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bird

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Everything posted by bird

  1. bird
    I'd guess, markos, that someone has produced data for later time periods that would educate me better, but I just glanced at the 2011 draft, a notoriously week class, and BA's 2011 Top 100. From a cursory look, I think about two-thirds of the tp 60 players selected in that draf have made it onto a big league roster. I'd say somewhere round 50-60% of the Top 100 also have logged some MLB innings.
  2. bird
    With due respect and appreciation for your knowledge, I think you are greatly overstating the legitimacy of an old study that looks at data from 1994 to 2006. There have been so many transformative improvements in virtually every aspect of the process and at every stage of the process since then. Technology that takes much of the judgment away from the trained eyes of scouts who see prospects a handful of times who are now supported by myriads of eyes studying video. Fitness and health upgrades, perhaps most dramatically affecting IFA prospects, knowledge about biomechanics, kinesiology, psychology, better coaching tools and knowledge. I don't have numbers to support it, but my intuition tells me that players who make the top 120 or so today probably enjoy odds that have improved enough so that the odds for Graterol, Badoo, and Enslow are closer to 50% than 25%, that even despite the much worse odds for pitching prospects because of the much higher injury risks.
  3. bird
    Yep, and I'll take a coin flip every day of the week for any IFA selection, any 3rd-rounder, and for sure, any later round pick like Badoo, Garver, Hildenberger Rogers, et al.
  4. bird
    By the time a prospect is recognized as having the type of potential that Graterol, Badoo, and Enlow have, the chances of them being eventual contributors increases dramatically, maybe to as much as 40-50%. I don't know about you, but I think I'd label them as better than crap shots. Their odds are now probably better than those of players selected in the second half of the first round.
  5. bird
    Right. Sigh.
  6. bird
    Draft experts viewed the pick positively, so describing it as a risky pick is an inaccurate narrative. I believe that had the Twins gone with an every day player instead of a pitcher with that pick, a majority of us would have been critical, although lots of people now vividly recall how adamant they were about picking Benintendi. As with all drafts, you wish you'd have picked someone else in retrospect, but for now, the jury is still out. It wasn't a bad pick even if in the end there are 10 prospects from that draft that deliver better results. One of the pitchers from that draft that might deliver the best results was passed over twice by a third of the teams, #42 selection Tristan McKenzie. He might be another Berrios.
  7. bird
    Good point. Also a great example of how a strategy of trading from MLB surplus for high-value prospects can pay off.
  8. bird
    Thanks for digging this up, Seth. This might be the reason I'm more excited about Jay than the others on the list, although Rortvedt is also intriguing to me. I have a distant recollection of opinions on this board that Butera was ranked too high when he made it all the way to, like, #23 in a much thinner system. Butera's the poster boy for why we should remember that a catcher's value doesn't get reflected very conclusively by his slash line. A lot of commenters ripped the FO and Gardy about Butera for years because of his atrocious bat (it WAS painful, wasn't it?), and he somehow managed to eek out a nice, long career on the strength of whatever value he delivered that I for one was unable to detect. I think if they start Rortvedt in A+, that'll be another indication of his promise.
  9. bird
    Why do I find myself hoping that Molitor's lineup construction is the product of rather forceful suggestions and not his intuition?
  10. bird
    I wanted my big brother to like baseball as much as I did, so I gave him Harmon Killebrew and took Bob Allison. But then Zoilo alienated my affections for Allison in 1965, which was my favorite season memory until 1987. I remain open to switching allegiances. My big brother was a disappointment as a baseball fan. Still is.
  11. bird
    If you and the intern were Yankees, you'd just tell them, proudly, rudely and arrogantly, to move you to a bigger table and bring one of everything. Hell, you can afford it. Only to be told about the small print on page 19 that sets limits on the size of the order. Oh well, nothing was looking all that appetizing anyway. You head on over to Murray's for a big Giancarlo Butterknife Ribeye.
  12. bird
    I'm wondering if expectations regarding Berrios haven't spilled over the top. Find a front line starter, Mr. Falvey. If we suddenly find that our mystery FA and Berrios, Santana, Gibson, Mejia, May, Romero, Gonsalves, Slegers, Hughes, and Jorge are all lights out, then we have some unforeseen trade chips. Yay.
  13. bird
    Millennials will not begin to embrace the game of baseball until MLB figures out that batters strolling back to the dugout after whiffing should be given a Certificate of Participation by the time they reach the on-deck circle. No waiting til he gets to the dugout because speed of game, you know. And instant feedback.
  14. bird
    I guess I'd make the distinction between expectation and aspiration. If Falvey gets us a #2 type starter, and if Santana and Berrios give us a bit better that #3 production, and if the back end of the rotation...you get the point...if things come together, then this team can be EXPECTED to compete for the wild card again, even have a shot at the division if Cleveland has a rash of injuries and we don't. Of course Falvey and gang aspire to more, as do fans. I don't think anyone is well-advised to expect that until we see a few more exciting additions and start to see peak performances from the core. Fortunately, that other window, the window that says the organization has the capacity to make the required moves, has also opened. They have the trifecta of cash, a decent talent pipeline, and the start of some surplus of truly valuable assets that can be traded for assets of like value in areas of deficiency. We'll just have to see if Falvine is up to the challenge. Right now, there's good reason most of our discussions still center on the wild card and the division title.
  15. bird
    I would guess he's allowed to ask questions. I doubt there's an institutionalized pattern of sending prospects home after their first season without any kind of blueprint regarding their off-season self-care, but I'd also bet a lot of first-year prospects feel a level of uncertainty like this guy does.
  16. bird
    I'd be a lot more excited about things if we had one more "can't miss" prospect, like we did when Buxton/Sano headlined the list. But we do have a few "boom or bust" types in Javier, Rooker, Graterol, maybe Romero. I think the odds favor at least a couple of those guys becoming impactful players. The other thing that I try to keep in mind is that we can point to a number of players on our MLB roster who barely crept onto these lists, if they did at all, and are now considered to be important contributors, guys like Polanco, Rosario, Kepler, and Dozier. It's good to have guys that fit into this category in larger numbers, guys like Badoo and Wade, and then even bigger numbers of fairly unheralded guys you hope can become your next wave of Rogers, Duffey, Garver, Granite, Hildenberger, Chargois, and Curtiss. You want the can't miss guys, but you need a fair percentage of both the handful of other top 100 prospects and those fringier prospects to bloom for you even more. We're in decent shape. How'd you like to be a KC fan? Sickles gives a better grade to 18 Twins prospects than he gives to all but 4 prospects in the entire KC system.
  17. bird
    Sorry, I missed that distinction from your comment upon entering the conversation. I think we have some common ground. I've said many times that I'll be critical of Falvey, just like I was after last off-season, if I view the results as sub-par and am cool with any one else having a higher bar. My bar is a front line starter from outside the system, one way or another, period, no excuses. Falvey cleared my bar when it comes to the bullpen, unlike last year. I don't want to know what sites you're going to where you're hearing all that tiring talk about trying hard and all those pat on the head talks. I just know it's not something that's going on here, other than the occasional opinion about the lack of effort.
  18. bird
    Suggesting that "trying hard" doesn't count for anything is dubious to me. Suggesting that the past or current front office "never succeeded" is, well, simply false. There's ample opportunity to dish out fair criticism about decisions, inaction, and actions without calling into question how hard someone tried or offering an inaccurate comment about something that questions his integrity. I'm not picking a fight with you. I just have a strong reaction to judgmental opinions about things like intentions ("he doesn't care about winning") or opinions based on something that never happened ("we've been told for years that"). I admit to being hypersensitive about unfair portrayals and criticism that's false or brutally unfair. I don't think Falvey solved the bullpen problem last off-season. He succeeded in that area this off-season. I think it's fair to be critical of last year's results and praise him for this year's actions, despite not yet knowing what the results will be. If Falvey fails in his effort to sign Darvish, I'll remain appreciative of his decision to go after him, won't you? I'm not going to question how hard he tried, because I wouldn't know what I was talking about and it would be a dubious criticism.
  19. bird
    "we were told for years they were in on the Cubans." Mike, we weren't told this. I guess we could excuse this as semantics, and if you didn't mean to create an impression that there was a level of dishonesty at play here, I accept that. We do agree that judging results is more important than judging activity. While not every action leads to success, that doesn't render the action worthless, so we disagree about whether honest effort is praiseworthy, and as you said, that's cool. I personally admire a great effort even when the outcome isn't equally great. And yes, I'll give Falvey credit for deciding to be in on Darvish regardless of the outcome, but I'll judge him unfavorably, like I did last offseason, if he fails to land another starter that on paper looks like an improvement over Gibson and mejia as a #3.
  20. bird
    Well, let's be clear about what we were "told". There's a huge difference between telling reporters you're sending evaluators to a workout for someone and that the team has an interest in them, versus saying someone "is a priority". You won't be able to come up with a single example of someone with the Twins saying the Twins are "in on" a bid for any of those Cuban players. I don't think there's any real similarity with what's transpiring with Darvish, do you?
  21. bird
    Not long ago I had an Uber driver whose son is a catcher at a Division II college who had spent a good deal of time filling in at various Twins practices as an extra catcher. The kid got to know some people pretty well, and apparently concluded from his conversations that a number of the coaches believed that the single biggest area of improvement for the pitching staff would be realized by bringing in a starting catcher who was good at framing pitches. This of course was pre-Castro.
  22. bird
    One of the things I keep thinking about is how few of our top prospects turned in disappointing performances last year, injury cases excepted. It really was an exceptional year in that regard. Was it luck? If it's a reflection of talent alone, we're going to be getting increasingly excited about the combined talent in the system and on the big club. I mean, I can remember years when, looking back on the season, half or more of the prospects on Seth's list had at best rather listless performances. Maybe it's just me, but this talent pool, while maybe lacking that one more prospect who projects to be a perennial All Star, is full of high-ceiling talent. A decade ago, the OF/1B prospects on Seth's list were, in order, Ben Revere, Joe Benson, Chris Parmelee, Jason Pridie, Erik Lis, Brock Peterson, David Winfield, and Dustin Martin. I like today's alternatives strictly on the basis of their better tools alone: Alex Kiriloff, Brent Rooker, Akil Badoo, Lewin Diaz, LaMonte Wade, Jacob Pearson, Zack Granite, and Aaron Whitefeild. On the basis of really fun names, 2018 is the clear winner.
  23. bird
    and is Chagrois pronounced Jaguar?
  24. bird
    To Falvey: The Dip, 2015: "Don't Make Me Wait"
  25. bird
    I'm not even so sure about that, Chief. They seem to like the whole "keep our options open and stay nimble" thing. Although from a different perspective, it's easy you conclude that they sometimes have a tendency to be indecisive or fickle. Without knowing for sure, I'm inclined to think they made the calls on Burdi and Bard to free up space for whatever opportunities came along and not specifically with a Rule V addition in mind. The scouts submitted their reports on the Rule V guys after that. Falvey studied the scouting reports and concluded, what the heck, we're so sharp, lets try to fix this guy Kinley. I accuse them of premeditated idiocy regarding Burdi. I accuse them of second degree idiocy regarding Kinley. In both cases, however, we'll have to wait to see what comes out at trial. Maybe there's a not guilty verdict in store because Burdi's development is impeded by something we don't see, or because Kinley is fixable. But I'm relieved they signed Reed, that's for sure.
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