twinstalker

As Manfred was at the podium about to announce the pick, I was repeating aloud Riley Quick, Riley Quick, Riley Quick I really wanted Casen Bodine to drop in the moments after the first Twins pick (and after Cunningham, Neyens, and Irish went) and then was both intrigued and scared by Stevenson, but Quick was the guy I had hopes for at 36 all week.

He's saying Houston doesn't have enough power for pitchers to be careful with. It's not all about HR power, so we'll see. He very well may be right, could possibly be wrong. Houston's scariest line item is his isolated power of .023 at the Cape Cod league. That's a serious problem indicated. College stats are very difficult to interpret, but CCBL stats are very helpful in any projection, mostly because it's better competition with wood bats. Frankly, in college, his college K rate is too high for someone with no power, and that's difficult to say about anyone with only a 15.4% K rate. It reminds of HSer Noah Miller. This is a bad pick, I think, and will depend on whether he swings in the zone, makes contact in the zone, and what his exit velocities are. These are unknowns that if they resolve in positive directions, I'd change my opinion. For all my doubts about Culpepper last year, I never said that (bad pick) about him, even though I did question it and preferred someone else. I did say it about DeBarge and Amick and the first three picks as a package. I think I'm saying it about Houston. I just don't see a path to being a starting player, except for the unknowns, which you have to see for any first rounder, much more so for the 16th pick in a good draft. For what it's worth, my pick (Witherspoon) was sniped by the Red Sox but I would have taken HS SS Cunningham or Auburn C/OF Irish or maybe HS SS (3B) Neyens. Keith Law, though, thinks he'll be a starter https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6490241/2025/07/14/mlb-draft-2025-day-1-picks-results-analysis/ Pick 16: Minnesota Twins — Marek Houston, SS, Wake Forest Live blog analysis: Marek Houston is one of the safest picks in the draft, as he’s definitely a shortstop and seems extremely likely to hit enough to at least be a regular for someone in the majors. He started to hit the ball a little harder this year, although his career-high 15 homers were aided more than a little bit by Wake Forest’s Manhattan studio apartment-sized ballpark. He hit for average and a ridiculous .465 OBP on the Cape last summer as well, a very positive sign since that came with the wood bat. I don’t see a star here, but I do see an everyday player. (my edit: Law should be ashamed of himself. That .465 means nothing. What's important is he hit .306 with a mere two doubles of powers to yield a slug of .329, and even that's influenced by batted ball data) Keith Law scouting report: Houston is a no-doubt shortstop who’s boosted his performance and some of his batted-ball characteristics just enough to give him a chance to get into the top 10 in a draft class that’s weak up top. He set career bests in homers and steals this year while playing plus defense once again. The power is kind of an illusion, as Wake Forest plays in a shoebox, and 11 of Houston’s 15 homers this year came at home, mostly wall-scrapers that would be doubles or outs in a typical ballpark. He does have very strong hand-eye coordination and almost never whiffs on pitches in the zone, with a short swing that had him over a 50 percent groundball rate as a sophomore but down to 44 percent this year. He’s a high-floor, lower-ceiling prospect, unless someone foresees more power in his future than I do. He is a definite shortstop who hits the ball hard enough to keep his average up against good pitching, but probably doesn’t get above 10-12 homers a year. (my edit: the biggest part of this is that Law says Houston "hits the ball hard enough." That's the main question.)

I got it and laughed.

LOL. It doesn't matter how much you say it or how logical it is...

Mick Abel isn't enough for either. And Painter is kind of sucking, though it's his first year back. Twins might have a shot there.

Nimmala isn't remotely on the table for anyone. Yesavage is very hit and miss. His motion and delivery is...well, I don't even know how to describe it. It's close to straight overhead and "hard." It appears to have little chance of repeatability, affecting control and making command a pipe dream. It comes at the batter fast, making college and low minors hitters uncomfortable. He has a chance, but I'm not as high on him as I was prior to watching him pitch. Orelvis Martinez is in no way a major league hitter. We should know that, right? Tiedemann almost certainly will end up in the pen. They also have Alan Roden, who's a better Larnach best case but more likely the same guy in a year. The Jays system was seemingly empty to start the year, aside from Nimmala, and that's why 1st round pick Yesavage is listed at 2. There have been some developments, from what I understand, but I'd be surprised if any are worthy of giving them Duran. The Twins would be wise to do anything it can to acquire Nimmala, but I don't really think it's possible. Perhaps they could give Duran and EmRod for Nimmala and Roden, but I doubt any team would accept EmRod as an impactful part of a deal for a future star like Nimmala. If the Twins take Orelvis Martinez back in any deal, it's further evidence they don't know what they're doing on the hitting side.

I don't understand in the least why the Twins put Severino on their 40-man last year, unless they truly didn't ever need that 40th spot. Basically, they wanted to give St. Paul a AAA slugger, I guess, and it was possible or they were told he would try elsewhere. They weren't losing any future MLBer by losing him. He was never a prospect in the sense that he would eventually do anything to help in the majors. And it really scares me if they thought he might be. It very possibly comes down to the organization problem of not understanding how to identify or develop hitting. One that scares the heck out of me as they once again draft a new batch.

You are focusing on the wrong prospects. Caissie will be pretty bad, for instance.

Amazing concept that Larnach is bad vs lhp and that it's made no sense to use him that way all year. You would have had to watch him or read box scores or look at splits for the entire year to realize this is affecting his stats overall. Now do Jacque Jones. :-) (sorry, sounds mean, but it's so obvious -- article needs to be about "why")

The key, sorry, is the decrease in strikeout rate. If we want to talk about how well he hits, then we need to talk about his current lack of HR power. He should be developing that before he goes any further. Most important, though, is reducing both his strikeout and walk rate. They're both at 19% in AA. The K rate is very good for his age/level, but when it's closer to 15%, then we know he's truly conquered the level. The walk rate is a problem, probably. Again, it's not going to translate as such to MLB. He can have a high walk rate in MLB but it has nothing to do with his AA rate, other than he can maybe distinguish some balls from strikes. The way he'll have a high walk rate in MLB, besides a decent eye, is to absolutely mash in the zone. That's not what's happening in AA currently. To wit, he's batting .284 with a .418 slug. There is nothing really impressive about that, other than he's doing it at a young age. He needs to get better. He's had all of 84 PAs at AA at age 20, so it's super impressive he can hold his own at that age, but he needs to change his best to be promoted. He has to start crushing. If his next month is 30 games at .330 with close to a .500 slug and 14% K-rate, then he's ready. If he does what he's been doing for another month, then he's not. The chicken/egg on the improvement will be K-rate/crush. We know enough to know Jenkins can take a walk. We don't need to look at that again for any reason ever until computing his OBP in MLB. Or if it's way too high at AA/AAA, which is absolutely an indication of passivity and therefore problems.

He looks off-balance. When he hits a HR, it's barely reaching the fences, it's all arms. They should be sailing out of the park with his power.

Julien is their best pick in the 18th? A random hole in the draft, along with spot 20.

And by that we mean compare the age to true prospects at the level, not just average age of competition. For example, Kaelen Culpepper is 22.5 years old, which is over two years younger than his AA competition, but guys who will be good or average in MLB are generally at least that young. This is a big rest of season for Culpepper, and it will tell us what to expect. The biggest number to look at is his AA strikeout rate (K/PA), and for a guy like Culpepper, we'll want this to be as close to 15% as possible. It's higher than that now (early), but a few quick peeks seem to find it's trending the right way. Gonzalez has another issue, and that is the Jose Miranda issue. He appears to be able to put balls in play and so his K rate is misleading. If you stick him between Jose Miranda and Kirby Puckett, he's obviously closer to Miranda, but the question is which direction will he trend? He was a favorite of mine in the Seattle system, and I was very happy we got him for Polanco, but I think his outcome is highly variable. If the Twins blow it up, he might get a chance by next year. Note that he's a very different player and hitter than Culpepper, but still it's somewhat important/interesting that he's slightly more than one year younger than KC, offset a little by his much longer time as a professional.

One prospect in the group (Gonzalez), two if you include the HM De Andrade.

I'm not sure what you mean by young. Everybody's young in low A. Actual low A prospects you can dream on are even younger. Fort Myers, unfortunately, has zero real prospects, other than perhaps a rehabber here and there. Dameury Pena was the one possible bright star, and he's fallen off a cliff. The ballpark and league as a whole are generally detrimental to hitting statistics, But still, this is probably another indication of how the system both has no clue how to identify hitters or develop them. They now have a team in low A that doesn't have a single hitting prospect you can have any hope for in the future. That is so rare it's glaring. I've always adjusted for the park and league when doing rankings, but there's nothing to adjust from if, as you say (and I've verified), no one is batting over .212 except a guy batting .250 without an extra-base hit. Rumors are the Twins have changed up their Latin scouting. Hopefully the current crop in the DSL are not like the recent ones. That's something we probably won't know until they see the states.

I fear otherwise. I think these are the type of names to expect. And I just realized that the absolute slowest team in the majors is going to lose its only speedy guys other than Buxton.

Or they could take Raya off the 40, put literally any other pitcher on it, and start that pitcher.

Bear with me. Lee's advantage is that he has competitive ABs. Last year as Keaschall was climbing my Twins prospect ranking and having already blown past EmRod, I kept him behind Lee (for the time being). Now, I love Keaschall, but here is my very paraphrased 2024 synopsis of Lee: Lee is a major leaguer, no doubt. He won't hit like a star and will likely be a second division starting infielder, defined as bottom 15 at his position among starters. His K rate was very good at AA (AAA, too, but it's trickier to analyze/interpret), meaning he'll have a true chance of making something happen each AB. He is a sound and steady defender. Like most, he'll have a few pop-up years, and probably one of them will lead to an all-star berth. I would imagine that's not what most wanted to hear. I mean, there are people out there expecting great things from EmRod, so I understand that unrealistic hope exists. But my synopsis is both very realistic and, I believe, the reason why Brooks Lee got the chance above others. Julien and Miranda are rather amateurish by comparison. If you had four Lee's among a Buxton, a realized Jenkins and Keaschall, and a couple of others I'm not sure I see in the system, you'd likely have a very good team. As for my putting him ahead of Keaschall, it only had to do with Keaschall's risk, and even though Keaschall hasn't done much since my mid/late 2024 rankings to change anything, he's truly a gem for this hitting-starved system. Keaschall will be the Twins best offensive player soon enough, which unfortunately still doesn't say a lot. It will be a constant race with Buxton's health to determine that. The system's offense ranking is going to be Buxton, Keaschall, and Jenkins in some order followed by a large, large gap, perhaps down to middling/mediocre. And while that's going to include Lee, probably, he's still a necessary piece.

This was as good an example of what's wrong with the Twins as any. The ABs weren't competitive. Skubal wasn't saved by low BABIP. And here's the thing. When the Twins hitters are seemingly good/competent and when they're bad, they have no idea how to approach the really good pitchers. It's been that way this whole century and has led to playoff embarrassments. Except for maybe Gausman. So by upvoting this, you're basically hiding your head in the sand. Another excuse. What does it matter which pitcher's on the mound? Yeah, you're going to do worse against a Skubal, but that doesn't mean you should be non-competitive if you are a playoff team. And if you're not a playoff team, well, maybe that's the point of the article.

I'm against this.

How do you procrastinate?

John Klein truly belongs on a hot sheet. He's pitched 14 inning his last three outs, giving up 2 runs on 6 hits, 2 walks (3 hbp!!!!) with 19 strikeouts. However, prior to that, his line 44 ip 43 h 29 r 18 er 15 bb 55 k. That's giving up about 6 runs per 9ip, which is terrible. Errors allowed his ERA to be better (3.68), but this one one reason ERA isn't predictive of future ERA, especially with a bad fielding team. Good pitchers get out of tough spots regularly. He's interesting enough to keep an eye on, though. Fedko is a fine organizational player. He has fine stats for AA at a way too old of age (25) to be considered a prospect. Even with a second time round at AA he's striking out too much for a 22 yr old non power hitter to be considered a real prospect. Like Keirsey, he may someday contribute a very small role, but it's not worth discussing. He may benefit from a Twins sell-off, but he might be too far away for that to eventually get him any real number of MLB ABs. I think it's possible for anybody throwing mid 90s to find something one day and soon be unhittable. I have zero reason to believe this is Chaney, who's been dumped and demoted. Imagine how many players we'd have on a hot sheet if the Twins said to them all that they're going to demote them one level. I would have left Chaney off here...for integrity's sake.

Culpepper is a huge unknown. His success has been at levels where's he's the same age as his competition, and that's a negative indicator if he's not doing it as a younger player. Foremost, as a college player, he doesn't have a lot of time to be younger. So he started at low A (same age), crushed in a small sample, got promoted to A+ (1.3 yrs younger) and sucked. Repeating A+ he crushed (same-ish age) and is now early in his promotion to AA (younger). How good Culpepper is going to be is going to be foretold by how well he does this year at AA. He's eight games in, so it's early. Here's what's not early: 2024 low A: 4.9% -- way too good for level 2024 high A: 18.3% -- 2025 high A: 16.2% -- 2025 AA: 21.1% If you look at this in the proper context, Culpepper's K-rate is good and predictive with some other indicators of future success. His walk rate is in the range you want it (not too low, not too high). If KC ends this AA season with a K-rate under 20%, it bodes well. If he Ks at 16% this whole AA season, he's a more athletic Brooks Lee, which means he should be an average MLB starter. Lee's not even average yet, but that's where he's headed soon, and Culpepper's K rate will determine if he is as well. But if he stays at 21% for this AA season, it's a lot more dicey.

Maybe if the Twins had done something more than beat four bad teams in half the years of a decade, they'd be remembered with more respect. It's not that it's Minnesota, as much as you'd apparently like to imply that, it's that the Twins never really did anything while playing against an inferior schedule.

Rod Carew's first batting title wasn't in 1972.