Cris E

So the ball is carrying a bit today...

Meh, go back a few years and take another look. It's not as clear as you're drawing it. A bunch of those acquired hitters were never signed to be starters, most of those awesome hitters are still well under 500 ABs for their careers. and a bunch of our good hitters and bad pitchers were acquired over the past five years too. It's muddled. As said above, how long does a guy have to be in our minors for us to get to claim him? Or this: we traded for Nelson Cruz and drafted Ober and Jax. It's fun to play with obvious conclusions, but this one isn't very good.

By the time Nashville makes more economic sense than Chicago, the old Nashville team will have moved to Oakland. This is empty posturing for more stadium subsidies. Any time Jerry Reinsdorf gets the vapors you know it's money related. Remember, all those Camden Yards clones are coming up on 30 years old and are completely used up, decrepit, unsuitable for anything more than high school softball really. We should probably get started on our Target Field replacement plans if you want my honest opinion. I'm not even sure the Twins should step foot in that deathtrap. Can we see about playing our road games at Joliet Catholic until the White Sox can come up with a better home option? Mercy.

Eh, maybe. In 2022 they called up Celestino a couple years early and learned that of course he wasn't ready yet. Larnach and Kirriloff both would have gotten solid looks too but they were hurt. Miranda was ready and then came to camp this spring and tore up his shoulder. This year Prato hit .170 in AA before moving to AAA and hitting twice that, so pardon me if I want to see a little more. Keirsey and Severino have only had a couple weeks at AAA and they are not setting the world alight. I get that we're slooow to move guys up sometimes (ie why were the moves to AAA this late in the summer) but the moves to the majors, at least this year, are largely driven by winning rather than development, and that's appropriate. If we pull away a bit this month maybe they can do more showcasing and learn some stuff while resting the starters.

If they're both still swinging a bat in October then it's not a nightmare. Ask Bryce Harper.

It's a good paranoid based on a horrific 2022 experience. I am fine with having depth the way they built this team. Think of Mahle, Lewis, Buxton and the host of other pitchers who I can't bother to look up who missed so much of this year due to injury, and yet we have a decent looking roster most nights because they laid in so much foundation last winter. But keeping a lot of dead weight around when it's clear the youth ARE producing and the elders are not is a separate and important issue. Mickey Hatcher was popular but had to go to make the 87 team work. Gallo is liked in the club house, and he has decent days but bad months. I liked the idea of his signing all along, and I liked the early performance, but he's not doing good work right now and it was time for some hard choices at the end of July. Sometimes you just have to shake a guy's hand and send him on his way.

I'm all about the 80s teams and the weak tea that used to populate the end of the bench or the back of the pen. Guys like Henry Blanco, Mark Guthrie, John Moses was my Mariner early this week, and Dan Schatzader was my Phillie. My problem is midmarket NL teams since I draw so much on my pre-interleague play memories and many of those teams never got near the playoffs..

This has clearly NOT been a nightmare. A nightmare was last year with 14 guys starting games and 2300 DL days. A nightmare is what the Cardinals are going through. A nightmare is the Mets spending twice our payroll just on their luxury tax and having to sell off all the new toys because it utterly didn't work. Mike Trout is missing most of the season, Aaron Judge missed most of the season, almost all the 2023 free agent starting pitchers have been injured or terrible and it's different here because we're still sitting in first in front of a lot of bad teams, which is way more the the Angels or Yankees or Padres or Cards can say. Geez, have a little perspective, eh?

They have plenty of money in general, and specifically there are a number of large contracts coming up leaving plenty of room to spend. The Pohlads will always be fine on the money front, but the window of being atop a terrible division with an easy road to the playoffs will not stay open long. They need to spend now to make the most of the chance they have. And let's be clear: a soft division means you can cycle stiffs like Dallas Kueckel through the rotation in August to rest starters, it lets you send out tired relievers and worn down infielders for a spa week in St Paul and still only have to fend off PIT and KC to hold your 5 game lead. So thinking about this question in terms of opportunity, Polanco is, at the very least, better than Lee and Castro and Gordon and Solano and Gallo. Farmer is still valuable for defensive value and half a platoon, Lewis and Jullien are worth more, and Correa far more. By the end of next year Lee may have pushed toward the front, but clearly not this year. Polo should be able to replace Solano, Farmer can be your SS backup and Castro can be the second utility guy that we always seem to need. We still need a CF if we choose to upgrade from Taylor's good glove, 15 HR and weak average, but I don't think Gordon is that guy and it's pretty clear Gallo isn't either. So I'd easily keep him while we're in Win Now mode (which we certainly should be.) There will be plenty of opportunities for these guys because I assume that we'll continue to have injury problems in the future, same as every team these days, and we'll be needing extra fielders all over the place. This is a fine problem to have, and the solution is to replace older role players with our younger, improving guys when they prove themselves ready. The choice isn't which youngster to get rid of, but which geezer to upgrade, and Polanco isn't that guy when you have some of these others around.

Glad to see some life from the offense, but it might be time for Griffin to have an "injury" vacation to St Paul and rest that arm.

They may have two things in mind: 1. He's not coming up for a bunch of months while he works on his hitting at AAA so he may as well play his primary position. And there's no guarantee that 2B or 3B will be open when he's ready either, so don't try timing the market and just stick to basic development and don't distract him with potentially irrelevant duties. 2. One bad slide and we could have a huge opening at SS. Correa has a long injury history and a scary looking ankle so the future could be closer than any of us want to admit and having Lee fully ready would look really smart on that dark day.

I gotta admit, I thought he was the guy who went to Florida and was just called up and sent down. Yup, just went and checked, and between the hair, glasses and meh results I see how I got him confused with Devin Smeltzer. Mea culpa Randy, keep grinding. Good things can happen when you identify and chase the big dreams.

But that's how WS winners work these days: good players play well, some unexpected guy pulls a Lemke and hits .400 (or a Soler and hits a bunch of HR) and the pen steps up huge. The Twins have pieces that have under-performed this season, but no one would be shocked if vets like Correa, Buxton, Polanco played well in the bright lights. It's mostly a health thing for many of the guys playing poorly to date. You can see how they could get healthy if Rocco can rest some guys as the rest of the division falls away. EDIT: Just want to step back and point out that this is plausible without addressing the probability of it. There is a gap there, to say the least.

Keuchel was working outside the zone, mostly low, with a 77 MPH change working off a 86 mph fastball/slider. You know what that looks like to MLB hitters and video guys? It looks like walks and opportunities. If you seem unconvinced go look at this work last August where he threw a 2.31 ERA out there in Round Rock before getting incinerated in the bigs to the tune of a 9+ ERA.

The strength has been starting pitching, the weakness has been some combination of injury and under-performance on offense. They are inter-related in many ways, but if the team performed as expected, even to within 90% of estimates, then things would be immensely different. What would things look like with decent seasons from Correa, Buxton, Polanco, Theilbar, Mahle, Alcala, Miranda, Lewis? (And that's before accepting this Kepler as the real Kepler and deciding what should have been expected from Gallo.) SO the plan wasn't too bad last spring: they had Farmer and Taylor in place in case the big two got hurt. They had depth for the starting pitching. Gallo was there in case the kids didn't develop at 1B or LF. They picked up one of the top catcher free agents. There was some doubt in the pen, but they had a lot of youngsters around to train up and they kept digging around, eventually adding the very effective Stewart (and Blogosvic is emerging as well.) So the things to address at the deadline were mostly holes where there were injuries and places where guys were not performing for one reason or another. The pen is still short and should have been shored up. The ineffective guys can still be replaced by internal options at the corner OF spots and by returning injured players within the coming week or two. You might have seen a much different approach to the deadline if it happened two weeks later when we knew how well Theilbar or Stewart or Lewis or Polanco would return. But as of this week they don't know much more than Stewart's fate so they're making guesses that things will be OK for those guys. (I'm still cranky about not adding to the pen though.)

I'll follow up on that Brewers remark with one more point: fans are rightfully proud of the good reputation the Twins organization has had over the years, especially regarding how they treat their people. Moving Lopez to be closer to his son, for example, is something that didn't necessarily benefit the org that much but made a big difference to his family. Last year Brewers GM David Stearns made kind of a meh trade to send Josh Hader to San Diego, which mostly saved some money, picked up a couple pretty good prospects and a couple other relievers that weren't nearly as good as Hader. But Hader's kid was not well, he'd been pitching distracted and then he was sent to the West Coast. The team had been 7-2 coming out of the all-star break and starting the day of the trade they went 1-5 against CIN and PIT, two teams that ended the year with 62-100 records. They didn't win the division and they only saved a few million bucks. It was a somewhat flawed team that probably didn't finish as well as it could have and part of that could have been trying to save a few bucks or grab some resources for the future at the expense of the present. Didn't work all that well.

If you're just playing in GM mode then that makes some sense, but here in real life there are other considerations, like actually playing the games. In real life things like winning games, winning the division, reaching the playoffs, have monetary value, and the primary goal of a MLB team in real life is not winning the WS, it's making money. If you sell every year that you don't think you can make the LCS you'll diminish fan interest by telling everyone Don't Bother, This Isn't The Year. There are also real concerns about wrecking the lockerroom like the Brewers did last year when they dealt Josh Hader. You can and should be free to deal who you want, but making deals for deals' sake is not without consequence. On The Other Hand if you think you want to win some games, win a division and try to make some waves in the playoffs then you have to do basic roster maintenance. The money's not free, you have to do your part. In this case you have a weak pen and some empty uniforms running around not providing value. I'm going to be charitable and assume Gallo is only here because Kirrillof is out, but I have no idea why they didn't replace Stewart. That was not good work.

I only wonder when they found out Stewart was broken. By releasing that news 30 minutes after the deadline it sort of looks like they suppressed it to make the job of picking up a reliever easier, but then they didn't do it even though several decent options were moved quite late in the day for not much. Even if Falvey wanted to walk into that clubhouse tonight and tell them he stood firm because he believed in them he should have filled that hole. They needed one more solid arm out there and the guy they need isn't on the roster.

He left, and good luck to him. But let's face it, 6 starts of 1.13 ERA should get you more than 32 IP. If he was really pitching that well he should have been able to go deeper than 6 innings at least once. After the bad smells that Archer and Bundy left in the clubhouse last season burning down the bullpen he won't get a chance in MN. Flavine did learn something from 2022.

My big complaint for the trade season was around the bullpen. They didn't need much, but they needed something. Releasing the Stewert news at Deadline + 30 minutes means they held it back to save their negotiating position while trying to trade for a reliever. Once it didn't come together they let the world know how screwed we are in the pen. I wonder when they found out about the setback, and how serious it really is. I wrote earlier this afternoon that I thought he'd been throwing with his heart all year and he finally realized he'd run off the edge of the cliff and broke down. If they spent two days knowing he wasn't coming back and still couldn't get any of the guys out there that's just bad work. I like Jordan Blasogzcwizczz's work out of the pen as well as the next guy, but there were numerous and better options that moved very late today for very little.

He won't be for long. In the time he should have been fighting for a spot in the utility OF, pinch runner, sparkplug guy role he was sitting at home wearing a boot watching Solano and Castro eat his lunch. He's not that good and his window was not open long and an injury screwed him. Bad luck, on to the next org with less utility depth. Anyway, darn shame about just barely missing on that Verlander deal. But at least Falvine can stop working on that one now and get back to the problems in the pen. (Yes I am being sarcastic. It shouldn't need to be said.)

The AL Central is going to be won or lost by the Twins, and nothing CLE does is going to change that. Either we get it together and walk away or we don't, but the teams behind us are even further from real contention and are even less likely than the Twins to mortgage their futures for a 2023 Wildcard Play In Game commemorative second place trivet.

So much of this comes down to what we're going to get from our injured guys, and that's just not known to us (and maybe the FO as well.) Stewart is the sort of arm we're looking for, Lewis is the kind of bat we're looking for, Theilbar is that lefty, Buxton is that CF, and so on. My guesses: Theilbar is back but I expect him to get hurt at least one more time this season but be pretty effective when he's available. Stewert will return and stay healthy but I'm not certain if he'll stay as effective. Part of my somehow feels he was just throwing his heart out and it took him that long to realize he'd run off the edge of the cliff before falling to the DL. Lewis will come back and stay healthy. I hope. A lot rides on this one, TBH. In the end they'll grab a RH cOF and a reliever based on what they expect from these guys so I look for a big Mets splash with Canha or Pham and that other reliever I can;t remember or posssibly a Cards package for Carlson in CF.

There is no way he is retiring after this season. No chance. He's going to get a 3-4 year deal worth $15-20m per season, he was in the all star game a couple weeks ago, he's having a fine year and he's (knock on wood) been healthy for quite a while. Let it go, it was an off-hand remark that's never been mentioned a second time.

Castro is a utility guy because he CAN make some great plays but he also makes some serious bonehead moves, and underlying this inconsistency his average performance is not that good. He may improve, he's better than Gordon, but right now he's not a starter on a good team.