John's Farm System Rankings
This is an interesting post that was made by a regular poster over on John Sickels minor league baseball SBN site. He uses Victor Wang's system of valuing prospects applied to Sickels' rankings and guess which organization comes on top...
over 2 years ago
hans
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I just love that bobblehead too much to go with anything else. I’ll put him in a new setting come springtime.
Welcome back, Sandy! ATALECG...
actually someone brings that up in the comments over there. Something to the effect of team’s should trade their A grade pitching prospects for top level hitting prospects and in the mean time collect as many B level pitching prospects., (kind of what the Indians are doing to a degree).
Interesting idea, using TINSTAAPP to get trade leverage.
But, unlike some other orgs, we basically don’t trade valuable prospects at all, much less our grade A pitching ones, if and when we have one.
Well looking back a few years, it was Adam Miller, Phil Hughes, and Homer Bailey who were really slated as top pitching prospects, their value was higher then than ever, and following TINSTAAPP here we would have looked to trade Miller (and NY and Cincy may have been better off doing the same with both of those pitchers).
I don’t think (and according to Sickels we don’t) we really have a “A” grade starting pitching prospect at this point, we have some that have blemishes (Hagadone and Knapp for example) but no one that compares in perceived value to what we had in Miller.
Yep. Miller was our #1 prospect for, what, 4 years in a row? He pretty much stood alone in terms of potential. I don’t think using TINSTAAPP as trading leverage is feasible unless you have backup “PP’s”.
I was struck that this current alt-ranking was not based on “B” prospects, but accumulating “C+” prospects, in Sickel’s rating system. Not sure that’s the way to go.
I guess that’s the task of any org trying to feed their team from within – concentrate all efforts to acquire depth, as high up the scale as possible. The more “B” depth, the more you can contemplate trading your “A” individuals, case by case.
I’m gradually convincing myself that the way to build a pitching staff on a budget is Good Arms + Ridiculous Depth. It’s a self-serving philosophy, but it makes sense to me. It may well be the secret to the Twins’ relative pitching success that everybody gets all hot’n’bothered over. The question is, how do you establish a Twins-like arms pipeline without relegating yourself to a Twins-like offense?
Our answer has been to trade everybody for two consecutive years. It might work, but I don’t see how you get away with that more than once a decade.
by fleerdon on Jan 19, 2010 9:15 AM EST up reply actions
sweet. what was our record and the royals record in 2009?
by Brick. on Jan 19, 2010 10:45 AM EST up reply actions 1 recs
I think people conveniently forget Mauer, Morneau and Kubel’s power.
I've really got to change my signature.
Put me on record: 2009 was Kubel’s career season.
by fleerdon on Jan 19, 2010 11:47 AM EST up reply actions
Also! I think people conveniently forget that the Twins populate the rest of their lineup with tweetie birds.
by fleerdon on Jan 19, 2010 11:56 AM EST up reply actions
i remember him goin 1-fer-14 with 9 Ks in the post-season
/mauichuck
by fleerdon on Jan 19, 2010 3:42 PM EST up reply actions
I think people constantly forget that Morneau is a first baseman with a career OPS of 851, including 861 over the past three seasons. He’s a 3.5-win player at the peak of his powers, and just because those BBWAA idiots gave him an MVP doesn’t make him an impact player.
WAR has him as the 67th most productive position player in the majors in 2009, 55th in 2008, 91st in 2007. If he were an Indian, odradek would be arguing that he doesn’t deserve a spot in the lineup.
I would still take a Morneau over a Garko, however. That’s the gist of my point.
I've really got to change my signature.
But you’re comparing their second-best position player with a guy we didn’t even want to pay $2 million in his prime.
I reject the idea that Ryan Garko had a prime.
by Brad D on Jan 19, 2010 8:07 PM EST up reply actions 3 recs
He wears 23, but other than that….
by Logodaedalus on Jan 20, 2010 1:01 AM EST up reply actions 8 recs
Getting simultaneous productive years out of Mauer, Morneau, Cuddyer and Kubel for the first time in … ever. And it gets them 817 runs. Whoop-dee-damn-doo.
I could, of course, say that 773 runs with a roster like the Indians’ in 2009 could actually be a positive sign, but since I was never actually comparing the two teams in the first place, instead I’ll just remind everybody that the Twins can get stuffed.
by fleerdon on Jan 19, 2010 11:45 AM EST up reply actions 1 recs
The Twins having a decent offense is like the Indians having a decent bullpen. It can happen, and it does happen occasionally, but it’s pretty clearly a fluke rather than an organizational achievement.
Correct! So, what does that make an Indians-like offense? I guess if you’re looking at Shapiro’s reign, it’s a just slightly better than Twins-like offense.
Well, I suppose it doesn’t tell us much to just compare those 2 offenses over that period without the greater context of all offenses. I suppose if I wanted to, I would look it up … but I’m not that concerned with it right now.
I've really got to change my signature.
In the last 9 years, the Indians have finished in the bottom half of AL offenses in RS 3 times. The Twins? 6. They’ve been better the last two years, but before that, good for the Twins was decidedly mediocre. Rank among the 14 AL teams in runs scored:
Year CLE MIN 2009 8 4 2008 6 3 2007 6 12 2006 2 8 2005 4 14 2004 5 10 2003 13 6 2002 10 9 2001 2 8
Just wait until Mauer walks in free agency, lineup will obviously suffer. The Twins have not experienced a painful free agency loss like we have yet.
Twins luck: There has already been call—in the light of what happened with Sabathia and Martinez—to keep these sorts of players with their home teams. Baseball will take up a collection to keep Mauer in Minnesota.
I just want to point out that CC and Victor were not born in Cleveland.
"I'm a baseball lifer. It's what I do." —Manny Acta
Yeah but aren’t you also convinced that Sizemore’s a goner?
"You are an LGT success story" -- Jay
by Turkmenbashi on Jan 22, 2010 4:14 PM EST up reply actions
This is just loading the dice. The Twins have been in contention mode, while you’re counting all of the Indians’ down years.
Lop off 2002 and 2003, or add on 2000 and 2001, then see what you’ve got.
But I’m counting each season of the last 9 years. We could remove 2001 too – the team that Shap inherited – and make it 50-50.
Should the Twins be penalized in this comparison because they’ve been in contention more often than the Indians?
Mine was just a quick quip, as I suspect was Odradek’s, simply meant to poke at the usual disparagement here of the Twins’ offense.
There is no team in baseball I loathe more, even the Yankees. I remember several discussions over the years here about who we all hate more and am always surprised at the lack of vitriol reserved for the Twins.
Hating the Twins seems to be too much effort for too little return, to be honest.
I’d rather hate the White Sox. Or the Angels.
I've really got to change my signature.
I have found hating the Twins to be easy, like breathing. It will be less easy once they abandon the Abomination Dome, but I think I’ll manage.
"Nobody ever thinks, 'Hey, maybe I’m actually an idiot.'" - Jay
by woodsmeister on Jan 21, 2010 9:08 AM EST up reply actions
I guess I don’t get all that upset about other small market teams. I reserve most of my hatred for those who deserve it most – The Jackasses.
I've really got to change my signature.
by emd2k3 on Jan 21, 2010 10:58 AM EST up reply actions 1 recs
Hating the Twins seems to be too much effort for too little return
In the words of our own most egregious Twin-praiser, that’s exactly right. There’s this slippery slope, emd. One minute, you’re sympathizing with the Twins’ plight; the next, you’re celebrating their achievements; and before you know it, you’ve bought into the myth that the Twins represent some sort of viable paradigm for small-market success.
I know, I know: The post-season is a crapshoot, and the only strategy is to throw the dice as many times as you can before you run out of chips. But if ever there were a counter-example to that truism, it’s the Twins. Their post-season record, in five appearances since 2002, is 6-18. Pitiful though it is, even that’s misleading, because the 2002 pennant chase was the last time the Twins won more than one (1) ALDS game.
I’m still not doing justice to their punchlessness. I give you the opposition vs. Twins play-offs runs differentials:
2009: 15-6
2006: 16-7
2004: 21-17
2003: 16-6
2002: 26-27, 29-12
And so we arrive at comments — not implying your comments, emd — such as, “The Indians should stop making excuses — look at the Twins!” I am looking at the Twins. With scorn.
“Modeling an organization after the Twins” is a euphemism for “dispensing with the AL Central in the post-season so the master-race of big-market sports fans can get on with the real baseball.” All of which, you might say, is a good reason to hate the ESPN-Yankees-et al Axis of Arrogance, but what does it have to do with the Twins?
The Twins and their acolytes, they like it this way. Not the post-season trouncings, specifically, but scraping through the division’s down years with a skeeball offense, then giving credit to Gardenhire’s craftiness and Punto’s gamesmanship and Hunter’s tenacity instead of, oh, I don’t know, having (at various points over the last decade, against often-incompetent competition) the best starter, the best pair of starters, the best starting depth, the best middle relievers, the best closer, the best defenders, the best catcher, and — last year — one of the best middle-lineups in the sport. The Twins take everything that is pure and holy and awesome about baseball and subjugate it to dirty uniforms and bunt singles and then they tell us that the reason we can’t share in their glory is that we just don’t respect the fundamentals like they do.
“But we were the team of the division in the aughts!” cry the Twins. So they were. And look what it got them.
by fleerdon on Jan 21, 2010 6:19 PM EST up reply actions 3 recs
I distrust the postseason results — it’s basically three weeks of games. Hell, even the 2009 Indians went 20-12 at one point (and with very little help from Victor or Cliff).
I think there is something to the way the Angels and Twins commit to an aggressive, contact-based offense — scouting and drafting through development and in-game strategy — that can defy the expectations of vanilla run expectation formulas. I think the prima facie evidence is there to at least give the idea a fair trial, if you will.
So maybe there is something to learn there — but probably not for the Indians. The Indians have their own organizational system for getting to an effective offense on a budget, and it’s working just fine and generally better than the Twins way. There also is little chance that the Indians can stick to their current system while adding a dash of Twins magic; for one thing, their philosophies are fairly opposite in most every way that they can be, and for another thing, they’ve probably already looked at doing this and either implemented something or decided against it.
No, the Twins secret sauce that really matters is developing young pitching. I don’t know if the Indians can learn from them or perhaps should just raid their scouting staff — but the Twins organization is famously a close-knit family, evidently even more than the Indians, so that’s probably a tough get. The point remains that their relative success has been based on delivering an impressive number of pitchers to the major leagues and getting effective seasons out of them. Yes, there have been flameouts and inconsistency, but that’s true for all teams with young pitching, and it’s more true for the Twins because they’ve had more of it.
All in all, they’ve produced more viable arms attached to viable heads. Without that, they’ve got an MVP catcher and not much else, but with that, they’ve got arguably the most consistently good team in the division. I don’t believe they will lose that advantage when they move to the new ballpark.
I will stop berating the Twins’ offensive philosophy when the talking heads stop aggrandizing it. However irritating it is to watch, it’s still, as you say, just another way of going about the business of scoring runs — and, as with our offense and the Red Sox’, the Angels demonstrate that it, too, is more effective when you throw twice as much cash at it.
I’d like to think that I give the Twins credit for what they do well, and that I hate them primarily for falsely ascribing their relative success to their Twin Cities je ne sais quoi. If you wanted to accuse me of raw, unfounded animus, though, I won’t deny there’s ample evidence to make your case.
I will stand by my assertion that the ESPNites would promote the Twins as role models for us much less cheerfully if they actually considered Minnesota a post-season threat.
by fleerdon on Jan 21, 2010 8:31 PM EST up reply actions
I will stand by my assertion that the ESPNites would promote the Twins as role models for us much less cheerfully if they actually considered Minnesota a post-season threat.
Good point. The condescension toward the Twins is irritating. It’s like the New Yorker who comes to Chicago and says, “I had no idea what a large city this is. And you have some very good restaurants, too.”
I think it’s kind of a lousy, misleading point, actually. I was wondering aloud about how to develop adequate pitching depth without (a) purging the 25-man or (b) neglecting position-player depth, and I used our — okay, my — historical stereotype of the Twins’ organization as a foil.
odarek is either putting words in my mouth — saying that I was drawing a favorable comparison of the Indians’ offenses to the Twins’, which I wasn’t — or he’s just defending the Twins for the sake of defending the Twins. Regardless of which, I can’t abide.
by fleerdon on Jan 19, 2010 2:43 PM EST up reply actions
The Twins rank high on my list of least favorite teams. Just pointing out that—with the amazing career year Kubel had, and with Span—the Twins’ offense was fourth in the AL in 2009. Which leads to the conclusion you don’t need to sacrifice offense too much in order to stockpile Ridiculous Depth with B/C+ pitching prospects. And, also, perhaps the historical stereotype is now less valid.
I’ll continue to argue that their relative offensive improvement was more stars-lining-up than organizational success. In other words, the Twins’ 87-win 2009 — I’d forgotten as well that their pitching kinda sucked last year — doesn’t do much to allay my long-term fears for the Indians.
Truly, though, I’m always going to recoil a bit at the notion the the Twins have built something we, or any other small-market team, should aspire to: If only we could also be so fortunate as to pick the bones of the division in down years and then get punted unceremoniously out the ALDS! What fun we could have!
by fleerdon on Jan 19, 2010 3:25 PM EST up reply actions
That said, I apologize for calling your point lousy.
by fleerdon on Jan 19, 2010 3:56 PM EST up reply actions
The Twins, maddeningly, seem to get more than their share of lucky breaks. Swinging bunts, Baltimore chops, etc. I can’t wait to see them play outdoors.
I thought the Twins’ 2008 offense was driven by unsustainable RISP numbers, but then they come out again in 2009. In the Fire Em series it was suggested that Shapiro could possibly learn something (who knows what) by looking at the Twins.
As I recall, the Twins have Carlos Gomez to thank for their abrupt departure in the postseason, and they sent him packing.
I think this is the most important point. What are we really trying to emulate from the Twins? Consistent mediocrity? I’d rather give the Marlins model a shot than be the Twins.
by Roger Dorn on Jan 19, 2010 5:42 PM EST up reply actions 1 recs
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