gunnarthor

Lee is #1 and Jenkins #2. Soto has potential but right now, today, he's a 17 year old kid with upside. Not really sure how that will be measured. Just looking at pipeline's Twins prospects, I think somewhere outside the top 10?

This season is strange. I thought there were ways the offense could be really good. In a perfect world, Correa, Buxton and Polanco could all be 5+ WAR guys, up the middle. Larnich/Wallner/Kiriloff would step up in some manner. We had Lewis, Julien, and Miranda ready to contribute. If you squint, things could have gone well and, if you really got lucky, really well. But I thought the pitching would be bad - and it still might. I didn't think they had enough arms in their staff and that they'd start hot but falter. That could still happen but it's been much better than I thought it would be. The end result is what I thought - slightly below .500 - but how they got there is completely different. I say that b/c it might be worth taking whatever else I say with a grain of salt but, to me, it looks like this is a patchwork team - both too young and too old at the same time. We have a few core players in their prime with nothing to support them. It's not clear if we should reload or rebuild. I think we should sell. I think we can still win the central without, for example, Gray. But reading this article, it seems more likely that Pohlad wants us to be buyers. Not sure that's a good thing.

That looks pretty good. Our garden got away from us this year. We planted a ton of flowers a few years back and now they are everywhere. It's a strange looking garden. But we got some good tomato and pepper plants to grow.

Liked the pick. Seems like we're starting to focus a bit more on hit tools again - Lee, Martin, Miller, etc - Twins aren't grabbing the 1B/DH slugger as much. Good to see. Obviously, the draft is hard to predict but this is a nice, solid pick. Made a lot of sense.

I liked this pick a lot. Two pretty solid drafts in a row for the FO. Nice to see.

I think this is mostly right but I do think there are real differences between guys like Gardy and Rocco. Both have their faults and strengths. Gardy definitely had teams quit on him down the stretch but also had his team outperform their pyt w/l in 8 of his 13 seasons. Rocco, with the caveat that this season isn't over, doesn't have that track record but hasn't quite had that level of success. But I'm not sure if there is any one thing that is the problem/solution. Gardy had some great team leaders for most of his run - vocal players in the locker room who didn't always like losing and young up and coming stars who had overcome stuff. And Gardy also had cy young caliber pitching in a lot of his seasons. That probably helps a lot, too.

I'm really impressed that they won this game. Nice to see them fight back to .500 and first place.

I don't know enough about this draft to say that drafting Teel is a mistake so I'll let the FO make its pick and hope it's a good one. That said, they've made a few bad ones and they sometimes try to get cute. So, let's hope they made a few changes to their process.

It's a bit of all three. Obviously, some players are not playing up to expectations but the FO put together this ill-fitting Frankenstein of a team so they get blame too. And Rocco may have been dealt a bad hand but he hasn't shown any ability to fix things on his own, either.

I have youtube tv so can't watch much. I've seen two games. It sucks. It's the least baseball I've watched since 1999. On the other hand, I'm remembering that I can do stuff without baseball, which is good for me. Maybe not so good in the long run for MLB.

I think you're somewhat right. Gardy used to be a big believer in static batting orders - especially for the key spots. That's why he would plug Mark Redmond into the 3 spot in 06 when Mauer rested. But static is also a bit misleading. Most teams will only use the same batting order (1-9) maybe a dozen times in a good year. What's more important - and the point I think you're getting at - is having an idea of who your leadoff hitter is, your #3 hitter, your #4 hitter, etc. And that's where the Twins are pretty extreme. For instance, in 81 games this year, we've had 10 different lead off hitters and none has lead off more than 18 times. The Braves have used Acuna to lead off in every game this year. And if you look at the best offenses in baseball, most of them have had a set hitter for the key spots. If you look at Atlanta, TB, Texas and the Angels and compare their lineups, you see that they have a lot more players "set" to hit in specific spots, often in over half their games. And they don't have the same fall day today - guys don't hit second one day and eighth the next. But there was also a lot of resistance to the idea that hitters do better in certain spots in the order or that they need consistency, creatures of habit, etc. My guess is that this FO doesn't think much of the idea that lineups affect players, day-to-day. Optimizing the lineups is a way to steal a win from the margins, so that's what they are trying to do. And, of course, injuries can completely destroy any plans.

Not sure I'd put some of these in the worst category. Again, like the best, you need to take a few things into account. I think the Jamie Garcia experience - giving up Ynoa for him in a "win-now" trade and then trading him to NY for future pieces a week later showed that the FO just didn't have a clue. Add in the Kintzler trade - where the FO essentially gave up on the season while the players went on to make the playoffs - cemented that the new FO had no idea what it had or what it was doing. Trading for Dyson made sense so I don't blame them for that one as much UNLESS they didn't do their due diligence on his injury (which may have been a repeated issue in the Mahle trade). My main problem, well, not my main problem, but a problem with this FO is that they don't seem to know where they stand/what they have. We add Gray but don't reinforce the rest of the pitching staff so we give Petty and have a losing season. We panic, and try to bolster the problem a year later and lose Steer and Arraez (among others) but don't have a plan to fix the struggling offense. It's like the FO wants to dip its toe in the water but never commits, one way or the other.

Berrios was an established ML pitcher at 23.

The reason you know the odd ducks like Johnson or Lee who broke out relatively late is because those were odd. So, yes, some people take longer than others but they might also have other things going for them - like being considered a strong prospect (which we could see on top 100 lists) with potential to being a top of the rotation arm or being a top draft pick, giving reason for the club to support the player longer. That said, I like Varland. I hope he establishes himself as something more than a back end starter. But when we're talking about a pitching pipeline, we wan to see a copy of what the Twins FO pulled off in the 2000s. That means smart trades (Ryan fits well here), rule v/amatuer free agents, waiver picks ups, but also development of internal players (which we haven't seen enough of)

And how old were they after those 56 and 63 starts?

I don't think anyone in good faith can say that we have an established pitching pipeline. It's so barren that we've had to trade for Gray, Lopez, Mahle, and Gray (among others), which added salary and took away talent. The reason to have a pipeline is so that very thing doesn't happen.

If the point of this article is to suggest that the FO is competent, then there needs to be some additional information included. For example, if the FO had managed to keep the Twins in contention in 2021, they don't make the Ryan trade. But, because the team had Total System Failure, we could make that trade. And, while Petty for Gray makes sense, it was a "win-now" trade and the team finished below .500 and 14 games out in a pretty bad division.

I really think they should be sellers at the deadline. Or, at least, listen on offers for Gray.

We've lost most trades we've made, spent poorly in FA, and drafted a bit poorly. So, most of that should be on the GM. But Falvey was in charge of modernizing the system and bragged about creating a pipeline, so ...

They should trade Gray to a team looking for pitching. If they could get a huge package for Duran, they should jump at that. But, with this division, they could still win the central after trading those two.

They should make the playoffs b/c the central is really, really bad. But that's it. It's not a fun team to watch right now but, fortunately, they're not on tv so I can't watch them, anyway. 😁

Rye?

Agreed. I remember following these guys back when it was sethspeaks, and three other websites (can't remember what they were called, now. Gleeman had one. Nick and John each had one, too?) I lived out on the east coast at the time and it was great to find a community of fans. The lack of Twins games on TV this year has really hurt my enjoyment and care about the team but TD is still fun.

Kepler is 30. He never took that step that we all thought he could make, not sure why. His babip is unusually low but that's what it's been for his career. You would have thought some coach could have figured it out. 2019 looks like the outlier because he hit 36 HR, the rest of his stats were, more or less, in line with what we'd have expected. At this point, I think the Twins should move on. Put Wallner or Larnich or Kiriloff in the corner and let them play and make him a bench bat and release him after the year.

Didn't we have the salary cap to pay him this year?