The Great Hambino

I actually think it's more likely that the roster looks depressingly similar after the trade deadline. Ownership is pot-committed to the idea that this team is competitive. Furthermore, as demonstrated in Tom's offseason comments, they operate under the midguided notion that maintaining the status quo constitutes doing something for the fans. So as long as they're close enough to a playoff spot to feign contention, they're not selling off anything meaningful. They think keeping Ryan around will drive increased attendance, even though that doesn't make any sense. If they already weren't drawing a crowd with him on the team, why would simply keeping him drive any meaningful change? This was the thought process behind holding onto their most valuable trade chips in the offseason (keeping Lopez/Ryan/Jeffers/et. al. constituted "doing something for the fans"), and I don't see why they would change their thinking now. They're also not going to be willing to pay the price necessary to make meaningful changes to the roster in a positive direction (it's looking to be an extreme sellers market if the entire AL can convince themselves they're contenders). This is a franchise that has made nothing but incredibly marginal additions at trade deadlines even when they are legitimately contending, with the exception of the disastrous 2022 deadline. And now, they're less than a season away from some potentially game-changing rules in the CBA that could make actual contention more realistic (read: less expensive) from their POV. If they weren't willing to make any sort of investment at the beginning of the season, I don't know why they would now. So they can't sell without ditching their narrative, and they won't be willing to buy. That's the recipe for a holding pattern. It's not what I want to see happen, but it's where I think we're headed. They might flip a low-rated prospect for a marginal rental reliever so they can say they "tried", but not much of anything beyond that. As noted philosopher Marlo Stanfield once said: "You want it to be one way ... but it's the other way."

After watching the defense displayed in this series, that play by Tovar was like finding an emerald in a pig trough

Regardless of what I think ought to happen, I think this true given the nature of CBAs being the product of negotiation and not some emperor's decree. The leveling of revenue distribution will drive competitive balance more than any other factor ... as long as those revenue-sharing recipients actually invest these receipts into payroll. And as revenue-sharing recipients have shown with their behavior, they won't do this if they aren't forced to do so - they'll simply pocket it and ride the gravy train to profitability. So in essence, you're just taking money away from teams willing to spend it and giving it to teams that won't. That's why the CBA is written so that players have to approve changes in revenue sharing, and why they pushed back against increased revenue sharing in the last round of CBA negotiations. In order for players to agree to increased revenue sharing, they have to have assertions that the barnacles of MLB ownership are forced to spend it. There's your floor. At the same time, the owners aren't going to agree to a floor with some real teeth in it without a major concession coming their way. There's your cap. So is floor/cap theoretically necessary for meaningful revenue sharing? Not necessarily. Is it necessary to get it through a negotiation-driven process? I think it is. Along those lines, I find it very hard to believe the cap we arrive at will be a hard one if derived through negotiations. I don't know what MLB would have to offer to make a hard cap palatable to the players - 60% of gross revenue? A floor approaching 90%? Would that even be enough? Would MLB ever agree to that even if it resulted in a hard cap? I don't know. So some soft cap with enough levers and exceptions that there can be reasonable debate over it even constitutes a cap is the most likely landing point in my eyes, assuming no one hits the big red button and nukes the sport

My understanding is that they presented the floor while including a bunch of costs like health benefits that are normally never considered to be part of payroll in other sports that use a cap or any context in which payroll is normally discussed. So a $245MM/$170MM floor (or whatever it was) was really overstated by about $20MM on both ends in terms of how payroll is almost always discussed. Furthermore, their claim of a 50/50 revenue split came after removing certain costs from the calculation, so they were really talking about less than 50% of gross revenue going to the players. Deliberately misleading on both fronts. This is all with the caveat that I didn't, like, read through their entire proposal myself or anything. My understanding is based on the mild-to-moderate amount I've read about it.

So strange - as someone who grew up in Plymouth and lives in Woodbury, I take my wife and two small children to like a dozen games a year and get that "secure family night out" every time. Not once have we encountered anything even approaching danger. I must be the luckiest guy in the world to not have been mugged or stabbed or carjacked in the lawless thunderdome that is downtown Minneapolis

I think they were misleading from the jump the way they disguised their definitions of both payroll and revenue to make both the floor and the ceiling look a lot more reasonable than they actually were. Every detail they've revealed since has made it worse

It was never meant to be common sense. They were just banking on the general public not reading/caring about the fine print

Yes, he did get to watch from the bench as his teammates won him a ring - no hits in 6 ABs that postseason. He got to play in the World Series (in a losing effort) the year before with the Dodgers as well, where he went 2-16 in their postseason run. So 2-22 in two full postseasons. Don't know what they woulda done without him. Point is, he was very far from the irreplaceable beating heart of a roster at that point in his career

Not just not good enough to be a starter, he was out of the league completely in two years. I once read something that hypothesized that career 2B tend to have have steep aging cliffs since they're already starting further down the defensive spectrum and need to rake to be able to extend their careers. Dozier certainly supports that hypothesis. The Twins also had their best regular season ever the year after trading him, so ... yeah

Yeah, pitchers naturally are going to have a smaller number of chances relative to other positions, particularly in an environment where bunting is minimal. I think this is reflected in the ranges of figures between the top and bottom players at pitcher (4.2 in the AL, or 3.7 without extreme outlier Drew Rasmussen at -2.4 - is he just hucking the ball into the stands or what?) and every other position, where the range between top and bottom is more than double that figure, even at 1B. And that's with pitchers having around five times as many qualifying players compared to other positions, which in theory should result in a broader range. So a few rough plays here and there can really skew your ranking at pitcher. So I wouldn't worry too much about Ryan. Even if his numbers are real and not statistical noise, the actual effect is relatively low and vastly outweighed by the value of his actual pitching

By my rough math, going back to the KAT trade to get under the second apron, they've turned KAT, Naz, NAW*, and basically every tradable draft resource for the next seven seasons into Ayo, LaMelo, a one-legged Donte, and Beringer. And still have to fill several roster spots with spare change just to remain under the second apron. He better be right about LaMelo *Maybe a little facetious to include him here, but they let him walk to extend guys they ended up trading a year later anyway, so into the ledger he goes

Zak Kent, Luis Garcia, Justin Lawrence, and now Austin Voth. All with fewer than 10 IP for the Twins this year, all no longer with the organization* Their combined line: 22.1 IP, 29 ER, 18K, 19BB, 8HR, 11.69 ERA That's the problem with thinking you can build a bullpen through the waiver wire: for every Yoendrys Gomez you unearth, there's like four or five (maybe more) of these guys. And it's not even July - this list is almost certainly going to get longer/more depressing as the season goes on. *Lawrence and Voth I guess aren't technically gone from the org, yet, but for all practical purposes they are

It's in Buck's best interest to keep a NTC in his contract because if he does decide to waive it for whatever reason, those 10-and-5 rights wouldn't follow him to his new team, but a NTC would. It wouldn't mean anything for the Twins (it's like wearing both a belt and suspenders, only a little less stylish), but definitely would for the player. So I can understand why he would and should want to keep it in the contract

Does this mean they're engaging in softcore contention?

Citing the 1987 Twins as proof that simply making the playoffs is true contention doesn't hold up for me. For one, there were only two rounds of playoffs. Today's Twins would have to fight through four (all without homefield advantage - more on that later). I'd feel much better about their chances if they were somehow getting a bye to the ALCS. For two, the 87 Twins benefitted from an extreme imbalance in divisional quality that arguably gave them a competitive advantage beyond simply an easier path into the playoffs. They clinched the weak West with five games left in the season, took their foot off the gas, and lost those last five games. This made their record look worse than it probably should've been - they don't get brought up nearly as much in this context if they had, say, 88 wins instead of 85 - and gave them the luxury of resting up before the playoffs. On the other hand, the 98-win Tigers were in a dogfight with the Blue Jays until the last day of the season - they clinched on the final day by completing a sweep of the Blue Jays in which they won all three games by a single run. And with no Wild Card, this was effectively an additional elimination series. Normally the 98 win team gets to coast into the playoffs while the 85 win team is fighting for their lives. Here it was flipped. Good news for rest in the rest vs rust debate. Bad news for the idea that momentum heading into the playoffs is a thing that matters. For two-part two, the 87 Twins were gifted home-field advantage throughout the playoffs because of the rotational nature of how it was handed out back then for both the ALCS and the World Series, even though their opponents had superior records. For three, the 87 Twins pitching staff was carried by two horses at a time that they could be counted on to go consistently on short rest in a playoff setting. This allowed them to use them in 67% of playoff games as opposed to 40% of regular season games. That's a huge difference and a big reason why they were able to play above expectations in the playoffs. None of these unique conditions would benefit a potential 2026 wild card Twins team. Saying they could just because the 87 Twins did ignores a whole lot of context. A better comparison would be last year's Reds. Their 83 wins did technically sneak them into the playoffs, where they immediately became cannon fodder. They were in no way, shape, or form a contender in any real sense. "Well, they were in the playoffs so they had a chance!!!" Well, anyone that buys a Powerball ticket has a chance of hitting the jackpot. That doesn't make it a wise investment. Just like bypassing chances to make your team meaningfully better in the near future - or even chasing the dragon and making low-probability win-now moves and making your team worse in the near future - because you have a longshot chance at being the 2025 Reds would not be a wise investment.

Contention means not being mathematically eliminated from the third Wild Card on September 1 I'm Tom Pohlad, and I approve this message

It's disconcerting to look at the scorebug and see BUXTON HURT splashed across the top

Oooh ... I think it's gotta be ten now

Bell thought he could, he thought he could, he thought he could

I don't know about Passan, but definitely not for Bowden. My theory is that he isn't even a living organism; he is poorly-designed AI that crowdsources trade ideas from Long Island 12 year olds It's to the point where I'm mildly annoyed with anyone that cites him as a source. You're just giving him more of whatever he runs on in place of oxygen

The players might as well counter with an elimination of the draft entirely, if they want to offer something the other side would view as equally absurd. I've been of the mind that the impending media contract negotiations would prevent either side from pursuing the nuclear option. I'm starting to think that the owners might disagree

Setting the no-trade clause aside, I don't put Buxton in the same category as vets like Ryan, Lopez, Ober, and Jeffers in thinking they should move them for the right price to avoid squandering their value and better align with a more realistic competitive window. For one, he is under control for longer, which means there's a better chance they return to competitiveness while he's still under contract. For two, he's the one I could plausibly see agreeing to a team-friendly extension, whereas the others are probably gone if they get to the open market. For three, his age and injury history might depress the value of the return they ought to get for someone of his ability level, at least relative to their other potential trade pieces. And finally, I just think it would be really cool if he had a one-team career Besides, I don't think Buck invokes the NTC unless a) there comes a point where he's thinking about retirement and they're out of contention at the deadline or b) Tommy P goes John Fisher on the operation

Brandon Nimmo putting on a defensive clinic

I've always thought of it as filling out a scorecard, nine closes the circle, so to speak. But I think I like your angle on it the more I think about it

Never trust a Gregg with three G's