Remember When History Tries To Repeat Itself

[Brandon]

An old memory popped up when I was reading about the Fuld / Mallone trade this morning and all commenters are talking about his pitch to contact and how the Twins have been drafting more power arms lately and you think how the Twins won't call up Meyer or May (because they need to be more consistent) but they will the pitch to contact guys Pino, Johnson and Darnell. 

 

I remembered how the Twins were actually ahead of this curve in the 1990's and had Hawkins who could reach 96- 98 MPH.  They traded Aguilera for Frankie Rodriquez who also threw 96-98.  They also traded for Scott Klingenbeck and I don't remember how hard he threw.  Those guys were failures as starters because their control wasn't there and didn't develop, while Tewksbury had some success before and then came here and gave the team a chance.  Radke was up and successful at that time as well winning 20 games one year with excellent control and being a consistant producer the others.

 

Maybe that has something to do with the Twins preferring control pitchers and why they are afraid to bring up Meyer who seems to have the same control as Frankie Rodriguez, who walked 3.9 per 9 in his career, had back in the 90's.

[diehardtwinsfan]

Guys with control issues in the minors are going to have problems in the majors.  If they are afraid about it, it's legitimate.  There's a reason people were very down on Trevor May up until this year, he was walking too many guys.  Meyer hasn't been THAT bad, but he needs work in the area, and not being on the 40 man means he's not getting an extended trial.  The way the org talks about him, he has an ML future, so I think it's more work/timing than anything else.

[Otto von Ballpark]

I think the 90's Twins were generally just desperate, that they tried or tolerated some bad control starters so long.  Tapani and Erickson were control guys (or at least lower K guys) and were the mainstays of the early 90's rotations.  Smiley, Krueger, Deshaies -- none of our veteran fill-ins before Radke/Tewksbury were hard-throwers either.

 

And Klingenbeck and Hawkins actually weren't bad control guys, for the most part -- they just sucked.  Pat Mahomes and Willie Banks would be better examples.  None of them were good K guys by the time they reached AAA, though.

 

Rodriguez's early stat lines look a bit more like Gibson's than Meyer's -- good but not elite K rates in the minors, albeit at a younger age, then he had decent results (90-101 ERA+) his first three years in Minnesota despite some poor peripherals.  Have no idea about his groundball rate or anything, though -- was likely smoke and mirrors, given his eventual fate.