It's that time again!
The way we did this thread last year kind of killed the thread, so I'd like to get back to just posting articles here and letting you guys comment - the (morbid) community of death-watchers that forms around this thread is always kind of fun. So let's get started!
With last night's Oriole victory, we lost.....
I guess the second Terry Ryan era didn’t work out quite as well as the first.
Five years ago, erstwhile GM Bill Smith was fired after turning a back-to-back division champion into a 99-game loser overnight. Terry Ryan, who served as the Twins’ GM from 1994 to 2007 and had been with the Twins in an oversight role since his retirement, decided to step back into the general managership, hoping to quickly reconstruct the tattered team and then perhaps pass it to someone better suited for the GM role than Smith.
For a while, everything seemed to be headed in the right direction. The minors were bursting with talent; before the 2015 season, the Twins had the second best farm system in baseball. Young, homegrown players like Eduardo Escobar, Tyler Duffy, Kyle Gibson, Eddie Rosario, Aaron Hicks, and (especially) Miguel Sano were arriving in the majors and having immediate impacts. Last year, the Twins even had a winning record for the first time since Ryan took over.
Then 2016 happened, and everything unraveled. Key young players either took a step backward (Escobar, Gibson, Rosario, Hicks, Duffy) or flopped upon promotion from the minors (Byron Buxton, Jose Berrios). Veterans like Ricky Nolasco, Phil Hughes, and Tommy Millone provided terrible innings and not enough of them. Wunderkind Miguel Sano proved to be human, as a falling line drive rate turned him into Mark Reynolds without the walks, while mental mistakes (the sort one might expect from a 23 year-old) put him on the receiving end of fans’ ire. The whole pitching staff collapsed; currently, Ervin Santana is the only pitcher this year who started more than one game for the Twins and has an ERA below 5. All told, the Twins are the worst team in baseball, and while the hitting has been respectable (especially Brian Dozier and his unbelievable 25 post-ASB home runs), the pitching is so awful that if the second-worst pitching team in the American League gave up 100 runs tomorrow, they would still have fewer runs allowed than the Twins.
How did everything go so wrong? Well, some of it was bad luck; young players are always a threat to regress, and many of them did. Part of it was a lack of veteran help; while Ryan got lucky with scrap-heap finds like Phil Hughes, Carl Pavano, and Sam Deduno in previous years, this year’s major acquisitions/scrap heap contenders were Korean slugger Byung Ho Park (.191 average, injured), Ryan Sweeney (released in spring training), and Carlos Quentin (also released in spring training). Part of it, too, was the fact that veterans appear to have reached the end of the rope – Tommy Millone, Ricky Nolasco, and Hughes previously had good years in Minnesota, but the Twins clearly didn’t expect all of them to go bad this year and certainly didn’t have a plan B for their whole pitching staff going south. In retrospect, it might be fair to point out that the Twins’ penchant for finding diamonds in the rough (like Hughes or Pavano) and then signing them to regrettable extensions instead of flipping them for prospects or letting them walk might have been part of the problem; the Twins seemed to have a tendency to believe that flash-in-the-pan seasons were real and replicable, rather than a great way to steal prospects from contending teams (like, say, Scott Feldman for Jake Arrieta).
Whatever the reason, this year’s disasterpiece cost GM Terry Ryan his job; he was replaced in June by Rob Anthony, with a full general manager search to happen this offseason.
Terry Ryan leaves behind an interesting legacy. Ryan’s instincts for how to build a farm system were exemplary; in both of his tenures as GM, Ryan took over a team with little talent in the minors and restocked the cupboard in just a couple of years. His ability to find key players via free agency and trades, on the other hand, were not nearly as successful; it is a testament to his ability to build a farm that he was able to put together winners in spite of this rather major handicap. In some ways, the Twins are the last truly “old-school” team, largely eschewing analytics (even more than the Royals), relying almost entirely on scouting, promoting almost entirely from within, and trusting themselves to simply scout better than everyone else. Whatever the sum total of Ryan’s tenure, he leaves the next GM in a favorable position, with a young core and a lot of help just a short ride away in Rochester. Of course, whoever takes over for Ryan will likely chart a very new direction for the Twins - there simply aren’t too many Terry Ryans left in baseball anymore….
The Twins last made the playoffs in 2010. Their last World Series championship was in 1991.
The way we did this thread last year kind of killed the thread, so I'd like to get back to just posting articles here and letting you guys comment - the (morbid) community of death-watchers that forms around this thread is always kind of fun. So let's get started!
With last night's Oriole victory, we lost.....
I guess the second Terry Ryan era didn’t work out quite as well as the first.
Five years ago, erstwhile GM Bill Smith was fired after turning a back-to-back division champion into a 99-game loser overnight. Terry Ryan, who served as the Twins’ GM from 1994 to 2007 and had been with the Twins in an oversight role since his retirement, decided to step back into the general managership, hoping to quickly reconstruct the tattered team and then perhaps pass it to someone better suited for the GM role than Smith.
For a while, everything seemed to be headed in the right direction. The minors were bursting with talent; before the 2015 season, the Twins had the second best farm system in baseball. Young, homegrown players like Eduardo Escobar, Tyler Duffy, Kyle Gibson, Eddie Rosario, Aaron Hicks, and (especially) Miguel Sano were arriving in the majors and having immediate impacts. Last year, the Twins even had a winning record for the first time since Ryan took over.
Then 2016 happened, and everything unraveled. Key young players either took a step backward (Escobar, Gibson, Rosario, Hicks, Duffy) or flopped upon promotion from the minors (Byron Buxton, Jose Berrios). Veterans like Ricky Nolasco, Phil Hughes, and Tommy Millone provided terrible innings and not enough of them. Wunderkind Miguel Sano proved to be human, as a falling line drive rate turned him into Mark Reynolds without the walks, while mental mistakes (the sort one might expect from a 23 year-old) put him on the receiving end of fans’ ire. The whole pitching staff collapsed; currently, Ervin Santana is the only pitcher this year who started more than one game for the Twins and has an ERA below 5. All told, the Twins are the worst team in baseball, and while the hitting has been respectable (especially Brian Dozier and his unbelievable 25 post-ASB home runs), the pitching is so awful that if the second-worst pitching team in the American League gave up 100 runs tomorrow, they would still have fewer runs allowed than the Twins.
How did everything go so wrong? Well, some of it was bad luck; young players are always a threat to regress, and many of them did. Part of it was a lack of veteran help; while Ryan got lucky with scrap-heap finds like Phil Hughes, Carl Pavano, and Sam Deduno in previous years, this year’s major acquisitions/scrap heap contenders were Korean slugger Byung Ho Park (.191 average, injured), Ryan Sweeney (released in spring training), and Carlos Quentin (also released in spring training). Part of it, too, was the fact that veterans appear to have reached the end of the rope – Tommy Millone, Ricky Nolasco, and Hughes previously had good years in Minnesota, but the Twins clearly didn’t expect all of them to go bad this year and certainly didn’t have a plan B for their whole pitching staff going south. In retrospect, it might be fair to point out that the Twins’ penchant for finding diamonds in the rough (like Hughes or Pavano) and then signing them to regrettable extensions instead of flipping them for prospects or letting them walk might have been part of the problem; the Twins seemed to have a tendency to believe that flash-in-the-pan seasons were real and replicable, rather than a great way to steal prospects from contending teams (like, say, Scott Feldman for Jake Arrieta).
Whatever the reason, this year’s disasterpiece cost GM Terry Ryan his job; he was replaced in June by Rob Anthony, with a full general manager search to happen this offseason.
Terry Ryan leaves behind an interesting legacy. Ryan’s instincts for how to build a farm system were exemplary; in both of his tenures as GM, Ryan took over a team with little talent in the minors and restocked the cupboard in just a couple of years. His ability to find key players via free agency and trades, on the other hand, were not nearly as successful; it is a testament to his ability to build a farm that he was able to put together winners in spite of this rather major handicap. In some ways, the Twins are the last truly “old-school” team, largely eschewing analytics (even more than the Royals), relying almost entirely on scouting, promoting almost entirely from within, and trusting themselves to simply scout better than everyone else. Whatever the sum total of Ryan’s tenure, he leaves the next GM in a favorable position, with a young core and a lot of help just a short ride away in Rochester. Of course, whoever takes over for Ryan will likely chart a very new direction for the Twins - there simply aren’t too many Terry Ryans left in baseball anymore….
The Twins last made the playoffs in 2010. Their last World Series championship was in 1991.