TheLeviathan

More than some of it is noise, most of it is. Many of those runs and losses came from guys that would not fit the "build the bullpen on the cheap" criticism. Unless somehow Nathan, Rincon, Jesse Crain, or mop-up starters giving up runs count as part of it.

Way I've always seen it is, unless otherwise specified as "AL or NL" - it's an MLB total ranking. If that's different for you, ok, but it was pretty easy to infer.

Your post took the context of that discussion and seemed to utterly ignore it to twist the point being made. You can always strive for more but no team is great at everything. The Royals won a World Series with a group of starters that ranked 22nd in the league in ERA. You could go back to any winner and find elements of their team that were less than great to a downright liability. Expecting everything to be top 8 great is unrealistic. What you have to strive for is as many strengths as possible with as few liabilities as you can. So, yes, the team should've been looking for more than Abad and should still be looking. But Ryan has generally been pretty good at constructing bullpens for his team.

So you have to be in the top 8 of everything or you're bad at it? That's preposterous, but putting that aside - take some of the context of the point being argued here in your reply: It was stated Ryan is bad at constructing bullpens and it cost us winning world series. I'd say finishing in the "above average" category pretty much every year shoots down that assertion. No one is stating he is god's gift to bullpens, but it hasn't been much of an issue. He's been pretty good at constructing bullpens and the numbers back that up. It certainly hasn't been our World Series achilles heel as suggested.

Um, anythign above 15 is definitionally "above average". So you can see what you want, but you're wrong and your point was still absurd. Unless you think the 1996 Twins' World Series chances were doomed by the bullpen, in which case your opinion may not be sufficiently described as absurd.

Right, I definitely should have included 94-00 for "years the bullpen cost a world series". I'd suggest the problems were pretty much everything from those years, so I'm not sure why they matter for the absurd point he was making.

I was responding to the absurd contention that Ryan's bullpens had been our issue winning a world series. That blame would fall on utterly choking time and time again. But Ryan's bullpens have rarely been the team's weak point.

Their bullpens were actually pretty good back then. From 2002-2008 they ranked: 9, 10, 12, 4, 1, 11, and 12th in ERA. Hardly a track record of failure.

I think Ryan does a pretty good job dumpster diving on bullpen pieces. He's pretty good at that. He also overly relies on that strategy, the two aren't mutually exclusive.

Absolutely - which is why he should still be pitching where he can do the most good.

They need 3? May is somehow equal to three other people? You've been cheerleading May there for awhile, the truth is tht you've decided you saw enough in 25 starts.

You seem to be in the camp unfairly expecting May to be gods gift to pitching in his first 25 starts. So May is a rotation equal now to Milone and likely to get better with seasoning, so you lose nothing now and help your team long term. The only issue? A bullpen you could fix with money. Then you have Milone and another quality arm in the pen. You seem to be defending an answer to a "problem" the Twins created themselves by a refusal to spend money in FA.

The answer is that we probably have no freaking clue. Perhaps throwing 90 with his changeup makes him devastating. Perhaps he gets no bump. Some guys seem to just transform themselves in ways their numbers give no indication. I don't want to project anything because, to me, it's not the valuable distinction. What matters is how you help this team now and going forward and that is almost certainly investing starts in a kid who flashed real promise.

I don't think it's money. I think it's a bizarre feeling that they HAVE to have a lefty in the rotation.

I'm not asking for it to be a mathematical proof, but if you're going to cite his ability to be about the same in innings 4-6 as he is 1-3, you should maybe fact check whether that is a trend worth even mentioning. Just, off the top of your head, pull up the stats of 12 good relievers that began as starters and I bet you'll find the majority struggled in their first three innings. It's the case for Perkins, Wade Davis, and many others. This isn't about stuff playing up early and then being found out for most of these guys, the truth is that a move to the bullpen is usually somewhat transformative for guys. So I'm not sure using their stats as a starter is all that reliable. Here's what we know: Milone is pretty good against both righties and lefties and last year he was electric against lefties. A guy that can do that is a pretty handy dude to have as a 7th inning guy. If he gets a velocity uptick there is no reason to believe he can't be Gorzelanny, Duke, or Brett Cecil if he moves down. He doesn't have to be a bullpen phenom, he just has to be pretty good and I think there is every reason to believe he can because, well, he's a pretty good pitcher. May has potential to be better than that and the only two arguments anybody is using to defend the move are: 1) We need him (a really awful argument, since this is freaking fixable. Even now!) and 2) He hasn't been that great....in 25 freaking starts. An argument I hope I don't have to take down because of how preposterously unfair it is to a developing young player.

The Twins only "NEED" Milone there because they chose to do nothing to alleviate that need. It's really a pretty terrible argument. Milone's fine, I hold no ill-will towards him, but he isn't the kind of guy that this team should be making a point to wedge into the rotation at the expense of their future. While his career splits versus lefties are not great, his splits last season were outstanding. Perhaps he's developed something as a pitcher to reverse that trend. It's also a bit of a false argument to say that his starting pitching splits are an accurate indication of how he'd pitch in the bullpen. In the bullpen his matchups would be hand-chosen and there is generally expected to be a velocity uptick. I mean, if we take that argument as valid - someone needs to explain Glen Perkins to me. He sucked terribly as a starter in innings 1-3, but was much better 4-6. It would seem to indicate he also was a poor convert candidate. I'd suggest the real flaw is in trying to use that data to project. So I absolutely see him as a left-handed, late inning specialist. That is a viable role for him that the Twins just haven't chosen to give him, largely (I believe) because they insist on having at least one left-handed starter. I don't think that's very good reasoning.

The point is that all this optimism people have over Hicks is for the equivalent of Jason Repko with a different name. That's who he has been. If you were truly basing this on what he's done and not his prospect hype, you'd have an incredibly weak case. Give me the guy that drives the ball that needs to work on pitch recognition over the guy that rarely hits the ball with any authority every day of the week.

Just by running himself into walls he may cut his career short. His fielding is really overrated and I love his career comps on Baseball reference - not a damn one of them was a significant player. For fun, two of his comps are Clete Thomas and Jason Repko. Yeah, that Repko.

Whew....well thank goodness OBP settles it all. Hicks had about 90 PAs where he was pretty damn good. The other 600 he was basically a bat on a shoulder that people were walking. Rosario drove the ball. Yeah, he needs to be more patient, but that wart compared to the host of warts Hicks has seems rather insignificant.

Hicks has repeatedly proven an inability to field consistently or hit righties. Rosario is going to have a much longer, much more successful career. Hicks may be lucky to have a job in 4-5 years.

All this team had to do was replace Duensing and Fien with Lowe and Milone and they'd have gotten younger and May could stay in the rotation. Really, that's all it'd take. And let's not get too caught up in May's stats. He hasn't even had 30 starts in the big leagues. I sure as hell hope people don't apply the same tough standards to Berrios or anyone else in their first 25. It's just not fair or realistic.

I think the logic that "the bullpen isn't good enough, so we have to move May" fails to recognize that the bullpen could be much better if we had, you know, signed a guy or two.

Ervin Santana in CF is only slightly less gag-inducing, that's the sad part.

People are seriously using a freaking month of Aaron Hicks to suggest he's better than Rosario? For one, Rosario was far less mistake prone as a fielder. For two, Eddie Rosario's first 400 ABs trounce Hicks. We're talking about a guy with 45 XBH in 437 PAs, it took Aaron Hicks over 700 PAs to match that. Please, don't cherry pick Rosario's one lacking stat with the one Hicks managed to keep decent (OBP) to make your argument. It complete ignores basically every other aspect of baseball in which Rosario has demonstrated much more success and a more sustainable future.

Ewww....Santana as the starting CF.