Written By Tom Schreier
Yeah, we want to win. We want a postseason; we want to get into the postseason, just like every year.
— General manager Terry Ryan after Paul Molitor was named the next Minnesota Twins manager, 11/4/14
It’s come to this. When a Minnesota Twins executive comes out and says that he wants his team to make the postseason, it is met with a collective eye roll from both the media and the fans. The same club that dominated the AL Central from 2002-10, signed one of Minnesota’s greatest homegrown athletes to a long-term contract and opened up a state-of-the-art baseball facility has now become, as Buster Olney described them in a recent column “the ugly duckling of the division” (Insider required).
Of course Ryan wants a postseason, but in order to get there, he has to assemble a team talented enough to compete for the AL Central crown. Blame former manager Ron Gardenhire all you want, but in the last three years he was given a rotation full of pitchers that could not get out of the fourth inning and a lineup half full of hitters who couldn’t, you know, hit. Blame Joe Mauer all you want, but he got hurt because, well, he’s human, and he can’t pitch and catch at the same time. Blame the Pohlads all you want, but they’ve insisted since Target Field opened that they’re willing to spend whatever it takes to put a winner on the field.
This one falls squarely on Ryan, his inner circle (Rob Antony, Bill Smith, etc.) and the scouts employed by the Twins.
Two-thousand-and-eleven may have been out of his control — Mauer and Justin Morneau got hurt and the entire rotation imploded — but only recently has this team gotten serious about fixing its pitching woes. Money talks, and so people took notice when Mike Pelfrey got a 1-year, $4 million deal in 2013, followed by a 2-year, $11 million contract the next year. People took notice last year when Ricky Nolasco got a 4-year, $49 million deal — then the biggest free agent signing in Minnesota history — and Phil Hughes received a 3-year, $24 million contract in that same offseason. And people took notice when Ryan and the Pohlads announced the signing of Ervin Santana to a 4-year, $55 million, topping the Nolasco deal of last year.
That’s $139 million owed to four pitchers next season; no small chunk of change. But when you break it down, the spending itself becomes a little troubling. Fifty million gets you about a third starter in the current baseball market, which is probably where Nolasco will end up when things even out over the course of his 4-year deal — he was unusually bad last year — and that’s probably what you’re getting in the 32-year-old Santana. Pelfrey has been a bust so far, even in his first year with the team, and is likely to become a bullpen arm, following the Wade Davis track. And Hughes looks like ace material; although he had a great year in 2008 with the New York Yankees and was eventually run out of town because of his poor performances.
Beyond all that, it’s troubling that Ryan appears to be satisfied without a true ace. “I’m not sure you need a true No. 1 to get to the postseason,” he said after the signing. “We have not had a true No. 1 in many of those years that we got there, so if you’ve got the five solid, you’ve got a pretty good chance to get there, and then let the playoffs dictate exactly where you’re headed.”
An improved AL Central
Considering the offseason moves, you can make a strong case that the AL Central is now baseball's best, with all of its Cy Young Award-caliber pitchers (Corey Kluber, David Price, Chris Sale, etc.) to its elite hitters (Miguel Cabrera, Jose Abreu, Victor Martinez) to the great bullpens of the Royals and Indians.
— Buster Olney, 12/15/14
When Ryan speaks of a division that can be won without a true ace, he is describing the AL Central of yesterday; one that certainly wasn’t considered the best division in baseball. An ace, or two or three, appears absolutely necessary now: The Kansas City Royals had James Shields, the Chicago White Sox have Chris Sale and the Cleveland Indians have the current AL Cy Young Award winner, Corey Kluber. Hell, the Detroit Tigers became 4-time division champions last year with three Cy Young Award winners — David Price, Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander — as well as a very good fourth starter in Anibal Sanchez. In short, everyone in the AL Central has great pitching, and the Twins don’t want to be left in the dust.
To be fair, Phil Hughes played well enough last year to be considered an ace going forward — assuming 2014 wasn’t an anomaly. He went 16-10 with a 3.52 ERA (112 ERA+), and his 11.63 strikeout to walk ratio is a major league baseball record. “I’m not going to tell you that Phil Hughes isn’t capable of being a guy like that,” said Ryan when asked if the team had a staff ace. “He’s only 28, and it’s always nice to have that one guy that you can count on in, for instance, a sudden death play-in game, stuff like that, but you can still get the job done if you’ve got quality — you don’t necessarily have to have a No. 1.”
Nobody is arguing that having five quality pitchers is better than two aces and nobody after them, but a combination of the two is always nice and it seems hard to believe that Minnesota can compete in the AL Central without one, or really two, aces on the staff. Maybe Alex Meyer will become that, and Ricky Nolasco or Trevor May could become a strong No. 2 next season — although that seems more farfetched at this point.
On the flip side, for the first time in a long time the Twins have pitching depth. Candidates for the Opening Day rotation include Hughes, Nolasco, Santana, Meyer, May, Gibson, Pelfrey and Tommy Milone. Instead of trying to get an overmatched minor leaguer to overperform — say the P.J. Walters, Cole DeVries and Liam Hendriks-types — the Twins are taking a more Darwinian approach to the pitching staff this year: Only the strong will make the rotation. This, in addition to the money this team is spending, is a sign that things are getting more serious entering this year.
“As everybody in this game should be pointing towards the playoffs, we are too,” said Ryan after the Molitor signing. “I expect to get into the playoffs every year. Why should we take the diamond (if we’re not)?” The central question with the Twins becomes: Can we trust them? When they say something, is it just lip service, or can they actually make it happen? When they say they expect to make the playoffs, can they deliver?
Reading into the signings
Increasing the depth of the rotation is a big thing we’ve been trying to do, and obviously we landed a very solid guy that we’re very excited to have.
— Molitor at Santana’s introductory press conference
So now that we know that the Twins are willing to spend money, what does this tell us about the team as a whole? In the days of yore — when Minnesota played against a weaker division and called a football facility home — the Twins were like the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays: thrifty and innovative. On Dec. 15, 2011, when Josh Willingham inked his 3-year, $21 million contract, it was the most the Twins had ever spent on a free agent. Even now, the $55 million they spent on Santana pales in comparison to the $200 million deals Justin Verlander or Clayton Kershaw got recently. They’re still thrifty, No. 24 in payroll last year, but it’s hard to consider them innovative.
If there’s one overriding flaw with the Twins in the last few years, it has been that they had pitchers that did not strike anybody out and a poor defensive outfield. After the rotation imploded in 2011, Minnesota ranked near the bottom of total strikeouts because of a pitch-to-contact philosophy that has become lampooned by media and fans alike throughout Twins Territory. Compounding the problem is that the defense in the outfield has been terrible since the departure of Denard Span and Ben Revere in 2012. Josh Willingham raked in his first season with the Twins, but never was a great outfielder. Oswaldo Arcia is still a project defensively. Ryan Doumit once committed three errors in one inning. Chris Parmelee, who actually played the right field wall pretty well, was asked to play center field last year.
What this meant, in essence, is that the Twins had to hope that their pitchers gave up ground balls, knowing that they wouldn’t strike anyone out, and a fly ball probably wasn’t going to be caught in the outfield.
The Twins can point to the fact that undrafted guys like Scott Diamond and Chris Colabello had good runs in Minnesota, and that indicates that they are ahead of the curve when it comes to player evaluation — after all, Diamond was the first and only player to come out of SUNY-Binghamton, and Colabello was a career independent league player — but they never got those guys to stick with the big league club. And while Ryan has a good track record with acquiring position players, he’s had less luck with pitchers. Look no further than the Francisco Liriano trade: Eduardo Escobar was a stellar pickup, but Pedro Hernandez was not a major league pitcher. Willingham’s first year alone merited $21 million, and he had a positive impact on Trevor Plouffe and Brian Dozier — two cornerstone players. Pelfrey’s play has hardly merited the additional two years he got after one lousy season coming off of injury, and Nolasco’s first season was brutal.
In terms of player development, there are plenty of question marks as well. Parmelee looked amazing in his brief stint in 2011, considered a move to develop two key prospects for the future, but Joe Benson, the other prospect, never made an impact and is currently a free agent. Plouffe is coming around, but that’s after years of shifting positions, learning third base and inconsistency at the plate. Ryan admitted to calling up Aaron Hicks too early. Gibson is still inconsistent on the mound, May appeared to be out of sorts when he was called up and we haven’t seen Meyer yet.
In order to trust the Twins, they need to develop players well. This team has not proven yet that they’re willing to spend the big dollars to keep their best players in town — Michael Cuddyer, Justin Morneau and Span, among others, have gone on to other franchises while the Twins struggled — and they need to show they have a keen eye for picking up bargains to supplement the homegrown talent.
The Twins model of drafting and developing talent still works today as long as it’s done well, but the problem is that a few bad trades, draft busts and free agent pickups will set this team back a long time — as evidenced by the past four years — and this team is straddled on the precipice of being a team that bounces back and becomes a model small-market franchise again and a team that takes another setback and becomes the Baltimore Orioles or Pittsburgh Pirates of yesteryear.
Ryan seemed unhappy about having to spend so much money to fix his rotation — “This isn’t exactly the blueprint that we had in mind, going out and signing a guy to $55 million,” he said, “the ideal is to have them keep coming through the system” — but he’ll eventually have to spend more money down the road if he wants to compete. If Gibson, May or Meyer pan out, they’ll demand a lot on the free agent market, and the Twins have to be willing to pay it. With a new taxpayer-funded ballpark full of loyal fans, there’s no excuse for letting great players go as they did with Torii Hunter and Johan Santana in the Metrodome days. And with advanced stats and a plethora of new information available to scouting departments these days, there’s no excuse for trading Jason Bartlett and Matt Garza for Delmon Young or Wilson Ramos for Matt Capps. There’s no excuse for letting Cuddyer or Morneau play for other teams. That’s what put the Twins in this position; that’s what’s caused Target Field to empty out only five years into its existence.
If the Twins want to win, they’ve got to be innovative again, and they have to get used to spending money. In the outdoor baseball era, this team needs to be spend whatever it takes to make this team great, but it starts with having the savvy to put together a great homegrown team that’s worth spending it on first.
When does the turnaround happen?
I’m coming here to win. I think that it’s very important to lay that out there, right from the start.
— Molitor on the day he was announced as the next manager of the Twins
Molitor wants to win now. He’s not going to put up with losing, and he made that clear from Day 1. He won a lot as a player, he’s seen the Twins win and he knows that franchises can turn around their fortunes quickly. Honestly, I could see a scenario where he just gets fed up with what the team management gives him and leaves after his 3-year contract is done; I’d venture to go as far as to say it’s more likely than the Twins firing him.
That sentence — “I’m coming here to win” — spoken minutes into the press conference announcing his arrival, may be the most important sentence he speaks all year. They are words of a man who refuses to lose; they are words of someone who wants to change around a culture of losing. And that’s what the Twins have now. Once a model franchise, the Twins have become an ugly duckling, as Olney called them.
Molitor is right, things can change fast, and they have to for the Twins to avoid falling off the deep end and taking the place of the Pirates and Orioles as once-proud small-market franchises that lost an entire generation of fans because they weren’t worth spending hard-earned cash on.
This is how far the Twins have fallen: There was once a time when Ryan said he wanted a postseason at the beginning of the year, and nobody would have questioned it. Now when he says it, it comes off as a hackneyed statement. Of course he says he wants to make it to the postseason: That’s what every general manager says at the beginning of the year.