Doomtints

I can see it now. Twins fans barrage Lynn. Lynn gets traded to a different team. Lynn beats the Twins in the playoffs. This year and next year. This quote says it all: "I hope the Twins aim higher, in spite of his success."

Salary relief for the Marlins, an exchange of minor leaguers, and some fresh blood for the Twins to finish out the year. This is a solid but not earth shattering move.

It's difficult to compare Buxton to Puckett or Hunter because Buxton's WAR is much more reliant on his defense. Though Buxton's hitting tool is coming along this year, it's still just in the neighborhood of what Span's was. Span's WAR dropped off when his defense dropped off. To beat a dead horse, the Twins could have and should have kept Span until he was a free agent at age 31. I don't know why any team would trade a good defender and competent hitter at age 28. Regarding Buxton's track, let's see if his hitting tool continues to develop as it has been quite slow in coming along. As thing stand today, I would say your career projection is way too high. His batting average is 80 points lower than Puckett's but you have him surpassing Puckett in WAR. Buxton's defense won't remain elite for his entire career. He is one knee, back, or neck injury away from being an average defender, at worst, and he's 4-6 years away from being average in the field at best.

You've watched the AL Central long enough to know that usually all but one team plays VERY HARD in the last few weeks against whoever has the division lead. You could almost call the AL Central 'The Spoiler Division.' No one in this division is going to give the Twins anything this year.

I think 95 won't do it. I think they need 98 or 99 to win the division.

I have been saying it for a while ... this team reminds me heavily of the 2001 Twins. This is, as you can imagine, not a popular thing to say and a lot of people disagree vehemently. Those Twins had an identical hot start, hovered around .500 for a bit to maintain their lead, and then hit a wall when a couple of bizarre moves at the trade deadline and an unfortunate injury sunk the team. So far, the track is identical. Whether or not these Twins suffer the same fate as that team did, losing the division to Cleveland down the stretch, we will just have to wait and see. Whatever happens, 2001 was an exciting season and put the Twins on the map as a serious team. We all know how the decade went after 2001, so if the Twins don't make it this year there are still (probably) a few good years to come.

I'm not saying otherwise. A couple of these players had one bad outing and then were cut. This is cutthroat management, and it doesn't work. Besides all that, cutting without having a replacement is not solving the problem. Generally you want to make a team better when you make a move. And never mind that they are reducing what they have to trade....

Moves need to be made, but this sudden cutthroat approach does not make a lot of sense. These players were felt to be good enough by management a couple of months ago. I also don't understand the idea of dropping pitchers before having replacements for them. This can only make the problems worse.

Good point, I had forgotten about Manaea.

The Padres are starving for pitching which makes them a less than ideal trading partner for the Twins. We should consider players on teams that need a bat or want to dump salary, as these are the only things the Twins could offer.

I don't expect this team to beat the Yankees in the playoffs. The best hope for the Twins is for someone else to do that. But you never know, if this team gets hot like it was earlier in the year....

The A's have shown they can make moves like this. They can simply trade Stroman away later to get similar prospects back. They've done this before. However, I think the author might be smoking something. The As don't need starting pitching, they need bullpen arms. If the Twins are not smart, the As will get what the Twins are looking for.

A graphic was flashed during the playoffs a year or two ago showing how playoff teams in that year acquired their talent. The number of playoff teams with talent that came from trades would clearly surprise you. If I recall correctly, there was only one team in the playoffs that year which was mostly home-grown talent. There were a couple that only lightly dipped into the free agency pool, but almost all the teams had large parts of their rosters coming in from trades. Settlers of Catan might be a good game for armchair GMs to play. You acquire resources on your own, but it's difficult to get every resource at the right time and in the right ratios to win, so to make up for that you have to do trades. Only by doing both can you win the game.

I haven't seen any "it's over" type comments, but anyone expressing them should be welcome to. They could be right.

May is feast or famine. As his K rate climbs, so does his inconsistency. He would probably do a bit better on a team where the coaching message was to stick to the plan instead of challenging batters more often when he's at a high point. He gets himself burned, he starts throwing wild, and everything resets.... As others have said, Baldelli on upward need some blame here too. The bullpen depth on this team isn't doing anybody any favors.

So what you're saying is I'm not following the herd. This does not change my advice. If the Twins are shopping for starters, hopefully they are digging deep.

Loaded question. There is only one Verlander, there will be no next one. Besides, I would only look at picking up relievers. 1) Jimmy Sherfy, or Yoshihisa Hirano if the Rays are ready to promote Sherfy to full time. (I don't know the extent of Sherfy's injury which could change my opinion). 2) Amir Garrett, or Lucas Sims if Garrett is untouchable. 3) Reyes Moronta, Sam Dyson, Will Smith, or Tony Watson. The Giants have a great bullpen but are starving for hitting. The Twins have some guys who can hit, right? This could be a blockbuster, multi-player trade.

The best advice is to not follow the herd. Archer didn't look great to me yet everybody was all up on him. Same with Darvish being injury prone. Oakland tends to do well because they ignore the name and they ignore the fanfare. They look at the data, and I don't mean WAR or even FIP, which for example were masking Archer's actual performance.

I agree. Let me know when they get rid of Trevor May.

And yet he has an 11:2 K:BB ratio and his WHIP is under 1.00. But yes, sinkerball pitchers are often described as "smoke and mirrors" pitchers by those who want relievers to do nothing but bring heat.

Morin was doing a very good job this year. I can count the Twins relievers who were better than him on 1 and a half fingers. I'm not understanding the various nods of agreement in this thread that he had to go. The Twins are blaming their bad infield defense on the pitching. Sad.

Magill isn't as bad as this thread is making him out to be. His IR was only at 20% and his ERA+ is above average. He had three bad outings out of 28. Without those three bad games, two of which were just doing mop-up duty in big losses, his ERA would be well under 2.00. Sure, in some years, you get rid of a Magill. This is a down year for pitching across the league, as his ERA+ shows clearly. If you're getting rid of him, you'd better be sure you're replacing him with someone better.

The Rangers had a run in the late 90s where they scored a hell of a lot of runs, but also allowed a lot of runs. Here is the result. Year Tm G W L Ties W-L% pythW-L% Finish GB Playoffs R RA 1999 TexasRangers 162 95 67 0 .586 .544 1st of 4 -- LostLDS(3-0) 945 859 1998 TexasRangers 162 88 74 0 .543 .535 1st of 4 -- LostLDS(3-0) 940 871 1996 TexasRangers 163 90 72 1 .556 .568 1st of 4 -- LostLDS(3-1) 928 799

This looks to me like Berrios was trying to comfort a friend and was not a big political statement.

SDI just adds three existing defensive metrics together to produce an index. This double- or triple- counts fielding events that are represented in more than one metric. SDI is based on a subset of Chris Dial's theories. The development team otherwise included SABR brass and SABR members who have been masterful at collecting baseball data, so in my opinion they missed having a critical eye on it. With the team they had, it would have been possible to create an aggregate score which does not double-count/inflate events which skew the scores (either up or down), simply by modifying some of the metrics to not include the duplicates, but for some reason they chose not to do so. You will note that neither fangraphs nor baseball-reference track SDI.