Doomtints

For a 22nd round draft pick, his 2018 is probably closer to reality than his 2017. It's also true that he was not playing well at all in the second half. Whether he was over-used or whether he was unhappy about the trade deadline moves is impossible to know. I suspect he was over-used. Hildy's sample size is so small it's just really hard to know what we will get in 2019, but he certainly has earned a fair chance. Let's hope the Twins are patient and let him play should he have a slow start. It took him a couple of weeks to get going in 2018.

I think this trade can make sense if the Twins are in a "win now" mode. Trade away the guy who (probably) still has to develop for 1.5 years to sign a guy who can 'contribute' right now. However, the Twins are not in a "win now" mode -- they don't even want to spend anything -- so they should have kept the guy with the higher ceiling and who the team could control until 2025. I'm not upset about this move but these are the types of things that got the team in trouble under Bill Smith. It really would not surprise me if Curtiss gets a WS ring before he retires as the likelihood that he peaked already with only 15 MLB innings under his belt and such great numbers in the minors seems unlikely. Obviously this is just my opinion, and clearly the Twins have a different opinion.

Large organizations assign dollar values to cross functional resources. You want access to a business analyst? That'll be $135 an hour. The BA is by no means being paid even half that even when including benefits, but the company expects to get more value out of the resource than just what they are being paid, plus there are opportunity costs, thus the high rate. I would be surprised if the Twins do anything like this, so we should be careful when we compare the Twins to corporations. In baseball, free agents get paid their full value to the organization and the other players get paid a fraction of their value. Other than professional basketball I am not aware of anything comparable to how baseball pays players.

(Curtiss has a higher ceiling than Parker.)

Yes but that's not nearly as funny.

The Twins will spend their excess cash in the Rule 6 draft, which is when the front offices get together to parse out which expensive bottles of scotch they can get from the Commissioner's stash. Pohlad likes to pick early in the draft as he considers himself a connoisseur, and it is after all a long season.

Shucks.

The pundits who publish pieces stating May will be the next closer are probably right. As for the original question of "Can this team be competitive with this bullpen?" Yeah, they can. They were near .500 last year with THAT bullpen, which I would call being competitive.... At this point I'm done asking if the team can be competitive or win the division. The only question I ask is can this team win a playoff game or a playoff series. The answer is still no. The headline of the decade.

Yeah. That's not lackadaisical, but it's certainly not focusing on touching the base either. His strategy on the play seemed to be: let's just try to crash into Pierzynski's face. It's like he was trying to reenact the scene from A League of Their Own. I probably would not have run on such a shallowly hit ball, and if I had I would have attempted to slide and try to knock the ball out, but it is what it is. The White Sox were very good that year, btw. It was not a bad mark to lose to them.

Cuddyer's bad defense shifted the momentum in the 2002 ALCS. The Angels knew exactly where to hit the ball in that game. I don't think losing that game deflated the Twins so much as it empowered the Angels. The rest of the series wasn't close. Cuddyer did some great things in the final years of his Twins career. He is a guy the Twins should have kept around, but the modus operandi at that moment was to get rid of everybody, so....

"I don't know how Terry Ryan got the impression he can't spend money. It's just not true. It's never been true." -- Pohlad at the firing news conference. Baseball is less fun when your favorite team's owner is dishonest.

They are "backsliding" but they have a long way to fall to be with the rest of the division. They'll have little trouble next year until the playoffs.

Pavano's 2010 was the least interesting 17-win season of all time. It was tthe relievers who got the Twins in the playoffs that year. The hitting and starters were all in fast decline. The relievers followed suit in 2011. It's surprising we didn't see this at the time as it's obvious when you look at the numbers now.

Twins season ticket packages are very inexpensive. I think the Twins could charge more for about half the seats in the stadium without affecting attendance that much. Target field tickets are close to what Metrodome tickets cost thirty years ago. Wages are 100% tax deductible, don't forget. I think it would be difficult to spend a franchise into bankruptcy in spite of this being a narrative that gets thrown around. Sure it's happened, but few of us would make the same mistakes if given the chance.

I think this is a given, unfortunately. There's no role for him on this team right now.

My first reaction to anything is to be skeptical. I want to know details. Some people view this as disparaging. It isn't. Do I think Falvey and Levine are doing good jobs? I think they are trying. I think they are working harder than the last guy did. As for Smith, I think he did mostly a good job. True leadership is how one reacts when things go bad, not when things are going well. The Twins never gave Smith the chance and Ryan's reaction was to roll the team back to 1996 and then disappear for 50 weeks out of the year. Smith certainly cared about the team more than that! People were generally very happy when Smith was canned. History should caution us to be careful what we wish for on that one. As for the idea of being too critical of leadership and ignoring the work put in by those under their supervision -- that's life, man. The guys at the top get paid a lot, they're the faces of the organization, and ultimately the buck stops with them. They are responsible. If someone beneath them screwed up, it's on the person at the top to address it. And, yes, the person at the top gets all the credit when things are going well. Until the people at the top of the Twins organization fix the very obvious communication with players problem it won't matter who they sign, the team will flounder in mediocrity. They keep trying to sign a new Torii Hunter every year instead of doing this organically by themselves.

Hey now, let's not split hairs.

Schoop = Vargas. Except Vargas might be better if given a real chance. The Twins are really weird sometimes.

The AL has this great thing called the DH. Some baseball writers, pundits, and other fun people don't seem to understand what this is all about even after all this time and say things like, "Gosh, signing a guy who can't play the field is a bad plan." The converse is true. Using the DH to give your mediocre batters a breather is the bad plan. Get the best boomstick you can find and have him be your full time DH. That's what it's for. And don't stick him in the field. Keep him healthy. The DH position is for hitting. If he twists his ankle going for a routine pop fly that any other yob could be out there fielding for you, you just broke the DH position.

Mejia is MUCH further along than Romero. He should be the first #5. The fifth spot tends to change over the course of a season anyway as the pitcher either gets better or goes away. As far as Romero goes, pitchers who can throw 96-97+ are great to have in the pen and practically wasted as starters, where they have to pace themselves and can only toss that hard sporadically. If Romero can be this generation's JC Romero or Juan Rincon, the Twins will win a lot of games. If the Twins want to stay cheap, high performing 8th and 9th inning pitchers are essential. These are the innings where heat is most devastating.

This is the signing that most people around here wanted, so I hope it works out. Signing old guys was in Terry Ryan's wheelhouse, so I'm skeptical. I would like to be proven wrong.

Hicks was terrible his first year as a Yankee. I credit Hicks's turnaround to the Yankees hitting coaches who figured out the issue and turned him around. Hicks would have never turned the corner in a Twins uniform.

We have seen Buxton play. We know he isn't a quitter. Having him sit out the last month was obviously going to rub him the wrong way and was a gross miscalculation by the Twins. None of this means he will instantly play well next year, that this was a "wake up call" or whatever -- because as I said, Buxton was never a quitter. The problem is something else, and by sending him home the Twins lost the opportunity to figure out what the problem actually is. The Twins did not have to play him over the last month, but they certainly had to work with him.

Hughes is interesting. For all the articles that were written at the beginning about Hughes improving due to being out of the limelight/pressure in New York, in the end he ended up being statistically the same pitcher for both franchises -- with the Twins paying him a lot more cash because they started to believe their own press and gave him a huge extension. So much for small markets! Maybe we need to coin the phrase "smart markets" instead.

Locking up a 31/32 year old #4 pitcher for 3-4 years is crazy talk. Gibson looked like he had things solved three years ago, too. Let someone else take on this risk. Best case is he has a good start and a contender needs someone at the trade deadline. Odorizzi is younger but he's just a #3 pitcher. Big deal. Sure, sign him because you need solid #3s, but it's just not that exciting of a deal.