chpettit19

You're not getting a better pitcher with more control for Steer and CES.

What do you base this on? What have you seen in their games to make you think there's better defense in there? Or is this just a shot at the Twins organization based on nothing real? It's turned out to be a bad trade, yes. It doesn't "really hurt" yet, but it could in the future. There's every bit the chance that Steer is pushed out of that IF as well by the elite prospects they have coming up. We'll see. Only time will tell who turns out to be the best between Steer, CES, Miranda, Lee, Lewis, and Kirilloff. I'll take my chances with Lee, Lewis, and Kirilloff.

What do the x-rays have to do with his current performance? Is the idea that his ankle is so shot right now that he's struggling to hit?

I never said Miranda and/or Julien didn't have defensive limitations, just said they're part of a group of players who can cover the same positions that Steer and CES do. I expect to see Miranda on the bench most of the time in that situation. I'm really confused by your point. The Twins had 8 guys (the 6 I named, plus Steer and CES) who could all play a role in covering the 3 positions in question. The Twins were willing to trade 2 of the 8. Thus the comparison I care about moving forward is how those 2 work out compared to how the 6 they didn't trade work out. Don't see the controversy there.

I agree part of why he's at 1B now may certainly just be roster needs, but they have a number of much better fielders coming up behind him pretty quick, and I'd guess the odds are that he is destined for far more 1B than anywhere else in the IF when the rest of this prospect wave hits. We'll see how it all turns out. Long ways to go in their careers. That trade definitely isn't going to be a win, though.

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No.

The determining factor, to me, on them haunting the Twins is what Miranda, Kirilloff, Buxton, Lewis, Julien, and Lee do over the next 6+ years. Steer is down to 1B/3B/DH. CES is down to 1B/DH. The Twins took a calculated risk that some combination of the 6 guys I named earlier would be a better overall combination at 1B/3B/DH for the Twins. Or at least that a combination of them at those positions, plus Mahle in the rotation for a year and a half, would be as good as Steer, CES, and Hajjar for 6+ years. CES has to be Nelson Cruz to be a truly haunting player. I would bet against that happening, but you never really know. That's the game you play when making trades. If Buxton is a fulltime, or most-time, DH over the next 6 years CES didn't really have a place to play here. To me, the bigger thing haunting the Twins in that scenario is Buxton being a DH. Steer has already been pushed down to having most of his time at 1B now. The bar to clear offensively for being a "haunting" player there is awfully high. I would bet against that happening as well, but he's looked good for the last month. Both of their defensive limitations lessen the likelihood that they're truly haunting losses. But Steer's current batting line sure would look nice in the Twins lineup right now. I wouldn't replace Lewis or Kirilloff with him, though.

I've had the same itch in the back of my mind about them being motivated by job security over best prospect when it comes to the high school kids. Or they fear a repeat of the Cavaco disaster, but that was them passing on the better HS prospect (Carroll) to grab the "helium prospect." If they pass on Clark for someone outside the top 5 and he becomes Carroll 2.0 fans are going to riot (well the really invested fans around here will write really angry posts). I'm with Jaime here. You got to jump up 8 spots (if I'm remembering correctly) and you're thinking of taking advantage of that by picking a high floor, low ceiling prospect (if the rumors are to be believed)? If that's true Pohlad better fire them in the next month. You have a chance to pick someone with an elite ceiling, don't get cute. My thought on this pick is to make it a "Brooks Lee line" decision. How many prospects in this draft would immediately become the team's #1 prospect? Is it 5? 8? 12? It sure sounds like there's 5 for sure. If it's only 5 you have to take one of the 5. If the top 5 are clearly better than him, but the second tier there'd be debate on? You have to take one of the top 5. My top 5 are the same as yours, and have the same disclaimer of not really knowing anything about them beyond what I read. But I know drafting "safe" in the top 5 is nonsense. Because there's no such thing anyways. Take an elite prospect when you're handed them on a silver platter.

I honestly don't have a super strong opinion one way or the other. I think they're in the middle of the FO rankings (same with Rocco as a manager). They're not spectacular, but they're not terrible. I tend to lean towards taking chances on finding the spectacular so I'd put myself mostly in the same place as you are in them needing to show something in the playoffs, but I also understand that we could be the Rockies and be run significantly worse than Falvine has done. I think they've drafted quite well overall. I think they've modernized the organization, which is huge. I think they have a decent plan for building a winner in MN with the constraints placed on them. I think they've failed at actually doing it. I think it's all sort of the same problem, though. They're average, they found an average manager, and they're really good at finding, or developing, average talent. I think the average fan wants to see more than average, though. And in order to do that you have to risk going from average to below average. It's very similar to the Kirk Cousins situation with the Vikings. Maybe not quite good enough, but you know there's far worse so how much do you want to risk to try to improve upon what you have? Winning a bad division and losing in the first round of the playoffs isn't quite good enough. But it's way better than 99, 96, 96, 92, and 103 losses in 5 of 6 seasons we just went through not that long ago. Really long answer to say I wouldn't push back on them being fired if they don't find some playoff success this year. But I'll be nervous about whoever they bring in to replace them.

This kind of sums up this FO regime. Can produce ML talent, but can't produce stars. So they have decent to solid teams who can hang around .500, but are never really contenders. They need to start producing stars or they're doomed to mediocrity. Their jump to #5 this year is a huge opportunity. Don't get cute. Have to get your star this year.

I know crazy things happen at the top of the draft, and draft dollar games are played, but if they go outside the general public's declared elite top 5 they better be right. These prognosticators are wrong all the time, and we shouldn't take their word as gold, but when every publicly available ranking system has the same 5 guys in some order, and they're all talked about as being likely 1-1 picks in almost any other year, you better have a really good reason to go outside them. And it being a HS hitter doesn't seem like a good reason to me when they took Lewis 1-1, and Cavaco earlier than predicted in the first. You got lucky in the first ever draft lottery and jumped into the top 5 in a 5 superstar draft. If you take someone else, but the guy(s) in the top 5 you passed on turns into a hall of famer(s) it doesn't matter if you picked an all star or a complete bust. You can't pass on the top 5 guy and have whoever you pick be worse than them, unless you also completely nail your bonus pool money manipulation. If you come away with multiple all stars you're good. But passing on the elite prospect, and having them turn out to be better than who you picked will not go over well with fans. Especially if it's one of the college guys and they're in the majors quickly. As far as Skenes goes, though, I'd be awfully surprised if he got beyond Texas at 4. It feels like they'd love to have him in their bullpen for the playoff push this year before putting him in camp with deGrom next year and letting him learn.

Option 1: Buxton's knees aren't toast, and he can get back to CF in some amount this year, and more next year. I'm starting to think this isn't a real option anymore. It feels like Buxton's knees are shot, and he simply will never be able to hold up to the wear and tear of playing CF anymore. Absolutely a disastrous outcome for everyone involved, including the team who want him in CF more than any of us and would put him there if they thought he could do it. Option 2: MAT. No thank you. Option 3: Free Agents/Trades. Not a lot of great options in the open market, but maybe there's a trade that can be found? I can't imagine it'd be cheap to trade for a really good CFer, though. It's what made Buxton so valuable as a plus defender and hitter there. Option 4: Royce. I've been on this bandwagon since last year, and it's still my preferred move. They have much more depth at 3B (and 2B) than they do in CF. Royce was tremendous in CF in the AFL, and his very brief Twins stint. Even the play he got hurt on showed how good he can be out there. I think this solves a lot of their immediate needs, and I'd have him start taking flyballs out there and have him ready to transition in the 2nd half of this year. Option 5: Other prospects. I'm not a Celestino believer. So he's nowhere near the top of my list of options. I think ERod is a corner guy, and needs to do a lot before I count on him to even make the majors at this point. Any of the top 4 hitters in the draft feel like they may be an option, but the HS kids would be years away, and Langford doesn't look like he tracks the ball well enough to play CF. Austin Martin may be the best non-Lewis youngster option. I haven't seen any update on him lately, but hopefully they get this elbow thing figured out, and he can come back and look like he did in the AFL. I don't know if they'd use him out there everyday, but he could be the main CFer as part of his likely utility role.

I think he's average. But, in general, I just don't think managers matter very much. I think they can swing a team's record +/-4 games in a season. I don't think managers are the reason teams win or lose close games, I don't think they're the reason a team's bullpen or offense or whatever are bad. I think they have very minimal effect overall. But, as for Rocco specifically, I think he's just another manager.

The Twins were 14th in baseball in runs scored in 2021. Almost the exact definition of average is all the team needs to go from being bad in close games to Rocco not even mattering? Feels like thats wrong. Your argument is basically that when the team loses close games it's Rocco's fault, but when they win them it's because the players are good. Sorry, I just don't buy it.

Sometimes it feels like they don't even read our brilliance.

FYI, Castro is one of the youngsters if we're just going by age. He's 26. He's half a year older than Kirilloff, 2 years older than Julien, the same age as Jeffers, half a year older than Wallner, a couple months younger than Larnach, a year and a half younger than Gordon, and only 2 years older than Lewis.

But in 2021 they went 25-19 in 1 run games while going 73-89 overall. Was he a great manager that year to raise their level of play in 1 run games so drastically? (For the record I'm not a Rocco fan, I'm not defending him, just attempting to point out the randomness that goes into most stats people think are driven by managers. I don't care 1 way or the other on who the manager is.)

The manager, and being around longer, is what's being talked about here, and my stance is he matters very little, and it's almost entirely about the players on the field. Like 97.5% players, 2.5% manager/coaching. If you're going to analyze the manager's extension I think it's prudent to discuss how much a manager effects a season. My stance is managers/coaches can swing a record +/- 4 games. That's 2.5% of the season. So I'm not so worried about them. I didn't say I don't know if it matters, I said I don't know if those 3 coaches are some great coaching talent. My stance is clearly that it doesn't matter "a great deal." 🤷‍♂️ There's many stories about Popkins working with Correa, Baldelli crediting Tingler with great insights (Tingler "is able to come at me in a lot of ways, in a lot of different scenarios. He knows what goes into every decision. He's made all those decisions," Baldelli said. "He's a teacher of the game, and he's very good with the mental side of it. I've been extremely impressed."), etc. If those guys are so impactful, why do their teams suck at scoring runs (Rowson) or winning games (Shelton)? We'll have to agree to disagree on coaching, and managing, mattering "a great deal." But we can agree that the problems run higher in this (and any struggling) organization. Because it's about talent, and the talent accumulated. Until I start seeing coaches turning bad players into good players, or managers making the playoffs with untalented teams, they simply don't matter much.

I like the creativity. I'd actually try to get Rocco to burn his bench moves in the 1st in this scenario. Start a righty opener, but go to the lefty in the first, intentionally walk 2 guys to get both Kirilloff and Gallo out of the game, then turn to Gausman in the 2nd for 8 shutout, 1 hit, 17 K innings and call it a night. Wait, now I'm moving your pieces.

These are interesting thoughts to me. I'm in the camp that managers, and most MLB coaches, mean very, very little in the success, or failure, of a team. Talent wins. Shelton, Rowson, and Pickler are good examples of this. Shelton is in his 4th year as manager of the Pirates. He has a winning percentage of 38.6 as a manager. He's lost 100 games each of the last 2 years. How much of that is on him, and how much is it that the Pirates just haven't been very talented? Rowson gets a lot of credit for the Twins offense while he was here, but he went to Miami and oversaw the worst offense in baseball, and is now coaching the 2nd worst offense in Detroit this year. Pickler is in Cincinnati. Does anyone wish the Twins were the Reds right now? How much impact do any of these guys really have? Terry Francona is pretty widely considered the best manager in baseball. His team has scored the fewest runs in baseball this year. Should we blame that on Francona or the players? The Guardians have all these big time young players that were supposed to take over and flourish under the guidance of Francona. Oscar Gonzalez is back in the minors. Gimenez and Kwan are flopping. Straw is pushing towards unplayable. Rosario seems to have completely forgot how to hit. They have 2 hitters with wRC+ over 100, and 1 of them has 20 PAs. The other is Ramirez with a 112 wRC+ that is 15 points below his career number, and 30 below where he's been the last couple years. If Rocco is to blame for the Twins offensive struggles (not saying you're saying that, but in general) is the best manager in baseball to blame for the Guardians offensive struggles? Are/were Shelton, Rowson, and Pickler great coaching talent? I have no idea. I don't think anybody on here really does. Player talent is really all that matters. The Athletic had an article a few months ago about MLB hitting coaches and how volatile that job is. The average length of tenure for active MLB hitting coaches is 2.4 years. Derek Shelton is quoted in it saying "Why there’s so much turnover is because one of the easiest things to do is just to blame the hitting coach." I think he's on to something there. Not just for hitting coaches, but MLB coaches, and managers, in general. The greatest manager ever isn't getting the 2023 Oakland As to the playoffs. They're just the easiest scape goats. All that said, I don't really care what they do with Rocco. I think he's just another manager. And the FO would bring in Rocco 2.0 if they fired him. So if the players aren't complaining behind closed doors I think the continuity is useful enough.

Yeah, if you're 20 games below the old adage of "everyone's going to win 54, everyone's going to lose 54, it's what you do with the other 54 that matters" there's nothing redeeming about it. This is bad for baseball, and if I'm another owner I'm telling them to F off and they're not getting a cent of revenue sharing. There's tanking (which is terrible for the game), and then there's this team. They traded everyone good, and didn't even get elite prospects back. The league should be embarrassed.

Yeah, that'd certainly be an option for Toronto, but how easy is it? You pulling your starter after 5 to make that happen? Burning through 4 pen arms just to get Garlick in the game? Do you risk using your lefty against Julien, Kirilloff, or Gallo segment of the lineup and risk Rocco letting his lefty hit? Cuz now you've pulled your starter early and are using a number of bullpen arms and you didn't even get Garlick in the game (for the record I'm sure Rocco would use Solano and Garlick no matter who the lefty is cuz that's how this team rolls). These are also games 15-17 with no off days for the Jays. How creative can they be? How heavily can they rely on their pen right now? Their starter went 3 last night. Mayza threw 1 inning. 2 nights ago their starter went 5. Berrios went 7 3 nights ago, and Mayza threw 1 inning. Bassitt toughed out 6.1 the night before that. Gausman was great for 8 5 nights ago, but they went extras and had to use 3 relievers. If Toronto wants to pull Gausman in the 5th or 6th to get Garlick in the game tonight I'm saying advantage Twins for the series. Watch tower to cone head red 52, set, hike! (I'm terrible at chess so this feels like an unfair advantage to you)

I will counter the Garlick going down cuz he won't play idea with keeping Garlick up because he won't play. Argument #1: The "threat" of him on the bench may motivate an opposing manager to leave their righties in, and I'd prefer that so Rocco doesn't get crazy with his substitutions. The other teams only having 1 lefty gives Rocco the chance to be more straight forward with his lineups, and force the opposing manager's hand a bit with when to use that lefty. Now Rocco could go off the rails and really get wild with things so maybe it's not the best idea, but, assuming he'll be pretty sane with it, having Garlick on the bench as a counter to their lefty usage is pretty nice for lineup strategy. Argument #2: With Garlick being the bench bat Rocco/the team will feel less, or no, pressure to play him. They seem fine letting certain guys "rot" on the bench, and I think they'd do that with Garlick as they seem to see him as strictly a platoon bat vs lefties. That means they'll be more inclined to set, and forget, their lineup. This stretch could be what a number of us have been asking for in that Rocco takes his best hitters, puts them at the top of the order for a week+ straight, and we see what they can do. Julien-Correa/Lewis-Kirilloff-Buxton-Gallo-Farmer-Wallner-Catcher-Taylor and let it roll for a week. Solano and Garlick on the bench is a nice package to have late in games depending on how the lineup falls for the opposing manager. If they use the lefty against Wallner you can make the move to one of the righties. It also lessens the chance you see the lefty at all since they're both such well thought of hitters against lefties so the manager may favor using their superior righty pitcher against the Twins lefties. If it's just Solano on the bench it's easier for the opposing manager to pick the section of the lineup he wants to target and know his lefty will get a positive matchup somewhere. With 2 righty bats on the bench his lefty wouldn't see a single lefty unless he's allowing runners or pitching multiple innings. Advantage Twins. The biggest question is the 3 games this weekend before Lewis is eligible to return. I think playing the series with a banged up Gallo, and unavailable Correa would be a mistake. Have to decide on Correa before tomorrow's game. Then it's is Kepler healthy, do you bring up Miranda, or are you playing 40-man games? I'd rather have Miranda up for 3 days than play 40-man games, because I don't see anyone in the minors as being truly useful and worth the DFA move for them in 3 days, or a vet now. Miranda getting a little time around the big club for the weekend isn't the end of the world. Could be worse than a couple big league ABs and Correa in his ear.

How old school we talkin? La Russa started saving his best guy for the 9th back in what the 70s or 80s? Before that there wasn't nearly as much bullpen usage in general so it's not quite the same thing. When starters are throwing 300 innings a year there's not much of a "when to use my best bullpen arm" decision to make since you only have 2 innings to cover a lot of the time. But once La Russa really got that closer thing going the best guy was almost always saved for the 9th, until very recently. Rivera, Nathan, Gagne, Papelbon, Hoffman, Fingers, Eckersley, even Sutter in the earlier 70s was being saved for save situations.