224 thoughts on “November 7, 2011: Destinos”

  1. SBGville's most famous native selects the top 50 college basketball players ever. He disqualifies players who had a better (or more meaningful, whatever that means) pro career than college career

    The individual's college career must be more meaningful than his pro career. This doesn't mean the player had to be a professional bust, or even a professional disappointment — the candidate could be still be the league MVP, win multiple Larry O'Brien trophies, and spend his summers playing Clue in Billy Hunter's boathouse with Hubie Brown.1 It does not require anyone to be a terrible NBA product. However, the peak of the player's career needs to happen when they're working for free (or at least pretending to work for free). If an objective, informed fan hears this person's name, they should reflexively associate that individual's greatness with the idiom of college basketball. That's the key — any theoretical pro career is just something semi-irrelevant that happened later in life.

    and then names Lew Alcindor #1, with the argument that Lew Alcindor and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are two different people. Or something.

    1. Alcindor obviously was a system player. I mean, UCLA won back-to-back titles right before him, then a bunch in a row right after him. How important could he have been?

      1. Maybe Jabbar's pro career was "just something semi-relevant". Six NBA titles, six-time NBA MVP, all-time leading scorer, first in career offensive win shares, second in career defensive win shares. Semi-relevant.

        I'm not sure that I should comment though, because I don't even know what "the idiom of college basketball" means.

          1. white guys like Phil Ford....

            also noteworthy: Khalid El-Amin made the list.

            22. Khalid El-Amin (UConn, 1997-2000): Did you ever play intramural basketball against a short, fat, confident kid who kept driving the paint and effortlessly scoring over every clown who tried to stop him? And no matter how hard you played him, he never seemed excited or intimidated or even particularly interested? And then — when the game was finished, and everyone else was exhausted — he casually decided to jump into some other random intramural game and scored another 28 points in the exact same way? El-Amin was the NCAA version of that unstoppable fat kid.

            Minnesota represent!

            1. Yeah, El-Amin as the 22nd best college basketball player of all time. And people wonder why I don't get how Chuck is so popular.

              1. How do you not get it? Chuck is the best amateur hack writer ever, if you exclude all the ones who became professionals.

                1. f you exclude all the ones who became professionals whose professional careers overshadowed their amateur writing careers.

                  FTFY.

                  1. I'm assuming you are referring to his writing for the SBGville school newspaper, in which he wrote that when it was crunch time, he wanted the rock.

            2. And no matter how hard you played him, he never seemed excited or intimidated or even particularly interested?
              Never got that feeling, but I stopped watching him after he left North except for a game or two in the 1999 NCAA Tournament.

              1. El-Amin wasn't materially different from probably a half-dozen guys in college -- John Bagley at BC, Antoine Joubert at Michigan and Pearl Washington at Syracuse all spring to mind as similarly doughy-yet-proficient guards.

    1. If that means the Twins go ahead and sign Jose Reyes this offseason, would that be a bad thing? 🙂

      I wouldn't mind Brendan Ryan in the middle infield for a few years, but I suspect GM Z in Seattle is too smart to let him go cheaply.

          1. i saw during the colts-falcons game yesterday, someone had had a andrew luck colts jersey made up.

    2. Seeing Jed Lowrie, of Johan Santana trade rumors saga fame, on that list makes me feel a little old.

    3. From a fan perspective, a lot of the SS options look pretty terrible, but as AG notes, the MLB average for SS last year was .263/.317/.380. Because that line is so low, there's plenty of "upside potential" at the position, and why teams would always love to draft a star SS, but at the end of the day, it's awfully difficult to find a player who can hit well and also field the shortstop position adequately.

  3. I'm hearing that the drumbeat for decertification of the NBAPA is picking up. So long, 2011-12 season. Screw you, owners, for locking out the players and expecting them to concede $400 million while you don't put together a decent system in which competitive balance is something other than a pie in the sky ideal.

    Ah, the life of the Wolves fan... finally something to get excited over and the season is toast and Kevin Love will be a free agent before he plays for the Wolves again? Sigh.

      1. It's getting worse than I expected. After seeing the effects of lockouts on other major sports, I'm amused that Owners are willing to let this happen. On the other hand, they have gobs of money. They don't have to care about the sport or the fans or the players. If they make their power play and it works, they've had their fun.

        I cannot believe they've assessed that they're willing to sit out two seasons. What a total embarrassment that would be to the game's history. I still get angry when I think about the fact that there was no 1994 World Series.

        1. I am surprised there isn't more articles destroying the owners over this. They don't want to just win. They already have and absolutely will. They want to completely rub the players' noses in it. That really doesn't sit well with me.

          1. What is hardest to come to grips with, for me, is that the owners themselves seem to be at fault for most of their financial difficulties. There are always some head-scratching contracts in every sports league, but the NBA always seems to take the cake. (So much so that it's even an option that everyone would agree that each team gets one "get out of jail free" card to dump a player's contract.) There's no reason that the front offices should have spent so much money if they didn't have it in the first place. Given the concessions they are usually able to get from local/state governments, they essentially get free rent, they have a monopoly on professional basketball in the US, and they still can't make that work? If they keep moving in this direction, they might as well blow up the whole thing and start from scratch.

            1. Plus, I think that they have a pretty good system. They have their rookie wage scale, which has been a tremendous boon, minimizing draft risk and allowing teams to keep their stars at bargain prices for four years. They have a max salary, which results in massive underpaying of their best talent once they get through the rookie contract. But, they still can't seem to avoid signing replacement level or average players to ridiculous contracts. The owners are idiots.

              2. It's rather embarrassing how they hand out so much money to second-tier players. On the outside looking in, it just seems so obvious how it happens every time. Teams work like mad to clear cap space to get a max salary free agent. The guys who are really worth that much are limited, so now the teams--which have just worked like mad to clear up the cap space--immediately blow it on whoever else is left over. There is no discipline. You'd think some of these guys would think to themselves "maybe it's good to have more cap room than the next guy and I'll be able to swing something that no one else is in position for." But no, must ... fill ... cap ... space.

                1. at the same time, I think I read that at least 60 percent of roster spots are filled with minimum contracts, rookie contracts, and veteran exemption contracts. The NBA is a league of "haves" and "haves a lot".

                  Ubes -- isn't part of what you are complaining about a feature of the old CBA requiring a percentage of BRI go to the players? I thought the NBA had rules on minimum payroll?

                  1. Does it require a minimum number of max contracts? The NBA system is too byzantine for my tastes and don't pretend to know all the ins and outs. Even if there are short-term limits on how much money they must spend at a minimum, they really ought to be able to find a way to spend it on shorter contracts and not all in one place on a max or near-max deal for multiple years. And I think a lot of the teams that sign the dumb contracts aren't really in danger of violating the minimum payroll if the Timberwolves didn't violate the minimum payroll last year.

                    For all these leagues that are worried about the owners not spending enough of the revenue, why don't they just put the unspent money into a bonus fund, and everyone in the league gets a percentage increase on their base salary? The money still gets spent, the players are all in a position where increasing the league's revenues benefits their bottom line, and no one is forced into awkwardly signing a contract to meet an arbitrary minimum.

                    2. Here's the answer:

                      8. What percentage of revenues do the players receive?

                      Contracts are individually negotiated between players and teams, and several factors control the amount each player can receive. Collectively, the players are guaranteed to receive at least 57% of revenues in salaries & benefits. If it's ever less, the league cuts a check to the Players Association after the season for distribution to the players.

                      There is also an escrow system that helps to limit the money the players receive to a specific percentage of revenue.

        2. I still get angry when I think about the fact that there was no 1994 World Series.
          But, everyone knows how to make us forget about it.

        3. I don't get angry about the 1994 World Series, per se. What I get angry about is how the owners were willing to let this happen and AS SOON AS THEY SETTLED THE STRIKE THEY STARTED ON A SPENDING SPREE THE LIKES OF WHICH WE HAD NEVER SEEN.

        4. Not all the owners are in on this two season or even one season nonsense. That's why it's doubly ridiculous. They locked the players out when they themselves don't have agreement on the end game. That's foolishness.

          The product on the court has never been better, in my estimation. The playoffs were dynamite this year. Could hardly have been better. Ratings were up. And yet, they were willing to blow the whole thing up without a real game plan.

          This has the potential to make me much angrier than I ever was about the 1994 baseball strike.

          1. And, let's not forget that the players have already made a $200 million a year concession ($4B in revenue, reduction in BRI from 57 to 52). The owners, or at least the hardliners, want another 5% reduction.

            And let's not forget that while college basketball (or at least the NCAA tournament) is still more popular than the NBA, the NCAA itself is in danger of collapsing. What happens when the super conferences leave the NCAA? Are they going to hold a tournament without the minor conferences? Isn't that about 2/3 of the appeal? The NBA is set to cash in on that implosion. But, here they sit, not playing.

            The golden goose is going to be dead.

    2. I don't see the Twins going 4/$52M on Cuddyer. As a point of reference, not long ago, they signed Morneau to a contract which went to $14M/year, and that was a year removed from Morneau winning the AL MVP award. Nevermind that Morneau didn't really deserve the AL MVP award, he still managed to win an award which Cuddyer will never even sniff. I don't see how they can do the calculus and figure, say, that Cuddyer's nearly as good a first baseman as Morneau promised to be, even with the added bonuses of positional flexibility, "leadership," and magic tricks.

        1. Well, I do, too, but I can see where the Twins might consider that in the realm of possibility--it's down to about 70% of what they pay Morneau rather than 90+% of what they pay Morneau.

          The part of this that surprises me the most is that the fourth year would already be in play. I'd rather go 3/$33M than 4/$40M, even though I'd still rather not sign him to either deal.

          1. Yeah, I agree. I think the 2/$16M deal that they Twins reportedly offered during the season is about what I'd offer, though I would probably have a mutual option for a third year.

            It will be interesting to see how this goes with Terry running the ship.

            1. TR always seemed to be willing to let guys like this walk: Koskie, Jones, Milton, Guzman, Guardado, Hawkins, etc. Under him, I have more faith that they won't overpay out of fear that they just can't possibly replace him with someone else.

  5. I wonder if Joe Paterno's chances of surviving at Penn State would be better or worse if he had knowledge that his players traded a ring for a tattoo.

    2. If anything is deserving of punishment, this would be it. This is one of the most disgusting things I've read in ages.

      1. This is the first I've heard about this, so I had to look it up. I came across this gem:

        "I didn't mean to hurt nobody at all and I didn't mean to bring anything down or embarrassment to our university because this is the greatest university in the nation," Pryor said, addressing his comments to alumni, former Ohio State players, fans, teammates and the coaching staff.

        Somehow trading rings for cash reflects more poorly upon the university than that monstrosity of a sentence. Go figure.

  6. I heard Mike and Mike discuss the Patriots' complete lack of explosiveness on offense and their total lack of a vertical passing game. Not once, though, did I hear the name Randy Moss come up. I'm not 100% convinced that he won't show up on that team any more.

  8. Speaking of the NBA, today is a significant anniversary for the league.

    The impact from Magic's riveting press conference was something like that of an earthquake -- widespread and devastating with frequent after-shocks. That's the only way I can describe it. The Spanish daily, El Pais, devoted two pages to "The Magic Man: A Living Legend and a Myth in World Sport," and rued the apparent fact that he would not be playing in the Olympics. All six major television networks in Japan, where basketball was not even a major sport, carried the news. Papers in Sydney, Milan, Oslo, London and Munich also splashed the story on page one, as did, needless to say, virtually every newspaper in America.

      1. I predicted to my grad school buddies shortly before the announcement that he would say he had HIV/AIDS. But I was still shocked when he said it.

  10. Breaking news -- Ryan in as interim, Smith out?? That's what they're saying on the waves, anyway.

  11. umm..WOW

    1500ESPNJudd Judd Zulgad
    Twins announced today that Terry Ryan has assumed the role of interim General Manager, replacing Bill Smith effective immediately.

    also..looks like a 4:30 press conference.

    4. I take TR as interim to mean that he's not a candidate for the vacated position. At the same time, he's clearly capable of doing the job, so they can take their time finding a replacement. Really didn't see BS getting cut out of the picture like that, though. I figured they'd give him a mulligan on this season given all the injuries.

      1. So... they say Radcliff can't interview for the O's job and bring back Krivsky. One of them has to be the new guy eventually, right? Or maybe Ryan is getting the band back together.

        1. Part of me wonders if TR wants a shot at this now that they have a little more money to throw around, but I think he legitimately didn't like the everyday grind of being GM and probably prefers his out-of-the-spotlight role. Maybe we'll have GM-by-committee and they will institute closer-by-committee.

          It is actually pretty amazing how leak-proof the front office is, given how no one had this as a rumor before it happened and there are no real rumors on what direction they are headed in now that BS is out as GM.

          1. I wouldn't be shocked if this isn't all that interim. TR comes back for a couple of years, tries to right the ship, and picks someone internally to replace him (again)?

            2. I get the feeling TR will be step back down before the season starts. I got the vibe from his resignation that he liked the role of evaluator, but not being the boss (i.e. trading/cutting players).

            3. It would actually be a hilarious way for TR to keep the media distracted. "Oh, no, no, I'm just the interim GM. We're still looking for a replacement. Seriously, keep working those phones and eventually you will find out who is going to replace me."

              1. So, just like everyone else here? 😉

                It seems to sort on timezone time, rather than absolute time. I would need to investigate the times in the database to know for sure though. Regardless, it should fix itself after 4:13 PM CST.

      3. So did Smith want a total overhaul and no one else was buying it? He did seem a bit more reactionary than TR (maybe?). Maybe Smith wanted more money and wanted to sign free agents to get the job done? I'm curious which side of the scope/approach discussion he was on.

        Personally, my main beef with him is that he's seemed to spend a lot of resources (whether using talent in trades or money for free agents) on corner players and relief pitchers, to the detriment of shoring up our up-the-middle talent, which was the one major way that I saw him differ from TR.

        1. I was kind of hoping it was the other way, but the more I think about it... what are the odds that multiple people in the front office want to make a big wave in free agency (or trade or whatever) and Billy Smith was so resistant to the idea that they canned him? Doesn't seem too likely just based on history.

        2. my main beef with him is that he's seemed to spend a lot of resources (whether using talent in trades or money for free agents) on corner players and relief pitchers, to the detriment of shoring up our up-the-middle talent

          well, he DID spend a lot of resources on Tsunami.

          1. $14.5M over 3 years? That's barely more than Punto made in his last three years with the Twins ($10.5M) and pencils out to about 1 WAR/year.

            1. Huh. I had it in my head that the posting fee was much larger than $5M.

              But considering that Fangraphs had him at -1.4 fWAR, that's still an awful deal (-3.2 fWAR compared to Punto this season!!!!111one111!!!). 😉

              1. Can I get that same thought with the top being a St Ides ad and the bottom the Coors Light ad?

        1. All joaks aside, does this signal a serious organizational change? I'm wondering if Gardy'll be next.

          1. I think Gardy is on solid footing. In fact, if I was a wagering man, I think I'd put my money on Gardy being one of the forces behind "Fire Billy Now". That's pure speculation, of course.

            One wonders who told Top Jimmy that the Twins should hire Wayne Krivsky. He put that out there and bam!, he got hired. Obviously, someone told him that. Was it Gardy? Maybe. Terry Ryan? Perhaps. I'll speculate a little further and say that whoever is Top Jimmy's source probably also fed him stuff on that pansy #7.

            Okay, back to work.

              1. If strategery had been troi, I would have demanded that he change his avatar from sunglasses to no sunglasses every time he posted.

          4. Ryan said he won't make any changes to the team's coaching staff unless manager Ron Gardenhire wants to bring in different people, according to Phil Mackey of ESPN 1500

    8. Add me to those who are surprised. This is not the way the Twins have historically operated under the Pohlads. Either this means that the new generation is not going to put the emphasis on longevity that Carl did, or it means that they concluded that Bill Smith was so far in over his head that they saw no hope for the Twins to improve under him.

      It remains to be seen, of course, how much good this will do. Unless this signals a total break from the Twins' way of doing things, I still don't see a lot of dramatic moves they can make to improve. They still don't have a lot of tradable assets, they still don't seem likely to be major players on the free agent market, and they still don't seem to have young players who are likely to make their mark this year. The best hope for improvement in the short term is for a return to health of people like Mauer, Morneau, and Span. The best hope for improvement in the long-term in improvement of the farm system, but it will take a few years for us to see the fruit of that.

      I guess it gives me some hope that things might improve eventually, but for this year, I don't see a lot of moves that Bill Smith, Terry Ryan, or any other GM could make to improve the Twins.

      1. Ditto and ditto. I suppose the vote of confidence should have made it obvious he wasn't going to survive the offseason, but I thought with the Twins, it just meant they're conservative and don't make sudden moves. This has to be the first public-facing official the Twins have fired in over 20 years.

      2. This line of thinking is what makes me lean towards thinking that Bill Smith really wanted to blow things up and make big moves, but there are plenty of people who have been with the organization for a long time who would be uncomfortable with that course of action, since the Twins have historically (or at least in the last 10-15 years) done things little by little and not in big, bold strokes. I can see the conversation going along the lines of:

        BS: "Let's blow this thing up."
        Everyone else: "That's not how we do things around here."
        BS: "My way or the highway."
        Everyone else: "Okay, see you later."

        Not that BS would have been that confrontational, but who knows. They might not have wanted to fire/demote him (is it clear which happened?), but he may have had an attitude towards the current situation which forced the issue.

        (This rampant speculation provides further proof that this is indeed the off-season.)

        1. The only problem with the theory is that he already blew things up. Blowing it up now would be like using explosives to clear the train wreck off the track.

          1. I dunno, did Smith really do much last winter? Off the top of my head, I remember Hardy, Punto, Nishioka, Hudson, Crain, Guerrier, and Pavano as decisions he made last winter. Some movement, sure, but hardly the sorts of moves that major shake-ups are made of.

            1. Moss just means that he blew up the team and the organization, and turned it into debris. Other than signing Pavano (which can be debated), damn near every move he's made over the years has been for the worse. And there's not a lot of promise in the cupboards.

              1. Signing JI

                JIM THOME. Trading for Pavano. Cargo for Hardy. Orlando Hudson. There were some good moves.

                2. And I still argue that the Santana trade was a fine move if they had to do '08 on a budget, which it seems they had to do. So far the Mets have paid him $82.5M and he's been worth about $45-50M. He wasn't a very valuable asset when they traded him and I think Smith got about as much as anyone was going to get.

                  1. Moss disagrees. You have to be able to get a major-league player in exchange for the best pitcher in the game. They did very poorly in that deal.

                    1. Only if the destination team doesn't have to pay over $100 million to make the player waive his no-trade clause. The going rate for waiving it is under a few million, so the Mets had to pay over 50 times the norm. There's your major-league player.

                    3. Santana was a great pitcher, sure. That makes him really valuable playing pick-up ball in the park, but he was nearly worthless as a trade asset.

                    4. They should have kept Santana for the remainder of that year. Entertainment value was more than what they got in return.

                    5. More than the entertainment value of a Game 163? That was a pretty fun season. And if we're going to the subjective "entertainment value," I thought Gomez was really entertaining and it's fun to watch someone play center field like that.

                      One of the things the Twins got out of that deal, which I think gets overlooked, was essentially $13M of payroll relief which they put towards locking up Nathan and Morneau.

                3. There were some good moves.

                  Which of those moves, other than the Pavano signing, has positive impact on the coming seasons/long-term health of the organization??

                  Moss isn't saying that Smith did absolutely nothing right, but the evidence in the "wrong" column is heavier than the "right" column.

                    1. Not explicitly, no. Moss stated that there's not a lot of promise in the cupboards. Also stated that "damn near" every, not every, move was for the worse.

                      As Ryan said on KFAN yesterday afternoon, every move has to be looked at in the short-term and in the long-term. Smith has done a number of moves looking to the short-term, and now the long-term is looking pretty grim for the moment.

                      The organization went from having some areas of strength and some areas of weakness to having nothing but weaknesses. Is there anything that they did on the field last year that was a strength? And is there any facet of the organization that can be viewed as a strength/area of surplus?

                      Ryan's got his work cut out for him. But Moss for one is glad he's back on the job, regardless of what happens on the field next season.

                  2. Under Smith's direction, the Twins went from a losing season, to a Game 163 loss to a Game 163 win to a 94-win season to a 99-loss season. Which one of these doesn't belong? Obviously, you can't judge a GM strictly on wins and losses, but that's still the bottom line.

                    1. At the same time, his overall winning percentage is about .510 compared to .540 the four years before he took over. I have a pretty ambivalent view of him. I don't think he was very good, but don't think he was terrible, either.

        2. I can't see Smith wanting to blow things up, either. Even if he did want to, I'm not sure what that would mean. Trading Mauer and Morneau? Signing Albert Pujols? Even if I thought he wanted to make big, bold moves, I don't know what big, bold moves he could have made that actually make any sense. That's why I think, regardless of what "philosophical differences" there may have been, ownership simply concluded that Smith was in over his head as a GM, and that things were not likely to get better with him in charge.

          1. Blowing things up would be trading what prospects we have for vets. Not that he could have definitely done so, but he might have wanted to try. Blowing things up would also mean things like letting Cuddyer walk, letting Kubel walk, let Nathan walk, maybe trade someone like Baker, Blackburn, and/or Slowey, test the market on Morneau and/or Span, etc. Maybe the Twins felt his ideas were unrealistic, which would basically be the same as thinking he was in over his head. I don't think we're too far apart on how we view this.

    9. 1500ESPNJudd
      Also congratulation to the Twins, who in 2011 managed to fire their GM without the information leaking out first. I'm being serious, too.

      it makes me wonder if the decision came this morning, Although looking back, the pieces were in place: bringing back Krivsky and not letting Radcliff talk to the O's

    10. This is very un-Twinslike. Firing someone? That's rare.

      Of course, Torii recently badmouthed BS publicly, and the FOTF is more Twin now than BS ever has been...

  12. Smith is on 1500 ESPN right now, in case anyone would like to listen.

    Sounds like he was offered another job in the organization.

        2. Dude, no kidding. I watched TC belt home runs at Tarzay last summer and that dude / chick is ripped.

          1. Someone once told me that TC Bear was Hrbek, or at least was Hrbek for HR contests. That can't be true (can it spooky?), but I've liked TC so much more once I decided to believe it anyways.

    2. He seemed to be pretty well respected when he was an assistant. It could just be a case of someone who makes a very good second banana but can't handle the lead role.

      1. It would take a real big pair - or a real small pair - to take that position in the same organization.

        Definitely not an averaged sized pair, though.

      2. I think I would actually really like to hear that this is the case. Its not every day an executive rationally looks at their ability to do their job and step back down to a lower level where their performance is more valuable if that is the reality. Usually, they just fire someone under them and continue trying to sink the ship.

    3. Our long organizational nightmare is over? I look forward to seeing what Terry Ryan can do with around $25 million in open payroll (assuming he's the GM for more than a short period).

      Edit: Or not. Geez - $90 million?

      2. This was confirmed last night on the source of all medical truth, House. Although Moss believes they described it as a temporary measure.

  15. Spooky-bait.

    The marketability of a big-name celebrity voice actor gave way, perhaps inevitably, to an even more insidious trend: directly basing a character's appearance on the famous actor providing its voice. The examples range from the Jerry Seinfeld bee inBee Movie to the Tina Fey-esque reporter inMegamind, but the apex is Dreamworks' 2004 animated film Shark Tale, which features creepy human-fish hybrids of actors like Will Smith and Angelina Jolie.

    2. Bait status: taken.

      I'm torn on this. Putting the actor's face on the character can be distracting, but would you say it's more distracting than a famous actor being in a live-action movie? It seems weird for the writer to be so against this trend when live-action movies give us no choice but to recognize the actor.

      What I prefer is for an actor to inspire the animators to use facial expressions and habits to meld with the character model that the animators have already created prior to casting. Most video games do this, and Andy Serkis's physical performance was incorporated greatly into Gollum's animation.

                1. oh yeah, that was jason lee. knew that one as soon as i heard him (and if the visual characteristic of him were based on anyone, it definitely wasn't jason lee).

      2. And I'd say Pixar clearly does an amazingly better job at this than Dreamworks, and, well, Pixar blows them out of the water in pretty much every way.

  16. Heard a part of Terry Ryan's press conference.

    When asked about the 2012 payroll, his response was South of 2011. When pressed further, he said, "I suppose about $100 million."

    He then talked about not being a big total payroll guy and said that he'd make do with $90 million, $95 million, whatever the Pohlads gave him.

    $90 million? Oy vey.

      1. If the Twins come in at $90-$100 million, there will be plenty of good seats available in 2013.

        1. I am trying not to read too much into it, but if that's what they're doing in a new stadium with Mauer under that contract, with all the holes they have next year... I am absolutely gobsmacked.

          1. If that's the case, Jim's got every bit of the PR savvy his old man had post-1993 or so.

            Unless he's playing possum with potential free agent signees. (Yeah, right.)

    2. I wonder what he means exactly by not being a big total payroll guy. I mean, at some point $10M in player development and draft bonuses can get you a lot more overall than $10M in major league payroll. I still think that looking at the payroll and draft budget over the years, it was pretty clear in '08 that the Twins made a concerted effort to put some of their payroll budget into the draft. (With mixed results, it turns out.) With the #2 overall draft pick next year, and potentially some supplemental picks, they could be spending plenty of money on the draft this year.

      Really, when its all said and done, the biggest decision the Twins have to make next year is who to take second in the draft. The difference between, say, Joe Mauer and Adam Johnson is pretty hard to understate.

      1. Or overstate. Ryan did mention this as a point of emphasis. He said that he's going to lighten the load on Mike Radcliffe. He also said one of his own strengths is putting guys on the roster. So, expect Mr. Ryan to be focusing on that #2 pick.

    3. My thought is that we may be in for a rerun of the Twins circa 1996-97, where they had a few pretty good players, but a lot of replacement level dreck around them. The goal was to try to get by until the farm system could develop some good players. It eventually did, but it took until 2001. I'm sure the Twins are hoping it won't take that long this time.

      1. I hope to be finished with my dissertation and on the job market around 2017-2018, so if the U wants to just offer me a job now I'll gladly plunk down a deposit on a season ticket package.

        1. Heck, if the U wants to throw Dr. Chop and I 1.5 positions we'll take two season ticket packages for as long as we live.

      2. My thought is that we may be in for a rerun of the Twins circa 1996-97, where they had a few pretty good players, but a lot of replacement level dreck around them.

        I sure hope not. I first moved to the Twin Cities in 1997. It was the first time I was able to watch the Twins on a daily basis and I did. It was awful but I was so enthralled with being able to watch the Twins every day that I kept doing it. Those were some very bad teams. Ron Coomer - All Star.

        1. It's kind of a travesty that Coomer even made that All-Star team. I'm not sure what their splits were at the break, but Radke, Milton, Mays, Hawkins, Miller, Koskie, and Jones all finished with better fWAR than Coomer that year. I wonder if these days Radke would get more respect than he did back then. That was a bit of a down year for him, but it was on the heels of two 5+ fWAR seasons. He finished 5th in the AL in fWAR in '97, and effectively a big tie for 3rd in '98. I guess it was pretty hard to get much attention as a starting pitcher that year with no run support and Pedro lapping the field. (12.1 fWAR to runner-up Mussina's 5.9.)

          1. He basically got there on the basis of a hot month. On April 12, Coomer was hitting .250. By May 16, his average was .365. He predictably came back to earth after that--he was hitting .313 at the end of May and .286 at the end of June--but by then the idea of Ron Coomer, All-star was fixed in people's minds.

  17. Listening to Terry Ryan, there's no doubt but that the organization is VERY unhappy about how long it took guys to recover from injuries. I think it's possible that there might be some changes in the medical staff, but it doesn't take too much reading between the lines to divine that they are VERY unhappy about that pu**y #7. It is my considerably ignorant opinion that the medical staff needs to be overhauled. And by God, if the organization isn't keeping close tabs on Mauer this off-season, they are idiots.

    2. I just don't get the deal with Mauer. Maybe he really is dogging his rehab, I don't know. But in Hunter's last season, I remember him gutting out some pretty meaningless games with a clear limp. Maybe I've just been turning a deaf ear, but I have yet to hear a catcher criticizing Mauer for the number of games he's played. Maybe he's been stubborn about sticking behind the plate, but at times it seems like Gardy's genuinely been adament about keeping him there, too.

      W/r/t the medical staff issue: I don't know how I would run the medical staff of an MLB team. It seems like it'd be a bit like herding cats. All the players are (rightly) worried about their own careers and generally always look to get an outside opinion on anything serious, which can more or less serve to make the initial opinion meaningless. Then how do you have a doctor oversee the correction of an injury which he may believe was incorrectly diagnosed?

      Personally, when it comes to the injuries, I know this is an oversimplification, but I put a good chunk of the blame the 12-man pitching staff and not enough depth on the bench. If there were more platoon players that Gardy could mix in during the season, he could get more days off for some of the regulars as a sort of preventative maintenance. Some of the injuries were bad luck, sure, but without depth behind the starters, the temptation is greater to keep them off the DL and hope they recover quickly. And without any quality in the bullpen, it seems like every pitcher is warming up and/or pitching every other day. This year, the Twins' 5 most-used relievers (at least the ones listed by bb-ref) averaged 0.88 innings per appearance. In Gardy's first season with the Twins, the 5 most-used relievers averaged 1.14 innings per appearance. That's not all just Gardy having an itchy trigger finger, but it has to be easier to make that call to the bullpen when you know you've got 7 guys there instead of 6.

      And finally, the Twins could at least find someone better than Drew Effing Butera to back up Mauer. It's going to hurt any time Mauer can't play, but at least get a major-league caliber player to back him up.

      1. Personally, when it comes to the injuries, I know this is an oversimplification, but I put a good chunk of the blame the 12-man pitching staff and not enough depth on the bench.

        Add to that what had to be 50+ games in which a player was "day-to-day" with an injury and couldn't play but the Twins were unwilling to put him on the DL, mainly because the medical staff said it would only be a few days and then the Twins end up putting the player on the DL anyways. It was ridiculous how often that happened this season.

        2. The issue I have with that is that what we know is that the Twins told the media that the medical staff said it would just be a few days, but the message the medical staff gave the baseball people was probably a lot more nuanced. It could just as well have been an issue of the front office being overly optimistic--something you might tend to be if you have no depth--as it was a matter of the medical staff being overly optimistic. After all, the medical staff presumably has no idea how to juggle a 40-man roster and aren't making specific "DL or no DL" recommendations. It just seems a bit like scapegoating to me, and at the end of the day, it's the GM's responsibility to make those decisions.

          1. But the nonmedical people aren't doctors, so they have to go by what the doctor tells them, as in, how many days will it be before he is back? If two weeks, obviously he goes on the DL, if less, then it depends on how much less and what kind of backup they have available. Of course, diagnosis of the day-to-day kind often hinges on how honest the player is about the pain he is in.

            1. And its also possible that the medical staff could have said "he'll be back in x days if such and such happens", and all the nonmedical people heard was: "he'll be back in x days." Medical people talk, nonmedical people don't always listen well.

            2. Of course, diagnosis of the day-to-day kind often hinges on how honest the player is about the pain he is in.

              I'd also imagine that's a big part of it. How honest are players going to be when the star player on the team is getting excoriated for not being a tough guy? It also seems that between Span and Morneau some of the day-to-day stuff has been concussion related, and I don't think anyone has any good time tables on that stuff. The doc can probably say that the player might be better in a couple days or a couple months and there's no way to tell. At that point, it seems to be a lot about who the backup is.

              1. concussion related

                only slightly related to the conversation: i have to admit that i still don't understand how debilitating the concussion issues have been to both span and morneau considering how they happened on relatively minor contact, yet many football players seem to receive them in much more high impact situations, and seem much less affected by them.

                i mean this in no way as a slight against span or morneau, nor am i speaking to the way that the respective leagues deal with concussion issues, i'm just saying i don't understand it.

                1. But aren't there a crap load of former NFL players with serious issues because of a career of essentially one brain injury after another? You don't hear about that sort of thing with retired MLB players. I'm thinking part of it is the concentration required to hit a baseball makes concussion-related problems way more obvious than the same symptoms in football.

                    1. He would almost have to, considering when he played, and probably had some never diagnosed. It shouldn't be a surprise that Koskie, another former hockey player, had his career ended by a concussion.

                    2. wasn't he a goalie though? i'd have to imagine the percentage of concussed goalies is much lower than your average non-goalie.

                    3. again, i'm not calling these guys' "toughness" into question. i know that NFL players have significantly higher problems later in life. i'm just saying that i don't understand how these two seemingly minor, low-impact injuries have been so debilitating.

                    4. i'd have to imagine the percentage of concussed goalies is much lower than your average non-goalie.

                      mayyyybe. But I'd think that having frozen pucks flying at your head at ~80-100+ mph might just occasionally do some damage. Plus, in youth hockey, not so much checking. Even in Canuckia, I'm guessing.

                    5. I think concussion damage has been found to be cumulative, so even without major OMG highlight reel hits, the brain is sustaining damage. Several years of linemen bashing on each other will do the job, or even a career of boxing without being KO'd.

                2. Brain injuries are very much a cumulative injury as much as anything. My understanding (I am not a (medical) doctor) is that concussions are more or less like bruising the brain, except it doesn't really heal from those bruises. So the last injury that really puts you over the edge can just be the proverbial feather that broke the camel's back.

                  My roommate a while back had a concussion from playing soccer which basically put an end to his playing days. He'd had a couple of major concussions when he was younger and one minor one, and in this case, he caught an accidental elbow to the cheek--it certainly didn't look like anything major, but I was on the other side of the field--but it put him out for a while. After that, he wasn't able to function as a grad student for a good two weeks, and he had lingering symptoms for a good 2-3 months. His personality noticeably changed. His temper was a lot shorter and he was generally more or less depressed. Concussions worry me a lot more these days than they used to.

                  Span was a wide receiver in high school, and could have had plenty of head trauma there. Koskie may have been a goalie by the end of his youth hockey career, but if hockey is anything like soccer, they rotate you through all the positions when you are young, so I'm not sure goalie really gets you a pass. And it's not hard to get concussions in non-sports-related accidents. Two of my roommate's previous head injuries were from riding his bike when he was younger. Also, as outlined here, it's not just concussive blows that are a problem, but repeated subconcussive trauma can be a big problem, too.

                  1. yeah, i know very little, but that fits with what i do know. if i'm not mistaken, we haven't heard anything about these types of injuries in their pasts, but then again, if i'm in their position i wouldn't be in a rush to disseminate it.

      2. But in Hunter's last season, I remember him gutting out some pretty meaningless games with a clear limp.

        ii was also trying to get paid.

        1. Sorry, I was ambiguous with my pronouns there. I remember Mauer gutting out some pretty meaningless games with a clear limp in 2007. (I mentioned Hunter because his calling out of Mauer and Morneau in the media surely had something to do with Mauer limping around the field that year.)

          1. Same in 2010. Mauer had the heel thing and then had a sore shoulder. He played basically every day until the Twins clinched and then was out almost until the playoffs.

        1. i'm the only one that doesn't seem to mind the new marlins logo, so i might not be the best person to ask (that, and i have no idea what he did or didn't do).

          1. Well, I don't hate the new logo as much as most, but combined with the home run effects....

            Anywho, I think his doctor is being convicted for making him dead, which, considering his personal life, doesn't seem so bad.

  20. The Royals make a trade and get a current MLB player in return. That doesn't feel like something they do very often.

    Melky Cabrera for Jonathan Sanchez. I realize the Royals don't have much pitching, but I'm not sure they can afford a lot of offense, either...

    1. At first glance this looks like a big win for the Royals, right? A pitcher who has struck out over 200 in a season for Melky Cabrera? Maybe Bill Smith wouldn't trade Jason Repko for Sanchez and that is why he got fired? Yep, I think that was it.

      1. Dave Cameron disagrees. Of course, if Cabrera turns in another sub-.300 wOBA, it looks great for the Royals. But, Sanchez is trending in the wrong way. His xFIP and FIP were below league average (and matched his ERA, hey they work!). He's moving from a division with three pitcher parks to the harder league.

        1. I knew it was just a matter of Central Time before someone proved me wrong.

    2. I guess it kind of depends on whether you think Cabrera's season was a break-out season or a fluke. A 5-4-3 weighting would give him a projection of 1.8 fWAR next year. And a 5-4-3 weighting would put Sanchez at 1.5 fWAR next year. So it's pretty even from that perspective, and I'm not sure what the contract situations for the two are like. I do think that pitching coaches can impact a pitcher's walk rate (usually to the detriment of the strikeout rate, but you'd think that perhaps Sanchez could reduce both simultaneously and be more effective), so who knows. Meche took a huge leap forward in his first two years with the Royals, in part because he was able to find the strike zone more, so it wouldn't be unprecedented.

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