Twins Fix

Back with the second part of his three-part series is Dan Wade, from Bleacher Report.  If you missed section one of this series, it’s worth your time look over the foundational principles  Dan laid out. They will be referenced again below.

One of the many comments I received about Part One was that I was somewhat of an apologist for the Family Pohlad and their skinflint ways. I just want to start out by nipping that idea in the bud; nothing can be further from the truth.

 

In fact, the Twins’ mentality has been successful in spite of the Pohlads as much as because of them.

Baseball has essentially three classes: The Big Spenders, The Vultures, and the rest of the league. For the teams like the Cubs, Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, and a few others, free agency is a way to make a huge leap by adding one of the top players at a position of need.

No matter what they think about the Yankees’ huge splurge, no one can deny that the Bombers have substantially upgraded their rotation, which was a weak point for much of the 2008 season.

When the Cubs added Alfonso Soriano in 2007, he seemed to be a huge upgrade over Matt Murton, who spent the remainder of his Cubs career bouncing between Iowa and Wrigleyville.

For these teams, free agent failures hurt, but they are mistakes that can easily be rectified by trade or by adding someone else during the next off-season.

For more “economically efficient” (read: Cheap) teams, hearing about the Mets’ or Yankees’ big free agent mistakes is like a shark hearing about a giraffe’s sore throat; the concept is about as foreign as can be.

The middle-class teams, the Clevelands or San Diegos of the world, play a dangerous game when they enter the free agent market. A long-term deal worth a substantial portion of the team’s projected payroll is a game of Russian roulette. If the player works out, the team improves and the GM looks savvy.

Milton Bradley’s $5 million deal with the Rangers was a risky move, considering Bradley had appeared in just 61 games the previous season, but the slugger posted one of the highest OPS marks of his career and helped Texas to four more wins from 2007 and second place in the AL West.

On the other hand are the deals given to Barry Zito, Carl Pavano, Andruw Jones, and myriad other deals which seemed foolish at the time and now seem downright asinine.

If a team with a limited payroll signed one of these players, the contract could handcuff them for years and rather than push them ahead in the division, might act as the anchor that weighed a good team down.

There’s no indication that the Giants pulled out of the CC Sabathia chase because of what happened with Zito, but I will promise you this: Had the Zito fiasco never happened, the Giants would have pursued Sabathia longer than they did.

More money would have been available for the cause, and any lingering doubt in Brian Sabean’s mind about big money free agent pitchers wouldn’t exist.

The Twins are one of these middle-class clubs, even though they spend and act like a vulture. Market size and stadium revenues both put the Twins in the lower end of the major leagues, but higher on the list than their payroll would lead observers to believe.

One bad, Zito-level signing would cripple the team for years, even when if the payroll were to expand when the new stadium opens. This is, of course, hypothetical, since the Twins’ biggest free agent signing since 2002 was probably Dennys Reyes, who originally signed with the team on a minor-league deal.

The simple truth of the current free agent system is that it is much more likely to produce a bust rather than a boom. A list of free agent failures is substantially easier to populate than a list of impact signings, due in large part to the astronomical expectations generated by contracts in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Expectations aside, it is simply unrealistic to think that one player could push a team into the playoffs or to win a World Series.

(There is much more! Please click the link below to read the rest.)

The Phillies were already a good team heading into the 2008 season, but they signed five free agents to solve a few lingering problems. The most heralded of these, Geoff Jenkins, was not the one who made the biggest impact.

Pedro Feliz played 133 games as the Phillies’ third baseman, yet he was not even on ESPN.com’s top 50 free agents heading into the season. While Feliz had a decent season, one would be pretty hard-pressed to call any player with a WARP of 2.3 integral to the Phillies championship run.

Ultimately, planning on a free agent to make your team a winner is a bad call, and teams that employ this strategy often find themselves on the outside looking in. This is not to say that some players won’t make the desired impact, but between injuries and the natural ebb and flow of players’ production, banking on any unit smaller than the team to carry the organization to success is futile.

Once the free agent market is stripped of its mystique and shown for all its weaknesses as far as teams are concerned (it’s great for players and especially for agents) the Twins’ refusal to mortgage their long-term vision in order to secure a short-term gain shows itself to be a superior strategy than living and dying by the free agent market.

 

The Twins are subject to the same injuries and other player issues, but they generally have some margin of error.

Over the last few years, there has been considerable pressure on the Twins’ front office to deal from strength to fill needs, that is, to trade some of their young starters for hitters. Matt Garza brought back Delmon Young, but the so-called surplus of pitching stayed largely intact.

That decision proved critical for the Twins, who made the playoffs (much in the same way the play-in game still counts as part of the NCAA tournament) on the back of their young pitching staff.

Due to injury or ineffectiveness, the Twins had just one pitcher make more than 30 starts, and a total of seven players made starts for the Twins this year.

Lest it seem as though there was a constant carousel on the Metrodome mound, all seven starters made at least ten starts, and five had ten wins or more. Francisco Liriano won just six games, but was an integral part of the stretch run.

To a certain extent, the Twins have been exceptionally lucky in terms of player development, but as with all things, they have largely made their own luck. Minor league managers and coaches are chosen carefully and held to a high standard, and as a result they produce some of the best young players in baseball.

Rather than scouting other teams’ current players and the potential free agent class, the Twins focus more scouts on talented minor leaguers who are getting passed over by their current teams. For example, Alexi Casilla came to the Twins for J.C. Romero, and Johan Santana was just one of many successful Rule V picks.

This also helps explain why the Twins don’t sign type-A free agents, regardless of their cost. Losing a draft pick in order to overpay a player means not only time and money lost to a player unlikely to produce at a level which would warrant the large deal the market deems appropriate, but also bypassing the minor league system designed to get the most out of young players like those taken in the draft.

Position players lag behind their pitching counterparts among the Twins’ well-known successes, but players like Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau, and David Ortiz have raised the profile of the Twins’ minor league hitters.

These same principles hold up in the trade market. The Twins are good at identifying long-term prospects, but are rarely going to be willing to give up the players it would take to gain another team’s star player. As I’ve mentioned previously, the Twins could easily get the third baseman they seek this off-season, but the costs create more problems than they would solve.

By avoiding the pitfalls inherent in the huge free agent deals or blockbuster trades, the Twins have set themselves up to produce solid players for years on end, rather than pay inflated prices for players who are supposed to make a big impact, or to sift through the remnant for some reclamation project that may, but probably will not, pan out. 

So, if the Twins have such a pipeline of talent, why have the Twins signed players like Tony Batista, Ramon Ortiz, or the indoor rain delay, Livan Hernandez?

The simple answer is that no system is perfect.

The set of principles I outlined in part one, done for the reasons presented above, have given the Twins the macro-strategy to win in the short-term and to stay competitive well into the future, but the short-term tweaks teams need to make over the course of a given season or two- to three-season period to go from competitive to dangerous seem to escape the front office.

This is where the Twins uncompromising strategic vision becomes harmful. Baseball is a zero-sum game, that is, for one team to succeed, another has to fail. As such, even if a team is having a weak season, if its division rivals are comparatively weaker, that team should do what it must to maximize that advantage.

The balance between short-term strikes and long-term development is a difficult one to strike, but that’s why general managers aren’t volunteers.

So, now that the Twins organizational mentality has been explained, rationalized, and finally problematized, where does this team stand?

The third and final installment of this arc will look at the Twins position heading into the final eight weeks of free agency and what moves they could make to improve the team without compromising their internal strategies.

-Dan Wade