Major League Ready

Good hands and a quick release can help make up for a very average arm at SS. I would guess they hoped to improve his throwing mechanics which is not unusual, right? You managed to ignore ever other point I made and cherry pick this one. Do you disagree with the points I made for each position? Where would you have played him?

I have my reservations about SWR as well. Ideally, Festa and Matthews both surpass him. I hope I am wrong, but SWRs ceiling looks like a back of the rotation guy to me. Let's hope Festa and Matthews can become as good or better than Ryan / Ober and force a trade of SWR.

Not really. His bat / arm does not profile as a corner OFer especially given he is a mediocre even as a corner OFer. He is below average defensively as a CF defender which would be OK if he was elite offensively which he is not. He does not have the arm for 3B. Bat does not profile as a 1B. That leaves SS and 2B and how many failed SSs end up at 2B. It's not hard to imagine why they tried to elevate his value by developing him into an everyday SS. The fallback is he can provide value as a utility guy even if that value is through trade because with any luck at all there won't be a place on this roster next year for Martin unless of course he steps it up a notch offensively and is able to take a Castro type of role minus 2B.

Thanks for sharing this info. I have not seen Franz much at 1B and was under the impression he was no better than Miranda. That made it hard to understand why they wouldn't just go with Miranda. If Franz is much more capable but hampered by an injury last year, they can evaluate him this spring. Could be significant upside with virtually no risk. I am looking forward to applying the eye test this spring. The irony here is that a whole lot of people were dead set against Miranda as anything but a DH.

I have an extremely hard time believing Justin Ishbia dropped out of a $1.5B+ transaction because he did not want to be in a position where he MIGHT have to spend the remaining one-third of a $24M contract for a rental. I used $24M to make the math easy. $8M is one-half of 1% of $1.5B. Put another way, let's say the Pohlads were asking $1.5B and Ishbia countered with $1,492,000, do you suppose the Pohlads would say no. I think we can speculate with great confidence that Ishbia's interest was not going to be even remotely swayed by an $8M line item.

Most likely someone (Stewart perhaps) starts the season on the IL. They could also option Topa. I doubt the team even seriously considers starting Alcala at AAA.

I am with you and Bean in terms of retaining depth even if it means someone like Ober starts in AAA like last year. We know it takes a lot more than 5 SPS to get through a season. IDK about you but I am happy to be debating how to roster and retain several good SPS instead of discussing the signing of retreads to fill out the rotation.

What about Lewis / Wallner & Larnach? Yes, Lewis had a rough stretch last year but those guys are solid players. Wallner and Larnach actually had a good 2nd half last year. Both were well above average. Wallner was actually great. They were not the problem. I also would not thrown in the towel on Julien, Martin & Miranda either so it seems a bit over the top to be comparing the Twins to the Angels.

I would look a little deeper if I were you. Baseball America's Farm rankings have the Angels dead last and the Twins 8th. These ranking are only part of the story. The Twins have graduated several good young players in the past 3 years that will likely contribute for the next few years, including Festa and Matthews last year. I also like the odds that Rodriquez and Keaschall contribute this season.

While I am not totally convinced, I tend to think the 5 SP spots are pretty secure with the players you mentioned. What I am hoping for is that the SPs we define as depth right now are good enough the early part of the year that the organization feels best served by trading Paddack by the AS break or sooner. Of course, this would also mean everyone is healthy. A guy can dream, right?

The money is spent. If the team would be better with Festa, Matthews, or even Sands starting, they could get value out of Paddack in the BP or they could find a trade partner. The return might not be much right now but they could dump his contract if they were convinced the team was better off with someone else starting. It also does not have to happen immediately. They can wait to see if everyone is healthy and how other options look this spring. You can bet other teams will have early season injuries. That would likely create an opportunity to trade Paddack. It's simply smarter to sit on these options right now.

ST training has proven over and over again to be a very poor predictor of regular season success. Should we send Wallner to AAA if he has a relatively poor ST? How about Bailey Ober. Should we give his spot to Matthews or Festa if he has a poor ST? Now, there are some guys who have not given the team adequate reason to trust in past performance but putting a lot of emphasis on ST is not a common practice for ML teams. Picking between two guys that have not previously performed or performed very inconsistently is a different matter.

Loosing / rebuilding teams follow very different strategies. Are they signing serious free agents? No. How about trading prospects for established players. Of course not. The fact that you can fail using the same strategy goes without saying. Let me ask you this .... If you measure the productivity of each acquisition strategy for every 90+ win team, would that indicate the relative impact of each one of those strategies? Of course it does. If drafting produces 40% and acquiring prospects is 40%, and trading for established players is 10%, and free agents contribute 10%. these are facts not projections. This is a measure of what has worked. If the odds of success were increased using a different mix of acquisition strategies, that would definitely show up in the data. For example, trading for prospects would be 10% and trading for established players would be 40% instead of vice versa. The odds while not directly measured are inherent in the data.

Prielipp is 5th or 6th on the depth chart because he has been out forever. Should we believe, Prielipp would shoot up that depth chart with a healthy season. Does he have a higher ceiling than most or all of the people currently ahead of him on the depth chart? If so, converting him for expediency is a really bad asset management not to mention really unfair to Prielipp. He might get to the show a year earlier but it would like cost him tens of millions of dollars.

This is not predictive. It's a measure of what happened. In other words, how were winning teams constructed. We are not talking about looking at anecdotal evidence but looking at every 90 win team, determining the percentage of WAR produced from each acquisition strategy. We can then look at how any individual organization constructed their best teams or we can consolidate the data and determine the percentage of WAR produced by each strategy across all teams. That's about as conclusive as you can get on this topic. Why do you want to know how the worst (rebuilding) teams produced WAR. They are very unlikely to invest in free agents or trade for established players. That data would be utterly useless in determining what strategies have contributed the most to winning teams.

I think you're right. One of Larnach / Wallner will play the OF and the other will DH. However, what happens when ERod arrives? If they are all healthy, I would hope that Bader only starts against LHP. Buxton, Rodriguez, and Bader would be one hell of a defensive OF.

I mostly agree with you and completely agree that producing prearb players is the key to creating payroll availability for free agents. Obviously, this is relative to revenue. In other words, it's a lot more important to the Guardians than the Dodgers. What motivated me to collect all the data was statements in the past just as you made above where fans advocate a given acquisition strategy. I wondered what history would tell us about the relative importance of various acquisition strategies. That curiosity compelled me to collect the data and organized it by acquisition method for teams with 90+ wins. I did not collect data from lesser teams becasue I was specifically interested in how winnings teams were built. Trading for prospects and trading for established players are very different strategically so I separated them. I didn't separate free agents based on high end vs low end. However, I did collect the years and AAV for all of them. What stands out when looking at these successful teams is that generally speaking they produced 1 WAR for about $3M in spend. The $20M type free agents are pretty rare. There are many more teams that got over production from $1-$10M free agents. You will find a lot more overall production from these players than the higher end players. Obviously, the ideal situation is to produce so many good prospects that you only have one or two holes to fill and the prearb players make it feasible to spend bigger on one or two players. We did that with Correa and Lopez. I am sure we all agree we would have rather filled our other holes with Alonso, Tanner Scott and Teoscar Hernandez. t's just financial reality that an average or below average team can't fill that many roster spots with high dollar players. We also agree that playing the prospects has upside. We spent roughly $10M on Bader, Columbe, and Franz. Would we have been better off spending $10M on one player. I seriously doubt it.

I look at the 5 Twins you list and I would only consider two of them (SWR / Martin) to be considered MLB level players. In other words, the others have provided no value so why include them? The quantification is obviously open for interpretation. I would suggest that every team has 14 players (without considering the IL) on the 40 man. Including any player that makes the 40 man considerably erodes this measure in terms of measuring value. Many of the players that make the 40 man provide little or no value. Therefore, making the 40-man roster is a very poor indicator or the value derived in an acquisition (draft or trade) measure of value IMO. When collecting and organizing this data, I look at the total WAR produced sorted by acquisition method. Players that have not produced are not of consequence. don't even consider them. Do we care about the relative impact on the major league team or how many make it on to the 40 man? I think it was you (and others) that pointed out they have produced a fair number of players the last few years but very few high contributing players. Great point. Is it better to produce 20 players that produce 20 WAR in a given season or 15 players that produce 30 WAR? I don't care how many they produce. I care about the total production of the players they produce.

My comments were aimed at the last 20 years, not this year alone. I have the data for every Guardians team that has won 90+ games and 44.4% of the players that produced 1.5 WAR or greater were acquired as prospects. The 23 number also makes no sense. There are not going to be 23 prearb players on the 26 man roster. You appear to be counting all the prearb players on the 40 man. Counted this way, the twins have 20 but that makes no sense. Cleveland has 14 players that are arbitration eligible or veteran contracts. That leaves 12 players on the 26 man that are prearb. 5 acquired by trade is 41.66%. Spotrac Cleveland Guardians 2025 Payroll

I like it. That would be very cool. Have we had a rule 5 pick of any consequence since Johan Santana?

These teams are successful because they continually come up with inexpensive talent. The disconnect where the Twins are concerned is that you only identify players "drafted and developed" by the Twins. Roughly 40% of the prearb players you have identified for these other teams were acquired through trade and the percentage is even higher for Cleveland and Tampa. Part of what is going on in Minnesota is they have not been as skilled as Cleveland and Tampa in acquiring prospects.

I am all for giving a guy the chance to hit opposite side pitching. However to point out Wallner's career .866 OPS without pointing out also pointing out his career splits of .510 vs 951 would suggest you don't want us to look at the whole picture. I am OK with investing in Wallner by giving him greater opportunity but let's not pretend playing him against LHP has not been counter-productive to this point.

How anyone looks at one of the best examples of sustained success in MLB and concludes they had a bad plan is absolutely mind boggling. There should be penalties (funding withheld) but forcing a team to put free agents on the field instead of developing their young talent is absurd. How many times have people posted here that they don't want the twins to be taking up roster spots with mediocre veterans. Most of us hate the idea so why would we want to force teams to do it.

We heard this same rhetoric with Buxton. Many stated this with Buxton as if it was a fact that he would leave as soon as he had the chance. It's actually more likely that the Twins won't want to extend Duran because they are not inclined to put that kind of money into a RP.

This might be the most interesting spring training in several years. It seems like there is going to be legit competition for roster spots everywhere except the outfield. Wallner / larnach are the corner OFers. Buxton and Bader are CF and 4th OFer. The INF and BP are going to be really interesting. SP gets alot more interesting if Paddack gets traded but that is becoming increasingly less likely to happen.