Greggory Masterson

It's going to be a weird Twins offseason, let's talk about it. Lou, Cody, and Gregg break down what they see as the Twins biggest offseason needs, how they think they might fill them, and unleash some bold predictions. They also play a blind lineup, discuss the return of Backyard Baseball, and Gregg has TWO gripes. Listen using Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twins-off-daily-podcast/id1741266056 Listen using Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4tb78XlurcPTYYSsARdbD7 View full article

Put away your abaci, nerds. Willi Castro changes the definition of a replacement player. Image courtesy of © Matt Blewett-Imagn Images Okay, maybe “changes the definition” is a bit extreme, but stick with me here. A Willi Castro-type player alters team construction and decision-making in a way that’s unique to a small subset of players, even if he’s not an elite player in and of himself. The Twins have a decision ahead of them. It’s a decision that probably isn’t so tricky but for the apparent need to keep payroll tight ahead of 2025, but here we are. Willi Castro, their do-everything man, is due for about $6.2 million in arbitration, according to MLB Trade Rumors’ projections. Castro earned himself some recognition this season, being named an All-Star and a "finalist" for the Gold Glove at the utility position (whatever that means). He was about 5 percent better than the average hitter, starting more than 25 games at five different positions (including shortstop and center field). He led the team in both games played (158) and plate appearances (635). For the analytics wonks out there, FanGraphs had him at 3.1 WAR, and Baseball Reference had him at 1.6. He produced like a solid starter. The All-Star nod was based on his electric first half, and he saw a significant drop-off in the final three months of the year, but production is production. He’s not a great defender at shortstop or in center field, but he can play there well enough to get you by. He’s the quintessential 10th man, and there are few like him. Sure, there are players who can play multiple positions on every bench, but it’s rare to find one who can both hold his own at the plate and cover the more challenging positions. And that has ripple effects. First, he’s a starting-caliber player who can replace anyone. Should injuries (or ineffectiveness) happen at any position, Castro can cover that spot for weeks at a time, as he did in 2024 at second and third base, shortstop, and center field. There’s value in that, by itself. If a team’s best bench option is a utility infielder, that guy can’t cover center field. If the team has a solid corner outfielder on the bench, good luck teaching him third base. In such cases, teams have to skip over their top players for their second or third options. That’s not so with Castro. Even though Castro doesn’t play right field often or first base at all, all those positions require is a slide across the field from one of the team’s other starters. He can handle it everywhere else. You don’t have to skip over Castro to get to someone else. Second, Castro’s flexibility allows more creativity in bench construction. The modern four-man bench in MLB looks something like this: backup catcher, backup infielder, backup outfielder, free space. It's pretty straightforward with the backup outfielder and infielder—if the team loses a player in the infield, the bench guy comes in to take his spot or some sort of realignment, and it’s the same for the outfielder. In this setup, a massive part of who ends up on the bench for the team is coverage. There’s no hole one of those first three guys can’t fill. But what if one guy can cover both? That’s Castro (and a select group of other players in the majors, like Houston’s Mauricio Dubón). Because Castro can hit and play six and a half positions (like, I guess he’d play right field in an outfield alongside Austin Martin and Byron Buxton), a team now has two free spaces. If you want a big bench bat, go for it! A mostly platoon hitter? Why not! Carry both! You can justify a roster setup that you wouldn’t be able to without Castro being both your utility infielder and outfielder. The situational and functional effectiveness of the bench just went up. Note: Of course, this only works if the other role players on the bench also fulfill their bit roles and aren’t stretched past their capabilities (see M. Margot, Minnesota Twins, 2024). However, that’s true of all benches and roles. Form follows function and all that. In these cases, though, the positional component is reduced. The team has coverage. You don’t need to place as much emphasis on having a glove-first infielder as you would have otherwise. It would be nice to have a better option defensively up the middle, but Castro reduces that need and allows more roster construction flexibility. Third, and here we’re getting to the replacement player part (I know Chekhov’s Gun; I don’t leave those loose ends), Castro affects who the team’s replacements are. You know, those hypothetical replacement players freely available at Triple-A, or on waivers, or free agents, or whatever. With Castro, you get the pick of the litter. Let’s consider a 2025 hypothetical scenario. Royce Lewis, everyday second baseman, gets hurt. He needs to go on the IL. The top infield option for a call-up is Michael Helman. The top outfield option for a call-up is Emmanuel Rodriguez. Sight unseen, who would you prefer to get the call? Well, if your Kyle Farmer-type is moving into an everyday role, you probably want the infielder. Suppose your Willi Castro is moving to an everyday role. In that case, you might have some room for your top prospect to get some time in the outfield, taking Castro’s time out there now that that’s free, given that the initial plans would include him playing a little on the dirt, a little in the outfield, pinch running, platooning. After he’s tied down, there’s playing time everywhere else to be had. In truth, we never really saw how Castro’s versatility would have played out as a primary bench player, in which he would have time spread out around the diamond and been used situationally as he was in 2023 (see this Ben Clemens article on depth charts, if this stuff interests you). Instead, he was thrust into the starting lineup in the second game of the season after an injury to Lewis. And that’s the fourth effect. A Twins team that is as injury-prone as this one needs a Castro. Not every team relies on so much production from players who are injured so often, and to an extent, having a solid 10th man allows some risk-taking. That doesn’t show up in his statistics, but it’s another effect. A team with a strong bench or competent high-minors bats is tooled to withstand the injury bug better than the average team, and for the Twins, that’s not something that they can afford to forego. A team can only feasibly carry ten everyday players, but not every team can get to that number. A Castro-type makes that possible. Castro’s effects aren’t neatly summed up in a WAR number or stat line. Those still look nice, but some value is in the value that a player creates in the spots on the roster that they don’t occupy. It’s one of the reasons that Shohei Ohtani’s two-way abilities are so valuable, beyond his quantifiable production. His team has the freedom to do a little more with the spots around him. Note 2: If you read those last two sentences and think that it says “Willi Castro and Shohei Ohtani are equally valuable,” so help me. Naturally, none of this holds up if Castro is closer to the player that he was in the second half of 2024. Hopefully, any Castro decisions this offseason will be made based on how skilled the team believes he is, rather than the moderate sum he'll be owed. If there's a tiebreaker to be found, though, let it be the unmeasured value of the flexibility boost he provides. View full article

Another stellar piece of Friday Satire, Stu! You almost had me there!

This is something I considered going into a deeper discussion on. It seems like the position has been dropping off in recent years, perhaps because big plodding mashers just don’t cut it anymore for some reason or another. It’s reflected in the wRC+ for the position, in that 20 years ago 1st baseman were around 15-20% better hitters than league average but recently it’s more in the 107-115 range. That’s part of the reason I focused on the Twins’ rank at the position rather than the raw numbers. It’s understandable that not every team will have a guy who’s 2004 Shawn Green (126 wRC+, 10th among first basemen, minimum 200 PA) in modern baseball. But the Twins have gone 13 years without cracking the top 10, and their first basemen have tended to be more or less merely slightly above league-average hitters in their best years

It’s been how many years since a Twins’ first baseman was a middle-of-the-order bat? Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images I’m just going to cut to the chase: Justin Morneau in 2009. That’s the last time that a Twins’ primary first baseman has been a scary dude in the middle of a lineup. Seriously. Technically, Morneau was also a lethal bat in 2010, but because of the midseason concussion that cut short a potential MVP campaign and altered the course of his career, Michael Cuddyer technically logged more appearances at first base than Morneau did that year, and a 15-year drought sounds more significant than a measly 14-year drought. But whether you prefer to be technically right or technically wrong doesn’t matter; the first base situation does. First base is a place you can put nearly anyone—in theory. It’s the lowest position in the field on the defensive spectrum, meaning that the value of having a good defender there is lessened. You can get away with putting some schlub there that you wouldn’t dream about sticking in center field or at shortstop--or, to put it another way, you can take just about anyone who can play a passable center field, or third base, or catcher, and they're likely to be ok with the glove at first. As such, first base has historically been seen as a home for big bats. It’s a position that features players around whom a team builds their lineup. Since 2010, the average first baseman has been about 5 to 20% better than an average hitter, with very few years in which the position as a whole is less than 10% better than average. But for the Twins, it’s been closer to just another bat. The Twins have not been among the top 10 in MLB in first baseman OPS+ since a combination of an injury-riddled Morneau, Cuddyer, Luke Hughes, Chris Parmalee, Joe Mauer, and Trevor Plouffe ranked 10th in 2011. A Carlos Santana-led 2024 group (José Miranda and Alex Kirilloff both had a dozen appearances) nearly cracked the list, ranking 11th. But alas, Santana’s time as a Twin is likely over, and it would be difficult to count on a man in his age-39 season to match his age-38 production, even though his numbers weren’t eye-popping themselves. Santana was about 10 to 15% better than league-average as a hitter last season, and in a down year for first basemen (their lowest wRC+ as a group in decades: 107), that’s enough to almost propel the group into the top 10, but it’s still right around average for the position historically. Prior to Santana, the Twins spent a couple of years with a revolving door at first base. In 2023, Donovan Solano—a utility infielder—got a very slight majority of the time at first base, appearing in just over half of the team’s games (85). He was also about 10-15% better than an average hitter, which was average among first basemen that year. Kirilloff had a slightly better offensive year than Solano, but he was held to just 88 total games by injury, splitting his appearances between first base and the outfield. Joey Gallo also saw time there early in the season (when he was swinging the bat well), raising their level of production but not cracking the top 10. In 2022, Miranda played a plurality of games at first base (77 appearances), followed by Luis Arraez (65 appearances), and a dozen or so games from Miguel Sanó and Kirilloff. Despite good years from Miranda and Arraez, the group barely made it into the top 20 among the league’s first-base groups. Sanó was the primary first baseman in 2021 and 2020, and he clubbed 43 home runs in 170 games during that stretch (which included the 2020 shortened season), but he did little else, grading out as, at best, a league-average first baseman during that time—more of a sixth or seventh hitter in the order than a third or fourth—and the rest of the plate appearances went to a mediocre Kirilloff and Willains Astudillo performing like his post-2018 self. In 2019, everyone was hitting the ball across the league. Relative to the league, first-base production was a bit down, mostly because everyone was up. CJ Cron manned the position admirably until a thumb injury that substantially hampered his performance, as he had an .814 OPS before the injury and a .702 mark after it. In his absence, utility players Marwin González, Ehire Adrianza, and Astudillo got the lion’s share of the work, and they hit like utility players. Prior to those years, Mauer and Morneau held down the position. Both were (seemingly) held back by the brain trauma that they suffered in the earlier part of the decade. We don’t need to go back that far, but it ties the story together. This has been an ongoing problem. And looking forward, it’s unclear how exactly it’s fixed. The Twins are in a great position right now, with players like Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa providing good offense while playing defense-first spots and other players that the organization hopes can be relied on for offense, but they don’t have a full-time first baseman right now. On the current depth chart, infielders Miranda and Edouard Julien seem to be the heirs apparent. They are suboptimal defenders at third and second base, respectively, and show flashes of having plus bats that can rank among the top 10 first basemen in the league. However, both have been inconsistent early in their careers. Corner outfielders Matt Wallner and Trevor Larnach turned in good 2024 campaigns, and with the likes of top outfield prospect Emmanuel Rodriguez knocking on the door to the majors, it would be sensible to convert one of the two to first base, but the team has previously shown no interest. The former first baseman of the future, the oft-injured Kirilloff, has been inconsistent offensively and a poor defender, which has led to him being labeled a non-tender candidate this offseason. Right now, the position—the spot where offense should come the easiest—is in flux for the third straight offseason, with no clear internal fix and a seemingly limited payroll. Hypothetically, it should be an easy problem to fix, but the Twins have shown themselves incapable of finding a middle-of-the-order first-base bat for a decade now. Sometimes that can be offset by defense, like Santana in 2024 or Mauer in 2017, but for a team that has struggled to produce consistent offense in recent years, finding that big bat could be more vital than ever. View full article

It's an offseason... off-day? Sweet Lou and Ol Gregg kick off the offseason with a little of everything: takeaways from the final week of the season, discussion of what the core of this team is, and a check-in in on some of fans' free agent wish lists from a year ago. Lou also commandeers Greggory's Gripes and they answer a few listener questions. Listen using Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twins-off-daily-podcast/id1741266056 Listen using Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4tb78XlurcPTYYSsARdbD7 View full article

As the Sheriff prepares to ride once again, will it be into the Twin Cities? And will he be confined to the stables? Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images Chris Paddack and the Twins are at a crossroads. The Sheriff has, unfortunately, become a little redundant in this rotation. This town ain’t big enough for the six of them, if you will. Unlike a revolver, a rotation only has room for five. The Twins best get a wiggle on. Okay, I’ll do my best to refrain from engaging in Old West parlance. Paddack was acquired in a much-ballyhooed 2022 trade that sent future All-Star Brent Rooker and previous All-Star Taylor Rogers to San Diego. Alongside Paddack, the Twins received Emilio Pagan, a name not brought up around polite company. The Twins saw something in Paddack, who, as a greenhorn rookie in 2019, threw 140 innings to the tune of a 3.33 ERA (126 ERA+), striking out more than a batter per inning. His performance was lackluster in the 2020 shortened season (4.73 ERA) and didn’t improve in an injury-shortened 2021 (5.07 ERA), though his underlying metrics were far more favorable. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the Twins saw something in an injury-plagued player with team control and made a deal for him. He lasted all of five starts in 2022 prior to his maladies catching up with him, as he went under the knife for his second Tommy John surgery. Upon returning from the apothecary, he pitched in four games between the regular season and the playoffs, all out of the bullpen. In 2024, he opened the season as a rotation arm, making 17 starts before being shut down for the season after July. Normally, after six full seasons in the league Paddack would have been a free agent. However, the Twins signed him to a three-year, $12.5 million deal ahead of 2022 to pay him approximately $2.5 million per season as he came back from Tommy John and $7.5 for the final year, buying out a year of his free agency. And that’s how we’ve come to the place we are now. As the team continues to run a budget in the bottom third of the league, that $7.5 million contract looms large. It was a fair gamble at the time, and it’s at a price that Paddack could potentially go for on the open market, but it’s a questionable use of the team’s resources, especially with arms like Simeon Woods Richardson, David Festa, and Zebby Matthews who could arguably be better options than Paddack for a tenth of the price. The quick ascension of players like Matthews and Andrew Morris, as well as the resurgence of Woods Richardson’s prospect stock probably weren’t foreseen, either. So, let’s review the options. Keep Paddack in the Rotation This is the most straightforward move and the path of least resistance. Paddack could return to his place in the rotation, moving a younger starter out of the pitcher to begin the year. The most likely candidate to lose a spot would probably be Festa, as Woods Richardson has the longer track record, but Festa could be given the nod due to his higher ceiling. Either way, one of the two would be bumped (assuming that Matthews will finally be given a chance to get some Triple-A innings.) Although both Festa and Woods Richardson have impressed and seem destined for MLB careers, there’s precedent for these Twins to stash depth rotation arms, which are seen as MLB-ready in the minors to begin the year. This year, they had planned on keeping Louie Varland in St. Paul before the announcement that Anthony DeSclafani would not pitch in 2024. (At the time, many saw Varland as having some potential to be a rotation piece, and he had 15 starts under his belt). In 2023, they held Bailey Ober out of the rotation, which was far more egregious. So the Twins could open the season with a rotation of Pablo Lopez, Joe Ryan, Ober, Paddack, and Woods Richardson or Festa—with the other being the first line of defense against injury. They’d also have Zebby Matthews on call and other high-minors pitchers like Cory Lewis, Andrew Morris, and Marco Raya if the straits become too dire. This gambit might be getting too cute by half, and it could be argued that it’s time to hand the rotation over to the kids and reallocate those funds. At the same time, you can never have too much starting pitching depth. Move Paddack to the Bullpen What in tarnation? Paddack has a minimal history of bullpen work, coming out of the pen just five times in his MLB career. However, one was incredibly memorable: He recorded seven outs, struck out four, and allowed just one baserunner in Game 4 of the 2023 ALDS against Houston. He returned for the last couple of weeks of the season and pumped up his stuff in shorter bursts, and the stuff played. It wasn’t all success for him, as he did have an appearance where he gave up three runs in two innings during the regular season, but it was only one of his four outings. Paring down his pitch mix to an upper-90s fastball, a good changeup, and one of his breaking pitches could be a recipe for success one or two innings at a time, and it’s a role he was preparing for if the Twins reached the postseason in 2024. The bullpen may be his best chance at success for the rest of his career. Verily, he wouldn’t be expected to slot in among the top bullpen arms, at least until the team saw more from him. He’d also probably need some convincing, and if the team is worried about his salary as a starter, they’re definitely going to be wary of paying him $7.5 million to come out of the bullpen. Trade Paddack If the Twins don’t see him as worth the (admittedly paltry) sum he’s owed in the rotation or bullpen, the last resort would be to get rid of him. $7.5 million isn’t an unreasonable salary for one year of an up-and-down, injury-plagued pitcher still in his 20s with a bit of promise, but that figure means more to some teams than others. What could the Twins get for Paddack? Well, probably not a ton. He doesn’t provide much in surplus value, though all teams value players differently, and some teams might be high on Paddack—seeing him as a tweak or a healthy stretch away from being a mid-rotation starter. As it stands, though, fans shouldn’t hold their breath on an exciting prospect package. The club’s primary objective would probably be to find a team willing to take on Paddack’s salary and then decide amongst returns if there are multiple offers. They could run into another DeSclafani-Jorge Polanco situation in which a player from the other team, such as a first baseman or a right-handed platoon bat, is added to the deal to balance salary. How do you want to see the Twins handle Chris Paddack in 2025? Tell us in the comments below. Yeehaw. View full article

I'm out.

Thankfully for me, you, and business owners everywhere, I'm not providing a managerial analysis. I'm exploring a problem using rough figures that are rounded (mathematically-sound from the figures I started with). I'd appreciate that you not use the discrepancy between the numbers that I chose and the numbers that you'd prefer as an opportunity to grind an axe. Instead, I encourage you to engage with the content of the writeup, which doesn't meaningfully change whether I use $127.3-153.7 or $130-160 or whichever payroll snapshots that you'd prefer. The problem remains the same. I didn't discuss the BAM financial anomaly because that tangent doesn't address the topic of this article--the difficulty in operating with nearly 60% sorry, 56.6717% of an estimated payroll to three players. I have never once written an article to get readers "wound up." Including the reasoning, if this indeed was the reason, doesn't change the problem, nor does it make it seem like decision-makers were not blindsided. The big contracts signed make it seem like they were either surprised by the reduction or planned poorly for an oncoming reduction that they should have seen. That's in the opening paragraph. In terms of an article discussing percentage of spend to the rest of the league, I assume you mean percent of revenue that goes into player salary? We as fans are even more in the dark about revenue than we are just about anything else. I wouldn't write that, nor would I read that, because no one has that information. regardless of what Forbes reports.

To be clear, is your issue that I described a $30 million pay cut, based on a rounding from the total payroll allocations as available from Spotrac in both years (rounding 156.1 to 160 and 130.9 to 130) instead of a $26 million cut from an opening day salary of 153.7 to 127.3? When talking about an approximate payroll for 2025, it’s helpful to describe it round numbers that can be taken as more of an idea than an exact total. I’d appreciate the grace to not assume some sort of nefarious intent on my end.

Whether it be through poor forecasting, the rug being pulled out from under the front office, or both, the Twins’ payroll is too lopsided to provide the necessary flexibility. Image courtesy of © Matt Blewett-Imagn Images This is the first piece in a series of articles to kick off the offseason, here at Twins Daily. Each day, we'll tackle a different aspect or element of the team's predicament and their collapse at the end of this season--a different place where the buck might stop, and why, and what makes the assignment of blame complicated. We're calling it Ripple Effects. In 2024, the Minnesota Twins had an estimated payroll of approximately $130 million (21st in MLB), down from $160 million in 2023 and lower than their 2018 number (which ranked only 18th in the league). Spending in the bottom third of the league is no reliable way to put a winning team on the field, but it's perfectly possible to do so. Alas, this Twins team is seemingly built on the assumption of being somewhere in the middle of the league. There's a mismatch that matters just as much as the raw dollar number or payroll ranking. Payrolls are not created equally. Even similar payrolls can be distributed in wildly varying ways. The 2024 Twins—and, to an even greater extent, the 2025 Twins—could be described as a stars-and-scrubs distribution. Over the weekend, anonymous reports surfaced suggesting that the Twins could be facing a similar payroll limit in 2025 as they did in 2024. Although this is better than news that payroll would drop further, the club could be facing a less flexible situation than the one that forced them to cut $30 million in salaries ahead of 2024. In 2025, Carlos Correa will earn $36 million, Pablo López will earn $21.5 million, and Byron Buxton will earn $15 million--before any of his $10,000,000 in performance bonuses are potentially met. These three salaries add up to $72.5 million. If the Twins indeed have a payroll limit of $130 million again, that leaves $56 million to fill the other 23 roster spots. Other guaranteed contracts will eat up about $20.5 million of that leftover money, and players in arbitration will eat up more still. But even without those immediate expenditures, it’s hard to fill 23 spots with $56 million in today’s league. Buxton’s extension ahead of 2022 could be classified as team-friendly, as the team bought low on an oft-injured but supremely talented player, only paying top dollar if he played full seasons and won awards. Correa’s contract is the largest in team history, and López’s extension is the most the club has ever doled out to a pitcher—both deals conveniently being struck in 2023, during the highest payroll season in team history. From the outside, it seems clear that those deals were struck based on the belief that payroll would, at a bare minimum, stick around that $160 million range, if not increase. If the club had held pat at the $160 million mark, they would be looking at $86 million to divide between players not named Correa, López, or Buxton. That’s far more manageable, as the big three would only constitute 46% of the team’s salaries, rather than the 57% they project to soak up in 2025 based on a $130 million budget. It matters, too, that the team (mostly) knowingly made such heavy investments in three players who don't play a high volume of baseball and impact as high a percentage of the team's action as one might hope. Using the most generous math possible (counting all plate appearances taken by both Buxton and Correa and all the balls hit to each in the field, even ground ball singles to Buxton in center, as well as all López's batters faced), the trio played a role in 17.4% of the team's combined batting and pitching plate appearances this year. Obviously, that number pales in comparison to the percentage of the payroll they take up, but that's normal. You pay an outsize rate for established stars whom you can confidently project to be above-average, knowing you'll pay a bargain-basement rate for the guys who are just getting started. It's how baseball economics work, and it's not even necessarily irrational. But the ratio of 57% to 17% is much different than that of 46% to 17%--and crucially, there's another number to consider. If both Buxton and Correa were closer to everyday players, like many expensive stars (think Juan Soto, Bobby Witt, José Ramírez, etc.), that 17% number could scale up close to 24%. López's impact is bounded by the way all teams now use starting pitchers, and he provides plenty of volume for his cost and position, but if you're going to pay north of $50 million for two players against a total payroll south of $150 million, you'd like them to consistently qualify for the batting title. The teams who can afford to hold onto low-volume players with concentrated impact in less playing time are the ones spending north of $200 million, so investing in Buxton and Correa this way seemed to signal a belief that payroll would steadily increase. It immediately did the opposite. Of the nine teams with lower payrolls than the Twins have in 2024, only two have a single player with a higher salary than Buxton’s—Kansas City’s Salvador Perez, and Washington’s Patrick Corbin and Stephen Strasburg. Many of the teams above them don’t have a López-level contract, let alone Correa’s—which currently ranks sixth-largest in all of baseball heading into 2025. These salaries would provide some strain on the $160 million number, but at $130 million, the roster is being stretched to its limits, especially as prominent players like Joe Ryan, Bailey Ober, Griffin Jax, and Jhoan Durán are entering their arbitration years and will no longer be making the league-minimum salary of roughly $750,000. If the front office was aware of the impending payroll reductions, this was poor planning—or at least, an unusual show of risk acceptance from a highly risk-averse group. If the decision-makers were blindsided entirely by ownership over this change, it’s a disservice to the team and the fans, and I don’t say that lightly. One common refrain amid the Twins’ collapse in 2024 was that ownership’s unwillingness to meet last year’s spending, or even 90% of it, was a crucial factor in the team’s fate. One common retort to that complaint was that the Twins outspent the Guardians, Royals, and Tigers—each of whom finished ahead of Minnesota in the final standings. However, due to the constraints associated with beginning the offseason with more money on the books than they were allowed to commit by Opening Day, the club was restricted from making the adjustments that every club needs to make every year. No matter the payroll, there’s no team that doesn’t enter the offseason with some sort of hole on the roster that needs addressing. A payroll number for a given season matters, but the direction in which it's moving from previous years matters, too. A shrinking payroll changes the implications of every contract on the books, and all for the worse. For example, the Twins needed a starting pitcher. Instead of having $15 million in flexibility to spend on a Michael Wacha- or Seth Lugo-caliber replacement for their outgoing arms, they were consigned to taking on Anthony DeSclafani to balance out Jorge Polanco’s salary and calling the hole filled. At the trade deadline, reports indicated difficulty bringing on any player’s salary over $1 million. Regardless of the salary the team starts the offseason with, there needs to be some flexibility to fill holes, either over the offseason or during the season via trade. It does not matter what the total salary is when the team, for example, needs one more reliable reliever. That’s something that needs to be fixed now, not last year. And so when a team enters a season committing $74 million of their $130 million payroll to three players, they’re kneecapped, regardless of what everyone else is spending around them. That concentration of salary is built for a $160-million payroll, or an even greater one, given the specific identities of those three players. The team cannot truly address needs when so few funds remain to fill in the rest of the roster. Instead, they’re bound to build from within. Building from within isn’t a bad thing—it’s what every team should be trying to do. But filling every hole on the roster year-to-year with internal pieces leaves a lot up to fate, hoping that your Austin Martins are ready on time to step in as a fourth outfielder. And that highlights an important piece—these holes don’t always necessitate a Nelson Cruz-level addition. But even a Carlos Santana or Michael A. Taylor can be a nearly impossible acquisition, when that signing makes up 10% of a team's remaining payroll. You can miss a bit on your other moves when you have a middle-of-the-road payroll and those three big salary earners. When you’re in the bottom third, you need to hit on 95% of your other decisions to properly build around them. No one is that good, in the fiercely competitive world of professional baseball. It's not possible to be. View full article

I'll always take an opportunity to try to apply psychological principles to real-life teams when it presents itself. Working through them in writing, even if it's seen as filler, is a good exercise.

I referenced this in the article, but I'll go into it a bit more here. The counter to this argument is probably something like: it seems more that Baldelli trusts people to fulfill their roles rather than to succeed no matter what. If your role is 4th outfielder who crushes lefties, you're going to get those PAs. You'll get them over other players whose role is everyday but platoon outfielder. If you're the fresh lefty in the bullpen, he's going to trust you to get lefties out. If my assumptions in this writeup are true (and I'm not so arrogant as to believe they have to be), the concern here isn't that he doesn't distrust his Wallners more than he trusts his Margots; it's that the roles he trusts them in are too limited, misguided, etc.

Any manager’s most head-scratching moves can be interpreted in any number of ways. The most charitable interpretation for many of Twins manager Rocco Baldelli’s worst moves? He trusts his guys. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-Imagn Images Pending one last week of games, Manuel Margot just set the record for the worst pinch-hitting season in baseball history. He has both the most plate appearances (35) and the most at-bats (30) as a pinch-hitter without a hit in baseball history, within a single season. You might be tired of hearing about this, especially from me. But Margot's situation has officially become unprecedented. As long as he doesn’t get a hit as a pinch-hitter in the next six games, he’ll go down as the record-holder. On the same night on which Margot crossed that legendary threshold, Twins utility infielder Willi Castro also made history, becoming the first player in MLB history to appear at five positions 25 or more times in a single season. Castro set this record in one of the most challenging configurations—shortstop and center field (the two most critical defensive positions beyond catcher), then second base, left field, and third base. Rocco Baldelli deployed these two players to the tune of two of the most unique seasons in history. Baldelli does nothing if not keep us and his players on their toes. However, both cases, by some interpretations, can be chalked up to the same core Baldelli trait: trust. By all accounts, Baldelli trusts his guys--perhaps to a fault. The Twins’ skipper will put nearly anyone in any position. Look no further than the next game after Margot and Castro each made their niche history. In the bottom of the fifth inning, with a runner on second and two outs, Baldelli removed rookie starter Zebby Matthews from the game for a reliever—a reasonable choice to protect his young arm from a quick blowup. But the reliever that he chose was Cole Irvin. If you haven’t paid attention to Twins baseball over the last week, you might not have even known Irvin was in the organization. The lefty slop-thrower and recent starter had been waived by the Orioles and claimed by the Twins last week, reportedly to provide length out of the pen. This was the guy that Baldelli went to with the tying run at home plate. A few pitches later, the Red Sox took the lead on a three-run homer, and never looked back. By all appearances, if you’re on Baldelli’s team and you fit the mold for what he wants (in this case, a lefty reliever), he’s going to use you as if he trusts you. The same could be said about Ronny Henriquez, who had 29 unspectacular MLB innings at the time but was given a save opportunity a week ago against division rival Cleveland in the bottom of the 10th inning. If you want to go back even further, you could recall his moves to bring in rookies Zack Littell and Cody Stashak to hold a lead during Game 1 of the 2019 ALDS at Yankee Stadium. Baldelli is going to trust his guys, through and through, to fill the roles he sees as necessary. Crucially, too, he views all 26 or 28 players on the active roster as his guys. You can probably play the Uno Reverse card here and claim that his ballyhooed quick hooks for starters could be a sign of a lack of trust—but getting into that discussion is another topic, so my quick counter here is that he wouldn’t choose fledgling relievers over starters if he didn’t trust the fledgling relievers to do their job. Trust is important. That almost goes without saying, but it’s also held up to empirical scrutiny from team scientists. Social scientists define trust as holding a belief that another person will essentially hold up their end of the bargain, and then acting according to that belief—putting your money where your belief is. Believing that your reliever will get you key outs, that your bench bat will be able to hit in a big spot, or that your utility player can reliably play any of five positions, then making a move to play them in that spot would be an example of trust. This type of trust is generally referred to as cognitive trust—believing that someone else has the required abilities and the right intentions to use them. This definition contrasts with other types of trust, like affective trust—trust that another person has your best interests, can keep a secret, whatever. This distinction might seem trivial, but think about how you trust your coworkers versus your family. You might trust your mother to love you and look out for you, but not to change the oil like your mechanic coworker Jim. The effects of cognitive trust might be intuitive, but there are clear benefits that might not come to mind immediately. Beyond the confidence that, say, the manager can instill in an individual, he also instills confidence in that individual’s teammates. If the manager never wavers in his belief that, let’s just say, Manuel Margot can pinch-hit, it’s easier for teammates to also trust Margot. This means they are free to focus on their role, rather than worrying about whether their teammate will hold up their end of the bargain. And that’s where you want players to be: controlling what they can control and not worried about their teammates’ shortcomings. Their cognitive resources are focused on their job, not that of their teammate. That’s the manager’s job. Willi Castro himself had a nice quote alluding to this. But that goes much farther when those trusted teammates hold up their end of the bargain. There have been a ton of reports about just how much the players like their manager. Trust can be part of it. But there’s probably a limit to how much trust is responsible. Not every great manager in baseball history has offered this near-unconditional trust to their whole roster. Sparky Anderson, Tony La Russa, Casey Stengel, and Earl Weaver are prominent examples of managers who placed a huge amount of trust in specific players in specific circumstances, but were open about the exclusiveness of that trust and the way it was limited and bounded by the response of those players to that trust in those situations. In one framing, Baldelli is showing more trust in his own employers--a fundamentally self-serving trust, since it tends both to ingratiate him to his superiors and to give him cover when things go wrong--than in the actual players in whom he's ostensibly investing that faith. If you trust everyone, do you really trust anyone? Or are you just nodding along? Anderson, especially, would say the latter. Baldelli might need to be a little more honest with himself, and embrace the affective trust that comes from experience and emotion, rather than continuing to silo his trust in the cognitive realm and give it indiscriminately. With one week to go, the stakes of his leadership and his tactical choices over the final six games are sky-high, and when the chips are down, not everyone is to be trusted. View full article

These are dark days in Twins Territory. Sweet Lou and Ol Gregg are joined by Theo Tollefson to discuss how it's somehow gotten worse in Twins Territory. What went wrong, what chances do they have to make the postseason, are there any more reinforcements, and what would we do if the Twins did make the playoffs? Listen using Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twins-off-daily-podcast/id1741266056 Listen using Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4tb78XlurcPTYYSsARdbD7 View full article

The Twins won a series! Lou, Cody, and Gregg recap a deceptively 6-8 stretch of futility and look ahead to the stretch run. What hope do the Twins have for turning this ship around? What players are most important to the rest of the season? And why does everyone keep talking about Scott Boras? Listen using Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-twins-off-daily-podcast/id1741266056 Listen using Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4tb78XlurcPTYYSsARdbD7 View full article