bird

"And yet despite having a consistently bottom tier farm they keep finding ways to make big trades. People make WAY too much of their bad farm." Maybe we need to re-phrase this: Despite having a bottom tier farm system, they kept finding ways to make big trades. But alas, after trading 6 of last year's top 10 prospects, their system has now hit rock bottom, and it's not even close. Their best prospect, Derek Hill, was ranked #98 by Baseball Prospectus ( a slot ahead of our 8th best prospect Burdi) on the strength of his athleticism, despite very serious questions about his hit tool. He might not fetch more than a #4-5 starter at this point in time. So, now with an aging roster and almost no trade chips, free agency is Dombrowski's only source for a "quick fix". If they get "unlucky" again in 2015 and have a few of their key aging vets performing below expectations, Dombrowski's options are down to about...none, really. Their best prospects are now Buck Farmer, Steve Moya, and Hill, not Jacob Turner, Cameron Maybin and Andrew Miller. They have to stay healthy to win the division, IMO.

Yeah, if Stauffer gives us a better chance to win than all of those four guys and Nolasco, I'm moving to Chicago.

I was looking at a 2009 spreadsheet of "derivative" (whatever THAT means) lists. Say, looking at your non-derivative list from 2010, I had Trevor Plouffe and Tobias Streich flip-flopped at #'s 19 and 20, although it was a close call for me.

You're absolutely right about how thin the cows were back then, Thrylos. But actually Swarzak was the consensus top-ranked pitcher then, followed by the incomparable Shooter Hunt. Mijares was a distant third. The following pitchers were also in someone's top ten at the time: Mulvey, Delaney, Manship, Slama, Guttierrez, Robertson, Deolis Guerra, and Bromberg. McCardell, Duensing, Humber, and Lanigan also got higher ranks than DeVries, who at least outranked Alex Burnett, for God's sake. And Thry, you were the only one in the Milky Way Galaxy to rank PEDRO Guerra back then. . Just sayin'. Oswaldo Arcia and Josmil Pinto were not ranked by anyone. Just sayin'.

It's fair to say the Twins have favored vets over youngsters in their recent history in close contests. One could argue it's been misguided at times, but it wouldn't be fair to say they've been "lost in the wilderness" misguided, although we know we'll certainly hear more of that as we move along in spring training. I'm hoping for a close contest, and I'm hoping May comes in and wins it. I also think at least two slots are up for grabs, that they mean it when they say Nolasco will have to convince them he's a better option than Meyer, Milone, May, and Pelfrey. He might not be. I won't predict how it's going to play out. Instead, I predict that Verlander, Sanchez, and Price all come up lame, and Detroit's back-end guys make them lust for PJ Walters. They call up their two B- pitching prospects, and then turn to the first-place Twins, relinquishing their two remaining B- prospects to us in exchange for.... Nolasco.

I believe his mom was in ballot, not skating. Yeah, I think that's right, gunnarthor. I heard she was in charge of re-affixing the chads to the ballots down there.

Valid point. Also, DeVries and Fox WERE in fact ranked prospects at one point. DeVries was a mid-20's ranked prospect in AA by some. By the time Fox got to AA, the bloom was off the rose for him because of his injury problems. Granted, the farm system was an about-average one back then.

He musta already switched. To Milk Wave Lilt. Look it up, children. It really existed.

I'm intrigued that Joe swung at a whopping 9% of first pitches. I have allergies that prevent me from doing a lot of counting, and I admit it felt like a lower percentage. My question is, of the 91% of pitches he chose not to swing at, what percentage of those were called strikes? The other question I have is, if he's not very good at getting air under the ball when he pulls it, why can't he get better at it?

To be more specific, Detroit has two pitchers, Farmer and Kubitz, at one grade level above Duffey and Reed. Detroit has a TOTAL of four prospects at that B- level, and zero prospects graded higher than B-. I think it's probably safe to say that both Reed and Duffey would slide into Detroit's top 10, certainly top 12, but not necessarily in some other systems. In terms of the grades in our division, the SOX have 6 prospects graded higher than C+, the Indians 9, the Royals 7, the Tigers 4, and the Twins 14. The Twins have 5 prospects graded at B+ and above, the Royals 2, Indians 3, Sox 2, Detroit 0.

Sickels provides Grades, along with his rankings. By my count, there are 13 pitchers with a grade of C+ or higher. You didn't miss anyone as far as his rankings.

The Tigers have two pitching prospects (Farmer and Kubitz, also a Rice product, B-) graded a notch higher than Reed and Duffey (both C+), according to Sickels. They are the #2 and #3 prospects for them, I think. Of course, the Twins have twelve pitchers graded as high or higher than Reed and Duffey.

I believe he'd shot the picture tube out on the RCA with his deer rifle well before then.

Health will likely be the determining factor for them. If they lose any two of Verlander, Sanchez, Price, Cabrera, or Martinez to injury, the door is wide open, and if they lose two of these guys from either the mound or the plate, they could crater.

What's a sub-comment?

Terrific stuff, jay, thank you! I think your methodology, and the review of more years, makes this an extremely credible and completely honest analysis. That the Twins have middling results during this time frame doesn't surprise me. As I mentioned in the last thread, it's my belief that Carl Pohlad is in some large part responsible for these results. Despite being lobbied regularly about increasing the budget for scouting and player development, IIRC he acquiesced only a couple of times in any significant fashion, and those times pretty much coincided with increased revenue sharing in the first instance, and the luxury tax, which was agreed to in 2002, the next time around. And that was when they ramped up to build out the Latin American academies and bring on scouting personnel to belatedly establish a beachhead in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, which Smith headed up. Other factors are certainly a part of the explanation too. For example, as tobi suggests, perhaps it was a conscious and misguided decision to not draft HS pitchers, we don't know. It sure would be nice if we could get Ryan, Johnson, and Radcliffe to sit down with Parker, jay, Bonnes, and some of the rest of our very knowledgable TD members for an open discussion of what went on and what changes have taken place during this period and since. Personally, I think we'd come away with a fairly upbeat assessment of the knowledge and skill levels in place at Target Field.

Yes, I vaguely recall that sense of rivalry as being a real thing for my dad and grandparents, all of whom probably hated Minneapolis as much as they hated baseball. For my poor mother, there were bigger fish to fry. For at least 20 years, there was a clipping from Letters to the Editor of the Pioneer Press taped to the refrigerator, penned by my mom after a decision was made to close down the Pig's Eye Landfill in an austerity move. It read: "Thanks a lot for shutting down the Pig's Eye Landfill. My husband and I used to go there every weekend. Now we don't go anywhere at all." Sorry about the threadjack.

That's kinda how I see it too. KC could surprise if any of their stud pitchers comes through and Kendry, Moose, and Hosmer all have really solid years. If the wrong three players get hurt for Detroit? T-I-M-B-E-R!!!!

I had to put the covers and my pillow over my head and keep the volume way down on my Philco transistor radio, a secret purchase from my paper route money. My dad absolutely hated baseball, which he considered a drain on our gross national product. But I wasn't about to miss a game pitched by Camilo Pascual.

Carl Pohlad deserves almost all of the criticism for the past under-performing scouting and development infrastructure, and Calvin deserves the rest. Andy MacPhail, Jim Pohlad and others were unable to convince him to increase the budget prior to revenue-sharing. They tried hard. When they finally got his blessing to build up personnel and facilities and increase their focus in Latin America, Smith was put in charge of the academy piece, and I recall him saying it would take a decade before the new scouts had developed strong enough connections, etc. to get them in a position to go head to head for talent against the teams with established beachheads. Back in those days, the talent was even more controlled by agents than nowadays. Things are different now, and there's no excuse for being below average in terms of draft results any more. But still, when we compare results, if we're including selections 10 picks ahead or 10 picks behind the Twin's selection in any given year, we're creating a muddled picture, in my opinion. Also, we're doing the same if we don't give a mulligan to teams when injury dooms a prospect. The Cards lost Tavaras to an auto accident. Does that make them a worse drafter?

I hope you regard this as friendly push-back, mike. I will suggest that you, as much as anyone who regularly posts on TD, is arguing something other than outcomes. I think there's a pretty broad albeit imperfect consensus that these drafts didn't produce great outcomes. The discussion I'm following on here is tuned to questions about why the outcome was what it was to-date, and how it compares. Some of us are wondering whether, were the analysis focused more narrowly on a peer group that removes some of the noise related to draft position, if the relative outcomes would be much different. That's why I would suggest looking at the third of teams whose draft position in a given year more closely matched up with our own. Wouldn't that provide us with a better understanding? I've been closely following and participating in discussions, and some arguments as well, about the question of whether the Twins are awful at drafting for years. Quite honestly, it's really rare that someone says the Twins are exceptional at drafting, and it's practically a daily occurrence that someone makes the statement that they're poor at it. I push back hard when someone asserts that they're lousy at it, but I also don't believe they're superior drafters either. I see evidence that draft position is an incredibly dominant factor and that health and luck are also key determinants that make simply looking at outcomes and comparing them to the entire universe to be a bit of a garbage-in garbage-out exercise. This is the closest any discussion I've witnessed here has come to answering the question of whether the Twins have in recent history been any good at the process relative to their peers. As usual, Parker has done a great job, and to HIS credit, he hasn't drawn conclusions that reach way way beyond the analysis itself.

That was interesting stuff, tobi. It points out the very high bust rate, but it also suggests to me that we could likely go out to most other organization's version of TD and find a thread like this one, with the same premise that the home team produced poor results from the draft during this period. Hopefully, we can take this a step further as a community and generate an honest appraisal of how our organization fared compared to others facing the most similar opportunity in each of these particular drafts, and thereby either confirm or dispel the notion that the Twins are other really lousy at this business of acquiring raw talent or maybe not so bad after all.

I guess I'm one of those guys who sees that some things went wrong during the drafts from 2006 through 2011, but I'm still very skeptical that what went wrong for the Twins during that period is so very different from what went wrong for other organizations that faced the most similar set of circumstances in each of those very different drafts. My first suggestion would be to limit the evaluation of each of those years to the five teams that drafted in front of the Twins and the five that drafted immediately after them. Then, throw out the supplemental picks. Third, toss out injury casualties. Last, include as a surrogate first-rounder each team's highest-cost international signing from the year being reviewed. The questions I would love to have truthful answers to are: 1) why was their success limited in any given draft year; 2) are there patterns that we can confidently say were in place; 3) are there steps that could have and/or have been taken to remove the causes of any deficiency of judgment; 4) relative to other teams whose draft position most closely mirrored ours, how did we fare; and 5) what was different about the 2014 draft process from the 2011 draft process?

I agree with this. On paper, even if 75% of the good things happen in terms of avoiding regression, emerging production from youngsters, and rebounding performance from vets, the four other teams still look a little better on paper. But injuries and disappointments happen for other teams too. If Detroit is forced to go with Buck Farmer and Lobstein in the rotation because of injuries, for example...

Or, maybe they have a really terrific fundamental understanding of strategy but have bigger fish to fry right now. Like making sure all these new, immensely talented players learn how to be team players and accountable professionals. If Buxton, Hicks, Rosario, and the like are roaming the outfield in less than a year and they have a top tier OF defense, are you going to conclude that they suddenly gained a fundamental understanding of strategy? Levi believes, I think, that the Twins don't fully appreciate the value of good outfield defense. That's a reasonable point of view.