S.

Numbers-wise, last year was about the exact same as he had been the previous two years as well, so I'd have a hard time calling his year lousy or a down year for him, since it was damn near identical to 2017 and 2016 Edit: Should probably specify, this is in regards to Kepler

Considering how low our payroll is, it'd be nice if we could maybe get some actually good pitchers. As TheLeviathan said, this move is ok IF there are other better moves coming. But I doubt there are.

It looks like Steamer is predicting 2.2 WAR for Buxton and 2.5 WAR for Sano, so that jives with your expectation. And I think most people would probably be pretty happy to get that sort of production from them after this last season, but that still would not qualify them as "top players in any roster" as the other poster put it. At the end of the day though, I don't think projections should stop us from acquiring other good players, which is my main issue here. Lots of prospects and players project to be stars. A lot less achieve that success. Lots of people love to talk about not wanting to block prospects or not wanting to sign good players to multi year contracts because you might have some prospect who pans out in a few years. But for every prospect that becomes a great MLB player, many more fizzle out and never amount to anything, or become replacement level players, or decent players but don't live up to their projections. My frustration isn't so much with Sano and Buxton specifically (though they definitely frustrated me plenty last year), but more the idea that standing pat is a good idea with this roster. Go get some more good players. If in a year or two years all of our current roster is playing well AND we got a bunch of prospects knocking on the door, then that's awesome. If you have multiple players for the same position who are genuinely good, there will always be teams interested. Players can be traded. Players get injured. Having lots of good players isn't a problem and I genuinely don't understand why lots of people on this board seem so averse to adding additional talent to a roster that features more than its fair share of mediocrity. Also, just to add - I assume it's a given but wanted to specify that these points aren't targeted at you personally, as I'm not going to claim I can remember who specifically has said what in all these offseason threads.

Ok, then by what reasonable projections and/or multi season metrics are Buxton and Sano top players?

Are you basing this on their 2018 stats or just some hypothetical situation where they all play to their absolute ceiling? Because 2018 Buxton and Sano couldn't even make the Twins roster for most of the year, so they certainly wouldn't have been top players on any other roster. Rosario is absolutely a high quality outfielder, no arguments there. Kepler was also solid. Castro is not even remotely a "top player" In 2018, Castro produced -0.2 fWAR. He is the 69th ranked catcher by fWAR. Both Astudillo and Garver produced a higher fWAR than him. If you don't like WAR, then I think his .143 BA, .257 OBP, and .495 OPS speak for themselves. When you say 4 solid starters, who is your 4th? Pineda? You're ready to call him solid even though he hasn't pitched a single inning for the Twins, and hasn't pitched a single inning in general in over a year? I understand being optimistic, but there is no metric by which Buxton, Sano, and Castro would be top players on any roster at this point in their careers. Could Buxton and Sano become top players on any roster? Yes, it is certainly possible and I hope they do so. But as of right now, Sano is coming off a rough season (to put it nicely), and Buxton is coming off of a complete failure of a season, and your statement that they would be top players on any roster is 100% false.

Yeah, I'm certainly not an advocate for it, at least not with the current state of the central. Was a statement on where I think we currently stand, but I personally want us to sign some good players and if Buxton and Sano and all our prospects pan out, then that'd be even better. We can trade some to fill in other positions of need if we have the luck of having a surplus of good players for the same position. No such thing as too many good players.

A .500 team is the definition of mediocre, and Buxton and Sano "maturing" isn't suddenly going to turn us into legit playoff contenders with our current roster. How many position players do we have that are above average for their positions? Eddie Rosario is the only one who comes to mind at the moment. How many pitchers do we have that are above average? 4? You're telling me you're looking at this roster and you'd be frustrated if they added some more actual talent? Last season Jake Cave was our 7th highest WAR player (including pitchers) and Grossman was our 8th. 4th and 5th respectively for position players, with 1.5 WAR each. If we were far from mediocre, Cave and Grossman wouldn't be in our top 5 best position players.

Tanking usually results in good draft picks, where as I think we're probably going to be stuck in no man's land where we're not good enough to compete and not bad enough to get a good position in the draft.

Paying Gibson 4/60 right now seems absurd to me. That's more than we paid Ervin Santana, who had a much better track record. Gibson has never put together two halfway decent seasons in a row.

Which brings us back to the question of why the hell do we want this guy, and how does this improve our team in any way? As others have said, lets hope this is a depth move and not a "rounding out our bullpen" move.

Taylor Rogers 2015 numbers in Rochester were in Rochester, not in the majors. 3.98 ERA in AAA. Maybe he would've been a successful starter in the majors, but we don't know that and to this point we have nothing to show us if he can consistently pitch multiple innings at a time in the majors. Looking at his AAA numbers from 4 years ago doesn't mean anything to me now. It is going to be 4 years since he has started. In the last 3 seasons he hasn't broken 70 IP in a year. Why are we just assuming he can ramp that up so much and perform as well as he's been doing in the majors? I also don't buy that the Rays blew anything out of the water. In fact, I doubt having an RP start the game before a starter sticks long term for anything besides September rosters/fringe situations/playoff shenanigans, but that's a whole different discussion I don't dispute that there is some middle ground and good RPs should be able to go multiple innings as needed. However, I absolutely do think taking your best RP and turning him into multi inning guy every outing is a waste. Sometimes you need your best guys out there for 1 out, sometimes you need them to get 6 outs. But if you want them available for as many potential high leverage situations as possible over the course of the season, you try to limit those 6 out appearances to when you really need them so they don't need extended days off and to ensure they're still going strong come August/September/October. I'd love to have a bullpen full of guys who were all as good at getting 1 out as they were at getting 6 and had the ability to go 100+ innings every season, but its an unrealistic ask. I'd love to just have a bullpen full of actually good RPs. That would probably be a good starting point. Jim Hahn, a few posts up, did a great job of detailing a few concerns that I also share about the idea of that role. In general, I think there are plenty of times where you want your best RPs to have the fortitude to stay out there for more than 1 inning when you really need it, but I don't want to take my best guy and turn him into some role player who isn't available 2/3rds of the time because he's constantly coming off of 2 and 3 inning appearances. I feel like the much more sustainable option is to build a bullpen with a variety of good pitchers. If you want one of them to go get 6 outs here and there, then thats no big deal since you're not risking burning out arms with 100 IP by having a few guys make a handful of extended appearances over the course of the season. I also don't think this is an unrealistic ask because we sure as hell have plenty of money we could be spending on good RPs, but it remains to be seen if we will do so.

In 2015 Taylor Rogers was a starter. 27 of his 28 Rochester appearances were starts. In your plan, he would absolutely 100% need to be stretched out as a starter. And how many days off is a RP going to require after pitching 3-4 innings? So now in your hypothetical situation, if Rogers is one of your best RPs, he is now only appearing ~2 times a week and you're left with your worse RPs for high leverage late inning situations for the other 3-5 games per week. If he isn't one of your best RPs and you're trotting him out there for 3-4 innings, then he is just a mop up man. I don't disagree with your general theory that your best pitchers should pitch more innings, but there is a limit to how many innings they can pitch before their results diminish. There is also a big reason a lot of failed starters become relievers: they can throw harder in short appearances, and they don't have to face the lineup more than once. So now you're taking guys who for many of them have not had success starting, but they have had success in the bullpen, and you're switching that up. Now they can't throw full gas because they need to face 2-3x more batters. If they're appearing for 2-3+ innings they're going to be facing the same hitters more than once. They now have all the problems they faced as a starter, but instead of having a fixed routine like a starter, they need to be ready to go at any time. They need to be able to jump in the middle of an inning, with runners on base, but they aren't going to be able to approach it the same way they previously were with their success as an RP because you're expecting them to stay out there 2-4x as long. Could it potentially work? Sure, but you're asking for a lot out of a bullpen built up mostly by guys who weren't good enough at working multiple innings to stick as a starter for the Twins. Which is saying something.

That fact that we're even discussing this "issue" of Jake Cave potentially not getting enough at bats really speaks magnitudes to the state of our roster.

And the reality is that three of those four guys who primarily play OF don't have a good enough bat to warrant them hitting as a DH or 1B.

While I understand what you're saying in theory, in practice you're just going to end up blowing out all your relievers. When you say "find out what he can handle," all that means to me is that you're going to keep using your best RPs until they break down. Which I guess is a viable approach if you're pushing down the stretch to make the playoffs or pushing in the playoffs to win the world series. But if you have RPs signed for multiple years, trying to increase their innings by 2x from one year to the next seems like a good way to blow out their arms, or end up with a bullpen full of relievers in August and September who are already cooked and won't be able to produce down the stretch (or in the playoffs, though realistically I don't think thats anything we need to worry about in 2019). I do agree that you shouldn't keep trotting out garbage just because of sunk cost or because of some reputation that they've built from years past when they were a completely different pitcher, but going the opposite direction and hugely increasing pitchers innings because they're pitching well isn't a sustainable approach to me. Do I agree that the RP pitching well should get more innings than the Matt Belisles of our roster? Absolutely, but I don't think it is even remotely reasonable to assume you can just send most relievers out there for 100 or 120 innings every year and expect them to hold up over the long term. And likely many of them wouldn't hold up over the short term or are going to start losing velocity and all of a sudden they aren't your best relievers anymore because they're already worn down in July.

How good can he be if he was DFA'd? The best of the garbage heap isn't exactly going to move the needle on our pitching problems.

You'd think they wouldn't have lowballed him so hard if they *really* wanted him

Go look at all the teams that have won the World Series. How many of them don't sign good players to long term contracts? How many of those teams that don't sign long term contracts also don't trade their prospects for established major leaguers?

If Gibson pitches as well as last year, or better, there is no way in hell he is signing a 2 year extension. And there is probably no way in hell he's signing a 3 year extension without testing free agency. He'll be 32, that will be his last chance for a significant multi year deal. If he regresses he is a 5 ERA pitcher and nobody gives a **** or offers more than a bag of balls in a trade.

Every time you reply you just ignore what people say and change your argument. You wanna complain about his 2016 numbers and "a horrible year for a guy 32 years old," except he was 29 in 2016. You accuse me of grousing about not signing him, when there is nowhere in this thread (or on this forum) where I have ever made a post pushing to sign McCutchen. You say, "Frame it how you want," while completely ignoring the fact that I said I wouldn't pay him 3/50 and was just disputing your notion of being able to get that WAR "from anywhere" as you so claimed. So you want to look at his 3 year average WAR? Ok, it's 1.5. If 1.5 WAR players are everywhere, how come we only had 10 of them on the Twins in 2018? and 4 of them were pitchers, so we had a total of 6 position players with over 1.5 WAR. In 2018, the Twins used 21 players who produced 0 or negative WAR. 19 players under 1 WAR but over 0. And a grand total of 13 players who put up over 1 WAR.

I don't have the slightest clue. Possibly someone that is good with bbref filters or something might be able to get those stats, but that is outside my area of expertise. Honestly though, I'm pretty indifferent to McCutcheon (and wouldn't have wanted to give him 3/50) so I don't really have a dog in that fight, more just wanted to dispute the notion that you can get 2.4 or 2.8 WAR anywhere, or that 2.4 WAR players wouldn't be an upgrade over the vast majority of the players on our roster

You can get that from anywhere, huh? Then how come in 2018 only 3 players on the Twins had over 2.8 WAR and only 1 was a position player (Rosario, Berrios, Gibson)? And in 2017 only 6 Twins players had 2.4 or higher (Dozier, Buxton, Santana, Berrios, Rosario, Sano)

No argument from me that riding around on dirt bikes when you're a professional pitcher is a stupid move. I have a hard time faulting a guy too much for taking a comebacker to the hand though. Either way, depending on the price tag, I think Bumgarner could be a really nice addition to the rotation. Like I said though, I don't have the slightest clue what the Giants are expecting in return, but in theory I think he'd be an interesting trade target if the cost isn't too ridiculous

In Bumgarners case, he took a line drive off his pitching hand last year in spring training and broke it. I'd call that pretty flukey or unlucky. It wasn't as a result of bad mechanics or his delivery or any of that. 2017 he hurt his shoulder in a dirt biking accident. Which is a really dumb thing for a pro to do, no doubt. Now, I certainly understand the argument that a guy who has been injured in recent years is a higher risk moving forward than someone who hasn't been injured, but this isn't a guy who has some Chris Sale delivery and blew out his arm or anything like that. I wouldn't consider either of those injuries to be the result of his durability. I will agree they could potentially impact his durability moving forward though.

He's 29 and was dealing with injuries for 2 years. Why are we just assuming he's going to keep regressing already? The 4 seasons prior to that he put up a combined 17.8 WAR. What would you prefer we do? Stand pat with this rotation and trot out an army of different AAA guys to fill 2 spots for the whole season and put up a 5+ combined ERA?