Cris E

I doubt Sonny wants a three year deal. I bet his preference would be a 1+1 or a two year with Atlanta at around $20-23m a season to let him be near home, flirt with the playoffs and not be responsible for those lead dog duties that Sale is wearing so well these days. Not sure he wants any part of an under-performing Twins organization (relative to ownership goals) where he might have to act the ace, half way across the country and in front of this (contemptuous wave) bullpen situation.

Pagan does not have complete seasons. He was bad for half of 2026, in 2025 he looked good in the aggregate but his April and Sept numbers were a third of his season with a 6.00+ ERA, and before that he was only average or below average or it was 2019. We lived through that and found he's not a rock of repeatable performance. I'd much rather have Hoffman's bad performance be an extra walk or two than Pagan serving up a double and two HR.

When we have some ready catchers to trade in a few years we can do that, but right now our plan is hoping that Caratini trends back toward his career averages at the plate and something, someone, mumble steps up and really takes advantage of his opportunities! For 2027 we're in the market for a catcher because we have a gap in our development Pipeline at the position and we can't just slide someone over. This year we need to go out and get a bandaid or go big and retain a stud.

What? I assume the 6/95 is a typo, but there have been many catcher contracts for more then $40m handed out in the recent past. In fact Sean Murphy signed a six year $73m extension in 2022, JT Realmuto signed his 3/$45m deal last year at the age of 34, Kirk from TOR got his 5 year $58m extension in March 2025, Will Smith did a ten year $140m before the 2024 season, and so on. Lots of rich contracts. If you want to confine yourself to free agents only that's your choice, but the market is set by what others are getting paid and who is available, and Jeffers has got scarcity and a lot of other contracts going for him, establishing a rough valuation around $12-15m.

Most of MLB has gone all-in on FASTBALL pitching over the past five years, and to be fair to Falvey, he and Wes and Maki were kind of an outlier by sticking with the slider-first, everyone gets a sweeper mindset. The recent hiring of a fastball guru from the Rays is just catching us up to the herd.

Oh, and we should get together with Jeffers' team and bang out a 3/$45m deal to set his market. If NYY or someone wants to go four then let them and we'll take the draft pick, otherwise we have Clemens for 1B in 2027 and Jeffers can transition to a time share there in 2028 as Lackey starts his career and we don't sign an outside 1B this winter. If he leaves we go get Bauers for 1B and pick up some parts for 27 and half of 28. Also worth noting that Caratini was a league average hitter until this season, so he could bounce back. His big hot streak this summer was when he was catching full time during Jeffers' time away.

Exactly six catchers started 100 games last year, and only twelve started 90. And I have to tell you, the vast majority of those high inning guys were not hitters. #2 Contreras was a stud through October and constitutes an amazing outlier. #3 Dingler were above average, but in Dingler's final 37 games his OPS was only .388 (5 extra base hits in 140 AB.) #5 Stevenson started 104 games but after Sept 1 he had a .565 OPS in his last 21 games. Below 100 games we had #7 Montero in AZ, #8 Jenson in KC, #9 Goodman in DEN were all good through the entire year. But I skipped a lot of catchers who didn't hit much at all and half the ones who were OK were in tatters by the time summer vacation ended. The notion of "full-time catchers" starting 140 games and hitting like Ivan Rodriquez are gone. Realmuto (by a wide margin) has been the only guy in recent memory to regularly start 130 games, and he got paid for it handsomely because it is so rare. Cal Raleigh catches a lot, but completely broke down this year after his huge 2025. Others come and go, but generally since Yadi Molina ten years ago few players reach 120 starts with any frequency. (Sal Perez in KC only started 100 games six times in 15 years, for example.) Full time is 90-120 games in modern baseball, and you need at least three catchers to get through a season. That is exactly why you don't see much top money going to the position, because like relievers you need a bunch of them and can only afford one closer in your catching bullpen.

Ross is on the 40 and is a fine alternative. In fact he might be better than Lewis as a backup since he can cover SS.

Ummmm....there is NO comparison between Wallner, Miranda, and Julien....Kirilloff is a kinda maybe. Only Kirilloff was a first rounder, Miranda was 2nd, and Wallner, Julien taken deep (18th round +). The reason that those guys were listed is that they did perform well for a year or three. These are guys that made it and fell back, which is common in EVERY organization. But here's the deal: Kirilloff lost his career to wrist and back injuries and Miranda lost his career to a beaning. If you think you can draft around that then you should be in a front office being paid millions, or maybe go straight to Vegas or buy a bunch of lottery tickets. You can try to copy other orgs, but it's hard and even when you choose to copy the flavor of the month it's not going to work most of the time. For one thing you can't copy outcomes without the right people, and for another they might not do some things better than you. Milwaukee is not a ROY factory, for example. They had Devin Williams in the shortened 2020, Ryan Braun in 2007 and before that it was Pat Listach in 1992. You know who has turned out a lot of ROY recently? PIT and the Athletics (teams who don't spend enough to fill holes and have to play the kids) or ATL (who drafted two in the third round and signed an intl free agent all within the past eight years.) But ROY is a bad measure of how you develop talent. Tarik Skuba was not, Kyle Lewis was, Jacob Misieroski was not, Jonathon India was, and so on. What you need to do is get players to the majors who can contribute. Julien put up 2.6 WAR in 2023. Wallner hung a 2,2 in both 2023 and 2024. Larnach has never put up a negative WAR in six years, and his 4.7 is not bad for a platoon OF. That's not much different from Royce Lewis, who has 4.9 in five years. Miranda had already put up 1.7 WAR before his 2024 season was ended by a fastball to the head. We're getting quite good use from our draft picks. What we're not getting is the tent pole, the big dog, The Man. Buxton can be very good, but we need another for when he's out. They need a star, and teams that won't buy one tend to go without for long stretches because they don't come along that often.

All I know is that no matter what happens, next fall TD will be covered when it comes to second guessing the front office. They don't spend enough. They don't spend on our guys. They spent on the wrong guys. They paid for relievers. Does that about cover it? Wait, I guess we still have the ghost of Ervin Santana to invoke before they sign a starting pitcher. The roster is turning over and there are gaps in what the system is providing right now: a SS and the OFs have finally arrived, but still no 1B, a wait for one of the catchers to step up, and a lot of AAA SP trying to make the jump to the MLB rotation. Somewhere in there you skim off the ones that aren't going to make it and direct them to the pen, but recently there's been too much dreaming on having everyone in the rotation. Coaches have stats on second and third time through the order and can tell who can adjust in-game, so it shouldn't be hard to identify these guys. Same with the injured ones that could benefit from lighter usage, We used to do it well, but somehow lost the string. For the most part very few top prospects come to pro ball as relievers. Top prospects are starters, and any brand new reliever is certainly coming from a college program. A few years back they drafted a few of those hard throwing college guys and it turns out all their arms exploded. So now we draft a lot of college arms that have survived hard use without exploding and it turns out those guys are exploding too. Next perhaps we draft high schoolers and international arms that don't ever get treated badly and see how that goes? Well it turns out we have, and they also blow up. But some seem to survive no matter if you hold them like tiny little Raya-shaped eggs, only use them in a rigid four day pattern (Adams and Kline) or jerk them all over like Morris or Rojas. It seems hard to say what works, but that's kind of the problem the Twins have been having for the past few years. Lots of guys that get close but few closing the deal. Perhaps the new MLB coach's fastball-first theology breaks some things loose. Regardless, invoking one contract as some sort of object lesson is wrong. We're not growing our own right now, so we need to shop the market and it's not a certain thing, Too bad, sucks to suck, do better, etc.

Your point in the article about reducing playing time to keep guys fresh is why these are so low. Those guys don't know anything specific about any team, just what the algorithm spits out. But even if you see Jeffers as a 90 game catcher and want to ding him for it there's still the problem that he can hit better than any other option this winter. That's a huge deal when you consider that just playing him more often or letting him DH would extract more value for a team.

So the argument is what, three guys would be making $60m and that's bad? Here's the counter to that: only a handful of guys from the rest of the roster are making more than $2m. But Jeffers made $6.7 last year so this is really about the incremental $16m. We can clear most of it by moving a couple guys without roles and the rest can come from Tom P's viagra fund. If he wants to pose as a big man in front of the mirror every morning he's going to have to write some checks. Lewis Larnach and Ober make $18m and of all of them only maybe Larnach should be kept: we need a DH so maybe you keep him for a while instead of Bell. If we have Jeffers we can dump Caratini on someone who really needs a catcher and free even more money. Then you find some guy who can play the short side of a DH platoon and hit some lefties and you're golden. If Buxton needs days off he can have a couple, and if Jeffers needs to rest he can play 1B like Caratini. Maybe if Jeffers takes the QO you then offer him a contract with a second or third year where the total money gets guaranteed and they can smooth it out a little. But mostly you raise the payroll to $140m like an adult with a huge pile of cash coming in from shared revenue every year.

I don't disagree with this, but I do want to call out the strawman and say the opening day 2026 defense was no longer a thing by about the six week mark. In mid-May Lewis lost his 3B job, Lee left SS and a couple weeks later Keaschall moved to the outfield for good. Josh Bell played 1B 7 times in April, ten in May and three the rest of the way. And Wallner's glove was taken from him and flung across the river in May as well. Most of those changes were not driven by injury or necessity, as the guys mostly kept playing, just at new places. (Lewis was in St Paul for a bit, but others just moved around.) The defense has been much better since things settled down. Do try to give credit when they do things better, as I think it makes for a more pleasant mood and it may encourage them to keep it up.

He's out until mid-year, so little risk of Banda getting poached. Once we get through the narrow, non-IL set of roster months they can add him back on a minor league contract to hang on to him and help with his rehab. He's worth having, but you can take him off the top shelf for this house cleaning work.

Well they did start doing things differently in 2026. - Guys changed to new positions. They didn't add a new position, they left the old one and stayed at the new one. Revolutionary. EDIT: And this was mostly due to a material dissatisfaction with the defense on the field. That's also new. - Guys got a look and were gone if they didn't make the grade. Wallner was a favorite with a multi-year track record and was essentially cut in May. SWR is gone, Martin was set aside for the kids, Fedko is gone, along with Outman, Arcia, Topa, Orze and a host of other anonymous pitchers. - Pitchers got to stay in longer. Far fewer bullpen/opener games. Everyone got to close if their mom brought treats. - Far fewer IL trips, which sounds good until you realize I'm not pleased with this. Several guys were allowed to hang around and chew up innings and ABs when they should have been sat down or sent down to figure stuff out or get well. Buxton and Lewis were the worst, but there were many others. Morris was sucking the chrome off trailer hitches for a month in there, mid-Aug to mid-Sept. So things are different. It's not shown up in team building much yet, but let's see how things go. If Tom P is still on his hot yoga high when the free agent season opens we might see some stuff.

Both are OBP guys with limited power and poor defensive chops leading to a battle to find a defensive position. Luke has been healthier and shown more power. Luis has only been defensively average once in his career, and since it didn't happen until his age 29 season I'm not confident it's a new baseline that he can be counted on to maintain. OTOH he seems to have stayed healthy since leaving the Twins, which was a huge knock on him early in his career. But there are far better ways to spend $20m than a slower, weaker Luke Keashall (that also could end up blocking the real Luke Keaschall at 1B or DH.)

Waaay too many familiar names on this list. Go back two years and a third of these guys were not even in the organization. This is the primary reason no one writes these. You're standing on the edge of a change to the CBA which should directly affect how orgs like the Twins spend their money. There will be changes, perhaps even by Dec 1, which makes this an unwise waste of time. (But hey, clicks.)

Arraez is a poor choice because we already have him in a younger, better, cheaper Keaschall. Bauer makes way more sense to this roster because we don't have anyone like him yet. Buxton can do it for stretches, but Bell probably won't be back and the big stick that's always there in the middle is important to build around. (And not to bash Jim Bowden again, but I just want to bash Jim Bowden again and point out he thinks Lowe can be had for 3/$45m. He's a great backup if Bauer gets too rich.) Jeffers should be #1 in their plans, but it's quite likely Boras wants to wait things out and wring all possible dollars from this opportunity. It's why he was chosen after all. And you're not going to get the second or third catcher in this entire offseason on a cheap one year deal, so Kelly/Stephenson will be at least two. That's fine because odds are Lackey won't be a full time starter in 2028 yet. I mean he could be, but if you're building a roster you need to include contingencies, and rookie catchers taking more than a half season to get established is quite common. I don't see a huge need for top dollar relievers. I'd like to see one decent old guy to replace Rogers/Minter, so maybe an Adams, Abreau, Vesia or Blackburn type who won't be The Closer by virtue of his signing but could carry the ball if he earns it. Way more risk of volatility in this crew, but far cheaper too. Trade Ober now. Keep Larnach for DH. Keep Lewis with no promised roster spot and trade him the minute anyone wants him; I believe there are a lot of teams that think they can fix him.

I think the change from the slider-happy Falvey/Johnson/Maki regime to this new FB-centered ethos Reith has been preaching will help a lot. MIL was working with guys they found, including former Twin Magill, so a change on our end was due. Maybe in his formative years Falvey believed small dollar teams like CLE and MIN could never afford the high velo types, whatever, but the truth today is that there are a hundred guys that can hit 100 MPH and every team needs a bunch of them.

Just to echo what everyone is saying, Ryan can still pitch and pitch well. Ober is treading the fine line between bad starter and old swingman. That can be valuable to a team with a massive IR list, but we have a different problem right now and that's sorting through the ready and near-ready arms we have on hand. The last thing we need to do is waste innings on an insurance policy that soaks up valuable opportunities to develop our future. Ober can maybe pull a Dobnak and sit with German in St Paul, but I really don't want to see him on the mound at Target Field again.

You want to dump three of your healthy 2026 starters to avoid not having enough starters on hand for 2028. Say that out loud and think about how it sounds. Now what would that look like exactly? Be specific: names, estimated value required to get and arrival times on the MLB roster, etc. I think it's far more difficult than you realize. Really go do this now. Because now I want you to take that list (you didn't make the list, did you?) and compare it to the young pitchers who appeared for the Twins in the past two years: Prielipp, Abel, Mathews, Morris, Adams, Festa, Rojas, Raya, and Quick and Gallagher are at AAA waiting to come in after them. Who were you going to pick up that's got a better pedigree than Abel? What young starter are you going to acquire that did better than Mathews' 10 home starts (2.57 ERA, only a hotel routine away from Cy Young votes. ) They just went and got a few of these guys last year, so where's the development and patience to build them up? C'mon, posts like this are just noise and really can't work once you start thinking about them.

OK, now that I bothered doing that my real plan only differs in how much those first two would actually cost. 1. Still sign Jeffers, but probably only to 3/$50m or 4/$60m. 2. Bauers might go for more than 4/$56m, but stay in for a while. Lowe if you don't like where it ends up. Clemens can cover the other spot. 3. and 4. are the same. 5. I think they do need to get comfortable with the idea of trading young talent. They sent out the widely recognized Hill and the provincially valued Kline for Hoffman, and chances are good that'll never haunt them too badly. I like watching ERod play, lots of style and flair, but if he comes out cold next spring I'm not sure we have the intestinal fortitude to leave him on the bench with a .117 ahead of Martin, for example. Not sure what they target, but during this winter I encourage Tinney to find 1B glove.

OK, let's have some fun. I just read Jim Bowden's free agent piece over the The Athletic and I am going to BELIEVE* HIM! * I will also follow this up with a more plausible posting later. 1. Jeffers is only worth 2/$15m, so we do that. Heck, maybe go 3/$25m if I have that second mimosa for breakfast. 2. Bauers is only going to cost 4/$56m, but I assume he'll really want more so 4/$60m. 3. Sign free agents Jason Adam and Brian Abreu for the pen, come "close" on Morjon. 4. Offer Lewis a lowball deal and trade him if he balks. ATL might take a flyer on Royce as a replacement for Albies. Sign Larnach and keep him for DH unless you can find a trade out there.

So Shaw is available because the infield is full and he's without a position, so the person to trade him for is... another infielder? Why would the Cubs do this?

There are two questions here: managing the 40 man immediately and then what you want to do heading into the CBA negotiations. The day after the World Series ends you lose the four free agents, you DFA Grey and one of Acton, Anderson or Sabato, and then you keep the six names on the 60 day. You can always cut guys later if you trade for new faces or sign a big free agent, God knows there are easy places to upgrade, but there's no reason to do it all now. The harder question is how many guys you can move around by Dec 1 when everything shuts down. What do you want to be carrying into the break? The period before the winter meetings are usually pretty dead. This year might be different though, since other teams will be in the same spot as the Twins, wanting to shuffle some names before a lockout that's almost certainly going to only leave a short window afterwards to set the 2027 lineup. They may want to get a lot of little changes made now rather than packing even more into the couple weeks between a new CBA and the first games. So I'd find a way to move Larnach, Lewis, Wallner and Ober for just about anything. Honestly I'd move any name on that bubble list, but those are the only ones that may have value. If you haven't had a bite on them by Thanksgiving, then drop Wallner and offer below arb contracts to the others. They either sign at a discount or they're free agents. My guess is that Lewis and Ober would sign and Larnach would leave. And I'd be on the lookout for a real 1B and a backup C, or any arms. Caratini is not an inspiring choice right now. I think big free agent signings are going to be rare in November given how weak the class is and how the rules may change. That said, Jeffers gets a three year offer if there's any expectation in the front office that the spending is going to have to rise a bunch in the next few years.