Fire Gardy

Since we haven’t posted anything in two weeks, I wanted to make sure everyone knows we still exist.  Here’s a rundown of things that have happened in Twins-land over the past few weeks.

• Pitchers and Catchers reported.  Whoo hoo!!  Baseball has started.  Mijares was, of course, late.  He got held up at security because he had hair gel that wasn’t allowed by what TSA incarnation he was up against.  The good news is he is in camp, not in the best shape, but what did everyone expect?  He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who has any plans to slim down.
• Joe Mauer still doesn’t have a contract, but he did show up with a kickass beard.
• Justin Morneau plans to “take it easy” this spring.  His hope is to not break down in September.  Let’s hope it works. I trust him, I think he knows what he has to do to keep himself healthy all season.
• According to Denard Span’s twitter feed, Hudson is a great clubhouse presence.  He got Span into the weight room bright and early the other day.  Good to know he already is exerting himself as a team leader.
• Spring training is shaping up to only have a few position battles.  Third base is the big one.  The two candidates are Harris and Punto.  Both will make the team, its just a matter of who Gardy and co. want to start.
• The final bench spot is also up in the air. Will it be the out of options Alexi Casilla? Or a backup centerfielder?  I vote for an additional CF. Does Gardy think Span won’t need any days off?  Or does he think Punto can spell him every once in a while? I cringe at the thought of an outfield defense consisting of Young, Punto and Cuddyer.
• Pitching wise there are many more questions.  Who is the fifth starter? I think we can all agree that Baker, Slowey, Pavano, and Blackburn are guaranteed spots.  So it comes down to Liriano, Duensing, and Perkins for the final spot.  Unless someone like Manship or Swarzak really steps up this spring and takes the final spot.
• I am assuming that Condrey is all but guaranteed a spot in the bullpen, so there aren’t too many questions there.
• Did I miss anything?

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See what I did there? Eight is Enough was apparently a tv show at some point in time.

The Twins had eight arbitration eligible players and they signed them today in order to avoid arbitration.  Arbitration is a pretty ugly process, so avoiding it is great. A player basically has to convince a third party why he deserves X dollars, and management has to convince that party why the player doesn’t.  Can you imagine how bridges can be burned if Smith is in a room listing the reasons why Liriano sucks.  With Liriano present. Not fun.

So, here are the contracts:

Pavano- 1 year, $7million

Harris- 2 years, $3.2 million, with various plate appearance incentives included.

Liriano- 1 year, $1.6 million

Hardy- 1 year, $5.1 million

Crain- 1 year, $2 million (that is terrible, by the way)

Guerrier- 1 year, $3.15 million

Young- 1 year, $2.6 million, with various plate appearance incentives.  Should be interesting to see if Gardy benches him down the stretch.  Although the incentives aren’t very significant.

Neshek- 1 year $625K. With a minor incentive  that can kick it up to $700K.

Today was a pretty expensive day for the Twins. I don’t like the 2 million they gave to Crain, I think we would have been better off non-tendering him.  That figure for Guerrier seems a little high.  Especially when we are paying Nathan a boatload of money, you combine that with Crain and that is one pricey bullpen.

I thought Liriano would make a little bit more, but given his crappy year in 2009 I guess I’m OK with throwing him a million and some change in what might be one of his last chances with the team.  If he ends up in the pen, that makes it that much more expensive and upsets me even more.

I don’t really have a problem with giving Harris two years.  He is a useful player who will still be making much less than Nick Punto.

What does everyone else think of the (relatively) big bucks tossed around by the Twins this afternoon? Was it worth it to avoid several ugly arbitration cases? Or would you have like to see Smith take that worthless Canadian Crain down a peg or two?

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Frequent reader rghrbek posted a comment on yesterday’s Washburn post that I think is worth quoting and discussing in a new post:

I have this impending doomed feeling that the Twins will “get their man” and sign washburn right before spring training for 5 mil.

The twins could offer Lopez 10 mil over 2 years with a 5.5 mil option on the 3rd year, with a mil buyout. That is money well spent.

Bill Smith said that the reason the Washburn talks broke down was that Boras wants a multi-year deal, but — and this is important — the Twins feel they can’t commit any new money beyond 2010 in anticipation of the Mauer contract.

If that’s true, that would explain* why they’d consider themselves unable to offer such a contract to Felipe Lopez. If they can’t commit money beyond 2010, then they certainly can’t offer him a 2 year contract with an option for year 3.

* Which is to say that it would “explain it in such a way that it’s much more satisfying to me than the idea that the Twins don’t consider Lopez a viable 2B candidate for performance reasons.” Thought I should clarify that.

And if that’s really the case, it’s a disaster. Do they think Mauer isn’t tapped into the news surrounding his contract negotiatons? Mauer’s repeatedly said he wants to be in position to win, and he doesn’t want to sign a long contract with a team that’s not going to build a championship-caliber team around him. This offseason, I’d thought it looked like the Twins were doing everything they could in 2010 to show Mauer that they’re committed to winning.

But if they start sending signals that if they have Mauer’s big contract on the books then they can’t spend any money, all that work is thrown out the window. If Mauer even thinks the Twins aren’t willing to pull out all the stops to win a championship, it just got a whole lot more difficult to sign him. He won’t have such reservations about the Yankees and Red Sox, which will work in concert with their presumably much larger contract offers to convince him to leave the Twins.

I see this as another reason to try to get Lopez on a contract like the one proposed by rghrbek, beyond the simple fact that it’d be a good deal for both sides in a vacuum. I’m not at all confident in the Twins’ front office, though.

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Last night at midnight eastern was the deadline for players to accept or decline arbitration.  Carl Pavano took his sweet time, and acceptedlate last night.  I think this is a good thing for the Twins.  I was afraid they would foolishly give him the multi-year deal he was looking for.  However, but accepting arbitration, we now know that nobody wanted to give Pavano more than a one year deal.  Prior to 09, Pavano pitched just 145 innings over the course of his stay in the Bronx.  He will need to have a second consecutive 200 ip season to prove he is worth anything more than a one year deal. I obviously hope he does that for the Twins in 2010.

We now have 4 of our 5 rotation spots filled.  With Baker, Slowey, and Blackburn taking the other three.  The fifth spot in the rotation will most likely be fought over by Liriano, Duensing, Swarzak, Manship, and Perkins.  I hope Smith tries to trade the last one, as it seems Perkins and Management aren’t getting along.  At this point Perkins is the definition of expendable. We have 4 back of the rotation guys who have major league experience (3 if you think Liriano is a bullpen arm and nothing more).  We don’t need all four of them.  If someone is willing to give us much of anything for Perkins I say we do it.  Ideally we get some pieces that fill a hole, but the best move now is to just clear out the logjam at the back of the rotation and amongst middle relievers.

What do you guys think? Are you excited to have Pavano back? Who should take the fifth spot in the rotation? What should we do with Perkins?

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Now that he has locked up the MVP, lets start discussing specifics of a possible Joe Mauer Contract extension, and any other offseason moves.  This is the first time I’ve attempted anything like this so it probably won’t work.  In the comments section, leave you suggestion for what the Twins should be offering Mauer and any other musings you have in regards to offseason moves.

Remaining needs to be filled

A second or thirdbaseman

One or two mid rotation starters

some bullpen help.

In the comments let me know if you agree, or disagree, or have specific players in mind to fill these and any other holes.  We are approaching the winter meetings, so lets give Bill Smith some suggestions.

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When asked about the size of the Twins’ payroll, Terry Ryan and Bill Smith have always said that it’s simply a function of revenue — that the team will always spend right around 52% of revenue on the major league payroll. It’s a good excuse for keeping the payroll low; “we don’t have enough money” is something that seems to resonate with both fans and sportswriters.

But is it true? Khoi Vinh, a Yankees fan, did some research on this very topic in the interest of defending the Yankees* against those who would say they only won the World Series because they have the most money.

* Personally, I don’t think that’s necessary at all. And doesn’t the fact that this is what everyone’s talking about kind of tarnish their championship celebration? I’m sure the media and the Yankees themselves would have found some other way to tarnish it, but still. Let’s all get over the fact that they have the most money. We knew it before they won another World Series, and we know it’s going to continue. It’s just reality, folks.

What he came up with was a table comparing 2008 revenue to 2009 payroll, and compared them to get an “investment rate” in the team’s payroll. The Yankees’ investment rate was 4th, at 54%. The Tigers led the league with a 62% investment rate.* And the Twins? Well, the Twins were in the bottom third of the league, with a paltry 41% investment rate.

Given the numbers Vinh cites, the Twins should have had an $82M payroll in 2009 rather than $65M, based solely on their revenue and their claimed level of reinvestment in the team.

* Does anyone else think the Tigers are setting themselves up for some financial trouble in the near future? I mean, they’re in Detroit. How is their revenue not going to continue to drop? I’m guessing all those big long-term contracts are causing some ulcers in the front office right now.

It’s worth noting, of course, that the Twins’ 2008 revenues were the 4th lowest in the league, ahead of only the Marlins, Pirates, and Royals. So while it’s certainly easy to accuse them of not spending a large enough percentage of their payroll, they’re not exactly wrong that they simply lack the funds of other franchises.

The revenues probably went up in 2009, as they sold out an inordinately high number of games, took down the curtain to open up several thousand extra seats and sold those out, and played an extra home game with the curtain down. Additionally, revenue will certainly increase with the new stadium, as people rush to see the place, and season ticket sales climb, and (perhaps most importantly) the Twins actually get a reasonable share of the revenue from the Dome.

(I’ve written before about the Twins’ deal with the Metrodome. Basically, it’s the only stadium deal in professional sports that is not set up for the team to continually siphon off extra money from the municipality, instead allowing the local government to siphon money from the team. Minneapolis and Minnesota have received over $100M of free money from the Twins since the Dome was built. In all other stadium situations, that flow of money is reversed. I’m guessing that Target Field will be more common, so in addition to generating more revenue overall, a larger percentage of that money will find its way to the Twins.)

They could probably also use a more lucrative cable deal, which is increasingly one of the things that sets apart the large-revenue teams.

But the thing to watch, as the Twins move into Target Field next year, is not only the revenue increases, but also the level of investment in the team — if the percentage remains as low as it currently is, the increased revenues from the new stadium will simply go as profits, and will not help the team’s competitiveness as much as they should.

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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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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, Posnanski took a look at some interesting things about what makes an offense tick, and the difference between good teams and bad teams; he was, of course, focused on the Royals. But I thought this bit was interesting:

I took a look at every team in the American League and came to the unsurprising conclusion that teams with good 2-3-4 hitters tend to score more runs than teams with crappy 2-3-4 hitters. I know … that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t finish the post. It’s not 100% by the way — when I did the analysis, the Twins had the third best 2-3-4 hitters (by OPS) but were seventh in runs scored. But for the most part, it works … the bottom five teams in OPS for 2-3-4 were also the bottom five teams in runs scored.

He ended up not really writing that much about the connection between 2-3-4 hitters and the overall offense, because a) it’s pretty obvious, and b) the Twins kind of break the whole thing down.

First of all, I’m surprised — and delighted — that the Twins boast the third best OPS for 2-3-4 hitters in the league. And actually, after thinking about it, the Twins could rank even better, if a) Mauer had been there in May rather than Casilla/Tolbert, and b) Casilla/Tolbert stay the F out of the 2-hole for the rest of eternity.

But what does not surprise me is that the Twins are an outlier in the 2-3-4/runs-scored relationship. It’s been the problem for the Twins’ offense all season — we have two of the best players in the league, a very solid leadoff man, a very solid cleanup hitter,* and five spots in the lineup that are offensive not in the traditional run-scoring sense of the word, but rather in the insulting, foul-smelling sense. As in, “the bottom of the order is coming up next inning, might as well make a beer run.”

* I’m sure everybody noticed, but Kubel finally blasted a home run yesterday. In fact, he hit a three run homer in the first and again in the second inning. I don’t have nearly enough time to look through game logs, and my Retrosheet database is incomplete — so I don’t know how many times that has happened. What I do know is that it was awesome. Another thing I know is that Kubel hadn’t homered since May 13. That’s a pretty long drought. Before that he hadn’t homered since April 25. That’s also a long drought. As everyone knows, I’m a huge Kubel supporter. But he really needs to pick up his homer pace here. Morneau is leaving him in the dust.

It’s unacceptable that a team with playoff aspirations trots out a daily lineup that is 55% black hole. I mean, they score a lot of runs and win when the top four spots in the order hit like crazy, and that happens surprisingly often. But they’re not going to get a 10/15 with 4 HR, 10 RBI, 11 R performance from those spots every night … which is why you have this thing called a “rest of the team” in the first place.

I know Crede has potential to hit home runs and not get on base — if he’s healthy, that’s his game. And Cuddyer showed a flash of being a productive middle of the order hitter, but he’s in stage three of his Post Contract Seasonal Plan. The stages:

1. Suck for an extended period of time
2. Show a flash of awesomeness like you’re going to break out and hit like you’re being paid to
3. Get slowed by a series of nagging injuries which keep you either out of the lineup or ineffective
4. Sit out most of the rest of the season
5. Cash a big check

As a Twins fan, I don’t like Cuddyer’s new Seasonal Plan since he got his big contract. But if you’re Cuddyer, it’s not that bad.

The real problem is that Gomez can’t hit (yet?), Redmond needs to retire, Punto and Tolbert — why do we have two? — should play a combined 1-2 games per week, Harris is an average player at best, Casilla has regressed to the point where he doesn’t deserve to be on the 25 man roster any more, and Delmon Young is the worst position player in baseball.

Frankly, it’s incredible that a team like that can even consider themselves decent. It really speaks to how great Span/Mauer/Morneau/Kubel really are.

Oh, and we really need to do something about the bottom 55% of the order. This simply can’t continue.

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