TheLeviathan
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Everything posted by TheLeviathan
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What a comeback! My observations: 1) Run the damn ball more. This game turned around when we let the new OL and the new RB pound the Bears into submission. KOC was way too cute early. 2) B-Flo was way too vanilla early. We weren't even playing a containment style rush very well. There were a lot of third downs where we deliberately weren't pushing the pocket. I think somewhere midstream he said "Eff it....bring the house. Big boys go eat" because the pass rush looked totally different in the second half. 3) JJ was late getting to a lot of throws. Even on completions like the out route to JJ (not the pick) and the Oliver 2 pt....he just was a second or two late to his progression. Ball got there, but they lost opportunities due to giving defenders time to recover. 4) Skule got bullrushed into JJ's lap on 125% of the dropbacks. I'm pretty sure I did that math right. On the plus side: 1) Hargrave is a beast. He's still every bit the disrupter he was. Hopefully he's getting enough breaks to stay healthy and dominant. LDR had some big splashes too. I thought Turner played better than Greenard. 2) DBs looked fine even without Smith. 3) O-line had some nasty in them in the second half. We bullied the Bears. 4) The coaching advantage in the second half was enormous. Both our OC and DC had bad first halves, but then the second half showed they are on a completely different level. 5) Mason was a steal.
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Week in Review: Avert Your Eyes
TheLeviathan replied to Nick Nelson's topic in Twins Daily Front Page News
I don't think it's wrong to oppose a firesale, I just don't think the reasoning is completely sound. Ultimately the most important question is: who do we think is on this team, helping them win in 2028? If the team isn't going to cut a check for Ryan or Lopez, then the time to deal them is now. -
This team won't be good in 2026. They should be investing plate appearances in guys like Martin. Trade Larnach and don't sign any Ty France types. Let the kid play and see if there really is something solid there.
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Week in Review: Avert Your Eyes
TheLeviathan replied to Nick Nelson's topic in Twins Daily Front Page News
I know this sounds logical, but it is missing key elements that are crucial to evaluating future courses of action: 2028 is three years from now. In baseball, that is a very long period of time. Assuming 2025 Lopez/Ryan is a 1:1 swap in 2028 is dangerous. To show but a few examples....at this time three years ago Jose Miranda, Gio Urshela, and Nick Gordon were all at an OPS+ over 110. Devin Smeltzer was a 105 ERA+. Tyler Duffey was still a thing. When you make the decision to deal 2025 Joe Ryan to help your 2028 team, you have to bake in the reality that A) Joe Ryan may not even be a Twin at that point or B) May not be nearly the same player. None of that is to say we should deal Ryan or Lopez. Or that we are on a fast track to 2028, but just to point out that some of this is a bit spurious in presentation. -
Settling on "I'll watch the Jets game I guess" is a choice no football fan should seriously face.
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The noon game slate for opening weekend is really bad.
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How Can the Twins Win Back Fans and Fix their PR Issues?
TheLeviathan replied to Vanimal46's topic in Minnesota Twins Talk
I don't even think winning fixes this. Let's say they go out and have a top 5 record next season by the All-Star game. I don't think the attendance will have shifted at all by July. The issues are deeper. Fans feel double betrayed - betrayed by the payroll slash in 2023 and betrayed by the "We're selling the team!.......Psyche!" move during a horrible season. It's going to take a total reversal in behavior at the ownership level, for a sustained period of time, or it won't matter. Or just sell the damn team. -
Attendance has been bad long before the trade deadline. Ownership sent the message after 2023 that winning was not the top priority. It's really as simple as that. All roads lead back to the Pohlads.
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I'm all on board, great article Nick. Give him the extension and start putting down a roadmap for how to build a team around him. It wouldn't shock me if that was the impetus for drafting the most major league ready, glove first SS in this most recent draft. They're looking at him being the lockdown defender on the team they hope Jenkins is leading. Whatever pick we end up with this year, I wouldn't be shocked if it was a Langford type who basically comes straight to the majors. I think it's also worth pointing out that locking him up prior to what is likely a nasty CBA battle is prudent as well.
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An NHL style contract system would do baseball a world of good.
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I'd deal Lopez this offseason for sure. Ryan....extend him.
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Fully agree. I keep hearing Salt Lake City and laugh. Like....that town absolutely cannot support baseball.
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Well said, the problem with this argument is the strawman that anyone is defending owners. You can want a salary cap, a floor, revenue sharing, redesigned arbitration/early career pay-outs.... AND want more money for players. They aren't even close to mutually exclusive.
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On April 1st you get the bottom fifteen teams and I get the top ten teams in payroll. Who do you think gets a bigger payout from Vegas on that? If it's me. You're right. If it's you.....then you should reconsider just how bad your argument is here. And I think it's pretty damn obvious which that would be. Shall we pull up the odds in Vegas from April and confirm?
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Way too convoluted IMO. The NHL probably has it best.
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Cool....60% players/40% owners. Now what's the excuse? Salary Caps are irrelevant to player earning power. Only the above negotiation matters on that front. A floor, on the other hand, absolutely forces more money to players. What the cap does is force teams to be competent, not just rich. It's best for the league to force their owners to be competent rather than just rich.
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Owners won't agree to share media revenues without other things coming into play. Yes, sharing media revenues would do a world of good, but they aren't even agreeing to that amongst each other. The salary cap is merely devised by taking the percent of revenue allocated to the players and splitting it among thirty teams. This is how the other leagues do it. The cap itself is irrelevant....the negotiated revenue split is the issue. Other player unions agreed to caps for increases in their portion of the shared revenue - baseball should do the same. And demand an aggressive floor to make sure that money is spent. I've posted elsewhere but what you say/believe about parity and the issues with revenue disparities is simply not true. Baseball gets to dodge parity questions because the nature of the game masks incompetence/competence/money when pure, random luck happens in the playoffs.
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You should have asked for clarification rather than just straight up putting your foot in your mouth. 60% players, 40% owners. The salary cap is merely a reflection of the revenue split. It is irrelevant on the dollars players get. Where it is relevant is on forcing organizations to be competent rather than just wealthy. Baseball players, by refusing to give in to a salary cap, has been reaping a smaller percentage of revenue than their counterparts in salary cap leagues. They are leaving money on the table.
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The salary cap is irrelevant to saving owners money. The only thing that saves them money is A) the lack of a floor and B) Poor split in overall revenue sharing. The Dodgers and Mets revenue situations allow them a massive advantage through no competency of their own. That is a doomed model for a sports league.
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Agreed. The NFL/NBA/NHL have their outcomes determined more by skill than my luck of population and media revenues. A sport whose outcomes are determined more by market size than competency is a league doomed to fail. It might be slow, but it will experience doom. I want four things: 60/40 revenue split owners/players, full media revenue sharing, aggressive salary floor, hard salary cap.
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I don't work for an industry that has ridiculous exemptions from normal laws where the minimum salary is hundreds of thousands of dollars. MLB is not a normal business - part of what makes any sport league work is that the audience feels as though the game is fair. MLB is quite obviously not fair. MLB can certainly continue on this path and get further and further out of the public eye. Seems stupid, but sure...they could do that. A salary cap stops the Dodgers and Yankees from having a built-in advantage that has nothing to do with their competency and merely with the population surrounding their stadium. The league's popularity is a shared value, the revenues yielded from that should also be shared.
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A salary cap is what allows for equality in talent acquisition. It's like the (much needed) regulations we have that (should be) preventing Apple from leveraging their market share to bully out smaller businesses. That regulation can't solve an overall economic system that pushes 90% of profits towards the big cats. And that's the problem - how they split the pie that determines the cap. The cap itself is not part of that. I hope players win a 70/30 share.....with a salary cap/floor/rev sharing agreement.
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Also....the argument that a salary cap is the owners winning is only based on how the players/owners decide to split the overall revenues. Salary caps, by themselves, are a wonderful thing. If they are implemented in a system where revenues are split 80/20 for owners/players....then yeah, the money is screwed up. But the problem is entirely unrelated to the cap itself.
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This is such a ridiculous argument. The NFL has parity because of its revenue and talent distribution systems. MLB has "parity" because baseball is flukey as *@$^*.
