Cris E

The trendy, shifting nature of how hitting is being coached these days makes the idea of simply promoting your minor league coaches difficult. You need a guy who has stayed on top of the latest tools and can still relate to players, but if your AA guy is totally into the dark-ages methods of 2017 it'll be hard to move him up when everyone knows he needs to be doing physiology instead of studying pitchers (or whatever.) And because players need different things from coaches at different points in their careers, some old guys who developed into major league players in an earlier age might not want to hear from a guy who only speaks launch angles or whatever. It's got to be difficult to find the right guy for the personalities in your org and at a particular level (ie you can dictate how low A ball kids will be taught but it's harder to walk into the Dodgers clubhouse and start making changes.)

When Earl Weaver was asked where the backup SS was on his roster he would always answer "Rochester, where he belongs." That's where Celestino belongs until he learns his trade in CF. This roster needs a Buxton job share one or two days a week that Gordon, Kepler and Gallo can handle until Lewis or Martin reaches out and seizes it. Honestly Lewis could easily replace Gordon on the roster when he returns and Martin could inherit the utility-in-waiting tiara.

Juilien isn't much of a fielder so he needs to be a lock as a hitter. He'll probably start to move up the rankings once he gets another year against tougher opponents to confirm the fireworks from last fall. He's still never slugged .500 or hit 20 HR, so there's a lot of room to consolidate skills and prove himself this summer. It'll be a fun year to see games in Wichita, that's for sure.

I'll do it. Let me try to get the day off and then I'll let you know for sure.

It's an odd number year, Gallo is going to be fine! Seriously, if Gallo is at first it means we're not playing who we expected to for reasons of injury or poor performance. A pox on such thoughts this close to Pitchers and Catchers. If Kirilloff can't go then you'd likely be seeing an actual infielder over there, probably Miranda with a better glove taking over at third.

If you're worried about how often a guy gets on base you shouldn't look at batting average, you should look at his on base percentage, which measures that directly. In 2021 Gallo and Arraez were within .006 of each other and in 2019 they were .010 apart. Two of the last four years they were the same at getting on base. But in those two years Gallo out-homered Luis 60-6. Plus Gallo is a far better OF than Arraez is an infielder. Arraez' best defensive season was -2.0 runs in only 32 games according to Fangraphs. Gallo only ever had one year that bad and it was from when Texas was still thinking he could play third. And strikeout percentage doesn't directly affect your on base percentage: some guys don't strike out AND don't get on base, while TTO gods walk and strike out all the time. Besides which it's a junk stat that doesn't corelate with much at all. You can look up AB per SO (which is about the same thing) and it's a real mixed bag of decent players and randos (Kwan, Kirk and Yandi Diaz are 2-4.) And again, if the team hits .260 it doesn't mean much until you know who is doing the hitting. If you put nine Arraez clones out there and they all hit .270 (ten points higher!) you'll get wiped out. If Polanco comes back healthy and comes close to his career averages he'll hit .270 with 30 doubles and 20HR. details matter and batting average skips over a lot of important details.

If we hit .260 as a team it'll mean the whole roster hit 15 points above the league average and it would take some real strangeness to not be above average in runs scored. If you're going to be so concerned about batting average you should take a look at the league context. That list you're so worried about features exactly two guys below .243, the AL average in 2022, and those two guys are expected to be thumpers. But batting average doesn't really address the two real issues: getting someone on base and then driving them home, and improving the pitching to reduce how many runs we need to score. We've made a lot of good progress but we could really use one more solid bullpen arm.

Serious interest in Gurriel means that there are doubts about having a viable 1B on the roster, or because there's concern about table setting with so many hitters coming off poor performance, injury or simply new to the bigs. However the fact that Miami seems to be leading the bidding indicates it's not serious concern. I imagine we'd see a trade for this role before we'd see a free agent signing of a 38 year old with a slowing bat that the Astros both love and let walk away. This off-season isn't over yet.

Injuries happen when you're pitching tired, and you get tired by pitching too much on one day or too many days in a row. Rocco has proven he can manage the relief load and the outcome was far superior to the results Duran saw as a starter. Let it ride.

Pitchers making the move from starting to relieving pick up several MPH because they know they aren't pacing themselves or saving anything for later. Rocco was very vigilant about keeping him fresh, only pitching him back-to-back five times, and yet two of those second games resulted in a HR. Further, he only allowed 6 HR all year and the other four all came on or before May 5 when he was still settling in. And be honest about what he was doing as a starter in the minors: his best year was a 3.23 ERA at High A in 2019 when he was 21. He was still only throwing 5 innings a game and he was not blowing the league away, or even his teammates since the Ft Meyers team ERA that season was 3.11. Finally there is a difference in how pitching works when you only plan on facing a handful of guys. There was a good article on 538.com a few years ago that compared individual pitchers who had moved through starting and relief roles and compared their performance on the appearance length. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/relievers-have-broken-baseball-we-have-a-plan-to-fix-it/ Basically it says that when you go to a one inning role your velo picks up, strikeout percentages go up, and you can throw your third pitch a lot less often. Conversely, there's a big correlation between batters faced and strikeout rate (starting at the peak of around 4.5 BF) where the K% rate plateaus starting around 8.5 BF.

This isn't the problem you think it is for two reasons: most pitchers get hurt at some point so you just have to live with that, and contracts that price the injuries in can leave you the money to mitigate the gaps by having better backups on hand. Most pitching assets are distressed or soon will be. That is, MLB pitchers get seriously hurt all the time. Jon Roegele, a SABR researcher writing for the Hardball Times in 2018, did an article on Tommy John surgery that said 26 percent of major league pitchers used in 2017 had undergone Tommy John surgery. Today that percentage is 34%, and that's only the most serious elbow work, not shoulder, back, knee or hand injuries. His updated raw data is online here and it's fascinating. He's got every TJ surgery that he can confirm for MLB and MiLB players, including a list of unconfirmed and pending surgeries. Pitchers break, and break badly, all the time. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gQujXQQGOVNaiuwSN680Hq-FDVsCwvN-3AazykOBON0/edit#gid=0 As far as contracts go, Buxton was way below the market because he missed a ton of games and is expected to continue to miss games, but he'll get paid well when he stays healthy. Correa's deal was half the length that NYM and SFG were offering because of his health history. And even with those two studs on the roster we have acres of space on the payroll to accommodate whatever we need. We haven't spent it because we have a roster full of youth and uncertainty and it seems better to see what we have in the spring and go shopping again later rather than continue scraping the bottom of the barrel this month just because some fans can't wait for spring. At the bare minimum Maeda and Mahle are big additions to a rotation that was good when healthy last year. If they can improve on Bundy and Archer's work the whole roster changes starting with the bullpen workload. This focus on process has to leave room for things to work, not resolve themselves imediately.

A few late additions to the schedule: Two new Carlos Correa jersey nights are on tap. The Giants are in town on May 24 and the Mets are here Sept 10, and you can get fresh new Correa #4 jerseys! (Note: these were printed in SF and NY back when things looked a bit different, so they won't necessarily be Twins gear, if you get my drift.) Jose Berrios night is tentatively scheduled for Friday May 26. If he's pitching like he did in 2022, you can take home Jose after the game. Not a bobblehead, but your own actual MLB pitcher! This one is still pending approval from the legal dept, but we'll let you know as the date approaches. Once it became clear how popular the Back to School promos were in mid-July it wasn't a big leap to Halloween Night against the Pirates on August 19, Merry Christmas on Aug 30, a multi-game Hanukkah celebration the weekend of Sept 8 against the Mets and Opening Day 2023 on Sept 27 against the As.

I'm not sure Miranda is the answer to any question about improved infield defense, but I think Arraez got better at first the more he played there. It's not a super hard position, but there are things to learn and to drive into muscle memory through repetition and he's figuring it out. That said, losing Urshella is going to be felt at third until the year Miranda is eventually replaced by one of the displaced middle infielders. That could be this summer by Lewis or next year by Lee or in four years by Correa, but he's not good enough as a hitter or a fielder to hold off guys who can field better and hit as well. As with everything on this team, time will tell who keeps improving, who plateaus, and who gets hurt. There are plenty of opportunities for plenty of good young players and we may be best off holding back on changes until we get into spring training and see what we have in our hand right now.

Lewis has never had HR power like Soriano, so I'm not sure that's a good comp at all. Plus Soriano's bat was always pushed as far up the defensive spectrum as possible and it never approached SS quality. I mean sure, it's fun to pretend that our young SS prospect could hit 400 HR, but let's get real his best season high is 14. He's a doubles and speed guy, not a thumper. How about Robin Yount, or more realistically Trey Turner or Elvis Andrus?

Miller is Correa's heir at SS until he proves he can't hit. It'll take him a few more years to be knocking at the door and that'll be about the time to start looking at Correa's effectiveness at SS. Other than that you can let Lee or whoever play SS in St Paul (someone has to) but the planned succession goes past the guys you mentioned, which is I guess the point of the piece.

It was kind of a surprise, to be honest. It doesn't bode well for Gordon, that's for sure. In fact I could easily see them trading him and keeping Kepler as the short term CF sub and Celestino as the long term injury sub down in AAA. (Gallo has spent a little time in CF as well, and doesn't complain about it.) As soon as Lewis returns the standard for utility play is going to be much higher. Regarding the actual topic, I think they want a new LF after last year's abysmal production from the position. You can say it was Gallo and they're done, but I think they still want a little more certainty going into the year rather than count on the oft-injured and unproven Larnach and Kirilloff duo. That's why I don't expect them to trade Kepler without getting a good return. Fans may be tired of him, but he's very useful to a team with so much youth on the verge of emerging.

No. The guy does not take a thoughtful approach to hitting and he's getting eaten up at the MLB level because he won't make adjustments. Here's a link to a Trevor Bauer podcast (don't judge me) where he got together with Adell, Hunter Greene and Kenny Lofton to talk about many things. At one point Lofton is explaining how important it was to him to use video when it became available, to use advanced stats when they became available, and to stay ahead of pitchers however he could. Greene and Bauer agreed completely, but Adell was quite cool. Check out around the two minute mark where he explains how uncomfortable he is with new technology and info. "Honestly I'm kind of out on it." Around eight minutes he tells the others he can't pick up a pitcher's grip until the arm is in front and everyone jumps on him that he has to. At 25 minutes Kenny tells Bauer to dial back the social media because it's making him look bad, and he also talks about Houston's garbage cans and PEDs in general. It's a very good half hour, but Adell doesn't not come off as thoughtful or willing to make the most of his talent, I could be wrong, but at the time this was shot, pre-covid, he wasn't willing to take help and there hasn't been much in his numbers to indicate that's changed in the years since.

It won't be Kepler. He's got enough of a track record that his 2019 boom ball season is pretty widely discounted. If they don't want a 25 year old Carew at 1b then you'll need to break out the pre-arb power hitters. We don't have many with enough history to have any juice.

The Twins accepted different opinions because they weren't asking the same questions. The Giants and Mets were essentially working from the same starting point, trying to get a contract with an excellent youngish SS free agent who had a lot of leverage when playing teams against each other. At the point the Giants backed out it easily could have been a team thing or a real health thing. But when the Mets backed out too Correa's negotiating position was significantly weakened. Once his health was in doubt the Twins were free to not be considering 10-12 years of health because they had the leverage to crank down on the guaranteed years. When you need to paying out for ten or twelve years you're far more concerned about what difficulty a 38 year old might have with arthritis than when you're looking at six years and how the 34 year old might be feeling. Our front office was able to take those earlier negotiations to change their discussion to reduce risk to align with what the docs were saying.

Wait. He's got to prove that the injury that killed his numbers down the stretch last year is fixed and not recurring, he's got to show he can field at 2b without the shift, and we have to see how the many other doubles-power 2b coming up through the system mature. Let's talk next year when Arraez, Polanco, Julien, Martin and Lewis all have another year in the books.

Bonds had a lot left in the tank and is still at home. Bauer is a complete tool in the locker room and in the press and leaves less room for teams to maneuver. Plus MLB has been pretty serious about the domestic violence in recent years and Bauer's case has been especially gross, given his unapologetic, 50 Shades defense of himself. I see him doing podcasts during spring training with Aroldis Chapman and Carlos Martinez with Sam Dyson Zooming in from Mexico.

Personally I'm completely freaked out by Lewis' second ACL and I'd trade him as soon as anyone freaked out when his name was mentioned. I think the Marlins would love him, for example. I'm pretty conservative by nature so I'd hang on to as many of my MLB guys as possible until the AAA and AA kids and the injured MLB guys showed their 2023 faces in spring training. How do the injured guys like Polanco, Kirillof and Larnach look after a winter of recovery? Can Lee and Julien still hang against even better pitching? How's Noah Miller look this spring? Has Martin figured anything out this winter? Is Lewis still improving and on plan? Once you know where they are and if they're still advancing you can move Miranda or Arraez or Lewis or anyone else for whatever it turns out you need. Maybe we don't need Lopez, maybe someone takes a shine to Maeda, maybe the new catcher gets hurt, maybe Florida really wants a 2b from us, whatever, take the best deal, but right now I'd wait to move until some of these guys at a low point have a chance to recover some value.

They just sent out their SS and don't really have a good replacement on the roster. Send Royce Lewis for a real return. Correa has really changed his value to us, especially with Lee and Noah Miller on his heels.

Option 2.5: keep swapping out parts as the opportunities arise. The spiraling market said that we weren't getting a SS for a 13 year deal, so we get a filler there and go with the kids when Lewis gets healthy. You've got a young 3b, a delayed start to the young SS, old man Polanco at 2b is only 29 next year, Arraez at 1b will be 26 and you have good middle infielders coming up behind them that aren't ready yet. You just signed a solid glove at C to cover the gap in your farm and you're up to your fetlocks in good youngsters looking for OF time. We have a ton of decent starting pitchers that didn't get a chance to show their stuff last year. But Maeda and Grey have been good in the past, Mahle and Ryan are still improving, Mahle and Ober and Paddack have been good when healthy, Varland and Woods Richardson and Winder poked their noses up for a moment last year and there are more behind them. The bullpen has a number of good to excellent pieces to build around and a lot of starters that may need new roles this year. Honestly what's a rebuild supposed to look like? The thing to do here is play the kids you have and see how they mature, pitch the guys you have and see if they can stay healthy, and pick up some parts when the opportunity arises.

You think so? I think they had Arraez on the roster because he's a great contact hitter who has never shown an ounce of power and never impressed anyone with his glovework. I think they loaded up their draft classes and trades on middle infield guys who do not hit many HR but can go to other positions and hit doubles. I think they dumped everyone from that 2019 team who hit more than 20 HR except Polanco and Kepler, and Kepler might be on his way out. Keep up, I think the strategy changed while you weren't paying attention.