Monday Morning Minnesota: The Window

Happy Monday! I’m going to try something new today and get very opinionated and annoying as I link and blather about a slew of related articles. You can read it, or just ignore it. That’s how free will works!

The Twins are a team that have a measly 94.4 million committed to player salaries, thus giving them plenty of room to add some contracts. They are also a team that under-performed last season and had a run of luck so bad I can only assume goblins were involved. Players like Byron Buxton, Miguel Sano and newcomer Jonathan Schoop are players we know are capable of all-star tier production so it doesn’t feel like a huge stretch to imagine a quick 180 in team performance.

Then factor in that the rest of the dumpster fire that is the AL Central contains:

1. Cleveland who looks more beatable every day,
2. The White Sox whose window is not quite yet open,
3. The Tigers whose most recognizable player is a 400 year old Miguel Cabrera kept alive by a witch’s curse,
4. and a Kansas City team projected to win roughly 0 games.

With all those factors, plus two young generational talents being available, you might think this would be a good year to bet on the core and go all in.

You would be, according to the front office, very wrong.

• Phil Miller’s latest at the Star Tribune has some interesting and disheartening quotes from the Falvine twins, who both want to wait for the window to open before signing free agents, and wait until the trade deadline to make adjustments if the team is doing good.

Seems a little odd to me, seeing as if this isn’t the window being open, then the window won’t be open until the next wave of minor leaguers arrive. The very same ones they plan to sacrifice at the altar mid-season for some rentals if the team is doing good instead of just paying money now.

• You might have heard that there is actually only a small correlation between spending and success. This is actually true, but misleading as it is only true in a single season where things can and will get weird. For sustained success, as this old but very pertinent fangraphs piece shows, takes both money and player development.
• So again with most of the Twins core already in arbitration, this is as open a window as one might see with said core. Hoping your cheap but inconsistent players all choose this year to perform (for example; a now healthy Michael Pineda) might end in one good year, but it isn’t how you turn that one year into two or three or four good ones.

What’s the takeaway here? We need to SEIZE THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION.

by which I mean, go out and acquire players who produce lots of wins by paying them some money from the billion dollar pile of money I assume all owners have filling their swimming pools.

• Here’s Eddie Rosario and an old lady being adorable followed by (and perhaps made better by) some Yoshi’s Island music.