chpettit19

@RpR I don't generally question your "disagrees," but I'm curious in what you disagree with on my post about defensive metrics. Do you disagree that OAA is a counting metric? Do you disagree about how certain metrics are calculated? If you have differing info I'd love to hear what was wrong about my comment.

Part of the severe swings is opportunity based. If 2 players are both slightly below average defenders, but 1 gets the ball hit their direction more often he's going to show as a terrible defender depending on what metric you're looking at while the other guy just shows as slightly bad. OAA is a volume metric. It's not just judging how good you are in a general sense, it's counting the number of outs it believes you saved or cost. If you and I were to make all the exact same plays, but you made twice as many of them then you'd have twice as much OAA than me. Doesn't mean you're twice as good of a fielder, though. Polanco and Arraez could've been the same quality of fielder, but Arraez had 615 chances last year while Polanco had 236. Arraez had more chances to screw up so his OAA was significantly lower. Defensive metrics have a long ways to go, and it's super important that people know what each metric is actually trying to tell you. OAA isn't great for just comparing generally what quality of fielder 2 players are because it's a chance driven metric. But most of the other ones are very limited in how they're judging defense. Defensive metrics need to be taken with a mountain of salt. They have a long ways to go. It's one part of the game that the eye test should still be the leading "metric."

You didn't provide the OAA numbers. OAA numbers from last year: Julien Polanco Arraez Which defensive numbers are correct? Your go to BBref numbers or the Baseball Savant numbers? Cuz Julien was the best according to Baseball Savant.

It doesn't have to mean that, no, but the comment I was replying to was someone comparing the 2 and suggesting Kirilloff wasn't that much better than Santana. If you're happy with a 1B or DH with a 98 OPS+ against 3/4s of the pitchers in the league that's cool. You're more than welcome to be happy with Santana. I don't believe he'll OPS .700 against them this year, and even if he's a 100 OPS+ against righties this year (really crushing father time at 38 years old), I don't want my primary 1B or DH to be a league average hitter. I fully expect Santana to get a whole lot of 1B and DH ABs against righties. And I think it's a mistake. Those are bat first positions and your best hope is that he's a league average hitter. And that's assuming the 38 year old doesn't fall back to his 35 and 36 year old seasons when his OPS+ against them was 86 and 78. Sorry, I'm not impressed with that from a 1B/DH. When it comes to the positions he plays he should not hit against right handed pitching.

I'm setting my expectations very low so as to limit my disappointment! I agree with everything you said. I fully expect Santana to be an everyday player at mostly 1B with some DH mixed in. And I don't like it. Even if Santana isn't as extremely platooned as Farmer and Margot likely are I still consider them to have 21.5 mil stuffed into the short side. Just because he's going to be out there a bunch against righties doesn't mean he isn't still a short-side bat. Bring back Polanco!

Yep, I agree with all of that. And it's why I still don't like the Polanco trade. Or their obsession with platooning. They can't possibly imagine Santana is suddenly going to be a worthy 1B/DH bat against righties, or that Farmer, Margot, or Vazquez are going to be worth everyday ABs against them. Are they planning on throwing Castro into a legitimate everyday role? I'd bet Santana everyday is their plan, and I'm not excited about it. I never understood the need for a right handed hitting OFer. I understood the desire to have Buxton insurance, but never understood the idea that they needed to add a 3rd short-side guy to the roster when they were still short a long-side guy. They will platoon and sub like crazy again. Often times using the entire position player group. I understand that strategy when you're forced into it, but I don't agree with it being the main strategy if you have other options. I think the offense will be very good, but I don't like their obsession with forcing multiple guys who can't hit righties onto the roster.

Correct. But the discussion was about Santana taking ABs from him against righties or Santana hitting against righties at all. Santana has no business hitting against righties. AK needs to be the everyday 1B against righties and Santana needs to enjoy the seeds and gum on the bench.

2023 vs RHP: Kirilloff- .300/.373/.485/.858 Santana- .231/.306/.421/.727 Santana's quad-slash the 2 previous years vs righties were .178/.289/.366/.655 in 2022 and .184/.309/.327/.636 in 2021. I'd say AK reached what we thought last year vs righties. You're taking AK's first 2 injury riddled years and counting those vs Santana's best year by far in 3 years. 2021-2023 vs RHP: Kirilloff- .274/.328/.440/.768 and a 112 wRC+ Santana- .200/.302/.372/.675 and a 86 wRC+ So for 2023 Kirilloff beat him by 131 points of OPS and for the 3 year stretch of AK's injury riddled career he's beat him by 93 points of OPS. It's a black hole in comparison.

What's the definition of "good against LHP?" Is there something specific about those 3 that make them unlikely to be good, or is it just lefties in general? Kepler has been pretty hit or miss against lefties, but had a 108 wRC+ against them last year. I agree there's very few lefties he can mash lefties (Freddie Freeman, Yordan Alvarez, Kyle Tucker, Corey Seager, Juan Soto, Bryce Harper types being outliers), but there's certainly a number of lefties out there who can hold their own against same-side armed pitchers. Much of it is small sample size noise. To maximize offensive production you need to get your lefties to at least serviceable against lefties.

I know everyone loves Stewart after last year's 27.2 inning sample, but, to @Karbo's point, that is his 1 great season in his MLB career at the age of 31. Obviously makes sense that he's someone to have high hopes for in 2024, but there's not a lot of track record there at all. And Thielbar isn't getting any younger. Topa was solid for 1 year at the age of 32. Again, I believe that's Karbo's point. The pen has better names in it to start the year than any Twins pen I can remember. Nice depth for sure. But there is still a ton of variance and it's no sure thing that they'll be as great as people think. This pen isn't full of guys who don't have the same "bullpen arms are extremely volatile year to year" caveat as every other pen. The depth in their pitching ranks overall gives them a great chance at having a really solid playoff pen, and that's what I care about. But listing guys in their 30s coming off career years as some sort of sure thing pen arms is ignoring a very long history of pen performance. Is Brock Stewart an elite shutdown arm or is he an unusable major leaguer who didn't throw a single major league pitch for 3 seasons after having been a really bad MLB pitcher before his breakout?

Man, it must have been hard for you to call the Pohlads and Dave St Peter incompetent when they first signed Correa. Because you know full well that was a 1 year deal in their minds. Glad nobody got fired after that one. I never claimed the spending would be a 1 year thing. You asked for an example and I provided one. My idea this entire offseason has been to invest to grow revenue. I know that's a crazy business idea "your firm" never would've suggested so it's fine you don't think that's plausible. But if you make more you can generally spend more. My idea is that they invest to make more and thus the extra dollars over the 3-year that's really a 1-year deal wouldn't cause them to lose money. Our differing goals have everything to do with how you want the roster built over the long-haul and that was what I was referring to. Because, again, I never said the spending should be a 1 year thing. That was your idea. But I'm sorry if I misinterpreted things there and caused confusion. I won't be responding to you anymore. On any thread. Congratulations. You win.

Cody Bellinger is the obvious answer if you wanted someone for just 1 year. Maybe Snell and/or Montgomery end up with similar deals if their markets never come to their asking price. I don't have the energy to debate with you on why it has to be a 1 year thing. I think they can grow revenue by investing in a better product that reaches more fans. You don't. You're more qualified than me so you win. Congratulations. You know my definition of success is different than yours. You watch "120+ games a year and care about seeing a quality product more often than not in those games" while I care about winning the World Series. I'm not going to have this discussion with you again. You can either accept we have different goals or not, I don't really care, but I'm not going to go through this with you again. We don't agree on what we'd like their goals to be. I'm glad you approve of their strategies on both the business side and baseball side. The strategy you endorse hasn't met either of our ideas for success, but at least they're making money so you can be happy about the business side.

I don't "trust" any of their numbers. There's tons of ways for teams to have more revenue than is publicly available. Plenty of ways for them to be spending more or less than is publicly guessed. It's just a source people have been using here so it's the one I went with. Atlanta is the only team with numbers I trust because it's all publicly available. But your stance was basically "it's either as bad as I say or worse" and I'm just not going to buy that. As far as big picture profit goes, the Twins aren't losing money. They have a year here or there (1 apparently in the 9 year non-2020 sample you quoted) where they guess wrong and lose money. But the idea that the Twins are a losing business is not something I'll ever believe. No professional sports team is a losing business. And if the owner can't make it work they can sell it for an incredible profit and let someone else figure it out. If the Twins are such a terrible business for the Pohlads they can sell it for nearly 2 billion and move on with their lives. The fact that they don't I think should tell us all we need to know about whether or not they're struggling to make ends meet over at 1 Twins Way.

You're talking big picture I'm talking this moment in time specifically. I don't know where the Twins rank in profit because I don't care where any team ranks. They all make more than they spend in the big picture and they could all sell their teams today for a massive profit (unless they just bought it) if they weren't making money. You can claim they're 30th in relative profitability and I'll accept it and not care. My point is they make money on the team even when it's bad. When it's good (2019) they make more money. 2019 was the only year the fanbase was nearly as excited as it was coming into this offseason and that excitement got destroyed by outside factors. That's legitimately a bad situation for them. But this time the excitement is being hurt by them and their decisions. The twin cities have shown they'll turn out and support any pro sports team in this area if it's successful. Including the Twins. I'm not on these boards every year yelling "cheap Pohlads." I'm not even yelling that now even though that's the thing you want to argue against. I'm yelling "shortsighted Pohlads" because they're choosing to chase as much short-term money as they can while self-inflicting damage on their own fan's excitement. So I don't care about relative profit. They make money nearly every year. They make more when they're good. They had their fanbase as excited as it's been in 30 years. And they decided to play poor. That's what I'm complaining about. Not their ownership in general, but their ownership decisions this offseason.

I have no idea how it ranks. And frankly, I don't care. That's what you care about, and you're more than welcome to. Not telling you not to. Do other teams invest at moments like this in their team's winning cycle or do they all slash payroll? That's something I'd find intriguing. The point of the other number for me is to simply show the Twins aren't out there losing money as others have suggested. They were really good in 2019 and saw their profits rise considerably. Yet when some of us suggest they should be looking to invest now to improve their team and set themselves up in a great position to do that for many years we're told that's crazy and they just need to ensure what you claim is middling profits each year. They make what you believe to be low levels of comparative profits while being terrible most of the time, but then you turn around and claim they shouldn't invest to become good to see their profits rise. I don't get it, but I'm not the business genius around here.

So believe Forbes when they give info you like, don't trust them when the numbers don't match. Got it.

That's what I get for trusting someone else's post. Fair enough. But that Forbes page also says the Twins were up 114 million from 2013-2022. Including the massive loss they took in 2020 and the 2022 loss. In 2013 they lost 96 games. 92 in 2014. Nice 2015 where they were 2 games above .500! Then down to 103 losses in 2016. 85 wins in 2017 was nice. 78 wins in 2018 wasn't. Incredible 2019 with 101 wins (and apparently made 43 mil in profits! crazy that building a good team leads to more money, who knew?). Craziness of 2020 season with a nice "regular season" before getting swept by the Astros. Follow that up with 89 and 84 losses in 21 and 22. So in that 10 year period the Twins went 729-789 with 6 losing seasons while making $114 million in profit. Averaged nearly 26 mil a year in profit for the 7 years before covid season while 4 of those 7 seasons were losing seasons. They were so kind to sacrifice so much in that 2022 season. I'll never ask them to make a short-term spending risk again when they finally win a postseason game for the first time in 2 decades. How silly of me. Should've known the expectations shouldn't change with winning or losing seasons. Always need to make the Pohlads 25+ mil even when they put out garbage teams and can't expect them to make less when they're good. Fair enough.

Eh. In terms of trade value it's nice. But in terms of 2024 Twins impact I'm not overly impressed. Solid 4th OFer with no real upside, but a reasonable enough floor. Have to assume if (when?) Buxton goes down that Margot likely stays in his 4th OF role if Martin or whoever on the farm is performing and they are the ones who take over in CF. If you're going to build your lineup around platooning as much as you can this is a solid piece to pickup assuming there's a reasonable chance at a bounce back to his normal performance against lefties. I'd just prefer they were less "all in" on the extreme platoon stuff.

I'm certainly not suggesting they're actually going to even file a grievance, let alone actually get it to go their way. But he got close enough to the line by saying "The players that are out there right now, that, probably, a bunch of fans are talking about, we're not in the market for those players" and tying that to the 30 million number. Not saying the actual names is why it's not a violation. Or if he'd mentioned names but not a number that'd also be fine. But he made it abundantly clear who he was talking about and put a specific price on it. Makes sense that the MLBPA got a little puffed up about it, especially because they're Boras clients and you know he was in their ears. Much ado about nothing, really. But I can see why the MLBPA wanted to fire a warning shot from it.

Couple nice swings from Lee so far. Julien with a nice left on left laser is good to see.

But there's nothing to tie a leak to unless you think the MLBPA and MLB are going to start going around demanding sources from reporters. And I'm pretty sure they don't have any power to force reporters to give up sources. We all assume that Kike leak is from his agent (and that's a rock solid assumption), but it's not policeable at all because it doesn't say it anywhere. Who files a claim against "sources briefed on his discussions," the MLBPA or MLB? MLB can't say "we're pretty sure that came from his agent so here's our grievance against them." And that leak didn't include any numbers. Joe included a number. That's what the clause is really forbidding. You can confirm or deny that you're talking to someone, but you can't provide substance or details about it. Pohlad threw a number out. The Kike leak didn't. If Joe just said "we aren't in position to spend a significant amount moving forward this offseason" the MLBPA doesn't blink an eye. He specifically put a dollar amount on it, and was so obvious that there was no real question who he was referring to. He didn't actually say a name so it's fine, but the number is what got him in trouble. Leaks aren't prohibited, detailed leaks are.

The agent wasn't on the radio saying directly that those 4 teams are in on his guy. There's a difference between the leaked things from "sources" and individuals going out publicly and speaking on things. Joe got himself in questionable waters by saying things publicly. The PA shouldn't be careful at all about bringing attention to actual public comments from individual owners that include a number (30 mil in this case) attached to specific free agents (where Joe saved himself even though everyone knew who he was talking about). Generalized leaked information from anonymous sources is not the same thing. "The agent" may have put out the Kike news, but his name is nowhere to be found on it. It's not "loose enforcement" when there's no name attached to the report. "Source" can't violate a rule. And that leak didn't include contract numbers which is another important factor.

For sure. And doing a couple of cool tricks early after picking them back up (winning a bunch of games) will help the crowd forget even quicker. But they picked a really bad offseason to drop their oranges and kick one of them off stage. St Peter dropped an orange after 2022 when he questioned fans not showing up, but that was during an offseason with a team coming off back to back dismal seasons right after the covid season. The stakes weren't so high when you lost the division by 14 games after having lost it by 20 the season before. The half-filled crowd wasn't paying much attention to the juggling act anyways. This time they had a sold-out crowd watching in anticipation and they almost immediately started dropping orange after orange. And the killer is that they could've just sat on the stage and done nothing and it would've been just fine. Should've just let the crowd imagine you juggling oranges instead of failing at juggling the oranges.

Kike and his people didn't say it publicly in a statement. They leaked news the same way teams do. But it wasn't him or his agent on a radio show naming teams. Pohlad didn't technically break the rule so there's no problem there, but the Kike list of teams is not a good comp to Pohlad making comments on a radio show. Kike's "news" is just from a "source." Can't file a grievance against "source."

For sure. There's nothing that's ever going to stop payroll discussions or be "good enough" until they get a cap system in baseball (and even then some folks will complain if they aren't at the cap every year). I think this offseason has been a bigger discussion about business practices than simply "cheap Pohlad" shouts, though. My problem is with people lumping it all in as people just blindly screaming "cheap Pohlads" when we're really talking about bigger things, like the TV deal and streaming option that this article is about. Payroll naturally gets connected to that, but just dropping this into the same bucket as the typical "cheap Pohlad" talk is missing the point many of us are trying to make. I'd be happier if they'd slashed payroll down to $100 mil if it meant they were actually adding streaming and expanding their reach with the fanbase. They'd get less pushback if they were way better at messaging and simply never let Dave St Peter speak publicly (maybe Joe Pohlad, too). I'd be happier if they hadn't sent Provus out to talk up the "no more blackouts" stuff before they actually had that deal signed, sealed, and delivered. There's always going to be "cheap Pohlad" talk as long as there's no salary cap in baseball. But lumping all of our complaints into just that 1 bucket and then being annoyed by it is going to get some pushback from me, and others. They're always going to get pushback from a certain segment of the fanbase. But they also don't do themselves any favors. I don't know how this offseason could've been handled much worse from a messaging/PR standpoint. You know what may help quiet some of the shouts? Building a winning team and then building on that momentum. They had their chance this year and chose to not do that. I think it's worth noting that this offseason's complaints are different than the typical "cheap Pohlad" screams that will never go away.