bird

Again, Billy Smith never followed any of these guys. He had zero influence on this. He has never once had an independent opinion about any of them. He didn't develop a relationship with any of these prospects' handlers. And in fact, the area scout who DID develop that relationship had much much more to do with the signing of the first contract, including the amount behind the dollar sign, than Billy Smith ever had. We could have substituted any FO type as a substitute player in this IFA process and gotten the exact same results. Billy Smith WAS a replacement player himself. But, I know, we want to believe differently. Billy Smith should get credit for his role in persuading his owner to increase the IFA budget a dozen years ago. He had much more than replacement value in that regard. It's in that context that I agree with you that Romero is yet another international prospect that is a product (in part) of Billy Smith's aggressive international efforts.

Wonder if his agent is trying to line him up with a mouthwash endorsement.

You're probably going to remain convinced that the system is weak despite the many opinions that run contrary to yours from people who study this stuff. But every system, the strong ones and the weak ones, have a prospect or two among their very highest-ranked that is raw like Kiriloff, who is described as having advanced skills for a HS prospect. Griffey was a consensus 1-1 selection. Kiriloff doesn't fit into this category. And yet, he advanced quickly to E-Town.

I'm with you on both points. Making questionable statistical comparisons is the common cold of TD. It's contagious as hell, and if we're here long enough, we're going to get the bug. But it's fun stuff. However, I'm very confident no one who's seen both Gordon and Vielma in action, and especially those who have coached them both, would draw a close comparison regarding their upside as MLB hitters. Thrylos wants us to believe that the Twins have perpetuated this "suburban legend" that Vielma is a bad hitter. I mean, why would they do that? No one from the Twins, at any level, has ever even hinted that this is the case, we can be sure of that. But I hope he's right that Vielma has offensive promise, all the statistical gibberish notwithstanding. And yet, it's nice to have Javier, Gordon, Polanco, and the new free agent from Milwaukee at various stages of readiness, all of whom are probably better bets than Vielma, as is a rebounding Escobar.

I can think of a million things that happened last year for which Molitor could apologize. This isn't one of them.

I don't interpret his statement in that way. He's not saying they used statistics to create a justification of either an opinion of a player or a decision about a prospect, is he? I think he's saying they plan to use more data. The purpose will be to verify the story on a prospect, not justify a decision, as you're suggesting. I agree, that would be damning, but I disagree that it ever happened. I doubt any organization drives its decisions about who to draft by pouring a bunch of stats onto a spreadsheet and sorting things by some statistical criteria. I believe they all eyeball the prospect, sniff around and ask questions, study video and available stats, analyze the kid's background, and all that good stuff, and that triggers the confidence to render an opinion. Isn't Sean Johnson simply saying they're going to use more metric data as a tool for greater scrutiny of the opinions they're forming? From what I see it's all good. They're just taking steps to take advantage of the available information better than was previously done.

Yeah, I'm really hoping everyone who enters the season as a "lock" is on display with plans to dangle them at the deadline and take any overpay they can get. As far as I'm concerned, trade all four of them if you can, but don't settle for garbage. Go for low minors talent that is discounted because of how far off they are from MLB. Hopefully they extract legitimate prospects for at least a couple of them. And then factoring in the inevitability of stints on the DL for at least three guys, I'm not particularly worried that Berrios and May are going to be denied an opportunity to scuffle through the season in the rotation for most of the year. I guess I'd be more interested in making sure the five more exciting prospects at AA are considered for aggressive advancement and not blocked to any great extent by the likes of Hurlbut, Vogelsong, Haley, Slegers, Wheeler, et al.

I miss the dodo bird. A lot.

Did they go over slot technically but not in spirit? Who cares? And I don't care if you believe they should have blown through the allotment and signed more prospects. I don't care if you think they would've signed Javier for $5M had their allotment been $4.85M. Or that they should've shoved more money in his agent's briefcase and gone way over slot on "principal". All I know is they had enough conviction about this kid to take the huge risk of limiting themselves to just him. That speaks volumes, does it not? Regardless of what perception you've formed in your mind about the quality of the Twin's evaluators, you need only look as far as Sano or Kepler to see that they've bet fairly big before on a few rare occasions and they don't regret it. This kid is an exciting prospect to have in the system if for no other reason (so far) than the enormity of the bet and the things scouts are saying about his tools ( although, taking tobi's cue, if I had a nickel for every prospect described as a five-tool prospect...)

I wonder if there's another prospect out there where the "problem" that needs to be "fixed" is any clearer and indisputable. On the surface that is. Everyone who follows him "knows" : that he 1) didn't concentrate solely on baseball until he began his professional career; 2) is working to harness command of his stuff; 3) throws some impressive stuff right now and has progressed at a very young age at an acceptable pace with at least decent results in all categories except BB/K stats. So, the polarity of opinion about his upside is really exclusively about the one thing. Some don't like him much because of what they "saw", while others don't like him much because they forecast that this will not change, and still others, fewer in number this season, believe he will eventually overcome the command issues and become a decent MLB starter. I'm tired of the reiteration of the problem and am looking for signs that point specifically to details about steps in his development process that are being taken to address this singular problem. If in fact it is as singular and clear-cut as people describe it.

This list doesn't signal a relative strength or relative weakness in the pipeline. It simply tells us where we are in the cycle. Sickles pretty much agrees with the consensus, from what I can see, other than perhaps holding off judgment about Wander Javier and maybe having a slightly lower opinion of Kohl Stewart than one or two other publishers. No surprises.

Can you repeat that?

That was an extremely insightful article by Ryan Isaac, so thanks, Vanimal. If I'm a GM, i'm spending very little time and energy fretting about finding an ace, but I'm also not letting opportunities slip by either, knowing they're infrequent. I'm focusing on a conviction that the 6th inning needs to be owned by my starters 80% of the time over the course of a season if I want to ensure elite performance from my 7-man pen. And I believe you need exceptional results now from your 7-8-9 inning guys, which means the Twin's relief core is, well, uninspiring to say the least. These days, it's a challenge to find starters who wouldn't be facing hitters for the 5th time by the time the 6th inning rolls around, especially when you're forced to deploy 10 starters over the course of a season. My thinking would be that the most practical way to reduce the stress which is the 6th inning would be as a first step to reduce the number of times I'm throwing someone out there, either a starter or reliever, who is just plain dreadful. And this means my focus is on building pitching depth at AAA as my line of defense. Finding truly elite pitchers over time, yes, but avoiding having starters that implode in the 2nd inning every third start comes first.

Knowing your thinking, Chief, if Buxton runs himself onto the DL, you have high conviction that Zack Granite and Tanner English are money in the bank.

It will be interesting to see if what we're seeing is an effort to improve defensively simply from a roster construction point of view. Let's see what the game day lineup looks like I guess, but I'd view it as an over-correction from a roster construction standpoint if Stubbs makes the roster and has a role as a defensive replacement in the OF. Castro is unarguably a defensive improvement over Suzuki regardless of how we rate his defense beyond pitch framing. It was perhaps the single most glaring position player weakness and FA was the best avenue to fix it, so they overpaid slightly perhaps. He'll make a difference on game day, and we'll see about Adrianza in that regard I suppose. Falvey was painted into a corner. The paint was wet when he was issued his employee badge and won't completely set until next off-season. In the meantime, we have to expect to see him reach out of the corner to try to fix problems. Because of this, I'm actually impressed with the Adrianza move and find the Stubbs signing to be a function of having rather limited options. I hope they cut him and maybe pick up a better 4th OF option when spring training casualties hit the market.

Apparently he and Bruno avoided each other.

I'm most encouraged by Falvey's language when it comes to individual goals and honest two-way communication about how to "close the gap." Thinking hard, I can't honestly recall a single in-depth article or interview where either a Twins pitching prospect or a Twins baseball person discussed having a development plan or training regimen customized for a player as part of an organizational initiative. Maybe the beat writers don't explore these things. But I think it's safe to say we're going to see some positive changes on the development front. Good news, and terrific article, Parker. Thank you once again.

You're absolutely right, jimmer. What were we thinking? Of course the Twins are idiots for passing on Trout. Why wouldn't we parse out blame for that mistake? The fact that almost every other team also passed on Trout has no bearing. Well, maybe because the Angels passed on him twice...double idiots? Or geez, I suppose we could blame ALL the teams for passing on Trout. Yeah. All the teams are idiots. That's the funny part. They've had bad drafts when they drafted higher and bad drafts when they drafted lower. Almost everybody acknowledges this. Really good ones too, like pretty much all teams do. Almost everybody acknowledges this too. So perhaps some of the excuse-making you think you're witnessing isn't that at all. There have been a ton of facts laid out in this thread that call your opinions into question about the quality of the Gibson decision. These comments aren't excuse-making. They're opposing opinions supported by facts and proper analysis. Mentioning that the Twins missed on Trout contributes nothing to any credible analysis. And in fact, mentioning it without putting it into proper context is a bit disingenuous, is it not?

Right, and maybe people would soften their criticism (then again, probably not lol) if they acknowledged that 10 pitchers taken in the 1st round of Wimmer's 2010 draft did not work out. Only four are working out, all unavailable to the Twins when Wimmers was selected. So no missed aces there. And only one of the next 10 players selected after Levi Michael in 2011 have drawn a MLB paycheck.

I guess I WISH that was their biggest failing, but it's not even a failing. Even with all the graduations and their refusal to cheat on the IFA front, their minor league pipeline is still viewed favorably by the experts, #11 ranking by KLAW for example. Of the five recent high draft choices, one is ineligible for the list but was high on the list in the past(Buxton), one is ON the list among a group of shortstops that might be as talented a collection as we've seen in MLB's entire history (Gordon). Two probably just missed. Kiriloff was the 4th outfielder chosen in the 2016 draft. His exclusion after his first pro season is hardly an indictment. Jay, converting from relief and dealing with injury, is hardly a clear example of failure. How many pitchers from his draft class are on the list? Stewart is a disappointment, welcome to the experience every team has once in awhile. But I also think that having fewer than about 3-4 names on a list like this is not a good sign.

KLAW's list includes both IFA's and drafted prospects. That's not to minimize the reality, which is that, at the present time, there are few APPARENT really high-end prospects ready to supplement the talent that's just being initiated into MLB. I think it's possible to point out that Sano, Buxton, Berrios, Kepler, Polanco, and maybe one or two others were high on these lists not long ago without discounting this. I also think it's fair to point out that maybe things aren't quite as dire as a stark look at the list might suggest. One would do this by pointing to just missed prospects like Jay, Gonsalves, and Stewart. And maybe for some of us the edge is taken off because we choose not to ignore, without being Pollyanna about it, that prospects like Kiriloff, Javier, Romero and Diaz might be a year away from making the list. Or that there are a few fallen angels who still have at least a chance of coming through, like Thorpe and Burdi. The list itself doesn't change by mentioning that players who never make these lists ultimately contribute for their teams, but I think it's fair to acknowledge that the Twins have no shortage of these kinds of guys, such as Chargois, Pressly, Duffey, etc. But the list can change quickly, and it very well could with a Dozier trade and with the 2017 draft. So, while the list is ugly, it's not an indication of hopelessness. To me, it points to how important it is for the current core of Sano, Buxton, Kepler, Berrios, Polanco, to become exceptional players.

The reason I'm happy about the regime change is because I don't believe it's possible anymore to do a whole lot better than the competition at drafting these days. The playing field has been evened out by many things, such as the ubiquitous availability of information and video, spending limits, recognition of the value of drafting well which has resulted in a more intense focus on the draft by all teams, including the wealthiest, improvements in development and coaching at lower levels, etc. Ryan's old "we can outwork the competition" thing is obsolete. I think we HAVE to manage and trade player assets better than we did under Ryan. It was his achilles heel IMO. But back to the draft, of course it makes sense to compare results against other teams that enjoyed similar advantages in a given draft, or had similar challenges. Otherwise, saying you're disappointed that they drafted someone rings kind of hollow, really. BTW, Gibson is one of the best results from the 2009 first round, period. Of the 21 players selected before Gibson and the 8 selected after Gibson in the first round, when only three or four of those selections are turning out to be superior and those were players unavailable to your team, I think it's okay to not like Gibson, but it's not very credible to call it anything but a good selection. Again, if someone from the 2009 draft is providing first-round production and yet was passed over in the first round by every team many times over in some cases, those draft decisions just don't serve as an indication of much. Looking at who was selected around the same slot as Gibson tells you a lot about the quality of that decision. People forget that if a team places 3 prospects in a top 100, that's about average. So, if the Twins are still placing about 4-5 on these lists despite having recently graduated more than a half-dozen top 100 prospects, I find it difficult to be terribly critical of scouting. I can quibble about draft strategy. I can question development. I find fault with managing and coaching. But when I look at and actually compare each draft thoroughly I don't see a deficiency. Missing on Benintendi (who I liked the idea of more than I liked the idea of Jay without having an opinion about which was a better choice), let alone Trout, doesn't serve as an example of poor scouting or poor judgment or of trying to be too cute.

Come on, jimmer. When every team in baseball passes on the best player in baseball, what does it tell you? What does that do to support your idea that the Twins got cute with Gibson, or your more general view about how lousy the Twins are at drafting prospects? Again, Gibson was passed over until the injury risk was acceptable. About a dozen teams who drafted in front of the Twins that year wish, in retrospect, that they had been so cute. It turns out the risk was acceptable and the pick was solid. Very solid. In fact, compared to almost every player taken 10 slots before or after Gibson, he was a real steal.

Your earlier point was the Gibson pick suggested the Twins were trying to be cute by finding a diamond in the rough. None of the subsequent exchange is doing anything to add credibility to that notion. The opposite is probably true. Whether one thinks maybe Paxton or Richards would have been a better pick than Gibson doesn't do a lot for me, especially when half the teams had a shot at then between the Twin's selection of Gibson and their selection. How would having selected, say, Richards, been less cute than selecting Gibson. Gibson was a perfectly fine pick in 2009 at #22, and despite our disappointment in him, he's proven to have been a fine selection relative to who else was selected in that range of the 2009 draft. If someone wants to argue that they goofed up by not taking Goldscmidt or someone, well, that's just nonsense. I mean, who didn't goof up by passing on Keuchel a bunch of times?

There should also be a law against mentioning later round picks, prospects every team passed on often many times over, as suggestive of anything at all.