The Great Hambino

Here's one question I have that I haven't been able to clarify: When Joe was handed the team, he didn't really have control. Jim was the one who still represented the franchise on ownership committees, and it was Jim, not Joe, that facilitated the Correa trade. As it turned out, Joe was merely the public face of what was actually a family decision-making operation - and when push came to shove, a Jim-decision-making operation. The question I have is this: do these sort of limitations also apply to Tom? Is he the representative on league committees, or is he simply a new face on the same decision-making body? Jim and his brothers are still on the board, and the board is still majority-Pohlad-controlled even with the limited partners in the fold. I'd like to know these answers before I throw my belief behind Tom, even if he is honestly stating his true intentions. What good is an aggressive mindset if the uncles can still overrule it whenever they feel like it? If he truly is being given the autonomy to run the team as he sees fit, then I'd feel better - not good, but better - about buying what he's selling

This can be a place to discuss comings and goings around the league - at least until the sport heads to the dark side of the moon in December It's Closing Time for Dan Wilson in Seattle. I believe this is the only current manager opening since the Mets and Red Sox made their interim managers permanent; Don Mattingly hasn't been elevated to permanent manager in Philly as far as I know, but they're still going in the playoffs. At least for one more day, anyway

It took one whole pitch for Tatis to get the party started in San Diego

Coming off an off day, too. If that's indicative of the state of these rotations, then this entire series is just for show. And ownership wants to let even more teams into the playoffs? No thanks

And that's with structuring their ticket deals like the Twins Pass thing to goose up attendance figures as much as they could. To me, it illustrates the short-sightedness of their strategy ever since Tom took over, from the insistence that they'll be competitive without any investment to quixotically buying at the deadline when contention was a pipe dream, all was done with the primary goal of an immediate increase in attendance. Well, their attendance still went down, and they're in a worse position moving forward than they otherwise would've been had they made an honest assessment of where they stood and what it would take to win fans back. I still don't think they really understood how poorly they'd allowed their relationship with the fanbase to erode. It was always going to take multiple years of committed investment to win fans back over time; it was never going to happen in one year, especially with the paltry amount of investment actually made (they basically fully recoup the investment made at the deadline by not tendering Ober). They operated as if that would be enough to fix it immediately I really want to believe things will be different, but I'm having a hard time believing ownership truly understands the nature of the problem and what it actually takes to solve it. They say they need to win, but they have yet to demonstrate that they understand what it actually takes to win

I think it's very up in the air that a solid cap and floor result from this CBA, and I'm very skeptical that it will be implemented immediately even if it goes through. But even if there's a delayed implementation of one, it will create a whole new subset of the trade market: teams above the cap unloading payroll on teams below it, and paying the price in prospect capital to do so. You can see examples of it in other capped sports such as Brock Osweiler and a third round pick in exchange for a sixth, or recently the Wolves moving down in the draft for the ability to unload Julius Randle and his contract. There isn't a direct corollary in MLB since you're not trading draft picks, but I could imagine a similar thing happening with prospects. For example, what kind of prospect haul could the Twins get from the Yankees for taking on the contract of, say, Carlos Rodon to help them get under the cap. Maybe the Twins throw in a Mikulski or two to get it to qualify as a trade. I'm not necessarily advocating for that trade specifically, but something like that could be another avenue to raise payroll to compliance while also beefing up their prospect pool. Even if it creates a backlog temporarily, it could give them more ammo to trade for cheaper, controllable talent. Be creative and proactive and leverage the new rules to your advantage

I'll believe they care about winning a championship when I see it. I really don't see what Zoll has done to get the vote of confidence he's received. But at least he acknowledged that they didn't clear their own low bar of expectations. At least he didn't try to spin some nonsense with "actually, we did have some competitive games this September." I'm pretty sure Joe would've. Sorta like how paying for Correa to go away and not reinvesting the savings was "a baseball decision" Same offseason plan for me as always: expect the worst, hope for the best

Upon further review, the AL field consists of my five least favorite AL teams, plus the Rays. I guess it wasn't so hard to choose a team to root for after all. For various reasons, I'd probably pull for the Cubs, Brewers, and Padres over the Rays in a hypothetical World Series matchup

Re: RBI totals vs opportunities and the inherent knack for driving runners in, I found a fun little site that calculates the percentage of runners driven in (just the runners on base - no credit for driving in yourself with a home run) for any player going back to the 70s. It's not perfect - a runner on first isn't the same opportunity as a runner on third, and not all runners are created equally (read: who's more often on base when you get up - the speedy lead-off hitter or the backup catcher?), but it's a pretty good approximation of how well players turn their RBI opportunities into runs. For reference, average is roughly 15% For this season, Bell drove in 18.47% of his baserunners. This was good for 21st in the league among players with at least 100 runners on base. He ranked 13th in raw RBI totals and roughly 34th in number of baserunners. For comparison, Buxton was at 8.94%. So this year, Bell certainly made more out of his opportunities on top of having more opportunities Now, is this a repeatable, predictable skill, or is it driven by random noise? Going back the last five years, Bell was never that high (14.65 was next best), while Buxton was never that low (10.48 was next worst). Last year, Buxton outpaced Bell 17.14 to 13.09. For their careers, they're pretty close - Bell is 14.82, Buxton is 13.09. So did Buxton forget how to hit with runners on base this year? Did Bell uncover the secret to hitting with runners on at age 34? Or is this a phenomenon similar to BABIP where extreme outliers should be expected to normalize over time? You be the judge A few miscellaneous notes: Brooks Lee found his way into the top 5 in 2024 while having a career rate that's roughly average. This year's top 5 are Tyrone Taylor, Owen Cassie, Graham Pauley, Nick Kurtz, and Jake McCarthy (not exactly a replica of anyone's MVP ballot) Also, Kirby Puckett was apparently really good at this (18.30 for his career! Good for 4th since 1974 among those with at least 1000 runners) and Mauer was better than a lot of people probably think (16.47, good for 44th during his career, better than guys like Gary Sheffield, Jason Giambi, and Edgar Martinez, and literally right next to Torii Hunter in the ranking. And he was over 17.5 through 2010 before the injuries started getting to him) And among players in the top 20 in the data set in terms of runners on, Derek Jeter is the only one with a below-average RBI percentage (14.77)

That's a new one: the buzzer-beater QB sneak

Maybe they can get him for a 5th rounder

I cannot fathom rooting for the most unwatchable scenario under the premise that it will have any effect on the new CBA. This is all subject to negotiation regardless of the outcome. Do we seriously think if the Dodgers dogwalk the field, the players will be like, "You know what? We're cool with the cap now that the team paying us the most money is having the most success" and cave based on that? Or vice versa from the owners if the Rays and Brewers - the #1 seeds, BTW - meet at the end? I'm not buying that. As for who I'm rooting for, still not decided. But a Cubs-Brewers NLCS would be a barrel of monkeys

Apparently Jim Harbaugh helped sell his brother on acquiring JJ. So he loves him, but not enough to acquire him himself. And their backup is Trey Lance. I don't think the Vikings are going to regret this trade

I'm really thinking that letting Darnold walk was by design and Jones walking caught them off guard

Any feeling of collapse probably comes from the fact that they were buyers at the deadline and finished behind two of the teams that sold to them. Even the Mets, a giant dumpster filled with several smaller dumpster fires, finished with only three fewer wins after selling to the Twins

IIRC there were major cap implications that essentially rendered Herbert immovable from the Chargers standpoint. I don't think they're as onerous this offseason - assuming he doesn't get hurt and trigger a $25MM guarantee on his 2028 salary

Herbert is the best realistic option I think. Depends on if Harbaugh is given enough rope to allow them to pick up McDaniel's offense, which is apparently very difficult for a newbie

Zero% chance. If there was even a thought about Wentz v Murray being a competition in their mind, Wentz would've remained the starter against the Bucs under the guise of being cautious with a concussion. Murray was not good, but let's not forget that the alternative led the team to zero touchdowns and had a 55% completion percentage the week before.

Vikings are opening as 10 point favorites at Miami with an o/u of 38.5. That's getting into, like, Iowa-Purdue territory to be a double digit favorite with fewer than 40 points expected overall

If you're being charitable, I guess Brooks Lee in that he's shown that he could be good enough to be a lineup fixture at the bottom of the order of a true contender. Keaschall would've if he had a position he could play. And next year's rookie class that got their feet wet this season - Culpepper, Jenkins, Rodriguez, Gonzalez - didn't give us reasons to think that they couldn't make those kinds of steps next year. But overall, we're in the same position we were in a the start of last offseason where they're going to rely heavily on several quantum leaps internally to get the improvement necessary to be true contenders. Hope is still the strategy. This will be a very pivotal offseason for both ownership and the front office. Please prove me wrong here.

Your 3-0 teams: Vikings, Bills, Chiefs, 49ers, and ... The Kirk Cousinses If I knew how to make memes, I'd make one of the dragons with the Raiders having the googly eyes. The Vikings deserve one googly eye, I suppose

In the micro, yes. They technically did exceed expectations in that they won slightly more than their Vegas projections by a few games by riding the weird phenomenon where they collectively turned into a prime Stan Musial with RISP for a couple of months. They also out-paced my personal projection of 69 wins, though in my defense, that factored in another selling trade deadline. But in the macro? As in, have they advanced the franchise forward towards being a consistent contender? They've fallen short of my expectations. My hope was that coming out of last year's trade deadline, they would aggressively continue to align with a competitive window in 2028. They weren't starting from scratch; there were a lot of reasons to like in terms of the future core starting to form from their pre-arb guys and prospects both familiar and new waiting in the high minors. But instead, they thought they could wish their way into contention while reducing the resources invested in the club. They pocketed the Correa savings and lowered the bar for what contention means as low as possible. Unsurprisingly, that strategy failed. And the club feels not much closer to legitimate contention - if any closer at all - than they were before the 2025 trade deadline. Who has taken a big enough step that you're confident they'll be a future centerpiece (this year's debutants not included; the jury's still out on all of them, both good and bad). What internal candidates have been successfully transitioned into a legitimate bullpen weapon - maybe Morris if you're being generous? Wasn't the whole point of trading away your bullpen the idea that you can put one together cheaply internally? They had an opportunity to start operating like the Brewers/Rays/Guardians/etc; instead, they chose to continue to operate like the Reds. You know, the team an even smaller market that is one of only two franchises to have gone longer since appearing in an LCS than the Twins. Good leadership is supposed to make the right decision even when it isn't the most popular decision. Tom chose short-term popularity when insisting on immediate contention both in the offseason and at the trade deadline because he valued short-term attendance over all else. They didn't contend and attendance was down. In the bigger picture, this year was a missed opportunity. It wasn't catastrophic - there's still a path forward. But it's a narrower path than it could have been if they had been honest with themselves about the position they were in

I'm looking forward to an ALCS matchup of an 87 win team at worst vs an 85 win team at best Figure out a better way to bracket

1. In terms of investment for next season, Kremer and Ober are roughly equal (let's say $8MM each, give or take a mil) 2. The Twins acquired Kremer at the trade deadline knowing this 3. It doesn't make much sense to spend $16MM on two slots at the back of the rotation, especially since they can't be optioned to AAA if necessary 4. Some of y'all are acting like it's not possible for them to acquire more starters in the offseason. That is an option, whether through free agency or trade, especially if $8MM gets freed up by moving on from one of these guys 5. When in doubt, the starter that was recently used out of the bullpen is the likelier of two starters to be cut loose To me, it all adds up to goodbye Ober, welcome back Kremer. Now invest in a ceiling raising starter, and you might actually have the makings of a quality rotation with decent depth next year