Twins trade Carlos Gomez for J.J. Hardy
Good trade for the Twins, IMO.
over 2 years ago
westbrook
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I tend to agree. Gomez is quite a bit younger and, if I’m reading the fielding numbers correctly, he seems to be an above average fielder (in terms of range, at least). Hardy is at best average defensively by the same measures. But, Gomez doesn’t get on base and has little power, so his speed is partially negated. And, Hardy has pretty good power for a middle infielder — if last year was just a down year, the Twins probably improved by doing this. Who do they have to play CF? – Span?
Gomez also drves a manager crazy with bizarre decisions like deciding that bunting with two outs is a good idea..
bunting with two outs
Is this the whale section?
by sarcasmdave on Nov 7, 2009 12:28 PM EST up reply actions 1 recs
This trade was influenced by Clifton Lee, to ensure that he would be able to taunt Gomez for his failed bunt attempts at least once a year still.
Chugga-chugga chugga-chugga, Choo Choo!
He really screwed me this year. Damn him. Actually, damn me for keeping him in my lineup while waiting for the regression to the mean that just never happened.
My uncle says you've got a screw loose.
Your uncle molests collies.
by gorilla_baller on Nov 6, 2009 6:22 PM EST up reply actions
since i live in twins territory i see the twins on all the time and hear about them. gomez is loved while delmon young is hated. basically in my opinion the twins traded a part time player/defensive specialist for an every day shortstop. has to be considered a win right now for them
but, look at how poor the twins outfield defense projects to be next year without gomez. young and cuddyer are awful out there. span is slightly below average in center. and with all of their fly ball pitchers that may not bode well
Span is good anywhere in the outfield. They can hide Cuddyer’s lack of range more in RF and he has a strong, accurate arm.
They’ve really moved to a groundball-heavy staff in the last few years, too.
The once and future
by Manhattan Tribe Fan on Nov 7, 2009 9:44 AM EST up reply actions
Hm. My mistake.
The once and future
by Manhattan Tribe Fan on Nov 10, 2009 7:19 PM EST up reply actions
Seems to me this trade will be misconstrued because the obvious difference is offense, which goes heavily to Hardy, but everything else goes to Gomez.
Gomez may be arb-eligible as a Super Two, but regardless, he’s got four more seasons before free agency.
Hardy is already a third-year arbitration guy, so he’ll make a lot more money in 2010. He would have been eligible for free agency after 2010, but the Brewers knifed that with a 20-day demotion in August, so now he’s under control through 2011. That makes him more valuable, but he probably has a huge chip on his shoulder about that.
Gomez is just about an elite defender, perhaps not equal to Gutierrez but not that far off, either — he edged out Gootz in RZR this season, in limited playing time, .966 to .965. Hardy, meanwhile, is a shortstop, but a very mediocre one. He actually shot up in RZR this year, but his OOZ was more consistently low.
Gomez is also the younger of the two, by three years. He may be an okay hitter in a year or two. Hardy probably won’t stay at shortstop.
when i shot up with a razor, it oozed.
i will now remember these forever. this is how i got through the third grade.
by Brick. on Nov 6, 2009 4:59 PM EST up reply actions 1 recs
There is a level of offensive ineptitude where your defensive skills get negated. Gomez is at that level. And then some.
LGT's resident moderate Yankee hating fan.
by Joe. on Nov 6, 2009 5:06 PM EST up reply actions 1 recs
Also!
JJ Hardy is an above average defender as well. One of the better fielding SS’s in baseball, a more valuable position than CF. The Twins win here.
LGT's resident moderate Yankee hating fan.
More relevant (to me anyways:
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/highs-and-lows-of-uzr-2007-9-gutierrez
Finally convinced my dad that Jeter is immensely hatable.
Might this have something to do with Minnesota’s transition to grass? Gomez’ is a slap hitter who won’t be getting turf hits in Minnesota anymore.
Want out of Cleveland? Easy - mess with LeBron's entourage.
I honestly think that the transition to grass and the outdoors will be an extremely eye-opening thing for this franchise and their fans. This team had been built for the dome and thrived in the dome and what we’ve come to think of as “Twins Baseball” may not work as well as it has in the past. What happens when the grass turns those slap turf hits into outs and they actually have to earn their hits instead of BABIPping teams to death? It will be interesting to see whether management tries to address some of this in the offseason, and I’m thinking that trading Gomez for Hardy may be the first step in an attempt to remake the Twins as an outdoor team playing on grass.
Want out of Cleveland? Easy - mess with LeBron's entourage.
by woodsmeister on Nov 9, 2009 10:39 AM EST up reply actions
Good question. One would think that the new ballpark might give them enough income to keep Mauer, but then again, they just spent some of that money on Michael Cuddyer. It the Twinkies stumble out of the gate, do they trade the hometown hero and alienate fans in the first year of the new ballpark, or do they hold him and potentially get nothing but a draft pick in return.
Oh, the drama.
Want out of Cleveland? Easy - mess with LeBron's entourage.
by woodsmeister on Nov 9, 2009 11:13 AM EST up reply actions
Wishful thinking. They go on with the BABIP. This time it’s on grass. They’ve been that way for a long time, why should they change now?
Weird, though, how the Twins have been above Pythagorean wins with persistently high BABIP and RISP performance. One expects a correction, but…
In the days of Gary Gaetti and Kent Hrbek and Kirby Puckett they didn’t slap hit.
I think this line of thinking is wildly overstated. The Twins are excellent at developing pitching and, while everyone loves to complain about Nick Punto, the offense has been built on a foundation of genuinely good hitters like Mauer, Morneau, Hunter, Kubel, Cuddyer, Pierzynski, Puckett, etc.
It doesn’t matter how the fans think the “small-ball” business affects the team, I don’t think their perception reflects reality. To me, the team wasn’t particularly built for the dome over the last 20 years, no matter what the media claimed. I seriously doubt the stadium change is going to affect the team at all, let alone start some kind of sea change.
This is a reasonable argument. However, what the Twins did was dink and dunk the Puntos and Gomez’ aboard with slap hits ahead of their genuine hitters like Morneau and Mauer. When those guys aren’t getting on ahead of them, who’s going to drive in Mauer and Morneau and Cuddyer? Those three-run homers by Morneau turn into solo shots, I think the number of runs scored by the Twins at home goes down, which will put extra stress on the pitching.
Want out of Cleveland? Easy - mess with LeBron's entourage.
I’m sorry but this sounds CLE.com. It’s a “just-so story.” Is there any actual evidence that they convert infield hits into runs at a high rate?
What there is evidence of is that the Twins, over the past decade, haven’t scored very well and have excelled at run suppression. Since 2000, they’ve only scored more runs than the league average 3 times and two of those were the past two years, buoyed by what are obviously incredible offensive seasons out of guys who don’t owe anything to the Dome.
In contrast, since 2000 they have been better than league average at Runs Against 9 times.
If the dome was offering them some kind of offensive advantage, they weren’t using it to score runs any more effectively than the rest of the league. I can’t think of a solid argument as to why the Dome would make them much better defensively-if anything, it’s a more difficult place to defend.
And to top it off, something I cribbed from a random message board:
Interesting, my perceived Twins home-field advantage does not appear to exist,
at last looking at the past five seasons of data:
2009 – league averaged 46 home wins, while 49 of Twins’ 87 wins were at home.
2008 – league averaged 45.9 home wins, Twins won 53 of 88 at home
2007 – league average 44.6 home wins, Twins won 41 of 79 at home
2006 – league average 45.2 home wins, Twins won 54 of 96 at home
2005 – league average 43.6 home wins, Twins won 45 of 83 at home
When you add those past five seasons together, here’s the result:
League averaged 55.6% of its wins at home, Twins averaged 55.9%.
Interesting, but I think you need to look at how good the Twins were in general to derive any meaning from it.
by Jay on Nov 9, 2009 2:55 PM EST up reply actions
If you follow the link he goes about it about 3 different ways down the thread. They sort of get progressively more sensical and all lead to the same conclusion.
THAT THE TWINS ARE A BUNCH OF BUNT-HAPPY SLAP-HITTING TWERPS.
Finally convinced my dad that Jeter is immensely hatable.
by westbrook on Nov 9, 2009 3:54 PM EST up reply actions 4 recs
I’ve always argued that they never really have been a bunt-happy team, but they certainly have a organizational-wide hitting philosophy of using the whole field and hitting ground balls. Going back to 2004, the Twins offense has finished either first or second in the AL EVERY year in ground ball/fly ball ratio. You can theorize that this helped them in the Metrodome, but it’s hard to say exactly how much. Is this the leading factor for higher BABIP’s, and if so, will that trend more normal now that they’re on natural grass?
As Andrew points out below, it’s hard to argue that they have had a definitive home-field advantage above and beyond other teams. My guess is they’ll play a little worse at home but perhaps a little better on the road, since it won’t be a huge shock to the system to play outdoor baseball. Or maybe it won’t matter at all.
I bet Target doesn’t matter much at all.
A question, though:
…but they certainly have a organizational-wide hitting philosophy of using the whole field and hitting ground balls.
Do teams really have a philosophy that says “hit ground balls”? Or do they instead just have a bunch of guys who happen to hit ground balls? I recall teams’ sending players to Alabama to see Harry the Hat Walker, who would coach them in the finer points of bunting, Baltimore chopping, slap-hitting and butcher-boying. It never seemed to do much for the fleet of foot hitters that teams sent to be tutored by Walker. They still swung for the fences and hit more popups to second base than grounders through the middle.
Can an organization effectively encourage a higher GO/AO ratio?
I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t have included “ground balls.” I’ll defend my point about using the whole field, that’s pretty obvious just by watching them. Maybe it’s just as likely that they have tried to acquire players that fit that mold. I don’t know. But whatever it is, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they’ve been that consistently high in GO/AO ratio.
I agree mainly because I read an article about David Ortiz and why he found success with the Red Sox after leaving the Twins. He said the Twins organization had him focusing too much on hitting opposite field and using the entire field instead of letting him get up there and be comfortable. It is probably similar to how the Indians value guys in the minors who work the count.
I think it’s pretty clear that they encourage most players to put the ball in play and then run like heck.
That’s Bill Selby’s theory, with the absence of his patented aggressiveness and the stuff about running like heck.
Doesn’t every batting coach tell every hitter to use the opposite field? Not to get pull happy? Is that really Minnesota specific? Or did they just happen to have a few players (Punto, Tyner, Bartlett, Castillo) who hit grounders and went to the opposite field? And were inexplicably lucky?
So to review, the Twins traded the an elite pitcher in baseball, under 30 years old, and with a long history of abject domination, for the following:
- Kevin Mulvey (waived, traded for Jon Rauch)
- Phil Humber (DFAed)
- Deolis Guerra (mediocre minor leaguer for the Fort Myers Miracle)
- Carlos Gomez (traded away for JJ Hardy)
Makes me feel better about the Cliff Lee trade, that’s for sure.
by Toxicadam on Nov 7, 2009 1:51 PM EST reply actions 2 recs
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