Article: Twins Being Overwhelmed By Underperformance

[Mike Sixel]

 

I didn't like the trade last year because Jepsen wasn't very good in TB and looked to be on the decline. That was an incorrect read, at least last year.

 

But this is exactly right, it was just more half-measures. This team just cannot commit to anything, whether it's going for it at the trade deadline or committing to a full rebuild, they hedge their bets every single time and it's beyond frustrating.

 

They have clearly resolved to get harder throwing pitchers in the draft and trade, but then are hesitant to promote them or put them in key spots.

 

They commit to increasing the payroll, but only by getting multiple average players, not a couple of really good players.

 

They replace most of the field staff, but they do it mostly with other organizational guys.

 

Come on, get off the fence and stop being so wishy-washy.

 

This 100000000000000000000000000000x this.

[tobi0040]

 

This 100000000000000000000000000000x this.

 

Yup.  They call it no man's land. We have occupied it for some time.

[jokin]

 

The days of continued defense of Terry Ryan surely have to be over around here, eventually, right?

 

Actually, just based on the general TD consensus, I don't think it's ever been closer.

[wsnydes]

 

Yup.  They call it no man's land. We have occupied it for some time.

Exactly.  Pick a direction and go with it.  Doing both (or neither) isn't going to get you anywhere.

[jokin]

 

Give the Twins of the 2000s credit for this - defense doesn't slump.  

 

The fundamental problem with this team has been a rejection of defense in lieu of offense.  If you field a competent defense you can generally avoid being god awful but this team has insisted on the notion that you can just move guys around any which way you want and still field a fly ball pitching staff and things will be fine.

 

The "Twins Way" has lots of problems, but an emphasis on good defense was not among them.

 

And sadly, it was the White Sox that demonstrated this weekend that they are the ones that have learned this lesson- like the Royals before them. The Sox overall pitching peripherals are actually down this year- they actually trail the Twins in K/9 and K% rates! But no matter, they reminded Ryan and Molitor this weekend that the one of the Twins Way sacred rules is sacred to them, and seemingly forever forgotten in Minnesota.

Edited May 9, 2016 by jokin

[nicksaviking]

 

What were the Twins supposed to do last year except make trades for relief help? TR banked on one or multiple young RP's to be ready last year. He did it again this year, and we're still waiting for any young RP to make their way up. 
 

 

I think the complaint being made is that there weren't "trades" last year, there was one trade. If Ryan was going to shore up the bullpen to the point where it made a difference, that's one thing, but only getting Kevin Jepsen certainly wasn't going to do the trick alone. So, if you're only going to make one trade, which isn't going to accomplish enough to matter, why make a trade at all?

[by jiminy]

the thesis of this article seems to be that the Twins have talent, and everyone agreed they had talent, they have just underperformed. But your position rundown doesn't back that up.

 

their catcher, you point out, is miscast as as starter and is simply doing what he's always done. That's not underperforming. That's the GM incorrectly overvaluing someone. Their solution was Murphy. They seem to be wrong about him, at least so far. But you can't call that underperforming. That's misevaluating.

 

Shortstop, third base, second base, and left field are all positions where the incumbent showed patches of starting-caliber play but the bulk of their career was subpar.  You can call it underperforming that the wishful thinking didn't bear fruit. But no projection system concluded that because Rosario, Escobar, Plouffe, and Dozier had patches of good production that they had established a new baseline. Everyone but Twins fans and management saw their body of work and assumed they would regress.  And they did.  That's not underperforming. That's overvaluing.  

 

Buxton simply did what he did last year.  Deciding that a guy who skipped AAA and it showed, both last year and in spring training, will miraculously change isn't something you're entitled to be disappointed by.  He's still one of the youngest players in AAA, now that he's back where he belongs.  Having your backup plans being Santana and Mastroianni does not show much reality-based predictive capacities.

 

Sano has slumped a bit, but not beyond what you would expect for a guy his age, and with his off-season habits.  

 

Perkins has been injured twice in the past two years. I guess you could call it underperforming to get hurt earlier this year, but you can't call it a total surprise. The GM publicly announced that bullpen was his biggest concern at the beginning of the off-season, and he was right.  But no one can act surprised or let down when his own prediction came true.  

 

The starting pitching pipeline does have talent in it:  May, Meyer, Berrios, and Duffey could be the core of a good, young pitching staff.  I don't see how you can blame them for letting us down, though, when none of them were put in the rotation.  

 

Where in this article is your evidence that the Twins were not let down by the GM, but by talented players who let him down and underperformed?

 

 

 

 

[Vanimal46]

 

I think the complaint being made is that there weren't "trades" last year, there was one trade. If Ryan was going to shore up the bullpen to the point where it made a difference, that's one thing, but only getting Kevin Jepsen certainly wasn't going to do the trick alone. So, if you're only going to make one trade, which isn't going to accomplish enough to matter, why make a trade at all?

 

How quickly we forget about the Neil Cotts MEGA trade in August... 2 franchise changing trades last season I can understand that argument, and like I said before, TR could have done plenty more before the very last minute to improve the team. 

Again, if there was zero activity last year at the trade deadline, TD would have imploded with rage for not going for a playoff spot, and probably would have burned Target Field to the ground. 

[chopper0080]

 

Aaron Hicks has only struck out 8 times in 41 AB's so far this year.

 

This isn't the same Aaron Hicks under performance we saw in 2013 and 2014.

 

During 2013 and 2014... We endured 2 years of 140 K's in 467 AB's (30%)

 

2015... We watched him progress talent wise down to 66 K's in 352 AB's (19%)

 

Then we move him... and replaced him with a guy who struck out 50% of the time.

 

We endured the worst of Hicks and saw him get better and now we will watch another team display the best of him down the road. (I will be proven right later until then it's just my opinion).

 

A potential 20/20 guy moved for a player who will most likely never be a 20/20 guy and most likely never a 10 home run guy. Just a guy who if everything breaks right... will be an average player at a position that is filled with average players.

 

We overpaid for position scarcity. Only the Giants have a Catcher who produces big time at the plate. Every other team is putting average to below average players at Catcher.

 

We could of signed JP Arencebia or Salty and kept Hicks.

 

If you wanted to move Hicks because you didn't like him or believe in him because of work ethic or baseball sense or whatever reason you wanted him off the roster. 

 

Should have asked for Justin Wilson instead. Should have traded for a position where you can clearly upgrade... like the BULLPEN. 

 

BTW... If you did believe in Aaron Hicks and still traded him. This will end up as totally indefensible. 

 

Very similar to Carlos Gomez.  In both situations, the Twins sold low on a young prospect that needed time.  Now, Hicks's struggles were greater than Gomez's, and Gomez had a higher ceiling/better production, but it highlights the lack of commitment from this franchise towards it's young talent.  They throw these prospects into the fire, and then jettison them with prime years still remaining taking pennies in return.

 

Who knows what would have happened to Arcia if he hadn't came out hitting when given the chance?

[DJSim22]

I don't understand a lot of the complaining about Rosario, Buxton, Sano, ect.  They are doing what many on here were asking for.  Getting the kids in the line up. 

 

The complaints about Ryan are valid imo.  There is no plan, the calendar changed to May and the knee jerk moves started. 

 

The biggest problem continues to be the owners who are devoid of reality.  Pohlad talks like he thought this team, this year, was something that is years away.  Mind boggling. 

[markos]

 

Shortstop, third base, second base, and left field are all positions where the incumbent showed patches of starting-caliber play but the bulk of their career was subpar.  You can call it underperforming that the wishful thinking didn't bear fruit. But no projection system concluded that because Rosario, Escobar, Plouffe, and Dozier had patches of good production that they had established a new baseline. Everyone but Twins fans and management saw their body of work and assumed they would regress.  And they did.  That's not underperforming. That's overvaluing.  

 

Steamer and ZiPS both projected Dozier to be a top-10 2B prior to this season. Both expected Plouffe to be just slightly below average 3B. From purely an offensive perspective, Steamer and PECOTA all projected Dozier, Plouffe and Escobar to hit better than they currently are, some of them significantly. Looking at the rest-of-season projections, all three projection systems are still projecting them to hit better over the remainder of the season. Now the projection systems all predicted the Twins to not be very competitive this season, so it is quite likely that Twins fans and management ALSO overvalued them. But I think 'underperforming' is a perfectly apt description for how Dozier, Plouffe and Escobar have performed so far.

[d-mac]

 

What were the Twins supposed to do last year except make trades for relief help? TR banked on one or multiple young RP's to be ready last year. He did it again this year, and we're still waiting for any young RP to make their way up. 

We were still rebuilding last year, that I agree with. But there would be a ton more bickering and calling for TR's head than there is now if he did not give the illusion that they were going for a playoff spot. There was plenty more that TR & company could have done to take advantage of a lucky May. 

 

Hu is certainly underrated alright. If we took a poll of most casual Twins fans, they wouldn't have a clue who Hu is, other than reading the occasional Hu? joke on TD...

The Rays probably took advantage of the Twins... who knows. IMO there's bigger blunders to tally up for TR than this trade. 

 

Like I said, I completely disagree with you on the trade. Ryan shouldn't be making decisions at the deadline out of desperation. The bullpen he assembled predictably couldn't get the job done, so he reacted and overpaid. He could have been more proactive and done a better job assembling a bullpen and then would not have been in that situation in the first place. He's just compounding bad decisions by making more bad decisions.  

 

To me this is just another instance of TR buying high or selling low.

[TheLeviathan]

 

Should have asked for Justin Wilson instead. Should have traded for a position where you can clearly upgrade... like the BULLPEN. 

 

BTW... If you did believe in Aaron Hicks and still traded him. This will end up as totally indefensible. 

 

Look, I admire the amount of turd polishing you attempted here, but Aaron Hicks is just not good at baseball.  I'm not sure how many hundreds of at-bats you require to demonstrate this, but we're at 860.  And he's been putrid.

 

We appear to have targeted another putrid player, but let's not pretend we gave anything up.  The problem was that this was the solution to C and nothing was done to insure CF.

 

Aaron Hicks and his god awful play wouldn't have sufficed as Plan B either.

[Vanimal46]

 

Like I said, I completely disagree with you on the trade. Ryan shouldn't be making decisions at the deadline out of desperation. The bullpen he assembled predictably couldn't get the job done, so he reacted and overpaid. He could have been more proactive and done a better job assembling a bullpen and then would not have been in that situation in the first place. He's just compounding bad decisions by making more bad decisions.  

 

To me this is just another instance of TR buying high or selling low.

We'll just have to agree to disagree. You value Hu much more than I do, and that's perfectly fine. On to the next tangent or topic we go. 

[d-mac]

 

Twins fans are justifiably on the warpath. Enough blame in this putrid season to go around for everyone associated with the Twins. This season hit us like the foul tip off Suzuki's mask hit him, and I think we are in more pain than he was. Still over 130 games left in the season, but not even the most optimistic fan would hope for anything other than a strong finish to the season. Mauer and Nunez are having great starts to the season, but neither provides enough punch to carry the team to victory. Very few bright spots, indeed, and we bring in Mastro, Kinzler (Ian would have been nice), Centeno, etc. What a joke and a slap in the face. We have to hope that Berrios and Duffey, the few bright spots, are here to stay and TR starts bringing up the young bullpen arms very soon. I've been a strong TR supporter, but my faith in him is heading down the same drain as the Twins' season.

 

More like foul tip off the protective cup.

[d-mac]

 

Exactly.  Pick a direction and go with it.  Doing both (or neither) isn't going to get you anywhere.

 

As the great and wise Ron Swanson once said: "Don't half-a** two things. Whole-a** one thing."

[Riverbrian]

 

Look, I admire the amount of turd polishing you attempted here, but Aaron Hicks is just not good at baseball.  I'm not sure how many hundreds of at-bats you require to demonstrate this, but we're at 860.  And he's been putrid.

 

We appear to have targeted another putrid player, but let's not pretend we gave anything up.  The problem was that this was the solution to C and nothing was done to insure CF.

 

Aaron Hicks and his god awful play wouldn't have sufficed as Plan B either.

 

You may be right.

 

He's about to get some playing time in NY.

 

I'm waiting until he lands on a scrap heap somewhere before I declare it. 

[markominne]

No accountability shows no credibility. For both the front office and the owners. I am not saying fire them all right now, but Pohlad could do one single thing without firing anyone right now:

 

He can actually hire a baseball person who has never been associated with a Terry Ryan Front Office and has a record of building wining teams, give him the title of President of Baseball Operations and have Ryan report to him. This person, with the help of any outside the organization advisers he needs, can assess the situation and the staff in the front office, on the field and in the minors for the next 4 months and come the off-season he would have a carte blanche to build the Twins baseball operations including the front office the way he wants to. Also, he would have enough time to assess the personnel to lead the work on deadline trades and the draft.

I'd have to say you run the risk of widespread ridicule for proposing a real, practical step towards resolving this mess. Unlike many here, I'm not inclined to write off every member of the staff and every player on the team. However, this is the season the Twins have been building towards, and by the beginning of May they have played themselves out of any hope of contending this year. With the draft a month away, they cannot just fire everyone, but clearly the direction of the franchise over the past 6 to 8 years has resulted in a team without clutch hitting (and don't tell me that it doesn't really exist!), heavy in strikeouts (except for the pitching staff), no catching, and poor fielding. The pitchers can't hold on runners, the catchers can't throw them out, and on the other side of the ball, the Twins have no apparent clue as to how to run the bases.

 

Shuffling in and out over-the-hill or never-were veterans to attempt a short term fix makes no sense - the idea of bringing in a president of baseball operations over the team makes perfect sense.

[d-mac]

 

How quickly we forget about the Neil Cotts MEGA trade in August... 2 franchise changing trades last season I can understand that argument, and like I said before, TR could have done plenty more before the very last minute to improve the team. 

Again, if there was zero activity last year at the trade deadline, TD would have imploded with rage for not going for a playoff spot, and probably would have burned Target Field to the ground. 

 

Hey, post-deadline waiver trades are a great place to pick up average to mediocre relievers, because they can usually picked up for a bag of balls. Which, is probably what Jepsen would have gone for in August or the offseason. 

 

If TD told Terry Ryan to jump off a bridge, should he do it? Wait... don't answer that.   Most of the time I think many of us here at TD would do a better job as a GM than Ryan, however, making a deadline move just to appease a fan during a season that turned out to be a mirage is not a good idea. 

[d-mac]

 

We'll just have to agree to disagree. You value Hu much more than I do, and that's perfectly fine. On to the next tangent or topic we go. 

 

We tend to agree on most things. It's ok to have a friendly disagreement from time to time. 

[Platoon]

One of the stated but under emphasized components of this collapse is the terrible basics! Base running, cutoff men, throwing to the correct base, et al. Those things can be done correctly while hitting .152 or .352. And the next media talking head who plays the "young players learning how to play the game" card should be publicly flogged at second base during the 7th inning stretch! . These things generally start getting taught at the middle school level. Who knows, maybe someone even mentioned them in the 5 years of MiLB most play.

[Taildragger8791]

 

We tend to agree on most things. It's ok to have a friendly disagreement from time to time. 

 

This isn't how the internet works, fellas. I'm going to need you to pick up your standard-issue weapons of ad-hominem & strawman attacks and resume your fight to the death of your dignity.

[Platoon]

Aaron Hicks has only struck out 8 times in 41 AB's so far this year.

 

This isn't the same Aaron Hicks under performance we saw in 2013 and 2014.

 

During 2013 and 2014... We endured 2 years of 140 K's in 467 AB's (30%)

 

2015... We watched him progress talent wise down to 66 K's in 352 AB's (19%)

 

Then we move him... and replaced him with a guy who struck out 50% of the time.

 

We endured the worst of Hicks and saw him get better and now we will watch another team display the best of him down the road. (I will be proven right later until then it's just my opinion).

 

A potential 20/20 guy moved for a player who will most likely never be a 20/20 guy and most likely never a 10 home run guy. Just a guy who if everything breaks right... will be an average player at a position that is filled with average players.

 

We overpaid for position scarcity. Only the Giants have a Catcher who produces big time at the plate. Every other team is putting average to below average players at Catcher.

 

We could of signed JP Arencebia or Salty and kept Hicks.

 

If you wanted to move Hicks because you didn't like him or believe in him because of work ethic or baseball sense or whatever reason you wanted him off the roster. 

 

Should have asked for Justin Wilson instead. Should have traded for a position where you can clearly upgrade... like the BULLPEN. 

 

BTW... If you did believe in Aaron Hicks and still traded him. This will end up as totally indefensible.

 

And if two way productive catchers are as rare as hens teeth, we could bring up someone like Turner who many say is a ML defense catcher already. We are giving up the AB's anyway! Ps at least half the reason Aaron Hicks was traded was about personality. IMHO He has been a thorn in managements side for three years!

[Oxtung]

 

Are the players as bad as they are currently performing? That's a tough case to make. I named about 20 players in this article and a total of two (TWO) are playing up to their established career baseline or above.

 

We will see if they are this bad long term or not.  That's why my last sentence was prefaced by,

 

"..if we end with a terrible record...".

 

I think you're over simplifying things by only comparing to their "career baseline".  There was no crystal ball needed to see that Buxton, Rosario, Sano, Dozier, Mauer, Suzuki, Murphy, Park, Arcia, D. Santana, Jepsen, Fien, Perkins, Abad, Hughes, E. Santana and Nolasco all had questions about their ability to contribute this season.  I'll grant you that few people thought they all would regress but even if only half of them regressed this would still be a pretty poor team.

 

Again, we'll see if this continues for the season or if there is a bounce back along the way (I think there will be a bounce at some point) but if there isn't Ryan and the FO can't hide behind the words "Nobody saw this coming." There will have to be some accountability.

[by jiminy]

 

Steamer and ZiPS both projected Dozier to be a top-10 2B prior to this season. Both expected Plouffe to be just slightly below average 3B. From purely an offensive perspective, Steamer and PECOTA all projected Dozier, Plouffe and Escobar to hit better than they currently are, some of them significantly. Looking at the rest-of-season projections, all three projection systems are still projecting them to hit better over the remainder of the season. Now the projection systems all predicted the Twins to not be very competitive this season, so it is quite likely that Twins fans and management ALSO overvalued them. But I think 'underperforming' is a perfectly apt description for how Dozier, Plouffe and Escobar have performed so far.

Fair enough. I concede that Plouffe, Dozier, and Escobar were not projected to be THIS  bad. So in that sense, they have underperformed. I agree. I also don't think they'll stay this bad. I think they're better than they've shown. I overstated it if I said no one has underperformed at all. Let me try again.

 

As a whole, the projection systems you mentioned predicted a losing team. 

 

Yet Twins fans, myself among them, chose to focus on the potential upside of each player. Dozier, for the first half of last season, was a monster. Yes his second half was horrendous but if he returns to form, imagine how good he could be with a whole season of pre-all-star-break production! That is nice to think about, sure. But it's not the way a GM should construct a team.

 

Rosario, was seen as a proven commodity by the Twins and given a starting job, despite a sub .300 OBP and monumentally bad plate discipline. His OPS was buoyed by a record number of triples. There was not a lot of upside to his batting approach, and a lot of downside.  Did he underperform? I would say, not really. 

 

Escobar I thought had proven something -- his first full year of starting had produced starter quality numbers. He underperformed my hopes, certainly. But would any GM other than the Twins consider him a sure thing? 

 

Plouffe has always been up and down. I'm not shocked by his start, and won't be shocked if he brings his production up around average.

 

But the hopes for this team were based on best-case scenarios.  No one should feel betrayed when the lottery tickets didn't all hit, or make excuses for the GM who crossed his fingers and hoped too.

 

A case could be made that with so many high draft choices going for relievers, this was not the time to clog the pipeline with three and four year contracts for veteran relievers, especially since their careers tend to be so volatile anyway.  And especially if you know you're not going to win now so you can afford to wait a year to see if any of the youngsters work out.  But that's a very different thing from saying, the bullpen, as constructed, has underperformed or disappointed.  Jepsen is who he always was, mediocre.  Perkins is who he always was, an injury risk.  The rest are just warm bodies.  No surprises there.  Like I said, the GM himself pointed out the bullpen as the biggest area of need, and he did nothing, so he can't plead surprise now.  His one gamble, Abad, worked out!  So did May!  Nobody let him down.  He just decided to hope he could get by for a year until Burdi, Charguois, and those guys arrived.  He gambled and lost. But it was always the most probably outcome.  

 

speaking of Jepsen, the Twins do have a habit of overvaluing recent performance, or near recent performance, and building their plans around that continuing. Jensen was okay, but he really came through last year, so we can count on that continuing! Same with the extensions for Hughes, Pavano, all the way back to Blackburn. They see something they like, and they read too much into it.  Like that Danny Santana had proved he earned the shortstop job, because of his good attitude about moving to the outfield without complaining.  Or that Rosario had proved he could handle big league pitching because of an empty BA.  

 

Maybe these guys will all have a resurgence. But at this point, I'm starting to wonder, is Buxton another Hicks?  A tools, high draft pick, who if he only learns to hit will be an all star?  Is the pipeline a pipe dream?  I'm not giving up yet, but this year has shaken my faith.  

 

Which will make their great second half even more enjoyable, if it happens!  

 

Now that the playoffs are out of the picture, I think we'd all be happy with a second half above .500.  That's not impossible, if things go right -- Buxton, Kepler, etc. could all take off -- and they could have a decent young pitching staff anchored by Berrios, Duffey, May, and Meyer.  

 

But that won't take them much above .500.  To really win it all, they need to be in on the bidding on someone like Greinke next time.  Pool all the money from Nolasco, Santana, and Hughes, and lump it into one all-star, to bring the young talent up to the upper echelon.  I still have hope of a winning team.  But I won't have hopes for a win-it-all team until I see something like that.  

[Platoon]

While some of the Twins young RP with velocity have been slowed by injuries, opportunities to promote have still been bypassed. Most recently Chargois. And while I know and understand all the pros and cons of Meyer, why not Meyer. What the bleep is the difference. We are 13.5 out. Maybe with Meyer we would be 14 out and completely out of the running, but let's take a chance!

[nicksaviking]

 

Look, I admire the amount of turd polishing you attempted here, but Aaron Hicks is just not good at baseball. 

 

Well we still haven't put him on the mound yet. I want to see that rumored high 90's heater.

[Platoon]

Hey, post-deadline waiver trades are a great place to pick up average to mediocre relievers, because they can usually picked up for a bag of balls. Which, is probably what Jepsen would have gone for in August or the offseason. 

 

If TD told Terry Ryan to jump off a bridge, should he do it? Wait... don't answer that.   Most of the time I think many of us here at TD would do a better job as a GM than Ryan, however, making a deadline move just to appease a fan during a season that turned out to be a mirage is not a good idea.

 

The good news is we probably could do a better job. The bad news is the trading deadline would expire while we argued about what to do!

[d-mac]

 

The good news is we probably could do a better job. The bad news is the trading deadline would expire while we argued about what to do!

 

The roster would be a total "camel."

[d-mac]

 

This isn't how the internet works, fellas. I'm going to need you to pick up your standard-issue weapons of ad-hominem & strawman attacks and resume your fight to the death of your dignity.

 

But...but... I like Vanimal!