Earlier this month, Craig Edwards contended in a post at this site that the Twins really needed starting pitching. Actually, “really, really” was the precise verbiage he used. That’s two reallys. The addition of some rotation depth was an urgent matter for the Twins’ success, Edwards claimed.
The timing of his post helps to explain the urgency. Just the day before, reports indicated that Ervin Santana would miss roughly the first month of the season. Santana was an important part of a Twins club that unexpectedly qualified for a Wild Card game last season. For a team that entered the offseason with something less than a full complement of major-league starters — and which had little margin for error in a division also featuring the Cleveland Indians — the loss of the staff’s nominal ace for any amount of time would be damning.
Last night, the Twins went some way to addressing their lack of rotation depth. Marc Topkin gets right to the heart of the matter in this post on social-media platform Twitter dot com:
By the version of WAR calculated with FIP, Odorizzi produced just one-tenth of win last year in 143.1 innings. He didn’t fair much better by the run-allowed version of that metric (1.1 RA9-WAR). He had also just won his arbitration case against the Rays, entitling him to $6.3 million in 2018. For a Tampa Bay club that appears to have no interest in adding — and, in fact, appears intent on subtracting — payroll.
Every now and again I’ll forgo my usual spot in the Fenway Park press box and watch a game in the stands, an overpriced adult beverage in hand. Such was the case last September when the visiting Blue Jays made a pitching change and the friend I was with asked what I knew about the left-hander jogging in from the bullpen. My response was something along the lines of, “Not a whole heckuva lot, but maybe I’ll talk to him tomorrow and see what I can learn.”
That’s exactly what I did. I approached Tim Mayza the following day, and as he’d thrown almost exclusively sliders, I began our conversation by inquiring as to why.
“It’s is my out-pitch,” explained Mayza, who’d come into the previous night’s game with 13-and-a-third big-league innings under his belt. “I’ll throw it at any time, in any count, and I faced two lefties. With deception and the different shapes of the slider, it tends to be more effective than a fastball, per se, left on left.” Read the rest of this entry »
Ervin Santana won’t return to the mound for a few months, probably. (Photo: Keith Allison)
The Twins need starting pitching. You know that. I know that. The Twins know that. It’s the reason they’ve been connected with pretty much all the available free agents, Yu Darvish the most prominent among them. Jake Arrieta, Alex Cobb, and Lance Lynn are among the next tier of free agents who would make some sense for the club. Below that, you have former Twin — for one game, at least —Jaime Garcia and some other options like Wade Miley and Jason Vargas.
Before yesterday, it seemed pretty likely that Minnesota would be adding one of the top four pitchers available this winter. With Ervin Santana now expected to miss the first month of the season due to finger surgery, it might actually be a good idea for the Twins to sign two pitchers.
Nick Gordon is one of the top prospects in the Twins system. Drafted fifth-overall by Minnesota in 2014, the lefty-swinging shortstop is coming off an age-21 season where he slashed .270/.341/.408 for Double-A Chattanooga. He’s also coming off the release of his first album, “I Do It All,” which dropped earlier this month.
“G-Cinco” started rapping when he was in middle school, but it was only recently that he began sharing his hip-hop stylings beyond his inner circle. Prompted by the urging of a close friend, the son of former all-star closer Tom “Flash” Gordon, and brother of 2015 NL batting champion Dee Gordon, decided the time had come to “let people hear this side of me.”
The multi-talented youngster is well aware that mixing music and sports can make for a tricky balance, particularly in terms of image. But he doesn’t anticipate any issues. Not only does Gordon consider himself “a baseball player first,” he’s “never been one to lead a lifestyle that isn’t appropriate,” nor does he feel a need to “go out there and rap about things I don’t do.”
What he does do — along with rapping base hits — is “sit down and listen to beats, and write.” As for which he considers more important when crafting a song, the beat or the lyrics, that’s largely a matter of inspiration within the creative process. Read the rest of this entry »
I noticed an underlying theme in both pieces I’ve written since coming back, along with many others written this offseason at FanGraphs. If you are a fan of a small- or medium-market team that will never spend to the luxury-tax line and thus always be at a disadvantage, do you want your team to try to always be .500 or better, or do you want them push all the chips in the middle for a smaller competitive window? In my stats vs. scouting article I referenced a progressive vs. traditional divide, which was broadly defined by design, but there are often noticeable differences in team-building strategies from the two overarching philosophies, which I will again illustrate broadly to show the two contrasting viewpoints.
The traditional clubs tend favor prospects with pedigree (bonus or draft position, mostly), with big tools/upside and the process of team-building is often to not push the chips into the middle (spending in free agency, trading prospects) until the core talents (best prospects and young MLB assets) have arrived in the big leagues and have established themselves. When that window opens, you do whatever you can afford to do within reason to make those 3-5 years the best you can and, in practice, it’s usually 2-3 years of a peak, often followed directly by a tear-down rebuild. The Royals appear to have just passed the peak stage of this plan, the Braves hope their core is established in 2019 and the Padres may be just behind the Braves (you could also argue the old-school Marlins have done this multiple times and are about to try again now).
On the progressive side, you have a more conservative, corporate approach where the club’s goal is to almost always have a 78-92 win team entering Spring Training, with a chance to make the playoffs every year, never with a bottom-ten ranked farm system, so they are flexible and can go where the breaks lead them. The valuation techniques emphasize the analytic more often, which can sometimes seem superior and sometimes seem foolish, depending on the execution. When a rare group of talent and a potential World Series contender emerges, the progressive team will push some chips in depending on how big the payroll is. The Rays have a bottom-five payroll and can only cash in some chips without mortgaging multiple future years, whereas the Indians and Astros are higher up the food chain and can do a little more when the time comes, and have done just that.
What we just saw in Pittsburgh (and may see soon in Tampa Bay) is what happens when a very low-payroll team sees a dip coming (controllable talent becoming uncontrolled soon) and doesn’t think there’s a World Series contender core, so they slide down toward the bottom end of that win range so that in a couple years they can have a sustainable core with a chance to slide near the top of it, rather than just tread water. Ideally, you can slash payroll in the down years, then reinvest it in the competing years (the Rays has done this in the past) to match the competitive cycle and not waste free-agent money on veterans in years when they are less needed. You could argue many teams are in this bucket, with varying payroll/margin for error: the D’Backs, Brewers, Phillies, A’s and Twins, along with the aforementioned Rays, Pirates, Indians and Astros.
Eleven clubs were over $175 million in payroll for the 2017 season (Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Tigers, Giants, Nationals, Rangers, Orioles, Cubs, Angels), so let’s toss those teams out and ask fans of the other 19 clubs: if forced to pick one or the other, which of these overarching philosophies would you prefer to root for?
Earlier this week, I chatted wth Red Sox manager Alex Cora about the relative value of contact skills versus hunting pitches that you can drive. Not surprisingly, the 2017 American League batting champion’s name came up.
“People might be surprised by this, but Jose Altuve isn’t afraid to make adjustments even when he’s getting his hits,” said Cora, who was Houston’s bench coach last year. “When Jose is really, really, really good — because he’s good, always — his strike zone shrinks. He doesn’t chase his hits. Sometimes he’s getting his hits because he’s unreal with his hand-eye coordination — he gets hits on pitches that others don’t — but when he looks for good pitches he’s even better.”
Cora was a contact hitter during his playing days, and looking back, he wishes he’d have been more selective. Not only that, he wouldn’t have minded swinging and missing more often than he did.
“I had a conversation with Carlos Delgado about that,” Cora told me. “When you commit to swinging the bat — I’m talking about me — it often doesn’t matter where it is, you end up putting the ball in play. It’s better to swing hard and miss than it is to make soft contact for a 4-3.” Read the rest of this entry »
We haven’t spent much time talking about the Twins this offseason. The last post dedicated to the team was published Dec. 8, when this author wrote about two savvy little trades the club had made after losing out on the Ohtani sweepstakes.
But in what has been a quiet offseason, the Twins have quietly been one of the most active teams, bolstering their bullpen by signing ageless wonder Fernando Rodney, left-hander Zach Duke, and most recently, Addison Reed.
They’ve also made a move with an eye toward improving their 2019 rotation by signing Michael Pineda. Pineda is expected to miss most, if not all, of this coming season while recovering from Tommy John surgery. Given his bat-missing upside, though, the $10-million commitment seems like a prudent value play.
Overall, only 21 of Dave Cameron’s top-50 free agents have signed so far this winter. The Twins are responsible for two of them, however, in Reed and Pineda.
Dylan Carlson was the Cardinals’ first-round pick in 2016, so it’s easy to look at his numbers and say he’s been disappointing. After getting his feet wet with a .717 OPS in his draft year, he slashed a ho-hum .240/.342/.347 in his first full season. There have been flashes of power, yet the switch-hitting outfielder has gone deep just 10 times in 652 professional plate appearances.
Not to worry. While his performance has been anything but splashy, it’s important to consider that Carlson has been playing against older competition since signing. He spent the entire 2017 season in the Midwest League as an 18-year-old.
If he’s sometimes felt like he was in over his head, he was reluctant to admit it. When I asked him late in the season if being one of the youngest players on the field is ever intimidating, Carlson dove directly into the positive.
“It’s actually great to have teammates who are older and have been to college,” said the former Elk Grove (CA) High School standout. I can always lean on them for advice — I like being around older guys for that reason — and it’s also been fun coming out and competing against older guys. I’m learning a lot.”
Carlson claimed he’s essentially the same hitter he was when he entered the St. Louis system. While developmental strides have been made, there have been no mechanical overhauls or watershed moments. Aside from “standing a little taller in the box,” he’s just focused on “refining the basics.” Read the rest of this entry »
When FanGraphs conducted its annual free-agent crowdsourcing project just after the end of the 2017 season, the results suggested that Addison Reed would receive the third-richest deal among relievers this winter.
“Rank” denotes rank among all free agents per crowdsourced results.
If the crowd were correct, Reed was in line for something remarkably similar to Mike Minor this offseason. So when Minor landed a guaranteed three years and $28 million at the beginning of December — that is, almost precisely the same figure for which he’d been projected by the masses — it seemed that, in theory, the crowd’s estimate represented a reasonable target for Reed.
After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Minnesota Twins. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Batters
The Twins’ surprising 2017 campaign, which included a place in the Wild Card game, was a product in no small part of the club’s most promising young players translating their immense talents into on-field success. Byron Buxton (projected for 538 PA and 3.2 zWAR in 2018), Eddie Rosario (578, 1.6), and Miguel Sano (531, 2.7) combined for 8.3 WAR as a group. ZiPS calls for the triumvirate to fall short of that mark in 2018 but to still approach the eight-win threshold — all at basically no cost to the team.
Buxton remains a source of great interest, of course. After a series of fits and starts, he managed to hit well enough this past season to allow his other skills to carry him. In 2017, he recorded the highest WAR (3.5) of any player who also produced a below-average batting line (90 wRC+, in this case). Dan Szymborski’s computer suggests he could once again earn that strange distinction, projecting Buxton for a 90 wRC+ and 3.2 WAR.
Finally, it should be noted that ZiPS projects plate-appearance totals using only the data from a player’s observed track record and is agnostic to news of injury, etc. Accordingly, there has been no attempt here to account for how allegations of sexual assault might affect Miguel Sano’s playing time. Which is good because, whatever the virtues of Szymborski’s model, contending with fraught and difficult and nuanced social conversations isn’t (and needn’t be) among them.
