Doomtints

This is an interesting take since every signing the Twins have made this offseason has taken a chunk out of where he can play.

Don't be so sure about it pushing out Adrianza, but it most certainly means we will never see The Turtle playing for the Twins after spring training.

Let him celebrate a bit and thumb his nose at his many doubters. If his doubters are right he will be gone soon anyway. Let him have his fun. Plunking him won't keep him off the bases, mind you, so I might suggest a different strategy. By the way, there was another guy who the baseball establishment doubted because of his body structure: Kirby Puckett. I read for a long time that no one expected him to be able to hit in the majors. We all read it at the time. Well, he did hit and he was instantly popular with fans. Fans latched onto him a lot quicker than his bosses!

This isn't a bullpen that will scare opposing teams, that's for sure. c'est la vie. All of us would have done this differently during the offseason.

"Somehow, I don't know how it happened, but we ended up in our meeting this morning having more fun talking more about Willians than, again, any other player here," Baldelli said. Weird. It's almost like the guy is popular for his exciting play or something. "This is a guy that's been a successful hitter to this point," Baldelli said. Thanks for throwing him a bone there. "Where don't we want to see him defensively, is the question," Baldelli said. "We are going to move him around. We're going to give him opportunities to show us what he can do." He's been showing you. It's time for you to show him something, might I suggest an attitude other than sheer bafflement at his ability.

Remember how the team stuck with Logan Morrison last year? Yeah, it's like that.

If it wasn't a concern we wouldn't have heard about it. I don't see why he can't have a bionic foot too, though.

Free agency in the MLB was designed to help owners who didn't want to participate. If a franchise wants to keep its head down and pay its players 90% less in exchange for having no stars on the team, they can do that because the rules allow the owners to hold all the cards until the player hits free agency. It's a great con where fans in small markets have been convinced free agency is the devil's tool as their teams watch the playoffs from the outside 15 years of of 20 and the "big market" teams keep all of the capital (and play in the lion's share of playoff games). It's a broken system, broken by the owners who feared free agency rather than letting the market play out for itself. Don't blame free agency, blame the owners for how players are treated before they hit free agency.

Some of the commenters are forgetting one thing: The Twins are implicitly cheap. If the other guys are looking to get paid what they are worth rather than simply have a stable job while being underpaid, they're not taking the deals we have seen. Considering these are negotiations, imagine what Kepler would have been originally offered by the Twins........

Precisely.

The Athletics love OBP and stockpiling it has worked out for them from time to time.

I don't know that I would give someone who profiles so closely to Dan Gladden a contract like this. I would pay him his due share through arbitration and let him go in free agency -- or sooner if an internal option looks more interesting. 20 dingers a year just isn't as valuable as it used to be.

Austin could be OK, but yes the story is pretty much written for the other two. And yeah, right now they are all of a similar profile. They could all swap uniforms and no one would notice.

I believe this is referred to as being a "party pooper."

When will Rivas get his due and be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame? Yes, I know what you are thinking. His -1.5 career WAR makes that impossible. However, we all know that advanced baseball algorithms never lie. Take a look at this snapshot from statistical powerhouse Baseball-Reference: That's right. Rivas was as good as Paul Molitor and Rod Carew, who are both in the HOF. When will this injustice be rectified?

All I know is the Pohlads have done a great job of burying the Clete Thomas story and Stu is showing great courage by trying to put it back out there. When you google this there is scarce information on it. We need to keep this story alive! The Twins have multiple bobblehead giveaways every year just to push what happened to Clete down in the search results.

Eh. Target Field was the first to get Statcast installed and all it did was allow defenses to figure out how to beat Joe Mauer at the plate.

Thank you for using keywords so Google can file this with the other articles on this topic.

I like Duda, but: I don't know what this signing does for him I don't know what this signing does for this teamThis just seems like a mismatch / source of conflict for everybody involved. Though it's fun to say we have The Dude / The Big Lebowski on the team, likely he's only going to be around for the blink of an eye. One year tops with an over/under of perhaps spring training only.....

That's the point. You don't hand off the jackhammer to the person who doesn't know what he's doing.

You called it.

I don't think it's a bad deal. I don't think Polanco has peaked yet, I feel like he will have some very good seasons ahead of him. His throwing errors are concerning, but not a deal breaker.