John Bonnes

You both may be interested to hear that I talked with Dozier a bit about the free agent market and what he expects next year. I'll include it in the Twins Daily Nightly Wrap later tonight.

FWIW Thrylos, he talked about it because I asked him about it in a one-on-one interview. He's not parading around talking about it. I give him props for being willing to talk about a very sensitive topic.

FT. MYERS – If you’re a Twins fan hoping for a contract extension between Brian Dozier and the Minnesota Twins, prepare for some disappointment. It sounds like Dozier is resolved to hit the free agent market at the end of the season. He’s even excited about it. “You mentioned “intriguing.” [Free agency] is very intriguing,” said Dozier. “And it’s something that to get excited about. I feel like it’s always a goal of anybody at this level to reach free agency. And that’s no disrespect to this organization because I love this organization. It is all I know. But I do know I’ll be a free agent at the end of the season.”It is not clear if there have been any discussions between the Twins and Dozier this offseason. Dozier didn’t want to go into the details, and also wanted to emphasize it is not a distraction. “I don’t want to elaborate too much on this, but I will say: my focus really is just on this year. All that stuff takes care of itself," said Dozier, when asked about possibly his last spring training as a Twin. “But also at the same time, I do know this is it. I mean, this is it. I’ll be a free agent.” Of course, hitting free agency doesn’t necessarily mean that he won’t be on the Twins next year. It is the organization that he has been with since he was drafted out of the University of Southern Mississippi. So it isn’t safe to assume that this is his last year with the Twins. “I’m not going to say anything is going to happen or anything,” said Dozier. “But I do know: I’m a free agent at the end of the year.” Ok then. Apparently Brian Dozier will be a free agent. Click here to view the article

FT. MYERS - It's all the thoughts, rumors, speculation and notes that don't make it into our stories. It's the nightly wrap. Tonight's focuses on a pregame injury, learning what a balk is in spring training, the suddenly competitive roster battles and a possibly overlooked bullpen arm. It's eight minutes long and you can ask questions for tomorrow night's Wrap below. Download it here.Download it here. Click here to view the article

FT. MYERS - I don’t think I’ve ever noticed a pitcher, after finishing his start in a spring training game, walk straight to an umpire and have a couple of minutes conversation with him before walking back to the dugout. But that’s what Phil Hughes did after his start today. So what was he talking about?“[Catcher Mitch] Garver took a foul tip off the mask and I asked [the umpire] ‘If I go up and see how he’s doing, if that would count as a mound visit,’” said Hughes. “And he said ‘As of right now, yes.’ Which I thought was surprising, because when a guy takes a ball off a mask, we’re just checking to see if he’s all right and give him a second. We’re not talking about strategy or anything. So he said as he understands it right now, it’s ‘yes’ but he wouldn’t be surprised if there are some memos that go out that clarify.” That’s in reference to the new rule implemented by MLB this year to speed up the pace of the game. In a regulation game, a team can now only have six visits to the mound. That includes everyone, not just the coaching staff. Catchers and other fielders are included, too. The loneliest spot on the baseball diamond is becoming even lonelier. But nobody knows the details yet, and so it’s become an interesting topic around the ballpark the last couple of days. Yesterday Addison Reed had a quick conversation with catcher Jason Castro midway between the mound and home plate, and Reed wasn’t sure if that would count or not. Hughes was given the scenario of an umpire catching a foul tip of the mask and the catcher goes to the mound to give him a minute to recover. Would that count as a visit? “I think would also count as a mound visit – if he could remember that you did it,” said Hughes. I would think there’s going to be a little bit of wiggle room as they see how it plays,” suggested Manager Paul Molitor. “Hopefully we’ll get a little more clarification tomorrow.” Tomorrow, Joe Torre, who is in charge of MLB umpires, is coming to camp and he’ll be meeting with Molitor and other Twins officials. One would think that player safety (and common sense) would trump concerns about game length in this case. But it’s another example of the concerns players raised: that simple rule changes can have unforeseen consequences. Hughes Champing At The Bit The Twins beat the Cardinals 5-4 in a home game on Monday afternoon. It marked the spring debut of Erick Aybar and starting pitcher Phil Hughes. Hughes was registering 91 mph on the radar gun, threw first pitch strikes to all seven batters he faced and said he felt good after. It’s likely that none of that means anything, and even Hughes acknowledges that, including the feeling good part. “I’m going to have to get to that 100-pitch mark to really have an idea,” said Hughes. “But for two innings and 27 pitches, it felt good.” Obviously, one can’t expect anything from Hughes this year, but you have to root for him. He talked today about how he was a little more amped up than he expected to be. The threat of losing something might be providing that much more incentive. But “want to” isn’t going to give him back his health or velocity. He’s in the same spot as we are: just keep watching and see what happens. Click here to view the article

The Big Story dropped, as the Twins have a deal in place with slugger Logan Morrison. You can find Twins Daily stories on it here, here and here. Oh, and here. But to some of us old timers, there was even bigger news: the possible return of the infamous bullpen cars. That’s the most fun and fairly straightforward news that resulted from a long interview with MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark regarding pace of play. That nostalgic, semi-ridiculous, totally unnecessary lovable, promotional crutch of my youth is what you’ll want to hang onto – we’ll get back to it – because once you leave that simple idea, things become a lot messier.In fact, messy is the best way to describe MLB and the length of their games. The games are longer because they’re messy. The solutions are messy. The positions of both the league and the MLBPA are messy. And the agreement that was reached for this year’s games is messy, too. Even the use of the word “agreement” is messy. The MLBPA worked with the league on the issue, but opposed most of the solutions. As a result, the agreement simply said that the MLBPA would not oppose the changes, which is safe to do because they had almost no power to oppose. The solutions are messy, so I’ll provide a link to the details. The summary is this: only six visits to the mound per game, and that includes the catcher. Commercial breaks between innings will be slightly shorter. And for now, there will be no clock for anything this year, with the suggestion that the players will try to police themselves. But it’s certainly not ruled out for next year. The MLBPA’s position on the changes is messy, too. Certainly the players would love to make sure that they don’t spend an extra hour at the ballpark. “Players don’t want to be in a position where they’re playing three-and-a-half or four hour games,” Clark says, and he went back to that point repeatedly. But what is less clear is what they’re willing to propose. Because there are game integrity issues about which the players are concerned. We’ve seen changes that were supposed to improve the game have unintended consequences, like instant replay totally changing how stolen bases are called. The concern is that rule changes will impact the game. “It’s not a matter of not appreciating advancements in the game. It’s not that,” says Clark. “As it relates to a pitch clock or not a pitch clock, the guys - on its most fundamental basis – just don’t believe that a pace of game violation should potentially change ... the outcome of a game.” In this case it’s the players who are being the baseball purists. By doing so, they’re at odds with their own self-interest in shortening the games.But they're not alone. The fans face the same dilemma. “Baseball games are too long” is becoming as ubiquitous a cliché as “MTV doesn’t play music videos” but the truth is that for the last decade game times were fairly steady prior to the past six years. Per Baseball Reference, the first time that MLB games averaged over three hours was in 2000, likely a result of the offensive explosion of that era. But it retreated, and didn’t exceed that mark again until 2013. Like players, fans also care about the time of the game so long as it doesn’t affect their team. By all means, if the opposing team’s closer is taking too long in between pitches, they should be penalized. But if your slugger needs to readjust his batting gloves for the fifth time, you want that to be his prerogative. Of course, it’s easy for fans and players to be conflicted, because ultimately they don’t get much say. That could change in the next Collective Bargaining Agreement, which is still four seasons away. We’ll find out if the players really want to oppose impacting the games and how important it is. Is it really important enough to open a new front in the negotiations with management? Are they willing to give up something financially for their fundamental belief on the integrity of the game? (And, more cynically, is that one of the reasons that MLB is pushing this agenda to annoy the players?) The MLBPA’s position would be strengthened if they released some concrete proposals, and that’s where we might see the return of bullpen cars. Clark gave some background information about that idea, sort of tongue-in-cheek. It was the result of talks about reducing the time of pitcher changes, which average almost three minutes per change, since pitching changes are going up in frequency. Bullpen cars were one idea to help. “And it was a nostalgic one that any fan who has been around the game, and has loved our game as long as a number of them have, can appreciate the days when there were cars,” clarified Clark. Bullpen cars! It’s nice to see one idea that fans, ownership and players can agree on. We’ll need to wait on it, but we’ll also be waiting for the owners and players to sort out the rest of this pace-of-play mess. Twins Notes The Twins beat the Rays 5-4 on Sunday afternoon in their Grapefruit League home opener. Kyle Gibson started, was relieved by Addison Reed, who was followed by Ryan Pressly, so a fair number of potential Opening Day roster pitchers appeared. The lineup also contained several probable starting players. After the game, manager Paul Molitor revealed that Joe Mauer and Miguel Sano will likely make their first spring training appearance on Wednesday, presumably in the home half of the split squad games scheduled that day. Furthermore, the current plan is to have Sano play in the field, though he didn’t specifically say if it would be at first base, third base, or center field. ;-) For more notes and speculation today, I’d encourage you to check out a new feature on Twins Daily that we’re trying out: Twins Daily Nightly Wrap. It’s all the inside stuff we couldn’t fit into the column in a short audio file that you can listen to on your smart phone or computer. Let us know how you like it. P.S. No, but seriously, the bullpen car will be awesome. This is a no-brainer. Make them super fast to speed up gametime. Sponsor the hell out of them. So long as it's a car wearing a baseball cap, we, the fans, are IN. Click here to view the article

Every day we're in spring training, there are lots and lots of notes and speculation that can't fit into our stories. So we're going to talk about those for 10 minutes or so occasionally in the Twins Daily Nightly Wrap. You can listen on your smart phone at work at this link. Tonight's topics include Logan Morrison, Miguel Sano's health, a conversation with MLBPA Executive Director about the slow free agent market, Kyle Gibson's turnaround and arbitration process and Ervin Santans's finger.Listen here. Click here to view the article

Aaron and John conduct an emergency long-distance podcast about the Minnesota Twins signing Logan Morrison and then go back to talking about various other topics including listener questions. You can listen by downloading us from iTunes, Stitcher or find it at GleemanAndTheGeek.com. Or just click this link. Sponsored by Sota Stick and Bark Box. http://traffic.libsy...3?dest-id=74590 Click here to view the article

It appears that LoMo is indeed, the big story. Fortunately, there are already lot on the site for him. And, yes, even if Romero absolutely dazzles this spring, he would need a number of injuries to put him the discussion to make the team.

We’re still waiting on the Twins big story of the week even as a smaller story played out. The Twins introduced Erick Aybar to the press today and he said all the right things. That was expected. The modus operandi of this front office is already well known when it comes to signing veterans: they need to be team leaders, they need to be competent, and they need to fill a need.It’s that last criteria that is the only question. In theory, moving Eduardo Escobar to full time duty at third base opens up a utility infielder spot that Aybar could fill and it sounds like that’s his focus. “I’ll be here for everything. Play second, third, short, outfield, whatever,” said Aybar. “I’m here to play baseball.” Depending on injuries and possible suspensions, that might make sense for him. If not, and he’s willing to spend a month in Rochester, injuries happen. But the bigger story is that he signed a minor league deal, which means he does not need to be added to the 40-man roster, which means the Twins minted a newly open roster spot which was not for Aybar and for which there is no explanation. That open spot is still the biggest story of the week, even if we don’t know what the story is yet. Game Notes And Baseless Speculation The Twins tied the Orioles last night 1-1. If you’re interested in who did what, here is a link to the box score and recap. I’m determined to ignore all individual results this early in spring training, my theory being that no data is better than noisy misleading data. We’ll see how long I can maintain that stance, because LORD but I miss talking about real baseball games. But it’s a fairly easy resolution to keep for this game due to the lineup the Twins provided. This was a road game, and it was sandwiched by the season opener (which featured a lot of Opening Day starters) and tomorrow’s home opener (which will likely feature a lot of Opening Day starters). So the best known players in the lineup were Robbie Grossman, Ehire Adrianza, Kennys Vargas & Zach Granite. The only pitchers likely to make the club were starting pitcher Adalberto Mejia and reliever Taylor Rogers. It did give manager Paul Molitor a chance to talk pregame about Mejia and his impressions of him last year. “I think we saw things at times that were able to get your attention, in terms of his ability to compete against some pretty good lineups,” replied Molitor when asked about Mejia. He also mentioned that Mejia needs to work on his consistency, command and pitch count issues. Mejia certainly appears to have worked during the offseason. He looks considerably thinner, and says he lost 13 pounds training, including flipping tractor tires. He also lost a lot of weight back in 2016, which was his breakout year in the Giants’ minor league organization. Mejia had a good outing, but perhaps more telling is that Mejia wasn’t “piggy-backing” with anyone in today’s start. Early in camp, since starting pitchers are only throwing a few innings, it’s not uncommon to have two starting pitchers pitch in the same game. This is especially true if a couple of guys are competing for a single spot in the rotation, since it makes it slightly easier to have them both slot into that same spot in the rotation. That’s piggy-backing. Mejia wasn’t piggybacking with anyone Saturday night. By most objective observers, he was already fairly safe to win a spot, especially with Ervin Santana out for a few weeks (and provided that 40-man roster spot isn't used for a big name pitcher). This is yet another data point that suggests going into spring training, that it is his spot to lose. The Rotation Sets Up Kyle Gibson will be pitching the home opener on Sunday afternoon.Phil Hughes will start Monday at home versus the Cardinals.Jose Berrios will be starting Tuesday night when the Red Sox drive across town to Hammond Stadium.Still no word on when we’ll first see Jake Odorizzi, but he would line up for one of the split squad games (probably the home game versus the Rays) on Wednesday afternoon.Anibal Sanchez will be piggy-backing with someone. Hughes would make sense, since they're seemingly competing for the same spot. But it might also be Jose Berrios, as Sanchez is viewed as mentor to younger pitchers. Click here to view the article

The footwork thing....we'll see. I tend to give guys with a really good arm a lot more leash at SS than others. A strong arm can make up for a lot of ... awkwardness. It can even make up for range if the shortstop plays back further in the field, and that's especially true at the major league level where the ground balls are hit harder and the fields are smoother. And by the accounts I've heard, Gordon has a lot of arm. The struggles last year against left-handers scares me more. That's the second year he's done posted about a 530 OPS against LH pitchers. On the other hand, I don't think he has even 500 AB against them in his entire minor league career, and he was just 21 years old. It could also only mean he won't be a star, not that he won't be a regular. If a LHed shortstop can hit right-handers at a good clip, he's good enough overall to be an everyday player.

Aaron and John talk about the Minnesota Twins signing Jake Odorizzi and Anibal Sanchez, not signing Yu Darvish, Jermaine Palacios' scouting report, the value of reverse splits, old friends Trevor Plouffe and Hector Santiago finding new MLB homes, projected payroll levels, the impact of Josh Kalk, and the state of the Twins' starting rotation. Sponsored by Pick and Shovel Wear and Casper Matresses. You can listen by downloading us from iTunes, Stitcher or find it at GleemanAndTheGeek.com. Or just click this link.http://traffic.libsy...3?dest-id=74590 Click here to view the article

I'm interested to see how Mauer reacts to a contract year. That's never happened before. (Unless you want to count his first three years on the team, when, I suppose, the Twins could have cut him if they wanted to. But that would've been ludicrous.) Once he finished his "serf" years, he signed a four-year deal that bought out his first free agent year. Then he signed his big deal with a year left on that deal (and right after his MVP season). So this year is unique to his career. One of the underlying knocks against Mauer by his critics is that he's resistant to change. A free agent year certainly encourage a player to raise their level and show some new skills. If Mauer is able to do some of the things his critics say he should be able to do (pull the ball, swing at the first pitch, hit with power, lead in the clubhouse), one would thing the incentive to do so would be raised a bit this year.

It's continuing a tradition now, I think. They started doing that, I think, two years ago, and it definitely helped with selling out the home opener even after several years of crummy teams. They're continuing, I think, because it worked. But if they have a few good years in a row, I can see them going back to something like they used to do - fridge magnets or posters - and saving sweatshirts for another game.

Aaron and John talk about Ervin Santana's finger surgery, Trevor May, Tyler Duffey, and the Twins' other in-house options for replacing Santana in the rotation, the price tag to acquire Chris Archer, how to look good, PECOTA comps for Miguel Sano and other prominent Twins, drinking beer at Modist Brewing, how to make Valentine's Day plans, the Twin Cities' best restaurants, and mailbag questions from listeners. You can listen by downloading us from iTunes, Stitcher or find it at GleemanAndTheGeek.com. Or just click this link.http://traffic.libsy...3?dest-id=74590 Click here to view the article

Aaron and John review Super Bowl week in Minneapolis, debate the slow offseason's causes, recap the Minneanalytics Sportcon event, and reveal Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA predictions for Minnesota Twins players and the overall team. You can listen by downloading us from iTunes, Stitcher or find it at GleemanAndTheGeek.com. Or just click this link. Sponsored by Harry's Razors. http://traffic.libsy...3?dest-id=74590 Click here to view the article