59 thoughts on “July 31, 2017: So It Comes To This”

  1. Last night I spent more time than I would like to admit thinking about whether anyone would want to be operated on by a surgeon who performs surgery with the same degree of accuracy as Phil Cuzzi does umpiring.

    1. I think first you would need to identify which surgical operation is as difficult as umpiring an MLB game.

        1. My hope is no one would trust the Phil Cuzzi of surgeons with a circumcision.

  2. From the Twins' perspective, I find this to be one of the more intriguing trade deadlines in recent history. How far away from competing are they, really? Did they show enough this year to think that they can compete next year if they add pitching? If so, can you get pitching for next year via trade? That seems unlikely. Indeed, Ervin Santana is one of the few controlled-next-year guys whose names are being thrown around. Everyone else discussed (Sonny Gray, for example) would make the Twins look like buyers, not sellers.

    Or do you look at the first half as a lot of luck and say "they're at least 2 years away" and maybe sort of throw in the towel on next year already by moving pieces like Dozier and Santana?

    I don't know what I would do if I were the Twins. I suppose it would depend a lot on how the pending free agency period looks, and I haven't tracked that at all lately, so... I don't know.

    1. For the Twins, I think "add pitching" needs to mean adding guys who will help in the future, as they've done with their last couple of trades. I'd be open to offers for Dozier and Santana, but I wouldn't feel any urgency to trade them. If you get enough you make the deal and if you don't, you don't. If they're both with the Twins next year, I'm okay with that, too.

      1. I think this is exactly the tension. I don't feel like trading them away is necessarily the right move, whereas in years past I would have been much more on board with the Twins being sellers.

        1. I've heard the broadcasters mention the '84 team a time or two, and I guess that comparison works well enough, even if it's not a precise match.

          Like the '84 Twins, there's a ton of reason to be optimistic about the young position players. The current team's actually a little older (Mickey Hatcher, at 29, was the oldest regular in '84), but it still has the capacity to take a big step forward together as these guys move into their primes.

          Like Viola on the '84 team, Berríos is a young starter who seems like he could anchor the rotation for years to come. Ervin Santana's a better No. 2 than Mike Smithson could ever have hoped to become. If he could figure out how avoid deep pitch counts, Mejía seems like he could be a passable No. 4-5 on a really good staff.

          And like '84, this bullpen is an absolute dumpster fire.

    2. With our pitching our achilles' heel (our HUGE achilles' heel), I am bothered by trading Santana, even if it meant getting (potential) future help. Is he blocking anyone? Well, not anyone that's ready, as the 5th starter revolving door has shown. We still need to give fans the chance of winning games the rest of the season. When the toilet's plugged, let's not trade our plumber's helper for more toilet paper.

      1. No, Santana's clearly not blocking anyone. Again, I'd be willing to listen to offers, but there's no pressure to trade him if it's not a good deal.

    3. Dozier plays his part:

      Still, when Dozier awoke to the news on Sunday that the Twins had traded lefthander Jaime Garcia to the Yankees for two pitching prospects — only six days after acquiring him from Atlanta, and a day before the nonwaiver trade deadline — it was as if hot coffee were poured in his lap.

      “That’s frustrating within itself, to not go on a little run,” Dozier said. “A couple of games could have gone differently. We should be adding [players]. It’s frustrating.

      “I know all these guys feel the same way.”

      1. He's saying the right things, the things we'd expect from someone who has pride in their work and backs their teammates ... but the players who carried the club during the first 2+ months have regressed (or collapsed), situational hitting has been awful, the starting pitchers (all 12 of them) have struggled, either early on or over the past few weeks, and (even including Ervin's 4 CG's) are averaging ~5.5 innings per start...
        They've played the best teams in baseball and lost, even when they've dodged the likes of Kershaw, Kluber and Keuchel in those series' ...
        I don't want them to wave the flag in the season, but I just can't see this as anything more than a .500 team with no true #1 starter and an overburdened, outmatched bullpen.

        [edit] Also, I know he was Cuzzi'd yesterday, but as of today, Sano leads all of baseball with 144 k's and Dozier is fast approaching 100 (with 97).

    4. I don't think it's generally that complicated to account for the timelines involved. If you trade someone established (like Dozier or Santana, say) for players who will contribute farther in the future, then you get them on a lower salary in the near term which allows you to spend more on free agents in the near term. So in practice, I don't think you have to sacrifice quality next year for quality farther down the line. You just have to make sure that when you consider salary and expected WAR, you come out on the winning end of the trade. Do that repeatedly and you will be in good shape. The key is just to get the expected WAR piece correct and to keep your roster from getting too unbalanced toward hitting or pitching.

    5. To me it seems like the "pitching for next year" job is a job of selling the team in the offseason to free agents and being willing to pony up some money this offseason. In theory this is the time for the team to move into the top 10 in payroll. So the only real place the trade deadline plays in that offseason game is probably optical. In that case it might be worth keeping Santana (unless blown away) in order to show that the team plans to compete hard in 2018. _Perhaps_ an indicator of competing beyond 2018 comes into play with Dozier's status as well. Dozier signing an extension (that hopefully equates to his 2017, not 2016, play) could be a huge positive indicator to free agent pitching talent.

      This trade deadline is interesting in the sense that it could add a baseline of players in the prospect ranks to keep feeding the ML team. But proof of competing and ownership interest in competing probably comes in the offseason. If the Twins truly made a push to the top 10 in payroll it probably means around $40 million in additions, that probably allows them to sign a #1 (is Darvish the only one out there?) and a #3, two #2s, or a #2 and 2 #3s. The strategy might be to sign a #3 and then with that as evidence, go hard after Darvish. I think it might also be interesting to sign someone like Pineda to a discounted 3-year contract. Use that to incentivize a couple solid #2s to sign on.

      Anyway, that's how I'd approach things.

      (Of course, if there aren't a lot of options out there maybe a trade is the only way to get some pitching onboard?)

      1. Signing Dozier to an extension beyond next season does seem like an obvious way of underlining the club's intentions for the free agent pitcher crowd, but I'd be wary of inking him to anything more than three years; my guess is he'd want closer to five.

    6. Right now, it sounds like the only player likely to be traded before the deadline is Kintzler, which would mean the new front office only traded away players that weren't under team control next year. It also would mean the last couple months could be really ugly unless Molitor starts trusting the younger relief arms more.

    1. Reading that entry, I am rather disappointed it wasn't named after Dr. C. Paul Boner instead.

      And also, wish I would have seen this before last night's deadline for a spookymilk survivor story about how a person/place/thing/whatever got its name. Would have been way better than my idea.

      1. I was out of the country for 70% of the mooch's tenure. I wasn't out of the country that long... smh

      1. Can't you just imagine the local media turning on him, and then his subsequent response? That'd be entertaining.

    2. Per Gleeman:

      Twins' return for Brandon Kintzler is Single-A left-hander Tyler Watson, according to @Ken_Rosenthal. Another mid-level pitching prospect.

        1. Wrong Tyler Watson! The one the Twins traded for is a 20-year-old lefty starter with a K rate of nearly 10. His ERA in A-ball is 4.84, but he has very good peripherals. I feel much better now.

          1. He has some good numbers, but he's so young and far away that it's anybody's guess whether he'll be any good or not. Trust the scouts, I guess. But given that Kintzler will be a free agent at the end of the season, it's probably about as good as you could expect to do.

              1. Really, I'm pretty pleased with the trades the Twins have made over the last week or so. They turned Huascar Ynoa, John Ryan Murphy, and Brandon Kintzler into four pitchers who look pretty good in the minors. Only time will tell whether any of them actually come through, but I think there's a good chance that a couple of them will.

      1. I don't think it's actual money. Each team has a cap on how much money they can spend on international free agents. Teams can trade part or all of that space to other teams, so if, say, the Nats traded the Twins $1M in cap space, the Twins' cap would go up $1M and the Nats' cap would go down $1M.

  12. Listening to the Fort Myers Miracle game. Glen Perkins has just come in to pitch. I don't know how likely it is--probably not very--but it would be awesome if he could come back and be the closer now that Kintzler is gone.

    1. If it happens, it probably won't be right away. Perkins gave up two runs on two hits and a walk in one inning. In his prior appearance, he gave up a run on two hits in two-thirds of an inning. One could observe, of course, that with those numbers he'd fit right in with the current Twins bullpen.

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