Major League Ready

While at the same time the new guy in charge is saying he does not believe in half-measures. The off-season isn't over but so far, all indications are they will follow a course that exemplifies a "half-measure".

I agree completely and didn't mean to suggest IKF makes this a 75-win team. Filling our holes with players like IKF and Bell and RPs of a similar stature might get you to 75 wins. So, if that's the goal, signing this type of player might get you there.

If your goal is to win 75 games, then IKF or players like him are a good solution. I would like to see them do something that is not destined for mediocrity.

I am not sure I follow. IKF would not be replacing Kreidler. He would replace Lee who produced .3 WAR last year and IKF produced .7. We sure have low aspirations when signing a less than 1 WAR player is considered a positive. We know if the sign a guy like IKF, they will play him instead of getting Culpepper up who might actually be a solution to the problem.

So, they don't have bad players. They have players playing badly. I guess that's one way to look at it and that hope that bad players can become good is appealing but it's not a good doctrine by which to manage a roster. We all know what they say about doing the same thing and expecting different results. I see a hole at corner OFer, 3B, SS, and probably 1B, and a giant hole that is the BP. That's a lot of holes.

I have been asking the same questions for a couple years. The top revenue teams are not going to agree to just give away a large portion of their competitive advantage along with enough revenue loss to drop the value of their franchise by 25% or more. I hear a lot of ideas that would be nice for those of us that are fans of mid and small market teams but like you I just don't know how you resolve this problem. I thought keeping the luxury tax down was possible last CBA with all the concessions owners made especially given a lot of that money goes to revenue sharing but the players were not bending even a little.

I am not in the least defending the current direction but as I recall, when Santana and Bader were signed, the majority of this board said they were terrible signings and had similar criticism of the FO.

Draft bonuses and player benefits are around $40M. If they have an operating profit of $30M which is modest, that leaves around $100M for operating expenses. I would estimate personnel cost of roughly $70-75M which leaves $25-30M for all other operating expenses. Seems about right.

Good point. It begs the question ... what can we take away from each player's 2025 that might suggest who will be better this year. @Brock Beauchamp pointed out Arraez made very weak contact. How much consideration should we give that stat? Was he fighting injury or just not squaring up the ball? I like to look at 2nd half numbers to see how a player is trending. Arraez wRC+ was 105 and Bell was 139. Should we put anything into the difference in their 2nd half performance?

There is only one pool of money. Therefore, if you give the guys at the bottom more, it will take away from the guys at the top like Harper. If not, they would have voted to give Milb players more money a long time ago. It's not like the owners will just accept less profit. The Dodgers and many other teams could easily make more profit if that's what they wanted to do. Virtually every team spends in line with revenue while maintaining a reasonable profit. There are a lot of industries with a higher average return on capital. The only two teams that could spend significantly more are Pittsburgh and Miami. People seem to forget that the players wanted to reduce revenue sharing and pushed hard for a higher luxury tax threshold during the last CBA. The problem with a floor and a ceiling is that a floor has to be financially feasible for the lowest revenue team in the league. Therefore, spending would not increase for all but a couple of teams and the difference between what they are making and what a minimum profit level would be is insignificant. We are probably talking $25M for a couple teams. Even if the ceiling was $220M, there are several teams that would have a $100M advantage. There are 7 teams that spent over $220M last year. If the amount was lowered to $220M, the incremental decrease in payroll would be $350M. The couple of teams spending below what would be a reasonable floor would not remotely make up for the difference. I just don't see a cap and floor as a solution the players would accept.

Great example in Boston. I am sure Bloom's approach was not popular in Boston but he has set them up for success. I also agree with Falvey putting himself at risk which is why I think this is coming from ownership. Falvey had an easy sell. Picture this. Falvey goes to ownership and tells them they are perfectly positioned to rebuild in an unusually short period of time. They already have a lot of major league talent with 4-6 years of control. Jenkins / Culpepper / Rodriguez can be transitioned this year. There are a few other guys like GG and Tait that have a good chance to impact the ML club. They have several SP prospects and they need innings at the ML level and those who don't make it can be tested in the BP. Here is the key, they have great trade assets that should add impact players. Many bad teams don't have this trade capital. On top of that the 3rd pick next year. BTW ownership The additional assets acquired in trade will give us the best shot at sustained success. This approach will improve our chances of building of a true contender. It also accelerates the process of building a real contender. Double BTW ownership, this approach is guaranteed to be profitable. The bonus for Falvey is that he buys a couple more years for himself. If Falvey is pushing this approach, he either thinks he is bullet proof or he is not thinking about job security. He also is not thinking about building a real contender.

The lackluster approach can be explained by the budget but aggressive when you are bad is to reload/rebuild like the Cardinals are doing. Is Falvey telling them the best way to build a contender is what the Cardinals are doing now or like Cleveland and Tampa have been doing for a decade or two? If it were about money, that’s an easy sell because a rebuild would gut payroll and make the team quite profitable for not just this year but the next couple of years at least. So, is Falvey picking a direction that he thinks will save his job or is it ownership, especially the new partners trying to placate fans with a strategy that is likely to fail?

I too have noticed the moves the Cardinals have been making and have to agree their direction is much clearer than the Twins. They have failed to make an aggressive move when they have a real shot and now they are failing to be aggressive when they have almost no shot. I say almost because there is always the very slight chance that everything goes right. What I would like to know is if this is Falvey or is this ownership including the new partners placating fans by putting a 500 team on the field. Is Falvey just trying to save his job because I can't believe he thinks adding some mediocre talent to a less than mediocre team is going to end in a playoff run.

Don't let the guy who traded for Ryan and Lopez be the guy to trade them?

You have to be kidding. Vientos is kind of a 3B vs of Julien. I would rather have the much better fielding more versatile Fitzgerald as a bench option and keep Ober or whomever would be traded to get him.

Good point! I thought about that but was too lazy to address it.

For starters, I am suspect of a player going into their age 35 season, especially a player whose performance fell-off in their age 34 season. Clemens was a good as Walker last year for league minimum. $40M in BP additions would be far more valuable. REALLY bad idea!

What do they know and not know. Let’s start with revenue. Television revenue is widely reported. That’s the biggest share of revenue. As @old nursepoints out, most of the remaining revenue is subject to sales tax and therefore can be verified. Sponsorship revenue is not subject to sales tax but the sponsors are publicly traded entities so that information can be found in their financials. Basically, the revenue side can be measured with a high degree of accuracy. How about expenses. We know exactly what they spend on payroll, regular draft bonuses, and their international bonus pool. Player benefits can’t be audited but they can be estimated with a high degree of accuracy so total player related expense is roughly two-thirds of operating costs. Other personnel and us with operating costs can’t be audited. However, they can be identified with a high degree of accuracy and things like facilities, travel l, and personnel can be estimated with a high degree of accuracy. To sum it up, we know almost exactly how much revenue they have and we have exact numbers on two-thirds of expenses and we can estimate the other one-third of expenses with a high degree of accuracy. So, while it’s true we don’t have audited financial statements, the relative profitability of major league teams is not nearly the mystery that many make it out to be. Why jump to the assumption something can’t be done if you don’t understand the process required to do it?

There are ways it could be done but there is a whole lot of speculation here with no actual knowledge of the situation. In other words, there is a lot of guessing going on which is fine but none of us have the requisite information to do anything but speculate.

The IRS does not allow a business to borrow money for one operation and put it on the books of another organization. Whatever they acquired would be an asset of that organization and the deft a liability. The equity in the Twins might be collateral but that debt belongs to the organization where the acquired assets reside. They could have done something sneaky like have the Twins purchase assets of one of their other companies for $500M but you can't borrow money for one company and put it on another companies balance sheet.

Where are you coming up with the 90% number? That would be a total of roughly 33M for all other costs. If this were true, the team would be making $150M/year. Actually, every team would be making over $150M. The Twins have 942 employees according to this site. IDK if this is accurate. We can find the number of FO people but I would assume their are a lot more non-front office employes. We also don't know their average salary especially given this includes a handful of very high salaries but let's use a very conservative estimate of $60K given we don't have good data, that's $56M or 17% of revenue. Just health care costs would be $25M or 7.5% of revenue. Their draft and international bonuses are around $20M. That's 6%. So, that's a total of $30.5% before considering any cost for equipment, office space, computers, travel, advertising, etc.

Ryan / Lopez replacement is whoever is considered the 6th SP so quite a bit of drop-off. The alternative to Duran is whoever plays the best between Wallner / Roden to start the season and most likely Jenkins by mid-season. It just does not move the needle. It's awfully hard to get better short-term by trading your best SP. If we were to trade pitching, let's target our weaknesses which are the INF.

If I were trading Lopez or Ryan it would not be for an OFer. I am keeping Buxton and with Jenkins / Martin and all the others, I am pretty confident we will have a very good OF by the end of 2026. We have one INFer (Keaschall) that inspires any confidence, and he only has 200 major league ABs. SS/3B/1B are all very uncertain. If I am trading Ryan and/or Lopez it's for a middle INfer or high-end pitching prospect. If we are so fortunate as to have Keaschall continue to hit, and Culpepper make the transition, and Lewis improves substantially, we can move Keaschall to a 1B/OF role.

Bell had better splits against LHP in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024. Prior to 2021 he was weaker against LHP every year and he was bad last year in 100 ABs against LHP but he no doubt has been a better RH hitter in recent years. I would think they view him at this point as a better RHH at this point. He has not been much better than Clemens against RHP in recent years and Clemens is the by far the better defender, so it looks to me like they signed Bell for his RHH.

I didn't want to hijack the Joe Pohlad thread, but it would be very interesting to hear from TD participants what specifically the team needs to do to win back trust. Spend more is always popular but they were spending more than other teams in the division and got absolutely nothing done. They signed "higher profile" free agents like Correa and Donaldson and that got us nowhere. Point being we would all like them to spend as much as possible but that would never close the talent gap the team has had for a decade. Regardless of past success, spending as much as possible is a popular practice. Is Joe Pohlad going to make a difference in how we develop? Will he help make the right trades. I doubt it. The most important thing Tom Pohlad and the ownership group will influence is the current practice of filling in a flawed roster and hoping to compete. That necessitates one of two directives. They can commit to a full scale rebuild or they need to really shake up the current roster and add several established above average players and a couple difference makers. We only have one elite player (Buxton) and one above average player (Jeffers) who of course is a FA next year. One or even two trades are not going to make us immediate contenders. They already filled one hole (1B) with an average player at best. This means replacing most of the position players and most of the BP. Here is the catch. These are two polar opposite approaches. I think it's fair to say half of us that post here believe a rebuild is the most likely road to success and the other half want to build around this "core". Obviously, the team can win back trust eventually if they are very successful with one approach or the other but how in the world do they satisfy more than half of Twins fans when we want two very opposite directions?