nicksaviking

Why? Last year the Twins had only one player play more than 140 games and only four play more than 110 games. Even if healthy, one of the starting nine will have a day off just about every day and this is baseball, they won't all be healthy.

That's only because we as Twins fans have long forgotten the benefits to having league average hitters available on the bench. It seems like a good thing in theory, but we haven't gotten to test it out in decades.

Well Adrianza played in 114 games last year and no one was intentionally trying to get his bat in the game.

I want to see a game this year where the Twins do a double Caesar Tovar. Gonzalez AND Astudillo play all 9 positions in the same game.

I think Drunk Uncle is going to have something to say about that bat flip too.

I'm less confident in a bounce back from these two. Sidearmers in general just seem to have a limited window of success. Most seem to have a novelty about them which works for awhile until batters catch on. Hildenberger doesn't appear to have great command either. I think Reed needs to get back those 2 MPH he lost on his fastball or he's going to get shelled. He doesn't have an offspeed pitch and his slider has never been particularly effective, last year in particular. Not that I'm worried these two couldn't easily be replaced if needed.

I’d like there to be better delegation than under Molitor, but if he goes INTO the season with equal confidence in Reed and Hildenberger, my confidence in Baldelli might take a hit. I want to see those two rebound before I trust them. Reed with his velocity, Hildenberger with his command. Currently I’d be OK if neither made the team if they didn’t prove those things in spring training, which would be difficult.

I'm all for putting some of the starters in the pen, but looking back at the best starter-turned-reliever transitions, they almost all took a full season to get their footing and establish themselves. I wanted Clippard. I'll still take Norris, Madson and Warren, Kimbrel too. I'm not too keen on Vincent, I don't trust relievers who throw 89 MPH. I do like the Blake Parker signing, I think he would have been one of the higher under-the-radar guys I would have been in on had he been a free agent to open the year. But if he's not throwing a slider or changeup, he probably needs to throw that curve more. I'd think he'd need better diversity than running with a four seamer and splitter 90% of the time. I would be pretty disappointed if the Twins traded for bullpen help considering this near historic class of free agent relievers; that would scream of choosing money over prospects.

Can't wait to see you guys down there some day. Not sure which day that is. I have three young kids and a wife, none of whom are terribly interested in sports (fingers crossed with the 20 month old). Asking if I could go to Florida and leave the family for a week sounds like a great way to find myself murdered in my sleep.

Where is his pop coming from?!? He's doing the Denard Span/Byron Buxton no-step swing and it looked like he put about as much effort into that swing as a guy simply trying to foul off a pitch. I really like this guy. He might turn out to be a fad and someone who ends up as a a fun anecdotal footnote in the history books but let's ride this while it's hot. He might be someone you roll with, though perhaps not something you try to understand how it works.

I'd like to see Berrios extended now, but seeing as the two contemporaries used as examples were a year ahead of him in service time, it will probably have to wait until next year. No idea if the Twins want to extend him (they better want to) but Berrios' camp will probably see that he should have more value this time next year.

Max Kepler was projected to make 3.2M in arbitration in 2019. Polanco wasn't even arbitration eligible. So Kepler is probably getting about a 50-80% raise? Polanco will be getting about a 600% raise.

I'd be more worried about them trying to shoehorn him into the lineup to justify his salary if he didn't show to be a pretty good CF last year. More often than not there will likely always be room for him even if he's just platooning. Also, if a guy can play decent CF, you can usually move him even if you have to eat a bit of the contract. If Polanco doesn't hit and his SS skills don't improve, I'd think he'd be the guy to worry about.

Most guys struggle coming out to AAA too. They're going to have to learn at the MLB level no matter what route they take to get there.

Redacted. Sounds like they may have done a bit of this with Kepler, so apologies and well done if the rumor is true.

I'd like to see that as well, but if they did, it would pretty unique for a MLB team. I'm guessing owners prefer to hold onto that $25M and keep getting interest and dividends as long as possible. Future payroll is still secondary to future profit.

I'm just fine with this deal, but I think a lot of people are over-estimating the flexibility of this deal in it's later stages. Assuming the pay is going to escalate, years four and five will likely be approaching if not above $10M and the option years will surely be higher than that. $10-12M per year for a 2B on the free agent market is about the max these days. I think this is likely a rather player friendly deal, which is just fine, but I don't think it will help with his trade value unless he turns into Jose Ramirez. In which case one would hope he's not traded.

I don't know, are all change ups equal? I'd think it would be best to have an off speed pitch to keep batters honest, but it wouldn't have to have much movement or great locatability as long as it crosses the plate from time to time.

When you have a 100 MPH heater, I don't think you have to have a good change up, you mostly just have to be able to camouflage when it's coming.

There's a pattern here with good young arms, hope the Twins see it and agree with it as well.

Obviously an injury shouldn't increase a player's value, because objectively that's ludicrous. But after seeing Sano's 2015, Kirilloff's 2018 and throw in Luis Arreaz's season last year for fun, well I'm guessing the bookies are hoping everyone takes the under on Javier this year.

Getting called up after only one full season in the minors seems like pretty unrealistic expectations. There has been one player from the 2017 draft who has gotten called up to the majors, Kyle Wright. He went 4th overall and has pitched a total of 6 innings. By these standards Keston Hiura and Brendan McKay are failures as well. Had the Twins not signed both Nelson Cruz and CJ Cron, I'd be pretty confident that the Twins would give Rooker every chance to earn a spot on the team out of spring training. Or if they were doing the service time bit, call him up a couple of weeks after the season started.

I know I've posted this before, but Rooker improved each month: K% April - 29.6 May - 28.6 June - 28.0 July - 24.2 August/Sept - 22.8 BB% April - 2.2 May - 7.0 June - 11.2 July - 13.3 August/Sept - 13.4 Heading into the draft Rooker was known to be obsessive about crafting his hitting technique, he's a great candidate to always be able to adjust. And his last month isn't much to be worried about, his strikeout and walk rates were peaking at that time but he had insanely bad luck with a .210 BABIP.

Whomever worked with Kyle Gibson to improve his slider last year should be tied to the hip of Thorpe this year. I hope that guy is still on the payroll. Mid 90's or low 90's fastball, nothing is better than a lefty with a killer slider.

The three batter minimum rule seems to be getting the most push-back, which I understand as it is the most impactful, even more so than the DH. I'd be really curious to see how it played out though. Will it make guys who can ONLY go one inning marginalized? The staple 2000's bullpen of six one inning relievers and one mop-up guy couldn't work any longer could it? Seems to me that would force teams to start carrying more traditional starters in the pen. So even without thinking about options, it would seem like guys like Romero, Gonsalves and Mejia would need to be on the big club instead of guys like Busenitz, Moya and Curtis. Would these multi-inning BP roles for young relievers turn into a defacto waiting list for starting gigs instead of waiting things out in AAA? Also, I'd have to think it would help extend the careers of aging starting pitchers. A Clay Buchholz or Ervin Santana may be a better fit than say Brad Boxberger. So aside from the decrease in strikeouts due to playing matchups, I'd think some of the guys who typically get strikeouts would be replaced by guys who don't. If you have a BP made up of more guys than not that go multiple innings will teams go back to seven man bullpens? Or dare I speak it, six? With that 26th man could teams possibly go with a five or six man bench? Also, it sure would make it more enticing to be a switch hitter again and it would decrease shifting. You'd still have shifting, but if you can't dictate righty/lefty matchups at will, it won't be happening every at bat. I might also think this would actually help the traditional use of the starters. The good starters who don't have awful RH/LH splits won't be pulled for a LOOGY in the 5th, it will be more incumbent on the team to have it's best pitcher out there, not their best pitcher against a specific batter. 200 IP might become a realistic goal again and maybe we'll see another 300 win pitcher! Plenty of questions with doing this though. Losing some strategy seems to be the biggest thing. I don't know though, current strategy would basically be shelved, but I think a more complex strategy would be developed. Would a team bait the other with a reliever to see if the other manager will use TWO of his bench players in the same inning? Do you save your best relievers for the highest pressure situation, or do you save him to face the big bench bat that you know the other manager is saving? Originally at the top of my post I said I was just playing Devi's Advocate, but then I ended up talking myself into really wanting to see how this would play out. I like trying new things, of course that's with the understanding that I'm not opposed to dropping the new thing if it doesn't work out.