Cris E

Derek Shelton <> Terry Francona EDIT: To clarify, I am not saying they are in any way interchangeable. Rather that these are not at all alike. This situation has a few differences from Franona's second gig with the 2004 Boston Red Sox roster, for example.

The MLB Trade Rumors article on trade candidates listed Heim from Texas in their top 40. He was good two years ago but then regressed, but some of the lost value was in framing and that might cease to be a valuable skill once the lasers arrive. He makes the same as Jeffers but his market value is probably lower so getting him would take less than what they'd get for Jeffers. OTOH he might be worse for the same money and we still wouldn't have a backup. Whatever, dumping Jeffers is a dumb trade unless they get some Wonka-grade prize in return.

I love this point. Teams just don't do these trades because a player with two years left that's worth a ton in trade is probably better than most of the prospects that you'd get back. There are exceptions like Juan Soto, but he returned a ton because he was a guy that never comes along rather than a guy who never comes up in trade talks. Joe Ryan is a good starting pitcher, but he's no ace. The Twins need a starting SS or C and most teams won't make that trade for a #2 or #3.

I think the whole thing comes down to money, not strategy. Without money they will lose in any situation, and with some money they can get back on track within a year or two. With some spending they could be close to .500 right away. If they trade away these players the resulting short-term bridge team will lose until new talent comes aboard. But if they rely on the system providing a new SS, a new catcher, a bullpen, a new 3b (once Lewis proves he can't be trusted) all at one time they will lose because those parts are not all in their minor leagues today. At some point they will need to spend and the day that starts happening is the day they'll regain fans and make some money. Losing games is losing money, and as bad as the current TV contract is, it's made worse by fielding a bad team. So it all comes down to Pohlad fortitude. I am sad, for they are soulless and weak. That puts Falvey on the spot to decide how to go about saving money. That means a choice to add something rather than a choice to dump something. The monster return for these guys is a MLB-ready starting catcher and/or shortstop. That 18 year old catcher we got from PHI may be terrific, but he's exactly 42 light years away from relevance. He just won't contribute in 2027. Maybe we get a SS from BAL or that young catcher from LAD, but it only works as a blockbuster for talent rather than away from payroll. And it entails a commitment from ownership to start spending again in the not-too-distant future. Getting great players is swell, but great means they're more mature, and thus probably close to arb dollars. There aren't enough top rookie players to run a payroll on them not being paid, so the Pohlads will need to spend enough to keep 15-20 of them around long enough to win, whether it be 85 games or a world series (and then be able to sell the team for $8 billion dollars and be free of this tedious nightmare of MLB ownership!) I'm only kind of laughing, because saying you want to tear it down and build something great sort of implies that you still want to own it when it's great, and that'll cost money. I guess this is a plea to stave off the destruction and work towards a sale, which is now more possible given the debt pay-down.

That was one season where Sonny was coming off a lot of injuries. The next year he earned longer outings and got them, improving from 119 innings in 24 starts (just under 5 IP/start) to 184 innings in 32 starts (5.75 innings/start) and finished second in CY voting. The idea that Rocco held him back was not a real thing.

This is crazy. Who is questioning the group that put the last outstanding bullpen on the field? That group is mostly still here and they should be promoting from within to maintain continuity with a very successful program. The coaches that brought you youngsters like Varland and Funderburke (and Jax and Duran in previous years) as well as injury reclamations like Stewart and Coulombe are still here. They already were handling the vibes and moods and personal angles quite well and they deserve the chance to continue that work. Latroy is doing very well in the booth and there's no need to stir things up by questioning the part of the pitching pipeline that was working.

A couple things: @Alex BoxwellWhat are your thoughts about the number of rookies on this team that might still be developing their routine and learning who they are at the MLB level (eg Keashall, Lee maybe, Martin, half the pitching staff after Aug 1)? Does coaching matter more to them than usual, or do mentor players make a bigger difference? Also, even replacing Falvey wouldn't make much difference this year if the parameters of the budget don't change. If Pohlads want to lay in some money for the cold winter coming next year there's nothing to do but watch the Twins lose 100 or go to Saints games and see who is going to on the field in 2027. No manager or GM can win in the current game with a $80-90m payroll.

Wallner has the power that most of the rest of the roster is missing and it has to be kept until one of the prospects proves himself at the top level. We don't have a better DH candidate right now so he can hang out there, but if Buxton gets hurt or we need to rest Jeffers he'll need to play OF at times. He's not terrible so that's not the end of the world, it's just not his first position. Maybe he plays 1B OK in the future, but I'd rather he worked on his OF skills this spring. Roden feels like the improved Martin from September (with a better OF glove) but Martin in no way feels like Castro. His IF defense just doesn't play aside from innings ending in "teenth". Once Roden establishes himself I don;t know what happens to Austin. Royce Lewis has to improve or go, as his flirty relationship with power has become tiresome. I'm glad he improved his throwing and range last winter, but this year it's time to get back in the cage and figure some stuff out. Health plays such huge a role in his story that maybe he needs to hang out with Byron B to get some insights into taking care of himself. As far as the rest of the roster, they need a future catcher and a real SS to push Lee, another bat from any source to put at first or DH or whateever, and a hundred bullpen arms. Some are in the minors already, but a lot rests on how ready the owners are to play in the big leagues.

OK, I read all of those words and I think I know what they all mean but I still have no idea why Mikulski was included. Did he piss someone in Houston off? Was he caught in a bad stalking situation and they were doing him a favor? Is he dating Falvey's niece? They sent that other Lopez to Miami a few years ago to be near his kid's doctors, but this one comes with no backstory.

This is a big deal, especially given this organization's lack of catching depth. With Jeffers' appearances behind the plate being managed tightly the team had an incredibly long run of not needing a third catcher. Both stayed healthy, and if Vasquez had managed to hit anywhere near his career norms it would have been heralded as a triumph. Normal catchers get hurt all the time, and the success at keeping ours in the lineup so effectively for years should have been appreciated while watching Mickey Gasper filling in like an NHL Third Goalie.

(dup)

I posted this elsewhere, but the Twins ALWAYS go with the inexperienced manager. The last time they hired a manager with MLB experience was Gene Mauch in 1976. Seriously, that’s 50 years. And of those eight hires since 1976 the only two that weren’t promoted from within the organization were Mauch and Rocco Baldelli. When Rocco was hired it was good to see horizons raised above the level of the staff Christmas party list. This time they may actually accept that previous MLB experience might be more than expensive. One can hope...

I think he was hurt early, lost confidence in his body, developed some bad habits trying to hit without using his gimpy leg and then got healthy without making all the adjustments his recovery allowed. When he did get better it took him a while to trust his legs' health, but eventually he started running out more grounders, taking extra bases and stealing when the team was unleashed in August. Alas he did not make any changes to his swing when his health returned so he kept dancing in the box and flicking his bat at things without conviction through the end of the year. I think a lot of the negatives with him come down to the fact that he doesn't like making changes mid-season. He sounded like a brat for not wanting to learn 2B in the midst of a pennant race. He held off on improving his throwing until last offseason. He didn't re-work his swing during the season this year. The good news is that his throwing did improve a lot coming into this year, so maybe if he gets a healthy winter he can regain his old form in the box. But the inflexibility between March and October is something coaches are going to have to work on with him.

Well that's not true at all, or it's obviously true all the time. "What he's worth" is a bogus phrase that hides all the possibilities of injury, positional scarcity, budget games and a host of other factors and also ignore point of view. Polanco wasn't "worth" $10m to them but he was to you, so who is wrong? If the budget is smaller than you'd like then you can't have Polanco and a new 1B, so how does worth get calculated if Polanco doesn't play first? Meanwhile they've paid a bunch of guys in recent years. You may not like the outcomes, but they have tried to pay for performance as evidenced by the number of expensive deals they've inked. They went and got Sonny Grey but didn't want to re-up him for top dollar, which I believe was the right move based on what STL got from him over the past couple years. They kept Lopez and he's been injured but good. Buxton was signed for good money adjusted for his limited playing time, which was fair to both sides. Correa was an aspirational signing, but they threw down for him and paid a lot of money for almost four years. Donaldson was a colossal *ss but he hit homeruns so they paid him (until he was just too awful to keep, and then they magically got the Yankees to pay him.) You're frustrated and it's leading to over-broad generalizations that just aren't true. Complain about the budget decisions rather than the outcomes of them. That's rooted in truth.

Polanco's value ended at the end of his contract in 2024. At that point anything he did was available to any team that wrote him the $7m check, and it could have been the Twins. That original deal was a lot of money going to a guy that was battling a lot of injuries and not fielding well at all. Not much value needed to be realized for shedding the $10.5m spent on 118 games of 92 OPS+ to be a good idea. But even if the immediate dump of Polanco's salary was breakeven it was a win because it provided them with the freedom to afford the rest of the roster. You want to evaluate the rest of the transactions separately that's fine, but then you do all of them in a big bowl since none of them can be separated and the $6-7m or whatever was saved gets its own line item. It mattered a lot in the bigger picture of that off-season.

Also, there's a lot of mention that these outsiders are going to be bringing in their own guys, but the staffs they are on are not theirs. We're not going to be getting a lot of MIL or CLE coaches as those guys are already working with playoff rosters. That said, we have hired some really good position coaches the last few years as evidenced by how well they performed elsewhere right after leaving MN. Think of James Rowson (NYY) or David Popkins (TOR) before thinking that no one here knows what they're doing. Coaching at the MLB level is much more than just reminding guys to stay still or open their hips a little. There's some psychology, more physiology, some analytics, and a lot of trust involved. Rowson showed up at Byron Buxton's big contract signing even though he wasn't in the organization anymore just because they had developed such a bond. Sometimes coaches are a problem, but often there's way more involved when player performance dips or doesn't evolve and they get used a scapegoats.

Baldelli was the only one that didn't come from within, so as much as the "new blood" sounds good it's mostly a case of the Cs: Cheap and Continuity.

I kind of get what you're saying, but you're kind of ignoring some prominent counter examples like Pablo Lopez (VEN), Carlos Correa (PR), Willi Castro (PR), Christian Vasquez (PR), Johan Duran (DR) and so on. The fact that we traded a bunch of these guys away has more to do with their value/cost than our affinity for Latin American baseball. And our best kids feature some Latin roots as well: ERod (DR), Tait (PAN) and Rojas (CUB) are in our top 5. It's a feeling but it's mostly an artifact of the deadline fire remaking the roster.

Houston is miles away, so put that talk on a shelf somewhere. Culpepper could be the future, but first we'll have to see how he does with longer exposure at AA and the even larger challenges of AAA. He was good at AA, not outstanding. Lee is going to get a half season at least, barring injury. And even if he does get hurt I'm still not sure Culpepper gets more than a week or two before August.

And this problem means this juncture was a particularly rough time to lose Castro. He was at least a credible stopgap SS in ways that the rest of the roster is not.

Bryce Harper has a defense problem: he really can't throw. If we trade away our 4th OF and get back a guy who can't play CF we'll be looking at a 70-92 season and we may as well trade everyone. (But I do like that Harper could be another third catcher, like Mickey G. That's got value.) /S in case it isn't clear that most things I write need a /s

Pretty sweet post-game work by the radio engineering team. Crowd noise instead of interviews is innovative and challenging, but mostly for the serious fan.

Lower velo? Seriously? Last year this was maybe a thing, but his avg 4 seam is over 100 this year. He's learning to pitch, and oh by the way he's fixed the FB too. This is a fine article about a broadened repertoire, but it seems to use the lower velocity aspect as clickbait. Let the good work stand on its own and resist the temptation to hunt for views. Thx.

Bader just has to hang on until Walner comes back and then he can go sit down and wait for defensive spots and the odd tough leftie. He got off to a really good start (for him) and is now regressing to his old self. Not a concern (unless Falvey really thought April Bader was what he was going to get all year.) Castro was hurt and then didn't even get a rehab game. Settle down. Jax and Stewart concern me. A lot more depends on them than middle relief guy Varland.

You know he didn't go up on a mountain to have God hand him game logs on stone tablets. You can do this yourself.