T, it's nearly impossible to contemplate the absolute ruinous effect the Slot Guidelines have wrought upon our Mets & Omar's initial plans. Sandy Alderson obviously is aware as one of his initial considerations for overall improvement was revealed when he stated"perhaps we need to review/revisit our adhereance to the Slot Guidelines" LET US PRAY!

Here’s what Terry Ryan said when he was asked if he would consider his style a sabermetric style.

Terry Ryan: “No, I am a little bit of a combination of a lot of things. I will look at raw statistics, sabermetrics, scouting reports, history, injury, league information, and even individual advice from someone who may not even work for us. Makeup and character is a big part of our organization, maybe more than some others. I am not one thing and the Twins organization is not one thing. We take a lot of things into serious consideration when it comes to acquisition, but character is up there pretty high.”

So there you have it. The Twins are more about character than about stats. he’s 100% right. Of course you look at everything like stats, but makeup and character are most important.

All of those players are worth the money we would have to pay them, In Free Agency they will likely get paid MORE than their worth which is not something we can control anyway so doesn’t factor in.

The chances of them being let go or being traded is directly proportional to the amount of rebuilding that needs to be done here.

If the team BADLY needs to be rebuilt (ie Beltran, Wright, Reyes, Bay, Davis, Thole, and Pagan do not hit (any combination) then it is more likely whoever DID hit from that group will be traded away for prospects that we can rebuild with.

If reyes is the only shining light next year then his chances to be traded go through the roof. Same for Wright!

Beltran I believe is gone no matter what. And it makes sense really to trade him. The stigma from the Minaya Era is so venomous (just read the posts here!), what better way to close out the Minaya Era than to trade away the player that started the Minaya Era which is largely Beltran. he was the first puzzle piece brought here by Omar.

The only way I see both Reyes and Wright being in our future (and we will probably keep at least one of them) is if the team doesn’t appear to be that far away from competition. Beltran goes for players but Pagan takes his place in CF. That leaves room to go buy a top OF slugger to take Beltran’s place at cleanup. Someone younger, less likely to break down Or maybe we get a young prospect who can fill that role and become part of the core we have like we hope Davis and Thole might.

Get a decent hitting 2B and we are playing for something if the pitching is there. Then it makes sense to go out and buy some pitching. 40 Mil worth of pitching would get you two frontline Ace capable Starters and add Santana, Pelfrey and Niese to that and you got a pretty good pitching staff, certainly enough to win a WS!

So it depends on how close we are to competing. If we suck then eveyone who has value will be sent packing in favor of youth to rebuild a core with.

If we are in the hunt for the division then we will hold onto most of it and try to trade Beltran for kids, then make a splash in FA with all the money that comes off the books.

We haven’t fallen off the cliff yet.
But this is the year where we either pull ourselves up and regain our grip or we let go and fall to the bottom selling everything of worth on the way!

“I just saw this one the other day…might have been in a Reusse column. Is it “First-Strike in Inning Pitched?”

All the saber guys on here say how FIP is the most important pitching stat… so how could someone who uses advanced statistics not even know what the most important pitching stat is?

Are you just saying they use adavnced statistics because they “hired a guy?” Well Omar had a saber guy too, so do you think he used adavanced statistics? He obviously didn’t..because then we wouldn’t have gotten Francoeur and Barajas.and he wouldn’t have been interested in signing Bengie Molina. Just beacuse the Twins “hired a guy” doesn’t mean they will change their beliefs on how to evalulate players.

Well anyway, back to my main point, is that the Twins don’t use saber and are a succesful franchise. Somebody should write a book about them.

It will never happen, but who cares about that? It’s much easier to just make things up, right?

As for GMJ, you’re right it turned out to be a bad move, but lets get a few thing straight here. GMJ was here to bakcup Pagan, GMJ wasn’t Beltran’s replacement, Pagan was. Big difference there. And like it really would have helped if we had kept Brian Stokes and his 8.10 ERA.

And then at the end of May after Reyes and Delgado had gotten hurt they had another good stretch where they won 7 of 8…but that didn’t last either.

Those two weeks or so were pretty much the extent of the good baseball played by the Mets in 2009. Yes obviously the injuries were the reason they ended up being absolutely awful that year, but its not like they ever played consistently good baseball that year…they looked bad at times when everyone was healthy.

It’s not that I don’t make sense. They don’t.

Like the silly idea that slugging percentage doesn’t tell you anything about the player, but RBIs are a great metric (so they do use statistics).

And that is the funniest part about the whole thing. Its not that you and them don’t like statistics. You use them all the time. Pitching saves, wins, RBIs batting average etc . You just are refuse to using the new statistics.

So, you are forced to invent strawmen to make your argument look better.

Chase Headly WAR 4.6

Hanley Ramirez WAR 4.4

wow what a great stat!

Okay so wins above replacement. Now with this stat you’re comparing a real life major league player, with imaginary replacement player.

…..Wow what a great way to evaulate players! Compare them to another player that doesn’t even exist!

What makes WAR EVEN worse (if you can believe that it gets worse from here) is that WAR uses UZR, which needs THREE years of stats to “accurately” judge a players fielding ability.

So how do you accuratly judge a player’s YEAR with with a stat that needs THREE YEARS of stats to be accurate? AND your comparing how many wins he would get you over a imaginary replacement player.

What a TERRIBLE stat!!!!

In 2006 the entire NL sucked except us. No one else even won 90 games. St. Louis won the Central with 83 wins. SD won the West with 88 wins and LA the WC with the same. Atlanta has had only 2 losing seasons in the last 16 years. 2006 and 2008. I’d say that had as much to do with us winning the division in 2006 and being in the WC race 2007 and 2008. But you can’t wash it all away with the injury excuse. Omar did not back up our starters effectively either here or in AAA. That cannot be disputed. Ever take a look at some of the names that started games for us in 2006, 2007 and 2008? How do the names Jorge Sosa (14) Brandon Knight (2) Brian Lawrence (6) Alay Solar (8) Dave Williams (6) Jose Lima (4) Chan Ho Park (1) Claudio Vargas (4) and Geromi Gonzalez (3) sound.

Considering we lost in 2007 by 1 game and 2008 by 2 I would say having had competent backups considering the age and injury history of Pedro, El-Duque Glavine and Trachel that would have been the difference between winning the 2007 and 2008 NL East or going home. And that’s before the injury ravaged 2009.

I’m not minimizing what Omar did because sports are a result oriented business and he got Sanchez, Hernandez, Oliver and Bradford and Wagner for the pen. Backed Kaz up with Valentin, got El-Duque Maine and Perez and it all worked out but he kept counting on those guys despite age, injuries and bad play and got rid of the guys who did play well and even though he got 2 picks from both Bradford and Hernandez he blew the draft and gave away a pick on top of it for Alou.

I’ll give you Beltran and Reyes and I’ll even give you Perez. No one could see him being totally useless at any kind of money.

Pelfrey was a high #1 (9) not a big surprise. Niese, a terrific 7th round pick. Ike not a huge surprise but a good pick. Thole will always need a platoon partner, Parnell a solid pick especially in the 9th. Gee a great pick in the 21st and Mejia he cost a year with by dicking around with him last year.

I wish he had not fired the guy who drafted Pelfrey, Niese, Parnell and Thole a few months after because the following years draft was one of the worst of all time. Check out picks 1-7 2007 draft someday. We got 4 extra picks because of losing Bradford and Hernandez and not only did our bullpen cost us in 2007 but we blew the whole draft too. Why? Because he selected college RELIEF pitchers in the high early rounds for immediate and cheap help up here ASAP instead of drafting players we could be turning RF 2B and starting pitcher over to right now.

Monkey Ball has cost us the primes of the best two position players we have ever produced and put this franchise into yet another death spiral by thinking you can solve all your needs by just waiting around until free agency and see who you give an outrageous contract too in order to play like s**t.

so if Omar would have had the chance he would have traded half our “young guns” for joe blanton or worse. Yeah that’s what he was going to do this offseason – That was his plan.

I’d like to talk about things that you know, can ACTUALLY HAPPEN. Instead of these crazy hypotheticals.

Dude, how can you bash him for a move he didn’t even make? now THAT’S weak.

Okay, so here you say they are using it.

“It just goes to show they don’t understand it.”

Now you’re saying they don’t understand it. So what it sounds like you are saying they use it, but don’t understand it? So they don’t understand it but use it anyway? yeah okay….now I’m confused. you’re not making any sense.

Oh and yeah managers aren’t important during the game, yeah ok…whatever.

Also, when you sign a type A free agent, the team he left gets your next first round draft pick as well as an extra pick. So, you kind of are trading away a prospect.

We consitently have one of the highest payrolls in baseball with one playoff run to show for it. We had high priced has beens or wash outs manning important positions, like left field, second base and starting pitcher.

wasn’t he an free agent signing?

Of crouse, Gardy is also proving the concept that managers aren’t all that important during the game.

And I’d like to know who was on a good team that hit 24 home runs but only had 60 RBIs. Maybe we should look at who was hitting in front of him rather than call out the hitter himself.

Here’s what he said about that:

“Because you win with runs. And I want that guy because you are probably going to have a better correlation that is going to have a better batting average with runners in scoring position. He’s the guy that’s going to step-up, the guy you want at the plate. There have been so many guys – and I don’t want to name names and insult anybody – guys with 24 home runs and 60 RBI”

And here’s what Ron Gardenhire said about saber:

“Sabermetrics has picked us to finish like fourth or fifth three years in a row. So you figure their numbers out, numbers are good bases to go off things and try to figure things out, but for every number you throw out there that’s not supposed to work, the human element’s always coming. Bad pitch, guy gets a hit. But he’s not supposed to, still rips a pitch in the gap. Those are all great things and, over the course of time probably prove out pretty good. But I like the human element and I like the heart way better than I like their numbers. And that’s what I’ll always stay with.”

Yeah, the Twins are REALLY into saber…come on.

He has admitted to outsourcing their statistical analysis in the past and using it along with their traditional scouting.

He even claimed last year that they “hired a guy”. Granted, not a ringing endorsement, but I’ll take a grudging one.

The Twins just don’t dedicate as many resources as other teams. We’ll see how long that persists.