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MeleMouth

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Everything posted by MeleMouth

  1. MeleMouth
    Who are these greats that could do it all when thrown into a pennant race? It's pretty rare. Note that Prielipp has more fWAR this year, his first year, than Jacob Misiorowski had last year in his first year, more than Shohei Ohtani had his first year of pitching, and the same amount as Clayton Kershaw in his first year. For sake of comparison, he has more than Frank Viola had in his first two years combined. It's unrealistic and dangerous to expect a pitcher, particularly one like Prielipp who's missed a lot of time with injuries, to unexpectedly step into a rotation as a rookie, have all his pitches, and be able to throw a full set of innings.
  2. MeleMouth
    Better than Jim Kaat, Frank Viola, or Johan Santana? Highly doubtful.
  3. MeleMouth
    Your comments actually demonstrate my point about how mixed goals work against long term success. Working on something like a "knockout change up" is exactly something a rebuilding team would have Prielipp do, but a competing team would shy away from.
  4. MeleMouth
    If the team had one goal, rebuilding, 2026 would have been a year to get Prielipp adjusted to innings and work on skills needed to succeed in major league baseball. But because the team had two goals, competing while rebuilding, Prielipp has been put into situations where the top goal isn't development, giving him contradictory goals. It would be great to shut him down now or just give him limited innings for the rest of the year, to work on specific skills with focus on 2027.
  5. MeleMouth
    No, the future isn't now. It's in 2028 and maybe 2027. They're going to regret trading Hill and perhaps some of the other prospects they traded this year, because they could have had talent or trade value for better future teams. Similarly, the Twins should have completed the tear-down this year and brought in additional talent instead of selling "competitive baseball in September." I just hope they don't bring back the whole gang and try to sell some kind of competitive window next year. "Buxton! Ryan! Lopez! Larnach! Lewis!"
  6. MeleMouth
    This should have been the goal for the whole year, with eyes focused on 2027 and 2028, but instead they talked themselves into the mythical "competitive rebuild," where you sorta look like you're rebuilding and sorta look like you're competing, but don't really do either one well.
  7. MeleMouth
    Meanwhile in Baltimore, many people are going, "That's the Kremer we knew! We're so glad the Twins talked themselves into being able to fix him!"
  8. MeleMouth
    Just spit-balling here: are they picking players for the bench based on saving a few bucks? Jackson has a contract, so he gets paid no matter what, but if they promote someone like ERod, then he gets a big raise. It's prorated, of course, but still a decent amount of money. They SEEM to be opening the wallet a little, but maybe that requires pinching elsewhere. Otherwise, I still got nothing.
  9. MeleMouth
    Agree with most, but what are they going to do with Festa, who just had season-ending double surgery four weeks ago?
  10. MeleMouth
    They said he has an impingement. Hundreds or thousands of athletes have surgeries for hip impingements. For example, in 2005 Matt Birk had hip surgery for a torn labrum, then played ten more years. Similarly, in 2006, a somewhat pioneering surgery was done on LaMarcus Aldridge in his second year of college, when he was injured pretty badly, and he went on to play 16 years in the NBA. To put that lengthy career in context, just imagine the hip movements necessary to play basketball and the risk from jumping and landing on a bad hip. Those were 20 years ago. Surgery has gotten a lot better since then.
  11. MeleMouth
    They have been clear that he has an impingement and that Dr. Larson, the Vikings doc and one of the top hip guys in the country, gave him a shot. An impingement by definition means that he has a tear, either of cartilage or his labrum, and often both. Neither heal on their own, but occasionally they calm down enough to allow someone to function, but rarely for the movements necessary to play baseball. In hockey, goalies can't play with impingements, because side-to-side can be nearly impossible, but sometimes wings can, although direct hits can hurt like [pain only hockey players and lumberjacks can handle]. It is visibly affecting his performance. We don't need anyone to say that he might need surgery to know that he probably needs surgery.
  12. MeleMouth
    Maybe they think they're going to some kind of Angels thing if they fall out of the race and put a bunch of people on waivers to save a couple of million. If Caratini gets claimed on waivers, then they need Jackson. Of course, he had already been assigned to St. Paul, so he could have been stashed fine there. I guess I'm out.
  13. MeleMouth
    One simple reason to bring up ERod now is that he can actually play baseball right now and Buxton can't. Are there reasons why you would keep Buxton on the roster instead of ERod?
  14. MeleMouth
    The simplest answer, which many people don't like, is that the Twins did either a bad or really bad job with their trades last summer. To mention a few, not only did they get the unneeded and questionable left-handed Roden as a throw-in for the excellent and cost-controlled Varland, they got the unneeded and unquestionably incapable left-handed Outman straight-up for the occassionally very good and cost-controlled Stewart, and the unneeded and incapable of defense left-handed Mendez straight-up for the competent Bader.
  15. MeleMouth
    Itemizing companies that spend lavishly to improve the customer experience - besides the ones you listed, I can think of several others - does not negate the central point: MOST (I did not say "MANY," as you rewrote the statement, although that is true, also) companies seek to spend the least amount necessary to maximize profits. Interestingly, you conclude your paragraph with examples of companies whose business model and even branding is exactly that: spend the least possible. A corollary is that most companies pay their employees the least necessary to get their best work. If you want to say that most companies spend more than the least necessary to maximize their profits, or that most companies pay their employees more than they need to, you are being oppositional for the sake of being oppositional in defiance of basic economics.
  16. MeleMouth
    For several years, the strategy has been to squeak into the playoffs by taking advantage of playing in the weakest division in baseball and then hope for the best. This is actually relatively sane behavior, because most businesses try to pay the least possible to develop the products they need to make get results in their market. This is basically what the Twins do, because they have a monopoly in their market. The problem, of course, is that many market monopolists in MLB have more resources and many other monopolists with resources similar to the Twins compete in more difficult divisions so competition forces them to be smarter in managing their resources in order to maximize their revenue. Then, once the playoffs come around, the Twins monopoly loses to these wealthier or smarter monopolies.
  17. MeleMouth
    It's short-term thinking, like a poker player who has a strategy for the immediate hand but doesn't really think about playing this hand in consideration of later hands. They'll have a multi-year macro strategy strategy one year, but it runs into some bumps or short-term facts change, so they then pivot to reverse the previous strategy and implement a new one. Of course, OTOH, for many years in the Falvey era, they did seem to follow certain micro strategies long after they were proven not to work, like giving Joey Gallo chance after chance and pinch hitting Manny Margot enough to set a record for futility. Thankfully, after several years of trying, they learned not to treat closers like fungible parts you could get off the scrap heap (Belisle, Robles, Parker, Colome, Pagan).
  18. MeleMouth
    Buxton should have surgery now instead of risking his hip getting worse. They should also end the magical thinking that he will play better with an injury if he just rests it a little while. It's never worked for him in the past and this injury could be worse. You just can't play baseball well with his hip injury.
  19. MeleMouth
    Agree completely. Would add that they are compounding their mistakes last year into this year, like they compounded their mistakes in 2023 into 2024, and their mistakes of 2024 into 2025.
  20. MeleMouth
    The idea that a CEO isn't involved in deciding who plays and has delegated it entirely to his hired management is based on (1) generalizing among all CEO's and owners, based on an assumption, but not knowledge, of how the world works; (2) having never heard of Jerry Jones and Hal Steinbrenner, among other sports team owners; and (3) ignoring TP's comments about involvement with the team. To elaborate on #1, imagine that the Twins are a widget business and Buxton accounts for 15% of the company's sales or value. Assume further for the sake of this example the Buxton product had a major defect, for which the choices are to pull the product off the market to fix it for the future, risking a portion of current sales, or to leave it on the market, with a good but not certain chance that the defect could get worse, requiring additional time off the market. The CEOs of most, but not all, companies will be very heavily informed and probably involved in the key decisions about whether or not to take that product off the market for a while. Now, some CEOs actually do care more about their golf times and don't want to be responsible for major product decisions, but most CEOs, particularly most good CEOs, do. It is actually highly unlikely Byron Buxton suffered a major injury and Tom Pohlad just said to Zoll, "hey, you run the team and do whatever you think is best." It is also highly unlikely that a GM like Zoll on a short-term contract who wants to keep his job is not doing his best to ensure that his decision aligns with what the CEO wants, and "doing his best" means "having multiple conversations with the CEO that are as direct as possible."
  21. MeleMouth
    Buxton had an excellent game at the plate last night, but he is still at .194 with .250 slugging for August after a similar July. Now, he often seems to start slow after returning from injury, so maybe this was the start of his return. But you can't ignore that he did it against pitchers who ended the night with 6.08, 9.00, 10.66, and 6.35 ERAs, and that Springs, the starter, has some of the lowest velocity in the league. To me, Buxton still looks like he's dealing with a serious injury that will make it very hard for him to maintain even league-average performance over an extended period, particularly against better pitching.
  22. MeleMouth
    Fair enough opinion, although I'm not sure why you persist in wanting to make comments personal. We all hope that Lewis will continue hitting well. My points have always been that projecting his early August streak forward is a mistake.
  23. MeleMouth
    I would like to know more about him. Some of his stats suggest he is selling out for power and getting lucky in AA, but does he have the skill to make his swing succeed at higher levels?
  24. MeleMouth
    Quentin Young is still on the list? A year from now, he's more likely to be DFA'd than to be promoted to AA. He has a 57% contact rate in low A and, after many experiments, the Twins haven't demonstrated the ability to improve a player's strike zone control. Plus so many errors! I guess the top value he brings is that with him in the field low A pitchers get more opportunities to work on their skills in game conditions.
  25. MeleMouth
    Fun exercise. You may have too many on the 40-man. Do you want to wish happy trails to anyone else? Without going too deep into your proposal, one I would call out is Wallner: unless a player is a total masher or still developing, the Twins need to be done with poor defenders with bad contact rates. There is no future in Wallner and the present is pretty poor, also.
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