Loosey

I agree with your assessment. I’ll take it a step further and say they are the most irrelevant professional sports team in Minnesota. The Vikings are always going to be #1 mainly because the NFL is a machine and knows how to market their league and teams. The Timberwolves recent success and superstar Ant has moved them past the Twins in the past few years as #2. The Wild I would put as #3. Even in the 4th most popular pro sport in the country in Minnesota hockey is always relevant and the team is always a playoff contender with a star and better marketing. I also think the Lynx popularity and relevance today is greater than the Twins. They win, they have a devoted fan base and have perhaps the best player in the league. So that leaves the Twins at 5th not far ahead of the Loons. The Twins should be #2 or #3 even when bad, but their issues stem much deeper than the team on the field. When you have an ownership group that doesn’t care, eventually that will trickle down the casual fan base. The Twins and MLB’s marketing is awful. Byron Buxton should be a superstar. But the team hasn’t embraced him as that nor shown the national baseball audience how good he really is. I’m not a marketing guy, but the team needs to find a better way to market the team starting locally. The other teams appear to be involved and out in the community much more often, maybe the Twins are, but they do a bad job of showing it if that’s the case. They have done the opposite instead. It’s hard to watch them on TV, and most people literally had no idea how to watch them early in the year, largely because the team didn’t do anything to help the fan base with that. We had to figure it out ourselves and many gave up trying after their poor start. Unfortunately for the Twins the only way they will become relevant in our own market, let alone nationally will be to put an exciting, successful team on the field but that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen for a long time after recent events. So, if they can’t stay relevant in Minnesota, how do they stay relevant nationally. This is all an internal issue that needs to be fixed but likely will not anytime soon.

So a large contingent of the Fanbase will be unable to watch the games on TV (Comcast). Were the Twins unaware that Comcast and Bally's agreement was up less than a month into their season? Did they just assume all was well and that everyone would happily re-up? Ownership of this team is messing up on multiple levels. This isn't even a baseball operations issue, this is something that supposedly very smart, savvy, rich business people should know how to navigate. If they were messing up this much on any of their other business entities the boards would be going crazy. And to make matters worse, this does in fact trickle down into the baseball operations by not allowing them to spend as they should be able to in order to be competitive.

This is not really anything new from the Twins. And if I had to guess, the FO has been in contact with players they want to sign and teams they want to trade with but their markets won't be set until other signings happen, so once some more activity happens, then the Twins will pick up.... I hope. Outside of keeping Gray I don't see any other players the Twins would have realistically signed off the board yet.

I think there is a difference between refusing to play CF and not being comfortable out there or disliking it. If Kepler were the Twins best CF option and the Twins told him, they understand it's not his most comfortable spot but they need him there to make the best lineup I'm sure he would play. I get Lewis's agent making statements about CF. He got hurt there and he has traditionally been an infielder. He needs to get his client to a 2nd contract as healthy as possible. But if he were healthy and the Twins needed him there I doubt he refuses to play. That being said, Buxton is the best option and having the Twins come out and clarify what is going on with him not being able to play CF other than the vague reason's fans have been given would help answer much of this.

I think initially us as fans were enamored by the 100MPH fastball since we hadn't seen someone with that type of power come through the Twins organization. Now half the Twins bullpen can touch 100MPH and is almost a pre-requisite for a back end reliever in the MLB. And even more so, like you said, if it doesn't have movement it isn't going to be too tough for most Major League hitters.

Overall, I think the Twins should be happy with this trade. Graterol would likely be a solid reliever in this current bullpen and probably in the Jovani Moran or Jorge Alcala role. But at this point I personally would have him behind Duran, Jax, Lopez when closing out games. Maeda has been a good starter when healthy and was very good in 2020. So using hindsight, anytime you can get an above average starter for a 7th inning reliever with upside you make that trade.

I'm having trouble find a loss on the schedule....

Has anyone actually ever tried to ask MLB for their written consent to broadcast the game? Maybe they just say “go ahead”. But seriously, $40M a year in the grand scheme of things isn’t that much. Honestly in the world of steaming YouTube should try to get a contract for every team currently with Bally’s. I know grandma and grandpa will be confused how to watch a game but I think the handful of games they produce are pretty good. If they get rights to every game I think they could invest in more interactive type of content. With that sort stuff they could add in stadium type stuff when you have the you tube app on your phone and your at the game. I think Ballys going bankrupt could offer MLB the chance to really change the way a game is broadcast. MLB has a chance to be ahead of the curve in the way a baseball game is aired. One idea that current play by play guys would hate, is let people use YouTube’s stream and individuals broadcast the game on their own YouTube channel. Imagine TwinsDaily having their own writers calling a game. It would sort of be like Manning cast, but anyone could do it! Covid showed us you don’t HAVE to be at the game to call it.

I've written this before, but the Twins have a ton of options to make big trades, but first they need to know where the replacements are at. Brooks Lee, Royce Lewis, Kiriloff and to a lesser extent Austin Martin could come in and a take over for some variation of Polanco, Arraez and Kepler. But until we know if Lee and Austin can play above AAA, Is Lewis healthy and back to his late May MLB self and is Kiriloff's shaved down wrist bone OK, i really don't think they can do much right now. With all that Arraez is probably the one who is most likely to go today. He is position-less, and could probably be replaced with guys currently on the roster. at about 90% replacement value.

Jared Allen is not the same as Trevor Bauer. Jared Allen was/is extremely well liked in the community and in the locker room. Jared Allen made some dumb mistakes with alcohol and drinking and driving when he was young. He figured it out by the start of his 3rd NFL season and it was never an issue again. When the Vikings took their "chance on him" he was 2 or 3 years removed from any of those issues and had matured a lot by then.

I agree with you partially. I think the Twins have players to trade for front of rotation starters. However, the players to backfill them are question marks for the time being. Arraez, Polanco and Kepler specifically. For them to be moved for a starter someone needs to take their place. Lewis, Lee, Martin, Kiriloff are unknowns today. Maybe in July we will see Brooks Lee looking like a future all-star and have the freedom to trade Polanco for a starter, or maybe Lewis comes back and can be a 3rd baseman/LF and move Miranda to 1st which frees up Arraez. Lots of moving parts that are too unknown for a team that looks like they are going all in to trade away known commodities as of now.

If they stay healthy the Twins will have 2 superstar players in their prime for a fraction of what many expected them to be paid. Buxton on the open market (if healthy) could demand $250M+ and obviously we know someone is willing to pay Correa $350M if it weren't for his physical. Good on them,

I play men's hockey with a recently retired MLB player. I will ask him how the taxes work. He's pretty open about sharing some of the stuff i had never known about when it comes to MLB and perks, etc.

I have always been a proponent of "NO SALARY CAP" to protect owners because I don't care about the owners money, they are all billionaires and am happy for players to get their piece of the pie. However, this offseason has sort of shown that if you essentially have unlimited funds you can overpay every other billionaire and just completely buck the system. So I am now leaning toward not only a cap but a hard cap of sorts. Even if a Cap of $300MM was set only a handful of teams would reach it, but other teams would likely spend more because the teams that cap out woudln't be able to continue to buy more players. This in effect would probably hurt the super stars like Correa a bit and limit them from reaching those $40M figures were heading towards but would probably end up being good for baseball in the long run.

Yes