Rod Carews Birthday
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Everything posted by Rod Carews Birthday
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Let’s hope you are correct. He seems to have made some adjustments to the adjustments that the pitchers have made for him. If he can keep ahead of that curve, he will be very successful and back to the Julien we saw last year. If not, it’s back to the drawing board again for him. I do think that he has what it takes to be an excellent player. However, we, as fans, forget that there are almost always ups and downs on the way to the final product. Again, let’s hope that this is the start of something great! -
I’m not necessarily anti moving Lewis to 1B, but I think it is premature at best. He has the glove, that’s the key. He definitely needs work on throwing, but that is a skill that can be learned and practiced. A “Julien” style defensive emphasis over the winter could do wonders. In the long term, I think the infield will be Correa at short, Lewis/Lee at third, Lee/Julien at second, Julien/Lewis at first. They have the people in place to make this work but it will require some patience and persistence. Doing so will allow things to shake out into the best solution. There are others in the system who could force their way into the picture and/or one of these guys could get traded, but I think this is the most likely outcome for the next year or two. This also frees up Martin and Castro to truly be utility players, which makes everyone else that much better.
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I'll put this on my list of things to hope for, but not hold my breath on.
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- nathan eovaldi
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Great stories. Life has those special moments and we never know when or where they are going to happen. I hope everyone can find them -- wherever they seek them.
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Four million buys nothing in starting pitching. Getting a free agent pitcher who is really good at that price is winning the lottery.
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- derek falvey
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Every team has those situations. The baseball draft is a pretty difficult and inexact science. In the aggregate, I think they've done pretty well. It would appear that 20+ minor league systems would trade places.
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- derek falvey
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Excellent article, although I caution against using that word - pipeline. It will definitely set a few people off with their own interpretations and definitions. Pitching prospects are always pretty fickle, but it certainly looks like they have built something that may continue supplying good solid arms for at least the short term future. Drafting based on mostly projection is dangerous, but if they can do it somewhat successfully, then full steam ahead. I think that Festa and Matthews (and some others) are going to be good MLB pitchers, but let's not judge them successes or failures until they have quite a few innings under their belt. Joe Ryan getting hurt was a bummer, but I don't think all is lost by any means. Let's go Twins!
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- derek falvey
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Wow! He’s better from the other side by a lot than I am with my natural side! Sigh . . . I guess I better keep practicing.
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I was about to write something very similar about cost of WAR, but you beat me to it. I can't argue with the cost of $8M/WAR in free agency, but as you said, many players still under team control also generate WAR at a much lower cost. So, yes, going out and duplicating it in free agency would indeed cost a lot, but finding ways to generate it more inexpensively are also possible. As to Buxton's contract, believe it or not, I think the Twins got the numbers about right. He will likely generate that in WAR value in years where he's more or less healthy. They did a good job of insulating the team from a huge and terrible contract while still letting Buxton cash in on his upside if he can have such a season. Some years he may fall short (2023), but others may go well (2024). He's still tantalizing and frustrating at the same time.
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- pablo lopez
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The other side of that trade looks no better. Polanco has been pretty awful for the Mariners and the money saved in salary gave them the means to pick up Carlos Santana. It seems it was mostly an even trade, but the Twins still have Gonzalez to either trade or keep for the future.
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Completely agree on the development plan. He's just weirdly valuable on the team from a hitting perspective. His numbers don't look amazing but he is certainly a catalyst with a bat in his hands. Now he just needs a spot on the field where he's really good and a winter of pure centerfield action could really help that.
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Correa is certainly an upgrade over pretty much anybody, but I'm not so sure about Farmer. I'm worried that he may be cooked, but I would be thrilled to be wrong.
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It's a little bit like watching the Olympics. On the more mainstream sports the commentary is pretty good, but on the more niche pursuits, the commentary strays into "That fall might hurt his score", or "If she can go faster here, it's really going to help her win", or "It's a pretty complicated scoring system, but whoever gets more points will win." There are probably several ways for the Twins to do well this season, offensively, pitching-wise, and just luckiness. But the most logical and mainstream ones have been covered to death. Brooks Lee was professed to be the second coming and the key to the Twins season a few weeks ago, and he has played with a pretty good glove, but the hitting isn't quite there yet (just like with MANY (most?) prospects of his age. Pablo Lopez has been, at best, wildly inconsistent but he could turn it around and be a real stopper. Matt Wallner was supposed to be a key, until he was terrible, and now he's pretty great again. There are lots of things that can happen, good and bad, expected and unexpected, that can really make a season turn one way or the other.
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That’s a cable tv contract. That train left the building. I’m actually trying to make less money, but thank you, you’re proving my point about how difficult it is.
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By that logic, since we can’t hang with the Orioles or the Yankees, those two teams should have the best record in the league by MILES, because obviously none of the teams with worse records than the Twins can beat them either. Hmmm. Maybe not. Best record in the league is a good thing. It is not the determiner of whether you will win the World Series. I would think that if you DON’T have the best record in the league it would make you MORE likely to need to add at the deadline. All of that said, there wasn’t much to be had this year that I found particularly interesting. Lots of great players didn’t get dealt anywhere, especially the two really good pitchers in Crochet and Skubel. I don’t like how this deadline turned out, but I also don’t feel that we really missed out on a golden ticket to the World Series.
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- pohlad
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I believe we will agree to disagree. It seems more productive for both of us at this point.
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Keep spending other people’s money and keep the conspiracy theory going. It’s actually far less complicated and far less sinister than that I’m sure. When ESPN went off of Dish Network a few years ago for a while whose fault was that? How about when my local NBC affiliate went off of Comcast? It’s just two stubborn parties sticking to their guns and not compromising. The Twins are a third party here. Everybody is trying to maximize their revenue. I don’t like it when it affects me, but I can’t change it and screaming about it doesn’t make me feel better or change anything. Rich people like to keep their money just like you and I do. What is absolutely “pocket change” to them is big money to me. You are correct, but I don’t throw away my pocket change and I’m sure they don’t either.
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It’s neither actually, but I can do the math on it. Let’s say that your goal is make $40M. That would roughly replace the TV deal they had/have. I don’t know what the outlay by the team would be for that, but I’m guessing between $10M and $20M between on air talent, staffing, and physical costs, and I might be WAY low. So, you need to gross an absolute minimum of $50M to do that. That’s without taking startup costs like equipment, etc. into consideration. If you assume that people would be willing to pay $100 or more for a season of streaming Twins games, that means that they would need to have 500,000 subscribers AND they would need to hope that it wouldn’t cut into their gate attendance too much. (Would people attend more often or less often if they can watch it through streaming? I’m not sure actually). That is too big of a number of fans that would care enough to pay for streaming to make it work. The big problem is that in order to make it work you need a larger fan base or more fan bases. So. . . the NFL is off the table as is likely U of M with the NCAA involved. Maybe the Timberwolves, assuming that they aren’t in the middle of a deal themselves. Maybe the Wild or the Loons. Now you are down to pretty small fan bases (Minnesota State? St. Thomas?) that really don’t help you much, and you increase your costs by needing to cover more events. I believe MLB strongly inferred that the Twins should wait a year so that the league could have its own streaming package in place. I’m not sure if that was a suggestion or a mandate. We’ll see if that all happens or not. I do know that the league has a lot more economies of scale to make more happen, but who knows. I personally would love streaming as I live a long ways away from Target Field and have to catch the Twins on the road, but I don’t think it works unless it is paired with something that is more lucrative monetarily.
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Deals expire and are renegotiated all the time. It happens with little guys like Bally and even with big guys like ESPN. The two parties obviously don’t agree on the value of the product. That’s between Bally and Comcast. The Twins aren’t at that negotiating table. Pure streaming deals are not very lucrative in a midlevel market so they turned back to the best TV deal they could get. Strategically, development of other options in the past couple of years would have been ideal - but doing so would have cost a fair amount of money rather than making it and the Twins opted not to do that.
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Which other more lucrative TV deal would you have had them take? Many things were speculated and dreamed about but when crunch time came, what they got was probably the best financial deal they could get. The Comcast debacle isn’t on the Twins. That’s on an entirely different set of billionaires. It sucks. As to ranking, i believe that I also had them middle of the pack - better some years and worse others. I just choose to take the long view because as I stated elsewhere, owners are around for a lot longer than relief pitchers and utility infielders.
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You kind of have to take the long view on team ownership. They stick around much longer than relief pitchers. Would I have done some things differently this year? Absolutely but then again I don’t have the same information nor the same size checkbook, and ultimately no influence over their decisions.
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I understand and agree with some of your frustration. I think you are wrong if you think that there aren't many team owners that have done these same things (or obviously similar with different names). I don't like it, but they own the team so they get to call the shots. I think they are roughly middle of the pack as owners over the years, with some real flashes like the Correa signing, and some real turds with the offseason budget cuts. It's hard to call the Pohlads incompetent. They have managed to keep the team mostly competitive , with a couple of WS championships, for more than 40 years. We may not be satisfied as fans, but I think that's true of more fan bases than you think. Where the Twins dropped the ball the hardest was in failing to capitalize on some good feelings after last year's playoffs to keep fans excited for the next year (2024). The PR associated with those decisions was absolutely atrocious.
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This is always an interesting thought. The question is whether any of those vaunted prospects will develop into real stars or not. On paper (and that's a terrible place to play baseball), we have Correa and young pieces in place in the infield all the way around. In the outfield, we have Buxton and then several potential future players in Wallner, E-Rod, Jenkins, etc. If some of the young pitchers are good, that could be covered as well. The problem is that that almost never happens. Prospects can and do fail all the time. It will take those young players, and then trades from the surplus spots or free agent pickups to put a championship level team in place. The trick is to know which ones will be great and which ones won't. We as fans send ridiculous mixed signals when we declare that we definitely want/need the team to be aggressive and trade for (insert name of established star player here), but yet we consider the prospects that might get it done to be untouchable. We clutch our pearls when anybody talks about trading guys like Lewis, Lee, E-Rod, or Jenkins. They could be immensely valuable . . . until they aren't. Would you include one of them in a trade for Skubel? I would. What if we had traded Miguel Sano or Byron Buxton at peak prospect value? Would we be better off? Buxton (maybe?), Sano (likely.) Could they trade Duran, who is at a relatively high value? Why not? It ALWAYS depends on the return. Would you have traded a young Rod Carew? No way, but wait a minute. . . what if the return was Johnny Bench or some other HOF'er? Unfortunately as a GM things aren't that straightforward and you have to make some good choices to succeed, but sometimes you really do have to try to guess right as much as you can.
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Will Baseball Leadership stick around? I think probably yes. First of all, they have done enough to bring the Twins organization kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and they have also won enough to earn their continued keep for now. The 40 man roster crunch remains. No. Not really. They have a little bit of a 26 man roster crunch but not really a 40 man. There are certainly guys on the 40 man that can be jettisoned, particularly on the pitching side. The 26 man is trickier. Money Really Was a Big Deal. Yes it was, times 1000, and it will continue to be.. However, it would be simplistic to assume that it was the only factor. There weren’t that many names that changed hands at the deadline that were really on my list of desired acquisitions, and the cost prohibition was more about the prospects that would have been required than the money. Does the wrath of Correa matter? No. He’s a really good baseball player and a really smart baseball mind. I’m sure that the front office listens to what he says and takes it under advisement but he ultimately doesn’t sign the checks so the decisions aren’t his to make. He knows that also. Roll the dice in October. THIS. If you have a reasonable amount of talented players (the Twins do), you can go through a hot streak where most everything seems to go right. Neither of the Twins two World Series championship teams were teams for the ages, especially not 1987. They won because they had good chemistry, played well at the right time, and the other pieces fell into place. Acquiring Tarik Skubel would have been awesome and really made a difference, but he didn’t get traded to anyone, let alone us, a team in the division so we can stop crying about that. Let’s get to the playoffs and play some October baseball. I plan to enjoy it while rooting for the Twins to win.
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And what if they were worse? Ask the A’s. Ask the pre-Pohlad owned Twins. I would love a great pickup. I can’t control that. It didn’t happen. I’ve moved on to the next game and I will continue to enjoy baseball.
