The Twins Worst Trades: Wilson Ramos

That said, Capps was really good for the Twins that year. They may not have been a playoff team without him.

There is no evidence to support that latter claim, Seth.

On the surface, it seems doubtful, since we won the division by 6 games and Capps, while good, was still just 2 months of a mostly 1-inning reliever, whose numbers weren't appreciably different than the guy he bumped down the depth chart (Rauch). But it actually looks worse when you examine it closely.

Our only real competitor for the playoffs late that season was the White Sox, and indeed we were 1.5 games behind them when we acquired Capps. Maybe Capps' performance against the White Sox was responsible for our turnaround? Nope -- here's Capps first 4 games as a Twins against them:

1. the last inning of a 5-run loss

2. the last inning of a 5-run win

3. blown save, we still won in extras (Jim Thome game)

4. gave up a run in the 9th, putting the tying run in scoring position, but escaped with a save

At this point, the Twins had already opened up a 5-game lead on the White Sox and were already in the driver's seat in the division -- the lead would never be smaller than 3.5 after that, and in fact grew to as many as 12 games in mid-September as the White Sox spiraled downward.

Maybe Capps was clutch in our other games, to get to that point? Not really -- in his first 7 save opportunities for the Twins, Capps actually allowed runs in 4 of them. Only one of those outings was a scoreless 1-run save, and he only came into a tied game once in that period too. He wasn't bad or anything, but there just wasn't the opportunity or performance for him to be considered a main factor behind our 7-game swing in the standings over 3 weeks.

One of the team’s biggest weaknesses was the bullpen

I'm not so sure about that. I'd say the pre-Capps bullpen wasn't that far behind the post-Morneau lineup, or the fully healthy rotation which featured Brian Duensing as our third starter in the postseason.

All that said, Ramos wasn't really good enough with Washington to make this super-regrettable, although our organization was exposed as embarrassingly thin at catcher, just a few baseball months after trading him, so that was kinda bad. Then Ramos went on to have arguably his best year in 2016, still under team control, the exact same season where we swapped Aaron HIcks for John Ryan Murphy to shore up our catching...

Yup, it's just an opinion... 

An opinion supported by what?

Here's a fun game -- see if you can distinguish between Rauch and Capps' 2010 overall stat lines:

3.12 RA9, 2.94 FIP, 1.301 WHIP, 9.5 H/9, 0.5 HR/9, 2.2 BB/9, 7.2 K/9

3.33 RA9, 3.23 FIP, 1.260 WHIP, 9.2 H/9, 0.7 HR/9, 2.1 BB/9, 7.3 K/9

Your opinion is that one of those pitchers may have been 6+ wins worse than the other, over a two month span?

Their relief careers 2005-2010 look similarly interchangeable:

https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=rel&lg=all&qual=0&type=8&season=2010&month=0&season1=2005&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=4788,1475&startdate=&enddate=

An illustration of how much we overpaid:

Rauch was a few years older but largely the same pitcher in terms of 2010/career performance as Capps (see my previous post).

We got 1+ years of team control of Rauch during the 2009 August waiver trade period for basically nothing (sorry, Kevin Mulvey!). During those 1+ years, we paid Rauch about $3.5 mil in salary.

To get 1+ years of team control of Capps in 2010, we gave up Ramos (MLB-ready catcher prospect, #58 on BA's preseason list) AND we had to pay Capps over $8 mil for his services during that time.

Now, they were both useful pitchers in 2010 and there's nothing wrong with having useful pitchers, and not every useful pitcher can be acquired as cheaply as another, but that wide gulf in cost is problematic.

Heck, a month after we got Capps, we got Brian Fuentes for basically nothing too (sorry, Loek Van Mil!). Fuentes was near the end of his line but still quite useful -- 11 games, 12.1 shutout innings for his Twins career -- and only cost us about $1.5 mil for the month/playoffs.