Fire Gardy

I can’t believe I missed this, but a little while back Fangraphs posted an article about a White Elephant Contract Party … and I think it’s worth a visit. A mental visit, that is. Feel free to click the link and make it an internet visit too, I don’t care.

Here’s the concept: Every team has a bad contract, right? And every GM takes flak for that bad contract. So every GM takes their bad contract and they go into a room and put all those contracts into a big pile. They then begin pulling contracts out, one at a time, in some order. Each GM that pulls a contract either has to take that contract or attempt to trade it — if another GM is willing to make a trade.

Setting aside, for a moment, the fact that the only GM in the league that would agree to something like that is JP Ricciardi,* let’s imagine what it’d be like if it actually happened.

* What do you mean, he’s not a GM any more? How long have I been gone?

Firstly, let’s go through a mental exercise. Who’s got the worst contract on the Twins? I figure there are a couple ways to look at this: Who has the biggest contract (which are the ones you least want)? versus Who is the worst player (which are the ones you least want)?

Biggest contracts:

1. Morneau
2. Mauer
3. Nathan
4. Cuddyer
5. Kubel
6. Punto

Worst players:

1. Casilla
2. Young
3. Harris
4. Tolbert
5. Redmond
6. Buscher

Okay. Well, that really didn’t help. The players with the biggest contracts are (almost) all of our best players; if we put any of those contracts into the middle of the table, our reward would be watching one of the other GMs doing an extended — and presumably obnoxious — happy dance. And the crappiest players on the team all have small contracts; Redmond and Buscher are already as good as gone, and Young is the only one remaining on the list that makes more than the minimum.

Before the 2009 season, I’m sure a lot of people would have said that Cuddyer’s contract would definitely be the Twins’ white elephant contract; in fact, I had to defend Cuddyer and his contract earlier this year when it was singled out as one of the worst in the game. I don’t think many people are clamoring to get rid of Cuddyer at any cost after his 130 OPS+ season.

Similarly, I’m sure Punto would get some support for worst contract. How can Punto be making more money than Kubel? How can $4M for Nick Punto not be a bad contract, when so often he comes up to the plate and fails, and his presence continues to encourage Gardy to make bad decisions … it’s a bad contract, right? Well, I think by now everyone knows my feelings about Punto. He’s not a very good baseball player, but his versatility has value. His versatility probably has more value than we’re paying for.* It’s not a bad contract. Plus, someone with an $8M total contract, in the walk year, can’t really be considered a terrible contract.

* I think it’s worth pointing out that the Twins have never overpaid Punto based on his contributions. Even in his down years (like 2005, 2007, and 2009), he produces more value than we’re paying him. 2009 was close, in that he was worth $5.5M vs his $4M salary, but if you’re getting more than you’re paying for you really don’t have all that much to complain about. Right?

Reusse and his fans* would probably say that Nathan’s is a bad contract; after all, he blew a save in the postseason when Alex Rodriguez, one of the greatest hitters of all time happened to come up while he was in a “god damn it I’m hitting .500 with power right now, what are you going to do about it?” hot streak, hit a home run. Also, Nathan wasn’t completely dominant this season … if you’re not Mariano Rivera, you’re nobody. I mean, Rivera-like dominance is available everywhere on the cheap, that’s why every team’s closer is perfect every year except Shitty Joe Nathan.

* Wait, does Reusse have any fans? Does he even have anyone who agrees with him, ever? Seriously, I want to know. Someone please point me to a pro-Reusse blog, or something.

Okay, so that probably wasn’t all that necessary. But suffice it to say that a lot of teams would probably love to be able to pay Joe Nathan $24M over the next two seasons. If we’re going to unload that contract, we’re going to be getting something in return, not just dropping it. It’s a market value contract for an elite player playing at an elite level. We might not be able to afford many of those, but it’s not a disaster to have one.

I’m just going to go ahead and assume nobody wants to just drop Mauer, Morneau, or Kubel for nothing. If that’s not okay, let me know.

So it seems none of the Twins’ big contracts are bad ones. What about the bad players?

Casilla was awful this year, one of the worst players in the AL. I’ve been a big pro-Casilla guy for the past few years, and he only briefly looked like the player I’d hoped he could become. I’ve begun to think that his ceiling is much, much lower than I previously thought it was; he’s still young, with time to grow and get better, but his performance is so bad, and his demeanor still so immature, that it might not be worth waiting around for.

Delmon Young was one of the worst players in the AL too, until he got hot over the last few weeks of the season and showed some of the hitting talent that we thought he had when we got him. It seems like he’s Gardy’s fourth-favorite outfielder, and is getting squeezed out of the outfield situation; if he’s going to play, he’s going to have to really hit the ball. He hasn’t yet, and he looks terrible at the plate, and I’m this close to wanting to give up on him. But I can’t just yet. Can you?

Tolbert sucks, and is useless to a team with Punto already on it; but I have the feeling that if Bill Smith showed up at the party with the minimum contract of a second-string utility man, he’d be kicked out (and possibly beaten) by the people lugging in the contracts of Vernon Wells, Alex Rios, Barry Zito, etc. Maybe that’s not a bad thing.

Alright. Either I’m totally missing the boat on something, or the Twins simply have no bad contracts. If you’re a mid-payroll team, the only way to contend regularly is to develop your own players and avoid bad deals; obviously, the Twins have been able to do that and have reaped the rewards for it.

Now we get to see if this success continues once they move into the new stadium and have some more money to spend.

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Remember earlier this year when I complained about the Twins allowing Dayan Viciedo — the stud 20 year old Cuban defector who was described as “the next Miguel Cabrera — to go to the White Sox, who signed him to a 4 year, $10M contract?

Well, the early returns have not been great. Marc Hulet of Fangraphs describes him as one of 2009 “Prospect Duds,” saying:

Viciedo’s .692 OPS versus right-handed pitchers is cause for concern, as are the scouting reports that focused more and more on his lack of conditioning, which no doubt hindered him at the plate, as well as in the field. He showed worse range than Oakland’s Brett Wallace, widely considered to be a first baseman playing third base (especially based on his range). Unfortunately for Viciedo, he has yet to display enough power to be an asset at first base, and he lacks the mobility for even left field. The Cuban also performed poorly in a small sample size as the designated hitter in double-A, which could be a result of his focus issues.

Basically, Viciedo fields like a DH and hits like a CF … and that’s not going to work.

The hype around Viciedo was impressive, and it sounded great;* he was supposed to be able to step into the majors this year, and he was apparently the White Sox’s best hitter in Spring Training. Obviously, their scouts saw something in the way he was playing that the numbers didn’t pick up, because he sure wasn’t ready.

* Doesn’t it always?

I don’t see any reason to give up on Viciedo, and Hulet even notes that a) the sky is still the limit, and b) he’s still only 20 years old. So while I’m still pretty high on him, at this point I think it’s fair to say I was wrong for getting up in arms about the Twins passing on Viciedo, and it’s certainly not a bad thing that they don’t have $10M invested in a young prospect with declining prospects.

And that’s the thing about teams with more resources; they can afford to take risks that other teams with less resources simply cannot afford to take. The Twins can’t risk blowing $10M on some unproven commodity that might never turn into anything — even though taking those sorts of risks is how you build a great ballclub, without sufficient money you just can’t risk it.

All of which is another reason to be hopeful about Target Field: if it truly does increase revenue enough that the Twins can admit that they’re simply no longer a “small market” franchise, then perhaps they’ll start spending enough money that a $10M gamble doesn’t seem quite so unreasonable any more.

In the long run, I’d call that a good thing.

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For some reason,* I’ve been thinking about Jermaine Dye recently. And since the Twins starting a big series against the White Sox, one that has the potential to bury them (or the Twins), let’s go ahead and talk about Jermaine Dye. Everybody knows he’s quite the hitter, but that he looks as awkward in the field, a la Delmon Young. On the other hand, I’ve always thought he was a pretty good defensive right fielder.

* If you read the comments, you may know the reason.

Why in blazes would I think that, I can hear you asking. Well, I think it has a lot to do with how sports memories are created. And I don’t know if that actually works very well for baseball. I know you don’t know what I mean, so … let me try to explain.

Despite the fact that I live in Chicago, I rarely watch White Sox games. I really only watch them when a) the Twins are playing them, or b) when I see that they’re getting their doors blown off by the Yankees or something and I want to enjoy a little schadenfreude. As a result, my day-to-day exposure to Dye is limited. I only see a few of his highlights on Sportscenter all season, and I see him play about 20 games.

And what I see him doing is blasting home runs into the upper deck, over and over. I see him winning games in the 9th inning — one of my lasting memories of US Cellular field was a game I attended in 2006, Santana vs Contreras. Johan pitched that day, and pitched pretty well, and it looked like the Twins were going to win it. Dye hadn’t done anything all game, but he came up against Joe Nathan, in the 9th inning, with the Twins up 7-5, and a man on base. I was in the upper deck, down the third base line, but even from their I could see Dye’s brow clenched in the way it does when he’s concentrating, that look I’d seen dozens of times in the two years it’d been since he came to the White Sox. I knew, at the same time as everyone else in the stadium, that this man was going to do it. That Joe Nathan was not going to get him out. That the game would be tied, and that the White Sox would go on to win.

Soon, he blasted a monster home run that I’m pretty sure landed somewhere in rural Illinois. I was devastated. Also I was ridiculed by the drunken White Sox fans surrounding me. The moment is seared onto my brain. This is a sports memory. This is, I think, how they are formed. They’re just instants, single moments, snapshots in time that live on in your head when you close your eyes. It kind of faded into the background that the Twins ended up winning that game in extra innings — I didn’t even remember that until I looked it up. It was that moment when I knew Dye would get a clutch hit, that Nathan would blow that save, when I knew as well as 30000 White Sox fans that the Sox were going to beat the Twins that day.

And it seems like Dye does that to the Twins all the time. He’s getting big hits and making diving catches in the outfield. It seems like every time a Twins player rips one into right field, and I lean forward thinking this is going to be the big hit we need to break the inning open, and Dye is moving like molasses out there, and dreams of the ball clattering around in the corner and turning into a triple dance through my head — and then he explodes forward, dives or slides with his glove extended, and the ball invariably finds its way into his glove. Jermaine Dye is a good fielder, right? I mean, he gets to balls that it sure doesn’t look like most outfielders would get to.

In 2006, he was -22.5 runs defensively. In 2007, -21.6 runs. In 2008, -19.4 runs. In 2009, he’s been -14.5 runs so far, with some time to build on that. Jermaine Dye is a bad fielder. I have to reconcile the fact that it seems like he’s always making a great catch when I’m watching with the fact that, when I’m not watching, he apparently can’t field his way out of a barn.* I don’t fully trust the defensive metrics, but they never say a good defender is giving up 2 wins per year with the glove. That’s just horrible defense.

* Does that newly invented idiom work? I think it doesn’t. I doubt I’ll use it again.

And it’s not a fluke — it’s been going on for four years. This is his skill level. Is it possible that he actually fields better against the Twins than against other teams? Maybe, I don’t know. I don’t know of any stats that measure something like that — UZR or UZR/150 vs opponent? If someone knows where to find that, I’m in.

But this, I think, is why sports memories don’t work in baseball. You see someone do something great in a big moment, and it’s a coincidence. You see him do it three or four times, though, and he’s a clutch player. At least in your mind — if you’ve seen the scores and scores of times he’s failed in those situations, you might not think he’s “clutch.” You might not even believe in clutch* any more.

* Albert Pujols’ OPS in “late & close” situations is 1.047 — that’s amazing! He’s a clutch player! Except that his overall career OPS is 1.055 … he’s the same hitter all the time.

That’s the thing, though. Baseball is a game of failure. Even the best players, like Mauer and Pujols, fail all the time. ESPN shows the times Pujols blasts the grand slam, or hits the walkoff home run — but he’s a transcendent star, so they don’t show the times he pops out in those situations. Nobody succeeds every time in baseball, nobody.

I’m talking about hitting right now when I’m discussing clutch players — there’s no stat for “late & close fielding,” or anything like that. And nobody really even considers it possible, right? When someone turns a key double play to end a threat in the 9th, is it a clutch fielding play? When Torii robs a game winning homer, is it a clutch fielding play? You never really hear about that. But what I’m really trying to get at is that baseball is not really about these moments. I mean — it’s nothing but these moments, it wouldn’t be baseball without these moments, you wouldn’t love it without these moments.

The thing is, baseball is a lot more than those moments, though. If you had a guy who only performed in the big moments, you wouldn’t have a very good player; you don’t get to bat with the game on the line every day. In addition to all the big moments, there are a lot of small moments. Millions of them, really. And each player builds his value, just a little bit, in each one of those millions of moments. Sometimes he does well and his value goes up — other times he does poorly and his value goes down. You can’t tell by looking at one game which players are good — how many times has Punto got a couple of hits while Morneau goes 0-4 with 2 K’s? You can’t tell by looking at a month. You can’t really even tell by looking at one year.* It takes more time that that to put all these little moments together and try to figure out how good a player actually is.

* Is Punto a .290 hitter like in 2006, or a .210 hitter like in 2007? Is he a .284 hitter like in 2008, or a .213 hitter like in 2009. My answer: No. And yes. It’s baseball.

I said this in the comments, but I know a lot of people don’t read those, so I’ll bring it to light here. (Even though I also know a lot of people don’t read this far down into my posts.)

The game is a lot larger than that one at bat you always daydreamed about when you were 10, win-or-lose in this moment. And in your dream you always win, and you idolize the players who do it in real life, who win the games at the end, who hit when it “counts.”

But you’re not 10 any more, and it always counts. Do you get hyped up more than ever for every at bat, like it’s football? Or do you relax more than you used to, accepting the games where we lose at the end because someone failed to come up with a hit in the 9th — perhaps realizing that they turned a key double play in the top of the 9th that even got us to the situation where we could win or lose in that particular at bat? Or do you just continue to “ignore” (not the right word, probably) most of the game and focus highly on those win-or-lose moments, staying a casual fan?

It’s each person’s choice. And there’s no wrong answer. But I feel like when you’re talking about who’s the worst player, you’re talking about their “value to the team.” And a player’s value is a whole lot more than a counter of the times they came through in the 9th inning.

So, yes. The big hits are the ones you remember, the moments that stick. I guess maybe that’s what defines a great player — someone you remember forever is someone playing in a lot of those highlight reels in your head. But I think there’s a lot more to it than that, and I think the beauty of the game is just that. All those tiny, meaningless moments. Every single day. All spring, summer, and fall.

Was this really about Jermaine Dye? Of course it was. But even more, it was about all the players.

Maybe now, just maybe, when you’re in the comments section talking about how badly Nick Punto sucks, you’ll have a better idea of where I’m coming from.

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I haven’t been around here in a while, so I figured now would be a good time to toss out a nice little blog post. Oh, and in case anyone’s paying attention, that sweep of the Royals just jumped us to 4.5 games behind Detroit, and we basically got ourselves right back into the picture. Quite satisfying, thank you.

As you all probably recall, I was pretty down on Torii Hunter when he left, and I didn’t like the attitude* he was showing towards the team and towards his teammates, and I didn’t think he’d age that well, and I thought his contract with the Angels would quickly turn into an albatross. That might still happen, but so far he’s been more than worth what the Angels are paying him. Of course, Gleeman still takes an opportunity to point out that he’s been right all along about Torii’s big tough-guy talk being a big load:

Torii Hunter’s tough-guy act took another hit recently, as he spent six weeks on the disabled list with a groin injury and then delayed his return thanks to “flu-like symptoms” after dining at the Olive Garden. Seriously. Hunter spent his final season in Minnesota publicly criticizing Mauer for not possessing the toughness to play through injuries, yet has missed 56 of a possible 284 games since signing with the Angels and has been in the lineup just eight more times than Mauer during the past five years.

I guess Torii shouldn’t have gone with the never ending pasta bowl. That’s something that seems like it sounds a lot better than it actually is. And yes, I basically just posted that quote to point out, once again, how ridiculously awesome Mauer is.

* Although my dad pointed out something interesting about Torii’s “attitude” in his last couple years with the team. He’d come up with a different generation of prospects, and all his friends were gone. The new core was already forming, and the team was clearly built around Mauer and Morneau. It’s got to be kind of tough for a guy, the face of the franchise, to sit there and watch as he’s slowly ousted from his perch in the center of the fans’ collective heart. And why would he listen to the new silent lead-by-example leadership of Mauer and Morneau when he’s several years older than they are and has been a vocal leader for years? Everything about how he wanted out makes sense to me, and I just can’t be annoyed with him for it.

And speaking of players who left, check out these two stat lines:

Player A: 3.78 FIP, 7.88 K/9, 2.48 BB/9, 1.08 HR/9, 1.21 WHIP, .296 BABIP Player B: 4.06 FIP, 7.40 K/9, 1.79 BB/9, 1.36 HR/9, 1.17 WHIP, .291 BABIP

Those aren’t that different, and if Player B could just keep the ball in the park a little bit more his FIP would probably drop down and be right in line with Player A’s. They’re remarkably close to the being the same pitcher. So … which one would you rather have? Let’s look at some more numbers:

Player A: 30 years old, $20M in 2009, $118M owed after 2009 Player B: 27 years old, $750K in 2009, $23.75M owed after 2009

Yeah, you probably know now who the players are. But which one would you rather have at this point? Is 0.28 points of FIP really worth $21.25M?

Just so we’re clear, Player A is Johan Santana. Player B is Scott Baker.

Does that change your answer?

For as bad as Baker has been, and for how discouraging that has been, just imagine if he had the big name like Johan, and we were paying him 25% of our payroll, and he was doing the same thing. You’d feel worse, wouldn’t you?

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Everybody knows Mauer and Morneau are having great seasons, and I’m feeling pretty good about my Free Jason Kubel movement* from last year, and my criticism of the Cameron/Neyer Fuck Jason Kubel movement from the beginning of the season given that Kubel’s jumped up to just about as good as Mauer and Morneau — wait, just about as good? So the Twins have three of the top hitters in baseball this year?

* Although nobody else really followed the movement, and now the t-shirts make no sense, because why does he need to be freed now that he’s one of the best hitters in the league? I think it’s time for a new t-shirt.

According to Ken Funck at Baseball Prospectus, Mauer/Morneau/Kubel ranks 1-2-3 in the AL against RHP this year. That’s nice, but you have to face LHPs too if you’re going to be a star. So how do they fare? Once again, well: Mauer’s 1st, Morneau’s 2nd, and Kubel’s 4th (Youkilis sneaks up into third place, the asshole). He points out that such a feat is extremely rare: the last time one team had the top two players in OPS and another in the top 6 was the 1960 Yankees, with Mantle, Maris, and Skowron.

He relaxed the numbers a little bit, just looking for teams with three players in the top six, and found that it’s still rare but happens from time to time. It’s become increasingly rare — but has been the mark of extremely good teams. It’s happened three times since the start of divisional play, and all the other teams to do it went to the World Series (1995 Indians, 1990 A’s, 1971 Orioles). In fact … guess who was the last team to have three such great players and not go to the World Series.

…

If you guessed the 1964 Twins, with Allison, Killebrew and Oliva, you’d be right. Good company the Twins aren’t quite keeping, eh?

Funck has some amusing bits to say about the Twins:

The list is peppered with great players, great teams — and the 2009 Twins, who seem to be displaying an innate talent for doing less with more. The vast majority of teams with three players managing such gaudy production also paced their league in Team OPS+, and were thus able to bludgeon their opponents into submission; the Twins are currently fourth. Is there a reason? Well, the tenets of Minnesota Nice would require me to describe the bottom of the Twins batting order as “really trying very hard.”

Yes, great. So we’ve managed to put together step one of having a transcendently great team: a core of transcendently great players. Step two, of course, is filling out the roster with players who don’t fucking suck ass at baseball at a monumental level, and I’ll leave it to you to guess my thoughts on how we’ve done with step two.

Funck points out that merely upgrading a few of the spots in the lineup from “terrible” to “average” would go a long, long way to making this one of the (if not the) best offenses in the league — and it’s somewhat damning of the front office that they’ve done nothing to do this.

The point is, it would take very little to improve this lineup to leverage the rare and wonderful production currently provided by Mauer, Morneau, and Kubel, and the window to do so may soon close. The elephant in the corner of GM Bill Smith’s office is Mauer’s contract, set to expire at the end of 2010. Even if the Twins are able to re-sign the St. Paul native at a hometown discount, that contract, along with built-in raises for Morneau, Kubel, and Cuddyer (who has a team option), will mean even less financial flexibility starting in 2011. Minnesota’s home-grown hitters are in their prime, and it will be a shame if such a compelling concentration of hitting talent goes unrewarded.

Is anyone else feeling confident that Smith can make some sort of push (probably in the winter) to complement The Big Three J’s with actual major league talent? I can’t see any reason to be confident that this rare feat won’t go unrewarded.

But for this season, the Twins get to be both of the teams in the last 50 years to have three of the best hitters in the league and manage to do nothing with them.

So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

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Yesterday, as I’m sure everyone knows by now, the White Sox acquired Alex Rios from the Blue Jays. Rios is the best position player on the Blue Jays, is 28 years old, and is under contract for the next 5 years. You might think the cost to acquire such a player would be staggering. You might think that if Bill Smith were to have engaged the Jays to ask for a trade, he’d come back and tell us they asked for our entire AA and AAA team, along with the Mississippi River and half of downtown Minneapolis. You don’t just get star-level position players in their prime for peanuts!

Well, actually, if you’re Kenny Williams of the White Sox, you can keep your peanuts. Because the cost to acquire Rios was … nothing!

It’s a good thing nobody’s come out to question Smith about what he really means when he says the cost in prospects is too high for certain players. Because most of them move around to other teams for a lot less than he claims was demanded. You can either believe that teams are deliberately keeping the price really high just for the Twins, or you can believe that Bill Smith is a timid/incompetent negotiator, or that he’s just afraid to do anything and is lying about everything. I’m leaning towards incompetence,* with maybe a little bit of liar thrown in.

* Hey, at least he’s better than JP Ricciardi!

The Twins made their big trade acquisition Orlando Cabrera, and the White Sox went and got Peavy. I didn’t much care for either move,* but I am particularly down on Peavy this year and in the coming years. Either way, there’s no doubt that Williams was more aggressive that Smith in trying to improve his team both now and in the future. Then the Twins make their splash on the waiver wire, trading away a minor leaguer to be named later to get The Disabled List** into the starting rotation. And the White Sox respond by picking up a great outfielder in Alex Rios and give up nothing. Literally, nothing.

* Although the Cabrera trade has been working out great so far.

** As you may know, during Pavano’s tenure with the Yankees, any time a player would get injured and go on the DL, the other players would call it “going on the Pavano.” I think that’s brilliant, and I’m trying to go with the reverse here. As in, instead of calling the DL the Pavano, I’m calling Pavano the Disabled List. I’m going to go ahead and say this could be as good a nickname as “The Blackburn” is. I’m going with it.

A lot of people have been saying the Blue Jays just had to get out from under Rios’s terrible albatross of a contract. Fangraphs has been doing a good job of discounting that bullshit:

Rios is a +3.5 to +4.5 win player in the prime of his career, and he’s due to make just under $60 million for the next five years. This is a really good contract for the Jays.* Rios is an outstanding player being paid less than his market value. He’s as far from being a Wells-like albatross as you could possibly get.

Vernon Wells contract is awful, and the Jays have to regret giving it to him every single day. Alex Rios’ contract is very good, and he’s one of the pieces Toronto should be building around. They are in no way similar.

* Yeah, this was written a few weeks ago, before JP Ricciardi sealed his fate by letting this contract go. Now it’s a good contract for the White Sox.

Alex Rios has an albatross contract in the exact same way that Delmon Young has a bad attitude. Which is to say that he’s an outfielder on a team that happens to have another outfielder with a big problem — in Rios’s case, Vernon Wells is in a virtual tie with Barry Zito for the worst contract in baseball; and in Young’s case, it was actually Elijah Dukes that had all the personal off the field problems — and since most sportswriters can’t be bothered to learn the names of players who don’t play in either their own market or in a real market like Boston or New York, these guys are elided into one amalgamation of a bad guy/contract because of nothing more than proximity.

So the White Sox improve their team this year, and assuming that Rios’s BABIP regresses to something realistic, they’ve improved themselves dramatically for next year and the next few years. Rios was an All Star caliber player exactly one year ago, and he’s doing all the same things now except his BABIP has dropped. It’ll come right back, and he’ll once again be great.

Twins fans, meanwhile, get to hope that Delmon Young turns his career around (and soon) so they don’t longingly eye every ledge they pass, wondering what it’d be like to replace the worst player in baseball with an ace and a star shortstop who happens to be 3rd in the batting title race.

Sure, it was an aggressive move by Williams, and the White Sox have taken on money. It’s their money that allows them to be that aggressive — but they’re doing exactly the right thing and setting themselves up to be an absolute powerhouse in the AL Central. Kenny Williams, as a GM, is perfectly suited to a team in a large market with a large payroll and an owner that cares more about winning than money. As the Twins gain more revenue and are able to increase their payroll, it remains to be seen whether Bill Smith can adapt to the style necessary to work with dollar amounts that large, contracts that long, and players that good.

The early indications, by the way, are not good.

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Last week everyone was down, and the impression I got was that the Twins were in the process of losing a bunch of fans for the season; after sweeping the White Sox, some of those fans might be sticking around for a little while longer. Last week it was clear to everyone — including the front office — that the team needed to add players in order to stick around in the divisional race; now, though, the front office doesn’t seem to be in panic mode any more. I can’t say the same thing about the #Twins stream on Twitter, though. After spending some time following that, I’m pretty sure the sky is falling. If it hasn’t fallen already.

The big acquisition the Twins failed to make in the last week was Freddy Sanchez. He’s a solid second baseman who can hit for average and has a vesting option for next year (which he’s sure to get). He would have been a defensive improvement at 2B over Casilla, and could have slotted very nicely into the 2-hole between Span and Mauer, alleviating Gardy’s fear of batting Mauer second. I thought getting Sanchez would have been huge, and that the Twins should go after him.

Well, he was traded yesterday, and (in case you feel like being surprised) it wasn’t to the Twins. He went to the Giants. And before everyone gets their blood boiling about it, this was definitely one of those times when the Twins were legitimately outbid. We all know it’s the Twins’ constant position that acquiring people in trades costs too much, and every GM is asking for way too much, and blah blah blah, the result is that they didn’t do anything and then the guy gets traded for a couple of nobodies who’ll never make it to the majors. This is not one of those times. The Giants gave up a pitcher named Tim Alderson, who at 20 years old is holding his own at AA in a hitting-friendly environment with guys 2-3 years older than he is. He was rated as the 26th best prospect in all of baseball. The Giants gave up a whole lot for the privilege of paying Sanchez $11M through 2010, and I don’t think the Twins should have tried to outbid them.

In all likelihood, the fact that the Giants gave up so much says to me that the Twins were serious about getting Sanchez. That Smith offered a pretty good package, and the Giants’ GM is a more aggressive guy and is going for it this year and tried to shoot the moon. I think it’s better to make no deal than to make a bad deal, and giving up more than Alderson was a pretty bad deal. At least our involvement is going to kill the Giants in 3 years and make Sabean look like even more of an idiot than he already looks. That counts for something, right?

With about 36 hours or so left until the trade deadline, I don’t think the Twins are going to make any moves. I think Smith spent most of his time trying to get Sanchez, and I think offering so much* and getting turned down probably rattled him. As you can probably tell, I’m not high on Smith’s emotional strength. So what I’m saying is don’t get your hopes up that there’ll be a new face in the locker room this weekend — we’re going to have to get by with what we’ve got, just like every year.

* Yes, I’m going to assume we offered a lot until I hear otherwise. As I mentioned, if we didn’t, then there’s no reason to think Sabean would have given up Alderson.

And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s kind of a part of the identity of the Twins, year in and year out. You can scream as loud as you want that the team owes you something, but they consistently contend and make money, and they wouldn’t do either of those things (consistently) if they threw a bunch of prospects away at the deadline every year.

I think a much more interesting development, one that might give us some hope, is Duensing’s start last night against the White Sox. I’d always kind of liked him as he was coming up through the minors (as a starter), but he’d performed extremely poorly in the majors in his 9 relief appearances. I was not confident at all that he’d be able to do much in his start, and thought we’d get our doors blown off. Instead, he looked pretty good. His best pitch is his curveball, and he hadn’t been using that as a reliever — it looked pretty good to me in his start. He shut the White Sox down for 5 innings, giving up just 2 solo homers (a young Twins pitcher prone to giving up home runs? No way!), and kept us in the game. And he didn’t get knocked out after 5 IP — he’d thrown only 64 pitches, which is pretty efficient work. He’s just not stretched out right now after spending a bunch of time in the bullpen.

In my opinion, Duensing has earned another start, and I think it should come at the expense of Liriano. He continues to look bad, and now he’s hurt his forearm. Time to shut him down for a while and see what we’ve got in Duensing. If he can stretch out a little and give us what we got last night over 6-7 innings most times out, we’ll win a whole lot of those games. I’m just a little wary of the fact that he only struck out 2 guys — that’s what Perkins and Blackburn were doing during their periods of success, and it turned out to be unsustainable.

We’re in second place, two games behind an extremely flawed Tigers team that’s clutching to its winning ways, and has been doing it longer than I thought they could. I still expect them to fall apart at some point in the next couple of months. The Twins are in a pretty good spot right now. And while adding a guy or two would sure help, it’s really not worth getting so worked up over.

Really, what did you expect?

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Another brutal loss last night, this one because Nathan blew a rare save. That happens, I guess. It’s hard to take right now, especially given the stretch we’re in, but there’s nothing wrong with Nathan, and we’ll continue to win right around 90% of the games we’re leading in the 9th inning. The remaining 10% do hurt a lot, though. I think Gardy can feel what we’re feeling too, by the way.

“We’re in one of those stretches where you have to keep battling,” he said. “You’ve go to work your way out of it. No one is going to give you anything. No one is going to feel sorry for you in this game. If they start feeling sorry for themselves, shame on them. I don’t feel sorry for myself as the manager of this team. You have to keep playing. You have to keep going out there and trying to figure out how to win ballgames.”

I’ve seen a lot of fans screaming, lately*, about the lack of aggressive moves by the front office. Just make some trades, damn it! Steal us some pieces without giving up anything in return! But is it really a good idea?

* When I say “lately,” what I really mean is “today,” specifically. If you haven’t seen the open letter to Twins management that’s been bouncing around the Twins Twitterverse this morning, you might want to go read it. I mean, just to be caught up and all. I think most of it is pretty off base, myself.

The problem with this team is that they’re not good enough. And when I say that, I mean it in the most profound, complete sense that anyone can possibly* mean it.

* I’m not kidding. Read on. If you’ve gotten this far, you should really continue. Is it natural that I have this ongoing fear that people read about the first third of every one of my posts and then just bomb the browser tab, possibly cackling ominously? I should probably think of some way to get over that. It can’t be healthy.

This team is not good enough as it is right now to compete for, well, anything. They also don’t have any bigtime prospects that other teams value and would offer difference-making players for — and that’s a good thing, because the Twins are more than one or two pieces away from being good enough.

When you look at your team in mid-July and say “Okay, we just need 3 infielders, an outfielder, a starting rotation, and a bullpen,” then it’s not time to be a buyer at the trade deadline. It’s time to wonder how you’re only 2.5 games back in the division, and wonder if it even matters, when there are real contenders to play against in the playoffs.

But you know what else this team isn’t good enough at? They’re not even good enough to be sellers. I suppose that’s part of being a young team across the board; if you’re in a position where you should be a seller at the deadline, you can’t because you don’t even have any movable assets in the majors. Who’s the only person the team might be able to move? Cuddyer? What team is going to make a deadline deal to improve their team and give up a prospect for Michael Cuddyer? It’s not happening.

So while it’s frustrating to hear Gardy talk about the need to keep on battling, and it feels like they’re just sitting on their hands and doing nothing in their ivory tower on Kirby Puckett Place, the front office has certainly appraised their chances and seen that a) they have too much buying to do, b) they don’t have anything to buy with, c) they have nothing to sell. So yes, the only thing they can do is “keep battling,” and hope that the 25 hits that Punto and Casilla get for the rest of the year happen at opportune times.

The question they have to ask, though, is whether the fans will watch that. I suppose we all have to ask ourselves that too.

My answer is yes, I will watch. I’ll watch every game, I’ll still fume when we lose and feel like we’re a couple good hits away from the World Series when we win. I’m not getting off this roller coaster until they kick me off.

I don’t know what that says about me, though. I doubt it’s good. And if too many people feel that way, then what incentive does the front office have to do anything?

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Alright, remember when that AAA umpire blew a call at the plate to end the game on Monday? You know, that game where we blew the 10 run lead? Okay, now that I’ve brought back a bunch of bad memories for you, let me change the subject a little. Apparently, after that game, Gardy started lobbying for a rule change — red flags:

“I’ve said it all along, I want a red flag,” Gardenhire said Tuesday. “If you use it and you’re wrong, you don’t get the red flag the rest of the game. But if you use it and you’re right, you get your red flag back. … Last night would have been a great red flag game. I could have thrown it out there and then they could have run and checked the replay. It would have been perfect.

“Football has a red flag. Why can’t we? Keep it in my sock like they do.”

My first reaction, upon reading that, was that Gardy should call the NFL. The replay rules would be a LOT better if the coach didn’t lose a challenge for being correct. You should be able to challenge 10 times in a game if the ref keeps getting calls wrong.

I then waited a couple days for my thoughts on this issue to percolate.* I think I’m finally ready to talk about it. Also, I felt it’d be wise to delay this so it didn’t come off as complaining about that particular play. That’s really not the point of this.

* Ferment, perhaps. Rot? What happens to an idea once it gets a little over-ripe?

How would this work in baseball? I’m a big proponent of instant replay — I think they waited too long to institute it for home run calls, and I think they should do it for foul balls and close plays at bases.* But I also think it shouldn’t be the field umpires who all get together and talk over the call in secret, hidden away in a dark room somewhere in the mystical bowels** of the stadium. There should be a team of replay officials who are NOT umpires, but are employed by the league, and they should be in a booth somewhere in the stadium, and they should choose what plays will be reviewed and alert the umpires to wait while they do it. There should be a camera on them while they review, and it should be shown both on television and in the stadium. Everything about this would be better.

* I am also in favor of using a computer to call balls and strikes; in what sense is letting a curmudgeonly 60 year old who’s losing his eyesight blow calls because he can’t see the ball “good for baseball,” or any such nonsense? It’s bullshit, and the problem needs to be addressed.

** First time anyone has ever used the phrase “mystical bowels” in a sentence? I hope so.

But I’m getting away from myself a little bit. What of this red flag idea of Gardy’s? Calcaterra’s take is that “if you have an idea to improve baseball, and your reasoning in support of it requires you to cite football’s adoption of said idea, it is ipso facto a bad idea.” He calls it the “Carlin Rule” in honor of George Carlin’s brilliant football vs baseball sketch. Noted Twins-hating windbag Rob Neyer attempts to “throw a wet blanket on Ron Gardenhire’s recommendation that baseball be football-ized,” calling it a lousy idea.

From an aesthetic perspective, frankly, I love the idea. I love it when managers start throwing things, and this would be something they’d be allowed to throw, presumably every few games. Sounds like a lot of fun.

In the end, though, I don’t like it very much. Would managers have to throw the red flag on home run calls? That doesn’t seem right — they can’t really see, they don’t get a good view of the replay, they’d just be guessing, and really, we just want the call to be correct. Let someone outside the heat of the game decide whether to review the home run calls. And while we’re at it, it should be someone outside the game that decides to review any reviewable call. If the manager has a little red flag to throw, perhaps in addition to The Benevolent Reviewing Dictator, the Dictator would be loathe to automatically review anything — expecting the manager to initiate every review.* And that sucks.

* I think there are a few reasons for that. Cover-Your-Ass, certainly, would play a part. If the Dictator waits for the manager to initiate every review, he can never be second guessed on his “decisions.” I think that’d be a huge problem.

The only input the manager should have over whether a call gets replayed is to go yell at the umpire to delay the game a little bit while the Dictator and his band of merry men decide whether to review. If the manager gets ejected during said delay, well, great. But lose the red flags.

I want the calls to be right, and I want them to be consistent. I don’t trust umpires in either regard, and if a manager loses his flag on a close call early in the game he’d be unable to challenge an egregious call later on. The Benevolent Reviewing Dictator and his Band of Merry Men is a more elegant solution than the NFL’s red-flag-tossing situation, and I think it suits baseball a whole lot better than a secret meeting of reluctant umpires.

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Sometimes a game comes along that makes you change what you think of a team. I’d say such a game typically involves a comeback of some sort, either by the team or its opponent. Last night, I think, was one of those games. All season I’ve basically been of the opinion that the Twins are a pretty good team, perhaps a 90 win team, and they just need to bide their time around .500 until they get hot and make a run to the playoffs. I kept waiting for it to happen, as June passed, and as July passes. After the happenings of last night, though, I’ve begun to think it’s just not going to happen. Not this year.

Everybody knows about the game. They know that Kubel swung like an MVP, and that Morneau had 7 RBI by the 2nd inning. That we were winning 12-2 in the 3rd. That a few bad plays by Punto and Morneau extended innings that led to the A’s scoring runs. That Blackburn turned into Blackburn of last year, and given a lead does everything he can to give it back. That we lost the lead on a grand slam backed up by a solo shot. That Cuddyer was safe at home but the game ended anyway. And that we lost, and that hearts were broken.

Maybe it was fatigue that shortened Punto’s arm, the reason he couldn’t get the ball across the diamond. Maybe Morneau was tired from the long, late flight, and from swinging so hard early in the game, and that was why he couldn’t snag those tough throws and why he missed that popup. Maybe Blackburn was tired, which is why his pitches had no movement and were basically batting practice, why he did everything he could to give back the lead.

Maybe Gardy was most tired of all. Maybe that’s why Duensing was warming up for three innings before he finally entered the game. Maybe that’s why Redmond batted and Mauer pinch hit for Casilla — and then entered the game as the catcher.* Maybe that’s why Keppel came in with the bases loaded — has he stranded an inherited runner all season? Was there any doubt those runs would score? The only surprise in my mind was that Keppel went on to give up 3 of his own.

* Seriously, the idea was to take both Redmond and Casilla out of the game. So you have the following options for who hits against a right handed reliever: Redmond/Mauer, Mauer/Buscher, Mauer/Crede. Tell me which one of these makes more sense. Okay, now take into account that Redmond promptly grounded into a double play, and that Mauer pinch hit with 2 outs and the bases empty. Which makes the most sense now? And another thing — once the double play happened, why not save Mauer for the 9th to hit instead of Punto? He’s not going to hit a game tying homer.

In the end, Cuddyer was called out at home, and we lost the game. Sure, he wasn’t actually out. Sure, it was a bad call. But it sure wasn’t the reason we lost the game. If anything, it was the umpire saying “You idiots deserve to lose this game.” And he was right.

“There was no doubt in my mind I was safe,” Cuddyer said.

“Definitely, Cuddy was safe,” Gardenhire said. “There’s no doubt about that. A little bit of a bad call there … but we also shot ourselves in the foot.”

I’m pretty sure this is made funnier by the fact that Posnanski just wrote yesterday about how much he hates it when teams, managers, players, etc complain about bad breaks. About injuries, about bad calls, about the things that go against them. And about how it’s all bullshit, because that happens to everyone. You make your own breaks. Cuddyer defended himself last night, but Gardy was right on.

Gardy was right about something else, too.

“You don’t even know how to describe this game,” Gardenhire said, “because this stuff doesn’t happen very often.”

No, it doesn’t happen very often. But when it does, you know you’re not a very good team.

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