mazeville

Nontender Plouffe and Milone. I mean, unless you can find a trade partner for Plouffe, it's hard to imagine spending $8 million on Plouffe after his performance last year. The Twins should have traded him when they had the chance.

Molitor. And they're on one-year deals so I'm guessing he doesn't need Falvey's OK ...

I don't mind this at all. I like the Dozier trade idea and the Santana trade idea. I probably keep my FA signings to a minimum while focusing on low risk/high reward guys for next year. This team is not going to contend next year, and I still focus on building a core of strong, young players and acquiring young pitching. I might sign Castro simply because we have so little catching. But I keep Escobar at short. And I definitely go with youth in the rotation, including May.

You don't actually disagree all that much with Reusse. In fact, "mid-70s wins" would not have gotten the Twins into fourth place in the AL Central. The Chicago White Sox won 78 games. I think he's fully illustrating the massive, uphill battle that the new CBO will have. This team won just 59 games. 59 games! They could improve by 20 full games and still not get to .500 and would indeed be just in fourth place in the AL Central. Sure, the offense was excellent. But that pitching ... man.

I agree it's tough watching these elite prospects perform while ours do not. But that doesn't render Buxton a flop, either. Did he have a disappointing start to his major league career? Absolutely. Was he a flop? Nope. Players with less than a year's worth of major league experience and very little experience at AAA or even AA cannot be declared a flop.

The lesson here isn't patience with "the team," but patience with a player. I, too, am impatient with this team at this point. I want them to win yesterday. I'm sick of the losing. I'm tired of the excuses. I'm REALLY tired of the team taking half-hearted efforts at trades and free agent signings. So I get the lack of patience when it comes to the TEAM. But individual players deserve patience even on a team that doesn't. Calling Byron Buxton a flop when he had less than a year's experience in the majors -- and was called up too early from AA -- was silly. He needed more time. And now he is clearly showing he can play in the majors.

Good luck, Mr. Falvey. We wish you immense success. In fact, we plead daily for your immense success.

In some ways the Twins are actually ahead of where the Cubs were back when Epstein and Co. took over -- they already have a cache of young talent here that just needs to be reconfigured a bit and supplemented with strong pitching. But I think the fundamental thing is that the team needs patience, and it needs to be smart about draft picks and aggressive in making trades and signing international free agents. And Falvey must be willing to take risks. Those are the things the Cubs did the past few years.

Seriously damages it. No team is going to give him a long-term deal now.

What are you even talking about? First, 1987 was built largely on luck because the team got into the playoffs with just 85 wins. The year before that the team won 71 games. So that was a 14-game improvement. That was nice. But consider this: This year's team will win, what, 58 games? Add 14 to that and you get ... 72 wins. Let's double that, and say they can somehow win 28 more games next year than they won this year. That's ... 86 wins. Fair to say they'd be in the wild card question. But they'd be in second place at best in all six MLB divisions with 86 wins based on this year's records. 28 wins is a LOT of games. They would need to add nearly three Mike Trouts to the roster to make up for that gap. It's not going to happen. This team has NOT had an aversion to signing players. They signed Ricky Nolasco, Phil Hughes and Ervin Santana to big deals and only one of them could be considered a success. Yet those signings came when the team still had some rebuilding to do and wasn't ready to take the next step into contention. AND those signings were largely of mid-tier free agents that should generally be avoided. In any event, I was saying that no single veteran will take this particular team to the playoffs next year, and in fact no two or three veterans would do the trick. So it does not make sense for the new POBO to go out and trade prospects for veterans and to sign free agents (assuming, that is, any free agents would want to come play for a 100-loss team ...). This is a rebuild job. Now, theoretically this team has the talent in place to make a relatively quick turnaround. But that pitching staff ... woof.

For heaven's sakes. This is the problem the Twins got themselves into years ago. Once again, no free agent will fix this team. No veteran will fix this team. They should not, absolutely not, trade prospects for veterans unless they have a logjam (like at first) and the player they receive in return is also young. They need to build for the long term. They need to look at trading guys like Ervin Santana and Brian Dozier for more prospects and they should find a way to fix their logjam at first base/DH/3B and they should also consider a long-term solution at short. This team's needs are so numerous that it's not even funny. But "opening the checkbook" ain't gonna help. Not at all.

Derek Falvey has grown up in a completely different baseball world than Terry Ryan."High marks" in one decade are not the same as they are now.High marks from the scouting departments and player development in the current generation of MLB front office means an awful lot as to the character and skills of the person.The same as what happened in Terry Ryan's generation. Also, from the Pioneer Press article:One of Falvey’s associates raved about his “people skills,” calling him “an outstanding person” and a “communicator with an analytic mind-set.” Follow-ups to the interview.... Except that TR got "high marks" last year. As far as I know, last year is still the same decade as this year. And LOTS of people say that TR has people skills and is an outstanding person. People LOVE the guy. Every single thing Jim Pohlad has said and done have pointed to only one thing:Change.Step 1 seems to be completed.Step 2 is the person hired for Step1 to hire a GM.Keeping a manager to assist in a turnover is an establish SOP in every business. It is certainly not SOP in the baseball business. You hire a new POBO, that POBO gets to hire a manager. Highly, highly common. I'm not anti-Pohlad, not by a long shot. But forcing your new POBO to keep a manager is short-sighted. Worse, it's a sign that the ownership is taking a more hands-on role than it should. My hope is that Pohlad basically lied when he said that Molitor would return. (It wouldn't be the first time, either) And again, this team has been AWFUL for years. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt whatsoever when it comes to their decisions. I refuse to give it to them because glowing media reports say the new POBO is highly regarded.

That doesn't tell me a thing why my comments are absurd. Here are two things that are absurd about your comment: First, you assume that getting "high marks for his interaction with the scouting and player-development departments" automatically necessitates POBO material. Those "high marks" don't tell me anything. You know who else got high marks for such things? Terry Ryan. Second, it's absurd to dismiss any question about this hiring. The Twins are about to break the team record for losses. Its owner refuses to let the new POBO name his own manager. It will finish last for the fifth time in six seasons. I'm not going to suddenly ignore all of this team's bad moves simply because this one looks good. I'll give the hire this: It's a gutsy move. But what will ultimately make this move successful is if the ownership enables Falvey to make the overhaul he needs to make — rather than simply be a new name atop the same organization.

I sure hope they're not hiring the young guy so he wouldn't be as strong and therefore wouldn't make the top-to-bottom changes this organization needs. In other words, my fear here is that Falvey would be more prone to keep Antony and many others in the Twins' org while simply employing some of the strategies he used in Cleveland. In my view, this team needs an absolute overhaul of its front office. Keep some people if you need, but the new POBO has to bring a new culture and a new way of doing things. Period.

At this point you're nitpicking. The broader point is the same: The Twins have not developed a good starting pitcher in a long time, and that's very, very bad.

I guess. We won't know if this is a good hire for a few years. I like the idea of the Twins thinking outside of the box. I like the fact that he has a strategy for developing pitchers. And it's GOOD to get new blood. But this is a big, big risk.

Um, you still have to develop pitchers. And there's no question the team's track record on this is brutal. He is absolutely right. The Twins do not develop pitching well enough to be competitive.

The fundamental difference between 2016 and 2011, when the Twins first stumbled into oblivion, is the fact that this year's team has assets that could provide for a quicker turnaround. There is the young core of players who could definitely improve. There are players like Brian Dozier and Ervin Santana who could be flipped for younger players who could speed up the rebuild. In addition, the team has the top pick in the draft along with the most money to spend on prospects next year. I'm not nearly as pessimistic as I was back in 2011 when the team had few tradable assets and no high quality prospects. That was bad.

Indeed, go youth. But Trevor May needs to be a starter. Clearly, this bullpen thing ain't working, and the Twins need starters badly.

Right. So how do you do that? Free agency? The Arizona Diamondbacks went out and got one of the top free agent pitchers on the market, then traded for Shelby Miller, and look where that got them. This is a 100-loss team. Clayton Kershaw wouldn't fix the pitching. This team has to fix the defense and get better pitchers if it is going to improve. And if you look at some of the best rebuilding jobs over the years -- like, say, the Cubs -- they all accelerated their rebuilds by making trades of players they should supposedly had kept. For the Twins, that's Brian Dozier. While it's tough to lose that kind of production, the team didn't have any better of a record in the second half, when he was playing out of his mind, than they did in the first half, when he was awful. There is no way -- NO WAY -- the Twins can fix this problem simply by spending money on some free agent pitchers. That defense is too bad. They have to take every step possible to improve. That means trading Dozier.

You didn't watch the same team I did that year. They were awful and it wasn't just injuries. Everything about that year suggested they were in for a very long rebuilding process. And simply blowing $$$ on free agents was not going to fix that. In any event, that's not proof. It's mindless speculation. There was plenty -- PLENTY -- of reason to give Bill Smith the boot. The Nishioka signing. The JJ Hardy trade. The Delmon Young trade.

Do you have any evidence of why "most of us think Pohlad fired Smith"? Because that's unfair and may well be wrong. The Twins were in BAD, BAD shape in 2011 -- worse shape than they are now, by far -- and there was no way on earth that team was spending its way out of the problem. Also, Bill Smith damn well needed to be fired. His trades were awful and set that team back years.

FWIW: I don't like to see people get fired. I believe baseball managers have less power than coaches in other sports like basketball or football. I get that Molitor is a smart baseball man. But all of that should go out the window when a team loses 100 games, as the Twins will this season, and the team is on its fifth horrible season in six years. At the very least, you let the manager go so the new regime can insert its own guy. That's a complete no brainer. I still believe -- strongly -- that this job should be good and attractive to a lot of candidates. But I don't see how or why ownership would put that yolk around the new POBO's neck. As a side note, in the same column Reusse also endorsed the Royals' Piccolo for the new POBO position in part because he knows what to do on a budget, rather than any Cubs guy who came from high-profile, high-budget jobs. BS. I want the best guy, period. And I think it's high time this team start acting more like the mid-market franchise that it is, rather than simply try to work on a shoestring. That was Terry Ryan's big problem: He spent so many years perfecting the art of working on a shoestring that he had no idea what to do when the team got some resources.

He ain't going to be the POBO. GM? I guess. But it would be an utter shock if the Twins hired him as the POBO. It would be an utterly stupid move and a big middle finger to season ticket holders and other fans who are tired of seeing this team lose year after year. They're not that idiotic.

Brian Dozier is a good dude. Nice video. But it won't matter diddly if the team keeps losing and refuses to invest in the product.