Six for Tuesday: Twinkie Town Talk Edition

Twins Rumors

• The latest on Carlos Correa: As of this writing there is little new news after we learned the Mets are also concerned about Correa’s physical. While we don’t know for sure, the indication is that the concern is about his surgically repaired right ankle. Jon Heyman reported yesterday that, unlike when this happened with the Giants, the Mets are still motivated to work through this snag and get the signing completed. Mike Puma also added that Correa has been unwilling to re-open negotiations on the terms of the deal. As a result, one of Heyman’s sources placed the chances of the two sides finding common ground at 55% and at least three other teams have poked around in case the deal falls through – but, no word if that includes the Twins.
• Max Kepler Rumors

• I don’t have a clue if this source has any merit whatsoever, but the Kepler to the Yankees idea has been persistent all off-season. Both of the prospects named above likely have more trade value than Kepler alone, so a deal like this would almost surely have to involve other players. That said, Trey Sweeney is a shortstop with outlier bat-to-ball skills who almost no one expects to remain a shortstop in the majors, so he fits the Twins’ prospect acquisition patterns exceedingly well.

Understanding the Super-Long Contracts

Decade-long free agent contracts have been all the rage this off-season and represent a stark posture change from just a few years ago when any free agent approaching 30 years old was seemingly lucky to find any kind of multi-year deal. There have been several very well-done pieces published in the past couple of weeks that explain what’s driving this phenomenon.

• Zach Crizer, Yahoo Sports
• Ben Clemens, FanGraphs
• Ben Lindbergh, The Ringer
• Alden Gonzalez and Jesse Rogers, ESPN

A lot of it has to do with the time value of money in today’s interest rate environment and teams maneuvering around the competitive balance tax thresholds, which have the stiffest penalties they’ve ever had as part of the new CBA. It’s also a pretty clear sign that baseball is doing very well economically.

Reactions to Steve Cohen’s spending spree

Aside from the decade-long contracts (or more), the other story dominating the offseason has been the New York Mets' spending spree under owner Steve Cohen. As is to be expected, Cohen’s disregard for the “norms” that the owners club has for spending money has rubbed some the wrong way. Here’s an excerpt that about sums it up from Evan Drellich’s piece for The Athletic:

“I think it’s going to have consequences for him down the road,” said an official with another major league team who was not authorized to speak publicly. “There’s no collusion. But … there was a reason nobody for years ever went past $300 million. You still have partners, and there’s a system.”

A word of advice to other team officials speaking to the media: don’t say the quiet part out loud. And, if you have to say something is not happening, it sure makes it seem more like that thing is probably happening.

The reaction from those outside the owners has been much more positive. Here’s Stephanie Apstein’s take for Sports Illustrated and Ken Rosenthal for The Athletic. Count them both firmly on the side of “more owners should act like this.”

I’ll join them. Yes, baseball’s economic system fundamentally disadvantages smaller markets in favor of larger markets, and not every owner is the 38th-richest person in America (as Steve Cohen reportedly is). But baseball’s competitive system is also fundamentally designed for championship parity.

For all that the Mets have done to invest in their roster, they’ve only raised their chances of winning the World Series by a few percent. They are still far from guaranteed to win anything.

The NBA is the professional sports league where the “best team” wins championships the most often. According to research by Michael J. Lopez, Gregory J. Matthews, and Benjamin S. Baumer the best team advances in the NBA about 80% of the time in a best-of-seven format. In order for baseball to have that same rate, they estimate that playoff series would need to be best-of-75.

With the number of baseball playoff participants expanding, the sport has arguably made it more difficult for championships to be foregone conclusions. Just look at the Dodgers. For all their dominance and pacing payrolls over the last decade, they’ve still only got the one World Series to show for it. As another example, last year’s 101-win Mets lost in the early rounds.

Owners’ claims that they can’t compete with the big boys or that another owner is “buying a title” are nonsense.

Of course, the central question to that claim is whether owners are unable or unwilling to spend. Because no MLB team’s finances are public, we can’t know the answer to that for sure. However, that may be about to change (see next). In either case, here’s hoping the new owners of the Nationals and Angels will be more like Cohen than not.

Liberty Media Planning to Spin-Off Braves

We might get better insights into the financial situation of one MLB franchise when Liberty Media completes a spin-off of the Braves into a publicly traded company in 2023. Doing this could be the precursor of a sale of the Braves to a new owner, although that’s just speculation at this stage. As our friends at Battery Power noted, “If this move goes down as announced, the Braves will become the only MLB team to be publicly traded as a discrete sports franchise in this manner, and will likely be the only North American sports team whose ownership, independent of other, unrelated corporate assets, is traded on some kind of major stock exchange.”

Twins and Twins-Adjacent Links

• FanGraphs’ Michael Baumann analyzed the Twins' signing of Joey Gallo and summed up the Gallo conundrum concisely: “Gallo is a star when he’s hitting .220 with a 19% walk rate. He’s an above-average regular when he’s hitting .200 with a 15% walk rate. But when he’s hitting .160 with a 12% walk rate, he isn’t playable.” Baumann called out arresting Gallo’s increased rate of chasing fastballs out of the zone as a needed adjustment and the coming shift ban as a reason for optimism about the signing.
• Willians “La Tortuga” Astudillo is heading to Japan. No word on whether he’ll also get to pitch.

• Old Friend Taylor Rogers is a beneficiary of the Correa deal with San Francisco falling through. He agreed to a 3-year, $33-million deal with the Giants and will now play, pending a physical, on the same team as his brother Tyler, a right-handed reliever.
• Sarah Langs commemorated that news with this round-up of twin brothers throughout baseball history.

Other Fun Links

• Major League Baseball confirmed Monday that the U.S. granted a license to the Federation of Cuban Baseball to allow Cuban players to represent their home country and play in World Baseball Classic.
• Mike Petriello and Tom Tango collaborated on an approach to estimate how much players might benefit from the shift ban. In the most extreme case, the Rangers’ Corey Seager, the two estimate an upper limit gain of 33 points of batting average and 64 points of OPS.
• New research indicates fans’ self-esteem is heavily influenced by the successes and failures of their favorite teams. Minnesota sports fans already knew that.
• The Annual New York Times Baseball Trivia Quiz is a fantastically difficult challenge
• Randy Holt of Pitcher List rounded some of the best one-hit-wonder seasons of all time. That got me thinking about former Twins’ lefty Scott Diamond, who came out of seemingly nowhere to go 12-9 with a 3.54 ERA over 173 innings in 2012 (2.4 fWAR). Diamond crashed back to earth in 2013, as expected, and threw only one more MLB inning after that.

For today’s discussion: What’s your favorite Twins’ one-hit (season) wonder?

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John is a writer for Twinkie Town and Pitcher List with an emphasis on analysis. He is a lifelong Twins fan and former college pitcher. You can follow him on Twitter @JohnFoley_21.