Major League Ready

I specifically noted that reasonable people might see this differently. I see it as they had enough money to sign all of the people you mentioned because they traded Polanco. Who knows which player that trade enabled but I have a feeling it was make or break for guys around $1M. You also only mentioned the failures but not the piece that was a success. That's not objective, IMO.

I think an objective person would find it reasonable to say the savings from that trade went to signing Carlos Santana who produced 2.9 WAR. Now, assigning pluses and minuses to all the stuff is not an exact science and reasonable people can see things differently. However, it's not fair to omit the Santana piece of this puzzle. No doubt DeSclafani had an injury history that was suspect so let's call that out. Let's also acknowledge that Sanatana was part of the puzzle. Santana was miles better than Polanco and we also have a good prospect in GG.

I see where you are going with this but you are assuming that the Twins assumed Descalfani would be injured and took him on knowing the money was sunk. This is a substantial reach. He was healthy to start spring training. I think the more reasonable take was they spent $4M for someone that would have cost more but was discounted given the inquiry risk and they took that risk. Topa delivered 1.0 WAR for $2.5M. It's not much but it was also partially the product of injury and it's 3X the average production per free agent dollar spent so you can't say the Twins got nothing. You can say the deal for Topa had the potential to produce more but you can't say 1 WAR for 2.5M is a negative. If we go with the premise the Twins assumed DeScalafani was sunk, we can say GG cost $4M given Topa was a reasonable value. That's the cost of the 22nd overall pick this year without actually giving up a draft choice. Not bad. If he becomes an average MLB player, the Twins win this trade. If he does nothing they blew $4M which is modest in the context of how many draft bonus dollars produce nothing.

What was the cost of trading Polanco? That's easy. 1 season at .3 WAR. He was then non-tendered and Seattle’s contractual control terminated. Any team could have then signed Polanco so the cost was 1 year at .3 WAR. We can say the Twins should have signed him as a free agent but anything that happened after Seattle non-tendered him is the result of a different decision. Who here thinks Cleveland, Tampa or Milwaukee would have opted for a good prospect over what Polanco produced if they had a crystal ball and knew exactly what was going to happen?

I would suggest the word is contend because you could say a 72-win team can compete but personally, I find no difference between 72 vs 75 wins or 78 wins. In order to contend, this teams needs at least 4 BP arms. We need significant improvements at 1B/SS and to a slightly lesser degree 3B, and one of the corner OF spots, and BU catcher. Is it realistic to believe that can be done even if the spend an additional $50M? That's about 6 wins. Is this team 6 wins away from contending. My guess is much closer to 16 to get a playoff spot and more than that to be a legit contender for a playoff run. They have two distinct paths they can go down, they can replace these weaknesses through free agency and trade or they can replace them with prospects. IT makes zero sense to replace these players and then later in the season replace the replacements with prospects. They would get a little better very fast but slow down the process of actually building a contender, IMO.

The Roden/Fedko/Clemmens idea is indeed creative. I am not sure they could take 3 roster spots for 1B/OF but that's another discussion. At least these 3 guys are athletes, and they all have some experience at 1B. Heck, add Martin to the list as well. Maybe we end up with a couple good athletes that can play OF and 1B. I dislike moving Lewis to 1B given he is now playing above average defense at 3B. It would diminish his value, and it just crates another hole. You could eventually slide Lee to 3B when Culpepper comes up but what have you really accomplished. Now, you have 2 well below average hitters playing corner INF spots. That's not a recipe for getting to the post season. The best-case scenario to me would be a trade for a ML ready or near ready 1B.

I don't know if you still don't understand that the goal is to determine which acquisition methods are the most effective or if you just refuse to accept any information that does not fit your narrative. The "method" you refer to identifies precisely the percentage of production from each acquisition method. That's it. Job done. We know exactly how much each acquisition method has contributed. You want to know the relative impact of drafting or any other method, you have it. Why exactly one method has produced better than another could be debated but the relative amount is quite certain. We might assume free agency only contributes 11% because it's more expensive but I don't need to consider cost to understand it's far less impactful than drafting or trading for prospects. The one-year thing has become comical. The data spans 25 years. How do you identify a playoff team with looking at a specific year? Obviously, that's the only context that makes sense. If you want to understand if an organization has sustained success, you look at their relative success over many years. Once you identify the most successful organizations, you aggregate all of the years to determine the relative percentage of production from each method over whatever period of time is measured. In this case, 25 years. The sample size is literally every team in the bottom half of revenue for 25 years and you somehow think we are talking about 1 year. You see only what you want to see.

How would I possibly know a team's process with any degree of accuracy and when was that ever the conversation? We don't have the access and information to determine any team's process. I think it was quite clear we were discussing which acquisition practices were the most likely to produce success. That we can clearly identify. As a matter of fact, we can identify the acquisition method (practices) for 100% of every contributing player on every team. Therefore, we can determine exactly how much each acquisition method has contributed to every successful team. There is no mystery as to if we can clearly identify how a team was built if you are willing to actually take an objective look and acknowledge what has worked. The fact they every team have varying degrees of success is indicative of the quality of their process but tells us little about the relative merit of acquisition methods. Would you expect any practice to work universally even when executed very poorly? That's a ridiculous argument. Do you want the organization to follow the practices that have produced the best results or should we ignore them if they don't work when applied poorly? The alternative is to follow practices that have worked to a far lesser degree. That's not what I would hope for from the Twins.

OK, I will bite. How does identifying the players that contributed the most to a successful team and how much they contributed (via WAR) "do nothing to further the knowledge off how to do that".

You and I are in the minority. The emphasis on immediacy is big for a large percentage of baseball fans. This is no surprise. Who wants to go backwards? What surprises me is the acceptance of a goal to maybe have a shot at the playoffs knowing there is no way this team becomes a real contender without a rebuild. In the last few years there were many complaints about the organization not taking aggressive steps to put a real contender on the field. Now, it seems many are lobbying for the team to give up the opportunity to acquire meaningful pieces so that we can put a team on the field that's a fringe contender for a playoff spot at best. We know intuitively that a modest revenue team is absolutely dependent upon producing cheap talent that is controlled for a long period of time. Yet, a lot of fans really want the organization to change the roster by acquiring more expensive players that are under control for a short period of time.

Man you just don't get it. If we want to determine the relative contribution of acquisition methods used to build the 97-win 2025 Milwaukee Brewers you identify the acquisition method for the players that contributed to the 2025 Milwaukee Brewers. Pretty simple. If you want to understand sustained success you take the data from the individual years for the teams that have had the most success and average the results to determine which acquisition strategies have contributed to their success. If Cleveland has (10) 90-win seasons in a 20 year period, how do you determine the relative contribution from each acquisition method for their most successful teams? You take the data from all of those 90-win seasons, and average it for each acquisition method, That would illustrate how a team sustained success over a long period of time.

Here is another way of looking at it that might make you feel better should they continue the rebuild. Every trade is a decision to be better at some point and worse at some point. The goal of trading for established players is always to get better immediately for whatever period of time that player is under contract. Generally, a short period of time. That same trade also projects to make that team worse at some point in the future. That period of time generally much longer. When the Padres traded for Juan Soto, they did that to be better immediately. Juan Soto is no longer providing value. Are they worse today as a result of getting better during Sot's tenure with the Padres. The answer is the Padres would be better if they had the production of James Wood, CJ Abrams, and McKenzie Gore, especially given they are all on prearb salaries. Robert Hasel has debuted last year in his age 23 season. It remains to be seen if he provides value. If the goal is playoff success or even overall success, the question becomes is Joe Ryan’s present value more meaningful than his future value which is the value of the players acquired by trading him. My take is I would rather have a shot at being better for 7 years. I see the result of keeping Ryan as going from 70-74 to 74-78 wins which is inconsequential to me. We have no BP, a below average 3B, a well below average SS, a below average 1B, and a below average corner OF spot that all need fixing. I take the chance that I get an equivalent player back in trade. If we do, we are better for 7 years when there is at least a chance some of those years result in a playoff team.

And you don't understand several things. One I collected the data from literally every 90 win team in the past 25 years and the numbers I am quoting are the result of all of those teams and provided an example of a given team to illustrate. Two, the entire premise is to determine how a good team was built. That is done in a given year. If you want to understand the impact on all teams you simply average the total of all of those teams or takes the best teams from a given successful organization which I have also done.

Let’s look at a real-life example as see how the model holds up. The Brewers not only had the best record of teams in the bottom half of revenue, they had the best record in MLB. How did they acquire the players to build this roster. They had 15 players that produced 1.5 or greater WAR. 4 were drafted and 2 were International signings. So there were 6 prospects acquired without trades. They produced 42.8% of their WAR. 4 pitchers and 2 position players fall under the category of acquired as prospects. Peralta was acquired as a minor leaguer as was Chad Patrick. Quinn Priester had pitched 100 MLB innings and had .1 WAR in the previous season. I think we can call him a prospect. The other pitcher that produced 1.5 WAR was Megill who was acquired from the Twins and he certainly was unproven. The 2 position players were Collins and Durbin and they were acquired as minor leaguers. These 6 players contributed 40.7. So prospects contributed a total of 83.5% of their WAR. They had no production from free agents and two players are categorized as trades for established players. There is no doubt Yehlich was and established player. Contreras however had (1) 2.0 WAR season prior to the trade so he was basically an Eddy Julien Equivalent in terms of being proven. If you slide him to the acquired as prospects bucked, this brewer team only had one player contribute that was not drafted or acquired as a prospect. If Contreras is not considered a trade for an established player the percentage produced by prospects goes to 93.5%. This team was built through prospects as are the majority of success stories among teams in the bottom half of revenue. It's not rocket science. It's just not feasible to compete with teams that have a $100M or $200M or $300M revenue advantage unless you build through prospects, It's just not financially feasible which Riverbrian pointed out in the percentage of prearb players on successful teams throughout the season. 2025 Brewers (97 wins) Acquired WAR Brice Turang Drafted 4.4 William Contreras AaP 3.6 Sal Frelick Drafted 3.6 Jackson Chourio Intl 2.9 Caleb Durbin Aap 2.6 Isaac Collins Aap 2.6 Christian Yelich Trade 2.4 Freddy Peralta AaP 3.6 Chad Patrick AaP AaP Quinn Priester AaP 1.9 Brandon Woodruff Drafted 1.8 Abner Uribe Intl 1.7 Trevor Megill AaP 1.5 Aaron Ashby Drafted 1.2

I think they need to keep one veteran around for leadership and Pablo sure seems to be ideal for that role. They can entertain offers at the deadline and see if another team is willing to give up a premium prospect for Pablo.

I am trying to have a polite but you are just hearing what you want to hear and then sniping back. I already told you that the WS comment was only an aside to the point I was making because there is always someone that says but did it result in a WS win. The point we were discussing is the role of prospects in building a team based on your comment that prospects were merely suspects. You also apparently ignored the explanation of why I used such a conservative number for WAR. One reason is that in a given season that seems like the minimum number that most people would agree was a contribution. If I use a larger number, it is an absolute certainty that more trades would go in the acquired as a prospect bucket and increase the percentage of players identified as being acquired as a prospect. Do you understand this completely nullifies the argument you are making. Using a higher bar would widen the gap in favor of prospects. Using this conservative measure, Cleveland, Tampa, and Milwaukee best teams have only produced roughly 22% of WAR from Free agents and trades for established players. I agree that it makes more sense to use a metric we all could agree would be more representative of an established player. I used a very conservative number because I understood the metric would likely be challenged by those who consider prospects suspects. Therefore, I used a measure that would understate the influence of prospects and least in comparison to established players. If we used a metric that represents the type of player that is typically called for in trade, I would estimate the current number of roughly 11% of WAR would be cut by 40-50% and end up around 6-7% at most.

If this was the rule, they could still keep every dime they generate outside revenue sharing. I don't see this as having any impact. They tried to increase penalties for high revenue teams and the players union to a hard stance against. They players actually wanted to reduce revenue sharing.

Why we use attendance to determine the relative level of impact of acquisition methods or even specifically the impact of prospects? We could infer winning drives attendance but the fact they had a winning team would tell us absolutely nothing about how players on that winning team were acquired. Fair enough? We were discussing the relative importance of prospects in building a winner. It seems fair enough to conclude people who frequent this site want the organization to build a winner and I think it’s fair to say how that is most effectively achieved is of interest to TDers. 1.5 WAR is debatable but that same modest bar is used to determine if a player acquired in trade was “established” or a prospect. Trading for established players appears to be favored by the majority here, I wanted to set a low bar for what’s an “established” player so that bar was not criticized for being too high. Why? Because, if we moved that bar to 2 for example, the percentage of players acquired as prospects would actually go up and trades for established players down. We can quibble over but if you want it higher it would increase the percentage of players acquired as prospects which would widen the already wide gap between acquiring established players vs prospects. I don’t see much concern here for 1 WAR players or how we acquire them. The number seems reasonable even conservative in terms of determining the impact of trading for prospects vs trading away prospects. How would you better measure the impact of the various types of acquisition measures than to take winning teams and determine the acquisition method for the players that contributed in a significant way? Frankly. WPA would be another viable measure but I doubt it would be any more accurate than more for this exercise. The alternative ism for all of us to assume whatever method we favor is the best without actually looking back at winning teams to see how they were built. History overwhelming suggests that prospects (drafted and traded for) are by far the most influential to winning. It’s not even remotely close. Do we want the team to follow the practices that have been the most successful?

I try not to make a point with an anecdote. I threw in that example because there have been times when people come back with comments that suggest the only thing that matters is if the team got to the WS or won the WS. The comment about suspects has appeared here MANY times. It's the reason I took the time to chronical how every player that made a significant contribution to every 90 win team since the turn of the century. Yes, many prospects fail but that's the wrong question to ask. The question to ask is what the relative contribution of each type of acquisition method to successful teams. Do we want to know how winning teams were constructed or do we want to know if prospects fail? The teams that have had by far the most success have produced roughly 80% of their WAR from players that were drafted or traded for as a prospect which I define as a player that has never produced 1.5 WAR in a season. The split is roughly equal. Free agency and trading for established players contributes about 20% so the whole prospects are "suspects" and therefore not valuable is not even remotely aligned with what has actually transpired. How about this Year's Brewers team which had the most wins in MLB. The table below shows all the players that contributed 1.5 WAR or RPs with 1.2 WAR and how they were acquired. 85% of the Brewers WAR came from players that were drafted or acquired as prospects with a little more than half produced by trading for prospects. 2025 Brewers (97 wins) Acquired WAR Sal Frelick Drafted 3.3 Brice Turang Drafted 3.2 William Contreras Trade 3.2 Isaac Collins AaP 2.8 Jackson Chourio Intl 2.8 Christian Yelich Trade 2.1 Andrew Vaughn AaP 1.6 Caleb Durbin AaP 1.4 Joey Ortiz AaP 1.4 Freddy Peralta AaP 3.6 Chad Patrick AaP 2.6 Quinn Priester AaP 1.9 Brandon Woodruff Drafted 1.8 Abner Uribe Intl 1.7 Trevor Megill AaP 1.5 Aaron Ashby Drafted 1.2 Acquired by: Drafted 4 26.3% International Draft 2 12.5% Acquired as Prospect 8 46.5% Trade for Proven 2 14.7% Free Agent 0 0.0%

I just happen to have the win data compiled since 2000. It's actually the Royals with the lowest overall win percentage. I also have the number of 90/94 and 98 win seasons compiled to provide some context to the number of good teams they have had over this period of time. Here it 90 94 98 Wins Wins Wins Win % 1 Yankees 16 14 7 0.579 2 Dodgers 13 7 5 0.566 3 Cardinals 13 6 3 0.554 4 Braves 12 9 4 0.545 5 Red Sox 13 8 2 0.545 6 Giants 7 4 2 0.521 7 Angels 7 6 3 0.521 8 Oakland 10 7 2 0.518 9 Cleveland 10 3 1 0.516 10 Astros 8 5 4 0.513 11 Phillies 5 2 1 0.508 12 Blue Jays 3 0 0 0.503 13 TWINS 6 4 1 0.502 14 Mariners 6 1 1 0.499 15 Mets 4 3 1 0.499 16 Cubs 5 4 1 0.498 17 Tampa 9 5 2 0.497 18 White Sox 4 2 1 0.494 19 Brewers 5 3 0 0.493 20 Rangers 6 2 0 0.491 21 Nationals 5 2 0 0.486 22 Dbacks 5 2 1 0.484 23 Padres 1 0 0 0.474 24 Reds 3 1 0 0.471 25 Marlins 1 0 0 0.468 26 Tigers 4 2 0 0.464 27 Rockies 3 0 0 0.462 28 Orioles 3 2 1 0.453 29 Pirates 2 2 1 0.447 30 Royals 1 1 0 0.436

I am not sure what we are talking about here. Are you saying it would be difficult to get a premium prospect for Ryan or are you making a more general point that there are not many players acquired as prospects that make a significant contribution.

More 45 or even 50 grade prospects would not add great value. They have lots of those prospects. What they don't have are prospects that project to be impact players. Jenkins is the only premium prospect they have and Keaschall looks like he could be an impact player. Tait if he sticks at catcher. Trading Harrison Bader does not get you premium prospects but trading Joe Ryan trade will. There is no guarantee but that would be a fair projection. Duran brought back a SP with the potential to be as good as Ryan and a position player with the potential to produce equivalent WAR to Ryan. Of course, Ryan has much more trade value than Duran. There is risk but there is also tremendous upside because these players are under control for 3X the number of years. If you can get a Joe Ryan equivalent for 7 years you are basically giving up a modest chance of contention in 2027. The benefit of trading Ryan is uncertain. However, the projection and the upside over 7 years is far greater than the likely benefit of keeping him if the goal is contending. Cleveland and Tampa have made this type of trade for years. Fans don't like it, but the results are very clear. This type of trade has been a major contributor to the building of many playoff teams. I keep Pablo if he does not bring back an impact prospect. His value is probably not there at the moment, but he would be traded at the deadline if the return becomes impactful. Same with Jeffers. I don't believe he brings back an impact player so he stays to lend stability to a young staff. Really on the fence with Buxton if he would waive his NTC.

What if the Twins were “aggressive”. We are seeing a lot of advocacy for putting the best team possible on the field in 2026. What does that look like and what could we expect. The Twins were 18-35 after the deadline which is a 55 win pace. They could spend $60M in free agency and pick up another 6-7 wins. The two most needed positions are 1B and SS. Should we fill SS and hold Culpepper back. $60M would get a very good 1B and SS but leave little left over to rebuild the BP. Should we trade away top 10 type prospects and try to get it 70 wins 75 wins if everything goes great? There has always been an understandable desire for being aggressive and getting final pieces to enhance our chances of bring a real contender. This means increased spending and trading prospects for final pieces. In other words, converting future assets to present assets. The parallel when a team is in the position the Twins are in now is trading the remaining good players to acquire difference makers for the next run at contention. Houston tore down to the studs. KC traded Grienke for Cane and Escobar. I think you could make a good case KC does not make it the WS without those two players. Cleveland has a long history of trading established players for prospects that contribute. That's the norm in a rebuild. So, is the best we can hope for to keep Ryan and Lopez? Hope everything goes great and we win 75 games? Is that the goal or should we take it on the chin in 2026 and take a shot at getting our own Cain & Escobar and others who can contribute to the next run for 7 years? Time to recognize this ship needs an extreme makeover.

The continued development of pitching is the key. Free agent SPs are too hard to land and either don't perform or get injured far too often. I would prefer those free agent dollars or extensions go to position players. Were the deadline deals they made influenced by this aspect of roster building? Abel, Bradley, and perhaps Rojas give them a very legit pipeline when added to SWR / Matthews / Prielipp / Hill / Soto / Festa / Raya / Quick / Morris and Bohorquez. They should be able to fill a rotation with quality SPs for quite a while and there should be a few good BP arms among those that don't crack the rotation.

Lewis had a wRC+ of 80 post deadline and it's been a while since he has been good. However, he is finally healthy now and I have not given up on him but 2026 is do or go for me on Lewis.