Rod Carews Birthday

I think it’s a little weird that PECOTA thinks that last year’s 76 win team is going to become an 84 win team with little to no changes in personnel. Granted, they will likely have pretty solid starting pitching, but that lineup is pretty hapless as a group. They aren’t exactly me and 8 guys I found on the street, but they pretty much are Jose Ramirez, Austin Hedges and 7 guys found on the street.

These signings are nice, but when you start with a team that only won 56 games, it’s hard to get close to contention. They are still probably only a 70ish win team, but that’s a big step forward. If more of their young players develop and they can take another step forward after that, they are looking at a .500 record by 2025. I’ve always liked the Royals, but the road ahead is a very long one. Luckily for them, the White Sox will work very hard to beat them to the bottom of the basement this summer.

At a time like this it is important to reflect. What was your favorite moment of the Jesse Chavez era?

Nobody is overlooking these players for this year. Two of our best hitters and one of our best bullpen arms (right now, maybe the best until Duran gets back) will definitely be heard from loudly this season. If Julien and Jeffers can duplicate last year’s numbers over a full season, they are definite all-stars and maybe more.

Not exciting, but pretty useful. This is the rough equivalent of signing Keuchel last year, only the bullpen version. The season isn’t going to hinge on this guy, but he could be a useful bridge player. Deals like this around the margins have virtually no risk and could provide nice returns. It may not be the big starting pitcher signing we wanted, but it’s more than nothing.

I’m in complete agreement with you, as I really don’t care about gambling in general. HOWEVER. . . It’s against the rules for any MLB baseball player or connected employee. Ohtani has earned millions of dollars from baseball and either knows it’s against the rules (in addition to being illegal depending on how it is handled) or most certainly can afford to pay someone to tell him that it is against the rules. If some poor schlub like me were involved in a situation like this, no one would cover up the situation for me. However, I expect the handwringing and “aw shucksing” to be turned up to 11 on this from the Dodgers and the league because he’s somebody important, and that is what I think is wrong with this situation. If he broke the rules, let him pay the dues.

“I’m sound as a pound.” I’m gonna use that. Priceless!

You may disagree with the philosophy but there is no black and white in baseball, or in much else for that matter. A great pitching staff can get you a long ways in a season of baseball, but so will pounding the opponent into submission by scoring a lot of runs.. There are too many variables to each inning of each game to make any absolute statements. It is finding a good balance that leads to excellence and sometimes that balance tilts in a different direction. As for trading prospects at the deadline, an entirely new group of prospects may be available at that point because there is an additional half season of data available on them. For some previously “untouchable” prospects, the shine may have worn off and now they are tradable. For other previously unknown prospects, they may have come forward to shine and have strong value. Sometimes how different prospects develop means that others are now expendable. For example, do you think that the Twins wouldn’t have been better off trading Larnach, Miranda, or Winder when their values were at their peak? There is a certain additional degree of clarity that develops with more data from the minor leaguers (and major leaguers). It’s not an exact science to trade for pitching help during the season, nor is it easy to find a trade partner in the offseason. Free agents only cost money, but there is always a finite supply of that, plus, just ask the Red Sox how the Giolito contract looks now (and many, including me, thought that Giolito would have been a good target for the Twins). All of those free agent acquisitions didn’t work out so well for the Mets or the Padres or the Angels either and they all spent big bucks. It’s pretty easy to to throw rocks at the front office for every mistake that they make, but if you are going to do that, you need to give credit for the fact that they won the division last year and seem poised to do it again this year. At the end of the day (and YMMV) you have to decide if you are comfortable with the product on the field given the current team situation or if you think it is vastly underachieving. For me, I like the competitive baseball that we had last year and I will choose to cheer for that to continue. The team may look and feel a little bit different this year, but that’s OK. We won a division in 2019 by scoring a lot of runs, and we won last year by preventing them. Maybe a balance will be a better option and enable us to go a little farther.

Maybe he bet it all on the Blue Jays in the first game of the Twins playoff series last fall, and much to his surprise, the Twins came through!

Let's go Louie Varland! I'm pretty optimistic that he will do well in a starting role this year. News Flash! He's not going to win the Cy Young Award this year. That's OK. If you want to think of him as the "5th starter", whatever that means, then the bar is plenty low for someone just getting their first extended look. With the experiences gained last year both starting and relieving, he has the tools to do well. I'm certain that more than half the teams in baseball would take him in a second to be their fifth starter. A few years ago we might have looked at a young pitcher like Varland to be our second or third starter!

I am absolutely with you on taxpayer money being used for a new stadium. That's a no for me too, but I don't think that is going away anytime soon. However, you lose me on complaining about the BILLIONAIRES needing to cough up more money because fans don't like the way the roster looks. Let's play that out. Elon Musk owns Tesla. Should he make his cars only cost $10K because he can afford it? Should Apple make the iphones only cost $50 because they have plenty of cash on hand to do so? Whether we like it or not, the Pohlad family is running a private business that they are trying to make money with. They get to do whatever they wish to do, and since only two clubs in the majors have real transparency (not the Twins) we can kick and scream about it, but it only makes us sweaty and tired. I'm going to choose to enjoy the baseball and leave the business to the people with more money than me.

Because doing this is easy and everyone in the league is doing it? For the most part, pitching is in short supply all over and there are only a couple of teams that seemingly have sustained success developing a surplus. It seems to me that it is quite a lot better than it was a few years ago, but perfection it is not.

"It didn’t have to be this way. The Minnesota Twins could have carried over some of their pitching prowess from the starting rotation in 2023. Thanks to a lack of investment in the team on the part of ownership, though, the weight of the world now falls on the starting lineup. " When you have a budget, it's all about choices. If the front office feels like the hitting side of the lineup is likely improved, it lessens the need to spend more on pitching. I don't think that makes them sinister or even necessarily cheap. It seems quite realistic that the hitters overall will be improved (never a sure thing), so their choice is a reasonable one. The pitching staff is projected to still be on the upper end of the league, so I'm willing to go with it for now. If there is a problem that can't be solved later in the season we can trade for a starter at the deadline. People do it all the time. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Apparently any article that brings up the Twins pitching staff will bring about the arguments that the Twins can’t develop pitching, the Pohlads are too cheap, we don’t look hard enough at the medicals, etc. etc. etc. People need to look at the arguments at face value instead of reverting to the same old, same old. 1. All pitchers are either injured or will be. This is undoubtedly true. In fact, it has been said that even a “healthy” pitcher’s scans will show damage to the elbow/shoulder. With the advent of better surgeries and recoveries, this isn’t the career ended that it used to be. Verlander has had a TJ. Mariano Rivera had a TJ. Many other very successful pitchers have had them. It’s an unfortunate part of pitching these days. It’s about catching the right player when he’s healthy. 2. The Twins aren’t willing to leverage their farm system to trade for pitching. This is also true, although I would argue that it’s about the degree to which they are willing. They have obviously made some trades, but when they don’t work out they get destroyed for making them. For every Mahle there is a Gray. It just doesn’t always work and it’s scary to trade front line prospects like Brooks Lee or Emmanuel Rodriguez. 3. Big contracts don’t always work out. This is the understatement of the century. A team like the Yankees or Dodgers can afford to eat a big contract (or two or three) for a player that doesn’t produce. A mid-market team can’t do that and the owners and management know this. It’s one of the reasons why the Twins are usually “out” on big money players, especially pitchers. Signing a couple of big name pitcher for big dollars that don’t perform could leave the team in last place in the central for a couple of years. I personally don’t want that. It makes baseball no fun at all. I lived through the late 1990’s. There are absolutely exceptions to these points, as there are to everything. If it was so easy to have a great pitching staff, everyone would have one. The reality is that the Twins starting staff was #2 in the league last year and this year is projected for a little lower but still easily top 10. If that is failing to do right by the pitching staff then sign me up.

These seem pretty conservative, maybe not as conservative as the CBS Sports projections were crazy, but generally VERY safe. Correa and Lewis leading the team in games played (if they can stay healthy) seems fairly reasonable, but Buxton as the #4 in games played seems pretty far out on a limb. Overall, they are planning for a lot of regression in the rate stats by some of our younger players and for the pitching to be just "ok", which is normal in projection systems when there isn't a long track record. I'm hoping that there are several players who outperform these predictions so the team can have a really good year.

I would sign up for this EVERY DAY! How many games would the team win if they all hit their projections? 110? That's crazy. I'm going to take the under but say that several players will have good years and the Twins will win 90 games.

In the short term, assuming both Thielbar and Duran are back on the field without major setbacks, the bullpen will get stretched a little in terms of high leverage arms, but I think they will survive. Some of those lower leverage guys will need to get pushed a little bit. In the longer term, it may (oddly) be a positive development. A few less miles on Duran and Thielbar come September and beyond might be good for their effectiveness going forward as well as some development of the other guys in the pen.

I think you are forgetting that Maeda was a mess for a big part of the season as well. You are correct in saying we had Ober ahead of Varland as well last year, but I'm not sure that Varland was necessarily thought of any higher last year than SWR/Festa/Headrick are this year, and now there are three of them. That does increase the odds of success. I do think that Lorenzen is a worthwhile starting pitcher (but definitely a little gun compared to the big guns out there), but I'm choosing to believe management when they say they are done spending this spring. We can wish all we want that it isn't so, but that doesn't make it change and we just wind up more frustrated. At some point imploring the front office to spend money to sign another free agent pitcher is a fruitless exercise. It's not suggesting that we trade Nick Punto for Mike Trout, but the results are the same and the frustration is probably higher when it doesn't happen.

They look to be in great shape against right handed pitchers. Hopefully they can get some traction vs. lefties as well. This may or may not relate to the DH position (although it could), but they are going to need to let some of the potential platoon guys (Julien, Wallner, Kiriloff) bat against lefties occasionally. Maybe they discover that one or more of them could develop some lefty/lefty batting skills. You can't do this all the time, but not all of the positions in the lineup are going to mash everyday anyway, so a little strategic lineup construction could have some long term benefits, even if the short term isn't so pretty.

How different is this to when Mahle went down last year? We have a young guy waiting in St. Paul who is largely unproven that can step in just like we did last year. It certainly worked fine and there’s a solid chance it will again. That’s one of the reasons that the Twins acquired an “extra” starter. Now that someone is injured (coincidentally the guy we acquired to be the “extra”), we plug in the next guy. I also think that it is in our best interest to have some starts by SWR, Festa, and Headrick this year. I would rather not have it be at the end of the season with the division on the line, but at some point those guys need to have a shot to see what they can do and so that the Twins can know what they can do. The odds of at least one of those guys being solid are pretty good, yet some are treating potential starts from them as being a disaster for the team. The payroll isn’t increasing, so the big guns aren’t coming in to save us, and we have our own little guns that are just as capable as the ones we might be able to sign by having a bake sale.

They're all going to pitch with the Twins at some point this season. Take the hot hand for now and let the St. Paul bullpen express begin!

Potentially losing DeSclafani for the season to injury is actually quite a bit less scary than losing Mahle was last spring. At the time Ober was mostly unproven and Mahle was thought of as a top end arm. Varland is also unproven but promising, and I don't really think anyone was counting on DeSclafani for a lot this summer. This moves Varland up the food chain and SWR, Headrick, and Festa potentially into the mix waiting in the wings in St. Paul. I'd rather have DeSclafani healthy than not, as he is a potentially OK arm, but I don't think this is the end of the world at all. On the other hand. . . if Duran is hurt for an extended length of time, I'm very worried. They have other "potential closers", but again it moves everyone up the food chain, and we definitely don't know if they are all ready for prime time.

No. That was good rest combined with a little bit of luck so it's probably not happening again as someone will get a little dinged up sometime (hopefully not a lot dinged up). But that's OK. We have a guy who should be a solid #3 in St. Paul to fill in. He will gain valuable experience by stepping in and the team will be better for it in the long term.

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