Brian Kingfield

I’m happy to keep him another year and see if he can stay hot. And the infield looks so much more crowded that I’d rather trade from that strength.

As someone who has been known to shoehorn a Seinfeld reference into a conversation, this was one shoehorned Seinfeld reference 😂 Great article. Nice to learn a bit more about some of our foes.

Embarrassing admission - this feeling didn’t quite sink in for me until Pagan left. I get the hate, but he is a solid and inexpensive arm. I get that some of these paydays are maybe a bit higher than the player’s value, but to pass on them means we feel we can find better value elsewhere. Can we? I’m a little nervous that we’re going to keep waiting for the perfect, cost-effective deal only to watch all good options pass us by. This makes me think some pretty big trades are in the works. Hopefully there is a plan that we’re just not seeing yet.

After losing Arraez I’m not ready to say goodbye to another on-base percentage guy like Julien. And having him at the top of the lineup letting everybody get a good look at pitches is valuable.

I’m pretty on the fence. Everybody wanted him gone at the trade deadline last year, but I’m sure glad we kept him. The argument for trading while high is a good one, but I’d be more onboard with that philosophy if we didn’t have a need in centerfield and a young outfield in general. It could be nice to have a veteran out there for one more year while the young guys settle in. I’m worried we could get some Jose Miranda situations with some of the young guys this year. I’m all for the youth movement but depth really worked for us last year. Without Kep in the outfield it starts to feel a bit thin out there.

I think they will happily keep him for his defense, veteran leadership, and relationship with the pitchers. As others have said there are other contracts I feel we’d be better off getting out of as opposed to his.

This is what makes me wonder if perhaps Rocco and the front office stay put no matter what happens this year. It seems they’ve done a good job developing talent but due to our veterans going cold and the young talent not being quite ready and/or injured it just hasn’t been our year.

A historic win in that it may be the only time we can say that Popkins saved the day (simply for getting tossed so Gallo wouldn’t).

At this point it should either be CF or IL. A minimum 10-day stint on the IL certainly won’t hurt, and we won’t be missing out on much offensive production while he’s gone. The resounding quote at the beginning of the season was “we’re a better team when he’s in the lineup,” and the data backed that up. I’m not sure that’s true anymore:

I agree. I’m hesitant to count on him every 6 days but if we use him as needed to give guys a rest I’m all for the preventative maintenance to ensure we don’t lose one of our starting 5 to injury. I’m also curious about just adding him to the bullpen to add some depth. Then we wouldn’t have to be worried about limiting the pitch counts for starters and letting the bullpen take more innings.

This is what I resorted to but it was eventually so finicky I just gave up and cancelled. I will gladly pay money to watch the Twins but I’m not getting cable for it.

I’m not sure if I’d agree that the FO assembled a bad roster. If they did, I’m not sure many of us could have predicted its badness. We knew offense wouldn’t be a strong suit, but the lineup at the end of Spring Training was looking not horrible. I put asterisks next to offensive assets. I have no idea how to assemble a lineup so forgive the order… 1. Buxton* 2. Correa* 3. Polanco* 4. Kiriloff* 5. Miranda* 6. Solano 7. Gallo 8. Kepler 9. Vasquez A lot of us praised the depth at having flexible guys like Taylor, Castro, and Gordon on the roster too. There was also hope in AAA with Julien and Lewis. This doesn’t look that bad on paper at the start of the season. We could have predicted some of those asterisks not panning out and the FO was prepared for that possibility. To have all 5 of them either hurt, in an extreme slump, or relegated to AAA is the worst case scenario. The FO was prepared to have some of them fail, but not all of them. All this to say I’m fine if big changes are made with FO, but I don’t think we can act like FO put together a bad roster and we all knew it the whole time.

As painful as it is to imagine how Arraez could be helping this offense right now, it’s easier for me to imagine whatever sickness ails this offense spreading to Arraez as well. There could be a parallel universe where he stays with the Twins and hits a dry spell in 2023.