Doomtints

Sure. Still, this is a good narrative for the future administration. It's good for them to be coming in thinking the development system needs an overhaul. Let them discover for themselves that it's not quite as bad as everyone thinks.

I'm assuming the honeymoon is over now on Beresford and we can ask wtf he is he doing in the majors? He is not a part of the current team. He is not a part of the future team. Same goes for Albers. Why are the Twins wasting time on these guys when they could be developing somebody?

Puckett used to make those throws, and Puckett was the reason Molitor came to the Twins. Molitor can go and coach the Brewers if he has some other idea of how defenders should act. The Twins have had outfielders doing that since the 80s. As for Rosario, is it really surprising that he's not the bust some people want him to be? He is still young and learning, and when he was striking out all the time at the start of the year, so was everyone else on the team. The entire team was getting bad advice.

More weirdness from the Twins marketing department. The next group may want to replace this group too.

The Twins front office under Ryan has avoided doing anything unconventional. They failed to realize that if they did something unconventional and it worked out, they would look like geniuses. With Sano they can sew up the DH position for the next fifteen years. Who cares if it's not normal for someone his age to be a full time DH? Boston happily took that deal with Ortiz. How many trips to the DL might Ortiz have taken if he fielded regularly?

I'm wrong all the time. Welcome to the club. It took you long enough to become a member.

"Mean" and "Median" are both ways to calculate average depending upon what you are wanting to do. Most people use mean exclusively. "Median" is the middle number in an odd-numbered set. In an even numbered set, it is the average of the two numbers in the middle. You seem to be suggesting median is the average of the highest number and the lowest number (the range) which is not right.

We know he can't. And we know he has injured his elbow while fielding 3B multiple times. This is not only a viewpoint that can only result in failure, but it's an irresponsible viewpoint considering his injury history.

If you had been hurting all day and were only up there hoping it would be better when you tried to swing, you wouldn't have to do that.

You make a great point here. Polanco has plenty of time to learn a new position. You should *never* move someone who can defend in the middle infield somewhere else. This move keeps him there. Sometimes it's easy to miss the obvious, which I have done here. Good job.

He should be left at 2B. His defense is better than Dozier's. Move Dozier to 3rd, Sano to DH, and send away Plouffe. Or, if the Twins want to swing for the fences, trade Dozier while he is peaking since they have the 2B of the future ready to go.

Here's a neat trick. If you think median might skew things, and you think mean might skew things ... use both! Take the mean and median and average THEM together. Essentially, you take the average of the two averages. You should then end up with a number that you are comfortable with. You could also plot out a regression analysis and see what which teams are paying too much or too little, which is rather simple to do as it's built in Excel.

Runs Created suffers from the same problems. SLG uses a scoring system which isn't real-world baseball stats. RC does the same thing, it just uses different weights (more points for singles and triples, less points for doubles and home runs). RC has some other modifiers thrown in so as to weigh other additional statistics that aren't covered by OPS. OBP is a real world system. If the batter touches a base, they get a point. Otherwise they get 0 points. Throw all of the events together and you get the average. When you try to combine a real world system (OBP) with an artificial points-based system (SLG), you are going to have problems matching it all up, particularly when some event (in this case, the hit) is counted in both systems. One way to fix OPS would be to remove hits from the OBP portion of the equation. This would fix OPS, but it would devalue OBP even more in the process, at least if people start only looking at your new version of OPS and continue to ignore OBP as standalone stat. An alternative way to fix the issue would be to re-weigh the SLG statistic by subtracting one for each hitting event and leave OBP alone. Since 1 point is already gained by a hit on the OBP side, on the SLG side a single is then 0 points (as it was already counted in OBP), a double is 1, triple is 2, and HR is 3. A third possible fix would be to do OBP + extra-base-hit%. That would be interesting and it would cover everything without going to a points-based system (though no doubt many would not like the idea of doubles being weighted the same as triples and home runs). I have done the former (and generally liked the results -- try it with Mauer's and Killebrew's MVP years) but I have not tried the latter two. As an aside, both OBP and SLG are important but let's face it not every player can do both -- and teams don't need every player to do both. We should be OK with using OBP and SLG separately to judge the strengths of players. Teams want SLG guys in the middle of the order and OBP guys everywhere else (probably including the bench). Taken that way, there is no doubt that OBP is underrated. OBP and defense should be the bread and butter of a baseball team.

I don't disagree. When correcting for the OPS error of over-counting hit events (both OBP and SLG count hits, which greatly helps singles hitters like Mauer when it comes to OPS), Mauer STILL shows as being more valuable. It's worth saying that Mauer just finished his best month since May of 2013. He won't have many great months left, whereas Kepler is likely to have several. Thus, the comparisons don't mean a lot. Mauer is better today, Kepler will be better tomorrow. This is how it should be.

I would call that a sampling error. Mauer's overall OPS and Kepler's overall OPS are the same. Kepler has less than half a season under his belt.

Yep. Don't give 6 year contracts to 31/32 year olds. I would have worded that a bit differently, instead of a "sustained decrease in numbers" I would have said that, by age 32, a player's WAR would expected to be around half of their peak WAR ... and it gets worse from there. There is a flaw in the data but I don't fault the person who compiled it. He should have excluded pitchers who are out of the league early. A big reason the age 26-28 pitching WAR is so high is because there are more pitchers in the league at those ages. We are only concerned with top tier pitchers who have long careers. Having the shorter career guys in the mix skews the younger years higher. Still, it's a nice effort. Unfortunately it's difficult to give long contracts to pitchers under 28/29, as that's the age they tend to first hit free agency. Scherzer, the noted late bloomer, is an exception. (His contract is exceptional anyway as much of his salary is deferred until he is in his upper 40s). It's a reasonable risk to give a long contract to a 28 year old and expect a decent return.

This is one aspect I would agree with "the Twins way." That's too many contracted years for that age. Let the other teams do that. However, the Twins would have been smart to grab the top tier 28 year olds for the same price.

He has already had 54 plate appearances in the leadoff position. The results were tragic to say the least. The kid needs to learn how to hit. Forget about where in the batting order for now. "Babying him" is precisely what the Twins need to be doing until he stops looking like a deer in the headlights.

Many of those examples are entering their peak years (27/28), so those make sense. Scherzer is a bit of a late bloomer so his signing I can understand (though I would not have done it). David Price is the one true exception on your list who I also would have chased after. Look, there is always going to be a team dumb enough to give an older pitcher a long contract based on a guy performing very well in his contract year. This doesn't mean it's smart to do. It doesn't even really mean it's the market rate. Very likely other teams were offering, as I said, something close to 3 years considering his age, which is why he ended up on a small market team and not a team expected to compete. Just because there are a couple of teams willing to extend contracts to get the guy they really want doesn't change what I said.

It's not. How often does a 31/32 year old get a 6-year contract, at any position? Contracts like that happen for people on pace for the hall of fame, sure. Is that Zack Greinke? The $/yr makes sense. The length does not. 6/8 year contracts are for players entering their peak years, not players exiting them.

I'm actually not understanding this article. A cautionary tale that the Twins should not follow the path of the Diamondbacks? Isn't that what the Twins have done? Like the Diamondbacks, the Twins have expensive pitching contracts that did not work out. The problems for both teams, as they stand today, are the same problems: starting pitching. In spite of Greinke's stellar 2015 numbers, the dude is 32 years old. No respectable GM would have given him the contract he was given unless his specialty is a knuckle or curve, which isn't the case here. No sensible team gives Zack Greinke, at his age, a 6-year contract. Other offers on the table were probably all for three years. So you have the Diamondbacks who gave one guy who was about to start his decline a huge contract. You have the Twins who gave four guys with questionable track records market-to-above market contracts. As for which was worse, I would call it a tie. Both teams spent a lot of money on garbage. At least the Diamondbacks didn't block better pitchers from coming in by filling the staff with, well, filler, like the Twins did.

You are the one saying that it matters which GM brought the player in. I never said anything along those lines. I am stating that veterans were let go with no effort to replace them when Ryan came back. When I suggested this was done to thumb his nose at Smith, I was talking about how Ryan thought he had to cut spending down to the bone because (he felt) Smith started overpaying people. Plus he claimed veterans were poison and only home grown talent was worth a darn, which is surprising that any fan bought into. Fast forward a bit and Ryan was spending just as much for worse players and fewer veterans. But rather than admit his plan did not work, he seemed to check out rather than make the painful trades and cuts he needed to make to fix his own mistakes.

This is good. McLeod is the person I would be targeting too. With laser vision, actually.

The problem there is that ANY player is going to be slowing down Buxton. It may be better to have a guy who hits doubles regularly ahead of him. But you also don't want that guy batting 9th. Thus, it's probably best not making this a concern.

Let's be fair here. Gardenhire was really the guy who mishandled rookies throughout his career, but he largely got away with it in the 00s. TK had some great veterans AND some great rookies before Ryan came along. When Ryan came in, both the rookie and veteran avenues dried up for TK and he did the best he could with what he was given, as Gardenhire had to do after 2011. In the two Ryan eras where there was little talent on the team, the results were not good for either manager. To be 100% fair it's thus difficult to judge Molitor because neither Gardy nor TK did great jobs on teams bereft of talent. However, Molitor seems to make bad decisions during games at a level that I don't remember TK or Gardy doing, and I think everyone agrees that a clean slate is in order.