mlhouse

I am not imagining the finger pointing of self righteous idiots who think removing a statue solves any of the real problems in the United States. AS far as the "segregating" players issue, big deal. 1964. That is the year I was born. Segregation in the South was still alive. What is more important about 1964 was that my favorite Twin player of all time started his career with the Twins that is still ongoing: Tony Oliva. AS far as being "strongly opposed" to taking down Griffith's statue, it is ridiculous to be offended by something that was said more than 40 years ago by a man who was born more than 100 years ago. If your life is looked at in such a narrow manner, you would not pass muster either.

Calvin Griffith was not a racist. In fact, for his time he was rather cutting edge. His baseball teams were fully integrated and he was cutting edge in signing Latin American players. The fact he grew up and lived in a completely different era than we do today does not make him a racist. ALL OF THESE HOLIER THAN THOUS POINTING FINGERS AT PEOPLE ARE THE REAL PROBLEM.

This is dumb and shows that this new movement has not concept of what racism is. The Twins are ignoring the TOTALITY of Calvin Griffith's life and only focusing on one incident that occurred around 50 years ago. Expecting that a man born in 1911, like Calvin was, to behave and use the same language as a person more than one hundred years after his death is idiotic and unfair. Times were different and unlike a lot of these racial-grammar editors, Calvin Griffith was in many ways a pioneer especially in the promotion of Cuban and other Latin American players. Tony Oliva, Zoilo Versalles, Camilo Pascual, José Valdivielso, Pedro Ramos, Cesar Tovar, Rod ****ING Carew. The later era Washington Senators and Minnesota Twins have always been an integrated team to the fullest extent. Calvin Griffith was a baseball owner of a different era. He wasn't a tech or banking billionaire who invested in a professional sports team for the prestige, tax write offs, and capital gains. Baseball was his business. Removing his statue from outside of Target Field for some drunken remarks he made 50 years ago only brings into focus, what mistake or foible are they going to get to use against you.

1. I think the MLB Draft is going to evolve to the shorter round structure they did this season. The reason is cost. Last year, the Twins spent $875,000 plus on signing bonuses for players drafted in rounds 5-10 and another $1.326 million on players drafted in rounds 11-25. This totals to $2.1 million for a single year of signing bonuses. Then, if you look at the last 10 years of Twins drafting 2010 - 2019, 12 players have made it to the Twins from draft choices between rounds 6 through 25. Only two of those players, Mitch Garver (5.1) and Taylor Rogers (6.4) have WAR > 1.0. The other 10 players have a cumulative WAR of -2.9. Maybe the Twins have been historically poor drafting teams and there are still a lot of players in the more recent drafts that are still making hteir way through the minor league system. But, the point is, spending $2+ million a year on signing bonus with very little results isn't something that I think will move forward. I think that they will eventully evolve into a much shorter draft of 4-10 rounds and a lot more UDFA with a fixed bonus pools. Unlike the 2020 draft, there will not be a fixed UDFA bonus maximum and teams will be able to bid on the available UDFA. This will benefit many UDFA because they can negotiate amongst teams but it will have an impact on the players who used ot be mid round picks who could command 6 figure bonuses. 2. I believe that the minor leagues will evolve too and they will become team centric. By this I mean instead of the minor league players playing in leagues spread all across the nation, teams will concentrate their minor league players at one or two facilities. There would be live games, and they would perhaps play against other MLB minor league teams, but everything would be under the team control. The Twins would move the lower level minor league players to Ft. Myers. Like "Extended" Spring training they would mostly play in competition against this group of players. If you want to have a prospect play against AA level players on Monday and A players on Tuesday, you just move them to a different field. The savings in transportation and affiliation fees would be significant, and the development would be more team focused.

While they have some down farm prospects like Enlow and Jordan Balazovic, if the Twins want to keep in the competitive level of MLB they are going to have to utilize the value of their farm system to add a top of the rotation level arm. They need to manage the "surplus" bats they have at these corner positions, identify the players that have real value and the highest value and magnify the value of the ones they think are lesser values. One way of magnifying the value of a prospect is to move him up the minor leagues rapidly. A 20 year old performing average at best in AA is much better trade bait than the same 20 year old doing really, really well in A ball. Don't believe this? Look at many of the trades the Twins have been as the selling party, the Johan Santana trade in particular. The high salary teams like the Yankees and Dodgers do this consistently.

I guess that would be great if you had eligibility left. Most of the players that will sign as UDFA will be college seniors without leverage.

Cal was never going to sign Rod Carew to a new contract. People are not monolithic. Not everything they do can be judges by racial factors alone, and even those racial factors are never black and white (no pun intended). Griffith was way ahead of his time in finding Hispanic and Cuban players, and for its time the Twins/Senators played black players at least as much as any team in the league. What Griffith said was inappropriate. But it was something that someone born more than a century ago said more than 4 decades ago. It has no bearing on what is happening today.

If you look for racism you will find racism.

I don't know what they are basing the claims Jeffers is a good defensive catcher, I have seen him play several times in Ft Myers and he isn't very good defensively. One thing is for sure is that they are not planning on signing Eddie Rosario after 2021, if they do not move him before that. I would have to believe they would love to move Larnach into LF this season if they could make a deal. And while these GMs have made a deal with prospects, they are still very conservative with them.

I would have liked to have seen them draft a college pitcher in round 1 and I thought there was a lot of value there when we selected. I think we really need to start looking at using the system to bolster the 3-4 starters in the rotation because as Kepler and others move towards the end of their current contracts the finances might get a tighter and the opportunity to spend money on that part of the rotation will not be available. I also have some concern that the top players in the farm systems are going to start to converge on each other. This has been a problem for hte Twins in the past because they rarely trade minor league prospects. This becomes especially problematic when those players do not have much positional versatility. Larnach, Rooker, Kirillof, and Jeffers (maybe he can stay at catcher). Even Royce Lewis staying in the infield is questionable. Now you add Sabato and Soularie as two more positionally limited hitters to push quickly through the system.

It is what I assumed but it isn't 100% foolproof. I assume that Rosario will be a rather easy signing because he is not going to a high end baseball school. But Maya seems like he might be more expensive than that slot with a Texas Tech commitment.

Are the two HS players they selected signable?

https://ps-baseball.com/prospects/marco-raya/13220/

If you ran a business and received half your revenues, would you pay your employees 87.5% and call it a day?

I think college arm was the better choice. Several good options out there.