TheLeviathan
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Everything posted by TheLeviathan
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I think it goes back to your earlier point....Ryan is just really fearful of giving out deals 4+. He has very justifiable reasons for that, but that stance comes with consequences too.
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Who has ever done that ever? Of course he had restraints, in part that's what made his misuse of funds even worse. Flushing 7M down the toilet on a 120M dollar payroll is bad enough...on a 70M payroll? That really hurts. It's just one of his biggest weaknesses along with what bird mentioned earlier. And that's ok, he can still be a good GM and have a weakness or two.
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I really liked this part of your post because it brings up two big issues. 1. I think your phrasing of the first is important. That perception exists because at one point turning the blind eye was critical for reinvigorating the game. But I don't think the lack of juiced baseball is hurting the game. 2. Those 20 years of peace...who has been the biggest loser in that? In other sports a labor war has been necessitated by dwindling profits or lopsided CBAs. In baseball, the players are making gigantic profits and so are the teams. So who loses? Well, all of us that do truly enjoy the game. We get gouged buying tickets to watch a slow product trailing only NASCAR for the obnoxious rate of advertising. We pay more expensive TV/cable packages. I'd argue baseball is pricing itself out of its own market -the relaxed sports fan.
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I think it's entirely the pace of play. Baseball games drag on and on and on and often much of that time is filled with uneventful play. That's a bad recipe for staying relevant to people's TV interests.
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Prior to that awful offer in April of 2007, there was no certainty of what was going to happen. That's what sealed the deal. Had the Twins offered him something competitive, or nothing at all, they wouldn't have killed their leverage. Or at least there might have been a chance at salvaging it, but the fact is that it was their ludicrously low offer that announced to everyone that his departure was imminent. That's on Ryan, he created that situation when it would've been far better to have done nothing at all or had the guts to deal him himself. Even if the timing was difficult to swallow. Some relevant stuff from back then: http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/johan-santana/page/23
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......So it hurt the team's leverage. Same thing that happens any time a team's hand is forced/revealed. The facts we have are that the offers coming in were not elite packages - they paled in comparison to what was offered for a player making similar money but not nearly as impactful (Teixeira) and rumors throughout the process were that the teams were low-balling the Twins. They were only in a position to low-ball their offers because of the lack of leverage the Twins had. Their GM handing out insulting offers to one of its star players was a mistake. Especially when they're in their final years of team control.
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Well said. We can't talk about past hypotheticals because we have such a narrow view of what was available at the time. It's important also not to get too caught up in specifics about what the team should do in the future. As drjim said earlier, it would've been nice if the team had gambled on more "rebuild value" types. Who? Well specifics are really hard to get into with that, it's more about the approach/mindset. So getting caught up in specific names to back up his point would be a fruitless exercise. His point, for good or bad, can be analyzed without that. That's just one example, but relevant to this thread so I thought I'd use it.
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I'm dramatically overstating the value of the best pitcher in baseball? So much so that we should be thrilled with getting a prospect package that featured no one ranked in the top 50 in baseball? And less than a year removed from Freddy Garcia netting Gavin Floyd and Gio Gonzalez. Or the massive haul Texeira landed Texas? Cmon, Terry Ryan is a good GM and I like him for many, many reasons. We'd have been better off if he had stayed as well IMO. But defending his handling of the Santana negotiations this hard? To me that just means we're at an impasse that I can't wrap my head around.
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No, it was not. It was the destruction of leverage. What value could have been had with actual leverage is impossible to know because, well, Ryan destroyed it at the time.
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I think you're right, I feel like I remember it being heavily rumored that player negotiations had worn him down. It was a hard choice to make with Santana, especially given his well founded concerns about pitcher contracts. Even still, his approach seriously hurt the team's position. Getting a better haul for Santana may have totally changed the face of this franchise and he undermined it with some really awful negotiating tactics.
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Oh absolutely, we all know Ryan was wary of long-term pitching contracts. (Not incorrectly to his credit) But if that's the case than you don't offer him anything and you deal him. You don't slap him in the face with an offer, refuse to further negotiate, and then drop it in the lap of a new GM. That's all but holding a press conference to announce to the league that you're not going to hold on to him and NEED to move him. I'm not making the Kahn comparison lightly. From the moment that awful extension was offered this mess started. Just like minutes after the extension with Love was signed. There was just no LeBron to save the leverage for the Twins.
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Because I don't intend to indulge that fallacy. Hopefully everyone will start ignoring those sorts of challenges - they aren't relevant.
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Unless he was a psychic about the later injury that has nothing to do with lowballing the best pitcher in baseball and destroying leverage to make moves. My issue isn't the results of the trade, it was the Kahnsian bungling of the situation that led up to the trade.
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I cannot believe anyone is trying to spin the Santana thing as anything but bungled. If we can't criticize Ryan for that we should just close this thread and ban criticism of him from henceforth. Good gravy.
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The problems started long before then. I could link to many more examples - the seeds of that debacle were planted long before that bizarre deadline.
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He chose to spend that money that way. It was 7 wasted million. If all he can do is dumpster dive...that's fine....but he'd better be good at it. And he wasn't. Ever in his tenure.
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Santana was the best pitcher in baseball his value got dramatically reduced by the lack of leverage. The lowball offers and refusal to negotiate midseason cost the Twins dearly. It should have been a bidding war and it became a "take this or leave it" war. That is a catastrophic loss of value.
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My bad on Lamb, but on the 2007 roster alone he spent more than 7M on Ramon Ortiz, Jeff Cirillo, Rondell White, and Sidney Ponson. Just saying.
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Do we really need to rehash the insulting offers and stubborn negotiating tactics? Ryan's approach destroyed all trade leverage and possibility for redemption. It was a David Kahn like bungling that he doesn't get nearly enough flak for. Pity Smith didn't have LeBron to bail him out of his predecessors mistakes.
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Bill Smith needed less than 7M to do more than Ryan did in a decade.
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That's fine, take it into account. No problem with that. It just doesn't change the fact that he has largely nickeld and dimed his way through the Mike Lambs of the world.
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This last part was spot on: It simply can't be overstated how much value was bungled in the Hunter and Santana situations alone and they are 100% on Ryan.
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No one was talking about 2012 and that kind of tangent is exactly why that question needs to go away. The comment was made about Ryan's long history in FA and he's been pretty putrid in his results going back more than a decade. FA is just not Ryan's strength and that's all the comment was saying. When Kevin Correia might make your "Top 3 signed Free Agents" in easy fashion...it's hard to argue with that. No matter what hypotheticals or red herrings you want to throw out there, Ryan has never utilized FA well.
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So it's not possible for the person asking the question to go back, look up available FAs, and see that there were likely options to improve the team? Or perhaps trade targets? Imbedded in such a question is the notion that there was no way to improve the team. I think that statement is always false. There are always ways to improve the team. Then it comes down to the costs to do so and a myriad of other factors that Ryan has to sort through. Either way, it's his job to sort through them and improve the product. If he doesn't, excusing it because of assumptions over who is or is not available is a fallacious waste of time. We can acknowledge the difficulty, but every thread about this sort of thing gets mired in all these useless hypotheticals rather than evaluating the result.
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All this question does is get into a whole web of assumptions, counter-factuals, and red herrings. Basically this question relies on this: If there are options for Terry Ryan to sign, then he'd make the team better. Except the posters asking this question never accept that there were indeed options for him to sign, so therefore he never had a true chance to make the team better. The question is designed, from the outset, to prove Ryan never had a chance to make the team any better because they'll never accept the antecedent to be true. I think there are many, many things that have stood in the way of Ryan improving the team over the years, but I also believe it's still his job to find a way to do it regardless of those obstacles. So this entire question basically absolves him of the responsibilities to the product he put on the field, regardless of how much you disagree or agree with arm-chair GM suggestions.
