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gunnarthor

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Everything posted by gunnarthor

  1. gunnarthor
    Barring an injury, I would expect Sano to start the season at third base. The team is stuck with Mauer at one of 1B/DH. My guess is that the new FO will look to see what a Dozier deal looks like and possibly see if they can scare up interest in Kepler but probably not do a lot to that offensive side quite yet. They probably need time to evaluate and they have other priorities (pitching and catcher). I would imagine the lineup would look something pretty close to: C- FA and one of Murphy/Garver/Centeno 1B - Mauer 2B - Dozier SS - Polanco 3B - Sano OF - Rosario/Buxton/Kepler - if those three can hit, are they a good defensive OF? I think they'd be ok but only Buxton would really be elite. Bench - backup catcher/Park/UI/4thOF with the Twins trading one of Park/Vargas Obviously, trading Dozier would make a bunch of changes but several of the positions seem fairly close to set. Sano, Buxton, Rosario, Kepler, Mauer and Polanco will be starting at some position.
  2. gunnarthor
    Yeah, I watched it at home with my dad and brother. I remember saying - after we turned a really neat 4-2-4 double play - that we were gonna win this game. Everyone wore their Twins sweatshirts to school the next day.
  3. gunnarthor
    Anyone get this yet? http://kotaku.com/civilization-vi-the-kotaku-review-1788213327 Civ is about the only game I still play so I am excited to get this one - although I won't get it until this weekend.
  4. gunnarthor
    I didn't want to clip your entire post. Here's the point I'm trying to make. Looking at only players who amassed at least 1 WAR, the Cubs this year got about 22 WAR from FA, that's the largest group of WAR talent on the team. Trades and drafts combined for about 31 WAR. Cleveland got about 8 WAR from FA this year. They got 39 WAR from trades and the draft. That's the model the Twins will have to follow. And the payroll differences of those teams and those groups is gigantic.
  5. gunnarthor
    Things like drafting, trades, development etc are things ALL teams do - it's the reason Cleveland is in the WS this year and the reason the Royals won it last year. No one thinks the Twins can't or shouldn't do that. But comparing the Twins to the Cubs - the "it" team of the moment - is a purposefully false comparison. The Cubs are where they are because of payroll. They wouldn't be the Cubs without that payroll. If they had the limits the Twins had, there is no evidence that they would be in the WS. There is evidence that teams with similar or worse payroll handicaps to the Twins have made the WS and those are the teams we should be looking at.
  6. gunnarthor
    I don't think anyone has suggested that. I think most of us realize that we can't pay our way out of the issues like big payroll teams can. Pretending that the Twins could do what the Cubs did is fantasy. The Cubs are paying their 3 FA starters (Lester, Lackey, Hammel) 50m this year. For all the complaining about how the Twins misspend money for Hughes, Nolasco and Santana, just those three players made 16m less then their Cubs counterparts. And, unlike the Cubs, the Twins aren't going to be able to add 20m in salaries at the trade deadline. Payroll is a huge advantage that, for some reason, people just don't want to accept. When the Cubs 20+m hitter puts up worse numbers than Buxton, it's an inconvenience because that player isn't expected to be the key player for them. That was just the cost of adding a complementary player.
  7. gunnarthor
    As long as the Pohlad's own this team, you're never going to see a high payroll. Cleveland and the Royals are the teams the Twins should be copying. Cleveland traded for Kluber - who was never a top 100 prospect - for example. The Cubs have advantages that the Twins, Royals and Cleveland don't so it doesn't make sense to compare. Teams with 200m payrolls can erase errors that the Twins can't/won't.
  8. gunnarthor
    It seems that we should probably focus on what teams in our payroll (and maybe our league) are doing - maybe the last two WS teams? I get that that Cubs are the "it" team but they really aren't a good comparison to what the Twins can do.
  9. gunnarthor
    We're picking up more Disney stock. Nothing overly sexy about that but we like it and low 90s is a decent area to grab more at.
  10. gunnarthor
    One other thing to consider/concern would be exactly how much talent is out there in any individual year? Not every draft is going to be as loaded as the 2011/2012 years were. There probably is some validity to concerns that certain teams would amass the best talent period if there aren't controls on how amateur players are selected.
  11. gunnarthor
    I generally agree with Mike and I like the pooling idea although as the Red Sox and Rangers showed, there will be some issues with that. But I do think that the draft might help fix some of the chaos happening in the DR.
  12. gunnarthor
    Yeah, I don't know why someone like Mejia - unless he was injured - wasn't called up. I think maybe the interim GM didn't want to add payroll (as small as it would be?) down the stretch? But a guy like Walker could have gotten a few at-bats up here.
  13. gunnarthor
    I'm not sure how much his secondary stuff can improve against HS competition - if those kids can't hit his 98 mph fastball, there's not a lot of incentive to not throw it.
  14. gunnarthor
    Do you know who the Twins pitching development people are? Do you know how long they've doing those jobs?
  15. gunnarthor
    I have to admit, it's sort of fun to see the GOP collapse like this.
  16. gunnarthor
    Well, barring injury of course. That said, he sounds to me a bit more like (a better) Kolak than Bundy. Bundy was nearly a finished product when he was drafted in 2011. Greene might need more work but his arm is amazing.
  17. gunnarthor
    I think it suggests that the industry weighs the risk of the HS arm a bit more than we fans do. A few LH starters have gone 1-1 (including Brady Aiken) but LH starters are rarer.
  18. gunnarthor
    I certainly won't complain if the Twins take that risk but we have a while before we have to really narrow it down. He has season to pitch yet and some of the college arms could break out as well. I hope they go BPA and I'm hoping that BPA is a college arm.
  19. gunnarthor
    In the first round of that 06 draft, 8 HS pitchers were taken. Two have amassed more than 1 WAR in the majors. Nine of the 16 college arms taken in the first round have amassed more than 1 WAR in the majors. Drafting HS pitchers is risky. I'm good with drafting HS arms but it's important to remember that they don't always work out and it's not necessarily because the team can't develop pitchers. There's a lot that can go wrong and a lot worse possibilities than what Kohl Stewart has shown so far. (And Strasburg was considered a nearly perfect college pitcher who could step into a ML rotation from day one. Not really fair to compare him to a HS pitcher who was working mostly on his football game).
  20. gunnarthor
    Well, what were Smith's big signings in 2010? The rules changed on international signings and the Twins have done pretty well so I'm not sure it's fair to say they haven't spent after Smith. They haven't nabbed a guy as universally acclaimed as Sano but they have spent a lot on guys (Javier) and they've spent their pool. Some years, they've gone quality and some years they've gone quantity. It's a bit too early to say how they've done - Lewin Diaz, for example, signed in 2013, just reached rookie ball. But after 09, they've signed guys like Romero, Jorge, Thorpe, Ynoa, Vielma etc
  21. gunnarthor
    I hate this election. We have real humanitarian concerns with the middle east refugees, more tension with Russia, flat-lining rural economic growth, practices of wall st banks and internet privacy concerns and the nominees are so ****ty that voters won't even get to vote on real issues. Instead we get more and more stories about how unfit (duh!) Trump is and how crazy the GOP has become. Does anyone remember when the republican party had people like Arlen Specter and Jim Jeffords?
  22. gunnarthor
    Yeah, but we knew he wouldn't. IIRC, the consensus was the Twins would nab the pitcher that was left - Appel, Gray or Stewart. There was some discussion of the two Georgia OFers but they were secondary to pitching.
  23. gunnarthor
    I don't think anyone doubts that but most of us can see that there are pretty good reasons to hope that those core guys (Vargas is not a core guy) will be pretty good. Kepler had a 2.5 WAR season, Buxton's WAR was 1.9 and that shows his offensive floor is pretty low to be a strong player in the league. Sano's defense was horrible - esp in the OF - but he still hit 25hr and put up a 110 OPS+ in what we all think is a bad year. Mauer hasn't topped 110 since 2013. Berrios did have a disaster season. I also think it's worth remembering - since this is a prospects thread - what the expectations were of these guys. Sano and Buxton were always elite guys and cream of the crop. But Berrios was an undersized supplemental first round pick that developed into a top 15 prospect. Kepler (and Polanco) were big signings for us as Twins fans because it was an exciting year and there was something unique about Kepler but neither were big international signings that year. Both were in the 15-20 range in bonuses. Both developed into pretty darn good prospects. No team will ever draft perfectly - look at how few drafted players are part of the Cubs or Cleveland or even the Nats, for instance. But I do think that Steil and company have done a really nice job of developing players since he took over in 2012. If you get two players out of a draft, it's a good draft and I think most of those drafts we can get at least that.
  24. gunnarthor
    Well good luck to all of them
  25. gunnarthor
    Another degree? You know the Librarian isn't a real job, right?
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