SmellEm

That account actually came out a couple of days later and said he was just a Braves fan who made it all up.

This 100% reads as Donaldson trying to use the Twins as leverage to get Atlanta to up their offer.

How big of a disaster would this off-season be if Odorizzi's agent was good at his job?

So there's our rotation. No impact free agent and no impact trade. We got swept by the Yankees, they add the best pitcher in baseball and we hope we can get Gibson/Perez level production from a guy whose ceiling is mediocre and the most injured pitcher in MLB history. Eagerly waiting to hear that we made a competitive offer to Donaldson but he chose Atlanta or DC for reasons. Great job on the front office for dropping this on a holiday so maybe no one will notice. What a joke.

People need to stop comparing the Bumgarner and Wheeler situations as they really aren’t the same at all. It looks like Bumgarner really did want to go to Arizona and took significantly less money to do so basically forcing Arizona to sign him. Obviously the Twins probably weren’t going to get him with any sort of reasonable offer. But he is also pretty clearly an exception as most free agents aren’t going to leave that much money on the table. But Wheeler’s situation was completely different. As far as we know he turned down a slightly higher offer from the White Sox to sign with Philadelphia because he preferred the location. Obviously if a player has multiple similar offers where the money is pretty similar, other factors are going to come into play. But we have no idea if he would have signed with the Twins if they made a similar offer because they didn’t. All we know is that he preferred the Phillies over the White Sox when the money was basically the same. There is no reason to think he wouldn’t have seriously considered the Twins if they truly made the best offer.

The big difference between guys like Odorizzi/Berrios vs Cole/Verlander/Scherzer/etc is that the real aces keep their teams "in the game" for 6 or 7 innings not 4 or 5.

My girlfriend will be happy to know that despite the fact I didn't get her anything for Christmas I actually made several unsuccessful Ebay bids for really nice gifts she would have loved!

If the Twins lose ground on the starting pitching front to other top AL contenders, then this offseason is a failure. The Yankees may add Cole or Stasburg to a healthy Severino and Paxton. Boston will be hoping from bounceback seasons from Sale and Price. Cleveland and Tampa seems to be able to create starting pitching at will. The Astros will lose Cole, but have Whitley as potential future ace to go along with Verlander and Greinke. The Angels are talking to Strasburg and could add him and a healthy Ohtani to their rotation. If the biggest move they make is replacing Gibson with Bumgarner then they will likely lose ground to several of their top competitors who are making bigger additions. When you're a 101 win team that got swept out of the playoffs, that is not a successful off-season. Baseball is a competitive sport, of course the Twins success or failure needs to be measured against what other teams are doing.

The Pineda signing is great and arguably the best deal of any starters signed so far, from the team's prospective. But reports are out that the Yankees are going to make Cole a priority. If that happens, this off-season is a total failure even if they sign Bumgarner. We'll have the exact same problem we had last season, good starting pitching depth, but our top two or three starters will all the worse that their counterparts in a playoff series. The rotations for AL contenders next year are going to be stacked at the top and the Twins just won't be competitive. Which playoff contenders would have a worse 1-3 than us?

So basically we're going to end up replacing Pineda with a pitcher who was basically the same level as him last year, but at 3x the cost. And then the local media will pretend we actually signed an ace because he's a big name people have heard off. And even better, he's a potential clubhouse disaster given his past confrontations with players of color and the makeup of the rest of this team and the great chemistry they had last season.