Cap'n Piranha

It's all well and good to say we don't want a rebuild, but I'm pretty sure one is coming. The Twins have at most 5 pitchers that can be counted on to be full year contributors next year (Maeda, Berrios, Ober, Rogers, and Duffey). With a 13 man staff, where you need at least 5-6 solid options in the bullpen, that means the Twins need to find at least 5-6 arms this offseason; if any of the above get injured, or regress (can't be counted out, especially for Ober and Duffey), that number goes up. We can hope that Duran, Winder, Balazovic, and a couple of relievers can make the jump from the minors, but can you really feel good about your playoff chances if you're counting heavily on 4-5 rookies? There also won't be a ton of money to spend, because while you're clearing about $43M with Cruz, Pineda, Simmons, Happ, and Shoemaker moving on, all of those guys need to be replaced, and Berrios, Buxton, and Garver will get raises. To truly feel good about competing, I think the Twins would need to spend around $70M a year in new contracts for 2022, and that's just not going to happen. Accordingly, the only thing that makes sense is to completely tear down, to try and shorten the imminent rebuild from 4-5 years to 2-3. Trade Cruz, Berrios, Buxton, and Rogers for sure--those guys should net you 4-6 Top 100 guys. If you find takers for Simmons, Sano, Donaldson, Duffey, Robles, or Pineda, trade them as well. Play Gordon every day in center or short to see where he best sticks. Let Rooker DH every day to see how he handles the bigs. Call up every reliever from AAA/AA you can to see if any of them show flashes. Get Miranda up towards the end of the year as well. With any luck, you'll find a couple of keepers from that group, have a farm system with 6-8 Top 100 guys, some high draft picks, and loads of cash to use starting in 2023 to build onto a core of Kiriloff/Larnach/Arraez/Jeffers/Duran/Balazovic/others.

This seems to contradict your claim in the immediately preceding post, where you opined that you can't imagine him wanting more than $20M AAV. Berrios is right around the 20th best starter in baseball over the past 3 years at almost any metric you look at (he appears anywhere from 17th to 25th on almost everything one would consider important for a starter; ERA, FIP, xFIP, k/9, bb/9, hard hit rate, swinging strike rate). That seems like something any number of teams would be interested in, particularly given the durability he's shown, and if more than one team wants him, the bidding war ensues which the Twins cannot be competitive in. The Angels have needed pitching for years, and in the next two years shed the contracts of Fowler, Cobb, Bundy, Quintana, Heaney, Upton, and Pujols. That's $111M they free up before 2023, meaning they could hand out 3 $20M AAV contracts next year, give out $20M in arb raises to their homegrown players, and still offer Berrios $30M AAV (given his willingness to bet on himself, do we really think a 28.5 year old Berrios would turn down a 3/$90M deal? He'd get to sign his second huge contract before 32, or the Angels could easily absorb 5 and $150M). The Dodgers will clear the contract of David Price next year, as well as Turner, Kershaw, Jansen, and Kazmir. That's also $111M, and they'll again have to replace those guys, but I don't think they'll struggle to find the coin (their current payroll is $250M, and they only have $107M in commitments for 2023). The Yankees, Mets, and Red Sox are also teams with deep pockets, in competitive windows, who are shedding salary to some degree in the next couple of years. I think it's very possible 2+ of those teams want Berrios as their number two starter. Would any of them be willing to pay $30M a year for that? Maybe not. But a year and half out, you're probably going to have to give Berrios that to keep him from exercising his right to find out. After all, if I can look all that up in about 15 minutes, I guarantee you Berrios' agent has as well. Should the Twins sign Berrios? In a vacuum, yes. In reality, no; because the only way you get him to sign on the dotted line right now is to give him either $30M AAV, or something like 8 and $200. Anything less than that, and he'll just wait for the bidding war after the 2022 season.

They didn't make poor financial decisions. There's not a single contract on this roster that was bad at the time of signing. The closest would be Donaldson, but even he provided a 129 wRC+ last year, and 118 this year. And was signed to be the piece that pushed the Twins over the top for 2020/2021. Has everything worked out with the players they've signed? No, but that's always going to be the case. If you reject the reality that the Twins will never be top 10 in payroll, then we're not ever going to be able to find common ground in this, mostly because you're on another planet. The Twins also did not print money last year. They missed out on high 8 figures, and maybe even just into the 9 figures of revenue. They are continuing to miss revenue this year. The Twins have indeed stayed middle of the pack on payroll, because that is where they will stay--that's my entire point; when you sign Donaldson, Pineda, Simmons and Cruz to 8 figure deals (the four are getting $54.5M this year), keep your arb eligible players instead of trading them (Berrios, Buxton, and Rogers are getting $17M), and sign team-friendly deals with your supposed core (Sano, Kepler, and Polanco are getting $21M), you end up with a pretty high base. Those 10 players make $92M, which means the Twins had at most about $45M to play with on their other 16 players, or less than $3M per player. If they spend $20M on two rotation pieces, they now have only $25M left for 14 players, which means they're essentially playing nothing but pre-arb guys. Who are the 3-4 SP's on one year deals worth $5M on average that you think would have been superior options to Happ and Shoemaker?

With all your talk about not looking at things in a vacuum, you seem to be ignoring the vacuum of payroll. As I mentioned in my response to Chief, the Twins were already at near record payroll BEFORE Happ and Shoemaker, DESPITE large reductions to revenue both last year and this year. If you want a team that's going to allocate $20M-$30M to it's 4th and 5th rotation spots, I suggest you check out Yankees/Dodgers Daily. You are in line for nothing but frustration if the Twins are the team you choose to follow.

The Twins payroll this year is just under $128M, which means if you cut off the $10M for Happ and Shoemaker, they would be at $118M. That's pretty much right inline with 2019 ($125M) and 2020 ($122M over 162 games). Given the collapse in revenue last year, and the expected reduced revenue this year, I don't think it's fair at all for the Twins to be characterized as cheap. What two starters could the FO have inked that would have been notably superior at the time of signing, without adding $20M or more in payroll?

Coming into 2021, neither was viewed as a bad starter, particularly as a 4th and 5th starter for a team with limited payroll capacity.

Here's your quotation I was responding to--"Flexen's 2021 numbers so far have been dragged down a bit by one disaster start -- but unlike Shoemaker, he's been pretty good in the others." That reads to me like you're saying he only had one not-good start. As I pointed out, he has had several bad starts; in fact, Shoemaker has had 5 starts under a 4 FIP, which is only one less than Flexen. Flexen is undeniably better than Shoemaker, but that in large part is because Shoemaker has ben even more feast or famine than Flexen--5 good starts (although not as good as Flexen's), 1 average start, 1 bad start, 3 horrible starts, and 1 worst-of-all-time start.

Mikolas' MLB FIPs in the first 3 years of his career were all superior to Flexen's FIPs in the first 3 years of his MLB career. Quibble about how to define success, but Mikolas was, at least by FIP, a definitively more successful pitcher than Flexen in their first three years. Mikolas was also only one year older than Flexen at their debuts, and himself had barely 100 IP at AA or above when he debuted, so it's not like he had garnered a bunch of extra experience. either

Flexen was also a 25/26 year old pitching in the equivalent of AA or AAA. He should be expected to do well. Put another way, I'm sure if you busted Randy Dobnak down to Wichita and left him there the whole year, he'd probably win that league's equivalent of the Cy Young. That doesn't all of the sudden make him a great MLB option. Further, if you look at Flexen's numbers game by game, it's not like the one disaster start is his only bad start. By FIP, he had bad starts against Detroit, Oakland, San Diego, Texas, Anaheim, and the Twins (minimum FIP in those 6 is 4.83, with 3 of those starts above 5 FIP). He's given up 4 ER or more in 4 of his 12 starts, and 3 ER in another 2 (and one of those was only a 4 inning start). In reality, Flexen has been feast or famine, with 6 very good starts, one average start, 4 bad starts, and one horrible start. With his low k rate (15.9%, league average is 24%), there is a lot of potential for regression here.

Most players in the bigs aren't there solely because their best is that much better than the guys in the minors' best. It's that the guys in the bigs are much more consistent at being their best. Put another way, if Celestino plays the best he is possibly capable of playing, it's probably not that much worse than the best Buxton is capable of playing; he's maybe 85 to 90 percent as good. However, how often does Celestino have a day where he plays the best he is capable of playing? Once every 5 days? Every 10? And how often does Buxton do it? Every 2 or 3? It's like the old football saying about lesser teams beating better teams--if the lesser teams plays a perfect game, they can beat the better teams (it's also how the Twins took 2 of 6 from NYY/HOU, 2 demonstrably better teams). The St Paul Saints would win 2-3 out of every 10 games against the Twins, because 2-3 times out of 10, the Saints would collectively do a better job of playing to their potential than the Twins. But the Twins win 7-8 times because the Twins collectively more often play to their talent. With more time and seasoning, Celestino will either increase the ratio at which he plays to his potential, or he will find himself first a AAAA outfielder, and then out of baseball.

The story that isn't told here that is interesting to me is that, in reality, injuries aren't up that much. If we take the number Tom showed for 2021 of 14,350 days, and divide it by .37 (as we're about 37% of the way through the season), we see that the league is on pace for 38,784 IL days. That is vastly down to 2019 (over 21%), and just 13.7% above 2018. Conversely, the Twins are on pace for 973 IL days, up 55% to 2019, but actually below both 2017 and 2018. This makes me wonder--is part of why the Twins won 101 games in 2019 because they were able to avoid the IL? The Twins reduced their IL days in 2019, at the same time as IL days in the rest of the league exploded. Now that they are back to being league average in IL days, they're back to being non-competitive.

Numbers 1 and 2 both make me nervous. Polanco's ankle seems to be a body part that will never be fully healthy until he stops playing baseball (maybe not even then). As such, the risk of .800 OPS Polanco vanishing at any moment is an inescapable reality. Add on the fact that both Arraez and Gordon are probably best suited to play second, I think if Polanco keeps this up for another 4-6 weeks, you try and trade him. On Rogers, I may be reading the numbers wrong, but it looks like he is at the bottom of the barrel in fastball spin, Max EV, and barrel rate, while also being solidly below average on hard hit rate. Also to consider--Rogers is essentially throwing two pitches this year, a sinking fastball (and throwing it harder than ever), and a slider (also harder than ever). Unfortunately, his slider grades out as slightly below average, which means Rogers is getting by on one pitch that has some concerns behind it. As he is now over 30, and only has one more year of free agency, I think it behooves the Twins to trade Rogers in July as well.

Agreed. When you throw tradition out by having backup catchers throwing 46 MPH softballs, you can't expect the other team to continue to respect tradition. Even if that was some back-end bullpen guy throwing 86, I still don't have a problem with swinging 3-0, but the whole "respect your opponent and the game" thing does not hold water when Tortuga is pitching.

Donaldson has the 4th highest OBP on the team; the three ahead of him are Buxton, Gordon, and Refsnyder. I don't think anyone would be excited about moving Donaldson down in the lineup for Gordon or Refsnyder.

The Series Win stat is inaccurate--The Twins took 2 of 3 from KC in the April 30-May 2 series, crushing them 9-1 and 13-4 on Friday and Saturday, while getting crushed 11-3 on Saturday.

I agree with this. Look no further than the team at the top of the Division Standings that has beat our brains in this year (combined score of the 6 games is White Sox 48-23, an average of 8-4). In the 2016/2017 offseason, the White Sox traded Sale and Eaton for Giolito, Moncada, Lopez, Dunning, and Kopech (Dunning was turned into Lance Lynn). Add in the 2017 mid-season trade of Quintana that netted Jimenez and Cease, and the White Sox added 6 key contributors to their current team by moving assets when it was clear the team's upside was gone.

This whole post should be carved in granite outside all 30 stadiums. Fantastic takedown of the inanity of "unwritten" rules.

The problem with your reference to other sports is that most other sports are timed, whereas baseball is not. Unless you think in blowouts hitters should simply refuse to swing, no matter the count, hitters will have to swing in order for the game to end. Why is swinging 3-0 and hitting a homer disrespectful, but waiting one more pitch, and swinging 3-1 and hitting a homer is fine? If we are honestly worried about a mad rash of disrespectful behavior breaking out should unwritten rules be done away with, wouldn't it make more sense to simply codify the offending behaviors, and instruct the umpires to eject players who engage in said behaviors?

I feel like we have about three more weeks before the FO, if they're smart, will go in to full-on rebuild mode. Commit completely to it now, and you might be able to shave a year or two off the duration. Starting June 1, assuming no improvement in play, here's what I'd like to see happen Kiriloff at first every day (assuming he can return--full health in 2022 should be the priority) Arraez at second every day Gordon at short every day Polanco at third every day Larnach in left every day Rooker in right every day The Twins should eat the salary on all of the following players in order to trade them--if no trade can be made, they should be DFA'd; Donaldson, Simmons, Cruz, Colome Buxton should also be traded as soon as he is healthy, or you get an offer you're happy with. Rogers, Duffey, and Robles should all be traded as soon as you get a decent offer.

Just saw this, and love it! One minor thing (as those who know me on this board can I attest--I MUST get crazily specific)--it would appear that ads can pop up over the red circle, as that happened to me just as I was about to take the maiden red circle voyage. A small thing to be sure, and if it's complex to fix, certainly not worth it, but as a minor fix, that would be great! Thanks Brock!

My one suggestion--pin the top banner so that it's always there on any page you're on. It made it very easy to navigate back to the homepage. What I've noticed is that without that, you have to scroll all the way back up to navigate to another page, which is mildly frustrating on pages with lost of comments. Otherwise, looks great!

I believe the Twins have scored the bonus runner once, when Buxton went yard in Oakland. That was promptly rendered moot when Baldelli left Colome in for the bottom of the 10th, even though he had coughed up the lead in the 9th, and various Twins infielders forgot how to play defense.

37% increase in pitches from the 28th to the 1st. 43% increase in pitches from the 1st to the 6th. So if he increases his pitches by 40% when he starts on the 11th, that's 82 pitches. From there, he could pitch on May 16 and only need a 25% increase to get to 100 pitches. 20 days to stretch a guy from 30 to 100 pitches seems pretty expeditious to me.

Does this include Buxton? If so--wow!

Berrios pitched the second game of the season, and it was 6 no-hit innings. Donaldson has been worth .5 WAR in 17 games--That's 3 WAR in 102 games, which is worth $30M on the free agent market, and we paid $23M, so seems reasonable. He has an OPS over .800, a wRC+ of 127, and has accounted for 2.8 UZR in his 329 innings with the Twins. He is absolutely not the problem with this team.