Major League Ready

This is a little different given the amount of time removed from the surgery. The team has a fair amount of information based on his rehab and he made it all the way back to the ML level. Of course, they will continue to monitor his off-season activities so they should have a reasonably good idea of what to expect from Paddack. That said .... How many SPs make 30 starts these days. Teams expect the need for depth, and I expect we will see moves to provide that depth.

No. The parameter or the point of contention is not how many teams engage in a trade. It's how often does a team trade away a top prospect which is roughly somewhere in the neighborhood of once every 30 years.

$10M per WAR is the average production for free agents. Therefore, it is the average cost of 1 WAR in free agency. Cost and expected value are two different things and interpreting this as the expected or accepted value is misguided. For starters, a team with half the revenue of another team must produce twice the per WAR number as the higher revenue team for that investment to have equal productivity. In other words, the targeted production from free agent spending depends on the level of revenue they produce. A more practical to way to look at this is that a player expected to produce 2 WAR is not getting a $20M AAV. They are going to get roughly $12M. That’s the target but all of the bad contracts significantly inflate the average WAR/$$ spent. Did the Angels expect Traut would only produce 3WAR/season? A really gppd team produces about 50 WAR. If they produce just 30% via free agency that costs $150M. How many teams can be successful with this model? The ratio also seems to be higher for free agent pitchers and elite position players. This makes sense based on scarcity. Plus star players impact interest in the team and butts in seats.

I would not call last year a great success. They were pretty good, not great but where did their production come from? Sonny Gray and Pablo Lopez made a combined total of %17.5M. Their highest paid players produced next to nothing. The six highest WAR position players made a total of $15M with over half of that going to Kepler and the best RPs made the league minimum. I don't how we would come to the conclusion their success was a product of spending.

It is warranted to a degree and I know squat about this surgery but hopefully Wabene is correct about the high success rate. That's very encouraging. I am going to hope for the best. Let's not forget that just last year a whole lot of people said Kirilloff was cooked for good. What a boost it would be to get 100 games from Buxton. What they do about CF will tells us a little about the team's confidence in him returning.

Every owner has other sources of income. That's why they are owners. How many of them have ever in the history of the game intentionally operated at a loss. There has been one, Peter Seidler. Of course, he never spent lavishly either until he knew his time on earth was coming to an end. We expect players who earn multi-generational wealth over the course of a 10-15 year to act in a manner to get every penny they can from this game. Asking an owner to make nothing for a year or two would be one thing but expecting them to lose money is naive and entitled. If they are going to take tens of millions out of their own pocket, I would hope they would donate that money to a much more worthy cause than POTENTIALLY winning a couple more baseball games. Let's be fair and measure the Pohlads against all other owners in terms of how much of what they take in are they willing to spend on payroll. Just once, I would like to see one of the people who constantly whine about payroll support their position with some sort of evidence like we would in assessing the performance of any player.

We hear insistently that the problem is the Pohlads are cheap. Yet, those who post this NEVER offer any form of proof that the Pohlads spend a smaller percentage of team revenue than other teams. Nor do they show any sources that project the Twin's to make more money than the other teams or even the same amount of money. I looked up one year, 2022. I was lazy and just did the teams with +/- 10% of the twins revenue. However, I have done this for several other years in the past and as far as I can tell these rants are the product of an unwillingness to actually get informed before drawing a conclusion and/or complaining. TEAM REV Payroll % of REV

IDK, if you owned two businesses you would not be obligated to fund a failed business with the funds from a successful business just as you would not be obligated to fund it with personal funds unless you had a personal guarantee with a lender. There are numerous entities that own multiple separate businesses, and they are treated separately in the eyes of the IRS and the law,

Let's not count Correa and Buxton out just yet. Correa went from a career wRC+ 125 to 96. Should we believe it's over for him at age 29 or did he just have a bad year. The most recent news on Buxton is also encouraging. These two represent roughly one-third of the team's payroll capacity so it is crucial they perform. There is no way of getting around how detrimental it is to get virtually no productivity from two players representing roughly 1/3 of total spending capacity. You can't spend it twice. If they had the $48M, they could sign any SP they wanted and have plenty left over for a high leverage RP. Therefore, to say it won't impact the team's ability to improve defies any form of logic.

Without spending a lot of time looking into this situation, it would appear there are two different companies. Diamond Baseball Holdings who purchased the Worcester WooSox and Diamond Sports Holdings. Apparently, they are entirely separate organizations which means they would not need permission from the bankruptcy court to purchase this team. Again, I am not an attorney, and we have limited information, but it would appear the sale went through because they are legally two different entities.

Buxton just might play CF this year. Byron Buxton Update

They are in Chapter 11 which is reorganization vs Chapter 7 which is liquidation. I am not an attorney but my understanding is they would have to get permission from the bankruptcy court but perhaps an attorney will chime in. BTW .... Has the sale been completed or just announced? This could be pending bankruptcy court permission.

I guess we just have different interpretations of rare. One a year among 30 teams to me is rare. At that rate a team would be expected to complete such a trade every 30 years. To me that's rare and I think it's becoming even more rare. Then, how many are completed by teams in the bottom two-thirds of revenue which is the appropriate measure when asking how often does a team like the Twins trade away their top prospect. Also, that article was not specifically about a team's top prospect. Some of those guys were outside the top 50 which I would agree is a significant prospect but also not the same as a top 25 type guy like Swanson. Point being a top prospect that is ranked 65th is not the same as Brooks Lee.

Peralta is pretty darn good and has 3 years of control. Gurriel has some appeal too but we need someone who can step into CF as needed. I also don't see him getting an AAV of $20M. He has not had that level of impact. Trade rumors has him at 4/$54M. If we are going to give up Lee, I would rather they trade a combination of Polanco/Kepler/Lee with Seattle for one of their young guys that potential has more upside and more years of control. It would also leave even more payroll space to go get a CFer and a BP arm.

He opted out of his final year for $21M so his agent must be pretty sure he is getting more than a 1/$12M prove it contract.

I listen to a lot of MLB network while I am driving. They have some former GMs and industry reporters in various forms. The topic of reluctance to move top prospects is mentioned often in the course of these discussions. It's become commonly accepted that teams are reluctant to move top prospects. Of course, we have all heard much discussion about the new breed of GMs that focus on acquisition and development of prospects. This new breed had a more sophisticated understanding of asset management and they are more focused on sustained success. Assets with 7 years of (inexpensive) control are more likely to facilitate these goals. Trading 7 year assets for 2 year assets does not promote sustained success. It is a strategy that concentrates assets all-in for a short period. Many fans like this approach but the expectation of GMs today is to deliver sustained success. I am sure they have developed various analytical models to help understand how playoff teams have acquired their top producing players. I put together my own model using Fangraphs and BB Reference by taking the top teams in a given year and ranking the players by WAR and organizing them by acquisition method. I did this specifically for teams outside the top 10 in revenue because I was interested in what practices would be most effective for the Twins or teams with similar revenue constraints. Players acquired as prospects or before establishing a WAR above 1.5 by far outweighed players that were acquired as established players. If I did this for fun, you can bet teams have put forth significant effort to develop models that help them understand how to manage their assets.

This is why I qualified the statement with if this is true. Richie and I were discussing the difficulty of trying to discuss this when we know so little about the costs associated and who was responsible for those costs (Twins or Bally's) However, within your response you have pointed out an important difference between the Twins or MLB in covering costs. That's that the cost of personnel and equipment is allocated to other sports in the off-season.

Thanks for the list. I would say that 11 in 25 years would qualify is an unusual occurrence or we can look at it as a percentage of all trades where this is a tiny percentage. I would have guessed one every 2-3 years. It would be interesting to know what others have occurred since 2015 because it seems teams have become more reluctant to trade these top prospects.

Someone suggested that Bally's does not pay for any of the production cost. If that's true, and they were willing to pay $50M for broadcast rights, they forecasted add revenues of $50M + their operating costs and profit.

My bad. I did not realize local TV revenue is shared.

What they have said is that they lost their contract. That's very different than saying they expect to lose 100% of the revenue generated from TV. Also, you are doing math that makes no sense. They don't cling to this notion of 50% of revenue to payroll as you are doing here. If they lose $50M in revenue, they have to cut $50M in cost to counteract the loss. Show us a source that says they are assuming or projecting a total loss in TV revenue.

How do we know who shoulders what costs in the agreement between Bally and a team? I have no idea so I am not even remotely suggesting you're wrong. I am just wondering if this is documented somewhere.

How often do you see a team trade their top prospect or 2nd best prospect. It's rare. Your opinion is supported by a lot of history.

Steer does not have to start to be valuable. He is definitely better than Farmer for $6M less and he is more versatile than Polanco with a similar bat and he has 5 more years of control. Regardless, he would be great trade bait right so there is no scenario where we would not have been much better off passing on Mahle. CES crushed Milb pitching and had a 112 wRC+ to begin his career. He struggled for a month or so but posted a wRC+ of 155 for his last 100 ABs. I have heard him discussed on some of the national radio shows and he is viewd as great potential to be an elite bat. Nobody is talking about Miranda and even if they were, dismissing the value of having CES as an asset make absolutely no sense. Steer and CES or Polanco and CES would get us one of Seattle's young pitchers so that is the cost of the Mahle trade at this moment.

Lee really does not hit well enough from the right side for his switch hitting to matter much. The guy who can hit from both sides is Severino but he gets no love. Lee had a wRC+ of 100 at aa and 78 at AAA. Severino was 139 at AA and 100 at AAA. Of course, there is no comparison defensively. Just saying Lee's bat has not screamed elite. I also wonder if Severino is not a better trade chip than we think.