TheLeviathan

God forbid a team adds more assets.

Most good teams don't worry about clearing a path. They let the best players play and give the top prospects a spot when they can. Given the "talent" in that list, there shouldn't be many there that we made an effort to keep a clear path for. Only Hicks was truly deserving of that notion. You definitely don't worry about clearing a path one or two seasons before it's clear they are ready.

Well played gentlemen.

So despite the claims of at least one person that the gaggle of FO defenders that they "get it" about the uproar about this, we're five pages in of more arguments like "well, we're not contenders anyway", "don't spend just to spend", "we already took risk on Pelfrey" and other equally inane nonsense. The "risk" of Pelfrey is WORSE in terms of recent health and worse in terms of upside. The problem is that the Twins again avoided a high-risk/high-reward situation and this time the price wasn't even that friggin high!!!! That's the problem, please at least try and get that through your head. Shaun Marcum could dissolve into a puddle of hair ooze on the mound and for 5-8M the risk was STILL worth it for the reward. What we have is, again, more evidence of just how ridiculously gun-shy this FO is. And that concerns me deeply for this team's future ceiling.

Because we're Twins fans on a Twins board. If you want to open the thread about Houston, Pitt, KC, etc - by all means. They probably have some explaining to do here, but in the interest of this being a Twins board I'm guessing we'd like to focus in on that. If you did then why...... You DON'T get it by evidence of this next thing you posted! Look, before the offseason started if someone had said you could have had Shaun Marcum for an investment of LESS THAN 5 MILLION - people would've ripped that person for being pollyannish. But here we are, in reality, and the Twin's best case scenario came true: A truly good pitcher with a lot of talent and a good track record fell through the cracks of FA. Hell, this was better than best case scenario. And yet again, rather than assuage all of our fears about this organization and it's GM and going out and getting this guy, they stoked the flames of the fears all of us have: That this team's leadership is too tight-fisted, too narrow-minded, too stuck in their own ways, and too risk-averse to climb on market blips like this. It shouldn't matter if Marcum's arm is held on with gum and it falls off three pitches into ST - this is precisely the best case scenario the Twins should have been hoping for and they utterly failed to take advantage when the team needed them most. It does nothing for me with 2013, but it deflates my 2015/2016/2017 balloon a lot. If they can't, while sitting on more than quadruple this amount of money in "payroll flexibility", why in the hell should I believe that will change in 3 years? And if they are this stubborn and tight-fisted it will seriously hamstring this team when it is ready to compete again. That's what is frustrating and that is why people will continue to vent. Hopefully this time you actually got it so you can stop soapboxing on strawmen. This is a Twins forum, god forbid we talk about a critical offseason component this team miserably failed on. /rant

Again: See Kevin Correa. Except we overpaid him and then didn't get Marcum. That's the whole point!

We tried - we overpaid him and then didn't add Marcum. That's the whole friggin point!!!!!!

Another scarecrow bites the dust! This stuff lately is straight out of Hot Shots Part Deux.

Then outbid the one year offer. You're not spending the money anyway. Again, even double the 4M he got would've been well within what most any sane fan would've been ok with gambling on a talent like him.

Ok, back up and think. We all would love a couple Grienkes or something. But our GM hates large contracts to pitchers, so that wasn't going to happen. Here we had a very good pitcher, with serious injury concerns no one is denying, but with serious talent and excellent results in his career who was not being offered a multi-year deal and best he could do was 1 year and 4M. Meaning he fell right into the wheelhouse of what our GM can stomach. If someone prior to this offseason said "We could sign Marcum for 1 year 7M" or even "2 years 12M" you would have had people laughing at the absurdity of such a good deal. We had a chance at that or LESS and failed to even offer. There are no excuses for that. None.

You answered your own question. If you're not a contender....who cares? Let one of the many fill-in guys from last year take the spot. Again, offer him 2 years and 10M and you hurt NOTHING while taking a great buy-low opportunity. Marcum might fail miserably and be hurt.....but again....who cares? They failed to take advantage of a market blip that they absolutely had to. And the only reason was their own stubborn attitudes. As a fan, that is irritating as hell and shows a very narrow scope for how to improve this club.

That's all well and good, but in this kind of market and given this GM's resistance to anything seemingly more than 3 years.....this was PRECISELY the situation they should have been hoping for and pounced on. That's the failure here.

Yup, so, translated for those of you trying to generate conspiracies or excuse Ryan......we were not willing to pay the dollars and years to make them sign. We make "good baseball decisions" based on what they "believe they are worth". No more BS - it comes down to dollars and years. That's the bottom line. Nice line of questioning to get that very obvious, but unstated, bit of info out.

Except that the concrete issue was completely, 100% unprompted. Why are Twins players and now their public figurehead even mentioning this? Who, if not someone in the organization, is propagating this nonsense and why in the hell would Ryan even mention it if not as at least a partial excuse?

Yeah, that's walking back a bit, but not as much as I thought from your post. He's certainly in full spin mode.

No but he's suggesting the concrete settling is part of how the field is playing. Which is something Thome regurgitated a few years back about why it's hard to hit home runs. Essentially, Ryan is verifying this weird notion that part of why lefties don't hit homeruns is because of how the concrete is or is not settling.

Except the Pohlads and St. Peter are on the record as saying Ryan has full flexibility. Plus Ryan is on the record saying he doesn't like handing out big deals to pitchers. Trying to take the spotlight off of Ryan on this is ignorant of a lot of factors that are readily available via a google search.

I think this should be pointed out over and over again. People LOVED these deals, we got a ton of pages of praise out of it and there was a lot of conversation. We're just having our wounds thumbed with articles like this.

Source? When did he acknowledge that?

Well, it certainly could be misinterpreted....but what other reason is Terry Ryan talking about concrete? Just a few years ago Thome had "heard about" this same issue. Seems like an organizational selling point Ryan is just now voicing directly to me.

I'd probably be less fixated on it if there weren't weekly attempts by the organization to sell us on why he was such a solid acquisition. If you keep jabbing your thumb in a wound, hard to take your mind off the wound.

Dude...now you're on the ignore list too! What are you thinking?

This sounds like all the awful, inane arguments made by many other posters around here lately, but after they just stepped in a broken container of ooze and mutated into it's purest insanity. Holy crap.

I say we shut the whole thing down. Sorry TD - LoganJones feels all opinions are meaningless. So....we all just agree to de-bookmark, have a beer, and go our separate ways then? I think that's his point. Nothing else is "rational" to borrow a term. Unless.....you see that he's stick-banging about stick-banging. And if stick-banging is meaningless then his stick banging about the stick-banging meaningless. Problem....solved?

Did the Twins spend the rest of their available budget on an excuse-making machine? It seems in full gear these days....