Muppet

The Twins aren't the Yankees or Dodgers and, thus, will not be able to afford as much pitching, offense, and defense as they want. They have to make a plan and move the chips where they can to back the plan up. I'm sure poor hitting defensive studs are much cheaper than awesome hitting but poor defending players. I don't know if the plan will work, but as much as I wished they had more average hitters, I'm glad they are trying something new and sticking with it. The rotation looks to be one of the best I've ever seen. Perhaps they have no Nolan Ryan-style aces, but they have 5 or 6 number 2s. Even Ober, who looks to be the cast-off would have been the team ace in the Nolasco years. They could use better middle relievers and better hitters, but they very well might have the best rotation and all-around defense in the MLB.

And let's not forget those lovely Dodgers fans that put Giants fans in the hospital for supporting the wrong team.

$12 over 4 years? That's much less than they are paying Joey Gallo, who has even worse numbers.

He has been very good in the minors and mostly very good in the majors. In 2022 he almost only pitched against teams that were not very good, but excelled. So he has rocked AAA and rocked AAAA. A six man rotation is not unprecedented. And... like everyone says... someone will surely be injured nearly out of the gate. So, let's not sweat it. Put him on as the sixth.

Last year was one of his worst. He’s likely to be at least slightly better this year. The end of the shift will get the credit even if it has nothing to do with it.

I look forward to Emilio Pagan being MLB's most improved player in 2023.

The ghost runner sucks. I hate it. It makes for completely worthlessly disappointing finishes to otherwise close exciting games. Might as well end in a coin toss. Why is the position player pitching occasionally a problem that needs fixing? Who cares? To make baseball more watchable or relevant in the modern era, instead of focusing on ridiculous fixes to problems that don't really exist they could instead focus on making it possible for people who aren't wealthy to watch baseball games on TV (or even in person at the stadium). We are slowly degenerating to a future where baseball is just a series of random number generated outcomes constantly updated and augmented by the averages and standard deviations of fictitious player-avatars whose profiles are also randomly generated. What's even more pathetic is that I'll still watch and keep track of my bot-baseball team every day and get pissed when they lose.

If the lineup was full of decent hitters, having someone who strikes out a lot but hits 35 HR would be OK. As the lineup looks today, Gallo will hit 35 HR and have 35 RBIs. He will be involved in more 1,2,3 innings than anything else.

So he becomes a better pitcher by pitching in the AL's AAAA league? I'd say that just hides his "weakness" rather than fixes it. By that token, all of the Twins are probably not as good as they appear on paper (which might be true).

Totally true. We expect all prospects to turn into Aaron Judge. We should be happy if they all play as well and consistently as Polanco. Probably only half will… and those that do will be dismissed as failures …. Like the truly most underrated player on the Twins — Nick Gordon.

With an outfield this solid, they'll only lose every game 1-2 instead of 1-3. Please bring in someone who can hit.

They upgraded at catcher. CC is a very good, but overrated SS. That said, I'm glad they got him. Until Miranda puts in a full successful season at 3B he is just potential. His downslide at the end of last season is problematic. I don't count my rookies until they've hatched. That said, they've offensively downgraded at every position. They can still win if they have a miraculous ability to keep players off the IL, if the pitching is as good as advertised, and if the young guys improve. They've been to the playoffs before with a similar looking bunch of miscreants. I think they are a worse team than last year, but I don't care. They can still win. There is no better time to be optimistic and excited than before they've thrown their first pitch. For me winning is fun, but it isn't everything. I'll happily watch them if even if they have a 62 win season (though I'd prefer a 100 win season).

Ober may have missed time to injuries last year, but when he did play he was one of the most dominant on the team. Only Sonny Gray had a lower ERA but Ober had a better whip than any of the starters and fewer HR/9 than any of the starters. The flip side was that he almost only played against AL Central teams who obviously weren't the best in the league. When the Twins did lose with Ober pitching they lost 1-8; 0-5; 3-4; 2-5; and 2-3. Clayton Kershaw would have lost most of those games. ALSO, the bullpen lost 3 of those 5 games Ober pitched in. This tells me 3 things. 1. Ober belongs in the rotation until he gives the Twins a reason to be demoted, and 2. The Twins need offence more than they need starting pitching, and 3. The bullpen needs to be better than last year.

As someone who is mostly only able to "watch" baseball on a MLB game-day computer simulation where blue dots are hits and red dots are strikes, one of the things I'll never get to see is the quality of the pitcher. Perez' downslide looks the same as Dobnak's 'rising star' innings. They are both just red and blue dots. Seeing actual pitchers pitch is maybe the thing that makes teams decide that their faltering starter haws 2.89 ERA potential.

Assuming Celestino and Matt Wallner start the year in St. Paul, and that Kirilloff gets a few starts in RF, the Twins will have more outfield arms than bullpen arms. Seems smart. If your tired mediocre bullpen that pitches more than 4 innings per game starts to falter, your stacked outfield can surely get those extra outs.

Correa is the only guy on the team who we can reasonably assume will hit .250 or more. This team will struggle to score 3 or more runs per game on a consistent basis. The 15-20 hrs Gallo hits will not win many games if they are part of those 1-3 runs/game. The skills he brings are completely redundant with an OF that already has 3 gold glove caliber players and Larnach who looks as though he might potentially be GG quality. If the team is lucky, they can expect any number of the players to hit 15-20 hrs... Buxton, Kirillof, Miranda, C4, etc.. I think the team needs more players that can be on base when the HRs are hit, and more players that can move the line forward and allow HR hitters more opportunities to hit. Nothing against Gallo. He'd be a useful cog on a team that needed a good defending outfielder and someone who could hit a HR once in awhile. Twins don't need one of those. Pardon the dead horse, but they need a couple of people who are a bit more like Arraez to round out the team.

Jake Cave. 2023 will be the year of Jake Cave. (He can still be added to the team in Spring Training right?)

If the Twins are going to stick with the plan of limiting starters to 3 times through the lineup/5 innings, they need to have relievers that can pitch 2-3 innings. They must have had their reasons for limiting starters, but they never seemed to figure out that bullpen games with shaky bullpens doesn't work out. How many times did they turn a 1-2 run lead into a blowout loss because they needed to piece the second half of the game together with tired or ineffective arms. All that said, I looked at Fulmer's past. 2020 was an interesting case. The Tigers had him start all 10 of his games and limited him to 3 innings in each game. While he almost always got through the first inning without giving up a run (the highest scoring inning in baseball), he often was still shellacked despite only throwing 3 innings per game (an 8.78 ERA). NOT the type of guy you want serving as that middle innings eater role. But he's at worst a mediocre pitcher who doesn't give up a lot of home runs (when he's not pitching for the Twins). Definitely worth having around the pen ... at least more so than others on the team named Pagan.

Sorry to Rickys everywhere. Didn’t mean to Randy up your reputations.

Maybe one day my kids will be able to watch a Twins game on TV without going out to the bar.

To me the problem is that they don't have anyone better as a replacement. Taylor and Gallo are both supposedly great defensively. Taylor's numbers look about the same to me (I'm concerned about 2022 numbers, not career numbers) and Gallo looks like he fills a Sano sized hole. Larnach, if healthy, is too young to be a proven asset (though I hope and expect he will be) and besides, if he fits the bill, he'll probably be in LF. One thing I do wonder, though, is whether it is OK to have a poor defending RF when Buxton is healthy. Can't they afford a RF with less range? Especially if it means replacing the bat with someone who might actually move a runner forward? If that's the case, I put Gordon in right... until Buxton is hurt.

I don't care who they trade, as long as they pick up another great defending outfielder who can't hit. I'm collecting those.

I agree. I see Kepler staying with the team now. They have a rock solid OF and it is Buxton injury proof now. I understand that the younger squad is supposed to take over the hitting, but I'm always of the mind that younger players are only potential until they are proven. A good deal of prospects don't pan out, as exciting as they are in their first year or two. And sophomore slumps are real. If the young squad does meet their potential, this team will actually be pretty good.

I'm looking for a way to estimate how many runs a player is part of creating. There might be a better stat, but I can easily calculate this, so I did it. It doesn't double count HRs (those are subtracted from R and RBI) but it does double count players' runs. Buxton on second when Kepler hits a HR counts as a run for Buxton and 2 runs for Kepler. Also, not saying that is what will happen in the future, just what has happened in the past. Hopefully everyone does better in the future. I'm also concerned about players ending innings. So OBP when there are 2 outs keeps an inning going. With the Twins terrible at RISP hits, I'm looking at the RISP avg. And Taylor is the only one of the four above the Mendoza line. That his RISP avg is only .234 but is the highest of the four tells a little something about how much trouble this can be over the season.