TwinsWonWithHunter

Buxton has a Hall-of-Famer inside of him? He has been at best projected to be a Devon White-type.

Why is Lynn an underperforming malcontent? He had a wretched April, to be sure, but was more or less serviceable after that. I don't recall him saying anything untoward, or being disruptive.

The Rodney trade I don't get. It, more than the others, may have been the motivator for Santana's remarks, although I agree with Nick that Ervin--this year--has done nothing to merit the right to speak up on behalf of the clubhouse. Rodney is who he is, and has performed as he has for much of his career. He is sort of a high-wire closer who lives on the heart-attack side of drama. We knew that when we signed him. His age is not yet a hindrance, although it could become one at any day. But, or so, what we did was, we traded our closer, one we had a very cheap option on for next year, for a 21-year old on the shelf from TJ surgery. What message does that send to the clubhouse? That we do not need an established closer for the rest of this season (a point I will concede), nor will we need one next year. Or, that we have a void at closer now ... just add that to our growing list of voids heading into 2019. That is the head-scratcher for me: why did we trade next year's closer for a prospect who, if it all works out, might contribute in the year 2021? Again, none of this to glorify Rodney. But to acknowledge that he is an established closer, is still contributing, and is signed through '19. And we just gave him away for, as Nick described it, a lotto ticket. The front office's plan for 2019 is the great mystery at this point. And not one of the six trades we have made (so far) seems to speak, at all, to competing/contending next year. That is disheartening.

Nice article, would just add that we cannot count on building around either Sano or Buxton. No Twins fan wants to admit it, but it could be that those players just don't pan out. Regardless of what else we do in the off-season, if we just give Buxton his job back next spring without a viable Plan B in CF, that will be inexcusable. It does not matter what ceiling we want or hope for with Buxton. It matters only, can he produce, can he hit, can he be counted upon. So far, that answer is No.

I think that what is setting in for most readers on this site is that we are just not a very good baseball team, and that we may have been fooled but what is now looking like last year's false positive. Because let's be candid: 9-15 is a horrible month. If we keep up that clip all year, we will go 61-101. And it won't do to count on feasting on the dregs of the division. It may well be that we are also one of the dregs. There is just no way to sugarcoat 9-15. This team looks so much like the 2016 squad--uninspired play/no fire, horrible starting pitching, no ability to hit with RISP, inept fielding, bad bullpen, and a front office flipping pitchers on and off the waiver wire, or up and down from AAA, pretty well daily. This is looking more and more like Total System Failure II. And if that assessment is thought to be premature, or overly dramatic, then when can we reasonably make that claim -- May 15, June 1? How much more of this do we have to watch before we call it like we see it? We've all seen A LOT of bad baseball since 2011 (and from 1993 to 2000). We know what it looks like, and this year, 2018, is bad.

Nick, good job calling this like it is. Your Total System Failure remark is on the spot: this team looks more and more like the '16 squad by the day. I was curious coming out of Spring Training what kind of identity this team would have. There seemed to have been quite a few assumptions out of the national media that a) we would be improved over last year, we were a lock for (at least) 2nd place in the division, and c) we would absolutely be in the mix for a play-off spot. And since we won 85 games last year, it would stand to reason that a conservative win total expectation would be about 90. 90+ win teams, however, kind of know who they are, what their strengths are. But what did we really know about this team? We knew that we added two starters who give you six innings, nothing more. We knew that we added some bullpen arms, and that those same arms should signal at least a marginal improvement over the arms we ended last season with. Finally, we knew we had a DH who we could likely count on for about 30 home runs. But, were any of these additions game changers? Decent starting pitchers of the six-inning variety are, I am sad to say, nothing more than replacement-level. Bullpen arms come and go, come and go, and can be had throughout the season for a song. And 30 homers out of DH: one suspects that if we just had the patience to trot Vargas out there every day, we would have those numbers anyway. Hindsight is 20/20, and many of us lauded some of our team's off-season moves. But the returns after one month are plainly evident: the additions have not improved the club. I'd like to put this another way. If we go, say, 66-96 this year, what does that tell us about our whiz-bang front office? How then we will assess their first full off-season at the helm? Because as the calendar turns to May tonight, we are staring down a very bad baseball team that, at this point, has to be looked at through the lens of "This is what Falvey and Levine have delivered." It is time to begin that conversation.

I think it comes down to, going forward, will the Twins be better with Dozier, or better off without him? It is always a risky proposition to project replacement players, or in this case our cache of SS prospects (partnering with Polanco shifted to 2B). I don't advocate paying a player because they somehow deserve it for what they done. They have already gotten paid for what they have done. What is required I think is a cold, objective calculus. There are always other factors. But it is a tough sell to say we would be better off without a 2B in the prime of his career who has hit 75 HR the last two years. We'd have to really trade in some rhetorical gymnastics to make that kind of case.

In a word, depressing. These are the kinds of moves we made back in the '90s, when we were just looking for bodies and arms because the game requires nine men on the field. I'm handicapping this year's squad at about 69-93.

The window is absolutely open this year. But the team needs reinforcements. Houston stared at the window for two seasons (2015, 2016) before coming to terms with the fact that it is not enough to count on your young corps. It has to be augmented with veteran leaders. They need to sign a front-end starter and a veteran bat, and then probably need to double down on those same efforts at the trade deadline. I would go so far as to say that, in order for the Twins to be playing in the World Series this year, it will take a roster that has on it 5-7 players who right now are not even in the organization.

Buxton sure looks like he will be a superstar. But, let's face it: he has only hit well in 1 month of one season (2016), and 3 months of another (2017). And for the first 90 games last year - no small sample - he was utterly lost at the plate. So let's not roll out the anointing oils just yet. Let him hit like a real big leaguer for a full year first.

This is probably the first time I have ever suggested that the Twins do not spend money, but I am against signing Darvish. I don't think he is worth $200 million. There are only a handful of true aces in all of baseball. Verlander, Scherzer, Bumgarner. An argument could be made for one or two others. In (relative) recent history, we have had aces in 1987-1988, 1991, and 2004-2007. These horses just don't come around often. But then you have this next tier of "top of the rotation" guys --not aces, but guys that fit into the "1" slot on a staff. Darvish qualifies as that. But he is not appreciably better than the other available starters out there. All of whom, Arietta excepting, will command far less money. Meaning, at the end of the day, if we get Alex Cobb for five years, we will look back at having made a sound investment if he can win 65 games in that time. No one can reasonably argue that Darvish would win any more than that. But Cobb will come cheaper. This is a long way of saying that, as long as the Twins refuse to announce what their upcoming season's payroll will be - which they have never done - we can only assume that it will be modest. So it is tough to advocate for supreme top dollar unless that player is a True Ace or a generational talent. So I am not on the Darvish train, for the Twins, as a free agent signing.

I am a firm believer that teams should not "swap out" the pitcher at the top of their rotation. An example--although not a parallel in terms of the quality of pitchers being compared to in this case Darvish and E Santana--is when, a few years ago, the Phillies traded for Roy Halladay and then, a day later, traded Cliff Lee. So were the Phillies then sizeably, appreciably better? No. Their GM at the time all but admitted that. Back to the Twins. The rotation, by all accounts, is a weak spot. Signing Yu Darvish would improve it. But then trading away the one tried and true dependable holdover puts us more or less back where we started: with only one tried and true veteran starter. So it is a simple case of aďdition combined with subtraction leaving you still high and dry.

As strong an argument by Don Walcott as I've ever read for Morris making the HOF. It's not cherry-picking when the stats back up the claims. Morris was a true ace. There are three franchises that hoisted WS trophies that would not have done so without Morris. He literally put those 3 teams on his back, ala Bumgarner a few years ago. Any time a starting pitcher throws an epic post-season game, he is, invariably in real time on the broadcast, compared to Morris. Every time. Most recently Verlander in the ALCS. Morris is the gold standard for post season starting pitchers from his time until now. And it's not like he's a sentimental favorite. He jilted his long-time franchise after 13+ seasons, infuriated the Twins and their fans by opting out of a 3-year deal after 1 season, and was looked at as nothing more than a hired gun by and in Toronto. But give the man his due. He belongs in Cooperstown, I sure think!

Another note on myth 1. Not to kick up an old tired wound but ... In Dec 02, the Twins non-tendered David Ortiz. Why? To save a little over a million dollars. I remember the discussions well. The Twins had a young, power-hitting left-handed hitter who was their best power hitter since Hrbek. He (Ortiz) had just come off a 400 at-bat, 20 HR season. Even the most conservative and measured estimates concluded that, if you give him 550 at bats, he'll hit about 30 HR, drive in 90+. But, he was arbitration-eligible, and was projected to bring in somewhere from 1.5 to 2 million. So, the Twins (penny counters), came up with a rationalization. We'll let Ortiz go. Make Matt LeCroy the nominal DH, pay him about 500K. LeCroy can probably give us 15 HR, 60 RBI. And we will platoon him with "the bench"--a bunch of guys who can spell DH for a game here and there, keep our options open, keep guys fresh. And when it's all said and done, the DH slot will probably be in the ballpark, statwise, of the projected Ortiz numbers. And if it's a little short, We'll make it up in the aggregate on the defensive end, since our rotating DH slot guys are pretty decent when they play their field positions. Whereas Ortiz can only play one position, and he is sort of a field liability. So, we can save about 1.5 million in 2003, and we will have more day-to-day rotational options. It's hard to put a price on that! The argument had so many angles to it that you could almost buy it in real-time. Almost. And I am not stretching the truth one jot. What I just described is how the Twins sold that bill of goods during the 2002/2003 off-season. The elephant in the room of course is that we knowingly let an up and coming power hitter walk, and we did it to keep a dollar. The same family owns the Twins. They are not going to increase payroll beyond some nominal tick.

Last amendment, what we received for Viola ... (Aguilera and Tapani; and David West, who pitched well in the '91 ALCS for those who delve into the arcane)

Amendment: E Santana His stats for 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2017 are all but identical: 32-33 starts, 16-17 wins, 200+ innings. 2017 does not really stand out for E Santana other than to punctuate his consistency for more than a decade. It certainly qualifies as one of the better years of his career—in the top 4 using these standard stats at least. But not an over-the-moon career year. Those types would be more the domain of Puckett ’88, Viola ’88, Radke ’97, J Santana ’04, Morneau ’06, and Mauer ’09.

I would also add that the last 2 aces we developed -- Viola and J Santana -- we traded away when they became too "expensive" by team standards. Those two combined to win three Cy Youngs for us (and the former was a WS MVP). Not to quibble with what we received for Viola, but to rather say that we have at least a 30-year history of not even keeping our own aces, and with the exception of the Morris signing, which was something of a fluke, we've never gone out and bought one.

On Myth 1,2010-2011 were outlier years rather than the norm. And the Twins had just moved in to Target Field, so there was that boost. The Twins continue to count pennies by doing things like leveraging Park's finders fee against each season's payroll. This team has also never--never--publically stated what the following season's payroll will be. There is no real basis that I can see for an expectation of a sizeable leap in dollars. On Myth 2, we absolutely need (I think!) a frontline starter, but because we don't spend top dollar, it makes acquiring one quite the challenge. There are not any Jack Morris's willing to take a hometown discount for the privilege of pitching for us for one year. Finally, 2017 was less a career year for Santana than one of his typical good ones. He would need to go about 19-5 to have a career year. 15-8 or so is good but not any defining, singular statement.

Lost to the mists of time: the Twins clinched at 85-72, with 7 games to play. They then mailed in the last 5 and finished 85-77. I have often wondered why those 5 losses seemingly account for so much in the "worst" champion debate. What if they had won all 5? Would we have this debate at all. Of course the '88 team was "better"--they won 91 games. And finished 13 GB! I'll take the '87 team every time, thank you very much

Santana was an excellent signing. But our best signings ever were prior to '91: Jack Morris and Chili Davis. Had Erv (or if he does in the future) led us to a WS title it would be a different story.

The front office made a mistake when they sold at the deadline. Which is not to say I thought the Twins would play so well the last 2 months. The point is, however, that the players (and manager) proved the front office wrong. The front office, in effect, said, team, you no longer need your closer. Because there won't be meaningful games to close. And you no longer need that 4th starter we just added, because we are just not good enough to bother having him. The team, however, responded by rubbing the front office's nose in it. When a front office sells, and then the team wins anyway, then the front office was wrong. It's not about hindsight, or livelihoods, et al. But that the front office said, this team cannot win this year, and that the front office was wrong in that assessment

This has been the most insightful thread of the Falvey era. It is time for fans to take this front office to task for a shamefully negligent off-season when the 2016 product--which was a lousy joke--mandated sweeping roster reconstruction.

This is not a win for Falvey. He took over the worst team in baseball, one that sports the worst rotation in the history of the franchise. It is also a team that has had a sucking chest-wound of a leadership void since Hunter retired. To date, he has replaced one mediocre catcher with another, albeit one who "frames" well, which is a way of saying he helps his pitchers better than some others do. OK. If that was our only problem last year--that our catchers did not "frame" well ... So, now we are supposed to venerate Falvey for standing his ground? He is to be applauded for hardballing the league? Just what is he protecting, the sanctity of his 59-win club? I have no real opinion on whether he should trade Dozier. What I do think, however, is that when you win 59 games, you turn the roster over. Period. Oh well. The catcher frames well. Look out, October baseball!

In all friendliness, I have to take an eraser to Nick's penciled-in rotation. No way do we roll into 2017 with the same re-treads who made up the worst 2016 MLB rotation by far, and who have the dubious distinction of comprising the most regrettable staff in Minnesota franchise history. Pohlad did not fire Ryan to maintain business as usual. 1. MLB proven and capable front-line ready starter acquired in trade for Dozier. 2. Significant FA signing. 3. Santana. 4. MLB proven, legitimate starter acquired in trade for prospects. 5. Open competition among the leftovers. I count any pitcher not named Santana a left-over. We do this, we may sniff out .500 in '17 and gear up for a winning season in '18.

I know that Joe Mauer is a fan-favorite of many, and that his 9-season run from 2005-2013 easily qualifies him as the best catcher in team history. At one point in his career, he seemed destined for Cooperstown. The fact is, however, that careers are a total body of work. At age 31, his decline was steep. From one season to the next, he morphed from a .320 hitter to .270. And the .270-range is where he has resided since 2014, at first base no less, with an average of about 12 home runs and 65 RBI per season. That type of production (such as it is) is what we can expect during his two remaining seasons in a Twins uniform. Or when his contract mercifully expires at the conclusion of 2018. The best comparison I can come up with is Don Mattingly. His first 7 or 8 seasons, he absolutely raked. But injuries took their toll, and from ages 30-34 his drop anticipated that of Mauer’s. And by age 35 or so, he was out of baseball. Don Mattingly and Joe Mauer are not going to the Hall-of-Fame because A - their run of greatness just was not long enough B - the mediocre era of their careers started too early and lasted too long C - They had no defining October moments. It is what it is.