Cris E

@RiverbrianMy point is that they are in a very uncharacteristic space because of Skenes, one that's quite different from MN and possibly quite different from what Shelton might normally do, so there might not be many lessons to be drawn. Playing a backup catcher must happen everywhere, just as most teams have at least one roster hole. If you want to hold Shelton accountable for not having better CF options go ahead, but I'm not sure it's instructive.

Bonkers. You measure the outcomes from all sources because people don't develop on schedules and injuries happen when they happen and you still need to field a team year after year. There's no trophy for best minor league pitching pipeline except among the prospect hounds, and no one cares about it anyway. Quick, without looking it up, who had the best minor league pitching pipeline in 2022? 2012?

This isn't 1985 Whitey Herzog, managers do not have carte blanche to do whatever they want with the players. And while I can't speak to that organization in general, that was a small payroll team was in win-now mode to try to exploit Paul Skenes while he was still in Pittsburgh. That's hardly a scenario for best practices and far horizon thinking.

Or, and this may be crazy but hear me out, maybe he was injured and might recover.

This word pipeline is a bunch of distracting crap. it's a bad metaphor that doesn't reflect how staffing any organization really works. You get the best people you can from where ever you can, and if you can teach them things to get better that's good too. Forcibly remove the image of raw materials being manufactured into hall of fame pitchers because that mostly doesn't happen for anyone. Sure, you see a Cy Young grade Skubal or Skenes every once in a while, but the best most teams hope for is Joe Ryan. Hey look, we got Joe Ryan. To evaluate an organization's strength in procuring pitching you have to weigh drafting AND trading AND dumpster diving AND instruction AND preventing injuries AND recovering from injuries AND proper usage/roles and finally if they spend the money to maintain what they build. That's a lot of people doing a lot of different things, it's not a pipe with an In and an Out end. The organization is much better at this than it used to be. I don't believe you need a True Ace to be successful because there are a very finite number of them, but our rotation has been highly ranked at the MLB level for years (and it's been led by Lopez and Grey and Ryan -- good pitchers), we built an excellent bullpen without spending much on free agents (and they're going to try it again), and our guys miss time with injuries but not nearly at the rate of someone like the Dodgers. We even usually spend our big dollars on our top arm, Correa notwithstanding. Anyway, it's not something that you complete.

Similarly, if you are going to try to slide a guy through waivers I'll take the guy with control problems and an 8 ERA.

Hey look, Ben Rortvedt just hit waivers. You know what, this 26 man would look sweeeet with four catchers...

They better be seeing Clemens for his glove, because a bunch of his value comes from a hot 3 HR game in September. If you swap three singles for those three HR his OPS+ drops from 96 to about 92 or 93 (raw OPS goes from .725 to .697, right around JJ Bleday and Brooks Baldwin.) That's not a 1B bat.

This was not a Falvey failure. He wasn't doing the business side until well after these decisions were made, he just went with what was promised. If you're going to ding him for this then what was the right move here? He somehow had to know that the budget wasn't sustainable next year and not spend it? He had to only sign one year deals? He gave a contract with a ton of player opt-outs, without a series of long painful tail end years, with some triggers that would have offered the team outs in the event of serious injury. That was not a bad deal for a potentially injured player on a $150m payroll. Ownership takes risks and makes commitments. If they aren't going to stand behind decisions then they hang their people out to take unnecessary abuse. Go ahead and yell at Falvey, but this one says more about you than him.

Talk about blocking the kids, you go directly to the only part of the team that's above average, with the longest line of prospects on the verge of graduating to the bigs and want to spend a ton of money. Clickbait.

This isn't something that happened in the past decade since I'm not sure they ever bothered making any excuses in 40 years. There was some spending to get a new stadium, of course, and a couple years ago crazy cousin Joe got into dad's liquor cabinet and bought a Correa, but mostly they've always said "We spend 47% of the money we make and if we win that's great, but golly the system is rigged against the little guys from MN." The press writes it down, the locals rail against the Yankees or the Dodgers and then the family takes a giant slice of the pie home with them for fall. They make some changes every once in a while, but only when it looks like things are ready to turn anyway. Back in 1987 you think Tom Kelly was the reason they won the World Series, or was the waiting over and the kids finally ready for prime time? Same with Gardy: he had to suffer for years, and when things looked ready they threw the keys to Molitor, and Rocco got a playoff in his first year too. They don't care about excuses and scape goats, but when it's time to cash in they want a fresh face to help sell the future. If they hadn't thrown away the entire bullpen and hacked off the payroll, if they'd just gone and gotten the outside money in 2023 or 2024 and held their ground on the baseball side, then things could be pretty solid right now. If the budget had more room there's no way that Bell is in MN this spring, for example. Falvey might have ticked some folks off in the details, but he was building a solid organization.

I don't think it's as clean as Tom vs Derek. I think Joe was spend spend spend until until the end of 2023 and then he got cold feet. Falvey was on a path of building and was coaxing him along through the collapse in 2024 and the tepid start to 2025, but by the deadline in 2025 Joe made him burn it down. I think Tom came in when the huge debt made the team unsellable. I can't speak to who dug that hole, but it pre-dates the end of the RSN contract and there's never been a Padres-like run for the title so it had to be a business-side stripping of resources. Regardless, he stepped into the baseball side after the season and started saying We Can Win out loud but wouldn't commit to a budget increase. I think Falvey has a long term, very Cleveland-like plan to build the franchise. It starts with getting the pitching development going via draft and trades, and then he's got a pile of position players on the verge that look pretty good too although there hasn't been as much in the way of player development on that side of things. The other half of winning is to spending what he can to augment major league roster to fill in around the development organization he's built. Looking at the team at the end of 2025 they were regularly playing Jeffers, Lewis, Lee, Keaschall, Wallner, Buxton and Larnach, all of whom they drafted. I wish there was a real 1B to be had, and Bader had to take over a bunch of OF playing time because the corners were pretty weak against LH pitching, but the bones were there to field average guys around the field and replace them with better when possible. The pitching was good, sourced from whereever, with a bunch more youth on the way. Going into 2026 Tom felt a need to win to sell tickets and streaming subs, but Falvey mostly felt a giant pain in his bullpen area. If you have good pitching, both rotation and a deep bullpen, you can mark time waiting for the next set of youth to mature. But cutting the bullpen loose meant that they'd have to outscore the other teams to win, and that can't happen with this group. Tom keeps talking big because he needs them to win to make some money, and Derek knew it can't happen right now, so they split.

Fangraphs has a deep investment in methodology and not pissing off fans. Accuracy comes in third or so.

Dan Hayes in The Athletic puts the fire sale on the Pohlads and also describes Tom Pohlad as "naively" asserting that they can win this year. His piece pretty clearly indicates that Falvey was frustrated and they were not going to get along. What's not quite as clear in that piece is which Pohlad was the one who "implored the front office to rip apart the roster before the Aug 1 deadline. " If it was Tom who said both "Sell it all" in July and "We're going to win" in December then I could really see Falvey pulling his hair out.

OK, just read Dan Hayes' piece in The Athletic. Very informative, still leaves a little shadow in the corners but pretty clear about the basics, including a great history of the highs and lows of the past three years. Read it if you can find it. Falvey and Tom Pohlad were not going to get along. It sounds like Tom is going to be more hands-on than Falvey was comfortable with, maybe because he likes being his own guy or maybe because Pohlad knows nothing about baseball. In the context of the parting this morning it really doesn't matter much, but what it means for Zoll and the club going forward is quite another matter. There were a couple vague comments in the article that left me unclear what was going on, but it does look like Pohlad is now the one who claims they can win in 2026. That's probably good for fans. OTOH the odd line below about the deadline fire sale seems to indicate that some Pohlad was the one pushing for the sell off. Either it was Joe and he's gone or it was Tom and he's having a change of heart, but either way Falvey sounds a little POed at the constant changes. There was no indication of a specific match that started the fire, so more stories may be forthcoming, but this is a case of personalities and direction changes rather than bombshells on the ownership or CBA front.

They had another chance six weeks ago when they changed horses in the top office. Falvey gave them a solid enough story for a month but not a year? That makes no sense in any context. No, something else changed since then.

Something drove this at this moment, and it's very likely going to come out in the next couple weeks. Whether it was spending some money on a player, trading one of the big chips or cutting back for the year, Falvey had an idea and Zoll will be tasked with doing the opposite. hang on to your hats.

I don't think the lockout will be long if it happens at all. the beef is between owners, not with the players, and anyone in business for long knows that businesses cut deals. This is a deal that has to be made, just as free agency had to be accepted in the 1070s and revenue sharing was implemented in 1994. You have to do some things to keep the golden goose alive. Also, I think the Pohlads might be setting up to sell most of their stake, but not all, for the reasons outlined yesterday: it's a stable investment in a sea of crazy, especially important for a family with such a large portion of their money tied up in commercial real estate. So in 2027 or whatever you'll likely see the family hang on to 29% and sell their other 51% to someone who wants to become the majority owner. It could be one of these minority guys who came on board in December or a new face, but as soon as the revenue questions are answered the market will pick up and they'll cash out a bunch of their chips.

But what does that say? Was he the advocate for a burn down or just the busy hands? It doesn't indicate if he wants to sell Ryan/Buxton/Lopez or minimize the damage before rolling forward again.

When your budget is closely approved each year you really can't run up nine digits of losses. That money was pumped out of the organization at an industrial scale by owners and accountants, not baseball operations. I do agree with your two other points, that a deal was probably scotched and that it led to a bad conversation that blew things up. That reflects poorly on Pohlad again, of course, since he mostly likely moved the goalposts on Falvey again. That's been the case many other times.

I will say this is almost certainly not performance related. Nothing has changed since the transition last month, so either he should have been canned then or he should be allowed to keep going now. Some other decision, news, development away from the field had to have triggered this. Maybe it was sales info, new ownership money problems or news on the CBA front, but this was not rooted in anything visible to the public. Maybe they just got a line on a new head of baseball ops and want to install him immediately. My fear is it's a more mundane cause like deciding that no one in ownership has the cash to step up right now so they're going to dial everything back for a year and see how the CBA goes.

How would anyone separate Zoll from Falvey? They worked together for years, Falvey practically raised him. Maybe a difference of opinion on the sell-off? a coup? There's quite a story hiding here.

Oh, a couple other thoughts: I expect taking this team into the season with one more crappy bullpen arm in order to sell tickets, and once the season tickets are as sold as they're going to get there will be a major sell-off over the course of the summer. Within a year you'll start seeing the good work that Falvey did come to fruition. the pitching pipeline that you all mock so much is going to start launching good careers: Abel, Bradley, Mathews and so on, plus the hitters coming through are going to be pretty good eventually. If anyone here has any integrity you should be acknowledging this administration's work. In 2027, after the CBA is settled, I expect one of the minor partners to buy up 51% and ride the kids to the ALCS before 2030. They'll spend what the Pohlads were always afraid to and win.

Guessing here: Falvey probably isn't as good at business as he is at baseball, but the financial malfeasance predates him. He didn't get that job until 2024, after the fire sale and $400m hole was dug. Tom P is the new face of ownership, but I bet the new financial partners are getting far enough into ops to start offering some "advice". They may have offered him some money to put some lipstick on this pig at the time of transition, but after seeing the ticket sales "bounce" and the anticipated streaming revenue it might have been reeled back just as Derek was going into his last weeks of winter rag picking. Not getting the promised money right now probably initiated a hard discussion about 2026 resources, separating the business role, and maybe some "then this really can't work, can't it?" and a mutual reset. They may not actually know what their next step is right now, beyond playing kids and sorting bullpen arms. Again, I'm betting this goes back to wavering, indecisive ownership changing direction, changing budget, changing commitment. Cannot wait for them to sell.

Sooo many questions... Was a proposed move shot down? The last $5m not actually there? A hard discussion about real expected 2026 outcomes finally laid out? Was this planned since Tom P stepped in a month ago?