Unwinder

I think it really depends on how much the new owners intend to spend. All of these guys are definitely fine to extend if they're not going to rule out signing free agents later. none of them are without risk. Ober and Ryan are old for their experience level, but for the right deal, even if they end up holding down the back of the rotation at the end of their contract, it might be worth it. Jeffers isn't a superstar but catchers don't grow on trees. Lewis could be totally derailed by injury, but the front office would never live it down if he became a superstar elsewhere.

Spending is good. Throwing money away isn't really any better than not spending. I'm happy to roll the dice on the Ishbias over the Pohlads, and I think they may have learned some lessons from how they've run the Suns. And maybe I'm being unfair by lumping them together when Mat is mainly responsible for the Suns, and Justin is the one looking at buying the Twins. I'll take them, but I want to know who else is out there first.

It's such weird whiplash to read what Suns fans are saying about the Ishbias vs. what Twins fans are hoping for from them. Just read an article on the Athletic about how they've run the Suns into the ground. I'll take the Ishbias' willingness to spend and make aggressive moves IF they have a smart front office (possibly the current front office) that's allowed to say no. The Suns have made big, exciting moves, and have been willing to push in their chips to win in the short term, and they looked good for a few years. But in 2025, they look washed. They're a mediocre, top-heavy team, burdened by bad, untradable contracts. They have the bleakest future in the league, and have traded their first-round picks until 2032, and Mat Ishbia is STILL mortgaging what little future they have left to trade for clubhouse cancer Jimmy Butler. It seems to me like their main weakness as owners is that they're always in win-now mode whether they're contenders or not. I do think that, like the Timberwolves, the Suns can blame their current situation on the new CBA's punative salary cap, which the Ishbias could not have predicted when they put together this superteam. Maybe they'd be just fine if they could make trades normally, and if going over the cap just meant paying the luxury tax, which they're happy to do. In a best-case scenario, I see them thriving in a league with no salary cap at all, and spending their way to dominance over the AL Central and championship contention. In a worst-case scenario, I see them absolutely gutting the farm system to chase big-name players who are past their prime, and signing a lot of bad contracts.

I think the biggest indication that they want to keep the team here is that the White Sox are for sale too, and they'd be a lot easier to move.

I'm seeing a lot of discontent with the Ishbias from Phoenix Suns fans for a bad contract that's eating up cap space and making it nearly impossible to make a trade. You can't exactly blame them for making moves that became retroactively much worse under a new CBA that they couldn't have predicted, but it's got me very interested in seeing what other suiters the Twins might have (Though I would definitely take them over the Pohlads at this point).

I'm not worried about them moving the team out of Minnesota. If they had someplace they wanted to move a team, it would be much more straightforward to buy the White Sox.

I'd be reasonably optimistic about these guys buying the team. Making games available over the air and prioritizing letting people actually see the games is an extremely important move in my opinion. I think that in order to bring in new fans and compete with other options, watching baseball needs to be not just affordable, it needs to be easy. It needs to take as little effort as possible. I think these guys get way too much credit as big spenders for getting Kevin Durant. In a salary cap league that's not at all equivalent to signing somebody like Juan Soto. KD makes about the same amount as Karl-Anthony Towns. They made an aggressive trade for a player who wanted to be traded, and they sold the farm for him. That speaks to their ability to woo top-end talent, and maybe to their willingness to trade top prospects to win now, but it doesn't really reveal anything about their willingness to spend in a league where free agency is a pure bidding war. I'd say I trust them to push in their chips at the trade deadline instead of standing pat, but I have no idea what to expect for payroll overall.

Sure, but you traditionally get more trade partners once a few teams' free agent plans fall through. Edit: And we're not trading our ace (I hope). Trading for Crotchet was clearly Boston's Plan-A. Whoever trades for Paddack or whoever is only going to do it after some other options come off the board.

I'm not defending a "wait and see" approach, but how does "be creative" imply making moves earlier in the offseason? Where's the lie here? I see "be creative" as a euphemism for "make some controversial trades," which was always going to mean waiting for the trade market to heat up after free agency dies down.

I think the random chance in baseball has obscured the parity issue quite a bit, but it's harder to ignore after a Dodgers/Yankees world series after the Dodgers spent a billion dollars. The NBA has historically been a bad league for parity, but I think they've legitimately fixed it in the last few years. It's really hard to build a superteam under the new CBA, and really hard to keep a dynasty together. A few mismanaged cellar-dwellers might stay irrelevant, but I think the era of the same teams dominating year after year is over. I have no idea if a similar cap structure could ever work with baseball though, since baseball rosters have so many players.

Coming in hot after work, gotta choose between good food and making the first couple of innings.

I appreciate that tickets are generally a lot cheaper than many entertainment options, but for the last few years, I've been skipping beverages, trying to eat fast food on the way to the game, carpooling with friends, and going to games on random weeknights against lousy opponents when tickets are cheaper. I'm glad to have cost-cutting options available (and I'm personally going to keep finding ways to go no matter what), but my experience would be a lot nicer if trying to have an affordable night out didn't make me feel like a 2nd-class citizen at Target field. I'm not even saying that current prices are unacceptable, just that lowering them would increase my positive feelings toward the franchise and my goodwill toward the ownership quite a lot.

I think this is the only angle that makes a trade make any sense at all, but I still have a hard time imagining a return that makes any sense in the short term. Even though these guys could very well regress before their contracts are up, relying on them to continue contributing is still less of a gamble than expecting one of the guys coming up to replace them. I think you only make the trade if the return is good enough to plan around a worse starting rotation with less depth.

Love him to death, and there's nothing wrong at all with being an elite specialist. Hope he finds a home where that fits, and he's not expected to be something else.

My mom and my siblings were extras in Little Big League, we were part of the Metrodome audience. They had us move around to different sections of the stadium so that we could fill in the background for different shots. Mom set the diaper bag on the stairs next to our seats so that we could find ourselves in the movie, but we never found it. My parents weren't sports fans and this was the only time I ever set foot in the dome.

What does Bailey Ober need to do to get some respect from the Twins fanbase? He's outperformed Pablo's ERA for three years in a row (with the huge caveat that he's been pitching fewer innings). National sources consistently speak highly of him! Fangraphs puts him at 29th best starter in baseball last year. ESPN ranks him #40. That's a good to very-good #2! About the worst you can say about him is that he's not an ace. It's a huge gamble to count on one of Matthews, Morris, or Festa to reach that level! And as a late-round draft pick who made it as a reliable MLB starter, he should be basking in the same sort of pulled-himself-up-by-the-bootstraps local folk-hero status as Naz Reid. I don't see why he can't shake the narrative that he's a ho-hum innings-eater.

The fanbase seems to think that Correa is going to want out to go someplace more competitive, but if that were the case then why did he want the no-trade clause in the first place? Is there some trade scenario OTHER than the Twins getting cheap and trying to dump salary that he was trying to evade?

Ober erasure

Investor from the United Arab Emirates who has never seen a game of baseball before.

In all seriousness, I've been following the Timberwolves situation, and I don't think Glenn Taylor has a case against A-rod and Lore. I don't think that sale will fall through. Very unlikely that they will have any reason to pivot to the Twins. But they are popular with the fanbase, and are credited with a lot of bold moves that made the Wolves an elite contender. They have also demonstrated a willingness to spend (at least early on when they're trying to amass fan goodwill). The Kat trade was a payroll move, but it wasn't out of cheapness, it was because the NBA's new salary cap system heavily restricts free agency and trade moves for teams that spend as much as the Wolves were set to spend in the next few years. Time will tell if they work out long term, but I think ownership similar to that group would probably be 80th-percentile in terms of positive outcomes for the Twins' situation. My main knock on them is that they're not quite obscenely rich and might be less competitive in a sport with no salary cap.

Well, first of all, A-Rod has plenty of experience owning the Twins.

To be fair, when the team doesn't deserve fans, that's probably the most appropriate time to appreciate the fans. I'd like to see some groveling, personally. Sorry to everyone who thinks we need to boycott the team or whatever, unless one of you wants to step up and buy me a boat, I'm going to keep paying for this garbage because they still haven't come up with a better thing to go out and do on a summer night.

This site has become unbearably gloomy over the last month or so, if I knew what was good for me I'd log off until spring training.

I think this is going to be how trade deadlines are just going to be from now on, expanded playoffs have pushed up the demand and reduced supply for trades. The Astros paying two top-20 prospects for a rental starter with an ERA north of 4 sounds like a reasonable overpay to win-now, but we didn't need to match that bid, we needed to top it. I'm undecided on how much I want to blame the FO for backing off. I feel like I need to see a few more seasons of expanded playoffs before I feel totally comfortable passing judgment. My hunch is that the fallout of expanded playoffs is that the front office absolutely needs to get the offseason right, and avoid leaving anything to clean up at the deadline, because band-aids have become expensive.

I think the expanded playoffs have completely destabilized the entire trade deadline economy and I think we need to see a few more seasons of it before we really know what to expect. This year, there were very few sellers, and the teams that sold were able to get huge overpays. Is that how it's always going to be now? Or will fringe playoff hopefuls start to see the overpays that sellers are getting and decide to sell? If future deadlines continue to play out like this year's, maybe standing pat becomes normal for teams near the middle of the pack like the Twins.