jimmer

I'm having a hard time believing he's made two significant signings. Park is a low risk move that may never work out. We have no idea, he's never played a professional game at any level for any MLB organization. Then we signed a backup catcher. Are these significant, or have some been conditioned to believe they are due to what we are used to? It's possible neither significant move even affects our starting team come next season.due to the kind of action we are used to seeing. Signing two players who have proven nothing at the major league level and who may not even be starting come opening day doesn't strike me as significant. And, you know, it's possible one move just ends up hurting our OF defense.

In what universe was Hicks blocking 'the best prospect in the game'? That was not happening.

We don't have one catcher that should be starting in the majors and Suzuki wouldn't garner anything worth having.

No nerve hit, just tired of people complaining about people discussing what's happening with the team during a major event in MLB. Talk about the same old tired theme. In any event, it seems like a good time to discuss the things you sited with fellow posters. In regards to the moves made before the headlines, IMO, a low-risk signing of a guy to DH who has never played at any professional level is nothing to be too excited about. We have no idea how he'll perform in the majors and now Sano is pushed to the OF where he hasn't played, likely hurting the OF defense. Signing a backup catcher, while hurting our OF defense, doesn't help much while we still have no quality starting catcher. Do we have any new starters, besides Sano in RF IF our new DH proves he can hack it in the majors? Even then, Sano was starting, he'd just be starting at a new spot. So, so far, one new possible starter: Park. If he can hack it. As far as not getting worked up over a week's inactivity, these meetings are big for getting stuff done. On top of that, we have a huge historical view of the kind of moves our GM makes overall. How many times has he traded for, or signed, a proven MLB high quality player who was a star at the time he did it? Do we count Shannon Stewart? I doubt the groaning is really so much about just this one Winter Meeting's worth of Twins inactivity. I believe it's more the feeling many likely get that, under Ryan, we will NEVER make a big slash and that no one even expected us to make any kind of significant move. I imagine many were dying to be proven wrong.

Nick wrote an article, like he's done many times here as one of the staff writers. The thing going on the last few days in Major League Baseball was the winter meetings. This is a Twins site so he wrote about how the Twins didn't complete any transactions during said meetings. Makes complete sense he would write such an article and complete sense people should discuss lack of transactions by the Twins. You saw the headline, you could have skipped it altogether. No one made you click on the story, or read the comments, or make a comment yourself.

Twins did not convert Nathan from a starter to a reliever. He was already a reliever before we ever got him.

We need more than a LH RP. If the organization believes that's all we need, we are in trouble. And we should always be looking to improve any chance we can get.

Let's see, CF was the practically new position for Danny Santana, SS was the position he's been playing most of his professional career. Hard to believe he had a ton of confidence in CF and so little at shortstop. I'm just going to blame his dropoff in offense on the fact that his BABIP over .400 in 2014 was unsustainable and as he dropped down closer to an average BABIP this year, his numbers predictably dropped like a stone.

I applaud Santana's effort trying to play CF in 2014, but he wasn't good out there. He wasn't horrible and not bad if we take into account he's not an OF. His offense was unsustainable and that was easy to predict.

Well, there's defense too. We aren't comparing DHs here. Also Plouffe has over 4100 IP at 3B and Nunez has less than 800 IP. There's also the fact that the comparisons given above are for one season and fail to mention Plouffe had more than 3 times as many PAs

You forgot defense. Plouffe was worth over 20M in each of the last two seasons. Easily worth 8M. Easily. And regardless of what the article said, 2014 was his best year overall year.

I doubt he does better than what Plouffe did last year. Plouffe was a 20M+ player last year (and the year before).

Twins never compete to sign players like Jordan Zimmerman, Price, Cueto or Grienke.

There could very well be a reason we were able to win the bid. It was a small bid.

Very inexpensive investment, both by the bid amount and his salary. 3M a year is what we signed Nishi for. A low risk move, the kind of move the Twins are extremely experienced in. The kind of signing where, if it works out, they get praised and if it doesn't, it's no biggy cause it cost so little (in baseball terms).

And were they, really?The winner was Abreu by a huge margin. Got all of the 1st place votes for a total of 150 points. Vargas got no votes, Santana was put on one ballot. He got 3 pts. A MINNESOTA voter who isn't even a sports writer anymore (and hasn't been for more than a decade, I think he's an official scorer now) gave him a 2nd place vote. He was also one of the two writers who put Rosario on his ballot this year (while excluding Sano).

Well I rarely if ever believe anything TR says when he says it (because you can only get burned so many times), but I hope we keep Plouffe, myself.

Please don't take offense. It's not meant that way. If we like low cost/risk with low-medium reward type signings when we are supposedly shooting for a playoff spot and playoff success, then these three are the type you go after. And these are always the type of guys Ryan signings. It's safe. If it doesn't work out, it didn't cost much and expectations were low anyway. If it does he looks like a genius. Win-Win. At this point, I think bold is called for. I do like that you have faith in Jackson though. I hope you are right. I like him.

You've just named three guys that are right up Ryan's alley to go after.

Seems there is never a right time to tap into the farm system, even when it's loaded. Not when we are in the playoff hunt, not when it's to get a position player of need, never. We don't use a valuable source of acquiring players on the off chance a prospect might turn out great, even when the odds are so very much against it. I'm not calling for doing it all the time, or even often, but sometimes. Ryan never does it.

yeah, there are other teams we could have had discussions with if we did that. We basically tie a hand behind our back in regards to acquiring proven MLB talent when we refuse to trade a prospect our two out of our supposedly stacked farm system. Like I said, I understood why we didn't back in the day due to financial reasons, but it's just not the case anymore.

How about tapping into our lauded farm system? Why is it that our team never does that? Is it because it's always about the future and never about the present? I understand why it was such a bad move back when this team was poor, but that's not the case anymore.

If you find one post I have written where I strongly advocate even going after Weiters much less complaining that we don't, I will record the eating of my shorts, post it on you tube and link it here :-) I'm not 100% sure I've ever even talked about Weiters until this post (though I won't eat my shorts if it turns out I did one time back in the day :-))

If you think we are going to make serious bids for Cespedes, Gordon or Heyward I have some beach front property in Nebraska for sale :-)

I can see where you see people talking about their issues with Hicks for Murphy trade and equate it to a Kershaw for Berrios trade, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that idea is downright ridiculous.