twinstalker

He doesn't seem very untouchable.

It would be nice if he proved he could hit low A.

Do I understand the question right, who will get called up first, a guy with no hope vs a guy who will likely be a star? There is zero reason to call up EmRod. Only the failure to trade him in the offseason, along with Jenkins still being held back for service time reasons is a reason why EmRod might be up at the beginning of next season with Jenkins still down.

I'm sure it's been answered, but he can't play in the minors if he's on the 40 man, which he is, during the lockout. Running out of options would just mean he needs to not be optioned in spring training or after that, whenever they get started again.

They just traded Nimmala plus for Soriano, and they weren't going to do anything that wasn't Culpepper (who's not ranked as high) plus another good prospect, of which the Twins only have, imo, Quick. Toronto knows what it's doing. Not so sure about the Twins.

It's worse without Reyes and Hill (and Pena) by a good margin.

What catcher prospects? You mean the ones they can't trade until the WS is over? If the Twins let Houston or Culpepper get in the way of dealing for Neto, they're not very smart. He's got three years after this of team control.

I though he was going to be pretty good, but I wasn't researching prospects as heavily then.

I don't know about that. We have two guys who are/were somewhat old for being promising hitting in bandboxes. If we had any chance of trading one of them as the main piece for Neto, we screwed up. I'm okay not trading Jenkins, but I think Jenkins is 10x the player Culpepper is, 20x what Houston is.

I don't think the Twins could be as dumb as the Tigers were, or at least I hope not. Hope is not a great prospect (yes, ranking services make mistakes, even the same mistakes over and over). River is okay but old, the other is a potential reliever. Milwaukee offered up Luis Pena plus, and that means the Tigers screwed up. So I don't know what you mean, really. Do you mean we could get Luis Pena? Deal.

Walker JenkinsVahn LackeyKaelen CulpepperRiley QuickEduardo TaitHendry MendezCharlee SotoKhadim DiawGabriel GonzalezMarek HoustonEthan WachsmannBrett RenfrowJames EllwangerEmmanuel RodriguezRyan GallagherCJ CulpepperJason ReitzEnrique JimenezBrandon WinokurRicardo Olivar

I wouldn't be too sure about Crane nixing the Abreu deal. I think it's more likely Dana Brown had buyer's remorse, and it would make him look really bad to back out of a deal he'd agreed to. Bring in the owner at that point to be the bad guy. I highly doubt the owner is going to involve himself in a platoon player for setup reliever swap on his own.

The most important predictive stat is K rate. Why wouldn't you include Ks here like normal? I realize you're looking at how well they did, but it makes a big difference to the reader to know whether this means anything. That is, you can place a non-prospect like K. Rosario in here and celebrate what a great hitter he is in the minors, but by ignoring all his strikeouts, you mislead the reader. I like this feature, and it's fun, but ultimately I don't care if someone's a great hitter for Cedar Rapids if I can't see it in a predictive context. It would be like including on ERA for the pitchers but not walks, strikeouts, and homers allowed. Yeah, these pitchers were the best of the month because they allowed the fewest runs. Not really helpful for what we're really interested in. Thanks.

Houston is the most overrated prospect here.

Ignorance is bliss, and I'm not trying to be mean. The Twins gave up far more in Hill than any other team would for Hoffman. The Pirates got Weaver for arguably less, and Weaver is a ton better than Hoffman at the same dollar amount or less.

They lose an extra year of control from early August to late August? These are some fancy new rules. An Aug 1 call-up gets about 60 days of service time, A Sep 1 call-up gets about 30 days. If they continue to be on the active roster forever after, they have six years after this year of team control. In both cases. Now once you start talking about demotions, then yeah, to get under a year of service time by the end of next year, the Aug 1 promotion has to be demoted for 30-ish days more than the Sep 1 promotion. But rookie status doesn't matter in the least wrt service time. It does matter for ROY and the new incentives pertaining to keeping the player up (only Jenkins is a realistic candidate for that, then Lackey).

To be clear, Ramos' expected WAR when they traded him was not horribly far from that number, and Capps was also around his number, so that will go down as one of the worst trades in the 21st century, not just on the Twins. As much as I like Hill and Reyes, their combined expected WAR isn't remotely close to Ramos' at the time of the trade. Hoffman and Kremer's combined number might be less than Capps', but it might be close. Also, the Twins were going to win the division and didn't need a mediocre to average reliever to get them there. They thought "closer" meant something when it didn't/doesn't mean jack. So not only did they make a hugely bad trade, they made it under pretenses that as false as could be.

This is the same for Kremer and, due to salary and rental, Minter, too. The Twins got three pretty bad players and gave up a healthy amount for that. What they did get are guys who've pitched before. Way, way, way too much to give up for this all. Hill and Reyes are two of the less than 7-8 guys I wouldn't give up for anything but a great return. Pena is probably nothing, but I wouldn't give him up as a throw-in for this kind of value. It's a pretty ugly deadline. Did the Twins get what they needed? Probably not, and that answer should be an easy yes for Reyes, Hill, and Pena.

I wonder if Zoll is feeling violated right now. I had a lot more descriptive ways I wanted to say this, but I think I'd be at risk if I did.

That's not a massive price to pay. Twins get rid of Rodriguez, as they should. Diaw and Gallagher are ubiquitous. To me it comes down to Culpepper, and I'd try to trade anyone else there instead of him not named Jenkins or Lackey. I'm not a big Culpepper fan, but the Twins don't have much. Perhaps they could trade Tinney as a PTBNL (he, like Lackey, can't be traded until after WS). To me, this is Culpepper for Greene, and while that's fair, maybe like a lot of Twins fans the Reds could be fooled into thinking EmRod is far better than he'll be. The problem with the Twins is they can't ever pull triggers when they should. They wait too long on players because they're doing well or think the fans have connections with them. The Twins should make such a deal, trade Joe Ryan in the offseason, then trade Hunter Greene at his peak performance with them. They make a profit on Greene. But the Twins would probably be only three games behind in the division and not want to stir up negativity in the fanbase by doing the right thing.

Yeah, he actually had two acceptable plays. Step on first and throw home or go to second knowing there was time to get a slow runner like Raleigh doubled up. He chose the only bad option, and it's not the amount of 1B you've played, it's the amount of infield you've played. Royce has played infield for 20 years. Or maybe it's not his fault because of the time he spent in the OF in the Arizona Fall League in 2019.

Tigers added Max Clark to their team now, and he's the nearest comp to Jenkins, in terms of draft status (HS) and age. Given the impending lockout and possibility it could go all year, I don't know what to think, and that's sort of rare. :-) When this sort of thing ends, owners tend to give in to the player demands on service time, meaning we see Jenkins for a few weeks this year, and the next time he stands in the batter's box, he'll very possibly have over a year of service time in a world where the free agency line is reduced to fve years from six. So, if you want Jenkins called up, be prepared for him to have only four years team control when he plays next. Since Boras is his agent, that means at most four years with the Twins, and since it would be foolish to go that far with him, that might turn out to be only two years before you have to trade him to get good return. Also, wrt trading Larnach for pitching: I do know that if you're trading for and handing the ball to someone who's getting clobbered this year, that's probably a sign you're not understanding what it means when it's simply stated "you need pitching." Minter has struggled recently, Kremer has been getting clobbered all year. Abreu seems to be turning it around, which is why the deal got nixed.

Oh, boy, let's call up a guy who would strike out 40% of the time. Is that what you want?

I've been on the Luke Keaschall train from the moment he arrived in Fort Myers. It was a little early, but I got lucky and my commitment to him as the Twins best-ish prospect after Jenkins got stronger and stronger by the week. I'm less high on him now as a long-term true fixture for the Twins. He can get back to that level by working a lot of things, mainly by getting in the weight room and maybe getting away from the Twins and honing his craft at a place like Driveline. Don't get me wrong, I still like him, and his pitch recognition, strikeout rate, and the way he can square up a ball are big positives (and frankly, why he's in the majors). However, his hard-hit rate is in the 9th percentile of major leaguers. His average exit velocity is 3rd percentile. Crazily, these horrible metrics, combined with his speed, actually give him a few extra (more) base hits! So he's speedy, but he hasn't shown to be a good defensive player. This is problematic when he struggles to hit for power because the only position he's looked decent at is the corner OF, a position that basically requires slugging (LK is at the 12th percentile for xSLG, and even part of that is due to speed). Note, too, that his current bat speed (14th percentile on the year) is pretty much back to last year, where he's more comfortable. So what does this all mean? I think it means he's just a below average starter, both hitting-wise and defensively. And that generally is a pretty bad player, though his positives (K rate, sq up, speed) have him bordering on average right now. I hold out hope, but I'm pretty disappointed that he's not going to be the star I thought he might be. That's really all about not have Statcast data to look at, really, until he made it to the majors. I'm not really sure what happens next.

Given this is a retrospective, that's fair. But before you do that, make sure you know that he's #1 in WPA for July. That the true measure of "meaningful hits" or walks or whatever. Of course, it's hard to beat someone who improves his WPA by 1.5 or so in one AB.