The end is in sight. While I'll have one eye on Caitlin Clark and her Iowa Hawkeye team's amazingness the next six weeks (hopefully), it's great to see Spring Training starting this week. Much speculation has been made about the roster, so I'll add my read on how I see things shaking out. Here goes:
Offensively, I see the Opening Day roster as:
Group A: C - Jeffers, Vazquez
Group B: 2B/SS/3B - Polanco, Correa, Miranda, Farmer, Gordon
Group C: 1B/LF/RF/DH - Kirilloff, Ga
The idea of taking a shot at an offseason plan is always a fun one. Here's my attempt. As best as I could, I used the arbitration projections cited elsewhere. I also used the free agent projections at MLBTradeRumors as starting points. And I had the advantage of being able to include the Urshela and Farmer moves and other action that's happened to date.
First, the sunk costs – options that didn’t get picked up: Bundy $1M, Archer $.75M and Sano $2.75M for a total cost of $4.5M
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Quite a number of posts have railed about “The Plan” for Twins starters to make short starts and never face the Third Time Through the Order, but I did a fairly deep dive into looking at box scores and would offer a different analysis of their starter usage this season. Here’s an alternative take for consideration, arguing that The Plan was not the plan:
From Opening Day until about May 31, the Twins tried using starters in a “normal” pattern. If you look at starters across the board (e
I really hold back what I would like to say about then payroll arguments here. The fact that people don't accept the amount taken in dictates the amount going out requires one of two things. Extreme financial ignorance or fanatical bias that prevents the acceptance of something some basic. I did not change the argument. It's the same idiocy over and over. Do you really want to be on the side that suggests revenues does not determine spending capacity?
At this point in the pre-season, I’m just so happy to be seeing games again, I don’t care about the Twins record in 2023. I think they’ll win it all, unrealistically speaking 🙂