Hawkeye Bean Counter

Now just curious to see how Priellip performs tonight.

We got 2 wins against the Astros. Whatever happens tomorrow happens, but in any case this was a great series for the Twins. The Astros also have gone through a ton of their relievers as well.

Should have had Pagan pitch . . . I'll exit stage left.

Going to waste Duran for 1 out looks like

The look beatable right now, its a long season. If they continue this type of play through early June we can talk about it. I am just glad that we aren't playing out of the post season so far in these early games. Through April 23rd, looked like a tough start and at worst it looks like we will be .500 ball unless things fall off the rails. However, it looks like we have more than enough pitching and enough decent hitting and depth to do really well this season.

Boom

As much as I love Arraez, I will take Pablo Lopez any day of the week over Bundy or Archer :). Gotta give something to get something, and if Lopez is a legit 1 for us you do it everyday of the week.

The front office doesn't spend money on pitchers period - relief or SP. With the Correa and Buxton contract in place, we will not be able to do a major pitching contract for the next 5 years. I would love to extend one of the three pitchers we have coming off the books. Maeda, Gray or Mahle or have one of the 3 take a qualifying offer. However, it is not a must. With Paddack, Ryan, Lopez, Ober, you have a nice core to work around and see if any of the prospects have the stuff to take the 5th spot for next year. The real question is do you have 1-2 more pitchers that can provide depth.

This was the one trade that I felt was an overpay but it happens. As to this trade it really comes down to Steer vs Miranda. I think they will provide fairly equal value, but either one of the 2 players was going to be our long term 3rd baseman, and both may ultimately get bumped by Lee. CES is purely a big bat with some injury history. Most likely a DH bat but again not a whole lot of spots for him. I feel this is good for the Twins if they can extend Mahle, and of the pitchers I think he is the one most likely. If not we will get a draft pick, or comp pick. I think we lose this trade unless an extension occurs. However, its similar to how we got Joe Ryan. The issue was Mahle was never going to be that final piece.

The only thing we can compare it to is his best 4 game stretch last year was 5-15, 6 rbi and 3 homeruns, with 2 of the games against us included his best 2 game stretch and 2 home runs. He has already met or bested his best stretch at any point last year.

If he hits 10+ home runs in the first month, he will have produced 50% of what he did last year in a full season. It shows what a little more contact can do. We are still in the SSS, but I remain fairly optimistic he will well outperform his 11+ million salary. He has already provided tremendous flexibility and insurance at 1st base. Gallo's projections were BA in the 190's , around 23 HR, and 56 RBI's with OPS around .720. All we want is 2022 to be an aberration and he is a .200 or better hitter. If he reverts back to .160 batting average then we will several hitless days to look forward to. If he pushes to .225-.250 you have an elite hitter with his power.

If Larnach becomes a healthy solid player. That leaves us down to Kiriloff, who with Gallo currently playing the way he is, we look protected at 1st. Then the last question mark comes down to Polanco at second. Can Polanco get healthy and stay healthy. If not you have Julien waiting in the wings who could be our lead off hitter of the future.

He looks like he may have slightly better contact rates. Effectively, for me he has 5 hits on the season for a .333 batting average, I am giving him an extra that was stated as an error (LOL a .350 BA and .420 OBP, yeah we know that's not going to last). I do think he will have better contacts rates due to a modified swing. However, he is still a bad ball pitcher. He feasts on meatballs, that is effectively what he was served yesterday. I do think he is player that is also effected by his emotions and when a funk may struggle to get out of it. What this early season is doing is giving him some confidence. It is a low pressure situation, hitting 7th in the line up and letting him continue to work on his stroke. Someone else stated that as the home runs go up his walks as well. I do agree on the home run rate, helping his walk rate as pitchers will be more willing to take a free pass than give him a fastball down the middle of the plate. However, if you can get a .240 to .250 BA Gallo(due to less shift, less pressure and a modified swing), with his power and the additional walks due to pitchers wanting to avoid him, then Gallo becomes a true weapon. Look at it this way, I still compare Gallo to Arraez, Arreaz is having an otherworldly start. BA over .500 and OBP over .600 and yet his OPS+ is only 210. Gallo is sitting at 270 OPS+. Both will cool off, but so far the gamble on Gallo is paying off.

I was one who was cautiously optimistic about the signing of Gallo. We got the full Gallo experience in the first series against Kansas City, several strike outs, a grounder that in a normal defense would have been a hit to right, but in a new shift arrangement the right fielder was playing a rover position and fumbled the ball and Gallo was safe at first. In the third game Gallo carried the team, with 3 hits (double and 2 homers) and tacked on a walk. In looking at Gallo's stats against teams he feasted on Kansas City and Detroit the last 2 years. Essentially what we saw was this trend continue to carryover. I was impressed with the double to center, If teams want to start deploying a rover right fielder, a couple doubles to center will possible force teams to go with a more conventional defense against Gallo. Overall I still think Gallo will be the player that I expected him to be, a decent bit better stat wise than last year, partially due to feasting on bad teams, possibly a few extra hits due to seeing the shift less, even though teams may get creative like Kansas City did. I doubt we see a 40 HR season like he has in the past, but 25-30 seems doable.

Prielipp is the reason I believe the Twins were willing to trade their other 2 lefty prospects last year. Priellip is fully healthy. The injury hurt his prospect ranking which was odd to me because the waiting was over, other than uncertainty on his current ability. I think last years draft is looking like the Twins knocked it out of the park. Now just have to wait the 2-3 years and see if Lee Prielipp and how the rest of the draftees work up through the system.

Wow just looked at Langfords stats . . . wow 1.488 OPS. Gonzalez is 1.055. Looking like we will get a really good player at #5. Will come down to do teams want bats or pitchers.

What makes the draft crazy is when a team wants to save money for later in the draft and pick a lower prospect to save a couple million. I don't see that happening in top 4 picks but it could. Dollander, Skenes, and Crews definitely seem like the top 3 right now. If anyone of those 3 drops you take them.

The next question, would those homers been outs in target field? The big thing with Mahle has always been he is a flyball pitcher that gives a lot of warning track outs in bigger parks, but home runs in smaller parks.

Likely picked Dollander Crews Pool of possibly available - Langford, Skenes Waldrep, Clark Gonzalez Next Tier and wildcards - Bradfield, Lowder, Mitchell Its too hard to follow, but right now these are the players I am focusing on. Langford Gonzalez are you college batters Clark has the potential to be elite. We will have a very good pitching prospect available at our pick most likely. Waiting to see injuries and performance. Bradfield has elite speed, depending how this season goes with stealing could prop him up a bit. Lowder has the stuff. Mitchell would be the best Catcher available.

Regarding the pitching staff, yes we have spent capital to build our current staff. Up to this point those trades have actually been overall beneficial to the club. Ryan, Paddack came over in deals for players on expiring contracts. Maeda has been more valuable than Graterol. We do lose a couple years of control in that deal. Beyond that the pitchers we have given up as prospects is Petty, Hajjar, and Povich and a couple other lottery arms. Gray will be one of our best pitchers for 2 years and we can decide if we will extend or let him walk. Petty could hurt in the long run. Beyond that Hajjar and Povich are very replaceable arms. Although we don't have any per say ace arms in the minors/majors we have some very good arms. Ober and Winder both look like #3-5 pitchers, the issue with both is health and ability to handle a full season load. SWR and Varland both look very durable with good stuff. Likely #3-#4 type of players. Raya and Priellip both look like good prospects with very high floors but lots of variability. Then you have some lottery arms in Balazovic and Canterino who both appear to have talent but again can't stay healthy and now some questions on ability with Balazovic. Where we were 6 years ago, with essentially no major league staff and not much in the pipeline, I guess this is a huge improvement. Most likely we won't have to spend a lot of capital on pitching staff, but I think this will become the MO of the organization. Overload on bats and trade. We are loaded on infield prospects, we have too many. We will also have another draft with lots of early picks. Any full year draft since 2018, the Twins have done very very well. The 19, 21, and 22 drafts the front office has likely been in the top 8 in performance in my opinion. Now they have traded off some of that capital to get us where we are today, but I have a feeling they will just continually improve the big league club and the minor league system. We have lots of arms this year, some on their last year, it opens up the opportunity 1 or 2 may be traded off for someone else with more control or a prospect to replace or we just keep moving forward with what we have. We have let 3 players traded away as prospects that have a decent shot at performing well in the big leagues, Encarnacion-Strand, Steer, and Petty. The Twins I think will clearly win the Arraez for Lopez trade, but time will tell. No offence, in the grand scheme of things we haven't given up a lot especially big league talent (only Arraez who appeared to not want to do an extension). I think the Twins can easily continue to keep this up, I just don't think they will need to.

Tells me probably not very satisfied with Twins employment and the home dynamics were taking a toll. Wish he would have finished out the year, but understandable the position likely wouldn't be available. You just don't see many drop from the pros to the college ranks or vice versa.

This is a year for Martin to prove his skills. To me he is a .280 to .300 hitter and a .400 OBP player if he can continue to progress and make it to the big leagues. Personally I think of last year as a 1 off year for him. I think he needs good health and confidence, and I think he finally started gaining that confidence towards the end of last year and it rolled into fall ball. With his speed I think he will be a good asset in the outfield. I don't think his defense will make it at SS, possibly 2nd, but might as well use the wheels in the OF.

Boy it appears time plays tricks on us a bit. When we started the offseason it was clear the team was trying to manage the roster with a lot of potential possibilities that they thought the offseason would go. I think they thought they had a shot at resigning Correa but they weren't sure. They wanted Miranda preferably at 3rd and still do. So in a very short order we traded Urshela and then got Farmer for essentially the same price we got Urshela for. Yes Urshela is better than farmer but it made sense at the time. Ultimately we are talking about 9-10 million dollars for Urshela. We then used 11 million on Gallo. The real question is between those 2 who has a better year, my bet would be on Urshela but I could see Gallo winning that. We have some flexibility with this roster, and overall I don't think losing 1 year of Urshela is really that big of a deal. Zips is expecting .280 average .340 OBP and 15 home runs for Urshella. They expect Gallo to have .195 BA .330 OBP and 25 home runs. effectively slightly more upside with Gallo just on expected stats. Eh, we won't know until we play out the season but the offseason went over about as well as anyone could have expected, and if the biggest thing we can complain about is we would have been better off with Urshela than someone like Gallo . . . well lets just say we must not have too much to complain about.

He had like 48 innings of elite production now almost 3 years ago. Now he purposefully did not pitch last year, to hurt his draft stock (it may have done so anyway). Even with the workout, his 3 major pitches are still there. The control was a tad off last June but still rusty. I fully expect him to be very strong at A and A+ ball this year. I have no doubt he will be the ace on each team. His talent is that good.

We only need 1 Pagan. Maybe Barnes could offer a little more upside. I think Pagan performed better in August Sept.