The Minnesota Twins Should Trade Pablo Lopez & Joe Ryan This Offseason

54 minutes ago, cjvirnig said:

if you trade Ryan & Lopez and go for a complete rebuild, there's no guarantee this team will return to contention in 2-3 years. They could just as easily be awful for 5, 6, or 7 years. We see that all the time with failed rebuilds in places like Pittsburgh, Colorado, Miami, etc. 

Concur.  What's hidden under the surface when you have a reliable starter is all the sifting you had to go through to find him.  Except for the very top draft choices (and probably not even them), there's no assurance that any pitcher can handle the workload of a full season of 32 starts and, on top of that, excel.  Even when you trade for a "major league ready" arm like Joe Ryan, there are doubts, and you are paying the price of risk-analysis by acquiring him (look at it this way, the Rays weren't sold on Ryan or he would have been untouchable).  

Look at Ryan more specifically. The same season we traded for him, we were also crapping around giving starts to such luminaries as Beau Burrows, Lewis Thorpe, Charlie Barnes, Griffin Jax (who was later repurposed to the pen).  The Joe Ryan we see today isn't simply this singular talent; he contains these other guys too.  There's a high potential for a lot of losing baseball while we work at replacing him.

And yet, I can't disagree that the we're headed toward trading him and Lopez away.  The die was cast, when the FO traded away all of the established bullpen talent.  What I just said about sifting through to find the gems applies even moreso to the relievers - we're not getting back to the general level of bullpen competence (it was never "shutdown" like some teams achieve) in a single offseason.

I didn't advocate for a teardown and I don't particularly like it and I especially dislike giving the same FO another rebuild given that the last one they architected has fizzled, but here we are.  I don't advocate half-assing things now.  I hope the FO doesn't try to muddle through.  LFG, finish the remake by getting something in return for the value our best pitchers provide in a pair of coming seasons in which the Twins won't reap any benefits anyway.

FWIW though, I have taking this approach at times when I play OOTP as a general manager.  It almost always doesn't work out the way I hope, and instead puts the franchise in a death spiral of declining revenue and ever-narrowing options.

A final note: I don't think you can leave out of the analysis the possibility that there will be a work-stoppage of some kind in 2027 when the Collective Bargaining Agreement is renegotiated.  If 2027 was already questionable as a year of contention for the Twins, it tilts the decision even stronger toward trading away the assets controlled in that year.  OTOH the other teams read the same tea leaves, and it's possible the "prospect haul" will be lower than most people are expecting.

If you don't trust the front office to get good value in trading Lopez and Ryan, how do you trust them to effectively retool on the fly to a degree that makes the team legitimately competitive while Lopez and Ryan are under contract?