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Beast

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Everything posted by Beast

  1. Beast
    This isn’t a top 10 roster in the MLB, IMO. We lost two significant rotation pieces (Gray and Maeda), one of which was the Cy Young runner-up, one of the best defensive CFs in the game (Taylor, for now), we’re replacing Polanco and Solano with Santana, who is much less defensively versatile, and we have some heavy regression candidates (Wallner, Julien, Lewis, Jeffers). This could be offset somewhat by bounce back seasons from Buxton, Correa, and Miranda. This team was borderline top 10 last year, and the roster is significantly worse this year. Just in the AL, Seattle, Texas, Houston, New York, Baltimore, and Toronto are clearly better rosters. Tampa is always right there. If Boston trades for Cease, they have an argument (and let’s be honest, would likely win the Central). Detroit keeps getting better and is knocking on the door. We’re not that far off from falling out of the top 10 in the AL. That’s not considering the Braves, Dodgers, Phillies, Reds, Giants, D Backs, and likely a couple more better rosters in the NL. There’s a lot of work to before this is a top 10 roster in the MLB. Edit: We are #17 on the MLB.com 2024 power rankings, behind teams like the Cubs, Mets, Brewers. One spot ahead of the Cards, which is debatable. At this point, that ranking is largely based on perceived quality of the roster.
  2. Beast
    That’s where Boras and the unions aren’t really representing the player. They’re worried about the upper end of the distribution. They don’t care about the player that washed out at the big league level and now has to sell insurance or work construction. That’s where you need to have a conversation with out the agent somehow. $25 million dollars is life changing money that ripples down multiple generations of your family if handled properly. Also, these deals only bring a player through arbitration. It’s not buying out your entire career. You turn into star, you’re still going to make hundreds of millions after this deal. But, if you don’t, which you probably won’t. You’re still taken care of. A player that makes hundreds of millions is maybe sacrificing an additional $50-$100 million tops? But, you’re really buying insurance in the event you turn into Miguel Sano, Jason Kubel, etc. If I’m Lewis, I just all over a good deal right now. High upside with him, but also huge injury risk. He’s more likely to be medically retired at the end of arbitration than be on a 10 year, $40M per deal. $10 million from the draft is nice. $40 million from the draft and an arbitration buyout contract is better. Take the money, use half to buy up farmland or other prime real estate, and never worry about working a day in your life no matter what happens on/off the field.
  3. Beast
    Brilliant move for teams that have to pay a premium to attract big time talent, or refuse to spend an amount requisite to compete with teams willing to pay whatever it takes to win. We’ve seen it here for decades now. A handful of prospects graduating at a time - the rest of the roster is a bunch of garbage AAAA filler. Scared to start arbitration clocks. Guys who succeed quickly become too expensive and walk or get traded. You just cannot succeed like that. It takes every star in the galaxy to align perfectly just to make it to playoffs in most divisions. Winning a playoff series might happen once every couple of decades, and the window immediately slams shut. This may be a middle ground where you can accumulate enough talent to sustain something. You’re not trying to plan around future arbitration numbers of big time prospects. You maybe buy some goodwill with the player/agent instead of haggling over a $1M in arbitration If it doesn’t work out for the team but the player succeeds, you have huge trade value. If it doesn’t work out for the player, oh well, the team was going to stink anyway. You’re actively trying to find a route to success instead of being paralyzed by the fear of failure which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  4. Beast
    Unreal how low the bar is in this organization. Guy doesn’t have a big free agent signing or trade deadline acquisition to his name, thus won absolutely nothing in his career except for a bunch of empty division titles. He only kept his job as long as he did because he was the face of Pohlads desire to keep the payroll as low as humanly possible. He wouldn’t have lasted more than a few years in an organization that prioritized winning. He wasn’t there for it all, but his blueprint has a strong claim on the fault for the longest playoff losing streak in the history of sports. Great guy, I’m sure. But, come on.
  5. Beast
    Stop pinning the cuts on the TV deal alone. This is merely the excuse the Pohlads were waiting for. Show you’re a serious franchise that puts out a good, entertaining product that fans demand to watch, and the TV deals will pile up outside your door. Instead, they choose to cut every corner possible to maximize their lined pockets and try to contrive these carrots on sticks to trick fans into tagging along. It’s tiresome and a huge percentage a fans are getting fed up with it.
  6. Beast
    Dude, they lost the Cy Young runner up, and every player on the top 5 of your WAR list is a hard regression candidate. Michael Taylor was massively instrumental in the regular season “success.” He’s gone. You think we’re fine because we have Matt Wallner and Alex K, who couldn’t hit a beachball when it mattered in the playoffs? And you think Carlos Correa had little to do with teams success? And you think the article operated on a flawed premise? Griffin Jax had some good moments, especially in the playoffs, but there was about a month of the season where he was disaster and blew a bunch of games. Joe Ryan was absolutely awful for 2 months, and wasn’t trusted for more than one inning in the playoffs. Kody Funderburk? That’s who we’re going to tout as a championship foundation piece? Whatever helps fans sleep at night, I guess. Gotta rationalize it somehow. If you can’t see at this point that Twins ownership is “cheap,” I don’t know what to tell you. The Blue Jays just found a way to be competitive in the Ohtani sweepstakes - and here we are comparing ourselves to the Rays and As, and lamenting that we won’t even spend $10M on a backup OF. This team is much more likely to regress and miss the playoffs altogether than take any kind of step forward. The likelihood of those two scenarios isn’t even close. Forget about winning a playoff series or anything beyond. Zero chance. The Pohlads deserve for that stadium to have nothing but tumbleweeds blowing around. Any other business behaves this way and people are up in arms. Price gouging $15 beers while refusing to invest in a quality product….it’s shameful that people not only put up with it, but openly support and in some cases praise them for it. It’s Stockholm syndrome.
  7. Beast
    If this team refuses to bring players, they better not be scared to use some of these prospects. If they don’t sign anybody, and try to run out a bunch of AAAA stopgaps all year, just shut this thing down. It would be the final coffin mail in terms of displaying they have zero interest in winning.
  8. Beast
    Cease and Gray aren’t even on the same planet in terms of value. Cease has one more year of term of control than Lopez did when we acquired him, has better raw stuff, and has shown a higher upside. He definitely holds more value than Lopez at the time of that acquisition.
  9. Beast
    Cease is a Cy Young caliber starter. He has lower HR/9 and higher K/9 than Parle Lopez. He’s pitched 50 more innings than Lopez in the past 3 years. The high end of his ERA+ is 180 vs. Lopez 138 (was 117 last year with the Twins). His low ERA is 2.20 in 184 innings vs. Lopez 3.07 in 102 innings. Lopez has never broken 3 WAR until last season’s 3.3. Cease has done it twice; with a high of 6.4, which led the league. You want someone better than Cease? There is nobody better that’s available. Certainly not anybody that’s making less than $10M and under team control through 2025. This team is willing to shell out zero dollars to anybody right now. Cease’s FIP last year (3.72) is almost identical to Lopez’s his last year in Miami (3.71). You can’t just look at his ERA with the hapless White Sox. Despite his “down” performance last year, he was still 8 RAA (Lopez was 16, and were crowning him best pitcher in history). Pablo has never broken 20 RAA - Cease was 40 RAA in 2022. They have an identical career WAR, with Cease having over a full season less of service time. If they can fine tune Cease pitch mix and tighten up his walk rate here like they did Lopez, he’s the second best starter we’ve had in decades - maybe ever - behind Johan. He’s an 11-12 K/9 hammer at the front end of the rotation and an annual short lister for the Cy Young. His ceiling is the ability to put together one of the best starting pitching seasons in modern baseball history. Lopez is great, and I love him as a pitcher. But, he’s a rung below Cease in terms of ability, and Cease will be making half the salary Lopez will be through 2025. I’d give any of our prospects for Cease. He’s an absolute monster. Zero chance of it happening, but it would change how I feel about the team right now and the cheap Pohlads throwing a wet blanket on the momentum we built last year.
  10. Beast
    Signing washed up pitchers to minor league deals is the opposite of intriguing.
  11. Beast
    He’ll never be as good as either at their peak. Hopefully he doesn’t hit their lows. It’s entertaining to see the comments on disliking Sano because he wasted his career by being lazy. What a thing to say about somebody without knowing them. All the talk about not being able to control weight from people who likely understand that issue all too well. Never seen such vitriol directed at somebody like him, it’s strange. You never hear anyone talking that way about Marty Cordova, Jason Kubel, Oswaldo Arcia, or any other number of highly touted prospects that didn’t live up to the hype. The guy had a career OPS over .800 and OPS+ of .116. Hit 162 HRs in 2502 ABs. Multiple 30 HR seasons. He wasn’t that bad. He got jerked around and idiotically asked to play the outfield. He sustained a serious stress fracture that requires a rod in his leg. Can we just move on from these ridiculous talking points about laziness and weight every time he comes up? It’s just gross.
  12. Beast
    $100-$125 million? Fans should boycott if that’s the budget. Probably will be a lot that do naturally because the product will be unwatchable. I don’t care what the TV deal is. That’s how you get a dead-ass team, and only a handful of dead-ass fans in an empty stadium. Why fans just accept this as “Oh well, Ownership needs to make theirs too,” is so strange to me. Any other business on the planet refuses to take a risk by investing in a quality product people don’t buy the product. And shouldn’t. Here, they’re lauded. I just don’t get how more aren’t fed up with this ownership group treating the team like their personal annuity fund, while the Blue Jays (no better market than here) were just about to spend $700M on Ohtani. A bigger lie has never been perpetrated, and believed, by a customer base than what we’re seeing here. This is not necessary.
  13. Beast
    Say what you want about Bremer and Blyleven, but they’ll never be replaced. Bremer had an iconic voice, endless stories that catered to Minnesotans, and an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball history. Blyleven was a loose cannon who never seemed to know when he was and wasn’t on air. And the circle me thing, as much as some hate it, was one of the most successful gimmicks from a broadcaster to generate fan involvement in the league. Morneau just feels forced. I’ve never been a fan of Provus. He’s somehow monotone and annoying try-hard Casey Casum radio voice simultaneously. Bright side, they may be able to sell some of the broadcasts to a sleep assistance app to make up for the TV revenue that’s already torpedoed the season before it started.
  14. Beast
    A lot of teams ahead of them have made attempts to make their teams better. The Twins have gotten significantly worse. And, as in the spirit of the article, a lot of players performed at an unsustainable level.
  15. Beast
    I’d put Lewis and Wallner pretty high on the list.
  16. Beast
    Chisel them into the rotation in stone. No need for external help. That would cost money. What could go wrong?
  17. Beast
    Not bringing in a better starter and needing Varland in the rotation is malpractice. Choosing to slash payroll with a group of up and coming young players developing a taste for winning is malpractice. This FO and ownership group employ malpractice as their MO. They seemingly do what they can to make sure this team is incapable of winning a World Series. Using a home run plagued back of the rotation starter in the bullpen, where he is clearly most effective, is the least of the issues. It is non-issue that has almost zero impact on whether this is a good baseball team.
  18. Beast
    I get what you’re saying, but it’s not in a vacuum. That’s where these stats lose some applicability in some cases. There is middle ground (which is lost on most people, in most topics, these days). Its completely unreasonable to say your approach should be the same in the 3rd inning, 0-0 game, runner on 1st, 2 outs vs. 8th inning, 0-0 game, runner on 3rd, 1 out. Any reasonable person would agree. As I said, it’s a viable strategy over a large enough sample. Samples are also statistically different and are weighted differently. 1 set of 162 games isn’t the same as dozens of separate sets of 7 game playoff series. What’s a large enough sample? How much data is actually there? What is the context of the HRs vs. Ks? Who were the players/pitchers involved?How many is these events occurred in a specific situation? (Example, tie game, runner on 3rd, 1 out, bottom 8). Who is at the plate? Clearly there’s a difference in Carlos Correa vs. Willy Castro. I agree with the premise in general. But, it’s clearly more statistically nuanced than just saying swinging for the fences all the time leads to more playoff wins. There are situations when it doesn’t make sense. And, no, Falvey’s generalized statistics don’t disprove that. And, yes, not hitting with RISP is a failure by the hitters by definition. Doesn’t matter who you’re hitting against. You can’t say, “this is the strategy to win a championship, except when you’re facing better players.” Then, you’re just not good enough to win a championship and the underlying stats and strategies don’t matter no matter what you’re doing. It’s the MLB playoffs, you’re a spending a lot of time hitting against the best pitchers. Which. Further reinforces that sometimes you just sacrifice a potential 500 ft. HR to manufacture a run. I don’t think these takes are in any way unreasonable or statically invalid. I’m actually agreeing that it should be employed….just maybe a slightly more limited basis depending on the situation.
  19. Beast
    Depends. It’s a viable strategy over a long season. But, we saw how well it worked out in the playoffs. You still have to be able play fundamental baseball, move runners over, etc. We couldn’t do that and struck out too often with RISP. It cost us the series. Some of these metrics and stats are great. But, you also need situational context. Theory is one thing, real life with human elements is another.
  20. Beast
    What offensive depth? We couldn’t score a damn run in the playoffs when we needed to. Willy Castro was taking pinch hit ABs in the playoffs. We have no idea what we have in Wallner right now. Larnach isn’t good. Polanco, Lewis and Buxton can’t stay healthy. People wanted to DFA Kepler last July. Lee hasn’t played especially well at AAA and Rodriguez hasn’t played a game above AAA. We don’t really have another prospect that’s a difference maker and close to the big leagues. We don’t have a good offense. The way I see it, we have two known commodities right now: Correa and Julien. There are big question marks attached to everyone else. We have the opposite of depth.
  21. Beast
    You’d have be an insane person to accept Jeffers, Polanco, and Larnach. The other two options are certainly intriguing. Wallner and Lee would be my preferred option over Julien and Rodriguez. Im not a huge Wallner fan right now. He had a dynamic start to his career, but then the league caught up with him and he was unplayable in the playoffs. Capitalizing on the value he has now is a great idea, IMO. Lee is obviously a nice prospect, but seems to be a bit of a tweener in many categories. Fine defensively, but not a high-end defender and likely won’t stick at short. Good hitter, but not tearing the cover off the ball (.814 career OPS with .459 career slugging in the minors). With Lewis, Correa, and Julien entrenched in the positions he’s likely to play, and Julien looking like a monster….where do you put him? He’s not a good enough athlete to play OF. I also feel like his value is somewhat likely to be the highest it ever will be. I absolutely love Julien. Absolute stud at the plate. 130 OPS+. 16 HRs and 16 2B in 400 PAs. Came up huge in the playoffs (Lewis got all of the attention and accolades, but Julien was a monster). He should be in the 1-2 hole in the lineup indefinitely. There’s something special about Rodriguez. There are some serious tools there. Power, speed, eye at the plate, arm strength. He seems to have all of these high ceiling attributes, where Lee is more limited physically. Rodriguez has elite, top 5 overall prospect upside, whereas it feels like we’ve already seen Lee’s upside. Scouting reports for Rodriguez are centered around explosiveness, raw power, exit velocity, etc. Lee’s seem to be centered around contact, polish, instincts, fringe athlete. Seems to me that Rodriguez has real organization changing star potential and Lee is more of a solid, low floor role player destined for long but unspectacular career. Given the Twins organizational approach, I can’t give away a guy like Rodriguez. Oh, and Rodriguez is only 20, where Lee is 22.
  22. Beast
    Correa is a really good hitter when healthy, but he’s not one of baseball’s best hitter. Lewis won’t sustain his astronomical level of production.
  23. Beast
    The Royals are now signing free agents to contracts that would be historic for the Twins, and the commentary is that it’s too expensive. Nothing like capitalizing on the minuscule amount of momentum they’ve created with the fan base after a decade plus of ineptitude. They should teach this as a case study in business schools for what not to do to grow a brand and improve/expand brand loyalty. Im sure the phones at the season ticket sales office are smoking hot right now.
  24. Beast
    Bailey Ober is a quality playoff option? In what universe? He gave up as many HRs and he had Ks against the Astros. He gave up 6 ER in 4.1 innings. He hasn’t shown even a glimmer of being a guy you can trust to hold down the best lineups in the league in a playoff game. He’s a fine back end started in the regular season for a team scratching and clawing to win the worst division in the history of baseball. But, he is not even in the ballpark of a quality playoff option. Joe Ryan is such a quality option that a team with 2 good starting pitchers allowed him to pitch 2 innings in one appearance in 6 playoff games. He gave up HRs at a higher rate than almost anybody in the MLB last year. You can’t be giving that guy starts in the playoffs and tell fans with a straight face you’re doing everything you can to win a World Series. Chris Paddack has started 5 games since 2021. His last two seasons was a regular starter (12 starts in 2020, 22 in 2021, he had a negative WAR and ERAs of 4.73 and 5.07. The Padres gave him a postseason start in 2020 and he gave up 8 hits and 6 runs in 2.1 innings. I get we want to be positive and all that. But believing we have more than 1 starter we can use in playoffs is based on nothing other blind, biased, unfounded, Hail Mary level hope. This is not a good starting rotation after Lopez. Maybe we just differ on the definition of “quality option.” If you mean guys that physically stand in the mound and throw pitches, I guess they’re quality options. My definition of quality is a guy that can go win you a playoff game without high end run support.
  25. Beast
    Pinning the success of the team on Buxton being healthy is just lunacy at this point. Anything you get from him is a bonus.
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