Cris E

If you want to look at his minor league work check out the fancy 3.99 ERA in 390 IP (less than 5.0 IP per start, and there were only two relief appearances in there to dilute the numbers.) He's only made 5 appearances in AAA and pitched to a crisp 5.06 ERA in 16 innings, all in 2021. His best season as a starter was his second pass through high A when he put together a 3.23 ERA in 15 GS and 78 IP, but the team as a whole had a 3.12 ERA that year so it's not like he was anything special. The fact is he got special when he cut loose and stopped pacing himself. There's no way that he'd be the same guy trying to get through five times as many batters. And the league would have a better book on him if he was trying to throw that much more as well. I'm not certain the book matters when he can rear back and hit 102, but if he can't then the game changes a lot.

No to just about any rookie with fewer than 500 AB in the minors. The jump to the majors is harder than most people imagine and it's a lot of pressure on a 20 year old to have Buxton and Correa waiting for you to set the table. Also no to anyone who has never put together a .350 OBP season. Mr Taylor looks like a fine fielder, a good man in the clubhouse and a conscientious son, but he's a career .296 OBP and belongs in the 9 hole. I like just giving Buxton and Polanco the extra ABs even if they aren't typical leadoff guys. Also, Odd Year Gallo might be a guy you want in the 4 or 5 hole. You kind of have to wait and see who everyone is in spring training, after the carnage of 2022. Lots of new faces and guys that have to get the rust off. Looking forward to seeing how things come out.

Dylan Bundy, for good or ill, is a Proven Veteran with 160 starts, almost 1000 innings in eight big league seasons. He's a known and proven quantity. It's not great quality, but in a season where the Twins were going to be counting on a lot of Smeltzers it was good to have one guy in the #4 hole that they could count on and who might rally and move up to #3. Devin Smelter had 7 starts and 70 career innings and managed to deliver 70 more with a 5.23 FIP which was a run and a half worse than his ERA, indicating that it was likely unsustainable. If you want to be stomping around flipping off management about unfair treatment in a situation like that I'll just say that I'm glad you don't work for me. In his shoes it should always be a "Thanks for the opportunities, see you 'round" in case he washes out in Miami and needs a home in six months.

Bally The RSNs bought the ad revenue when they bought the rights, so if MLB takes them back they can recoup that revenue as well. But honestly the cost to sell car and mattress ads in 25 markets for 80 dates isn't going to result in billions of dollars of profit. The national ads are easy but the locals are cheap and numerous. I read somewhere else that this doesn't need to replace all the broadcast revenue, just the 50% the teams keep plus whatever their share of the national revenue sharing was. But it's still a huge amount when you consider how many cable subscribers today are paying for sports against their will and will be free to not buy an MLB product at any cost.

The trouble with buying out Sinclair for pennies on the dollar is selling the games for enough money to replace the promised revenue to the teams. We're talking the Braves, Angels, Rangers, Padres and a bunch of others, so you'd need to make enough on, say, the Angels games to cover the $131m that was coming in before. There are only weeks until Opening Day to get this fixed. Otherwise if you think that fixing the blackout problem would be enough to increase MLB.TV sales by billions of dollars I'm just going to flat out disagree with you. This is a mess.

I think Lee will be ready for MLB well before Correa is ready to move off SS so he may end up manning 3B for a couple years. And honestly I expect him to slide in nicely there, so over the next 3-4 years I expect an infield of Lee, Correa, Polanco/Lewis/Julien and Miranda/Kirriloff. They should be good, and when the time comes to move Correa the parts may move in ways we wouldn't expect today. There may be another younger, better SS ready to go, someone like Salas, and then who knows what happens next. Don't get too far ahead, just let it unfold and enjoy the ride.

As much fun as a list like this is, a decent amount of the value some of them is going to provide will only come in the form of a trade. Don't fall in love, because we don't have room for all these guys to play here. With that in mind, I'm all in on @tarheeltwinsfan plan of going and getting Vazquez' heir via trade. AZ and TOR swapped stud young players a few weeks ago to fill organizational needs and we should consider it as well. Some things are very hard to do, so not everyone does everything equally well. We are cranking out the middle infield prospects these days and so we are trading from that wealth to buy things we haven't been creating in-house, mostly pitching. But it's also been a long time since we drafted and developed a non-Mauer catcher that anyone else thought highly of. I just checked: it was a 32 year gap between Jeffers leading the team in games caught in 2020 and Tim Laudner in 1988 with only Mauer in between. There is no indication that we're even trying to figure this out, so we may as well get shopping. BTW, out of nine positions last year, the Twins featured starters Polanco, Miranda, Gordon, Kepler, Arraez and Celestino coming up with the Twins and only Correa, Sanchez and Urshela debuting elsewhere. It was the same number in 2021 too, which is pretty darn good development and one more cool thing buried within https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/MIN/pos.shtml

The thing about using local cable to wring the money out is that Charter or Cox (or whoever) can stuff FSN (or whatever) channel into the basic package and millions of people will pay for it that wouldn't ordinarily watch a minute of sports. When MLB is a separate package folks are free to not sign up for it, and most do not. The amount of money on the table gets much, much smaller if you take local cable out of the picture, so it's going to take some fancy stepping to not gut the lucrative basic cable positioning. It's not like MLB hasn't noticed that blackouts suck, but no one has wanted to screw with the golden goose.

The local TV contract revenues are both huge and poorly hedged against anything happening to subscriptions. It not like these regional companies that signed billion dollar contracts have alternative income sources that'll begin to cover them if subs begin to fall off. But the scary thing is that everyone could see this trend emerging for years, even before covid came along. And Sinclair spent like a drunken sailor in spite of the risks and is now waking up in the brig, hung over and trying to add up the costs. If the major sports leagues all pitch in and buy the RSNs it should be at a huge discount. But maybe they should just buy the contracts back and let the RSNs go broke and then re-sell the games to the teams. It could flatten the local money to the point where it breaks the league, so I don't expect too much along these lines, but as a small/medium market fan that wouldn't bother me too much.

The major surgeries are up, probably partly because they're getting better and more reliable and maybe because there are more injuries because larger guys are closer to the extremes of what the body can do. Some we will never know for sure. But there is injury data to be had that's pretty cool. I included the link below on a different thread around here a week or two ago and you should go out and look through it.

Oh I don't think that's completely true, things change all the time. Hitters are usually working on things, either to maintain consistency or in response to something that happened like an injury or the league figuring out how to pitch them. If you have trouble hitting one pitch then you work on it by seeing a million of them and making small changes to better handle them. You may open or close your stance a little, add or remove some of the emphasis on your trigger, watch film together to try spotting what changed from when you felt good to not feeling great this week, but none of it can happen until the player asks for help.

The trendy, shifting nature of how hitting is being coached these days makes the idea of simply promoting your minor league coaches difficult. You need a guy who has stayed on top of the latest tools and can still relate to players, but if your AA guy is totally into the dark-ages methods of 2017 it'll be hard to move him up when everyone knows he needs to be doing physiology instead of studying pitchers (or whatever.) And because players need different things from coaches at different points in their careers, some old guys who developed into major league players in an earlier age might not want to hear from a guy who only speaks launch angles or whatever. It's got to be difficult to find the right guy for the personalities in your org and at a particular level (ie you can dictate how low A ball kids will be taught but it's harder to walk into the Dodgers clubhouse and start making changes.)

When Earl Weaver was asked where the backup SS was on his roster he would always answer "Rochester, where he belongs." That's where Celestino belongs until he learns his trade in CF. This roster needs a Buxton job share one or two days a week that Gordon, Kepler and Gallo can handle until Lewis or Martin reaches out and seizes it. Honestly Lewis could easily replace Gordon on the roster when he returns and Martin could inherit the utility-in-waiting tiara.

Juilien isn't much of a fielder so he needs to be a lock as a hitter. He'll probably start to move up the rankings once he gets another year against tougher opponents to confirm the fireworks from last fall. He's still never slugged .500 or hit 20 HR, so there's a lot of room to consolidate skills and prove himself this summer. It'll be a fun year to see games in Wichita, that's for sure.

I'll do it. Let me try to get the day off and then I'll let you know for sure.

It's an odd number year, Gallo is going to be fine! Seriously, if Gallo is at first it means we're not playing who we expected to for reasons of injury or poor performance. A pox on such thoughts this close to Pitchers and Catchers. If Kirilloff can't go then you'd likely be seeing an actual infielder over there, probably Miranda with a better glove taking over at third.

If you're worried about how often a guy gets on base you shouldn't look at batting average, you should look at his on base percentage, which measures that directly. In 2021 Gallo and Arraez were within .006 of each other and in 2019 they were .010 apart. Two of the last four years they were the same at getting on base. But in those two years Gallo out-homered Luis 60-6. Plus Gallo is a far better OF than Arraez is an infielder. Arraez' best defensive season was -2.0 runs in only 32 games according to Fangraphs. Gallo only ever had one year that bad and it was from when Texas was still thinking he could play third. And strikeout percentage doesn't directly affect your on base percentage: some guys don't strike out AND don't get on base, while TTO gods walk and strike out all the time. Besides which it's a junk stat that doesn't corelate with much at all. You can look up AB per SO (which is about the same thing) and it's a real mixed bag of decent players and randos (Kwan, Kirk and Yandi Diaz are 2-4.) And again, if the team hits .260 it doesn't mean much until you know who is doing the hitting. If you put nine Arraez clones out there and they all hit .270 (ten points higher!) you'll get wiped out. If Polanco comes back healthy and comes close to his career averages he'll hit .270 with 30 doubles and 20HR. details matter and batting average skips over a lot of important details.

If we hit .260 as a team it'll mean the whole roster hit 15 points above the league average and it would take some real strangeness to not be above average in runs scored. If you're going to be so concerned about batting average you should take a look at the league context. That list you're so worried about features exactly two guys below .243, the AL average in 2022, and those two guys are expected to be thumpers. But batting average doesn't really address the two real issues: getting someone on base and then driving them home, and improving the pitching to reduce how many runs we need to score. We've made a lot of good progress but we could really use one more solid bullpen arm.

Serious interest in Gurriel means that there are doubts about having a viable 1B on the roster, or because there's concern about table setting with so many hitters coming off poor performance, injury or simply new to the bigs. However the fact that Miami seems to be leading the bidding indicates it's not serious concern. I imagine we'd see a trade for this role before we'd see a free agent signing of a 38 year old with a slowing bat that the Astros both love and let walk away. This off-season isn't over yet.

Injuries happen when you're pitching tired, and you get tired by pitching too much on one day or too many days in a row. Rocco has proven he can manage the relief load and the outcome was far superior to the results Duran saw as a starter. Let it ride.

Pitchers making the move from starting to relieving pick up several MPH because they know they aren't pacing themselves or saving anything for later. Rocco was very vigilant about keeping him fresh, only pitching him back-to-back five times, and yet two of those second games resulted in a HR. Further, he only allowed 6 HR all year and the other four all came on or before May 5 when he was still settling in. And be honest about what he was doing as a starter in the minors: his best year was a 3.23 ERA at High A in 2019 when he was 21. He was still only throwing 5 innings a game and he was not blowing the league away, or even his teammates since the Ft Meyers team ERA that season was 3.11. Finally there is a difference in how pitching works when you only plan on facing a handful of guys. There was a good article on 538.com a few years ago that compared individual pitchers who had moved through starting and relief roles and compared their performance on the appearance length. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/relievers-have-broken-baseball-we-have-a-plan-to-fix-it/ Basically it says that when you go to a one inning role your velo picks up, strikeout percentages go up, and you can throw your third pitch a lot less often. Conversely, there's a big correlation between batters faced and strikeout rate (starting at the peak of around 4.5 BF) where the K% rate plateaus starting around 8.5 BF.

This isn't the problem you think it is for two reasons: most pitchers get hurt at some point so you just have to live with that, and contracts that price the injuries in can leave you the money to mitigate the gaps by having better backups on hand. Most pitching assets are distressed or soon will be. That is, MLB pitchers get seriously hurt all the time. Jon Roegele, a SABR researcher writing for the Hardball Times in 2018, did an article on Tommy John surgery that said 26 percent of major league pitchers used in 2017 had undergone Tommy John surgery. Today that percentage is 34%, and that's only the most serious elbow work, not shoulder, back, knee or hand injuries. His updated raw data is online here and it's fascinating. He's got every TJ surgery that he can confirm for MLB and MiLB players, including a list of unconfirmed and pending surgeries. Pitchers break, and break badly, all the time. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gQujXQQGOVNaiuwSN680Hq-FDVsCwvN-3AazykOBON0/edit#gid=0 As far as contracts go, Buxton was way below the market because he missed a ton of games and is expected to continue to miss games, but he'll get paid well when he stays healthy. Correa's deal was half the length that NYM and SFG were offering because of his health history. And even with those two studs on the roster we have acres of space on the payroll to accommodate whatever we need. We haven't spent it because we have a roster full of youth and uncertainty and it seems better to see what we have in the spring and go shopping again later rather than continue scraping the bottom of the barrel this month just because some fans can't wait for spring. At the bare minimum Maeda and Mahle are big additions to a rotation that was good when healthy last year. If they can improve on Bundy and Archer's work the whole roster changes starting with the bullpen workload. This focus on process has to leave room for things to work, not resolve themselves imediately.

A few late additions to the schedule: Two new Carlos Correa jersey nights are on tap. The Giants are in town on May 24 and the Mets are here Sept 10, and you can get fresh new Correa #4 jerseys! (Note: these were printed in SF and NY back when things looked a bit different, so they won't necessarily be Twins gear, if you get my drift.) Jose Berrios night is tentatively scheduled for Friday May 26. If he's pitching like he did in 2022, you can take home Jose after the game. Not a bobblehead, but your own actual MLB pitcher! This one is still pending approval from the legal dept, but we'll let you know as the date approaches. Once it became clear how popular the Back to School promos were in mid-July it wasn't a big leap to Halloween Night against the Pirates on August 19, Merry Christmas on Aug 30, a multi-game Hanukkah celebration the weekend of Sept 8 against the Mets and Opening Day 2023 on Sept 27 against the As.

I'm not sure Miranda is the answer to any question about improved infield defense, but I think Arraez got better at first the more he played there. It's not a super hard position, but there are things to learn and to drive into muscle memory through repetition and he's figuring it out. That said, losing Urshella is going to be felt at third until the year Miranda is eventually replaced by one of the displaced middle infielders. That could be this summer by Lewis or next year by Lee or in four years by Correa, but he's not good enough as a hitter or a fielder to hold off guys who can field better and hit as well. As with everything on this team, time will tell who keeps improving, who plateaus, and who gets hurt. There are plenty of opportunities for plenty of good young players and we may be best off holding back on changes until we get into spring training and see what we have in our hand right now.

Hard no on Sale. He hasn't been healthy in years. The last time he threw anything close to a full season was 27 starts for 158 innings in 2017, posting fewer than 50 total innings since 2019. Oh, and he's slated to make $55m over the next TWO years. If you didn't notice the piece on MN Nice elsewhere on the site, take a moment to consider how that can be reconciled with bringing in Trevor "She asked for it" Bauer. He is not the guy for a team that takes pride in its community image.