Stick A Second Fork In Them For Next Year
On my drive home today I heard part of the weekly interview Chad Hartman does with Twins GM, Terry Ryan, each Friday.
You can listen to it yourself right here.
The things I took from this interview:
1. Contrary to the belief of some, Terry Ryan is not an idiot. The main focus of this off season will be offense.
2. Terry believes all of the offensive talent on the free agent market is overpriced and overpaid (read: more pickups like Rondell White this December).
3. Terry thinks there is some chance for offensive help within the organization (who?), but realizes they’ll need to dip into the free agent market, but won’t give anyone a 3-4 year deal (he makes a great point that free agents these days look for multiyear deals… but so what? If the guy is any good, is that a problem?).
4. Terry is “hopeful” that Torii Hunter will be the Twins starting CF next season (read: if Torii doesn’t take the hometown discount forget it).
5. Terry understands that there isn’t a better available player in the league to play CF for the Twins than Torii Hunter (I agree).
6. Terry agrees with me that the Twins are a team that will struggle against a team’s 1 and 2 starters, and should feast on the 3-5 starters.
7. Terry knows that the Twins struggled mightily against the 3-5 starters (including a few “who-dats”) this year.
8. Joe Mauer will never be the starting 1B, 3B, LF, RF, 2B… well, nothing but Catcher. Unless Joe Mauer says so…
9. Joe Mauer, like Rondell White, doesn’t like to DH.
10. Terry understands that Mauer brings nothing to the Twins unless he plays the catcher position (Barreiro should be happy to hear that)
11. Too many people call in asking about guys they went to high school with in St. Paul “ooh hey dere Terry, have you looked at John Gunderson who is playing Double A with Oakland… he played at St. Paul Central doncha know”
12. I really need to look into this, but how many other GMs in baseball have a weekly show where they take calls from random people. I know they screen the calls, but Terry handles the questions so well, even some of the tougher ones.
13. Bartlett better watch his back. He hasn’t earned a damned thing. Same for Casilla. Goes without saying about 3B.
14. Terry is sticking with Kubel, perhaps rightfully so.
I don’t have any long term hope for the Twins with the current financial contraints. Unless some talent emerges (Kubel, Bartless, F-Bomb, Cassilla, and a whole host of young pitching) we are looking at a team that is more or less the same next year, and after that falls off and heads towards 1995. Keep your hopes up… but get ready with that fork.
September 7th, 2007
A) The post title alone is enough to garner a chuckle. Good work.
B) You should have saved it for a Vikings post, though.
C) I’m not sold on the second fork yet. Let’s look at the roster. Even in a worst case scenario, the pitching looks pretty solid.
Rotation: Santana, Liriano, Baker, Garza, Boof, Slowey (some combo thereof). ‘Pen: Crain, Guerrer, Neshek, Nathan.
That ain’t bad. They’ll have to be damn good to make up for the offense, but it could be done. Speaking of the offense, we’ll go around the horn:
Mauer, Morneau, Casilla, Bartlett, [third base], Kubel, [center field], Cuddyer, [designated hitter].
Lotta holes there. They need power bats in two of those holes. Torii would be considered one if he comes back, so the Twins need to make him at least a respectable offer, or it’ll look really bad for Penny Pinching Carl (although I doubt he cares).
So we’ll see… I’d love to see them re-sign Torii and trade for Dunn. So much so that if they do that I won’t complain if Punto starts at 3rd. Seriously. You can hold me to it.
September 13th, 2007
i do (did?) appreciate ryan’s honesty. wonder if that played into him getting show the door?
not to be debbie downer, but liriano is coming off of major surgery and is overhauling his delivery. boof just got moved to the bullpen. slowey gives up so many home runs that blyleven is uncomfortable. and garza has a huge nose. not a whole lot of warm fuzzies there. and pitching, relative to our offense, is our *strong point*. /shudder
September 13th, 2007
I’m not trying to be snippy towards you, Ms. Downer, but let’s just compare with some of the bigger free-agent pitching names signed last year. Gil Meche? Jeff Suppan? Jeff Weaver? Steve Trachsel? And those were the *good* ones. So I’ll take the kids, thanks. However, I’ll offer this little caveat: rather than see another washed up veteran show up in camp, I wouldn’t be completely opposed to a Silva re-signing. I don’t think the Twins need to do it, but they could do much worse.
September 13th, 2007
oh, i agree that the FA market is crap, especially given how we couldn’t have even afforded meche or any of the other lowlifes you list above. however, i want to be cautiously optimistic about how the young’ns will do next year. the last time the twins went with that many kids the rotation featured such names as radke (not bad), latroy, f-rod, and something called travis miller.
seriously… can anyone else remember travis miller or have i killed too many brain cells? i remember someone with roughly that name pitching out of the ‘pen back in ’02, but was he really one of our starters back in 1996? scary.