Randy Dobnak and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Season

His magic when he first came up was batter's hit most of his stuff on the ground and he didn't give up many HR's.  Seems like teams might have caught onto his stuff, he is too predictable or he isn't throwing the same way. Not sure which one it is but teams are having a little too much success against him this year. He has the rest of this year and this offseason to figure things out.  If he doesn't I think he gets passed by.  We will see what happens but I am still on the Dobnak bandwagon.  He kept the ball on the ground and in the park before I believe he can do it again once healthy.

I really like his story, but stories are not enough in MLB.  I worry that tinkering with his pitches could have made things worse.  I wish Randy could find his magic again, but I also hope the next wave is so good that there is no room for him, but please no more bullpen.

I continue to believe in the young man.  And perhaps the most encouraging stat is that after his rough couple innings in his first start back, he finished with 7 consecutive batters being out on ground balls.  That is who he is and the Twins should work off of that.  Keep him throwing as a ground ball machine.

Have thought since day one that his working out of the bullpen wasn't working and messed him up for the entire season.  Hopefully, next spring he will be a starter and begin the season in the starting rotation with either the Twins or Saints.  Long term, I see him as a reliable starter for the Twins, one who is very inexpensive.

One of the most head scratching extensions ever. I'm a Dobnak guy, still don't understand this contract, though. 

According to Cody's article the most the Twins would be on the hook for is 30 mill...IF they pick up his option years.  If they did that you would believe he would be pitching very well at the time.  Good value for that many years of good performance.  If not you cut the cord if things don't work out and you are out 9.25 in guaranteed $$$...they were probably hoping for him to be a 5th starter type.  If you get league average or so performance out of him in that role that is a bargain.  

and in his last outting he thru lots of ground balls. Thats what I wanted to see. 

There's nothing wrong with Dobnak. It's the way they used him. They shouldn't have tried to transform him into a SO pitcher by forcing him to overload on sliders on the fly. He couldn't perfect the slider on the fly and hung too many and the hitters looked for them.

For a team with post season ambition you don't do things on the fly. They did the same thing at CF. Putting inexperienced players there instead of initially going with our only MLB experienced true CF that was hot coming out of spring training.

Leaving Dobnak in the rotation wouldn't been a decision based just in spring training. He earned it based on the prior two years and contract extension. Shoemaker should have been the one who had work out of the bullpen to start.

6 hours ago, mikelink45 said:

I wish Randy could find his magic again, but I also hope the next wave is so good that there is no room for him,

This is about where I am. Seems like a good guy, and wish him all the best. 

But also seems very much like the kind of starter a contender doesn't have on their roster. No, the contract won't kill the Twins financially, but it is looking like money that wasn't well spent.

That said, I'd much rather watch him get 20-30 starts next year to show what he can do than watch some $4M veteran Happ-hazardly signed for a meaningless year. 

Cody, with this title, are you suggesting he spend the offseason hanging out with Liam Hendricks or someone in Australia? 

Dobnak's contract is an inexplicable move in a series of inexplicable moves (Simmons, Happ, Shoemaker, the discount bin bullpen) this year by the front office. Ascribing any value, either positively or negatively, to Spring Training stats is buying fool's gold. 

He is a nice story. He seems like a nice man. But like Astudillo, Cave and a couple of others, he has no place on a legitimate major league roster.  

The danger of the contract is that it places pressure, either explicitly or implicitly, on the manager to keep trotting him out there. Falvine apparently wanted to play the lotto with this signing. The team needs to chew innings this year? Fine. But that's all it should be be. Like almost all lottery tickets, this one has expired worthless.   

3 hours ago, Mike Sixel said:

You think signing Simmons was inexplicable? 

I do believe he thinks every player on the team is inexplicable.

7 hours ago, IndianaTwin said:

Cody, with this title, are you suggesting he spend the offseason hanging out with Liam Hendricks or someone in Australia? 

 

Good luck getting into Australia, borders still closed for atleast 3 more months. 

22 hours ago, spanman2 said:

According to Cody's article the most the Twins would be on the hook for is 30 mill...IF they pick up his option years.  If they did that you would believe he would be pitching very well at the time.  Good value for that many years of good performance.  If not you cut the cord if things don't work out and you are out 9.25 in guaranteed $$$...they were probably hoping for him to be a 5th starter type.  If you get league average or so performance out of him in that role that is a bargain.  

Twins have to take some gambles like this. Too early to tell if this one will work out, fingers crossed that it does.

I still think Dobnak can contribute.  I think his success with the slider in spring made him use it more than he should.  He is a sinker ball pitcher and his success has been with getting soft contact on ground.  What had kept him from going too deep into starts was he did not have a clear out pitch.  The slider is meant to be that, but it appears he started using it earlier in at-bats.  

I hope rest of this year and going into next year he gets back to his basics with the sinker.  Then when at 2 strikes use the slider.  He should not be throwing the slider at 33% clip.  It should be a surprise pitch mainly as it will break different from the sinker.  Really good sinker guys can keep throwing the same pitch and the hitters know it is coming but it moves enough that they will not barrel it up.  With the slider, if he throws it for a strike it will get crushed.  He needs to always throw it to the edge or out of the zone to not get hit hard.  He was hanging the sliders or leaving them up, which books on sinker pitchers are if the pitch is up swing, so if the slider is up they will swing. 

Dobnak was one of the most dominant starters thru his first 16 starts that I have ever seen in a Twins uni (sans Liriano, Francisco). He is just 6 months older than Ober and was far more dominant thru his first 16 starts than Ober was, outpacing him by more than a 1.0 run in all past and predictive rate stats...and he was younger when he was doing it. At 24 years old Dobnak was dominating the best hitters in the world, while at the same age, Ober hadn't yet thrown a pitch above A+.

I say all this because if Dobnak had any sort of prospect pedigree and dominated the way he did thru his first 16 starts, then got yanked around by the FO and injured in year 3, we would just chalk it up to a lost season. But for some reason the story, the meteoric rise thru the minors, recency bias, and the fact that he looks 36 instead of 26, have soured far too many on Dobnak.

I don't think Dobbers will be amazing. I suspect his ceiling is a #3 in his best 150 inning seasons. That said, once a team has a solid #1 and #2, you need five Randy Dobnaks in your system to fill out your rotation.

57 minutes ago, Dodecahedron said:

I think a lot of people are stuck on the fact that he has different "stuff" than most pitchers.  It would take multiple years of him being an ace pitcher for some people to appreciate the good things he brings to the table.  Since he's not likely to ever be an ace pitcher, we are doomed to repeating the same conversation every time he loses a game.  The only solace we have to counter the banal abstrusity of witnessing the same commentary repeatedly over the next few years is the fact that he is probably going to have a few more good games than bad ones -- just like any other decent major league pitcher.

Bonus points for using the word "abstrusity". Thank you for introducing that one to my lexicon.

16 hours ago, Brock Beauchamp said:

I think we can chalk up most of Randy's issues to injury and not having a defined role. I suspect being thrown into the bullpen in a rush set him back and by the time he would have normally recovered, he was injured.

I really don't understand the usage argument. The guy did almost the exact same thing in '19, coming off an entire summer of starting. Suddenly a handful of starts in ST and subsequent move to the bullpen derails him? Eh....color me skeptical. 

As far as injury goes, if we want to erase the two games in TX, even the Yankees game (though I'd argue he was already getting bludgeoned prior to the nail tearing) we can, but the overall picture isn't any prettier. 

I think the issue with Dobnak has been......Dobnak. 

Maybe Dobnak lost his feel when they took away all the stickem.

I can't see him helping us. It's too bad about that contract.