The Great Hambino

How can someone with a marketing background have such a hard time delivering a coherent message to his customers? To lack even a basic understanding of what they think and what they want? The comments about 2023's excitement coming from a team with baseball's 11th-best record should illustrate that the bar really isn't that high. It doesn't take that much to make us happy. This shouldn't be that difficult.

Yet another expense that would typically be added back for business valuation purposes

A nil-nil draw would be quite the proper gift for the London crowd

You know what's a good sac bunt? The kind you beat out for a hit. Well done, Parker Meadows

Absolutely, the timing of the right-sizing needs to be considered when determining what kind of payroll they're really functionally working with. The 2025 opening day payroll was $142MM, or 18th highest in the league. But since $58MM of that was being spent on two players, they were also functionally working with a payroll of $84MM on all but two players. Compare that to the Guardians, for example. Their opening day payroll $100MM, but removing their two top salaries puts them at $69MM, which really shrinks the perceived gap between the available resources between the two teams. (Ironically, one of those top-two contracts was Carlos Santana, who signed with Cleveland in part because the Twins couldn't afford to keep him). Doing the same adjustment with the Tigers and Royals puts the Twins below them in terms of bottom-24 spending. That kind of lopsided payroll is incredibly irresponsible considering the Pohlads greenlit that long-term spending, reversed course months later (effectively drastically reducing their future flexibility and ability to pivot), and showed enough approval of Falvey's performance to grant him more power since then. You can certainly question the wisdom of many of Falvey's decisions, but I can't put the blame for the lopsidedness of the payroll on him.

As a shady accountant myself, I can think of a few ways to make this plausible (at least on paper, on a non-GAAP basis): - Expensing instead of capitalizing all your capital improvements, like the 2022-23 Target Field makeover). This would create big losses that year that could be used to claim average losses of whatever per year over whatever time frame suits their argument - Paying exorbitant management fees to a related party. Are there any other Pohlad companies that needed cash infusions over the last few years? Also allows them to tell the technical truth but functional lie that they don't take any money out of the business for themselves (read: an equity distribution) even though a management fee to yourself (which reduces income) and an equity distribution (which doesn't reduce income) are functionally the exact same thing. - Paying exorbitant executive compensation (this one should be self-explanatory) to people with a name that rhymes with "Schmolad" - Funding all of the above by racking up debt at Twins Baseball LLC. It's a slimy way of borrowing against the Twins to fund other enterprises without borrowing against the Twins to fund other enterprises They can technically do all this. The SEC doesn't care since they're not publicly traded. The IRS doesn't care since the management fees/executive comp are income-neutral activities (the Twins are a partnership and any deduction by the Twins is picked up as income somewhere else by the Pohlads). Their lenders aren't really gonna care since they know the MLB isn't going to allow a franchise to go belly up (it's guaranteed, even if not explicitly), plus the fact that they're likely showing their lenders GAAP-compliant financials that show a better, more honest financial picture of the franchise. The best part? All of the above would be added back to income as normalizing adjustments when earnings are being used to place a valuation on the business for, say, the purchase of said business (this is why MLB doesn't really care, even if you could argue that they probably should) So they can claim poverty when justifying spending cuts while enriching themselves and still maintaining the highest franchise valuation possible. All while being able to tell whatever tale suits them without technically lying. Dishonest truth-telling, brought to you by the magic of accounting

That's a pretty solid ranking. I see them in tiers like this: Braves Orioles/Rangers/Giants Nationals/Twins/Angels And then there's the Rockies: the abysmal organization that really has no business being that abysmal. They get much better attendance than they have any right to get, and ownership, for all its faults, is at least willing to spend. Their run of ineptitude was recently laid out in The Athletic: entirely insular, loyalty trumping talent, a strange aversion to trades, nearly a decade of drafting in the top 10 without anything to show for it, an analytics infrastructure about 20 years behind the times (for all you anti-analytics folks, this should be your favorite team). But it also was filled with quotes and comments from rival executives about the untapped potential of the market as well as the possible ways the unique environment of Coors Field could be leveraged to establish "the greatest home-field advantage in professional sports," according to one exec. This whole article sprung from their GM stepping down and the owner's son/executive VP (sound familiar?) stating that they're opening the search outside of the organization for "fresh ideas." Depending on who ends up in that seat, this job could rocket up the rankings in terms of attractiveness. Or it could be more of the status quo and remain in a tier of its own miles below the Nationals/Twins/Angels. It could be pretty interesting to see how this all plays out.

Agreed. Spending top dollar on the bullpen - a position group that seems to be the least reliable year to year in the FA market - given all the other needs of this team would be an incredibly inefficient use of limited resources. The bullpen that was nuked at the deadline took multiple years to build. Duran didn't become a closer overnight. Jax and Varland took a lot of trial and error before they settled in to what they became. Thinking that Festa or Abel or Prielipp can show up and be reliable high leverage options immediately is nonsensical - and that's what it would take to have a competitive bullpen next year. They are truly starting from scratch - Sands and Funderburk should be at best secondary options in a good bullpen, not the cornerstones they'll have to be. I hope their precious little tank was worth the marginal improvement in odds in the biggest crapshoot in all of professional sports drafts, because it damaged the bullpen to the point that rebuilding it within the remaining time they have with Ryan and Lopez is a bit of a longshot, especially if significant time is missed in 2027. And that's just the bullpen. This tank provided nothing in the way of meaningful immediate help to the lineup, which is relying heavily on historically inconsistent players like Lee and Lewis and Wallner suddenly figuring it out and staying that way, as well as guys like Jenkins and Culpepper being reliable contributors while having nothing more than a cup of coffee at best past AA. Expecting it all to click into place immediately, or at least early enough in the season to make a difference (games in April count in the standings just as much as games in August, after all), just isn't realistic.

I don't think anyone knows what the owners are going to do because I'm not sure if the owners know what the owners are going to do. Nothing they have done over the past two years has shown any indication of an actual cohesive plan. Would they be in a position to run a billion dollar operation if their last name wasn't Pohlad? I have my doubts

I can't imagine why anyone would think the playoffs are too watered down

Every NL 6 seed (all, uh, three of them) has won at least two playoff series under this format. I think that streak comes to an end here

This was a 110 loss team post-deadline. They are not a decent bullpen (which apparently you can just rebuild on the fly by throwing a couple coins in a fountain - they're completely starting from scratch here) and a single position player away from contending. Unless you're counting on winning a dozen coin flips in player development and assuming unproven starters can transition immediately to high-leverage bullpen roles without a transition period, contention in 2026 is a pipe dream. And with all the Falvey word salad we've been forced to ingest over the last year, this passage: "Those guys [López and Ryan] are part of it, right? So that's my vision, that's my hope. That's my expectation as we sit here. It still requires some ongoing conversations with ownership and what that looks like. And ultimately, my hope is that we could build around that group. That would be my hope.” reads to me like Falvey providing cover for himself when they're inevitably sent off to the highest bidder. "I wanted to keep them but I just didn't have the budget. It's not my fault!" That combined with Rod and Todd Pohlad talking about "short-term pain" and "investing when the time is right" have me completely convinced that this is going to get worse before it gets better.

This Ohtani guy might have a future in baseball

There's no way they fired him for the team's performance over the last two months, so the decision to let him go must've been made at the trade deadline. The pivot on the sale happened after the trade deadline. Ergo, the pivot did not affect Rocco's job status

Maybe if I was blazin’

Skubal was on fire. Coulda maybe had a shot at a complete game shutout if he could cleanly field a ground ball

Not to mention the high profile whiff Provus had when he assured us that blackouts were a thing of the past in the 2023-24 offseason

I'd be shocked if Bochy ended up anywhere other than San Francisco

Bob Melvin's track record of success in an environment like Oakland where he had to deal with similar constraints to what the Twins are likely headed toward, at least in the short-term, is intriguing to me. Then again, maybe his experience in Oakland is something he'd like to avoid experiencing in the future. But please forget about internal candidates. This position needs fresh ideas and an outside perspective in the worst way. I mean, what are the odds that Toby Gardenhire and his sub-500 AAA winning percentage is the best man for the job out on the market? Low. Very very low. ETA: if they thought an internal candidate was worth exploring, they should've been made interim manager at the trade deadline

Rocco may not have been the biggest problem - he wasn't. Their issues have been brewing ever since they reduced payroll immediately after paying for Correa and Lopez (creating a lopsided roster that functionally decreased the effectiveness of their payroll), which culminated in The Purge after a season-and-a-half of wishing upon internal improvement while treading water produced predictably mediocre results. But that doesn't mean he wasn't a problem. If we expected them to fix problems only in order of importance, then they'd be sitting on their hands doing nothing until the team somehow gets sold/another long-lost grandson emerges that's actually capable of running a sports franchise (kinda like Andy Garcia in The Godfather III). No one should expect this to solve all their problems, but it was still a problem that needed solving.

The Correa contract was stopping them. They couldn't meaningfully gut the payroll down to those levels without being able to move him. Once they found they could, they pivoted immediately. Why did they allow that contract (as well as the Pablo extension) in the first place when they were going to do their right-sizing bit less than a year later? That's another story, and IMO the biggest single reason we find them in the predicament they are in today.

The more I think about this, the more I'm shocked that he wasn't fired at the trade deadline. It would be insane to let the post-deadline results have an effect on the decision one way or another, so it must've been decided that he wasn't going to be returning for 2026 at that time. They have a bench coach with MLB manager experience in Tingler. Why not use the final two months to test him out? To me, the fact they didn't means they don't see him as a candidate. Or maybe Rocco's foray into the land of aggressive baserunning was his first journey off Falvey's script and it cost him his job. But that isn't what happened. I'm about 95% sure of it

Wow. I thought the time had come for this when they stumbled out of the gates this season (one could certainly argue for an earlier place in time), but in my gut I didn't really think they'd actually do it.

In the American League, I would love to see a Mariners-Blue Jays LCS. Which means we're almost definitely getting a Guardians-Yankees LCS. I'm not sure as much on the NL side. As much as I feel compelled to root against the big market orgs, there are a lot of likable players that create a bit of a paradox for me. I don't want to see the Dodgers repeat, but I like watching Freeman, Betts, and Kershaw, among others, do their thing. I generally loathe everything about Philly, but it would be fun to see old friends Duran, Bader, and Kepler have some success. A Brewers-Reds LCS would be fun for the sheer panic it would cause Turner Sports execs (and other reasons). I suppose I gotta go with Padres-Reds as my preferred NLCS matchup. Too bad the Brewers and Padres are on the same side of the bracket. So I guess I'm pulling for a Mariners-Padres World Series. If nothing else, player intros while there's still sunlight would be a nice dose of nostalgia

The Giants have given everyone a nice reminder that picking up a manager's option - even when done as late in the season as July - is not a guarantee that they'll be returning.