gunnarthor

Your grades are fine. Of this group, I'm most confident in Kiriloff. He'll be a solid bat, occasional all-star, for us. Just a solid hitter. I think Rortvedt ends up with a very long MLB career, like most glove-first catchers. But, man, his bat was so bad. He has to get better. I suspect he will. (Seriously, Kiriloff, Rortvedt, Baddoo, Miranda, Jax, Balazovic all in the first 5 rounds of the 2016 draft. Nice draft). I'm not usually the type to worry about Larnich. Rookies struggle, he's a slugger, he'll be ok. But he's a bit older than I'd want (COVID probably affected his and Gordon's career the most). Ideally, he's a middle of the order bat and, at times, looked it. But I'd also consider trading him before all the shine wears off his prospect status for some pitching. I was impressed with Gordon's defense, speed, and versatility. But his bat was poor. He has to improve to be Nick Punto. Good bench player, perhaps, but certainly not a future all-star at short that we had envisioned. I think Ryan is a legit starting pitcher. I'm not sure how the Twins will use him - 5 inning games, 130 inning season? Or will they let him develop into a more traditional pitcher? But he had a great rookie season for us and no reason to kill any optimism toward him. Ober is probably more a bullpen-game type pitcher where he doesn't get exposed. Solid rookie season but I don't think we should expect much more from him.

Nice article. Made me smile.

Always enjoy your lists. As a request, could you put the players age next to their name going forward? Of these five, Holland is the one that excites me the most. IIRC, he was targeted as a potential first round pick going into his junior season but had a pretty bad year. Getting him in the 5th was a nice get. There is some talent there, we just need to unlock it. He'll be 24 this year so it's getting a bit late but let's hope he breaks out. He finished last year really strong.

I don't like articles like this that much for two reasons. One, the Twins shouldn't be in rebuild mode, they should be contending for the central and the FO has already completely failed in that regard. We shouldn't allow them to move the goalposts to "building a staff from within". Second, and tied to the first, they don't have guys like Ryan, Woods-Richardson, Strotman unless they had utterly failed in the first part and had to trade off talent, so I don't think they should get a lot of 'credit' for having those arms as part of their half-decade strategy. That, after five years, the best starting pitching prospect that we have was obtained by the prior front office should be a huge mark against this FO. The reason the Twins don't go hard after FA starters is because it's extremely tricky. Mostly, the most successful FA pitchers are the most expensive ones, which the Twins won't go after. Mid-tier FA pitchers aren't usually worth it. So they are left doing dumpster diving for guys like Pineda, Bundy (who I liked), Happ and Homer Bailey types.

Good article. Tons of players struggle when they get up to the majors. Not really surprising. I don't think he's going to be a game changing batter like, say, Morneau was but he could be a Cuddyer-type player for a few years.

I'm not a fan of this FO but I will say both the Buxton and Bundy signings made me pleasantly surprised. They have more work to do in getting a pitching staff together but for now I'll give them an incomplete.

So, I'm not a fan of this FO but I will say that I love this signing. I've been pushing for this to happen for years. Even if he fails, I won't blame Falvine.

I'm very glad the Twins got this done. I really didn't think they would. Good for us to have the most exciting player east of California locked up. Kudos to the FO on this move.

8-4, and it feels like we under achieved. Not bad.

Obviously, he'd fit here but the Twins aren't going to be spending that kind of money.

None of this should really surprise us. For 30 years, no matter who is the GM, the Pohlads have had a tight control of payroll. Falvey and Levine were hired to duplicate the success the Twins managed from 01-10, where they turned over the roster several times and remained competitive. That's really hard to do and these two haven't shown the ability to do it. If the Twins were really committed to being competitive next year (and they're not), they wouldn't have traded Berrios. They would be in on guys like Gausman, Ray, Rodon, Thor, etc. They're not. They would sign at least three top end pitchers. They won't. The money Rodriguez got must terrify the Twins. Instead, they're going to build an ugly pitching staff where no one will hit 140 innings next year and fans will probably see 30+ pitchers throw for us. Again. At TT, someone wrote an interesting article that the Pohlads will resign Buxton and use him as the new Mauer - the reason they can't spend more money anymore. I'm not even that optimistic but I can see his point. When Falvey and Levine took over, they wanted to rebuild and tried to trade their best player and then screwed up the trade deadline. At the same time the players went out and demonstrated they were actually pretty good and made the playoffs. Since then, the FO's job was to supplement and support the core and extend the window of contention. They failed. Now they get to do a rebuild, even if no one will say it out loud. There's not a lot of reason for optimism that they can do that but the Pohlads will let them try.

Sadly, I think it's pretty clear that the FO is going to go with a fulltime bullpen pitching staff approach. Comments from a few weeks ago suggests they are looking at multiple inning relievers. It'll be boring baseball and bad baseball. Great for the fans.

This is a serious question - do the Minnesota Twins pay TwinsDaily writers? The Twins had arguable their worst pitching staff in decades and we're claiming they're ahead of the curve because of one silly definition of a pitch? We're so behind the curve, the curve is a dot to us.

If the Twins think his bat is going to stay around a 79 OPS+ bat, then they should move on. I like what else he gives us but his bat needs to improve. He really struggled in July and August (limited at-bats) but his bat heated up a bit at the end of the year, with more consistent playing time. With 26 man benches, his speed and versatility makes sense but you have to be Nick Punto to get away with such a low OPS+.

Michael Cuddyer. Solid pro.

Ryan - he's 26 next year. Generally, you know what you have with a 26 year old. Now, COVID changed things and he was a nice get, but he's likely a backend starter, at best. That's not really his "low-end potential." I like Ryan a lot but my guess is that the Twins will move annoyingly slow with him next year - he pitched only 90 or so innings last year (not counting the Olympics) and the Twins will probably aim for him to pitch somewhere near 130-150 next year. That's not really a front-line starter. My guess is the Twins would happily take a 30 start, 135ip 105-110 ERA+, 2 WAR season from him next year and call it a win. I do think Jax can be a solid relief pitcher but not an elite one. He gives up to many HR but at an inning or less at a time, he could be an arm. Kiriloff - I think this is the most likely of the ones but still not likely. I think (barring injury) he'll be a solid middle of the order bat and occasional all-star. MVP contender might be a bit much but he'll be a big offensive weapon for us. Lewis - he's missed two years of baseball and struggled with the bat. His minor league numbers are just bad. He had trouble getting an OBP over .300 in A+. I'm really surprised prospect gurus ranked him as high as they do. Hopefully they are right and I'm wrong but I think the Twins would be crazy to rely on Lewis at all next year.

I think it's two different questions but generally, no, the Central doesn't have a problem. The Sox did ok, as most good teams do, against other good teams and beat up really bad teams. That's pretty usual. I think the Sox don't stack up well against Houston in particular but that has more to do with those rosters. I do think that playing a generally soft schedule (like Chicago got this year b/c of how bad the central was) isn't good for a team over the course of the year but it probably doesn't impact the final records that much.

I think he wants multiple years and the Twins probably just want one. His agent will shop him around to see if he can find that second year somewhere. I like Pineda as my fifth starter but I'm really worried that the Twins view him as their opening day starter. We need several pitchers better than him and we have none in-house, which means we have to trade or sign them in free agency. So I would wait on signing Pineda to try and get the better pitchers first.

I don't want to derail the topic but the Twins said back when payroll was lower than it had to be that they weren't going to spend money just to push payroll up when they had the young guys they wanted to play anyway. They've also said that there wasn't any reason to spend big when we were rebuilding or retooling and we could plug those holes from inside. So we have decades of the team admitting they kept payroll lower than it had to be, even when we were making the playoffs. We've never had a corresponding era of ownership pushing payroll above where it "should" be because it was time to move all in. Right now, we have an MVP-type player in his prime and a strong offensive nucleus around him. This was the time for ownership to step up and say, "pitching sucked this year, we'll figure it out next year and bring in the arms this team needs to compete." But they didn't. They traded the one good pitcher we had. So payroll should be high enough to keep the window of opportunity open and if FO and ownership mistakes mean that number is raised even higher, so be it. I've spent 30 years listening to this small payroll crap. Until MLB opens their books to the union, cries of poverty are BS. Next years payroll should be big enough to sign at least two of Rodon, Gausman, Thor, Stroman, Ray, Scherzer. Plus a guy like Matz and Dylan Bundy. They can go overbudget for a few years, if that's even over budget.

We need to create a pitching staff that will be able to cover 1500 or so innings. He can solidly cover 60-70. He's a pretty obvious arb guy and an asset they'll move at the deadline next year.

Is Buxton going to go somewhere and load up on PEDS? Also, isn't it great how ownership has completely persuaded the fan base that low payrolls were so natural that no one blames the Pohlads for not paying to keep Ortiz and are willing to accept payroll as a reason to not pay Berrios or Buxton?

I'm not as worried about catching. We have three capable catchers of varying quality. Rortvedt's bat is always worse than I thought but I still have some faith in him turning into a quality catcher. Garver's bat is good enough that I might now be ok with him moving to full time DH if it keeps him the lineup more. Jeffers has shown signs although if any were traded, I'd vote for him. Of all the holes we have for next year (every spot on the pitching staff), we have enough internal options to make this work.

It really depends on what the Twins plans for 2022 are. My guess is that they'll trade Buxton and "retool" rather than a rebuild. So they'll keep Sano and trade him at the deadline.

2011. I remember arguing that the 2010 team didn't have any obvious "career seasons" and there was room for some improvement. Sure, Morneau's 187 OPS+ wasn't sustainable over a full season but a full season of his prime would be better than 2010. Cuddy and Kubel both had lower OPS+ than expected. Young was finally breaking out and we should expect more to come. I expected a little regression from Valencia but he was a solid MLer at that point and Hudson was going to be replaced by an MVP! And it looked like Liriano was finally back and Pavano was a solid vet behind him in the rotation. -sigh-

I think the problem is, again, while nearly every move is defensible, and so is their draft strategy (at least, arguably defensible), it's not working. The list of "didn't work" is growing pretty long with this FO.