nicksaviking

My take on the comment was perhaps the pitchers should find the catcher's glove more often instead of making the outfielders get all of their outs for them.

Agreed. This is the best discussion we've had since the trade deadline!

I agree with number 3 but only in so far as I'm not sure which direction the club is aiming for here. I wanted to go younger. However, how do we know that they aren't using advanced data? Perhaps they are using information not found on Fangraphs or any other fan accessable baseball site. All things being equal, he's a bad outfielder, but all things are not equal, namely Comerica Park and Target Field are not equal, not even close. Perhaps the Twins are thinking the now accepted defensive measurements don't work when comparing their stadium to stadium X, and perhaps they have forumals that adjust for range needed in TF compared to stadium X. We don't know Hunter's affect on the defense. I know many want to go by the book, but I find it highly unlikely that he's not an upgrade over Willingham and Arcia. And the fact that any data would suggest it, probably is good reason not to trust it. As for #2, I don't know what Law is on, but Hunter hasn't been barely better than a replacement level player since his early days for the Twins. Perhaps he will be in 2015, but he wasn't in 2014 or any time in the previous decade. Also, while it's likely he was the Twins top target, for all we know Rios, or any other OF already told them no, or that they are waiting until February to sign. The pickings were slim, I'm not sure how high you could really aim with this group.

True, but the same can usually be said about 39-year-old outfielders. I don't think he'll hit as well as he did protected by that Tigers lineup. On the other hand, I think there's a pretty good chance that he'll hit better than any other free agent bat the Twins could/would bring in. Rios was my choice if they were going to get a free agent OF, but if you have to wait for him, you might get nothing at all.

Boy, you know we've been starved for any kind of meaningful Twins news when a one year stop-gap signing brings this many hot-blooded points of view to both sides of the debate! $20 bucks says that in ten years someone's going to say, "Hey, remember that time the Twins brought Torii Hunter back for one season? That was so extremely......uneventful."

Yeah, I actually think this is actually a no-trade-clause that indicates a trade is even more likely. Demanding a full-NTC means Hunter wants control of where he goes, and if Hunter insists on the final say of where he goes, that likely means he wants to be playing in the playoffs ten months from now.

Sorry I missed that. I'm in the minority I guess, but I like that strategy. I guess I sound too much like Earl Weaver. Hope I don't teach my kids too many naughty words.

Yes, his bat should be a plus, it seems well suited to TF. The defense was so bad last year that it seems no one cares about anything else. No one has even broached the positives and negatives about his addition to the lineup.

Great stuff Parker. Still, Hunter catches that fly ball in TF. That is unless he started out playing two feet off the warning track. Comreica needs a rangy RF, Target Field has less need of one.

Well I'm hoping the new regime is past the days of the players dictating where they play. Willingham should have been in RF, Mauer should have also learned to play corner OF and Delmon Young should have been happy to have a spot anywhere on the field. My money is on Molitor telling players who demand certain positions, "I'll take your suggestion under advisement. Now get out of my office and get back in the batting cage where I told you to be ten minutes ago."

That sounds like trying to treat the disease instead of actually curing it. Pharmaceutical companies love that stratagy, but it doesn't mean you're any less sick. People need to stop and consider how silly putting this much weight in defensive metrics are if we are using them in a bubble. Using any common sense should show that Hunter is a better defender than Josh Willingham, Chris Colabello and Oswaldo Arcia, he's clearly a better athlete and he's played the position for decades. It's not a coincidence that his defensive numbers went in the toilet at the same time he moved to Comerica. It was the ballpark and I don't know how this is clear as day. Dislike the move because it departs from the youth movement, the defense was upgraded, even if it wasn't improved to an elite level that some may want. That just wasn't happening without sacraficing offense, and I'm not giving up offense for defense.

That's wholly surprising but I see that WAR and ERA+ back that up. I liked Radke but he never seemed more than a really good pitcher to me where as Kaat was a really good pitcher who also seemed to have a handful of elite seasons. Radke's traditional numbers surely were inflated pitching in the steroid ERA which were then nutralized with the more advanced metrics. Still, it just doesn't seem to jive. Eleven of Kaat's 13 seasons with the Twins and 18 of his 25 seasons total his ERA was under 4.00. That just seems like great pitching no matter which era you threw in, though perhaps today's numbers should outweigh history.

The marketing team did the math and decided the Hunter jersey would be the biggest seller this year. They then casually mentioned to the Pohlads that if the deal was only for one year, those jerseys would then be obsolete after only one season, just in time for people to buy Buxton and Sano jerseys.

No but at least he won't have the wall to deal with. If Arcia doesn't improve, he's going to to be a liability no matter where he plays.

Actually I think Winfield was less of a gimmick, the team was pretty good in 1992. Winfield was old but just came off a really nice season with Toronto and the Twins were trying to replace Chili Davis. I would say Molitor and also Terry Steinbach felt like gimmick signings at the time, however, as far as Molitor goes, he really was one of the only reasons to even remember that era of Twins baseball. I loved his chase for 3.000 hits and he played damn well for being in his 40s. Molitor and Steinbach might have been to entice fans to a terrible product, but Twenty years later, I'm still glad they did it. I'm happy to have had those guys in Twins uniforms in what we already knew was going to be a long season.

It's a one year deal and Rosario and Buxton probably aren't quite ready, so I'm not upset. There seems to be quite an overreaction to Hunter's poor defense though. IF they put him in RF, his defense is going to be just fine. His awful -18.3 UZR last year was caused entirely by his -18.4 range factor, meaning if it weren't for his decreased range, his defense would have been decent. Clearly his range was going to be magnified in cavernous Comerica Park, if they stick him in RF at Target Field, he'll be moving from one of the parks that demands the most range from it's rightfielder to one of the parks that demands the least. Arcia's problem in RF wasn't his range, but the terrible angles he took and his confusion with the wall. His range factor was only -4.4. That should indicate one of two things; either Hunter's range problems are 4x worse than Arcia's, which sounds completely illogical, or the difference between ball parks has an extremely large impact on the perception of the outfielder. I want a young team, so I wasn't too interested in Hunter, but this is going to be far from the disaster movie it is being made out to be.

WTF! Did I blackout again?! I don't remember posting this, in fact I don't even like Jay Bruce and remember saying I wouldn't trade for him, possibly even in this thread. Please tell me there is some kind of IT issue here and I'm not schizophrenic!

I'm not sure what the next "Era" will be, but I'm guessing John would be included in the Post 72 ERA that will someday be evaluated with the likes of Steve Garvey, Ted Simmons, Keith Hernandez, Dale Murphy, Lee Smith, Don Mattingly, Alan Trammel and Tim Raines, assuming those last four don't get in on the regular ballot.

I find some of the other names speculated a bit interesting. Edinson Volquez, Francisco Liriano, Justin Masterson, Brett Anderson, Jake Peavy. Volquez and Liriano huh? So are the Twins trying a Reverse Searge? That's when you GET a couple of productive pitchers from the Pirates and turn them back into pumpkins. The article actually only says the Twins talked to Greg Ganske, the agent for Liriano and Anderson. I'd guess Anderson is the guy they'd be interested in seeing as Liriano has a QO and no other players with a QO have been linked to the Twins.

Yeah, he does seem to be the forgotten man of those great early Twins teams. I guess I never heard of any acrimony, though there may have been some. To me it seemed like a failure to recognize his value. Those Twins teams were loaded with all kinds of great but perhaps not elite pitching with Kaat, Pascual, Grant, Perry, Chance, Boswell and later Blyleven. They may have been so spoiled rotten in pitching that they didn't realize how good they had it. I do believe the team gave him some kind of community service award this year at the annual Twins award banquet.

For what it's worth, we do have pretty clear insight as to how the voters ranked these Golden Age players back in the day. Most were on the ballot for years together, though Gil Hodges was quite a bit earlier than most. In the ballots from the mid 80's through the mid 90's, the pecking order was almost always Oliva, Kaat, Wills, Allen, Boyer, Minoso and Tiant, with Ron Santo, who got in on the last ballot sandwhiched between Oliva and Kaat nearly every time. Obviously we have different numbers to look at these days, but starting in 1984, the voters appeared to always favor Oliva. His first two years on the ballot were the only two he shared with Hodges, on those Hodges was ahead. Fun side note I noticed while looking up the voting records: 1984 both Harmon Killebrew and Luis Aparicio both got into the Hall along with Don Drysdale. Harmon failed to get in his first three years (likely because voters still put a lot of weight on batting average) but made it in with the slick fielding shrotstop and the dominant righty who's career was cut short. Killebrew's career OPS was an awesome 143, while Aparicio's was a cringeworthy 82. I'm guessing that is the largest disparity between same-year HOF batters ever. Drysdale's career OPS? 45, meaing the difference between Drysdale's and Aparicio's OPS was 60% less than the difference between Killebrew's and Aparicio's. In fairness, Drysdale was a pretty damn good hitter; for a pitcher.

The Twins probably haven't done him any favors by not retiring his number. If I was a voter and saw that the team he spent his formative years with didn't think he was as good of a player as Kent Hrbek, I'd have second thoughts.

I think Duensing best represents the disconnect between fan expectations for ceiling and front office desire for stability. I don't think we value what Duensing brings to the table nearly as much as the team does, we see his role as expendable where as the team would be extremely uncomfortable not having the veteran lefty with a decent track record available to them. I agree the Twins keep him and don't mind paying for a safety net. Ironically, it may be his arb increase that takes Duensing out of all our speculative trade talks, other clubs likely don't want to pay that kind of money for a non-closer bullpen arm.

They indeed may try him as a starter again: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/miami-marlins/sfl-marlins-royals-trade-20141128-story.html Suspiciously I was not cited in Mr. Rodriguez's piece and the Marlins failed to give me credit for the idea though I posted it nearly 45 minutes before the article was published. No doubt if a search history was performed on Rodriguez or GM Dan Johnson's computer this page would show up.

Right, his first couple of years I was of the opinioin that the Royals were wrong and he could be fixed, which coupled with Royal futility at the time of his arrival was not an outlandish assumption. I think he's too far gone to start now and if that velocity is kaput, he's possibly too far gone to pitch at all. I threw the question out there, but I do not have interest in Crow. Although I do like giving away two 40-man spots and taking on only one.