The Great Hambino

To my knowledge, the teams that consistently have quality cheap bullpens have a couple things working for them that the Twins do not. One, they are replacing one or two each year, not trying to replace the entire thing all at once. Two, they develop a steady stream of these young quality arms so they're able to reliably make those replacements constantly. Even as injuries inevitably arise during the year, they have quality depth to fall back on. There's a reason they targeted a bunch of young AAA-ish arms with a lot of their trades last deadline - there was a hole in their org chart in that area in terms of healthy upside, especially looking ahead to a post Ryan/Lopez era. These projections are based on WAR, which is a context-neutral stat. If your bullpen's WPA is worse relative to its WAR, then that's an easy recipe for coming up short of your win totals. Unless you think Sands/Topa/Orze/etc are going to magically become reliable high-leverage weapons this year, or they're actually going to use some of their top young arms immediately in the bullpen instead of somehow finding a way to evaluate like 8 young guys as major league starters all at once, that seems like a fairly likely outcome for this bunch Gleeman recently noted that they've undershot their Fangraphs win projections in four of the last five years. And you can't really blame last year's underachievement on the trade deadline since they were already on pace to underachieve before the trades. That could just be statistical noise, or it could be some characteristics of the club that cause an inherent overestimation. Does fWAR for pitching (which I don't love) overrate their pitchers? Was Rocco really that bad? Who knows. But it doesn't exactly fill me with a ton of optimism

Sub-Zero was really intimidating? I dunno, I don't get the fashion of the youths. See also: zipped-up hoods on NBA warm-ups. I never understood any form of cloth under the helmet - it's just uncomfortable and slides around. I don't get it. But I had negative swag The mouthguards are surprisingly easy to forget about. I saw a CB last week playing with it stuck in one of those new-age slits in the crown of the helmet

I think a guy like Buxton breaks the BBTV algorithm. His talent and health make him super high-risk, high-reward, so his average outcome might fall in the Ober range, but his 90th percentile outcome blows Ober out of the water. The rich contenders that would be interested in Buxton can afford to make that bet, while the algorithm makes assumes the prospective buyer is as likely to be the Marlins as the Dodgers. At least that's how I make sense of it in my head

Nate Tice is a guy who has carved out a space for himself in the analytical football space. I liked him as Robert Mays's sidekick on The Ringer's football podcasts before he went off to do his own thing. He shows up every now and then on NFL Network. He's an Edina product and held clipboards at Wisconsin. You're probably more familiar with his dad, Mike

They have a high floor. It's hard to say exactly what an accurate percentage would be since it takes a doctorate in economics and possibly quantum physics to understand the NBA's collective bargaining agreement with all its second aprons and mid-level trade exceptions, but from what I find online, the floor is 90% of the base cap

Depending on what you're defining as locally-generated revenue, that would potentially decrease revenue sharing, not increase it. And even if you're limiting it to gameday revenues (tickets, concessions, parking), the cheapskate owners would just drop payroll even further and maintain their profits that way. There's a baseline for how low that can go with baseball die-hards, visiting team fans, and folks that just want to spend a nice summer evening at PNC Park. They will drive payrolls down as low as they are allowed as long as they get their cut of national broadcast, merchandise, and sponsorship revenues. There must be a mechanism that explicitly forces them to spend for increased revenue sharing to have a meaningful effect. Hence the floor, hence the cap

He might actively want to be traded. He also might just be testing the waters on what his options might be if he were to waive it. He's not making any firm commitments; he can at any time say "no thanks" to whatever's presented to him. Plus, the Twins likely aren't going to seriously entertain any offers if they don't think he'd be willing to waive it, so he would need to make his willingness known in order to know what those offers might be. So I don't think being willing to waive it makes him the Meesta Meesta lady from Happy Gilmore. It's just a way to make the most informed decision he can. I also don't think he'd be able to get bumped up to his free agent market price since that would remove any surplus value in obtaining him, unless the market for centerfielders really dries up and a free spender gets desperate. He would likely accept something below market since it would still represent an increase. Besides, the contract he signed was pretty unique in that its base value was well below market but still included a full no-trade. It might be hard to find a historical comp for that kind of a deal.

An increase in revenue sharing with no real mechanism to force teams to put that into payroll does nothing for the players. In fact, since you're taking funds away from teams willing to spend it and giving it to teams not willing to spend it, you're actually suppressing salary overall. The players fought against increased revenue sharing in the last CBA negotiations because they rightfully don't trust the Nuttings and Fishers of the world to meaningfully spend and not just pocket those funds. And whatever weak requirements that exist currently to force teams to spend those funds clearly aren't working, since the Pirates are able to turn a profit operating the way they do. Giving them even more money to pocket is not a solution, and trying to shame them into spending it by calling them evil on an online message board isn't going to get them to spend it either. I don't think either revenue sharing or a salary cap on their own solve anything. Similar to revenue sharing with no enforcement mechanism, a cap with no offsetting upward push on payroll levels of teams at the bottom also has the net effect of suppressing player salaries. They need to work in tandem (along with a high floor, which I don't understand why it keeps getting ignored in these discussions) to level the playing field without taking money out of player pockets and putting it into owner pockets. The way I see it, increased revenue sharing is toothless without a meaningful floor or some similar mechanism (loss of draft picks, loss of future revenue sharing, etc). Now getting that floor or floor-like mechanism in place in collective bargaining would be a huge concession from the owners that would require a similar major concession from players. I don't know what that would be other than a cap. Because this is all subject to negotiation, which is ultimately about compromise, I think an NBA-style soft cap is much more likely than an NFL-style hard cap. In a lot of ways, a soft cap is basically a luxury tax with actual enforcement mechanisms at both ends of the spectrum. It's also worth noting that in the NBA, there's currently more parity than there's ever been in the sport (7 champs in 7 years including Milwaukee, OKC, and Denver but not New York or Chicago in the easiest sport for the best player to take over a game), player salaries are higher than they've ever been in the sport, franchise valuations are exploding (the T-Wolves sale ish-show came about because of this, also because Glen Taylor is a total knob), and there's a potentially budding dynasty located in one of their smallest markets.

That's almost every position. That's why I'm on team BPA and team DTU (don't trade up). I would avoid drafting a QB (need a veteran + not terribly impressed with next year's prospects), but if they're picking in that 8-12 range the best player available almost certainly won't be a QB since teams are so QB-thirsty at the top of round 1, so that issue likely takes care of itself

A few possibilities rolling around in my head (maybe even a combination of the following): They're set up as preferred equity holders, meaning they're entitled to a fixed percentage return as opposed to a percentage of profits. So their return on investment is pretty much guaranteed assuming the business doesn't go under (it's not going under, MLB won't let it) Profits and losses don't have to be allocated proportionally to ownership in a partnership, so perhaps they're getting a better-than-proportional profit allocation or are shielded from being allocated losses as a trade-off for making the investment with no decision making power They don't have the funds to purchase an entire MLB franchise (their investment is more in line with something between a high end WNBA/low end MLS franchise valuation), so accepting a minority stake is their way of getting the asset appreciation that they're certainly betting on getting over time from MLB ownership. They're investment groups, so there's a decent chance they care about the product on the field as much (or as little) as someone investing in a manufacturing company cares about mufflers, or whatever.

McCombs also bought the team right as they were about to have their best season ever* and sold the team after they had fallen into relative disarray. The Wilfs had to spend some time undoing the mess left by Red. Also, if Red had owned the team much longer there's a decent chance they're the San Antonio Vikings now. I think that ought to be considered in the calculus. But that's a good point that the Wilfs' hit rate on the playoffs given their mandate to compete for that every year is a little more underwhelming than I realized * NFC Championship not included

Didn't realize that about Basallo. Good to know

For the next week or so, Jim Kaat and Terry Ryan are now on the Old Timers/Veterans/Eras Committee that will decide the Hall of Fame fates for this year's batch of second-chance candidates

A question I've been batting around is would it be worth it to package Ryan with something extra (I'm not going to pretend to know what exactly that would entail) in order to access a truly elite prospect from the Basallo/McLean/Painter bucket. Sorta how the Athletics included JP Sears with Mason Miller to help get Leo De Vries. Depending on what that would be, I'd be interested in Basallo. Is he a C? Is he a 1B? Works either way for the Twins.

How about for relievers? At this point, you might be in line for a crack at a bullpen spot

I got the same email. Look on the bright side - Outman and Gasper aren't on there either! For real though, I count only 11 guys on the current 40-man on that list. Don't know what's shown historically, but I don't know how much to read into that. FWIW, Buxton and Lopez are pictured on the marketing graphic in the same email

Tomlin lives seven years in the past, so this checks out

Looking into next year and beyond, is there a single position group with better than average depth? Edge, I guess? No trading up for me, please. Too many areas in need of fixing to forfeit bites at the apple, especially with how limited they're going to be in adding free agents next year. If anything, trade down - within reason. No going 20 spots down in the first round. "Best Player Available" should be the motto for the entire draft. Also, while trying to find out about the picks they have going into next year, I learned that their original 6th rounder has gone on quite an adventure. Originally shipped off to Houston for Cam Akers, they got it back by shipping off Ed Ingram (always a good sign when you can trade a benched second-rounder for a sixth round pick), then shipped it off again to get Jordan Mason.

So far the sum total of meaningful contributions at the MLB level from the returns is like three good starts between Abel and Bradley. I'd maybe pump the brakes on declaring the deadline a win (or a loss, TBF).

I've watched a lot of bad high school football in my life. Never saw that before, even at that level.

That's Jim Bowden's entire ethos

I get what you're saying and agree that trade rumors would go away if something resembling competent QB play returns to the team, but: 1. There's bad QB play, there's utterly atrocious QB play ... and beneath that, there's what McCarthy has put on tape thus far. There's levels to this, and McCarthy is currently at the bottom level 2. The scenario where he might be looking for a trade is one where no outside reinforcement is brought in to stabilize the QB position. In other words, the Vikings would be doubling down on that level of QB play. If that happens (I don't think it will), then I could see Jefferson looking for an out

I guess you can't whiff on a draft pick if you light it on fire during the preceding season

Is it even mathematically feasible to trade him even if they wanted to? There's roughly $47MM or so of unamortized signing/option bonuses still remaining after this year. My understanding (which isn't complete on this, so perhaps there's some nuance I'm missing) is that all hits if they trade him. They're already well over next year's cap. I'm sure there's technically a way to make it work, but we're in to-the-studs rebuild territory if it comes to that. I think after next season a trade becomes a lot more feasible. I hope they can figure out something better by then.

Roden has options and Outman doesn't. I don't see Roden bumping Outman off the 26-man if it comes to it for that reason, at least not on Opening Day. It's how the Twins roll