Otto von Ballpark

The only Twins argument against the Nolasco-Shields trade is, we don't need another starter. I can understand that, although I think there is enough uncertainty with our other starters and in our bullpen (and potentially beneficial trade possibilities with our other starters) that I would respectfully disagree. The main Twins argument for a Nolasco-Shields swap is that it is looking increasingly likely we will get nothing for the remaining $25 mil on Nolasco's contract. Having the opportunity to put it toward an asset like Shields at a discount is better than nothing, even if that asset is not at our position of maximum need.

In addition to the career numbers posted above, in his down year last year, Shields still topped 200 innings at league-average SP run prevention. Meanwhile, Nolasco failed to reach 200 innings total across his 2 Twins seasons so far, with a 70 ERA+, at ~25% below league-average SP run prevention. He's barely pitched at all coming off of midseason surgery and is only a year younger than Shields. Shields ain't Nolasco.

Ken Giles just turned 25 years old and has 5 seasons of team control remaining, including the next 2 at league minimum salaries before 3 years of arbitration. The Twins never had a chance to trade Perkins with those supporting factors. By the time Perkins had a MLB relief resume even close to that of Giles, he was almost 30 with only 2 seasons of team control left at arbitration (or arb buyout) salaries. Buying him out and extending him with a hometown discount was a fine approach to take, given the situation. You weren't going to get a haul of 4 prospects like this.

Obviously we all want a better bullpen in the end, but we're here to discuss the process, no? At the moment, "Perkins, Jepsen, May, Meyer and Burdi" or some variation is basically our only path to a good bullpen in 2016, and it's a path that was largely employed and failed to produce a good bullpen in 2015. (Even at the end of the season, with Jepsen in tow, we struggled with May's availability and Perkins' effectiveness. Meyer wasn't even called up as a September option, and Burdi took a whole season apparently just to figure out AA. It might work out in 2016, but probably not from Day 1, and 3/18 or whatever is a pretty cheap way to give us additional potential paths to a good pen.)

Actually, closers in total are probably similarly "unpredictable." Sure, there are guys like prime Nathan, Chapman, Rivera, etc., and setup guys who are that good tend to get promoted to closer pretty quickly, but there are also plenty like Matt Capps or worse around the league at any given time. A guy like Sipp may not be entirely predictable, but that's already reflected in his likely modest 3/18 cost. He's still got better trends, chances of success, and upside than most other guys. Saying "eh, they're all unpredictable" and waiting for guys to fall into your lap cheaply is how you wind up with bullpens like the 2011-2015 Twins. I've been looking for a signal change that we're going to finally take a different approach with the pen, and unfortunately I haven't seen it yet this winter, despite a seemingly pretty good crop of FA relievers. Also, before his injuries, Ryan Madson had a 4-year run of 143 ERA+ as a setup man (plus an even better year once promoted to closer). 2015 alone didn't get him that contract, it just gave teams confidence that his health was back and that he had learned how to achieve similar effectiveness despite perhaps diminished/restricted abilities.

Guerrier was claimed off waivers at age 25, Burton has a career minor league K/9 of 8.7 with a full MLB season of 8.9 who had missed some time due to injury, and Fien too had a career minor league K/9 of 8.9 but hadn't gotten an extended look in the majors. Good signings all -- but that's 3 guys in 12 years. What are the odds the Twins add one for 2016? Have the Twins signed any guys with that kind of potential this winter? I've seen Dan Runzler's name mentioned a lot, although probably out of proportion with his chance, as he's almost 31, even older than Burton was when we signed him, and has never even thrown a pitch in MLB (or arguably many good pitches at AAA -- career 5.78 runs and 6.1 walks allowed per 9 innings there). I'm not so worried about missing specific names, but I will say the group of relievers that has already signed or been traded looks a lot better than the group of guys remaining. I'm much less confident in our chances of achieving a significant offseason bullpen makeover than I was a month ago.

The Twins clearly need outside help in the bullpen, and Sipp has been a free agent since, what, a few days after the World Series? It's on us to figure out if he's willing to sign here early, and if he's waiting out the market, maybe trying to land back in Houston, we've got to have other plans to deliver results. And these relievers may be getting a little more money than expected, but hardly enough that you should be focused on acquiring one and only one. I'm willing to hold off my final judgement right now, but I think it's fair to say I don't like the offseason plan to improve the bullpen so far. The longer we wait, the greater the risk we wind up shut out of real upgrades and basically repeating our weak bullpen plans of the last few seasons.

Terry Ryan's press conference, live from the winter meetings

I suspect the Nov. 20 deadline is just for protecting the players in your own organization as of Nov. 20, and you are still free to protect other players you acquire by trade or free agency after that date. Probably doesn't come up too often anyway, as Rule 5 eligible players generally don't have much trade value regardless of date.

The Padres did run him through waivers in August, but August waivers generally aren't a great barometer of value. I agree it's probably less than 3/65 but still fairly close. Lackey got 2/32 but he's 3 years older, and it also cost the Cubs a draft pick. I might peg Shields around 3/50.

Qualls got $6 mil total over 2 years. $3 mil per year. The market has not gone that crazy!

I think you can make the argument that while you have a cheap internal guy who could throw 200 innings, you might be better off using him for that and sign a free agent to throw the 60 innings of dominance. You could be O'Day and Madson for the price of Ervin Santana, for example. Although we do have a lot of starters right now, and our bullpen could probably use May AND free agent reinforcements, so I don't mind it. I do worry that May had back issues and limited availability after his move to the pen, though, which makes it harder to strategically place those innings.

I don't think anyone is suggesting this. Is signing Shields to a 3/40 contract (his deal, minus Nolasco's) supposed to be the equivalent of giving up our first born child? Or signing Melvin Upton to a 2 year, $7 mil deal? Of course, I agree that his value is at rock bottom, and that's why the above swaps being discussed here won't happen, but neither would be a great sacrifice of assets. (Although the longer you keep a guy with rock-bottom value, the more negative value he can accumulate -- think why the Cubs released Edwin Jackson. That point in Nolasco's contract would be this July, which seems about right for his remaining leash.)

Unfortunately, that's not really an option. Nolasco can refuse any minor league assignment, which would have the same effect as releasing him (you'd owe him the balance of his contract, and he'd immediately become a free agent).

Here's an interesting article about the value of David Price's opt out: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-value-of-the-opt-out-clause-in-the-david-price-contract/ They conclude that the opt-out probably discounted the contract $10-13 million for the team. Of course, that deal is about twice the length and 3 times the money of Shields', so what's the value of Shields' opt out? Maybe $4 mil? If it was a concern, you could probably buy it out from him for that price. Would another $4 mil make a big difference in analyzing a hypothetical Nolasco-for-Shields swap?

Again, no, there isn't. Not a significant one relative to the other considerations of the deal (namely, unloading Nolasco). Imagine if Nolasco had an opt-out in his Twins deal, would that have been a significant cap on the size of the upside? No, not significantly so, because we didn't sign him to that contract with the expectation that he'd perform at a level that would cause him to opt out, and pitchers with similar expectations to Nolasco could be had for similar commitments in free agency if we so desired (Garza, Santana, etc.). Even if he opted out, Nolasco would be fulfilling (or more than fulfilling) all the reasonable expectations of his contract. In absolute terms, Shields has a better expectation today than Nolasco two years ago, but he is also older and has a higher salary and therefore a higher threshold to clear before the opt out even becomes an issue, so I think it's a valid illustration. Shields still wouldn't be acquired with an expectation of being a $21 mil a year pitcher, just a better asset going forward than Nolasco, and if he opts out when we still need/want him, we can find pitchers with similar expectations for similar commitments in free agency (Lackey, Iwakuma, etc.). Even if Shields opted out, he would be fulfilling (or more than fulfilling) all the reasonable expectations of his acquisition (primarily to make lemonade out of the lemon Nolasco ). At this point, given his age and our full rotation, the opt out might actually be a feature for the Twins rather than a bug. He offers more certainty and better upside than Nolasco for 2016, which is nice, but no level of Shields performance in 2016 would probably cause us to "need" him or need any particular level of performance from him for 2017-2018, which dramatically reduces the potential negative effect of him opting out (or failing to perform at the elite level that would prompt the opt out). The opt out becomes problematic for a team when expectations are higher, time periods are longer, and they will likely want to retain a hard-to-replace player, like Greinke. Is this clear? I hope it is. I totally understand your point about opt-outs in general, like that of Greinke, but that is a vastly different situation than Shields. Especially if we're talking about flipping him and Nolasco. (As strange and unpredictable as I have found the Padres front office lately, I absolutely guarantee they would laugh at a proposed Nolasco-for-Shields straight-up swap, which should be an indication that such a move would dramatically favor the Twins.)

Depending on how you set it up, it may not be much of a concession to the players at all. But it would be a massive change from the current system, so I don't think it has any chance of happening. Will be interesting to see where the MLBPA pushes this grievance, though.

Sorry, your post specifically said "Milone in MLB" so I didn't realize this was predicated on removing him from the rotation. Although I probably would have used Rogers for MLB relief help down the stretch in 2015, I don't mind keeping him starting now if it means we get a real quality FA reliever like Sipp. If we aim no higher than Cotts, though? Then Rogers should get a look in relief from day 1.

Every contract has the risk of X number of bad years, in an absolute sense. The Shields contract was not probably not signed, and certainly wouldn't be acquired now, with an expectation for X number of elite seasons either. He's not Greinke. Heck, at this point, there probably isn't an expectation for ANY elite seasons from Shields over the next 3. (Not that Shields needs elite seasons to be useful.) So saying a team can't possibly get X number of elite seasons from this contract, while true in an absolute sense with the opt-out, isn't really a concern. Is this just a generic opt-out argument, or does this actually affect your opinion of a hypothetical Nolasco-for-Shields swap?

Care to respond to the rest of my post? Specifically, why you believe it is more important to have multiple LH starting pitchers rather than multiple LH relief pitchers? Given fixed starter usage patterns and flexible reliever deployment, that seems very counter-intuitive.

To what degree? They could be more unpredictable relative to other positions (possibly based on sample size, as relievers have limited usage), but still not be so unpredictable in absolute terms as to warrant a ban on multi-year contracts (a position which Seth himself seems to be backing down from). If you have any links you'd like to share about it, I'd love to read them. All I've seen so far is this study, and the Dave Cameron one it was based on, both of which were pretty limited and flawed: http://twinsdaily.com/topic/20731-article-gambling-on-the-relief-market-simply-folly/ Overall, Twins bullpens over the past 4-5 years have turned in entirely predictable performances, so there's that. I'd love to add an "unpredictable" reliever like Tony Sipp, Darren O'Day, etc. for a change.

I think it's a lot more important to have multiple LH relievers (for match ups) than multiple LH starters. You can't deploy starting pitchers based on match ups, but you can with relievers, multiple times every game. Also, for the record, Pat Dean is also a LH SP on the 40-man roster, and Logan Darnell was a longtime starter who returned to the role in August. Jason Wheeler still exists too.

The proposals I have seen would be based on when they sign, not age. So if a Dominican prospect signs at 16, he would be controlled through, say, 26, while a college player who signs at age 22 might be controlled through age 29. (Don't pick on my numbers, I just made them up here, feel free to adjust ages/years as you see fit, just trying to communicate the general concept.) And an indy ball free agent signing at age 28, maybe he gets controlled through age 30 or something -- enough to encourage teams to sign him, but also short enough that he can work toward free agency at a reasonable age.

What if Bryant was a 3rd round draft pick? No millionaire then. (Heck, second rounders probably don't clear a million after taxes either.) Or maybe outside the top 10 international bonus slots? No millionaire then either. I'd like to see minor leaguers see an across the board boost in pay and benefits, but that doesn't mean I can't also want the MLB system tweaked to encourage promotions based on merit too.

Most HS pitchers aren't taken 4th overall either. Every amateur ballplayer is a bit of a project, teams often rank them on the odds they won't be as much of a project, because that has real value. Stewart wasn't drafted 4th overall with the expectation that his first 2.5 pro seasons would look like they have. He's not yet a bust, of course, and he could certainly turn things around and will have many more opportunities to do so, but I don't think it's accurate to imply his development is exactly where everyone expected it to be right now.