Shobae

Well I think a few things, first we don't or may never get the full medical details on what the Giants saw with correa. Second it's possible, in fact good, that doctors have differing opinions when looking at a set of records. Perhaps the Twins doctors were fine with Correa when the Giants were not. To my knowledge there aren't any medical doctors/bio physicists in the forum so I don't thinks its very useful to speculate about the medical records and what could have happened there. Some people have mentioned insurance as a possible reason, seems certainly it would be a factor though I don't know enough about the insurance industry, nor its relation to MLB, to say anything useful on that. What I do know however is that a contract below 300 million dollars was never going to get Carlos Correa signed and assuming the mets deal is made official, my prediction will have been correct. That the twins offer never reached that money signals to me they were never serious about resigning Correa. They knew what Correa wanted something better than the Lindor contract and they knew what the market was like after Turner and Bogearts signed. Then to have the chance to get on Correa again and not moving from your original offer just confirms that for me. I think twins fans were all taken for a ride with this Correa saga. If you look at it from Boras/Correa POV it make perfect sense to have the Twins playing up your market so that you can then get a serious player to come in and give you the deal you want. It also makes sense from the Twins perspective as they can say they tried hard to get Correa and then have an excuse as to why they have lowered payroll YoY when league revenues only keep increasing. I would have been fine with the Twins saying they didn't want Correa at the start off the off season, but after all this noise and circus to then lowball Correa twice makes me extremely distrustful of their intentions from the start.

I would easily extend arraez for ideally 6 seasons. I think people here are missing a few things. First of all I don't really know where people got the impression that 120 wRC+ hitters grow on trees from a team with realistically above average position player development (we're not the dodgers or A's). The thought that all or most of Martin, Lewis, Julien and Lee have similar or better offensive production than Arraez is extremely questionable. How many people hailed the days of Kepler and Sano carrying the lineup in the future (who were much higher rated prospects, minus Lee). I think the twins most likely get 1 guy averaging 120 wRC+, maybe 2 if I'm being optimistic. So I'm not sure why a contending team would trade an established mlb producer and replace him with hopes and dreams. Second, on the current active roster Arraez leads by a significant margin of 9% in career wRC+ (min 1k PA). While you can argue Polanco and Buxton aren't the hitters they used to be and have vastly improved, there's still no denying he's a key bat on this team. I think it's realistic to project this to be the case in the years to come. Third is the defense. People are acting like he's complete useless on the field which while he's had some key errors this is obviously selection bias. Actually looking at the numbers tell a very mixed story. Thing with arraez is he just hasn't played enough to have a proper sample for these metrics to be accurate. At worst OAA grades his range (not whole defense) to be very bad at 2b -11 OAA in around 1200 In. At best FRAA grades him as above average defensively overall. Yeah he's not winning any gold gloves but I think he should be able to at least play a solid first base in the future. Fourth, people are really out of touch with the current market. A player like arraez who is in his late 20s when he hits free agency and has a career 120ish wRC+ is not get anywhere CLOSE to 10 mil. Schwarber who shares a decent amount of similarities with Arraez got 79/4 basically 20 mil AAV and now with the new cba and inflation the prices have only gone up. Finally, the aging curve for position players, while disputed, most agree on that the prime years are 27-29. Arraez is going into his age 26 season and of course there is significant variance player to player and arreaz might be peaking at 25-26 but that's not as set in stone as people make it out to be. It's entirely possible Arraez finds a new gear or can produce 2022 level results in his late 20s. If that happens a cheaper extension now will look great. With that out of the way my take is that I'd probably give Arraez 60/6 guaranteed and then tack on some incentives for PA and awards. If he wants straight up guaranteed money probably 75/6, increasing the yearly amount. At that price you're basically getting a 2-4 war player for 10-14 mil AAV which is very good in the 2020s AND you have a home grown fan favorite locked up for his prime.

Not sure were he's getting that from the most optimistic defensive metric (DRS) rates him as an above average shortstop that's all. So not sure where that's from either. Also I don't think I saw this mentioned here but this season Farmer murdered lefties to the tune of a 157 wRC+ in 158 PA, compared to urshela's above average 118 wRC+. So for a team that was starting jake cave against lefties in september he's certainly helpful in that regard. The difference between him and Urshela? Their wRC+ against righties is 67 wRC+ for farmer (sandy leon called he wants his stats back) vs 120 wRC+ for Urshela. So we can tell who's the better hitter here. So as long as we never see farmer bat against righties, unless the primary shortstop (please sign one) is injured this should be a solid pick up. PS: his career splits aren't as extreme but similar, 50 wRC+ difference from his 72 career wRC+ against righties.

I'm quite low on the return for Urshela, guess the upside is clearing the money and 40 man spot. TBD if they put it to good use or not but guess someone better start a prayer circle to the baseball gods that miranda stays healthy because the depth at third isn't great.

We all knew this was coming so I won't waste time on the option. I think the real question here is whether or not the twins want to try and extend gray before he hits the market. Personally looking at the projections and the predictive numbers I don't think the twins should bother with it. I think it's pretty safe to say that 2019 was his career year and he will not be getting close to it again. This season people have been praising his era but looking at his era minus it was only 80, 6% better than his career average. His biggest problem is obviously injury related and even on an incentive based deal I don't see the point in spending 10-20 mil on production you could probably get out of two young pitchers.

Lots of interesting takes here about Correa. People complaining about his bat (he was the best hitting shortstop in MLB by wRC+) others about his defense, since apparently yearly defensive metrics are reliable now. I think it would be interesting to look at how many people here were hailing the start of the kirilloff, lanarch and jeffers era in the late 2010s when they were in the system and then we can see how that panned out. We could go back to the Sano, Kepler and Polanco hype train for more comps. I'm not saying that will happen with lewis et al but I wouldn't say it's unimaginable. I personally don't think that these mega deals are great value for teams, however if you want a top tier shortstop then most of the time you have to pay market rates, or pray that brooks lee pans out as expected. Realistically what you're paying for in Correa is a premium bat who also plays the second hardest position in the game. Defensive metrics vary on his defensive abilities. DRS thinks he's elite, FRAA (BPs metric) thinks he's below average and OAA has his range being above average. I think people will have different opinions about where on that spectrum he lies but even if you take FRAAs verdict of him being below average, his bat more than makes up for it. In the likely event the twins don't resign Correa they will have to ask themselves how are we going to replace the 4-5 wins that we're losing from last season. Aside from massively improved pitching or signing one of the other top SS, I don't see any way this realistically happens, sadly praying for a MVP season from buxton (since he already had 3-4 war) isn't realistic. But we know this FO doesn't like to spend pitchers who could actually give you 4-5 wins so that just leaves me thinking we'll have another mediocre team without Correa.

I mean it's possible I think it's highly improbable. The first thing as has been mentioned already is a catcher who is able to qualify for the batting title while also playing enough games at the position to be considered as such. Secondly and more rarely is having a guy with elite bat to ball skills who hits for average. Given the shift in offensive philosophy I think that's very rare with many catchers now being more focused on power. Just looking at the qualified catchers on fangraphs in the top 10 hitters the lowest iso is .137, which is Posey who also has by far the highest batting average. The median for iso is .193 and for avg it's .262 so to me it looks like the future of top offensive catchers is solid batting averages with good power. Also Mauer I would argue is one of the top 10 most talented catchers of all time so I don't think there's much chance we see someone in his league any time soon. Though the only candidate who I could potentially be, Rutchman, is off to an excellent start.

I think the play here is to go sign Narvaez and platoon him with Jeffers. I think people are underrating Narvaez here because they're not looking at the numbers. Looking at Baseball Prospectus (who are the industry leaders in catching numbers) defensive catching metrics we can see that Narvaez has really transformed his defense (specifically framing) in the last 3 seasons. It should be noted this is only over a sample of 1852, which while good enough isn't the most reliable. Because Hank Conger was able to help Sanchez have a solid defensive year at the plate after 3 years of disastrous showings, I have faith he will be able to maintain the trend with Narvaez. The biggest problem with Narvaez is that his batting has noticeably declined since his days with the white sox and mariners. Hopefully platooning him and Jeffers would be able to mask both of their woes at offense to give us a slightly above league average catcher position. As for Contreras I see him as a massive risk personally. While he may have had his best offensive season, that's very normal to happen at 30 because that is many players prime. In 2 years I wouldn't be surprised if he'd massively declined at the plate or if not playing as a backup catcher. I say this because his defense is below average and he only caught 72 games this season. I'd much rather spend that money on a shortstop or pitcher. As for Sanchez he's at best a slightly above average defensive catcher, who's many selling point his bat completely disappeared this season. To me he looks like a juiced ball merchant as his entire offensive game was centered around the home run and he struggled this season. So while on paper he's similar to narvaez I'd favor the latter given his handedness and defensive uptrend.

I know this list is late, as the team MVP awards have already been announced but I wanted to do mine anyway. The subject that gets overlooked in much MVP discussion, is the definition of value. So, I want to start this off by explaining my definition, which will hopefully make my picks understandable even if they are not agreeable. When it comes to defining valuable, in my experience, often the answer you’ll get is “the player who helped their team win most”. However, that leaves open the question of how you measure a players contribution to wins and what contributes to those wins. For this list I define value like so: which player, while isolating uncontrollable factors, contributed/saved the most runs for the Twins in 2022. That means I won’t be looking at any expected numbers or luck indicators, this will be descriptive stats. In this list I’ll be ranking my top 5 of both pitchers and hitters. 1. Carlos Correa This should come as little surprise to most people. The case for Correa is simple: he led the team in all batting runs created above average stats, he played every game except 4 at shortstop, he was tied for third in games played and lead the team in every war metric. All the defensive stats agree he was around league average this season which is a large drop off from last season, however I’m not going to hold that against him because of his hitting performance. The argument against Correa is his batting performance in a context sensitive case. One could point to him being tied with Buxton in situational wins (WPA/LI), however I would argue that WPA isn't nearly accurate enough to be taken at face value and DRC+ (BPs advanced batting statistic), which is context adjusted, has him first as mentioned. 2. Luis Arraez The batting champion and the Twins healthiest player alongside Urshela, Arraez had his best year yet despite playing through inury. He was second in batting runs created with BP ranking him within one run of correa and ranked 2nd in bwar and WARP, with fangraphs ranking him third. He also served as a utility infielder playing mostly first and second base. While DRS and FRAA (BP defensive stat) both rated him as above average across the board while OAA had him as below average. In terms of a context adjusted stats situational wins had him tied for third with duran. 3. Byron Buxton In his second healthiest season of his career Buxton yet again proved to be the best player for the twins on a rate basis. However, as is the case with our IL MVP he didn’t play enough games to realize that potential. Buxton ranked third in bwar and WARP and second in fwar. He was third in batting runs above average and was the best base runner on the team. His defense was elite as we have come to expect, however his many games at dh due to his knee injury limited his games in the field. Situational wins ranks Buxton tied for first with Correa. The case against Buxton being third is the uncertainty surrounding all these stats given the very small sample size. DRC+ is the only metric that makes this uncertainty available, Buxton had a DRC+ of 121 with a standard deviation of 18 (for comparison Arraez and Correa have 10 and 13). Meaning there is larger variance in the values of his DRC+ that are calculated by the model. 4. Jhoan Duran Duran was arguably the twins best pitcher, certainly on a per inning basis it’s undeniable. Given he’s the first pitcher on this it’s a bit hard to directly compare him to hitters like buxton, urshela and Polanco. But I went with this pick mainly based on his situational wins being basically third with Arraez. On top of that he had the highest clutch score on the team, meaning his performance in high leverage situations was better than in low leverage. While it’s hard and very controversial to isolate a pitchers individual contribution, all stats, except FIP, agree Duran was the best. Aside from stats its clear to any fan that without duran this bullpen would have been a disaster which in my mind increases his value to the team. 5. Gio Urshela As mentioned, the Urshela was tied for games played on the twins which is the large reason why he takes this spot. He is 4th bwar and fwar and 5th warp. He is 4th in batting runs created and played every game in the field. His defensive metrics are polarizing with DRS rating him above average (4), FRAA average and OAA below average (-4). The biggest point against Urshela is his underwhelming situational wins, however given that’s the outlier in this case I won’t hold it against him. Sources used: Baseball Reference, Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs

I wouldn't use UZR for infielders because it doesn't account for the shift because it is zone based and I find the fact that it includes errors (which are inherently subjective and not standardized judgements) to be not good as well. I much prefer DRS which since 2013 uses estimates for how far a player had to go to catch a ball like OAA. But even if we accept he had horrible range this season, defensive metrics have a lot of margin for error with a small sample like Polanco's season so I'd look at his whole career playing second not just one season.

Well he's certainly got experience and seems like a good pick up. Whether the head athletic trainer has a noticable causal influence on injures? I'm less convinced, but at this point every bit helps with the legion of IL veterans we've got on this team.

One quick correction with regards to fangraphs offensive runs. Without going into too much detail those are basically batting runs (based on woba but meant to represent runs created at the plate) and base running runs (BsR) added together. Which to my knowledge isn't applicable to the award given that we are focused here on batting not base running. So using it in the context of the silver slugger isn't quite correct as you're taking into account base running as well. This is outlined in more detail in the war article in the fangraphs glossary, for those interested. On the subject of Shortstop I think that Correa is the clear winner, we can see that Correa leads not only in wRC+ but also batting runs with 26.7. The reason this isn't as close as ops would have it is that fenway is a hitters park while Target Field is a neutral slightly pitcher favored park. He's also second in BB%, iso and BA showing that he is the most well rounded batter at the position. With regards to Arraez I fear that with Ohtani being nominated he is the clear cut winner of the award, given the 11% difference in wRC+ and Ohtani's lead in every category except for obp and those to do with striking out less and getting more hits. I would be very surprised if they nominated him for utility and then didn't consider him a utility player (which to be clear he isn't). My theory is that they wanted to make sure Ohtani got an award for his singularly historic season, since he is very unlikely to win MVP, Cy Young (though he has a deeply sabermetric case for it) or Hank Aaron. Because at DH there is no question the hardware goes to Alvarez.

Well if you're paying big money to a guy presumably he has the ability to go a third time through and still be effective but even everyone's favorite Rodon only pitched 36 innings third time through the line up in this season in SF. Unless your name is Sandy Alcantara chances are you won't be going three times through on a regular basis in today's game.

Personally I'm against trading Polanco, I think the thing people are forgetting here is that Arraez is arguably less durable than Polanco as well as a worse defensive second baseman (though both have inconclusive samples). With the shift ban I'd argue the position will become more difficult (though I don't think by a lot) which would make the gap in ability potentially even wider. So this could backfire not only defensively but also cost arraez health by playing a more demanding position than 1B/DH. Then there's the topic of Nick Gordon who, while he had a good season, was offensively worse than Polanco and also only did this over 443 PA so it's a massive gamble to have him fill in and expect to be able to fill in the lost value of Polanco. Though not as big of a risk as relying on rookies and prospects to do so. I would say keep Polanco because he is a proven major league level second baseman with proven MLB upside, if the twins are serious about competing again. If he ends up blocking someone that's a problem you'd like to have, instead of the opposite when you can't make up the production you traded away.

To my mind what the twins need if they're going to sign starting pitching is someone who can give them at least 150 above average IP. As it stands I think Joe Ryan is really the only twins starter with a clean bill of health who you could count on for 150 IP (according to baseball prospectus he hasn't had any non-covid injuries). But the rest of the rotation is an unknown in terms of how many innings they will throw. I think there would be little sense in bringing in a starter with good or even great upside but who will only throw 100-130 IP. Out of the list of 16 these are the starters who I think could realistically give the twins badly needed volume Quintana, Manaea, Taillon and Gibson are the four that I think have the highest probability of doing so. (You could argue for a few others maybe but they have higher risk). Except for Quintana none of them stand out as above average performers. You're getting at best league average performance and with gibson (though best record of health) there is also his age (35) which raises concerns. Also given the twins track record of "fixing" free agent pitchers I wouldn't assume they could unlock that next level of potential from manaea/taillon. The most interesting pitcher in this group is Quintana who does have some age based regression concerns, but over his career has shown an ability to beat predictive metrics (which don't buy into his performance this season) so I think he would be an above average starter, with good upside, who could give you 160ish IP. I'm 50/50 on whether the twins should pursue him, but given their deathly fear of FA starters he's perhaps the best option that is also realistic.