Brandon Warne

Pitchers and catchers report for the Minnesota Twins in less than a week, yet the pile of free agents looks as picked over as a Thanksgiving buffet after the first pass. In short, there are plenty of leftovers — and primo ones, at that. The Twins have already signed four pitchers to MLB deals, but could still stand to stock up on the remaining goods — all of which are likely to come at a lower price than when the winter started. It also isn’t a perfect roster for the Twins at this point. Sure, it’s a perfectly decent one that prior to the Ervin Santana injury was very similar to the one that won 85 games last year, but there are numerous avenues the team could take to shore up depth across the board. Let us take you down that road. Insurance for the Miguel Sano situation If it wasn’t enough that Sano was sidelined with a stress reaction in his left shin down the stretch last year, the threat of the third baseman missing games from a possible suspension due to sexual assault accusations throws another wrinkle into the situation as well. While Sano has been working out in Fort Myers to get ready for the season for most of the winter, there’s still no guarantee he’ll be 100 percent to start the season, and manager Paul Molitor told MLB.com’s Rhett Bollinger in late December that it’s a stretch to believe Sano will play 150 games at the position in 2018. Now with that said, 150 games is a huge bar to clear, and those comments were made the day before the allegations came out. Now it’s a virtual certainty Sano won’t come anywhere close to those numbers for one reason or another, and to that end, it makes sense for the Twins to pick up the pieces in free agency and get some insurance. Eduardo Escobar did a fairly good job replacing Sano down the stretch, hitting .252/.298/.529 with 10 of his 21 homers coming in that 39-game stretch. But expecting anything like that again — or Escobar to be able to outrun a .298 OBP for a long stretch — is a fool’s errand. Escobar is a terrific utility infielder and occasional starter, but there’s a chance for the Twins to make a move here to shore up the infield, and in the meantime make sure there’s as little of a dropoff as possible from Sano. That means signing Eduardo Nunez. The last time Twins fans saw Nunez, he was the team’s only All-Star just before being traded to the San Francisco Giants. The last time the rest of the baseball world saw him, he was being carried off the field in the playoffs after suffering a flare-up to a previous injury to his right knee. He did not need surgery in the offseason, and has since been working out for teams in hopes of signing a new deal. If he’s willing to sign a two-year deal for something like $15 million, the Twins should run, not walk, to him to get it done. He’s great insurance for Sano at third base — not only to start the season, but all year — and gives the team added depth across the infield. That would be very valuable for a team that, in this case, would be leaning heavily on Robbie Grossman at designated hitter. In that case, days where Nunez spells guys like Brian Dozier means the latter could slide into the DH role. Nunez hit a solid .313/.341/.460 between the Giants and Red Sox last year (2.2 fWAR) which is pretty much in line with what he was doing for the Twins in 2016 with a bit more power. He frankly should be starting someplace, but as a utility player starting anywhere from 3-to-5 times per week would be an absolute luxury. This makes too much sense not to be seriously considered. Signing someone to get significant DH at-bats If Thad Levine and Derek Falvey don’t want to go down the Nunez path, there are still plenty of hitters available who can help the team at DH in a fairly regular role. If the Twins prefer to have Grossman in more of a fourth outfielder role while cycling through some at-bats at DH, there is no shortage of options on the market right now who can give the team added thump. The two guys who jump off the page — for different reasons — are Lucas Duda and Logan Morrison. Duda is terrible defensively and can’t hit left-handed pitching, but he absolutely mauls righties. He’s coming off hitting just .217/.322/.496 with the Mets and Rays last year — including fading hard with Tampa (.306 wOBA) — but the power makes up for the low batting average and OBP for the most part, and again, he crushes righties. Duda is a career .249/.356/.486 hitter against righties, and will come extremely cheaply on just a one-year deal most likely. Morrison’s track record is a bit more spotty and he was once the purveyor of a strange Twitter account, but he absolutely crushed for the Rays last year. Morrison hit .246/.353/.516 with 38 homers as he went from a groundball-hitting machine with low strikeout rates and average walk numbers to a fly-ball fiend with more walks, more strikeouts and a heck of a lot more power. What he did was almost identical to Yonder Alonso, who scored a two-year deal at just under $20 million from the Indians. At this point, it doesn’t seem like Morrison will even get that — and he could be a good pickup for the Twins to DH, play some first base and give them insurance after Joe Mauer’s deal expires and before Brent Rooker makes it to the big leagues. Either one of these guys would help the Twins immensely at DH, but another plan could be in the works as well, and….. …this includes perhaps looking at some cheaper right-handed bats, too The prevailing theme from last year was that the Twins did not hit left-handed pitching very well, though they got markedly better as the season went on. By the end of the year, the Twins hit .260/.332/.412 against southpaws for a 96 wRC+ — the 13th-best mark in baseball. In other words, they were about in the middle of the pack, and are bringing back almost exactly the same offense. But there’s certainly room for improvement. The offense will again be pretty lefty-heavy, so adding a right-handed bat — preferably cheap or on a short-term deal — again makes sense. J.D. Martinez can help literally anyone, but we’re not looking that direction at this point. Nor does it really seem like Jose Bautista is a fit — Target Field numbers be damned. Keep in mind that if he did sign with the team, he wouldn’t be feasting on Twins pitching like he did with the Blue Jays. Anyway, the two guys who make some sense who can be had for almost nothing are Mark Reynolds and Mike Napoli. Reynolds hit a ridiculous .267/.352/.487 with the Rockies last year, but that comes out to just a 104 wRC+ due to park factors and that sort of thing. In other words, he hit 30 homers but it wasn’t all that impressive because of the offensive environment he played in. Still, for a couple million bucks he could pop a few homers and see time at first base and DH. Napoli is regarded as solid in the clubhouse — nobody would know this more than Levine — and while he hit just .193/.285/.428 last year with the Rangers, he still provided some (though still not much) value against lefties. He battled some nagging injuries last year, and between the price, fit and a few other factors, it almost seems like a foregone conclusion that Napoli will garner strong consideration from the Twins. Then again, it felt that way last year and he picked the Rangers — a better team at the time that still finished seven games worse in the standings. Additionally, Jayson Werth is no spring chicken and hasn’t put together a good season in what feels like forever, but he can still hit lefties and might be worth a look on a minor-league deal with an eye on the Michael Pineda 40-man spot when the season starts. Higher up on the totem pole would be Matt Holliday, who almost makes too much sense. He’s going into his age-38 season, probably can’t play every day anyway and hit .267/.366/.477 against lefties last year. I believe he’s regarded as a really strong clubhouse presence as well — like Napoli. Please click through to read the rest of this article on Zone Coverage here!

This is an excerpt. Please read the full article on Zone Coverage here. Last week prior to the beginning of Twins Fest at Target Field, former Twins first baseman Justin Morneau formally announced his retirement. Morneau, who didn’t play anywhere in 2017, said it’s kind of funny, but the game oftentimes tells you when it’s time to be finished. And ironically, he took his final at-bat in a Chicago White Sox uniform at Target Field on Oct. 2, 2016. Now, he’s back in the Twins family, as he not only announced his retirement, but that he was joining the Twins a special assistant in the baseball operations department. Morneau will be involved with the power trio of Michael Cuddyer, Torii Hunter and LaTroy Hawkins in spring training, instructional programs and visiting minor-league affiliates and will also help develop the culture within the organization moving forward. He will also be a part of the amateur draft process and also be a resource for player acquisition. “I think I can speak for the Morneau family as well as the Twins family that we also appreciate the opportunity to celebrate a glorious playing career,” said team president Dave St. Peter. “But in addition to that, we’re celebrating a return for Justin, (his wife) Krista and the entire family back into the Twins family as we move forward. “Justin Morneau is one of the most significant players in the history of this franchise,” St. Peter concluded. Morneau began his remarks by saying that when he was at Joe Nathan’s retirement presser last summer, he told himself he was never ever going to do that. “I’m never going to go sit up there and talk about myself,” he said. “It’s just something I don’t want to do.” Yet there Morneau was, in the Kirby Puckett atrium in the Legend’s Club bidding baseball adieu and re-introducing himself to the Twins. Morneau spoke for about a half hour, and for the most part was his typical stoic self. He appeared a bit emotional at times — especially when talking about what the game meant to him, and his family and also about his return from the concussion that waylaid his career in 2010 — but he also kept it light by recounting a story where he brought his daughter to school that morning. “I was driving my daughter to school this morning and I said “You know, can you tell me any of the lessons I’ve taught you?”” he said. “One of the important things to me is being humble. You need to be humble. It’s very important. People don’t want to listen to you talk about yourself. If you’re good, people will notice. If you’re doing things the right way, people will notice.” “And I looked in the mirror,” he continued, “and I could see her sitting in the middle of the back seat. I said, “Do you understand what I’m saying?”” “I wasn’t listening to you,” his daughter said, which elicited some chuckles from the assembled media, friends and family in attendance. Another hearty laugh was emitted by the crowd when team owner Jim Pohlad took the opportunity to ask Justin a question. Earlier in the press conference, Morneau recounted how he’d learned to hit by playing baseball in the yard, with a deck and trees used as natural barriers for homers, ground-rule doubles and that sort of thing. “Justin, congratulations. I know I said that and I know you take it as a mixed message, but I think you for your words and I know it came from the heart,” Pohlad said. “And I want to thank you and Krista for making such a commitment to Minnesota, beyond just the Minnesota Twins. I know your home is here and you’ve meant a lot to the community. I did, however, learn one interesting thing, and I have a question about that. “What I was interested to learn was that during your wiffleball days was that you learned how to hit with green trees as your backdrop….” Pohlad said as the room busted up with laughter over the reported story that Morneau, among others, wanted the trees removed from the center field berm at Target Field after 2010 because it made for a bad batter’s eye view. “I’ll accept the deferral to Joe (Mauer) on that one, if you want,” Pohlad said with a light-hearted laugh. “I don’t know what to say about that,” Morneau deadpanned as the room cracked up. “We won 98 games that year too, or something like that?” “Best record and home record in the American League,” St. Peter chimed in. “There’s just some things you can’t get away from,” Morneau said with a smile. Also in attendance for the conference were former Wild player Mark Parrish, former teammate Joe Mauer and former teammate and fellow countryman Corey Koskie, who took the microphone near the end of the question-and-answer period and dropped some interesting tidbits about Morneau. “I want to make sure everyone hears this,” Koskie said as the attention shifted to the right side of the room. “I knew Justin when he got drafted. Justin came across as a skinny little Canadian kid when he came out from British Columbia. Like I say, he was a wanna-be hockey player that ended up falling upon baseball. But when Justin talked about his character, I saw Justin evolve as a human being through the course of his time with the Twins.

As far as we can tell, history was made on Saturday as the Minnesota Twins agreed to sign right-handed reliever Addison Reed to a two-year deal. Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic had the first report, and as far as the crack research team of yours truly and Mike Berardino of the St. Paul Pioneer Press can tell, it’s the first-ever contract multi-year deal the team has ever handed out to a free-agent reliever. It’s the third addition the Twins have made to their bullpen this offseason after right-hander Fernando Rodney and lefty Zach Duke, but it’s certainly the most substantial. While Rodney is expected to open the season as the closer, Reed has ample experience in the role — 125 career saves, three years with at least 25 — and is coming off closing 19 games for the New York Mets before being traded to help the Boston Red Sox for the stretch run. Consistency hasn’t really been the name of the game for Reed, who came up as a very well-regarded relief prospect in the White Sox system — seriously, Baseball America, MLB.com and Baseball Prospectus all had him as a top-100 guy, which is almost unheard of for a pitcher with no chance of working as a starter — before being traded to Arizona for third baseman Matt Davidson, who at the time was a good prospect. Reed’s thrown just over 400 innings in his career, and the numbers are really, really good: 3.40 ERA (3.18 FIP), 9.5 K/9, 2.3 BB/9, 0.94 HR/9 and a WHIP of 1.16. But as previously noted, there isn’t a ton of consistency with Reed — and maybe this is just a reliever thing — but these are his year-to-year ERA marks since debuting: 2011 – 3.68 (just 7.1 innings) 2012 – 4.75 2013 – 3.79 2014 – 4.25 2015 – 3.38 2016 – 1.97 2017 – 2.84 It’s not just ERA that jumps up and down for Reed, who turned 27 just two days after Christmas. His FIP has jumped year-to-year as well — though for his career (3.18) is lower than his ERA — and he’s vacillated at times between being a fly ball pitcher and a groundball pitcher. What has also vacillated — and somewhat correlated — with his change in grounder reliance is that he runs the gamut as far as being home-run prone. Last year he allowed 1.3 homers per nine innings, which was on the high side. The AL average last year was 1.31, but not surprisingly, relievers were quite a bit lower (1.17) than starters (1.4). Please click through to Zone Coverage here to read the entire story.

I'd be OK with 5/125 with a $30 million option for year six that vests at 350 innings over the final two years.

It's going to take at least 5/$125

Yes. Jay is a reliever, Granite is a fourth outfielder and Gordon seems less likely than not stick at short.

Literally nobody else had it. It was unsubstantiated. Just like this Thrylos "report"

That's definitely a blog.

The tweet that "reported" it was deleted.

This was not reported. It was an unsubstantiated rumor.

TF is this tweet?

This is a series of evaluations that will be done this offseason on every player that closed the season on the 40-man roster for the Minnesota Twins throughout the winter until each player has been evaluated. The plan is to start with Mr. Belisle and move all the way through the pitchers, then to the catchers, infielders, outfielders and finally those listed as designated hitters on the club’s official MLB.com roster. That means we’ll wrap it up with Kennys Vargas sometime before the season starts. Name: Alan Busenitz 2017 Role: Flame-throwing righty who earned Paul Molitor’s trust, and later-inning work, as the season went on. Expected 2018 Role: Role will depend on how many bats he misses; could be a setup man or could just be another guy. MLB Stats: 1.99 ERA, 4.20 FIP in 31.2 innings; 6.5 K/9, 2.6 BB/9, 0.98 WHIP, 0.1 fWAR, 0.7 bWAR. MiLB Stats: 1.78 ERA, 2.15 FIP in 35.1 innings at Triple-A Rochester Contract Status: Arbitration-eligible after 2020, free agent after 2023 2017 Lowdown: Busenitz came on the scene with the Twins as the lesser-known commodity in the deal that sent Ricky Nolasco and Alex Meyer to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and returned Hector Santiago. To that point, Busenitz was a hard-throwing 26-year-old righty with no big-league experience, though he got a late start as a college draft pick (senior sign) from Kennesaw State University. Not only that, but he played five years of college baseball, which is exceptionally rare. He spent two years at Georgia Perimeter College, then three with the Owls because his 2012 season was abbreviated by Tommy John surgery. Still, he’s a pretty great story. In his first year at Georgia Perimeter, he had a 4.37 ERA and a WHIP of 1.54. In his first two seasons at Kennesaw State — before getting hurt — he had a combined ERA that was close to 7.00 and a WHIP of nearly 2.00. But Busenitz made his way up the Angels system, pitching in relief for all but eight games in a brief stop at Double-A Arkansas — and not a good one, as he posted a 6.75 ERA. Even his minors numbers at most stops aren’t exceptionally strong. He blitzed the low minors like most 20-somethings should, but that first snag at Double-A Arkansas wasn’t that long ago (2015). He barely pitched at Triple-A in 2016 in the Angels system, and it went poorly to say the least. He allowed 11 earned runs in 13 innings (7.62 ERA) while opposing batters hit .308/.383/.462 against him. It’s not surprising he lasted just a month and a day before he was shipped to Double-A — though it was in Chattanooga, as he was then traded to the Twins. Like he has with pretty much every challenge in his career, Busenitz thrived in his second go-round at Triple-A, twirling a 1.78 ERA over 35.1 innings before the Twins gave him his first MLB call. He certainly didn’t disappoint with the Twins, either, posting a 1.99 ERA over 28 appearances spanning 31.2 innings. Now it’d be easy to point out that Busenitz had a FIP of 4.20, thanks in large part to an unsustainably low BABIP (.212) and a high strand rate (86.6 percent), and he also didn’t do much strikeouts-wise with his blazing fastball, fanning just 6.5 batters per nine despite averaging 95.7 mph on the heater. Please click through to Zone Coverage here to read the rest of this story!

? Todd Frazier is a pretty good player.

I'll add this just so I can stop posting and wasting all your time: Back when things were rolling (2010), this was a way more inclusive community all the way to the top. Now I think it's become a very closed society. Disagree if you want.

I also think people flock to "takes" rather than thought out, reasonable articles. I think that's bullsh*t, but I'm not going to change.

I say it completely tongue in cheek, but find a time machine to go back to 2010. For whatever reason -- I mean, other than the team being really bad for a long time -- but I feel like the community was on fire back then, and is just dead now. There's no interaction on twitter during games, clicks on articles are low. I don't know. I just feel like when Target Field opened, this community was amazing. Now that the team is good again.....I'm not feeling it.

Why? Johan Santana was the best pitcher in the AL for quite a while with the changeup as his best pitch.

He's worth around that either way, but getting two pitchers for the price of one can not be overstated. I don't care much about lefty-righty because LoMo will be quite a bit cheaper, but Santana should be the preferred option.

The hot stove has remained tepid to this point, and while that has been cause for a bit of antsiness among fans and people who care about this news, it also allows us to do what teams are doing with these players — dig in a bit deeper. So today, we’re taking a look at the power rankings of the players who offer the best fits for the Twins as free agents this offseason with all avenues considered. 1. Shohei Ohtani – RHP/LHH – Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters Because of the cost-to-potential ratio here, Ohtani is No. 1 on every team’s ranking by default. He may be a $200 million talent when all is considered, but will sign for less than $3 million while raking in endorsement money to make up some of the difference in the meantime. He didn’t pitch much last year due to ankle and thigh issues, but offers a blistering fastball in the upper 90s with a good split/slider combo. There’s no way to handicap the race at this point, but every team should throw a dart in his direction. For the Twins, he’d start out as the No. 3 but likely ascend to No. 1 in very little time. 2. Yu Darvish – RHP – Los Angeles Dodgers He’s the consensus best starter on the market, and might have more potential than one might think at age 31. He has a diverse repertoire with improving command, and a lot of his issues seem to center around whispers that he tips his pitches. He’s pitched far more like a really great No. 2 than someone who should be paid like a Clayton Kershaw or Max Scherzer, but as far as aces on this market, Darvish is atop the list. Prepare to approach $30 million per year, however. 3. Carlos Santana – 1B/DH – Cleveland Indians Santana is the safest impact bat in the market, and will command far less than guys like Eric Hosmer and J.D. Martinez because his skill set is predicated on his eye at the plate rather than sexier skills such as power. That eye at the plate is what keeps his value afloat even when he doesn’t have his power game working, as was true in 2015 when he hit just .231/.357/.395. Even still, his OPS+ was 102 and wRC+ 107. He’s considered a capable defender at first base, and can mix-and-match there with Joe Mauer as the latter enters the final year of his deal. Santana would be an ideal fit atop the Twins order — and any order, really — to move Brian Dozier down into a better spot for run production. This move would vault the Twins into the conversation of best AL offense behind the Houston Astros. 4. Jake Arrieta – SP – Chicago Cubs The luster is clearly fading on the 2015 NL Cy Young winner, but even at his low points — as a Cub, that is — he’s a very good and valuable starter. Two years ago he’d have been primed to earn $25 million-plus per year in a contract, and the fact is he probably hasn’t taken that much of a hit even with consecutive years of decline. He turns 32 in March, so there’s still a legit chance he’s got plenty of bullets left, and he’s only thrown 1,161 MLB innings. By comparison, Johnny Cueto — who is almost a month older than Arrieta — has thrown more than 600 more innings. If he signs for $20 million per year, that’s a solid deal. Truthfully, he’ll probably get more than that. 5. Logan Morrison – 1B – Tampa Bay Rays Morrison gets a boost because there’s no qualifying offer tied to him, and he was truly terrific this past season for the Rays. LoMo hit .245/.353/.516 with 38 homers, set a career-high with a 13.5 percent walk rate and successfully traded a few more strikeouts for a big jump in homers. The story is that he nuked his groundball/flyball ratio, scoring the dirt for the sky and never looking back. He may well sign for three years and $30 million and provide more value than Eric Hosmer over that duration. See players 6-12 on ZoneCoverage.com here!

I would have it in the toolbox, but not make it a focal point.

Bunting is almost always a negative play. It doesn't hurt to know how, but I don't want to see teams do it more.

Read this story in full on Zone Coverage here. It’s a play as old as the game itself, and maybe that’s because the DH didn’t always exist. It’s the bunt, a time-honored tradition that is being phased out of the game more and more every year. Fangraphs has sacrifice bunt totals dating back to 1895, and according to their database, the 925 sacrifice bunts laid down by teams in 2017 was the second-lowest figure in MLB history. Only the 1900 season (806 bunts) featured fewer, and there were only eight teams back then. So yeah, the bunt is dying a slow death. At a glance, the Twins were in the middle of the pack as far as bunts were concerned, checking in 17th among 30 MLB teams with 26 sacrifices in 2017. That’s a deceptive number, though; flip the dial to only AL teams, and only two teams -- the White Sox and Rangers -- bunted more often than the Twins. That’s more problematic. Subtracting NL teams -- yay, pitchers hitting! -- from that figure shows how much more the Twins were devoted to bunting than their junior circuit contemporaries. To frame up how different the game is bunts-wise, consider this: Twins bunts as a percentage of MLB on the whole: 2.8 percent (one team = 3.3 percent of MLB) Twins bunts as a percentage of AL on the whole: 9.6 percent (one team = 6.7 percent of AL) As you can see, bunting is severely shifted toward the NL, and the Twins are well above the average mark of their AL contemporaries. The White Sox offense was absolutely dreadful in 2017, scoring 109 fewer runs than the Twins while the team lost more games than every team in the AL but the Detroit Tigers. The Rangers were in the thick of the race for much of the season despite Adrian Beltre missing time due to injury and a patchwork rotation, and scored just 16 fewer runs than the Twins while winning 78 games to Minnesota’s 85. So maybe everything said in this space will also apply to the Rangers -- we’ll see. Here’s one thing that stands out, and it is glaring: no team bunted more than the Twins did with their No. 3 hitters. In fact, according to Baseball Reference, the Twins bunted five times with their third hitter. The rest of the league combined bunted six times with their No. 3 guy -- and no team did so more than once. And according to Parker Hageman of Twins Daily, none of those bunts led to runs. Blech. So what’s the big deal? It’s just giving up an out to move up a base. Doesn’t it make it more likely the team scores a run? Doesn’t it lead to more scoring? Aren’t those basically asking the same question?

They were four games under .500 and had to play at a nearly 100-win pace to get to the postseason. Full stop.

He deleted all of it and blocked everyone involved. That part seems to have stemmed from a racist tweet about not signing Otani.

It’s not often that I allow someone in my mentions to get me so wound up that I devote an entire, stand-alone article to a single person, but here we are. The tweet in question — feel free to click and read the mind-bending thread in all its glory — appears as follows: http://zonecoverage.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Capture-1.jpg NOTE: This person has since blocked me for reasons that don’t entirely make sense. He has also deleted the tweets, so I have saved this screenshot to remember his weird rant, which also included alluding to the Twins not going after Shohei Otani because of how poorly ByungHo Park and Tsuyoshi Nishioka panned out. Bad takes all around! It’s not often that baseball provides irrefutable evidence in a discussion. Nobody can rationally debate that the Houston Astros won the World Series or who won the Gold Glove awards which were handed out on Tuesday night. Those are set in stone. But in debates, there can always be varying levels of certainty, different angles being pursued by those involved and a number of other situations at play. In this case, the general debate is that the Twins front office messed up at the trade deadline. And quite frankly, there is no evidence to back that up. None. The back story to the debate centers around the Twins having the second-most available in their July 2 pool to sign international free agents. This looms especially large this offseason with Japanese phenom Shohei Otani petitioning to come over. Part of the reason the Twins have that much money is that they received some back from the Washington Nationals in the Brandon Kintzler trade. This is where that debate begins, as the party in question says the Twins “had no business trading legitimate major-league pitching at the deadline last year.” The simplest — and possibly laziest — form of logical fallacy is revisionism. In other words, looking at a situation and how it plays out, then saying “Well I wouldn’t have done THAT” without offering anything in the way of a solution. Even that isn’t in Mr. Papas’ favor. Why? Please click through to Zone Coverage here to read this story in its entirety.