considering a change at the top if I were ownership, viewing 2023 as some sort of sad high-water mark. 2024 has me a whole lot more optimistic about the leadership, regardless of how this particular post-season turns out. This article touches on some reasons why. The Berrios trade, in particular, has always had zero to do with Austin Martin and everything to do with SWR, in my own mind. You don't trade established pitching for anything but top-notch pitching prospects in return, and getting just one was a big gamble. What kind of good pitching could you get by trading Martin now? Not much more than what we got by trading Nick Gordon, IMO. It's SWR or bust, and right now the gamble is looking like a good payoff. Kudos to the FO for the talent evaluation and the development so far.

You left out that if teams aren't simply being stupid in their application of pitch counts to young arms, then they ask pitchers to risk injuries even more than the intolerable level it's at now.

Once in a lifetime? No, I want this to continue!

I've never seen him. The OOTP scouting report suggests he has CF skills but not extraordinary, and the arm might be the weakest part of his defensive game, a 50 where you'd hope for 60 or above. Just a game, but they take their scouting a little seriously, and until someone steps up with eyewitness information (he didn't play there in the game I watched last week, and wasn't tested in RF), it's a kinda-sorta datapoint. I'm thinking he might be a lot like Austin Martin, except he's experienced and Austin doesn't have a lot of games under his belt.

Is that in any proposal for ABS you've ever seen?

I advocate for Keirsey too, but he does have one problem. He bats lefty. In a scenario where Buxton is unavailable, you might have a starting outfield of Wallner/Keirsey/Kepler for a couple of weeks, and just one of Margot and Martin to step in when there's a left-handed starter. The braintrust hardly trusts Wallner at all against lefties, and Keirsey's AAA splits look significant, so we could have a serious problems against LH starters or late-inning relievers. I don't know the solution to this. A solution, weeks or months ago, might have been to cash in whatever trade value Keirsey has, as a MLB-ready LH bat with CF skills, in return for a similar righty bat in preference to Margot. Or trade Larnach similarly, since Wallner makes him a little redundant. Locating that exact RH trade target/candidate is above my pay grade, however. Here's another downside to calling him up. He'll be another player whose name we can't spell. 😀 What I actually don't like is that Keirsey is 27 years old and rotting on the vine.