d-mac

Then it's settled then! /s

LOLOLOLOLOLOL

Well now, we're getting nothing for Plouffe. Happy? At least a bag of balls and warm can of Coors Light would have been something.

Lazy Mauer just lazily walks to first. Lazy Sano lazily jogs around the bases after lazy homeruns.

But Buxton is not there yet. I'm just making comparisons based on a equivalent number of PAs. Bradley hit better than Buxton over the same period. Which, probably explains why Boston was more patient with him during his struggles. But they still sent him down eventually. Would he have figured it out the MLB level? Possibly, but we don't know that. We only know what they did and it worked. FYI, by the time Bradley came up for good in 2015 he had 1,032 PAs between AA and AAA. Buxton has had 459. Neither were ready for the show. There is no harm in admitting that as long as it's rectified.

I think Bradley has more in common with Hicks. IRC, they came up at the same time and were constantly compared to one another.

Bradley Jr, still had a 66 wRC+ over his first 353 PAs of his career. Buxton's struggles are painfully rare.

The issue isn't about some fantastical future where everything works out. Because it doesn't. Buxton is overmatched. He clearly has talent, and based on his age it is certainly possible for him to overcome his struggles. However, he has been so bad, I really fail to see how flailing away in the majors (hitting worse than Santana, a replacement level player, mind you) is going to help him. The question then becomes how do we fix these issues? None of us has the answer, but we have ample evidence showing that what the Twins are doing now isn't working. Something different must be done.

To humor people Here are the first 350 or so PA's to start the careers of recent Twins CF'ers in wRC+: Revere: 356 PAs: 61 wRC+ Span: 354 PAs: 124 wRC+ Gomez: 352 PAs: 79 wRC+ Hunter: 355 PAs: 68 wRC+ Hicks: 355 PAs: 62 wRC+ And none of them had a K% approaching 40. Hicks' was only 25.9%.

I don't think everyone does. Very few hitters that are this bad to start their career, ever become productive players.

I think with survivor bias, most hitters that are this atrocious aren't going to get a whole bunch of second chances to prove themselves. My thought is that it's mostly a non issue in this circumstance.

Correct, but Buxton doesn't have place on an MLB roster either. He's an offensive blackhole.

Bingo.

Griffey Jr had a wRC+ of 106 (6% better than league average offense in 1989, 506 PAs) his rookie season. Buxton has a career wRC+ of 49 in 356 PAs, 70% of Griffey's first year, with offense that his less than half of league average. Yes, most superstars don't come up and become superstars day one. But most are at least productive major league players from day 1. Buxton's struggles are historically bad: Since the end of WWII, there are 3,386 non-pitchers with at least 350 PAs in the majors. Buxton's career 49 wRC+ is tied with 15 other players for 74th(!) worst. That's bad.

D. Santana career fWAR: +1.6 Buxton career fWAR: -0.4

They've gotten it wrong before and will again. The dustbin of baseball is full of "can't miss prospects" that missed.

Another take away nobody has mentioned, is that there isn't a lot of success in this sample. Among Hosken's 50 or so original college relievers taken in the first two rounds of those nine drafts, the results are pretty underwhelming. There are far fewer productive relievers than even I would have expected, and I do not view drafting relievers positively.

Is it? If there is one key take away from Hosken's study is that virtually none of the college relievers spent time in the rookie leagues. Burdi is the only Twins' reliever that did not.

This x1000. Relief pitchers have less shelf life, why waste innings at a level with inferior competition to what many saw in college? That makes no sense to me and smacks of a "one size fits all" development policy.

A lot of meh, especially with the group converted to starters. Maybe drafting college relievers isn't a sound strategy after all. Shocker.

I'm a fan. Definitely seems like more of a LF'er than a CF'er, but he has some tools and shown the production that he could be a productive player for the Twins in a year or two.

Agreed. In a vacuum, both the Abad and Nolasco trades where fair, but unfortunately that's not how trades are made or how they should be viewed. Neither help us much in the 2018 and beyond time frame, which is where the direction Twins should have been looking to go. May, Duffey in the rotation do help us, maybe they won't pan out, but they get next year to gain experience/ work on establishing themselves while we still aren't competing. They can be moved the pen relatively easy if they don't work out. And who knows, we could get some young, cost controlled starters that could end up in the #2-4 range.

Like I mentioned earlier, the return of each individual trade I felt is fair, the Twins got a marginally better ML starter back and gave up a marginally better prospect. But, it's the direction they went with the trade is why I'm not a fan. Edit: Added missing words

it's hard to repeat mechanics, have a consistent release point, etc with levers that large. Which is why the Twins' love for ridiculously tall pitchers is weird. It's not any kind of market inefficiency, like short pitchers.

Seems, really anti-Twinsian. Don't they want pitchers to attack with runners on base? I think he'll be giving up the grand salamis in no time with us. The Twins staff as a whole has the 8th highest HR/FB ratio and 28th worst in LOB%.