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Otto von Ballpark

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Everything posted by Otto von Ballpark

  1. Otto von Ballpark
    Sure, that is fine. I just don't think you can dismiss #74 picks because there hasn't been a star taken there since, say, David Cone in 1981. When there have been stars taken with picks shortly thereafter. Not that it changes things too much, but by that point in the draft, you probably want to look at ranges, and expand the sample size.
  2. Otto von Ballpark
    More good points! If we planned to draft and sign the Gophers bullpen catcher at #74, we could apply the bonus to our #20 pick and make its bonus equivalent to the #14 pick. Or our #59 pick could be upgraded to the #37 slot. Now the draft is next week already, so the Twins probably have some idea how it is going to shake out. But there are so many moving pieces, it is hard to take an option off the table. And another example trade-wise, #74 pick Daniel Norris may not pan out as a long-term productive MLB player, but he was already used to acquire David Price at the deadline, pushing the Blue Jays to the postseason and deep into the ALCS that year. If the Jays had sold the pick in 2011, maybe they don't have the pieces to make that happen in 2015.
  3. Otto von Ballpark
    Good point. Looking strictly at #74 picks isn't quite right. It's not like there is a league-wide locked in ranking and we can only get the 74th ranked guy. We might get the guy ranked #40 on our board. The team picking at #100 might make the same selection at #74. (A minute of research shows Giancarlo Stanton was the #76 overall pick.) That's not to say it changes the calculus too much, but it's worth noting that while the average return on the #74 pick is fairly low, it is still an exclusive lotto ticket that we are forgoing for cash.
  4. Otto von Ballpark
    Last year, they were just overshadowed roundly by Bartolo Colon.
  5. Otto von Ballpark
    I think the implication is that this money isn't necessarily being cleared to be spent. Not that anyone is an idiot.
  6. Otto von Ballpark
    Twins had the 24th bonus pool before the trade, this moves them down to 26th. A bit behind our first round draft position of 20th. The Padres pool moved up from 8th to 7th, to match their first round position (7th).
  7. Otto von Ballpark
    It is a very interesting trade, I will give them that. The Padres were probably willing to commit the minimum salary for Hughes after we released him. That's ~$900k for the remainder of the deal (although obviously less if they release him earlier, which is pretty likely). The draft pick... from this article, maybe we can estimate it is worth $4-5 mil from a future WAR perspective: https://www.fangraphs.com/tht/the-net-value-of-draft-picks/ But it is one of only a handful of picks which can be traded, which would probably put a premium on it (if the Padres need an extra $800k for their bonus pool, there aren't many ways to acquire that). And of course its bonus slot could have been applied to another Twins selection too. Maybe the premium is an extra $1-2 mil? On the other side of the ledger, I don't know what value to assign to the catcher Villalobos. He's young enough to have a bit more potential than pure org filler, but not quite what anyone would call a prospect. Maybe $500k? So probably a fair trade on both sides, just by the numbers. Of course, it remains to be seen if both sides were right to move in these directions -- we'll see how their drafts play out, what the Twins do with the cash, and even what happens with Hughes and Villalobos.
  8. Otto von Ballpark
    How useful is that, though? You are talking 1 WAR or less type players. Ideally you should be paying less than $7 mil guaranteed for such players/performances anyway (the Rays got Morrison for an average of $3.35 mil per season, for example), much less giving away the #74 overall pick and its associated bonus pool allotment too. If we're planning on that kind of investment as a follow-up to this deal, that's not terribly encouraging. And if we're planning on making a run at, say, Machado -- well, $7 mil is just a drop in the bucket.
  9. Otto von Ballpark
    It will give us a spot for May or Ervin when they return. But that was accomplished as soon as we DFA'd Hughes -- in the context of freeing up the roster spot, it didn't really matter whether we traded him or released him, or how much money we ate.
  10. Otto von Ballpark
    I have zero positive professional experience too, but you wouldn't suggest I might have comparable value to one of the top college catchers in the nation, would you? Even if I had 230 PA of mediocre, OBP-heavy experience over 2 seasons at the lowest levels of rookie ball, and I was ticketed for rookie leagues again at age 21, I think the simplest explanation probably pegs me as a fairly minor piece of any trade I might be involved in.
  11. Otto von Ballpark
    An interesting way to look at trades is, how would I feel if the Twins were on the other side of this deal? Taking on a bad vet would suck, but hopefully we could talk him into minor league assignment first and cut him quickly if he fails to perform. But buying a draft pick might be seen as a good, aggressive move. Echoes of the Nolasco deal here too. Of course Nolasco had more value than Hughes at the time, but I always felt like that trade was mostly about the Angels "buying" Alex Meyer, which seemed like a good risk for them to take. I admit I was dismissive of Busenitz in that deal, and he looked like a diamond in the rough last year, but we've also seen how "AAAA reliever" is definitely a thing and maybe they're not so special. In any case, while Busenitz was a lightly regarded draft pick, by the time of the trade he was almost 26, pitching in AAA, and had already dominated AA. I can't imagine we could have anywhere near as close of confidence in Villalobos, at least not to assign him comparable value in this deal.
  12. Otto von Ballpark
    $1 mil in international cap space is HUGE, with the new hard cap. That's like 20% of the average total pool. Adding $1 mil basically makes you a favorite to land the top international free agents in any given year. (And it helped the Angels land Ohtani this year.)
  13. Otto von Ballpark
    I think you are reading way too much into Villalobos's limited stat line so far. He had a .437 OBP and 1.79 BB/K rate in 2016, but it was in 135 PA in the Dominican League, and with no power or average. Then he posted a .367 OBP in 2017, with an acceptable average and ISO, but in only 98 PA in the Arizona rookie league (and a rising K rate too -- his BB/K rate was down to 0.61). Those competition levels are so low, it is hard to know much -- Rosario and Danny Santana posted their career best BB% in rookie league seasons. And even if you think walk rates aren't affected much by competition levels, these are tiny samples. And Villalobos hasn't even played yet in 2018 -- he's apparently ticketed for rookie league again at age 21. It is a big stretch to say he is the equivalent of a #74 overall pick based on those numbers and that progression. Maybe the Twins found a diamond in the rough, but we can't really tell that from the stats at this point. He could just be org depth, or more favorably, still just a Willians Astudillo type of one-trick pony.
  14. Otto von Ballpark
    Per Cot's, the Twins only had $39 mil committed for 2019 anyway, even with Hughes. Obviously there are virtually guaranteed arb salaries to come, and probably Erv's option, but that does seem to dilute the value of saving $7 mil on Hughes next year. Put another way -- if we were only looking at $20 mil payroll room, saving an extra $7 mil would be a lot more important than if we already had $60 mil payroll room.
  15. Otto von Ballpark
    I would agree, but they really didn't get anything for Hughes. They essentially sold the #74 draft pick for $7.5 mil. Hughes's deal was just the currency used for payment. Seems like we fetched a decent price for that pick, but I don't know much about their relative value. And of course we don't yet know what the Twins are going to do with the money.
  16. Otto von Ballpark
    Not quite so simple. The Padres could use the pick's slot money to go over-slot on another pick. (The Twins could have done likewise, had they kept the pick.) Also, that dollars per WAR figure is an estimate, and it really varies by circumstance. For the Padres, or any rebuilding team, 1 WAR is worth a lot less than $8 mil. They just don't need marginal wins. For the Twins, a team that should be contending, we should rather have the 1 WAR than an extra $7-8 mil, could mean the difference between the 2nd wild card or staying home. That said, Hughes wasn't going to give us 1 WAR this year, and neither was the draft pick -- but if the pick was worth $7 mil, maybe we could have traded it for something other than salary relief? Especially since technically the Hughes salary relief isn't until 2019. If the Twins are sticklers about year-to-year budgets, $7 mil would be a lot more useful for the 2018 team than for the 2019 team (which already had a lot of free payroll space).
  17. Otto von Ballpark
    The catcher Villalobos was almost 19 when he signed with the Padres, presumably for a negligible bonus (can't find it reported anywhere). Combined with his pedestrian numbers/advancement, he feels more like org depth than a real prospect.
  18. Otto von Ballpark
    The Twins also lose .812 million they could have allocated to another selection. Also, they didn't need to trade the pick to save the bonus money --they could have drafted someone who would sign for a much lower bonus.
  19. Otto von Ballpark
    We could effectively extend his rehab by optioning him for less than 20 days. That could preserve the option possibility for 2019.
  20. Otto von Ballpark
    Tom Froemming mentioned upthread that May has reconsidered that position, and thinks the back issues were caused by something else.
  21. Otto von Ballpark
    Actually May is on an arbitration deal now. So I think he gets the same salary, regardless of whether he is in MLB or in AAA. I'm sure May would rather be in MLB immediately, but if the 2018 salary is the same either way, burning that final option before 2019 might be a silver lining. If he were to return to Minnesota for August and September, he'd still probably pass the 4 year service time threshold by the end of this season.
  22. Otto von Ballpark
    Hughes missed the first half of 2011 with shoulder issues, so it's not even clear they would have been able to get a policy to cover that in the first place. I suspect it would have been reported over the past few years if it was applicable (I remember media reports when Joe Nathan's contract insurance kicked in, as well as Ricky Nolasco's).
  23. Otto von Ballpark
    I don't think the Twins were that fixated on an "ace", though -- they just needed competent SP. Essentially the same brain trust that extended Hughes also traded Johan for Gomez when we were contenders (and Garza for Young, when Garza still had some ace potential), and didn't extend Liriano after his ace-lite season in 2010 when we were also contenders and he had only 2 years control left. I suspect Hughes was a lot like Perkins in that he was willing to sign deals forgoing top-end cash to stay here, and the Twins couldn't help themselves. Not that they were bad deals, as I have said. But they seemed to be driven as much by personality as by projections or planning.
  24. Otto von Ballpark
    My guess is that explanation is a bit of CYA (and that stands for "covering your" something, not Cy Young Award ). The broadcast crews have a ton of cameras, I doubt the replay office has meaningfully more/better ones. Although syncing multiple cameras is interesting, I wish they would do it more often on the broadcasts. (Originally they couldn't even do it at the replay office, so they didn't allow challenges on tag-up plays, but that has changed and they are now allowed.)
  25. Otto von Ballpark
    But there was no requirement to sign him to a long term deal. If he repeats it, we are getting an incredible performance boost as we move back into contention and an increasingly rare comp pick, with the fallback options of trading him for a haul. Frankly I don't even think the Twins pegged the odds of him repeating that performance as very high. I think they were looking to lock in a competent long-term SP replacement for the bust Nolasco, but there are better ways to accomplish that than tear up a 2/16 deal for a 5/58 one.
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