nicksaviking

Nice article but might I suggest Rochester needs to check the water in Minnesota? I won't pretend to know the atmosphere in the Twins clubhouse, but surely it's less than ideal considering all the losing the last three seasons. A big deal was made about the Twins losing team leaders like Hunter and Cuddyer. I'm not saying the team is devoid of leaders, but what if they are? What becomes of rookies in a clubhouse mired in a losing mentality when there are no leaders to rely on? I would think a rookie might feel isolated if this were the case. In most workplaces, new guys often take the blame and/or get ignored when things in the company are looking bleak. Your point about what may happen to Gibson once called up to the big leagues is a good one considering this trend.

Call him up now, Eddie Gaedel had a career OBP of 1.000. Got to love that tiny strikezone.

Welcome to the site. I read your article, and it's widely agreed (screamed?) on this site that Ryan will always refuse to bring in talented pitching free agents. In the case of the Revere trade, I thought at the time and still think that May was the centerpiece of the trade. He may not develop due to his control issues, but I think Worley was the secondary piece and an arm thought to bridge the gap until prospects came up. Still, since he's under team control for another three years, I'm sure the Worley experiment is far from over. This team gives plenty of guys 2nd, 3rd and 4rth chances deserved or not.

Lucky for the Twins, Arcia got hurt after his demotion. Had it happened at the MLB level this would still count against his service time.

Aside from Johan Santana, I think the word "Great" should be dropped from that sentence. Terry Ryan has gotten some pitchers who have had success but guys like Milton, Mays and Liriano have not been great, and surely not for very long if they were at all. Considering this team does not draft pitchers well and it refuses to sign quality free agent pitchers, it is essential for Ryan to trade for young sustainable top of the rotation arms. He's done that once. I wouldn't call that great.

Ryan provided a game changing theory to the game of baseball. He refused to trade prospects for vets and he demanded a high price in exchange for his vets. At the time teams were willing to make these moves because while clubs valued their very top young guys, any prospect that wasn't deemed elite was expendable and Ryan took advantage of other teams' "Win Now" mentality. This practice is widely adopted now which means he has lost his advantage. I don't know that Ryan has any other cards to play. He's too conservative and his hoarding of cheap young players seems to be the only revolutionary move that fits into his MO. The gig is up.

It sounds more like you want to trade him as a favor to Joe. While the Twins could always use more prospects, they have a ton and they'll all be showing up in the next couple of years. At that point, what they will need is some stability and veteran presence to help hold the developing talent together and you won't get that as a return for Mauer.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what all the offseason negativity was about. It's a shame nobodies like us could see it coming.

By nature the fans on this site dig deeper into baseball than the average or casual fan. We analyze why the pitching staff has the worst strikeout numbers, we debate which youngsters should get called up and who should be playing everyday. We talk about the minutea that makes up, and is meaningful to baseball. Because of this, I believe we have been sidestepping the simple fact that this team has lost nine games in a row. It has hardly been brought up on this site. I think we knowingly avoid big picture details like the won/loss record because instead we want to know what causes the record to be so. However, we are in the minority of Twins nation. To others, the nine loses in a row is going to be the issue that sticks out and needs to be remedied. My mom doesn't know Mike Pelfrey's WHIP, but she sure as hell knows that the Twins have lost nine games in a row. Mike Pelfrey's WHIP isn't going to make her turn off the TV and go outside this Memorial Day weekend, the nine loses will. With this floating in my mind the last couple of hours, is there a magic number that the front office will not tolerate? Surely there is. Will Ryan have no choice but to make drastic changes if the steak were to reach 15? Or 12? Or 10? The Star Tribune isn't going to publish an article with the headline Aaron Hicks OPS+ is Only 45. It certainly will publish an article titled Twins Losing Streak Reaches 10 Games. At what point will Ryan decide the headlines regarding losing are more embarassing and damaging to the organization than the one that reads Twins Fire Gardenhire after 12 Seasons.

Ha, well I really wanted to mention it as an excuse to bring up the poor K/9 and show why that is a relevant stat. Seeing as the Twins don't strike anyone out, the fact that the BABIP is so high is even more upsetting considering they are allowing that many more balls to be put into play.

Yup, this is why Ryan needs to go. The rotation was historically bad last year. Ryan replaced 80% of the starters and it's even worse this year. It's mind boggeling that such a feat is possible. How could the Twins possibly field their worst two rotations in history in back to back years when there is really only one common denominator? You would almost think the only way this could happen was if it was intentionally done, but obviously no one is trying to tank the season, jobs are on the line.

Of course the Twins are unlucky, they do have the highest team BABIP. A team could limit how much luck plays into the outcome by improving the K/9. Buuuut, the Twins starters K/9 is 4.25. That's the lowest since the 1992 Tigers. And this is after getting an 80% overhaul to the rotation from last year. This organization just does not understand pitching. Three teams have a K/9 rate from their starters 2x that of the Twins.

The 2013 Astros are going to give them a run for their money too. Though they do get to choose between Appel and Gray if they have the inclination to do so.

After getting over my initial frustration with the signings, my hope was they would pitch adaquate enough to fetch a couple low level prospects who would not require 40-man roster moves. Pelfrey has thrown that option out the window and Correia's honeymoon period is quickly fading.

The front office agrees. They think xFIP is Trevor May's new DJ pseudonym.

Do we have to DFA only one?

Right, so why squander them in Rochester? So now he's going to be limited to 11-12 MLB starts before being shut down in mid August? If the Twins want to pretend that they want to compete next year, you'd think they'd want him to get a little more experience this year.

He needs to start for Rochester on Friday? Why couldn't he just not start on Friday at Rochester and start for the Twins instead? That's when Deduno is scheduled so a promotion actually would have lined up perfectly with Gibson's current schedule. Or he could have not pitched for Rochester Friday and pitched for the Twins Saturday if they wanted to give him an extra days rest. Sorry, but this non-move reeks and I hope Terry Ryan has to answer some very uncomfortable questions from the local media.

The Twins could still win 88 games with incompetent leadership. They've done it before under Bill Smith no less.

This intentional avoidance of a call up has happened many times but usually for the purpose of retaining an extra year of service. I don't know that there has ever been this blatent of a case of a team preventing a player from gaining Super 2 status. Gibson is not a Major League player so I don't believe he is included in the playrs union as of yet. If he were, there certainly would be grounds to file a grevience. I don't think there has been a team in such dire need of a starting pitcher that continues to reject the most obvious and rational candidate to this extreme. This is disguting and I hope Gibson doesn't hold it against the organization seeing as it boils down to his employer bending the rules and going out of it's way to withhold money from him.

Not possible, the 10 rotation spots above him in AAA and the majors are filled with rock solid starters. I'd like to see the Twins keep the dynamic duos together. I like the Sano/Rosario pairing and the Buxton/Walker pairing. Keep them together to keep some continuity and hopefully they push each other knowing they don't want to get left behind a level when their buddy gets moved. Of course this only goes if promotions are deserved, which at this point they are.

I think the idea of a team using left over money to sign Manaea is a pipe dream and not well thought through by KLaw. Manaea was/is expecting top 5 money. Even if the Astros somehow saved $1 million bucks and used that toward Manaea, that still wouldn't be close to what he is expecting let alone the Twins who have a smaller draft pool. Let's not forget Scott Boras is his agent and something similar happend with Appel last year. And this is all assuming that the Pirates who have 2 first round picks, or a team at the end of the 1st round with a supplimental pick in addition to their origianl pick wont take him. I find it very unlikely a team like the Cardinals, Rangers or Yankees wont roll the dice on him.

Yeah, the past couple of years, Cuellar's rag tag team of over achieving AAAA pitchers with suspect baseball skills perform as well or better than Anderson's bargain barrel mess of vets the front office gives him. Neither have had much to work with but Cuellar certainly has made more out of the lack of talent.

That would seem logical but it was not how Liriano's productivity played out in Minnesota. He was actually at his worst in the beginning of the year. April was his worst month. He usually became lights out in late May through July before tailing off again. I always associated his April struggles with him being rusty, but this year he missed the first month and has pitched well in his first three starts. Perhaps it wasn't rust that caused him to pitch poorly early, perhaps it was the weather. Who knows. Either way, he usually pitched well through the mid-summer which means, at least for division foes, they had usually already faced him.

I have those concerns as well. However I wonder if the Twins failure with Liriano had more to do with Liriano's style not meshing with the Twins philosophy more than anything. The Twins could not get around the fact that Liriano was not going to go deep into a lot of games due to a high pitch count. It seemed that they would try to push him to limit pitches to become more of a Twins type of pitcher, yet he would then just become hittable which would limit his innings anyway. It's frustrating becuase the Twins show displeasure with pitchers who don't go deep into games due to a high pitch count attributed to working into deep counts and allowing free passes yet seem to make excuses for pitchers who don't go deep into games because they are extremely hittable. Liriano probably will do well in the NL. He might lose some steam once teams see his slider for the second time and start laying off, but he'll probably succeed because the Pirates won't get as frustrated with him not being able to finish 7 innings.