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gunnarthor

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Everything posted by gunnarthor

  1. gunnarthor
    Sure, they traded for guys like Silva and Lohse but they weren't paying these guys FA money. I don't think there was any guy they traded for who was a big money acquisition. They traded for cheap arms and arms under lots of team control. Rick Reed might be the lone exception?
  2. gunnarthor
    Sure, Santana was great but they had solid rotations. Ignoring Santana, they still managed 20 individual 2+ WAR seasons in those years. Radke was a great pitcher - he actually has more seasons in top 10 pWAR than Santana. I mean, the Twins won only 83 games in 2005 but they had maybe the best pitching staff in baseball. Lohse, Silva, Radke and Santana all made at least 27 starts and were worth at least 2.5 WAR. (The bullpen was killer too, the team had a 120 OPS+). So I don't think it's true that they were throwing out slop - sure, they pitching took a dip toward the end of the decade but that really was a strong run of pitching. The rip on the Twins used to be that they couldn't develop hitters.
  3. gunnarthor
    Maybe, maybe not. But the issue Mike brought up was how many teams could consistently create good rotations without free agency. I brought up the Twins themselves.
  4. gunnarthor
    It wasn't because of the rotation though, was it? It's also a really stupid way to troll threads. "Yeah the Twins were able to be constantly good for nearly a decade on no payroll because they didn't waste money on free agent starters and have a lot of sunk costs" "Ergh, statement invalid, they didn't win in post-season."
  5. gunnarthor
    From 2002-2010 the Twins got a total of 57 starts from real FA pitchers. Kenny Rogers (31), Ramon Ortiz (10), Seth Greisinger (9) and Sidney Ponson (7). They also got 59 FA starts when Radke resigned as a FA with the Twins. That's it. Nine seasons means 1,468 starts and only 116 were from free agents. That's less than 8%. All the rest of those starts were done by guys who were drafted, rule v picks, waivers or from trades. Very low salary guys for the most part.
  6. gunnarthor
    It might. Cole is an innings eater but hasn't quite lived up to his hype. I don't know if we'd have to include a ML OFer - they are loaded there with Polanco, Marte, Meadows and McCutchen- and they might want prospects. Gordon, one of Gonsalves/Romero might be enough frankly. Assume Cole is worth 6 WAR over the next two years. Do we want to pay with two top 100 prospects? That's probably about the price.
  7. gunnarthor
    I don't like it either but that's what we've seen for 20+ years now. Until the Pohlads change the narrative themselves, I don't think we should expect it. Levine said he knows we won't have a top 10 payroll. Falvey comes from an org who didn't rely on free agents. They didn't add payroll their first year. This is what it is. The Twins will continue to be a bottom third team in payroll. 110m is close to our max.
  8. gunnarthor
    Well, yeah. Unless Thorpe, Gonsalves, Romero, Stewart force the issue. We had a bunch of home grown (through draft/trades) rotations in the 2000s. I would imagine that is what Falvey wants to do at the end of the day.
  9. gunnarthor
    Archer would add about 6.4m next season and Martinez will probably get 20m/year so we're adding 26m+ to payroll right there. That's probably not realistic but if they did that, they wouldn't have a penny left for anything else. I like both moves but I'm not sure both could happen. One or the other. And if the Rays make Archer available, I think it would be a big bidding war that might cost more than Kepler, Gordon and Thorpe (although that is a good package). Might depend on what Tampa's needs are.
  10. gunnarthor
    Well, since the Pohlads are cheap it's a long problem that the FO faces. They should never have to deal with dead money if they could help it. You don't want a team that can't afford arb raises because we're paying the next Anibal Sanchez 48m for three more years to do nothing. You don't want to be unable to add a little payroll during the season to upgrade your bullpen. I do agree that with Mauer coming off and the young core not getting too expensive quite yet, the Twins have some room for error after next season (we might only be able to add 20/yr in contracts this offseason) but that doesn't mean we should make risky/dangerous signings. Lance Lynn, for example, is at best a #3 pitcher, right? Is that the bet we want to make? Are you 4x more confident that he'll be better than Jason Vargas next year? If not, isn't Vargas on a one year deal a better idea?
  11. gunnarthor
    This thread was not meant to seriously suggest Hamilton to the Twins. I just liked the thought of he and Buxton in the same OF.
  12. gunnarthor
    A one year deal for a guy - no matter his age - could work. Vargas? Feldman? Chatwood is only 28 next year. I just don't want to be paying 15m in 2020 to some guy who isn't going to be helping the team.
  13. gunnarthor
    https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2017/10/looking-for-a-match-in-a-billy-hamilton-trade.html/comment-page-1#comment-1108146 Hamilton is 27 already. His bat has never worked out so he's basically a defensive only player at this point and with Buxton he'd have no clear home in MN but man, it would be fun to see those two in the OF together.
  14. gunnarthor
    I hadn't realized Jay was in the AFL. Thanks for sharing.
  15. gunnarthor
    Sure, and I'm not against signing a FA. You just don't want to kill your payroll flexibility since the Pohlads are likely keeping payroll low. In a different thread, I posted all the contracts from 2013-2016 that got more than Santana in FA and it was a pretty ugly list. I think the list was 17 or so pitchers and maybe three were clearly better than Santana. I suspect the Twins will sign another pitcher who will make around 12m/year this offseason. Not sure how many years he'll get. But they shouldn't be investing heavily into pitchers for their age 33, 34 etc seasons. Twins can't hold a lot of dead money like other teams can.
  16. gunnarthor
    I think he'd be a find choice for Boston. He's a player's manager and he'd defend the players in the media which is probably a big part of the job description there. He's a good game manager. He'll do fine there.
  17. gunnarthor
    Well, if you look at the Twins playoff run years - 02-2010 - they certainly had quite a number of big strike out arms in the bullpens for awhile there. Only the White Sox and Angels had better k% for those years in the AL.
  18. gunnarthor
    I think if you look at the first few of Johnson's drafts, it was pretty much all-in on power pitchers. The problem with all of them (Bashore, Bullock, Guttierez, Hunt, Tootle) was the control issue. Now, obviously, it's not fair to say that Johnson only picked one type of pitcher since he also grabbed a high floor/low ceiling guy like Wimmers and an injury risk with Gibson but he was very much on flame throwers. And it's not fair to say that the Twins ignored power pitchers even when they were stock piling soft tossers. Garza, Adam Johnson and Durbin were all profiled as power pitchers, for example. But I think if you wanted to say that Radcliff's tendencies were 180 degrees different from Johnson's, I'd agree.
  19. gunnarthor
    The Twins for years had to get soft tossing pitchers because they couldn't afford the strike out guys. The draft slot system wasn't in existence until 2012. But they could afford control pitchers and that worked. After Radcliff/Ryan left, Johnson and Smith made more effort to get flamethrowers with questionable results. Since 2012, we've seen the Twins draft more high strikeout types but it'll take a while to see how it plays out.
  20. gunnarthor
    When Ichiro was in Seattle, it was Seattle. Since then, I'm not sure I have a true second favorite team. There are teams I dislike less and I'll root for AL central teams in the playoffs but .... I dunno. I always feel bad for Mets fans.
  21. gunnarthor
    I'm pretty sure the science of PED use has only continued to grow. Seeing how much PEDs are affecting other sports, I think it would be naive to think baseball isn't in a similar position. I'd bet that at somewhere around half the players are taking some sort of illegal PED now.
  22. gunnarthor
    His bat is solid enough but at this point he's probably DH only. Now, that said, RF in Comerica Park is a entirely different animal than RF in pretty much any other park. So he probably wouldn't be quite as bad as the numbers said but he'd still be really bad. He's under contract for two more years and his bat would probably profile pretty well in TF. He's still quite young and relatively cheap. He put up a 110 OPS+ last year which was better than Grossman, Escobar and Vargas and those three might get a lot of DH time next year. It was also a lot better than Kepler. He'd be a possible back up at third and RF but he'd be really bad at both so that's not much help. But if we thought Sano could hold down third he wouldn't be the worst DH option we could find. I'm just not sure we shouldn't have DH set aside for Sano. And Castellanos is another high strike out guy. I'd probably hope we go another way but it's not a horrible idea, esp if the FO thinks his bat plays up more in TF and/or they think they can improve his defense a bit.
  23. gunnarthor
    The A's?
  24. gunnarthor
    We got the Terraforming Mars board game. It won a lot of awards and was the big game last year. Really, really fun game to play.
  25. gunnarthor
    Pretty sure 25ip in the post-season isn't a big enough sample size to mean anything. I'd love to have 5 starting pitchers who could throw 200+ innings and put up 4.5 WAR. I'd happily take my chances with that rotation.
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