chpettit19

This is the front office's only move. It's been made pretty clear that the Dodgers are the only team interested in trading for Dozier. Nobody is being fooled by the Cardinals, Nats, Braves, or Giants talk. Those teams either don't have the prospects to make a deal or are in the same boat as the Twins and 2 years of Dozier isn't a need. The Twins have to get the Dodgers to become a little desperate somehow and this is the last card they have to play before the season actually starts. They need to convince the Dodgers they are more than ok keeping Dozier and really won't give him up for just 1 pitching prospect no matter how well regarded he is. I think this front office is smart enough to keep him if they don't get the deal they want. Unlike the Johan trade that was completed simply to do it. They will keep Dozier for as long as it takes to get a package worth dealing him for. If nothing gets done now you wait for the season and hope Dozier starts well and either somebody loses an infielder and gives something up for Dozier or the Dodgers continue to suck against lefties and they finally kick in one of their other well regarded guys. Getting De Leon straight up for Dozier would be a disaster of a trade.

The gist of my post was that all of these guys need to get better. Rosario is further along so his leash will be shorter (though ultimately he goes to the bench if he stumbles, no doubt). He needs to improve quickly. Buxton is still in danger of being bounced to the minors because his very low floor seems to match the very high expectations. Kepler is the newest of the bunch and at this point he has proven himself adequately. Of the three, he deserves the most slack. I don't know that hitting .230 is proving himself adequately. He's certainly showed he has the physical ability to hit major league pitching. Now the real proving comes. The league has real information on him and will attack his weaknesses now. He needs to show he can make the adjustment to that. He didn't make the adjustment at all at the end of last year. The optimist in me thinks the last 2 years have been great for Buxton. I think he's strong mentally and the struggles didn't crush him like they can. He's been forced to make adjustments and has shown he can do it. His struggles showed the glaring weakness we have in developing players as they tried to make him into a player he isn't and took away his athleticism. The hope that September was for real is in the fact that he started being an athlete again. He used his leg kick no matter the count and stopped being so robotic. He was just out there playing baseball and being the athletic freak that he is.

I don't know that I can give Dozier an A+. Yes, 42 homeruns is a ton, especially for a 2b. But he got that with a "greatest of all time" type second half. He was awful. Like questioning if he needs to be sent down for a week or 2 awful for the first half. Consistency has to count for something. And batting average has to count for something. Putting up out of this world numbers when your team is completely out of it is only impressive to an extent. He was expecting this team to compete when the season started and felt that he needed to be a big part of that. And he was at the head of the line when it came to not performing to start the year. I'd give him an A-. Still by far the best player, but being bellow replacement level for the first couple months has to hurt him a little. Cuz it really hurt the team. ​I'd guess it's also a big part of the reason we aren't seeing huge interest in him. The Dodgers and Cardinals are the 2 teams he makes the most sense for. And they're both really smart front offices. You can't fool them by just throwing 42 homeruns in their face and expect them to dish out 3 of their top 10 guys. 42 homeruns is not sustainable. The best chance for a huge return for Dozier is to keep him and hope he gets off to a huge start knowing there's no pressure this year cuz the team is expected to suck. If he hits 20 in the first half you'll get 3 top 5 to 7 prospects from a team with an injury or just a need for some right handed pop. Mark Trumbo is a much better option for a team just looking for right handed power as he'll "only" cost a 1st round pick and it appears that his price tag isn't going to be that high as him and every other big right handed bat not named Cespedes seems to have terribly misread the market this winter.

I think these guys can get us back to a respectable rotation if a few of them work out, but this article could have been written as a "don't get too excited" article just by changing the intro. The guy that's been promoted as our future stud and number 1 pitcher "could still easily end up in the bullpen." The second guy doesn't have dominating pitches or pinpoint command. Sounds like a description of Tommy Milone. The 3rd guy hasn't thrown 100 innings and is a fastball/slider lefty who has been in a bullpen since college. Not exactly screaming "I'll save your rotation!" The last guy has the best stuff and in a vacuum has the stuff to be a top of the rotation arm, but has never stayed healthy so expecting him to provide legitimate innings anytime soon seems far fetched. I love the depth of the Twins pitching prospects as they seem to have a whole bunch who have a real chance to make the majors and contribute in either the rotation or the pen. It's not a disaster if a few end up dominating in the pen (nobody would complain about one of them becoming Wade Davis). But it's hard to get too excited when they all have the upside of a number 3 starter if everything breaks right. They seem to be a classic Twins group of average starters who can do enough to not sink a strong offensive team in the regular season, but have no chance of beating legit teams in the playoffs. One of them needs to take a step and become a legit major league #2 pitcher. You don't need an Ace to win, but your best pitcher can't be the 3rd best pitcher in a good playoff team's rotation. If you don't have an ace you need at least 2 #2 guys and the rest need to be #3s. Hopefully a few of the current prospects take another step and have a tick up in their stuff and can be better than #3s.

The luxury tax situation is actually good for the Twins in a way. It's the closest thing to a hard cap they could ask for. If you break the threshold in any meaningful way you end up paying a 92% tax. That means you're looking at a $400 mil payroll. No team is going to be willing to do that. So it will hold contracts in check a little bit. It's not a huge thing, and the interesting part will be seeing what it does in the future as inflation continues to grow contracts and how teams like the Yankees and Dodgers will conduct business with having Harper, Machado, etc. coming out as free agents after the 2018 season. You can't sign Harper for the $40 mil a year he's reportedly seeking and then have Kershaw at 30+ and Jansen at 20 and then build your team through other free agents. Having 40% of your payroll wrapped up in 3 guys makes life hard. Even if they're 3 of the best players in the game. It should theoretically open the market up to more teams when it comes to the big time free agents. And if this offseason is any indication the GMs around the league are learning the lesson that huge long term deals to vets are a terrible idea as they get old and become wasted money. Mixing that with the extreme penalties of the luxury tax should make it, at least minimally, easier for the Twins to resign a few homegrown studs. Once we have homegrown studs again that is.

Nailed it. This is the key to the Twins becoming a competitive team again and being able to start having their big prospects live up to expectations. Both pitching and hitting coaches need to be better at this. "The Twins way" worked in the early 2000s because they had all the same type of players. The Piranhas were all "foot down early, slap the ball the other way" type players to start with so they were all able to produce the way the Twins wanted. The Twins have shown 0 ability to adapt to different types of players. Buxton looks like he's ready to be the everyday centerfielder next year after the Twins wasted 2 years of big league playing time trying to turn him into a piranha for no apparent reason. He had 9 homeruns in September and looked to be the uber-athletic 5 tool player he was supposed to be because he finally went back to just being an uber-athletic 5 tool player instead of trying to think his way through everything and do it "the Twins way." Great coaches make small tweaks to individual players to get the most out of their skill sets. Crappy coaches try to completely remake a player because that's the only thing they can coach. The Twins need to go out and find coaches who can adjust to different players instead of forcing every player to adjust to them.

Almora is the everyday player, not Almost. Sorry, autocorrect got me on that one.

The Cubs are an enviable team because they are set up for success for years because of how they built their team.Their draft picks are not the main reason they're great this year, but drafting an MVP caliber player (Bryant), an All-Star caliber player (Schwarber), a very likely every day player (Almost) and a consensus top 50 prospect with your 4 first round picks is crushing it at the top of the draft and is how you build a long term competitive team. And if that's what we want in MN then the narrative is not incorrect. The draft is 1 of several parts of building a successful franchise, but it's a huge one in a smallish market when you're drafting in the top 10. You need to make those picks count. And the Cubs have.

The beginning of the Cubs rebuild and the principles behind the whole thing are things Falvey or any front office can learn from. It's easy to point at Lester and Lackey and say they make too much and the Pohlads will never pay that money. But those were "put us over the top" signings. The Cubs looked deep into pitching analytics and went out and got guys they felt were underperforming, but could be very good pitchers. The 4 big arms they brought in (Arrieta, Lester, Lackey, Hammel) are all outperforming their career numbers. Obviously Lester and Lackey were big time pitchers before they stepped foot in that clubhouse, but Arrieta was awful and Hammel was pedestrian at best. The Cubs have targeted certain analytics and skills in pitchers and have a program to help build those pitchers into above average players. They also have the clubhouse atmosphere that breeds healthy competition and hard work. Offensively they built around big time prospects and crushing every pick at the top of the draft. They know high end college bats are the most likely to turn out to be the players you want. High school arms are the least likely. So they stocked their system with high end college bats and mixed that with trading away any player worth anything that they didn't expect to be around once they got good. The overabundance of impact bats in their system put them in a position to make deadline deals during the seasons they expect to compete for a championship. They went out and got the best closer in the game without putting a dent in their long term window for success. Those are all things Falvey can learn from. I have high hopes for his ability to build a pitching staff, as that's what he focused on in Cleveland. The Twins are at a different stage of their rebuild as they have their big time prospects already in the bigs and need to do things quickly to improve the pitching staff before the Sanos and Buxtons of the world leave in free agency. The thing the Cubs did best was time their rebuild. They got everyone to the bigs around the same time and built it all together. The first thing Falvey needs to do is get an accurate read on the timeline for serious contention.