jay

While the 'turn something embarassing into funny' approach is great, I'm not sure it's the right strategy for this situation. Is it appropriate for the Twins to make fun of their terrible performance? I'd imagine they're already embarassed enough as it is. Making fun of it could just as easily be perceived as not taking it seriously. I'm okay with them fighting back against being portrayed as a joke.

Hard to disagree with this. Also, not hard to see where this is going to turn into the cliche line that the Twins are trying to make him a singles hitter and sap his power.

Hey John, the data is in fact from the first 90 loss season and not the most recent. Additional 90 loss seasons are ignored after the first one until the team makes the playoffs. So, for the Twins that is 2011 and they are included in the teams that have had 1 and 2 seasons to rebuild. The Cubs, for example, show up multiple times as they went from 90 losses to playoffs and back to 90 losses with 2011 being most recent.

P.S. Joe Mauer.

Good question, John. Looking at the data that way removes the skew in the average from teams that have taken the long route in their rebuild. We can add 2011 and 2012 to get a few more data points. 41 teams lost 90 games and faced a rebuild. 8 of them made the playoffs the next year (19.5%). 36 of them have had at least 5 years since that first 90 loss season. 20 of them had made the playoffs by that point (55.6%). After 11 years, 90.6% of the teams had made it back to the playoffs. The Royals are the team that break the chart. Every other team with at least 15 years since losing 90 games has made the playoffs. Looking at the data this way gives us an average rebuild of more like 4-5 years. If the Twins don't make the playoffs by 2016, they'll be beyond the average rebuild time.

On a related noted, I gathered some data to see how long the average rebuild takes. For teams that don't bounce right back to the playoffs after losing 90 games, it's an average of 7 years to get back to the playoffs. I'm hoping we end up closer to 5 (2016) than 7. The full blog post is here if you're interested: http://twinsdaily.com/blog/463/entry-5330-rebuilding-from-90-losses-to-playoff-team/

2011. The Year of the Injury. Nishioka. Bilateral leg weakness. 90+ losses. 2012. The Rebound That Wasn't. Brutal starting pitching. Marginal bullpen and offense. 2013. Stop the Pain. The farm is looking better, but the major league team isn't so major. 2014. TBD. On pace for 90 losses, the consensus seems to be that this year's team is easier to watch. The team has made moves to transition to the next generation of players. This brings us to the question I've pondered and will try to answer: How long does it take a team to rebuild and make the playoffs after a 90 loss season? 90 losses is bottoming out. It's bad. Since 1996 through 2010, we can find 36 instances of a team that lost 90 games and has either gone on to make the playoffs in a future year or is still trying -- looking at you, Royals. Some teams have done it more than once like the four-time Cubs while only two teams have avoided a 90 loss season -- the Yankees and Cardinals. Some teams lose 90 games and relive that pain multiple times. Other teams have rebounded quickly. Number of seasons it takes to reach the playoffs after first losing 90 games: Six of those teams are still adding to their streak of no playoffs since their first 90 loss season after the '95 strike: Royals (1985 in real life, represented as 1997 here), Blue Jays (2004), Mariners (2004), Marlins (2007), Padres (2008), Mets (2009). We can come to a couple of interesting conclusions by looking at that chart: 1) If you don't rebound immediately after your 90 loss season, you probably need to rebuild. This is pretty evident with the 2012 Twins. After a long playoff streak, it was reasonable for us all to think that 2011 might have been a blip. Turns out, no. 2) In this data set, the average rebuild to reach the playoffs takes 5.8 years. If we exclude the teams that rebounded after one bad year, that number goes up to 7 years. The Twins are about to wrap year 3 since 2011's 90+ losses. We're certainly hopeful that the Twins reach the playoffs before 2017 or 2018, but it's feasible to think that could be the case as prospects continue to develop and grow into producers at the MLB level. The Twins appear pretty close to on track for "average" or just ahead. Many of us would have liked the Twins to be more aggressive in acknolwedging the first conculsion. We'd all probably agree that the farm system has come a long way and the future holds hope. Hopefully, this data provides some insight on how long a rebuild takes across MLB and, therefore, provides something to compare our current rebuild against. Obligatory Joe Mauer reference for free pizza.

Ah, but see what happened there? We can just use this to further b!tch about other ones... Congrats, Trevor!

That certainly could make sense. Surely, the Twins have Alex at AAA to work on something. The fact that we don't definitively know what doesn't make the Twins idiots who can't figure out when to promote a pitcher, as many here are suggesting. With a prospect of his type, I'd be almost certain there's a heck-of-a-lot of discussion around how to best develop him. I'm hoping he ends up in the pen for September.

I don't see the need for a sixth man in the rotation. Take Pino out of the August rotation and put Darnell in the September pen.

mike, which tier begins to qualify as "good to great"? Tier 5? 6?

Thanks. I'd have to agree with every bit of both your comments. If anything, the data here shows how rarely you can rely on these guys over the length of the contract. To see such a wide range in current results from our four free agents really shouldn't be all that surprising. I've made a few edits: changed the table to show seasons of the contract instead of date signed, corrected Lackey's contract info and updated the conclusion. I'm happy to upload the data to a public Google doc if anyone wants it.

If the Twins aren't interested in them, I think we'd want to exclude those data points so that we can see when pitchers who aren't attached to a qualifying offer actually sign. Since last year was the first offseason with the new qualifying offer rules and loss of draft pick (more importantly, bonus pool), it's easy to pick out who that was -- there were only two of them. Lohse is obviously the one data point way out in March. We could just cut off the chart February 8th without him. The other is Kuroda, who re-signed with the Yanks on November 20th. Without him, the chart would be slightly more steep from the left.

Thanks! I left out int'l FAs since the posting fee complicates things. I think the closest example to what you're mentioning would be Darvish and the narrative that other top pitchers will wait didn't actually happen. Buerhle and CJ Wilson were the other two big SP contracts that offseason (2011/12). They both signed right around the Winter Meetings while the posting deadline for Darvish was still a week away. Tanaka could certainly influence this offseason. I'm just not so certain what kind of influence it will be.

I happen to agree with this model as choosing which young players to invest in from your own organization would inevitably have to be more efficient than the free agent market. It didn't work out so well with Blackburn, but plenty of people (rightfully) argued immediately after the signing that he wasn't the right kind of target.

The Twins seem to give their MIs plenty of time and chances to be marginally adequate after flashing a little of anything. We can go back to Rivas, then Punto, and even Casilla. So, for our sake, let's hope Brian is able to perform and have some success. He'll be around for a while if history tells us anything.

Excellent sarcasm. For the true non-believers, the total WAR accumulated by a team has had a correlation to actual wins between .83 and .89 over the last few seasons. It includes some variables that are not perfectly measured (ie - defense) and can't account for real-life variation caused by the context in which contributions are provided (ie - winning an abnormal amount of close games or "clutch" and "luck"). It may not be exactly perfect, but it is extremely useful.

Nice job putting a plan together. A few thoughts... - Even if we pay down Morneau's salary to $7M, the surplus value for his one remaining year just isn't enough to bring back a top young pitcher... let alone a good young pitcher. I think we could hope for a decent AA prospect. - Agree with Thrylos' comment that Span has more value and would be more likely to go. Being cost controlled for up to three more years, he'd be more likely in my eyes to bring back a decent arbitration-eligible SP. - Agree in full on Scotty Bake Bake. - I'd almost rather see the Twins go all out on an SP. It's clearly the biggest organizational need and the payroll space is there to do it. Marcum had a few good years and even fits the Twins profile of slow-throwing (87mph FB), spot-hitting, walk-allergic... but I'm not sure that's what many of us want right now.

I would agree with glunn. There isn't a lot of organizational depth at 1B and the Twins would be taking on a lot of risk to go into 2013 with only one of them. If Parmelee continues to put up numbers and the Twins aren't in contention next year, then moving Morneau before the trade deadline would make the most sense to me.