jmlease1

The good thing is there are options that are available either as short-term or longer if needed right now. ideally, we'd have Kirilloff installed from Day One, healthy and productive, smashing line drives all over the park and playing a quality 1B. But it might not get there on the perfect schedule. So far, I don't think the news on Kirilloff is bad: no, he's not playing in games yet, but he also hasn't been shut down to rest it up either. So the recovery seems to be going ok? It's a process. I get how after the last two injury-filled seasons for the Twins everyone is hyper-sensitive to every droplet of news about an injury or rehab note, and with injuries that were supposed to have taken only a few weeks to rehab turning into months-long epics that sometimes led to surgeries. but right now, even if Kirilloff isn't quite ready for Opening Day, he seems to be on the path to go in April, not May or June. Gallo as a backup seems ok if not ideal (losing his defensive value in the OF seems wasteful). i don't think they want to run Miranda out there unless they have to: they clearly want him at 3B and it feels like they believe (and I don't disagree) that it will be better for his development if he slots in at one position rather than flip back and forth. If his arm isn't quite ready, I think it's more likely we see him at DH than slotting in at 1B. Solano seems to be the first choice to roll in there in the short term, and I think that's ok. But he's probably not the best long term fit. The pipeline for 1B prospects doesn't have a lot of guys lined up there, but the Twins philosophy does seems to avoid drafting players that slot in at 1B early in their career. They'd rather draft a hitter at another spot and slide him down as they develop than limit themselves from a prospect lane, and i think that's the right choice. Julien looks like he might end up at 1B and be fine there, and there are options in the lower minors from some of the OF that could end up at 1B too. It's also a position where there's almost always a CJ Cron type available in the free agent market if you're willing to commit $8-10M+ to the spot, so it's not that hard to fill the gap if you have the payroll to do it. (I'm sure the twins would love Sabato to break out and push his way up, but that's sadly looking unlikely.) Someone like Emmanuel Rodriguez may end up being a better fit for corner OF/1B by the time he (hopefully) hits his way up to MLB too. So I'm not too worried about the pipeline right now.

Yeah, that was my point: catchers aren't going to play in 130-140 games a season and you can't treat the position like you're going to have one primary guy and a backup that won't play enough to hurt you if they slug their own weight. they might be able to patch this through free agency after Vazquez moves on, or Jeffers flames out, but it'd be nice to have some organizational prospects moving along in the system. (I'm definitely not on the "trade Polanco" this season train, though; while it might max his value, I think this team is good enough to compete right now and Polanco is going to be a big part of it. Dealing him for depth is assuming a lot of risk that someone like Lee or Julien is ready to step in when neither has played a game in AAA)

Detroit needs some of the exact same work that the Twins did with we made a regime change. they need better drafting, more prospects, and a serious reinvigoration of their talent pipeline. (they also need to get their investment in the international markets improved, which was much less of an issue for the Twins) Torkelson & Greene were almost certainly rushed to the bigs for...reasons? not sure they made a smart decision there, but maybe they ran out of bodies. but the offense was rotten for Detroit last season and there's not a lot of guys that you think are positioned to make significant leaps. they need Torkelson, Greene, and Carpenter to all take a real step forward with Haase not taking a step back, and Schoop & Baez rebounding to have a quality offense. While I think Schoop will likely be better how much is a really the question, Baez is likely to have a modest gain at best. Meadows? He's had one great season in his career. Maybe he's back to his 2021 form. Baddoo had a nice Rule 5 rookie campaign, and then got exposed. not impressed or excited about their pitching staff either. I like Skubal and not much else. they needed to sell off last season and restart, but they didn't have much to sell that wouldn't have been selling low. This feels like a bad team without much hope. I'd feel better as a Royals fan than a Tigers fan right now.

even if Jeffers improves (and I think he will, in fact) the Twins still need to be thinking and planning for the future. It'd be great if your #1 catcher could play 130-140 games a season every year and you could slot in a specialist as the backup, but that's a best case scenario that's unlikely to be true. Vazquez is signed for 3 seasons and at the end of it I'm not expecting him to be a quality option at 35 and 11 years deep into his career. Catcher is easily the biggest organizational depth weakness right now, unless a couple of the young guys down in A-ball make a sudden jump. everywhere else we have guys, or guys that can slide down the defensive scale into those spots. But at least at the MLB level I think we're about as well-positioned as we reasonably could be.

1B/DH might be his eventual landing spot somewhat by default: even if he plays a passable 2B or 3B (and it's a little questionable whether he will get there), with Jorge Polanco, Jose Miranda, Brooks Lee, Royce Lewis, and Austin Martin (even with injuries putting the last two behind) Julien would really really have to hit to jump past those guys who are all better defensively (yes, even the oft-maligned Polanco & Miranda) at those spots. His eye at the plate is really pretty awesome, though and he's shown real ability to make contact and do damage when he decides to swing. he's not likely to be a batting title guy competitor like Arraez, but he's also not going to be a 200 Ks a season guy either. I think some time at AAA will probably help him refine his approach against pitchers with better control and better stuff; in the lower minors a player with a great eye can wait out the wildness that you see all the time in the pitchers. the higher you ascend, the more those pitchers have ironed things out and can clip the corners on breaking stuff and ride the edge with a high velocity fastball. there's fewer mistakes and meatballs to annihilate. I'm looking forward to seeing how his power potential develops; can he be a guy that slugs around .500 consistently? If he keeps showing and building that ability to punish the ball when he does take his hacks, it's going to help him keep that OBP up too, because pitchers will be more afraid to challenge him. As great a hitter as Arraez was, a good pitcher isn't going to be as afraid to challenge him with a pitch when there's 2 out and the bases empty or even with a runner on 1st, not in the same way. The great eye sets Julien's floor for me, but the power will determine how high the ceiling is. I expect we'll see him at Target Field sometime this season, and I'm looking forward to it.

In a vacuum, the Twins catching depth looks a little thin. In the context of MLB as a whole...it's probably pretty good? I mean, it's one of the toughest positions to find a true 2-way player at and even guys that are league-average hitters provide significant value at catcher when you consider just how poorly catchers hit last season. SD was ranked 15th last season in catcher in team OPS (.658) yet that was good enough for 2.4 offensive bWAR at the position. You have to go all the way down to the 24th spot to start getting to negative team offensive bWAR at catcher (the Mets, whose catchers had a collective .589 OPS). That's the context Vazquez and Jeffers are playing in. Offense at catcher is so bad league wide that if we get career average performances from Vazquez and Jeffers we're going to have one of the better duos in MLB, especially if they continue to be quality options defensively. We'll see how Jeffers and Vazquez do controlling the running game this season, but I'm a little surprised by the assumption that Jeffers is somehow terrible at it? The Twins don't have much minor league depth to be sure, and it's something they need to address in the draft, in international signings, trades, something. but right now, the MLB club looks to be in pretty good shape and better than most.

That's a real shame about Austin Martin. He had a nice AFL stint and I was really hoping it would lunch him into this season. Hope his elbow comes around. I know we're trained to presume the worst at all times, but a lot of these injuries aren't new so for guys like Buxton, Kirilloff, and Polanco they're just working their way back. There really isn't any new or bad news on them that i can see?

Not thrilled with the jump in BB/9 or H/9 when he made the jump to cedar rapids, but if the fastball can consistently get to 97 mph with some life then he's got a shot. Would like to see him dominate in high A and get an early promotion to Wichita for his age-23 season. I do appreciate his durability in making 22 starts his first professional season and throwing more innings that he ever did in a college season. that said, he needs to get deeper into games.

I think after the disaster that was the "Randy Ratio", any MN coach/manager is going to avoid putting hard numbers on something like this. But what Nick's outlined here is probably close to the ideal situation for the Twins. Will it actually keep Buxton healthy? No one knows.

Ok, you're right. The Twins will be dreadful on offense this year and destined to fail because everyone will get hurt again. Is that what you want to hear?

And as a result they made sure they had much better, proven depth options as insurance. What exactly do you want them to do? Trade all the guys that were injured last year (i'm sure you'd get great value there) and replace them with...someone? If Buxton gets hurt, we have Michael A. Taylor. If Kirilloff gets hurt, we have Solano as an option. Larnach clearly isn't being counted on; he's probably starting in AAA. They signed Vazquez so they wouldn't have to rely on Jeffers being healthy all season.

But you're not seeing the lineup that scored fewer than 700 runs. (a little disingenuous, that: they scored 696. it's not like they were the Pirates) That lineup had Jake Cave, Mark Contreras, and Billy Hamilton in it. And Sandy Leon catching. First half of the season the Twins were scoring 4.5 runs per game (over a full season that's 729 runs); second half it was down to 4 (including a dreadful 3.6 in Sept). Houston won the World Series with 737 runs, Cleveland won the division with 698. This lineup is more than capable of scoring enough runs to contend if reasonably healthy. But they're also deeper than last season and more able to withstand injury. That said...no team handles the level of injury the Twins had last season. #2 in all of baseball in player games lost to injury.

Hopefully, Joe Pohlad can fix the issue with the team's TV contract and broadcast "partner", get them into a better position for streaming Twins baseball, and position themselves to generate better local revenues and continue to have them spending consistently in the middle of the pack or better on payroll. I will say, it's always better to have an owner (or lead from the ownership group, or whatever the setup is) who likes baseball, and Joe Pohlad certainly seems to care about it. I hope the Pohlad Family looks to the Rooneys in the NFL as their model for a family ownership of a professional sports team.

This feels like a more well-rounded team than other of recent vintage. The starting rotation is easily the deepest it's been in a long time, and while it might not have the high-end of say, the Johan days, it has playoff-caliber starters going much deeper. the bullpen at least one elite performer and several quality options. the lineup looks to be fairly deep with an array of options: not relying on a purely Bomba Squad or Piranas methodology to get get runs. With some of the platoon/bench players they've added, it looks to have better R-L balance than last season (even if they got there in an odd way), and there's much more depth for if/when injuries strike. There's definitely top-end talent on this team: Buxton and Correa are both capable of MVP seasons, and while it's maybe stretching it a little to use Maeda's short pandemic year run to Cy Young contention as a true benchmark, every starter in the rotation is capable of having an all-star season if things go their way. We've seen it before that when a couple of guys have the big year at the same time it can get very interesting. (1991 Scott Erickson and Kevin Tapani had their best years as a pro at the same time that Jack Morris had a return to a classic Jack Morris season; twins have only had 3 starters all achieve an ERA+ of 125 at the same time once since 1991, and that was the pandemic year of 2020...and two of those guys made less than 10 starts. Mahle, Gray, Lopez, and Maeda have all hit that level before and all but Maeda have done it multiple times. Could Ryan join that club?) Duran is a monster at the back end of the bullpen. It's spring, so hope is eternal. I choose to look on the positive side (especially since there's not a lot that can be changed at this point. Why not look for the better possible outcomes?)

If MLB was changing the ball for Yankees & nationally televised games, then someone (and likely several someones) needs to be fired and run out of the game for life. That's a manipulation that cannot be allowed to occur in professional sports (or any sports, really). Yes, both teams would be playing with the same ball still, but you cannot allow any kind of manipulation of games like that. Want fans to see more offense? Make rule or ball adjustments in the offseason, be transparent about it, and make it uniform across the game. not so Judge can chase the HR record or you can get more action on the nationally televised game. I'm not terribly worried about how this nonsense will impact the Twins this season. If they've juiced the ball up again, their sluggers (and they have a few) will launch additional balls out of the park, and so will the opposition. Yes, the Twins are mostly flyball pitchers, but so is most of the league. The focus across baseball for pitchers has been on getting strike outs, and that's not the specialty of groundball pitchers. And the focus for the Twins this offseason on improving the defense wasn't just in improving the OF defense: I think the infield defense will be better too.

That's good news, generally. I'm not surprised if he's still not there on the changeup, which is definitely a "feel" pitch, but if he's velocity is up in the mid-90's then then it's a good sign overall, i think. I'm still very high on Alcala.

Hopefully he's just trying to get himself built back up. It's been a while since he's really thrown, so he might be a bit behind everyone else (and cautious to see how it feels out there. I'm still hopeful. I have no problem with kicking the tires on guys like Santana or Hoffman for spot at the end of the bullpen. Maybe you find a guy who finally got something to click, maybe you catch lightning in a bottle. but it's a low risk move so long as you're not trying to fill slots in your top 4-5 guys. (and the twins aren't doing that: they already have quality locked in with Duran, Jax, Thielbar, and Lopez for the back end)

There's very little not to like about Brooks Lee. He's had about as good a start to his professional career as you could ask for. I love the fact that he's a switch hitter, he can/should be a superior defender at 3B/2B, and I wouldn't be surprised if he adds a little more power as he matures. The approach at the plate is terrific. I honestly think the only reason he's not ranking higher on global prospect lists is he was a college player and many prospect rankers tend to value younger players with tools that they can "project" over older ones with demonstrable production.

Wallner has made it to MLB, though. yes, his role this season will be as an injury replacement...but he got there already. It's fair to question the Miller pick, but he does appear to have the defensive chops to stick at SS, which means his floor is still pretty high even if he doesn't hit because guys who can legit play SS aren't that easy to find (see also, twins, for like a decade). And Miller was an end of round guy, not a top 10 or anything. Petty might be legit...but we turned him into Sonny Gray and when you consider how many high school arms bust...even if we only get 2 years of Sonny Gray that's 2 years of a proven, quality MLB arm. A legit playoff-caliber starter. Rooker wasn't great, but he still played for us at the MLB level, so you can't call him a bust, and you can't put him in the same class as Cavaco or Sabato, that's just not fair to him. I get the desire to downgrade Lewis & Larnach because of their injuries...but those injuries are not a failure of draft evaluation, which is what we're talking about here. how can you predict that Royce Lewis is going to tear his ACL slipping on the ice in TEXAS? And despite that injury costing him a season, despite missing another season of developmental games due to the pandemic (on the back of his knee injury), Royce Lewis crushed it in AAA last season and looked legit in his cup of coffee in MLB before getting hurt again. Honestly, that's a heck of an argument for their evaluation of his sheer talent coming into the draft.

They seem to have done ok with last year's #1, Brooks Lee. Baseball draft can be a big crapshoot, unfortunately. While this front office hasn't produced a superstar from their drafts (yet), their 1st round results aren't awful even with some misses on the resume. Royce Lewis has debuted in MLB and looked good (can't blame the drafters for the injuries) Brent Rooker made it to MLB before being dealt Trevor Larnach has made it to MLB (injuries seem to be the only thing holding him back) Keoni Cavaco looks like he might bust...but is still only 22 Matt Wallner has already debuted in MLB Aaron Sabato is looking like a bust Chase Petty netted us a proven quality MLB starter Noah Miller looks like a quality defender at SS at age 20 in A-ball (we'll see if he hits, but seems ok for late in the round) Brooks Lee is already in AA, a consensus top 100 prospect, and literally doing everything right 2 busts (so far) out of 9 picks isn't too bad, the Lee pick is looking fantastic, and there's definitely some upside left here. the Cavaco pick is probably the worst one: it was a relatively high choice, there were other good options, and even at the time it looked like a reach. While I didn't love the Sabato pick, it wasn't unreasonable at that point in the draft, and frankly that draft was just a little weird because of the pandemic. I'm of the opinion that you can't call a player who makes it to MLB with your club a bust. And if you can trade a player drafted in the first round for a current starter it's hard to say he wasn't worth the pick.

Getting HBP is a significant part of Martin's game. He's our version of Don Baylor!

All reasonable choices. Cavaco needs to start showing something, but isn't necessarily at a break point, just because he's still only 21. Even if he doesn't have a real breakout the Twins aren't going to be "sorry, kid, but it's just not working out." after this season unless he regresses even further. His age and tools will give him a little longer rope. Sabato is increasingly in trouble. It doesn't matter if you have moonshot power if you can't make contact. He lit it up as a college hitter in a real league, but he's been pretty poor as a pro. Did his bat speed slow down since college? Is it the wooden bats? Pretty surprising to see a player who crushed it that much in college show so little straight out the gate, but at the end of the day he didn't actually play that much at North Carolina, and maybe that has something to do with it too. He played more games in his first year as a pro than he did in his whole college career, which might be an indicator. Balazovic is the most disappointing. High school players don't make it all the time, and a lot of us were questioning Sabato from the jump, but Balazovic had shown so much promise and earned his way up the ranks so for him to have collapsed at AAA is a bummer. Coming off a messy, injury strewn year there was hope that it was a one-off and he could bounce back quickly, but the off-field incident is going to set him back again and clearly the team is unhappy with him.

I've been high on Joe Ryan since we traded for him and he's done nothing to change my opinion. I'm really looking forward to seeing how the slider works for him this season, because if he has sharpened it up it should be a weapon. (it's anecdotal, but I clearly recall times where he was trying to get guys to chase it but couldn't get there) If the split change proves to be effective against lefties and settles in as a solid off-speed pitch for the arsenal then i think he's going to have a pretty terrific year. the dreadful "you got yourself into this mess, you get yourself out of it" game against SD really skewed his numbers for the year, but it's not like Ryan rolled up all his good numbers by beating up on KC & Det. He was also good in every one of his starts against Cleveland, and they were a damn good team last year (I'll take 3 runs yielded in 19 2/3 innings every single time). I'm very excited to watch him pitch this year.

very weird draft. Only 5 rounds? I'm guessing the pandemic was already messing up scouting opportunities as well. I wasn't thrilled about the pick at the time, but I do understand the thought process: they looked at his power production in college and his batting eye and thought he might be someone who could contribute quickly with his bat, even if he didn't add anything defensively. At the end of the round you're going to have more flaws in a player's game and/or more risk in their development. Sabato has immense power, and he's still able to draw walks, but his contact rate is dreadful. Wooden bat problem, maybe? ball that still flew out in college are just getting fouled back? The regression in cedar rapids last season wasn't enough to stop him from getting promoted, but it was still disappointing after his short stint there in 2021. there as hope that getting him out of the FSL might have unlocked something for him, but it's not really looking that way. He's got a lot of work to do in order to get himself on the 40-man. Right now, he's a pretty easy guy to expose in the Rule 5: he adds little to nothing on D and his contract rates don't allow his power production to play. The good eye at the plate isn't enough if he can't make contact when he swings, and eventually better pitchers will pump the zone on him if he can't punish them for it. You never know, but it's not looking great here.

I love Joe Ryan. He's my favorite Twins starter to watch, and if that split-change is working for him, then he's going to be even more fun this season. Ryan's got the mentality you want out there: fearless but smart. That fastball is really good, with that extra bit of deception on it. It's sort of what they used to call a "Positive" Fastball, because every hitter is positive they can hit it. (The old Jim Palmer bit) Mahle's shoulder issues are a weird one. There's nothing showing up structurally, so he should be fine...but obviously he wasn't at the end of the year for the Twins. Hopefully a normal offseason addresses that and he can focus on sharpening up that slider and making it a consistent weapon. I appreciate how direct he's been about where some of his pitches were last year. That tells me he knows what he needs to do to improve, and the time at Driveline shows he's putting in the work even when it's not on the team's nickel. Hope it works! I mean, a guy coming in to camp talking about the new/improved pitch they have is sort of the equivalent of "best shape of their life" on the cliché meter, but things become clichés in part because they're true as well...