LastOnePicked

I'm struggling to understand your proposed Joe Ryan trade. Are you just trying to dump salary? This is already a very low payroll team. And anchoring a rotation with a guy who has barely pitched in the last two years seems like you're essentially choosing "hope" as your Plan A - which never seems to work for this club.

The Twins seem to have the uncanny habit of trading away the exact relievers they need for the following seasons. If they actually learned to evaluate the talent they have and stick with a plan, they might not have to worry about these Reed-type signings. Like almost everything written about the Twins upcoming offseason, this boils down to baseball IQ. Not only doesn't this organization have an intelligence advantage, they don't even seem smart enough to realize that they don't have an intelligence advantage.

All of this is correct, but making the team worse is a Pohlad speciality. It's what happens when you don't understand what you own because you were given it instead of purchasing it yourself.

But you can't spend free agent $$$ in a way that compensates for lost prospect value. Free agents by definition are market rate players. It's rare to get a bargain. But teams can often get a bargain from the first few years of an MLB-ready player. If the idea is that the Twins can compensate for the prospects they lost out on by keeping Jeffers, they'll have to spend well beyond their previous record high payroll.

The single biggest issue is this: get a staff who can help them avoid serious injuries. Work with Rodriguez on sliding. Work wth Jenkins on throwing. Stop throwing young players out of position just because you need a roster stopgap. They all have real talent. They've entered an organization with about the worst track record in MLB for prospect development. Hopefully, Shelton and his staff can make some adjustments to the approach.

The fact that this team hasn't produced a Rookie of the Year in over 30 years is a sign of their deep developmental problems. Smaller-market teams should be producing these candidates at far higher rates.

Agreed. It boggles my mind that we're even entertaining this as a serious possibility. No other franchise in MLB would think this way. Hopefully this is just Matthew's speculation and not some legitimate rumor from the FO rippling outwards.

The future is hard to see, but 2028 will likely leave this team with Bradley, Abel and Prielipp. I can't imagine who they can or would trade to get a legitimate rotation arm. It's going to be question marks and castoffs after Bradley. Buxton isn't going to last - if they can get 50-80 good games out of him this year, that's a good outcome. Beyond that, folks better hope the new core can really hit. I mean, like really, really hit. So I'm not sure what happens, especially in terms of pitching, after Year 1. They put all of their eggs in this year's basket. They need to treat it as such, because there's clearly no plan B.

"To treat each losing season and early playoff exit as if it could be fixed by underwhelming offseason moves, year after year, has missed the forest for the trees; while Twins insiders debate which platoon outfielder the Twins could target, we have missed that much of Twins Territory has stopped listening." Just a perfect post. It's terribly sad, but it is heartening that some folks here seem to understand the gravity of the situation. This is a nothing organization. There's no heart, no grit, no energy, no brain trust and no will to win here. The Twins are less exciting at this point than teams like the Pirates and the Angels. And the reason is ownership. How you run an organization into $450M of debt while fielding below average payrolls and receiving a large share of competitive balance support is mind-boggling. And then to cut a promising run towards relevance off at the first sign of growth? Again, it's just sheer stupidity. There's no one at the wheel. There's nothing upstairs. Minnesotans used to love baseball. Now the Twins are an afterthought in this market. Friends have asked me to join them at Saints games and town ball parks. Not a single friend or family member has even mentioned going to a Twins game in years. It's going to take years to get out of this mess. And that process should have started years ago, so that there could be light at the end of the tunnel after the new CBA is signed. But the real work hasn't even begun, and the team is in worse shape now than they were after last season. They have a weak infrastructure, almost no trade chips and far fewer options to improve this middling roster.

This is the core of their problem going forward. Jenkins, Rodriguez, Culpepper, Houston and Lackey might be good big-leaguers, but it won't mean anything if they constantly have to dig out of 3-run deficits by the 5th inning. Trades for elite pitching talent on the cusp don't come cheap. You can try to get a few cast-offs like Bradley and Abel, but they're usually made available for good reason - their health or control are massive question marks. The Twins can get better a drafting arms, but even if they do, they won't see the benefits until this new OF/IF core are hitting free agency. If the Twins don't go all-in and win in 2027. I think this team is going to be stuck in limbo well into the 2030s.

I'm totally confused. The Twins cut payroll to well below league average for the last two seasons. They desperately need a better option than Caratini at C for one year as they try and make good on their foolish decision to keep Lopez and Ryan. Simply put, they can afford the QO and they need Jeffers. And that's just the result if he accepts, which he has already strongly hinted he wouldn't. At the very least, they'd get a comp pick, which is a pittance compared to what they could have gotten if they'd made a wise trade last offseason, but it's better than nothing. Not extended the QO to Jeffers would be a monumentally stupid move from a FO that has been accused of being monumentally stupid. Let's not find ways to excuse it or sugarcoat it, please.

"A recent study examining modern pitching metrics found that only 3.9% of pitchers returned to their full pre-surgery performance level in their first season after surgery. That figure increased to 11.8% by the second season and 28.1% by the third." This is an important splash of cold water on the idea that the rotation can be penciled in as a "strength" for the 2027 team. And this is the second surgery recovery for Lopez. The chances of him returning strong this year are very slim. Not impossible, but slim. So beyond Lopez you have: Bradley (hopefully building on 2027, but he'll have to adjust to a new pitching coach) Ryan (a massive question mark for anything past 15-20 starts) Prielipp (a bright spot for 2026, but still not much more than #3-#4 starter upside) Kremer (again, back-end rotation material at best) Matthews (about as uneven as they come - flashes of brilliance with massive backsliding) And a few other question marks, with no elite pitching talent at any level in the minors. The FO needs to figure out how to bolster this staff pronto, or the upcoming primes of the promising lineup are going to be wasted in season after season of games where the Twins lose to scores like 7-5.

It sounds like a nice island, at least. I don't agree - I think this team is headed for massive disappointments in 2027. But I do agree with the second part. They don't have the personnel in place to accurately evaluate who they have, or even who they could get for who they have. That's why the Zoll FO is paralyzed. Look at what they did with the roster last year during the stretch run. The Jackson situation alone should have gotten the entire FO staff fired.

Just another reminder that this has been a completely unserious baseball organization since 2023. And they weren't great before that, either. Happy for the Brewers fans, though. Intelligence and resilience find a way to pay off over time.

They needed that overhaul last year. Better scouting helps give the team useful information, as well as targeting waiver claims and assessing trade candidates. Instead, new young players are graduating into one of the least intelligent, least prepared organizations in all of MLB. They do have to make changes now, but they're going to be trying to do this all on the fly - assessing their scouting and developmental gaps - while trying to win now. It's not likely to work.

Perfectly stated. They also fear commitment and struggle to see an organizational plan through to fruition. The Twins are constantly in "react" mode, rather than "build" mode or "plan" mode.

Folks might be putting a little too much on Lackey's shoulders. It will certainly take a few years to adjust to a big-league staff. If they really want to compete, the Twins are going to need a solution a C for at least the next 2-3 seasons.

You can be a rich team or you can be a smart team. Additional spending can certainly cover up a few gaps. But it's more fun to watch some of the smartest teams in baseball take center stage. I can't figure out why the Twins, who go out of their way to remind fans that they're not a rich team, seem to have no interest in instead being a smart team. They seem to just wait for good things to happen and are totally surprised when they don't. They missed their chance last offseason to fully reload. It's what a smart team would have done. Now, if they want to win, they'll need to act like a rich team this offseason.

Excited to see how he does, but as Gleeman pointed out in a recent episode, teams like the Rays succeed because they don't stick with the same philosophy - they adjust and find new inefficiencies in the game as the league adopts their tactics. The Twins need to find a way to be ahead of the curve for once. They also need pitching talent for Reith to work with. There are a few arms here, but nothing special. At least, not yet,

The richest teams would have already extended him. The smartest teams would have already traded him. The middle of the pack teams would be finding a way to sign him and talk him into moving to 1B in a year or two. Even the worst teams would at least make him the QO. If the Twins don't make him the QO, then they're in far worse shape than we feared.

Very helpful, Nick. Good work. I tend to worry about a coach openly identifying a single or dominant approach with pitching or hitting - I hate to see the Twins get too scout-able and too easy to game-plan against. But Reith's track-record suggests success, so we'll see how it plays out. If our pitchers are giving up a ton of extra-base hits on first or second pitch fastballs, we'll see how the plan adjusts.

"The Twins currently possess an accumulation of starting pitchers heading into 2027" Every MLB team has "an accumulation of starting pitchers." That's not the same thing as depth. After Taj Bradley, this rotation is all question marks, including the return of the staff "ace" who missed a huge chunk of 2025 and all of 2026. We maybe need to stop promoting the fiction that the Twins' starting pitching is a playoff-caliber strength. If they're trading Ryan and rebuilding, they couldn't possibly have chosen a worse time. If they're trading Ryan and claiming they're going to compete, they're an even more foolish organization than they already seem. Rehabilitate Ryan. If they're firmly in the WC hunt at the deadline, keep him. If they're even a game below .500 at the deadline, start selling.

No one yet. This organization needs to build a winning culture. But that can't happen until the younger players see this team do something other than step on rakes from August-September.

You realize that these are perhaps the two greatest injury question marks in any MLB rotation, right? I mean, Prielipp showed a lot this year, but that injury track record of his is rough. So is Abel's. Hope is great to have. But no successful team would bank on either of those guys as being anything but exchangeable #4-#5 starters. If you get more, great. Chances are you'll get a lot less.

"Crisis" might turn out to be pretty spot-on come 2028. I'm a bit stunned by the number of folks here who seem to think the Twins already have starting pitching depth. They don't have anything remotely close to reliable, consistent depth. After 2027, it will be Taj Bradley and an awful lot of question marks. There is no elite pitching depth anywhere in the farm system, and the Twins have no recent history of producing top-tier starters or signing top-tier starters. And yes, 2028 is a ways away. But to have starting pitching depth by 2028, the Twins need top-tier trade chips. They don't have them anymore. The best years of Jenkins, Culpepper and Rodriguez are coming up soon. It would be a shame to see them struggle to score enough runs to support a very lackluster, shaky rotation.