bird

The fact that there's a narrow range of opinion about the quality of the Kintzler decision tells me a lot. I don't call it an error, but I can see why some would view it as a good decision and others a bad decision. I cut Falvey slack on the basis of the degree of difficulty. It could end up as a bad decision/good result scenario, who knows? But I also think it's terribly premature to form an opinion about the results. Tyler Watson could flame out in AA, but that $500k in IFA money could attract a stud. That's Lewis Thorpe or Jorge Polanco money, right? I'm going to wait.

Chief, where're you parked?

Thanks for rekindling great memories of that 1967 team I still think of as the most fun group of players I have followed. The 1987 group was fun too, and I'm now amazed at how much joy this current bunch is giving me.

I seem to recall the run differential being mentioned most often in conjunction with opinions that the Twins couldn't get back into contention or stay in contention without making significant roster additions. I doubt very many people not employed within the Twins organization thought players on the current roster might improve enough to turn this team into a different team. It wasn't foreseeable to them or to anyone, but it happened. What an amazing season! And kudos to the field staff for their patience while so many of these players endured very serious and lengthy periods of not just minor performance deficits, but in many cases, really putrid results.

Interesting. We think about a half-dozen other prospects under consideration for 3B, and TJWhite doesn't show up on the radar for most of us, so that's nice to hear. Blankenhorn, Miranda, Cabbage, Bechtold, maybe guys like Javier, or even Goodrum.

I'm glad our new guy has the wisdom and the sense to know what he inherited. He sees an historically underfunded baseball operation, lacking in certain disciplines and behind the curve in term of utilizing some of the modern tools, but he also is witnessing a farm system that those before him built. Even this year's draft is a product of the scouting organization he inherited. His is the winningest minor league system in all of baseball, thanks to those people. Derek has retained Brad Steil and all but a tiny handful of the organization's pro and amateur and international scouts. Why? Because he knows what he's talking about. He knows he has one of the ten most talented teams in major league baseball right now, a team learning how to compete and win at the highest level. He knows he has one of the ten most talent-laden minor league systems in all of baseball. And he knows he's fortunate, because very few organizations in the game have both a winning major league team and a stellar talent pipeline, with both being on the rise. Think about it. A grade school soccer fan could write this winter's off-season blueprint. What excites me almost as much as what we have in place is the fact that Falvey will have plenty of cards to play this winter. He can trade valuable assets from surplus to bolster the few areas of weakness. He has the financial wherewithal and freedom to tap into free agency. And he has depth, and I mean talented prospects here, at AA and above, in exactly the category he has the greatest need, pitching.

Thanks for clarifying that you weren't being overly harsh in your criticism of Gonsalves. It's so comforting to know that you simply meant to be overly harsh in your criticism of a guy who has been taking his own time to write these reports for the benefit of the rest of us. Thanks, Tom. Outstanding reports.

Yeah, it's been the the most promising overall minor league season in my very long memory. I can't produce numbers, but my sense is that the percentage of higher-profile prospects who met or exceeded expectations is extremely high despite some glaring injury problems. I can remember a couple of years when well more than half the prospects making Seth's Top 25 were injury or performance disappointments. Of course, those lists had nobodies like Doug Deeds and David Bromberg on them. There usually aren't any minor league All Stars that can't find a spot on a top prospect list, and this year there are many.

Like the Fangraphs guy said, the Twins just know how to win.

Yeah, I think Falvey has simply asked the pro scouts to stay on the lookout longer than usual during the course of this season. It's essentially the same pro scout staff feeding the GM with possibilities, maybe just a few more of them with the trigger pulled more often. I don't see any magic here.

I think we agree on your opinion that they've gotten less production out of the draft over the years. The issue I have is about the conclusion that this is a result of this one thing, which is poor talent evaulation. I reject that conclusion and have examined it in depth and have confidence that any deficiencies in "results" is a function of many other variables and not scouts who make bad recommendations. If anything, I think the organization's scouting department is stronger than average.

Evaluating the quality of decisions on a per-pick basis makes much less sense. This is especially true when making a "per pick" judgment about prospects in any round past the first. People ignore what other teams did with their selections immediately following their team's first round selection. Was Gibson a bad pick? I can agree with your statement but would expand it to make it accurate: no major league team has drafted very well in the 21st century...and I can partially agree with your personal assessment that, were someone to do a credible analysis factoring in all the variables, the Twins would probably rank somewhere on one side or the other of average, both in terms of a qualitative measurement of their decisions and a quantitative measurement of their results, results of course being altered by uncontrollable factors like injury, individual lifestyle choices, etc. I disagree with your premature conclusion about 2015, and believe the 2011-2016 drafts will eventually be regarded as "better than average". Are you calling 2012-2014 complete whiffs? Or is simply mentioning Buxton Berrios, Duffey, Rogers, Chargois, Burdi, Bard, Melo, Granite, Slegers, Garver, Gonsalves, Gordon, Hildenberger, Curtiss, Reed along with the others dating all the way back to 2001 cherry-picking?

Let's examine this common thought of a successful draft netting a team 1.5 contributors, on average, and look back 15 years to 2001. Let's arbitrarily assign 3.0 WAR as the definition of a contributor. That's double FanGraph's number. Of the 15 drafts from 2001 through 2016, making extremely conservative assumptions about the last two drafts, 2011 stands out as the only draft that didn't produce a single contributor. There were four drafts where they got a single contributor. Using the standard of 3.0 WAR or better, by my quick calculations the Twins have averaged and are on pace to continue to average close to two players per draft. As many of you know, I have the reputation of pushing back at the draft resistors who like to claim incompetence on the part of the organization's scouting department. This, to me, is more evidence that they have not been terribly deficient historically. And even if they were slightly overmatched by a few competitors, there are some clear signs that things have improved, perhaps from strategy, spending and technology standpoints if nothing else. Mauer, Blackburn, Span, Crain, Neshek, Baker, Plouffe, Perkins, Swarzak, Garza, Slowey, Duensing, Tolleson, Valencia, Revere, Hicks, Gibson, Dozier, Rosario, Buxton, Berrios, Rogers, Duffey....and then from there we take the leap of faith to feel good about Gordon, Hildenberger, Garver, Gonsalves, Granite, Slegers, Curtiss, Reed Chargois, Bard, Melo, and the 2015 and 2016 collection. My own conclusion is that the recent drafts are going to be extremely productive for at least three reasons: 1) the selections were influenced by the same competent talent evaluators (scouts) that have been in place for a long time; 2) favorable draft order, and 3) a more sound draft strategy, greater internal discipline regarding the process, and probably better information-gathering due to the introduction of and use of the new information. That said, I think that 1.5 players/draft standard is raised and we should expect more like 2 or 2.5/draft on average going forward.

Cool. If we bring back all the ex-Twins, we have wiggle room if one of them isn't that good.

Concur. The last thing I want to see here is another veteran on a one-year, low cost, "low risk" deal and a couple more minor league signings. Go top shelf or don't go at all. And they can afford to pay up in free agency for that one bullpen stud.

So few other IFA prospects signed because Javier slurped up the pool. Probably no correlation to indy signings, although I think I noticed one or more taking up, er, occupying GCL roster spots?

Let's just hope this is the last year anyone considers it a victory to replace the -0.3 guy (Tonkin) with the +0.3 guy (Boshers).

We're all looking forward to a day when they're not desperately seeking these guys out mid-season to fill up a rotation as an emergency tactic. That takes some of the fun out of these guys' stories. I'm a bit uneasy about all the mid-season add-ons of older indy "prospects" in the low minors. The number of these signings seems to be much higher than during any season of Ryan's tenure, doesn't it? Are they making up for the Wander Javier year of few IFA signings? Are they replacing last year's crop of late-round choices, or this year's? What's the deal here? I won't hold my breath waiting for a beat writer to ask Brad Steil that question...

Terrific insight. Thanks.

It's funny how differently we can look at things. I don't think you've got this straight at all, twinstaker. This report bodes exceptionally well for the organization. In the entire minor league system, Seth looks at a single month of activity and points to 14 prospects who happened to excel during the month. Half of them are very exciting prospects. Akil Badoo, Wander Javier, and LaMont Wade, for example, have all been mentioned as borderline Top 100 prospects by various professional evaluators. People on TD have been clamoring for Mitch Garver to get his shot. Others have wondered why we're not talking a lot more about Jose Miranda and Andrew Bechtold. And then you have the one first-rounder among them, Royce Lewis, who is looking to be everything we expected. Oh, and most of these guys are young for their age at their current level. So I'm not sure why anyone's eyes would focus instead on a couple of older non-prospects and then once again promote the fallacy that the Twins are loading their Appy League roster with older guys while the rest of the league does something different. A couple of years ago, I fact-checked this. IIRC, there were about an equal number of years, looking back year by year, that ETown had a roster that was younger than league average rather than older. Anyone who chose to look at it objectively could clearly see that it was a function of what the evaluators decided made more sense during that year's draft, and in some years, we saw a larger influx of college players selected. I even spot checked a dozen games, looking at the starters for each team for that game, looking at age, draft order, and IP's. In that short stretch of games, during that year, I found that the ETown starter was more often younger, a later draft choice, and with fewer innings under his belt than his opponent. This might change year to year. But I call BS on this narrative that ETown only wins because it loads the system with college guys and that they play against a bunch of pimply-faced high-schoolers. ETown is now 26-15, third best in a ten-team league.

Can I have your binoculars?

This list is damning, no doubt. I have a theory about Falvine's mindset coming in to the job that explains but doesn't excuse either their assessment of the situation and their choices, and I believe both were flawed. I think they saw a 103 loss team and assumed things were a bigger mess across the board than they actually are. They've admitted they didn't anticipate this level of capability from the big club. Therefore, they aimed low with their roster choices for 2017. Vogelsong instead of Cashner for example. In retrospect, I'm sure at the end of the day when they put their feet up on the conference table and talk, they admit they should have signed Belisle and then aimed for someone higher than him instead of aiming lower and taking on Breslow. Some of us will judge them more harshly than others, of course, although we should probably keep in mind that our own majority assessment here at TD also was that things were a bigger mess than they actually are. Injuries in particular to May, Burdi, Chargois, Reed, and Jay simply magnified the problem created by their choices. So yes, they mis-assessed, and that led to regrettable choices. Proving they're fallible, which puts pressure on them to make up ground. I believe they're making up ground as we speak, with shrewd decisions regarding the three most important in-season events: the draft, IFA signings, and trade deadline moves. I'm personally very happy with the outcomes in all three areas. We'll see what happens this winter. For me, the icing on their redemption cake is that the pipeline wasn't compromised. I always cut the GM more slack than a lot of you. In predictable form, I contend their assessment was erroneous but understandably so, and their choices, especially regarding the pen, were Ryanesque, and that's not good. I forgive them for Vogelsong and Tepesch.

Yeah, I think the IFA signing period starts on July 2 and runs for a year, with only those prospects who had reached the qualifying age eligible to be signed immediately. Having some dry powder to go after one or two more promising prospects might be huge, especially this hunting season, although we'll probably have a hard time figuring out how they applied the money out there. I really like the Kintzler trade, enough maybe to forgive Falvine for pulling a Ryan over the winter regarding the bullpen. In addition to the IFA opportunity(ies), I'm not so sure we're appreciating this Tyler Watson piece enough. My guy Sickles described him in fairly glowing terms pre-season as "a highly intriguing prospect with breakthrough potential." Despite "only" giving him a Felix Jorge-like C+ grade, he gave Watson his Sleeper Alert label, and it looks as if he's spot on in his assessment. So, the guy's stock should be on the rise somewhat, and he already ranked #14 in the National's system despite being 3 years away. So yes, he'll probably wash out at AAA like most guys who are described in glowing term like this, but maybe he's an outlier. As an aside I wonder if the board isn't a bit under-appreciative as well of both Littell and Moya. And remember, these two gets are for Kintzler, and I'm with thrylos here in viewing Kintzler's real value as that of a rental setup guy. Losing him won't detract much from my enjoyment of watching this team play, and I'm not of the belief that the quality of ball we're going to see the remainder of the season has just taken a nosedive with the subtractions of Garcia and Kintzler. I don't know who it's gonna be, but I'm not anticipating this big drop-off. Maybe Busenitz, Curtiss, Reed, Gee, Slegers come up and plug in much like Hildenberger has done this year.

Yeah, markos, that's why I'm a proponent of always being a conditional seller at the deadline 1) from your surplus; 2) for a price you have set or for more (an overpay) and never less; and 3) for prospects whose price (future value) is discounted because of the risks associated with being a ways from MLB.

Yeah, I thought that was interesting. Pre-season, Sickles graded Ynoa as B-/C+, and he was so-so in ETown. He graded both Enns and Littel as C+ and described the whole group of prospects in the C+ category for the Yankees as being especially "interesting". Obviously, Littell in particular appears to possibly be breaking out. I contrasted it against what the Sox got for Melky Cabrera, a C+ prospect, A.J. Puckett, whose stock is trending in the opposite direction, and another guy who didn't even garner a C grade from Sickels in a weak system. A cursory look at this comparison gives me a good feeling about this transaction. I hope these kinds of incremental baseball moves are a constant ingredient in Falvine's recipe.