Major League Ready

Gray has 3 years of control according to Baseball reference, not 2. You are projecting him at his current level of performance which is sensible. However, this is the kind of guy you trade for because you believe he has upside. There is little point of this team pursuing him the FO does not believe he has significant upside. I presume that's what the Brewers were thinking with Yehlich. Wheeler has 1 year of control and this team has no business trading assets for ANY player that will only be here through next year.

Extend Gibson and sign this guy and the next 4 years looks pretty decent for SP. Of course, this assumes he is a strong 3 or even a 2. Use stackers for for the final 2 spots until someone or 2 guys graduate to a regular starting role. Hopefully Graterol blazes through the minors in route to being the Ace we have been looking for since Johan left or Romero gets it together or both.

If Gibson won't sign an extension, I would consider a deal centered around Gray and Gibson but I would prefer to extend Gibson.

You have provided absolutely no evidence of what level of profit would be produced with $150M payroll for the 25 man roster yet you offer an opinion on viability. All of the data is readily available but you have produced no facts, instead uninformed speculation. Don't try this in the real world. Also, try going into your CEOs office and telling them they should give everybody raises this year to the point of the company being at B/E because they had good profits last year. Let's look at a different way. If a large portion of your income was bonus based would you work for free the year following a great year? Having said this ... if you actually take the time to look through MLB revenue and profit estimates, it does appear teams spend all the way to B/E levels when they truly have a good shot at going deep in the playoffs but within reason. Houston, was the most team in the league when they absolutely sucked. As I recall, their total payroll was under $40M one year. According the report I listed previously, several teams made between 80-100M. Yet, you don't see these teams increasing their payroll by $75M, do we?

There was documentation of financial viability. NONE. The validations was a quote there is no good reason the Twins could not spend $150. If you have had experience, and especially if you have actually been responsible for a $250M P&L you know this would not come close to flying. I have only had 4 positions with full P&L responsibility of $250M or more so that's a small sample but I believe had I presented to the board in this manner, I would have been relieved of my duties within a few days.

Just a guess but I think they probably feel homeless shelters or medical research or battered women's shelters are a better use of their charitable donations as compared to another $20M to get 3 more wins in a season.

I specifically used $150M. $140M might be viable but who knows because there is no attempt to validate the financial viability. The financial part of these discussion do not come remotely close to how these things are actually done in practice. It's fanatical rambling. Go ahead and dream but to put it into a plan in this manner suggests it's reality. If not, it's a bunch of adult spending a lot of time on fantasy. Why is Cleveland pulling back on spending when they are not at the $150M level? Doe sit not make much more sense for Tampa to employ this plan? There payroll is under $100M. These teams are businesses. Nobody blinks when Kershaw is not satisfied with his $300M contract and asks for ore but the teams should operate as a non-profit. ! would be fine with dreaming but it always turns into the problem is the Twins ownership is cheap and what really bugs me is there are many well presented ideas with of statistical support for player performance. When it comes to financial discussion most fall back to to "cheap ownership" with making no effort to actually inform themselves. What we get is "there is no good reason" when the fact is the reason is either not understood or worse yet no attempt has been made to understand.

OR ... it could been seen as a better opportunity. If you don't make it as a starter you have a chance to be a Stacker instead of being limited to a RP role if you don't make it as a traditional starter straight out of the minors. Also, we are not eliminating the use of traditional SPs. Any premier prospect is not worried about this system limiting them and as I said above it's an additional opportunity if viewed from an unbiased perspective. We have also seen some guys who were able to ratchet up the velocity in relief roles. Is it possible some guys could maintain higher velocity in a stacker role?

1) I used 1500 when 1450 is closer to reality or roughly 66 IP per reliever. I don't care how many pitched 66 innings. I care about if it's feasible and if there would be an expected drop in performance and/or injury. Hader pitched 81 innings and there were 89 over 60 IP. Are you really trying to tell me 66 IP is too much. 2) Some of you keep insisting we measure a new practice with old metrics. Perhaps the old system under utilized RPs or at a minimum mitigated the number of innings you could get out of them. Who says they have to pitch one inning. 3) If you have 6 instead of 8, is it not obvious they would average more innings.

Yes, this is how businesses are run. The board or ownership asks what is the impact on the bottom line or what will profits be as a result of this plan and the person in a position similar to a MLB GM says "oh is that a concern" I did not see a problem with operating as a non-profit or losing money." Last day on the job. This line of thinking is bury you head in the sand logic / fanaticism because most people with no management experience understand $150M budgets need to be validated. I would hope any of us working for an organization that managed profitability in this fashion would be looking for a new job because any such company has a very short life expectancy.

On what do you base the statement "There is not much reason they couldn't push payroll to $150? In the real world any report of this nature that did not validate such an assumption would have zero credibility. You also have a key assumption of that the Twins outbid the Yankees for Corbin who is from NY and the Yankees have $300M in revenue more than the Twins. It's fantasy baseball at best. The revenue reports for 2018 are not out yet. In 2017 the Twins ranked 21st in revenue with $261M. Whre would you expect a team 21st in revenue to rank. 16th looks quite reasonable https://www.statista.com/statistics/193645/revenue-of-major-league-baseball-teams-in-2010/ If you look on that list, several of the top teams made 80-100M. The Twins made $23M with a payroll of roughly $20M less than 2018 payroll. It would appear they were willing to push payroll to a level that would assure meager profits in 2018. To say there is no reason they could not push to $150M is uninformed or assumes they should operate as a non-profit.

Sconnie is right, we would need 3 to be even close to contention but let's start with one. Are you suggesting that this be done via free agency or a trade? I will ask the same question you asked. What are the cons of your strategy?

The most obvious is that If you fill two rotation spots with 4 “Stackers”, you only have 6 traditional BP spots which leaves less room for specialists or multiple moves for match-ups. This approach is most advantageous for SPs with stats that dip significantly the 3rd time through the order. That specific trait requires some ML experience to identify. Therefore, the model could hold back some pitchers from breaking through to be regular SPs. Put another way, it will require better management to facilitate both in game and from a player development perspective.

Ops, I quoted the wrong post so I deleted it. This is in response to Chiefs post which suggested this concept required two roster spots for producing the innings previously provided by one roster spot. You are applying traditional and perhaps antiquated concepts. Why do we have to look at as two guys taking one roster spot. Why can't we look at as to stackers taking the place of to traditional RPs who now provide 120 innings instead of 60? The fact is that it's a little of both.

There are 32.4 starts for a 5 man rotation which means the top 3 spots (not individuals) need to average 5.2 IP for the concept of stacked SPs to work. This would result in 550IP. For example, Boston got 525 IP out of their top 3. Of course, Sale, missed 6 starts, and Price missed a couple. Therefore, their replacements would have only needed to manage 3 innings per start to get to 550 innings. Let’s look at the playoff teams and see what their top rotation spots produced. In other words, instead of modeling the failures, let's model the successes. Cleveland had 4 starters over 175 IP and 2 over 200. (780 IP) This does not account for any missed starts. Houston had 3 guys over 200 Innings and a 4th with 167 that missed a couple starts. The Yankee’s top 3 had 500 innings and missed 9 starts. They would have needed to get 5 ½ innings per start out the replacements to get to 550IP. Of course, they have a loaded BP so the usage makes sense. Oakland only had 1 guy with 160 innings. Colorado had 4 guys that averaged 187 innings. Cubs top 3 pitched 556. Braves top 3 had 525IP so they would have needed to get 4 and a third out of their replacements. They also had Sanchez give them over 5 and 2/3 for 24 starts. Dodgers had a lot of guys miss starts so it would takes some effort to see what they averaged from their rotation. One could conclude that producing 550 IP out the top 3 rotation spots has a high correlation to contending. It's also apparent that it's far from an impossible feat.

The Twins used 34 pitchers in 2018. It would have been a convoluted mess to try to explain this in any other way other than using roster spots. Of course, this is very obvious and the context of that post very clearly used roster spots. You ignored the hard facts and twisted the information rather than consider the merit of the alternative. You also ignored some very basic math here. They don't need to have 3 guys exceed 185 innings. They need 3 guys to average 185 innings. Berrios and Gibson had 189 innings so the 3rd guy would only need 171 innings. It's also reasonable to believe Berrios will become more efficient and add a few innings to his total.

You don't need to get 160 innings out of all the starters. It does not make sense to apply old metrics to a new approach and you would not need 8 of them. You need to cover roughly 1500 innings. If you only need 3 regular SPs we should be able to come up with 3 that average 180+. Let's say you get 186 and 2/3 that's 560 innings. If 4 "stacked" SPs give you another 500, you need 440 innings out of 6 RPs or 73 and 1/3 per RP. I think this concept has merit. We know that most SPs do considerably worse the 3rd time through the order. It sure makes sense to take an approach that mitigates this problem.

There has also never been a case of a player saying "I did not earn even remotely close to what you paid me so I am giving back X millions of dollars."

I am not a Grossman fan and McCutchen was once a MUCH better player than Grossman but check you facts before you make these statements. The player who's September stands out the most is MCCutchen. wRC+ for July / Aug / Sept Grossman --- 116 / 149 / 149 McCutchen --- 96 / 123 / 149 Sure are a lot of people focused on how good players were in the past as opposed to how good they will be in the future. BTW ... Rosario ------- 67 / 75 / 61 and many are sure he is key. Not if he continues to have an absolutely horrible approach.

This is a very obvious outcome of teams employing analysts and practices with advanced metrics. The collusion theory requires we absolutely ignore what these metrics say about the value of FAs. It's actually surprising it took this long. While I agree completely that the players goal is to get paid regardless of how bad they suck, all of the big dollar / low production FAs probably helped the mid and small market teams. Removing this inefficiency will allow the big market teams to gain more production from their FA spending. Of course, the same is true of lesser markets but the relative impact is less when you have less to spend in the first place.

I don't quite understand all the Grossman hate. I also don't care if they keep him as he certainly has limitations. However, I like to look at the most recent data, in this case the 2nd half numbers. Grossman was the best hitter on the team with a wRC+ of 128. Rosario's wRC+ was 64 for the 2nd half. The only other above average hitters on the team were Garver (118) Austin (112), Polanco (106). Astudillo had a wRC+ of 158 but only 78 ABs. BTW ... Johnny Field's wRC+ for the 2nd half was only 5 points lower than Adam Jones. Let's not go sign guys because they were great in their prime when they already declining. Before anyone turns this into "are you nuts ... Fields VS Jones", that was not even remotely the point.

I don't think you have looked at the production of the "studs" in an objective way. Some of the big name / big spend guys have worked out great. More have been mediocre to downright horrible. The best case scenario with the big dollar guys is you get what you pay for. Over achievement or value is rarely obtained. It does not matter as much if you have the Twins revenue + another $150M to play with but it's a killer for a mid-market team if players with big contracts don't deliver. There are very few that deliver good value over the course of the entire contract. Let's look at some of the studs from the past couple years. Darvish – 6yrs / $126M – WAR of 0 Arietta – 3 yrs / $75M WAR of 2.0 Cobb – 4yrs / $57M – WAR of 1.0 Chapman 5yrs / $86M – Combined WAR of 3.5 for 2017-18. Jansen / 5yrs / $80M – Combined WAR of 4 for 2017-18 (.4 for 2018) Eric Hosmer 8yrs/ $144 – 2018 WAR of -.1 Cespedes – 4yrs / $110M – 2017 WAR of 2.1 2018 – 0 WAR (injured) Desmond – 5 yrs / $70M – Combined WAR of -1.5 for 2017-18 Fowler – 5yrs / $82M – Combined WAR of 1.3 for 2017-18 Let’s not forget the disastrous contracts of Jason Heyward & Chris Davis. Guys like these can really help a team while keeping enough payroll open to keep our core Mikolas – 2yrs / $15.5 - WAR of 4.3 Hill – 4yrs / $48M – Combined WAR of 4.5 for 2017-18 Morton – 2yrs / $14M – WAR of 6.3 over the 2 years (2017-18) Lowrie – 3yrs / $23M - Combined WAR of 8.5 for 2017-18

I would be just fine with having about 4 guys that you could count on for 4-5 good innings. Mix and match those guys and you probably have a real effective model, especially if you had three good "traditional" starters.

I meant no slight on Baldelli. The context was meant to be players in general who have a desire to coach/manage. The fact that he is already making an effort demonstrates more willingness to adapt than most MLB coaches. I guess my point is that you would think more coaches would be making the effort. I am sure the Latin layers would appreciate the effort. It's one of those things that help build winning chemistry.

I would think a player with a desire to manage would start learning Spanish during the later part of their career. They have time in the off-season and a fantastic opportunity to practice and learn from their teammates during their final season(s). There is also lots of travel time coaches could use to learn a 2nd language. Obviously, that travel time can be used for other preparation but they could find the time just as many of us have to master additional / incremental skills for our professions.