jmlease1

I'd vote for Rolen; he was a truly great player, despite the injuries. He was a better player than Ken Boyer (who I do think is a fringe Hall candidate who hasn't gotten the consideration he deserves). Rolen was a better hitter, even in the context of their eras and arguably a better defender too. Rolen wasn't just a good defender, he was a great one, the standard by which everyone else was measured by during his time. The only knock against Rolen is he played at the same time as Adrian Beltre, who was significantly healthier. Rolen was the better player IMHO (thought not by all that much), but Beltre's ability to stay on the field gave him much more overall value. Health matters, but Rolen was so good when he was on the field that he's worth induction. And it's not like Rolen didn't have a long and productive career: he played 17 seasons, he played over 2000 games. Elite glove man, excellent hitter, just a great player. 3B is underrepresented as it is, we should leave out a great 3B like Rolen. I've come around on Billy Wagner in recent years. Relief pitching is a position in baseball, we've enshrined relievers before, so why not one of the best in Wagner? It's not really his fault he pitched in the era of "the closer pitches the 9th" and he was absolutely dominant. The WHIP, the ERA+...he was destructive out there. He basically had one bad year once he became a closer...one! He was still dominant at age 38 in his last season. He was better than Lee Smith. He was probably better than Trevor Hoffman. I'm in on Wags. Andruw Jones is a tough one for me...he was so good in Atlanta. A spectacularly great CF. From age 20-30 he's a no-doubt Hall of Famer...and then just evaporated. The last 5 years of his career are just kind of sad. 1 ok year in Chicago surrounded by 4 awful ones as he bounced from team to team. But those early years...I think he did enough to ignore how fast he collapsed. The peak is too good to ignore, and it's not like he was only great for 3 years; he deserved every all-star game he made and probably should have been tapped for 2-3 more. And that defense was so ridiculous. I wouldn't vote for Omar regardless of the allegations against him; he was a wonderful player to watch, one of the most beautiful players to watch on defense...but a rotten hitter and his elegance on D almost certainly is overrating his good (and often great) play, but he's not Ozzie Smith and never was. He played forever but there's a good reason he was only a 3 time all-star. I'm out on Schilling, a great pitcher who I have no interest in giving a Hall of Fame platform to spew vitriol and hatred. He's not being penalized for being "conservative", or even supporting Trump (Mariano Rivera is well-known for his conservative beliefs and support of Trump was elected unanimously, and many other players and hall of famers are similar; baseball is very republican-leaning), it's because he's taken things far beyond anyone else, using his position and platform to spur hatred and violence, with no remorse or understanding, and believes he should be free of consequence for his actions. Some committee can reassess him after he'd dead as far as I'm concerned. We are not required to grant him this honor, despite his skill on the field. I'm still on the "get more distance" train for the steroid guys. There are a lot of good arguments for and against putting them in or keeping them out; we should have them all. But I'd age them off the regular ballot and let a later committee hash it out on these guys as we get further removed from those wild wild west times.

Feels like Billy Smith tried to play the Yankees and Red Sox against each other and get them in a bidding war and then both of them bailed out completely and he went to the 3rd place team out of desperation and convinced himself their prospects were worth it.

Who knows what his mindset was at the time, either. Maybe he wasn't interested in trying a bullpen role and was convinced he was a starter. Maybe the Twins didn't see anything that made them think he could make that transition (it doesn't work for everyone). The Twins missed on him, but so did a lot of people. He retooled his career relatively late and managed to still get someone to take another chance on him after he'd flamed out as a starter in a few places. Good for him.

well, the ChiSox have done what you would always ask of a team once the window to contention opens: spend some money on veteran players to fill in holes, shore up weaknesses and position yourself to be go for it. Have they done it correctly? I think it's hard to say. Some of these move look better than others: Grandal: could be the big mistake. catchers don't usually age well and as a hitter if his bat declines at all it's going to be disappointing if he has to play 1B or DH...which brings us to the next guy. Abreu: He's likely to regress from pandemic season; it's hard to believe he'll lead the league in slugging again at age 34. That's a number that screams small sample size. But his bat should still be quality...but he's also gonna be playing more and more DH, because a) Grandal may need a home and he stinks defensively. Kuechel: he was exactly what they needed last year. I didn't want the Twins to sign him, and I was probably wrong. (assuming he doesn't completely collapse this season through age/injury, but it seems less likely) even if the last season is a bust on this contract, I don't think they're likely to truly regret it. Lynn: Hard for Twins fans to like this guy after he was a such a dog for us and then did well everywhere else. But again: the big hole for the ChiSox was starting pitching. They really needed a 3rd guy they could count on and Lance Lynn has been that everywhere he's pitched except MN. It's a good move for a guy I will never cheer for, ever. Hendriks: They are rolling the dice on him staying good well into his 30's. This and Grandal are the big risks: relievers are fungible and it's rarely worth paying a premium and committing big cash to a closer, and catchers generally age badly. Maybe he'll be fine because he's got relatively low mileage on his arm. Maybe the last two seasons are predictive of where he really is...but I kinda doubt it. it's more likely that he pitches like the 2015-2017 version: still very good, but there's as good a chance he's 2018 Hendriks as there is he's 2019 Hendriks, which is way 3-4 year deals at big money for closers scares me. But they seem to be loading it up for this year, and their team is looking pretty good. A top three rotation of Giolito, Keuchel, and Lynn is playoff worthy. Hendriks, Bummer, and Foster looks strong in the back end of the bullpen. They've got talent in the lineup, including some star power with guys like Jimenez. The question is probably whether they have enough quality depth up and down the roster to ride it for a full season. (and whether their manager should still be managing) They've been aggressive and the Twins have not. But I have to keep remembering two things: 1) you evaluate the off-season when the off-season is done, not every time a rival makes a move, and 2) "winning" the off-season doesn't actually get you any hardware.

I liked the rumored packages from the Yankees and the Red Sox better than the Mets by a lot, so I will always wonder what was really out there. It felt like at the time the Twins were afraid to trade with the Yankees for some public relations reasons and that the rumors about the Red Sox interest weren't that solid (i.e., they weren't really "in" just trying to raise the price for the Yankees). Go-Go was incredibly fun to watch in the outfield, but he was just helpless at the plate as a Twin. Would things have gone better if he'd had better/more development time? It seems likely, since he never set the world on fire as a hitter in the minors and had been an awful hitter in the majors for the Mets. Defensively, he was ready but offensively he needed more work. But buy, his D was great until he started losing that incredible speed. I recall Guerra being talked about as the guy with big upside, and it's a reminder that a-ball guys in trades are often just lottery tickets and will bust out much more often that blow up. Humber & Mulvey were over-valued by the Twins because they were "close" to being MLB ready, I think. No way does the current office make that mistake today.

apparently the Cleveland ownership is trying to recoup all their losses from 2020 in a single season. Gross.

The list looks about right to me. I might quibble a little with some of the individual positions, but the reality is there's not much difference between a guy being ranked 8 or 10. Garver is probably the toughest call on the whole list, I think. His value is higher if he's 2019 Garv. If he's 2020 Garv, he doesn't make the list at all. If he's 2018ish Garv...this is pretty close? And we just don't know who he is, if 2019 was a fluke or not. If 2020 should just be written off as a fluky, injury pandemic year. It's a really tough call. I'm excited to see Kirilloff in MLB this year.

Man, Tommy Herr was a disaster. It wasn't a good trade from the start; Herr was already on the downside and had zero pop in his bat and trading a younger player for an older one like that is iffy unless the old guy really has the track record. And Herr didn't: he was a 1-time all-star and never played that well before or after. The change to clubhouse chemistry was more damaging than the loss of Brunansky's bat; Bruno wasn't a good fielder and was only a pretty good hitter. Drew walks, hit for some power but didn't have an elite tool. Herr wasn't even that bad on the field, considering how few 2Bs in MLB hit worth a damn back then and his D was fine. but it messed up the team and he didn't want to be there. Randy Bush was good enough with the stick that we didn't really miss Bruno's bat that much (Bush was almost Delmon-like in the field, though). Kicked off a run where the Twins really struggled to find a 2B until Knoblauch arrived: Herr (clubhouse cancer, but good on the field), Lombo (can't hit), Backman (couldn't hit the AL), Newman (couldn't hit). Three guys who couldn't hit and Tom Herr. Blech.

1) sure, but it should also account for changes in role. but ZiPS doesn't appear to have that ability. 2) Is it, though? It does account for injuries by players: guys who have been historically healthy and playing full time get projected to do the same, and guys who haven't been healthy don't get projected to play a full season. So how does a projection for someone like Rortvedt work? He's never gotten an AB in MLB, has 2-4 players ahead of him on the roster (depending on what you think of Astudillo as a catcher and the AAA guy they signed)...why would he get projected to get the same level of ABs as Jeffers? And the idea that Rortvedt is a significantly better defender at this point and that his offense would be fairly close to Jeffers so that he'd be more valuable is a bit silly. I'm a huge Rortvedt guy and even I know that Jeffers is far past him right now.

The biggest challenge with ZIPS is when you start drilling down into individual players. The Maeda example is perfect for this: regression towards the mean is pretty reasonable after last season's excellence...but projecting him to have ANY relief appearances shows they aren't accounting for his changed role with a new team. The Twins aren't going to push him into the bullpen absent some really strange circumstances, so this shows a flaw in their projection systems. ZIPS also assumes that players with an injury history will continue to be injured when doing these projections; that's not an unreasonable assumption, but it's always a chancy thing. I think the biggest surprises are a) how relatively unimpressed these projections are with Kirilloff and Jeffers; those ratings feel conservative to me, and again reveals one of the things I find the most frustrating about projection systems: they struggle to spot the young breakout guys. the projections on Astudillo, who I simply don't see getting anywhere near this much playing time in 2021, combined with the projection on Rortvedt. Clearly ZIPS likes Rortvedt's defense, but I'm not seeing him have this big of a role in 2021 (much as I like him) and Jeffers is going to get those ABs IMHO.

All good trade targets, although I'm a little less excited about giving up a pile for Story unless the FO is really confident on being able to resign him without needing to dump a ton of salary everywhere else; I'd really hate to do a deal that dropped a bunch of top-end prospects for a guy that only sticks for a year. Those kind of deals don't usually work out well in baseball. (see also, Alexander, Doyle) I like Gray and I think he'd be a good fit for us to fill out the back end of the rotation and see if Wes Johnson can up his game a bit more. Marquez is definitely worth giving up a serious package for: the contract is good, the peripherals are there...but I think the analysis above is right: he's going to be hard to chisel out of there unless they dump Arenado's contract and start the rebuild.

This. I think teams are realizing that paying a premium for a "proven" closer is usually a poor use of resources, and multi-year contracts for relievers has higher levels of risk not because of the talent of the pitcher but just because of the fungible nature of the position. It's tough to succeed as a starter without 3 effective pitches. As a reliever, you need one dominant offering and one other pitch that is effective playing off the first pitch. Which is why you're seeing starters who have that one dominant pitch and can't get their secondary stuff up to snuff continuing to have success converting to the bullpen. The secondary effect of that is you are having additional internal options for teams to develop bullpen options for the MLB club, because it's not just guys coming through as relievers. With the chain continuing to fill, what's the incentive to pay FA guys premium salaries? The days of paying "closers" $10-15M AAV contracts is done, and so is giving guys that kind of money for 3-5 years. You're going to see a lot more guys getting non-tendered as relievers from now on I think as clubs reset the market on relief pitching. If Taylor Rogers doesn't have a great season, he's going to be non-tendered too because the team probably isn't going to pay him $8M when his FA market value is $5M or less.

Look, either you think the Twins are a smart, professional operation with a good coaching staff and a plan for their pitchers...or you don't. If you're on board with the former, then this looks like a reasonable value play: talented reliever with some good peripherals but a bit of a control problem. If things go well for him then he's a fine late-inning option who will get plenty of Ks. His floor looks like Matt Magill from 2018-19 if things don't go as well. If you think the twins don't know what they're doing, if you only think you can get reliable relief pitching by signing big names, if you think moves like this are a waste of time & roster spots...then you're not gonna be very happy with this. And probably aren't going to be very happy as a Twins fan. strong bullpens have become more and more important in recent years with starters throwing fewer innings...but relievers remain the most fungible position in baseball. It's the easiest position to fill, rarely worth paying premium amounts for, and the small samples they have year over year make them the hardest to project. Robles is a great example of this: in 2020, he was awful...but it was 16 2/3 innings. He was roughly as bad in 19 innings with the Mets in 2018 and then immediately turned it around for the rest of the season in roughly twice as many innings with the Angels as he pulled it back to the mean. Might he have done the exact same thing in 2020 if he'd had enough innings? Seems likely. So why did the Angels move on from him? Probably the same reason a lot of people thought the Twins might move on from Taylor Rogers: not sure the arbitration number was going to match his performance. He was almost certainly going to get $4M+ in arbitration, even coming off a rotten year. Despite how strange it seems to us, everyone gets a raise in baseball arbitration, no matter how bad the year they had. Would they have kept him at $2M? They might have, but Robles also might have been ready to get the heck out of there after a) having a bad season, and maybe thinking that the Angels didn't really have that much respect for his talents after non-tendering him.

I'm more interested in getting in a power righty with a proven track record than spending all our bullpen money on another lefty. Hand is good, and I'd be happy to have him, but I'm looking for the replacement for May right now. Alcala can fill some of those innings, but we need a righty more than another lefty.

It's the easiest position to fill, so I'm not too terribly worried about it right now. They're probably going to want to invest a high draft pick there in the next year or two just to keep the pipeline going, but right now they're in excellent shape. Finding playing time for everyone who has shown they are MLB-ready (Rooker, Cave, Kirilloff, Wade, and Larnach) is going to be the biggest problem. I like that problem.

Doesn't this kind of worst-case scenario assumption mean that no position group is an area of strength? You can do this same exercise for every position group. But in comparison to other teams in MLB, the Twins catching situation is a strength: they have two players that have shown they can start consistently. They have backup options in AA & AAA and if things start going catastrophically bad, they have La Tortuga available to jump in and carry some weight, even if the team doesn't see him as a regular. Heck the Twins even have an A-ball guy with some promise. How many other teams are in this position? Half of MLB last year had garbage backups. The hated Yankees are more worried than the Twins are at catcher, and they have a 2-time all-star there. But Sanchez was as bad as Garver at the plate and worse in the field, and they don't have anything worth talking about as a backup.

I'm still a fan of Rortvedt, even if Jeffers has clearly flown past him in the rankings. Defensively, he's good enough to play right now, so if he can hit enough he'll be a great backup for the Twins in the future as a lefty bat to give either Garver or Jeffers a break. Catcher is an area of strength right now, which is a huge turnaround from just a few years ago. It's a great example of how position depth can change rapidly. in 2017 Garver wasn't seen as much of a prospect, we had nothing in the system that anyone was high on, we were signing FA catchers in their 30's to start in MLB...we were so thin back then people were concerned that Stuart Turner got taken in the Rule 5 draft. Now? Catcher looks strong.

I appreciate the fact that even after more than three decades in the booth, Dick continues to put in the work to grow and change as a broadcaster. While he's still not as comfortable as I might like in terms of advanced stats, he doesn't ignore them like many broadcasters of his generation, nor does he denigrate them (unlike some of his booth partners). Must be that St. Cloud State education! (seriously, though: SCSU has an absolutely elite mass comm program)

I don't think getting moved to the 'pen is a good excuse for screwing up your visa and carelessly mucking about with weed. Romero blew up his own career in MLB, and it's too bad. Maybe he'll get it together in Japan, but it's telling that he literally had no real opportunity in MLB.

I think it's fair to be concerned that Garver's 2019 had something to do with the juiced ball they were using. He was so much better at age 28 than in any other MLB season that it's fair to consider that it may have been a fluke year. It's great that there are some advanced stats to show that the great hitter might still be in there, and I'm reluctant to put too much stock in anything from the short COVID season, especially when a lot of hitters struggled...but the concern is real. Now, even if he hits more like 2018 if he defends like 2019-2020 he's still a very solid catcher and contributor for the team. I think he'll bounce back...I just don't know how high the rebound will be.

yeah, I'm guessing that his visa issue still isn't resolved or the Twins wouldn't have cut him. So it's looking doubtful that he plays in 2021, after not playing in 2020, and not playing well in 2019...maybe he can get his life squared away and I hope for his sake he does. But his MLB chances may have slipped away.

Twins are a bit top-heavy at 2B right now; all of their best options there are either already in MLB or sitting at AAA. So in the short term there's no real worries here. When you drop down into A ball there really isn't anyone coming along at the position that you get all that excited about...but 2B is also another one of those positions where you see a lot of guys get drafted at SS and then drop down on the defensive spectrum to 2B if they're not showing it at SS, so...who knows? I think you'll see the Twins continuing to draft guys at SS with what they see as a strong hit tool and react from there. I'm ok with that strategy. I feel bad for Nick Gordon. He's a good player, he was coming into the season ready for a shot in MLB, and then COVID wiped out his year. He's just snake-bit. Frankly, we could have used him last year to take some pressure off Arraez when he got dinged up and might have been able to do the same for Polanco. He may have missed his window in MN and his stock is low because of not playing much. I still think he's a good MLB player who will hit for average as either a utility guy or starting 2B.

Not too worried about organizational depth at 1B; it's another position where it's fairly easy for a player to move down the defensive chart to fill in, and as we've seen with guys like CJ Cron, there are usually affordable guys on the FA market if you need a transition year or two before a minor league candidate is ready to step in. Sano will be fine there, especially once he gets more game experience to know when he should attack a ball and when to let one go. I think he's got the glove skills to be solid at digging balls out of the dirt and there's no question he's a big target over there. Defensively he can get up to average if he keeps working at it, but his hit tool is more than good enough for it to not matter. Yes, he racks up tons of Ks but he also gets plenty of walks and HRs. I don't want an entire lineup of boom/bust guys like Sano but I'm happy to have Sano. Kirilloff or Rooker both look to have the capacity to fill in there, Garver has the ability to play there...we're in fine shape at 1B in the short-to-medium term. Long term...who knows. That just depends on whether guys that aren't even drafted yet pan out.

He's certainly a future option at 3B, which much like 2B frequently has players who were drafted at SS drop down the defensive spectrum, rather than necessarily having all guys who were drafted at 3B. It's so hard to assess where the team's franchise depth is right now with the minors not getting a season last year to assess anyone's development. I like Miranda, but he needs to show better plate discipline in drawing walks to continue to rise. Who knows where he's at on developing that skill? Blankenhorn is a reasonable depth option for this year and a strong contender to fill the super-utility role as he can fill at 2B (a bit stretched there, but playable), 3B and both corner spots. We'll see if he can hit enough to be a long-term fill in anywhere.

So the Twins would need to sell low on Garver, hand over a top prospect (and I doubt the Cubs would settle for Rooker), add maybe a lottery ticket guy from A-ball, and take on all of Darvish's contract to make this work? And we're betting on a guy who is 34 years old, has an injury history, and has only been a 5 bWAR player once in his career. That's a big bet to place that 2021 Yu will be as good as pandemic season Yu was.