TheLeviathan

Depends what I'm taking in it's place I suppose. Guys that are this feast or famine aren't ones I feel very comfortable building a team around.

I would like to see more FA spending when appropriate. I'd like the next time we're contending to pull that Cliff Lee type of trade from years ago. So I'm with you, but the timing and the context are important. I don't think the Twins are in a spot where making moves like that would be prudent. They need to be aggressive adding pitching this offseason, but that price is likely going to have to be paid via trade rather than cash. At least this year.

Except we'd have only a few more wins, no Buxton and Berrios and more, and be committed to Grienke for boatloads of money. Those few extra wins don't seem worth it.

You realize the vast difference between the two sides of the trade you're proposing right? It's not like that it's a straight swap. You'd have to add Buxton, 100+ million at least over the next few years, and several other prospects (like Berrios or Gonsalves and more) before that swap would be equivalent. So....I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

Every year teams do this, there are more teams that don't achieve a World Series than do. By and large all-in moves fail. That doesn't mean there aren't times to try them. Even if your odds are always more on the side of failure, there are times to try anyway. But there are also times when you try and you shouldn't have and then you fail (as was pretty much inevitable) and you've possibly done serious damage to your long term chances.

I agree, you have to see yourself for what you are. Even if that means you don't like the answer. I agree that they clearly didn't know what they were doing on a number of fronts, at the same time they did exactly what many here would've wanted us to do - aggressively improve the major league team. The problem was that Arizona wasn't really ready for that and has some systemic issues that prevent any real success. (They seem, like us, totally unable to find pitching internally) They concentrated on the wrong areas. Where they should have been trying to improve their organizational framework for identifying and developing pitching, they chose instead to throw money and prospects as a fix. I've always seen money and trades as the way you supplement or complement. Not as a particularly effective bread and butter strategy.

Part of the problem is getting teams to recognize what they are. How often do we sit here and have to argue that the team should be rebuilding? Or acting like a rebuilder? Only to have people pop on and dismiss the notion altogether. You'll have some that look at any situation, regardless of talent and outlook, and say "78 wins is better than 77, to hell with 2018". I think that's part of the thinking that was flawed in Arizona. Again, read your context and understand where to attack to make yourself better.

Your "aim high" analogy makes more sense if you imagine aiming a bazooka at your house to get the bird nesting under the roof. Yeah, you MAY get the bird, but for sure you're getting your house too. I appreciate, however, you helping to make the point to alarp that I was just arguing. Under the guise of suggesting the alternative to spending your assets like a drunk sailor is the Twins nickel and diming, you completely miss that there is a vast middle ground of sanity that is far more advisable. I think being a smart GM is a lot like being the smart manager of anything: know when to press and when to back off. Read the context of your situation and act accordingly. Always slow-footing and never taking risks isn't reading the context. Charging like a bull into every opportunity isn't either.

I don't know, we had a 7-10 page thread in which the bulk of the commentators defended the Oakland Donaldson deal. You'd be surprised what side of things people will stand. We've also had a near annual "The White Sox are gonna be awesome!" thread. There are people that will commend aggression for aggression's sake under the guise of "you should always try to win more games". I don't think all of Arizona's moves were as clearly mistakes at the time as you seem to think they were.

But when you are so singularly focused you risk these sorts of mistakes. There is a lot of chatter here about always trying to win and pushing all your chips in. The problem is that unless you win every move you expose yourself to huge risks with long term ramifications.

Expanding that rule to sliding QBs was absolutely indefensible. Unless college defensive players all have Jedi powers that I'm not aware of. You want to make football safer? Mandate all teams teach Rugby tackling and expand the range that DBs can be in contact with receivers to 10 yards.

Sure, teach flexibility.....in the minors. Don't toss career infielders into the outfield and call it innovative. This thread of the conversation started based on the spot-on criticism Nick laid out about not putting players in a position to succeed. The Cardinals are doing it and they are a bottom quartile team defense. Doing something no one else is doing is only redeemable if it works and gives you an advantage. Playing catchers and infielders in the outfield doesn't seem like a real strong chance of being that. Again, we could also field an entire lineup out of pitchers and get credit for being innovative, but being innovative isn't the point. Being better than the rest of the league is. If something innovative will help with that - go for it. Playing guys out of position and not maximizing their strengths is just a terrible idea on the face of it.

You clearly, totally missed my point about Suzuki. Maddon isn't being hailed as a genius for that stuff, the article was merely stating that more teams are trying it.

What's stupid is to prize flexibility in and of itself without qualifications. I'll pitch every day, play any position on the field, come out of the bullpen, do the laundry, and answer questions from Sid Hartmann for the major league minimum. I'll be the most flexible player in major league baseball history. Of course, I'll also be terrible. Like, get the Benny Hill music ready terrible. But dammit - I'll be flexible! So, maybe just maybe, we should ask that flexibility also comes with, I don't know, competence?

Merlin?

You're right that going younger doesn't mean getting better. In fact, like i argued earlier, often it means getting worse before you get better....but Ervin isn't going to be good forever. Hell, just in May and June he was 2-6 with an ERA around 5. And we've seen Dozier go from Babe Ruth to Babe the Pig like some kind of Jeckyl and Hyde routine. This is the time to shop these guys. Or, and mark my words, at some point in the next two years we'll look back on this as a lost opportunity. We'll have accomplished nothing more as a team with them and we'll wonder what else we could have gotten for them when the time was right. How many times have we done that lately?

Bingo. And let's not pretend Ervin doesn't eventually start wandering down the question mark path himself as he ages. I'm not scared of people thinking this is a deeper rebuild. And even if I was afraid of public perception, I wouldn't let it guide my actions. How do you lose nearly 100 games and not say "Hey, there's still a lot to fix here!". Anyone who thinks we are just a few good breaks from being back to hoping for 85 wins is missing the deeper issues here. Any fan that can't understand that isn't someone I would feel beholden to either. In the long run for fans, management, and the team you need to get the deeper issues fixed. That takes time. Spin it any way you want for PR, but at the end of the day we want to be a good team again. Not just appease a grumbling fan base temporarily by pointing out how our shiny bandaid (Santana) is keeping the damage from the iceberg at bay.

I can envision that being the case, but that doesn't make it prudent or likely. I also don't think trading Santana and Dozier qualifies as a total rebuild. Hell, if that were the case I think Dozier is the key to that argument, I'm not sure Santana really moves the needle all that much. And look, I get where you're coming from and I'm not willing to hand Ervin away, but if I can move him for good value (just like Dozier) - then I do it. I don't worry about public perception as a new GM because I can justify everything I do as being my vision for rebuilding the club. And we can't know what his value is if we aren't actively shopping him. At the end of the day I won't kick up a fuss if Dozier and Santana are retained because of underwhelming offers, but you better shop the bejesus out of them before you come to that conclusion. (Guys like Suzuki or Willingham or Abad are different - I'll take a slightly used bag of peanuts for guys like that)

Is trading Santana and Dozier a blowout rebuild? I guess I sort of take exception to that portrayal. I think it's just a natural part of a rebuild. We're selling high on two players with limited ability to help this team in even two years much less 4 or 5 when they are likely at peak value. And really, those are the only two players I'm actively shopping this offseason. No one else really has the value worthy of moving them. Also, by the logic you have here Nick, wouldn't the real answer to our problems be to put these players on the block: Buxton, Sano, Berrios, and Polanco? We might fetch 2-3 good MLB players to surround Dozier and Santan if we did. Wouldn't that be the fast track? I'd offer this up: are Twins fans jaded and losing interest? Yes, but at the same time we are almost guaranteed to have a totally new front office. You know what that buys? Time. Time to do things right. Sports fans get that new regimes need time to clean out the old mistakes. So we have time to do this right and the right thing to do is deal Santana for more help.

I don't deny it is defeatist. Part of my pessimism about this year was the fact that people are underselling the lumps young players sometimes have to take to show their best in the big leagues. Too many of you were predicting MVP campaigns and all that jazz for guys that still clearly had work to do. I think this year we saw a lot of the offensive players take their lumps, but we are nowhere close to seeing the pitching staff do the same. Meaning, we aren't that much further along for letting our guys adjust. We'll have the husk of Phil Hughes, the decidedly bleh Gibson, and a bunch of guys still trying to prove they are starters. I don't think, even optimistically, that we can field a good enough staff to contend next year. But what I would like to do is invest a lot of innings in Mejia, May, Berrios, and whomever we get for Santana and Dozier. Not to mention the young bullpen arms. Then, ideally, 2018 is a time we can start to actually hope. But retaining Santana does nothing to improve us, while dealing him may gave us more bullets in the chamber to improve over the long haul. I get that people want to say things like "don't give up on next year!", but sometimes that's just being a realist. Charlie Brown shouldn't continue to live his life believing he's going to some day kick field goals in the NFL. At some point he should just accept who he is and quit living the lie. Retaining Santana is living a lie about next year. Same with Dozier. I don't give them away, but I actively seek ways to move them for value. Anything else is just too detached from reality for my liking.

Or in the case of Doumit and Bartlett - totally inexplicably stupid.

Trade him. It's not illegal to get a guy that is ready to slot in his place. Given our pitching options in the short term, we've already given up on next year. It's going to take that long just to sort stuff out. Why make Ervin go down with the ship when you can trade him for a couple life boats?

North was trying to give your post credit for having something to say. So you just stated that we put catchers in the outfield....for fun? Maddon's point was that if a guy has figured out hitting but not fielding, move him around to find a spot that he can field passably so he can ascend the ranks quicker. Again, your article did nothing to suggest these moves are working or successful, only that they are being attempted more often. We could attempt to field a lineup entirely out of pitchers too, wouldn't make it cutting edge or wise to try. Sure, it'd be new, but I'm not interested in new. I'm interested in doing things that have a good chance of succeeding. Playing guys in the field based on what appears to be a "throw a dart at a picture of a defensive alignment and go with it" doesn't lead me to think we'll have much success. Merely being an infielder does not make one capable of being an outfielder.

I listed utility infielders. Who had rarely played outfield until years after their time in development. And all of them sucked in the outfield. Your link, while citing that more teams are doing it, fails to argue they are doing it successfully. We could play Suzuki in CF and call it progressive too, but it only makes sense if the guys can actually play it. Maddon was talking about cultivating it in the minors - that I can agree with. At the major league level? Terrible. And I'm guessing many of these experiments will end sooner rather than later. As Schwarber and Sano have.

I think this just proves you can measure our defense by any means you want and it still turns out as The Suck.