The Great Hambino

They need to keep Castro's versatility around if they're going to continue to platoon as much as they have. Salary space can be carved out elsewhere if needed. Among other things, I think moving him signifies a fundamental change in their platooning philosophy

What world are you living in where price has nothing to do with his replacement? This is a real team with a publicly-stated budget, not MLB The Show franchise mode

Over the past two seasons Jeffers is 9th in bWAR among catchers (threshold of catching in 40% of games played). Of the players in front of him, they all either arb/pre-arb with at least three years of team control left (Contreras-Milwaukee, Raleigh, Rutschman, Moreno, Yainer Diaz) or are signed to free agent contracts making more than triple Jeffers' projected salary (Will Smith, Realmuto, Contreras-St Louis). None are free agents this offseason. The best free agents on the list are 19. Elias Diaz (OPS+ of 88 last year), 22. Gary Sanchez (93), and 23. Danny Jansen (87). And I might be going out on a limb here, but I don't see an immediate upgrade within the organization. Even if you adjust to the last three seasons (Jeffers ranks 12th) or just last season (17th), no pending free agents rank ahead of him. If Jeffers is easily replaceable at $5MM, I'd be interested in hearing who all these replacements are.

Speaking of, uh, speaking about payroll: why would it be beneficial in any way to tip your hand to other teams or free agents what your spending plans are going to be? Say you want to unload a contract because you know you're maxed out for next year's budget and it might be the only way you can create space to add some guys. If other teams know your budget, wouldn't they be able to squeeze you on their offers knowing that you are in a position where you need to move him? Or if you say you're going to add payroll, but you keep missing on your targets (we were in on so many free agents!), do you feel pressure to throw money at whomever's still looking for a dance partner as spring training opens just to keep the pitchforked mob at bay? There just isn't a competitive advantage to divulging that information.

In the spirit of this franchise's time-honored traditions of nepotism and failing upward, I submit the most failingly-upwardest member of the Roy family:

Manfred is on record that they are looking to add two expansion teams now that Oakland/Tampa stadium situations have been resolved one way or another. Unless they reverse course, they're not moving any teams before those expansion slots are filled. So in effect, there would have to be three markets - not one - so much more desirable than the Twin Cities that it would be worth it to eat whatever steep financial penalty that would come with breaking the Target Field lease in order to move the team. They're not moving. Not even a remote possibility in the next 15 years.

I’ve been very critical of how the front office has handled their TV situation, so I have to give them credit here - not just for making the leap, but making it decisively. No farting around and letting the fans twist in the wind for yet another offseason. Rip the bandaid off and adjust to the new normal. Still a lot of questions left to be answered, such as any complimentary OTA/cable feeds ala the Padres model - and pretty please can the MLB.tv package season ticket holders get include the in market games? - but this is a great first step

In case there was any doubt that the RSN model is dying: wouldn't ROOT, NBC Sports, etc be champing at the bit to swoop in and get established in these newly (or soon-to-be) open markets if their own models were thriving? Maybe I missed it, but I haven't seen or heard anything to suggest that might be happening.

The Twins used 154 different lineups this year, which sounds ... high. But it wasn't too out of line compared to the AL playoff teams. Yankees used 106 different lineups, which was the fewest by far of the AL playoff teams. Having two hitters that were A) in the top 5 in all of baseball and B) healthy all year in Judge and Soto locking down two spots I'm sure had a lot to do with cutting down on the lineup permutations. If they were each only healthy for half the season - and the healthy times didn't overlap much - they'd have used more lineups out of necessity. The Royals used 137. Everyone else in the playoffs used at least 144. The Tigers - that team with the manager everyone here wishes the Twins had and the payroll the Pohlads wish the Twins had - used 155 different lineups Right, wrong, or indifferent, a fixed inflexible lineup just isn't something that happens in today's game. Back in the days of 10 man pitching staffs and no DH, there were 7 bench spots to cover for 8 spots in the order. Now there are 4 to cover 9. With the apparent increase in injuries in today's game, teams have to dip into that shorter bench more often. All this requires more flexibility, which is naturally going to result in more lineups. The Twins are on the high side for sure, but not as out of line as it might seem, and I'd argue driven at least partially by the injuries the guys you'd ideally build a lineup around in Buxton and Correa (throw Lewis in there too if you'd like)

I don't know if I've ever had my opinion of a player flip as much in as short of an amount of time as mine did of Alexi Casilla from the late tag up on what should've been the winning run in the tenth to "THERE WILL BE NO PLAY..." He really took me on an emotional journey across that hour or so

I'd love to be wrong here, but Lopez netted Arraez and a non-top 100 prospect when he cost $5.5 mil. You think he'll get 2 top 100 prospects costing nearly 4 times as much? I have my doubts. Maybe middling wasn't the right word - how about solid-but-unspectacular

Pablo gets moved for a pu pu platter of middling prospects. Salary savings are reinvested in bringing back Santana and bringing in one starter and multiple relievers with sketchy injury histories Twins kick in salary to move Paddack and prospect ballast for a serviceable RH ouftielder with team control - sort of a reverse of last year's Polanco trade with Paddack playing the role of DeSclafani Both catchers are retained St Peter decides to take whatever table scraps Bally will give him and accepts a carriage deal at a siginificantly reduced rate Fans continue to right-size their interest in the team

I believe during the last CBA negotiations the owners proposing a floor somewhere between 34-56% of the cap, depending on what you want to call the cap in a tiered luxury tax system. The NFL, NBA, and NHL have floors between 74% - 90% of the cap. There certainly would be a need to really ramp up revenue sharing to get in that range (plus other things like increased minimum salaries, maybe fewer arb years), but this shows why the players don't trust that increased revenue sharing will be reinvested into player salaries. And I can't blame them.

Have you seen Tires on Netflix? Joe Pohlad is Will

This is year one of an entirely new method of distributing baseball broadcasts. We didn't wake up one morning with a fully-formed cable television system in place where we could pay one price to see all* the games we wanted. It took decades to grow from something incredibly niche into the dominant form of television consumption. Cable isn't dead, but it is in hospice care. Certainly a streaming or hybrid streaming/OTA/cable/satellite model can't currently match the revenue available from a 2024 RSN contract. But you know what else can't? A 2025 RSN contract. Diamond's bankruptcy proceedings have confirmed that. So TV revenue is dropping one way or another. Given that, does it make more sense to get out on the front end of a new, growing model where you retain control of the terms of how your product is delivered, or do you continue to tether yourself to a model where revenue decline is a certainty and you lose control of the delivery? St Peter can talk all he wants about how there's nothing they could do in the Bally/Comcast dispute, but they did choose to grant Bally that power in the first place. Making any sort of long-term commitment to the RSN model would be like going all in on railroads in 1948 *In case some Captain Pedantic wants to swoop in here, I know it's not literally all the games, but it's basically all of them

That's a good question. Had some fun perusing historical rookie of the year votes (no, I don't know how I keep the ladies at bay) Since Marty Cordova won it, the the Twins have received exactly one first place ROY vote - Liriano in 2006. It's a fun list of names showing up down ballot in these votes. Mark Redman, Tony Fiore, Dustan Mohr, Eddy Julien (anyone remember that guy?) Even funnier: the entire Twins franchise post-Cordova has received fewer first place ROY votes than their current manager did

I mean the one that threatened contraction and a move to North Carolina until they got their subsidy

I'm guessing your hypothetical businessman didn't receive a nine-figure public subsidy for their place of business

The White Sox just started a network in partnership with the Bulls and Blackhawks that is starting out with a mix of cable and OTA carrriage (seems wise) but no current streaming option (seems less wise). It will be interesting to see if this city-centered model or a league-centered model becomes the more prominent arrangement in a post-RSN world. Since we're sorta starting from scratch, maybe the models could work together, share distribution, get wider reach while maintaining flexibility. My hope is that MLB tells Diamond to pound sand now that Diamond is trying to drop most of their MLB contracts. Hopefully this forces Diamond to fold and frees up NBA/NHL (they're only committed to Diamond through the upcoming season) and allows MLB, NBA, and NHL to create a joint venture of an OTA/streaming combo. Within that they could sell team, league or even city/regional subscription packages (or the whole enchilada for the truly depraved sports nut) while retaining all the ad revenue. No idea of how the math works out in that, and there would still be the issue of integrating non-Bally teams, but that's my dream outcome

In two years of this format, the World Series has been 1 vs 6 and 5 vs 6. With the way the Tigers and Mets look right now, I wouldn't be totally shocked if one of them can make it 3 for 3 for the 6 seeds. They'd never do this, but I think the teams on bye should receive more of an advantage than 3 home games out of 5 to compensate for almost a week of rust. Japan has a team on bye in their playoffs too, but they get to start their series up 1-0. The expanded playoff genie ain't going back in that bottle, and my plan is about as likely as Dave St Peter being named Twins Daily Executive of the Year, but I wish they could find some way to more substantially reward the teams that proved their excellence over 162 games

Funny you mention that Ober game. It illustrates a case where Rocco maybe did learn and tried a different approach. Two Ober starts later, he was in almost the exact same position. Instead of a 2-0 lead entering the 8th, he had a 2-1 lead entering the 7th. Exactly 83 pitches thrown in both cases. This time Rocco leaves him in ... and the lead didn't last past the next batter as a Naylor knocked it out of the park. This got overshadowed by what followed (Henriquez in THAT 10th inning in Cleveland), but to me it sort of encapsulates the entire six week meltdown. Not trying to absolve Rocco - I'm on record that I'd move on from him - I just think he isn't always as rigid in his approach as it seems. When I was a kid I had one of those choose your own adventure books where there was no happy ending - every possible path was doomed to failure. These last six weeks kinda felt like that.

What a shame to see the Astros go 2 & BBQ at home. A real, real shame

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/sports/padres-announce-local-tv-plan-for-2024-season/3473741/ That wasn't true for Padres fans when they made their games available in-market for streaming. Part of their streaming rollout included working with cable/satellite providers to keep games on their platforms, so they didn't have to pony up anything on top of what they were already paying. Other teams in other sports have struck over-the-air deals to supplement their streaming package (I think Vegas and Phoenix have done this). I don't know if a similar plan here would cover every single fan getting Bally's via cable, but it would certainly cover a lot of them

Please oh please tell me there's video of DSP chewing out TC Bear...

The most damning part of all of this is this part of their response to Comcast dropping Bally in May: "The Twins have no role or voice in this matter." Really? You couldn't have possibly foreseen the channel that's been falling off platforms left and right might have additional carriage issues? Yet another piece of evidence that they have zero long-term vision. They could've been out on the front end of what is clearly where baseball broadcasts are headed while keeping promises made to the fanbase and doing something to engage with younger fans. A lot of the people cutting the cord right now are the people that could potentially be bringing families to the park five-ten-fifteen years from now. Might have hurt the short-term cash flow a little (which we've been told was mitigated by the decrease in payroll) but it could've paid off big time down the road. Paying something now for a larger payoff in the future: that's literally the definition of investment.