With Catchers and Pitchers reporting in less that one month for Spring Training 2013, I decided to get ready for my Spring Training Coverage (teaser: expect 3 new guides this month) so I was looking at the past coverage here. I stumbled upon this little piece from the end of the 2009 Spring Training. It looks really innocent. After all it is a list of all 97 pitchers in the Twins' minors in 2008 from DSL to AAA, who were still with the organization in 2009 along with the 2009 MiLB FAs and where they would potentially end up in 2008.
Fairly innocent.
Until you fast forward to 2013, where you see that only 11 of those 97 players are still in the Twins' organization in any level and nobody made any impact in the Twins' rotation. The best players in the list were swingmen and bullpen arms. Here is the list of the 11 who are still with the Twins (the original list of 97 is here ):
Alex Burnett
Cole Devries
Brian Duensing
Deolis Guerra
B.J. Hermsen
Bruce Pugh
Tyler Robertson
Adrian Salcedo
Anthony Slama
Tom Stuifbergen
Anthony Swarzak
So if your minor league system does not feed the major league team with impact starters for 4 years and you do not sign impact starters via free agency or acquire them via trades, how do you expect to compete?
The writing for the mess that was 2011 and 2012 was on the wall for the Twins in 2009. They either just could not see it (by believing that their prospects were better than what they were) or they ignore it. Either way, it is equally bad.
'
Fairly innocent.
Until you fast forward to 2013, where you see that only 11 of those 97 players are still in the Twins' organization in any level and nobody made any impact in the Twins' rotation. The best players in the list were swingmen and bullpen arms. Here is the list of the 11 who are still with the Twins (the original list of 97 is here ):
Alex Burnett
Cole Devries
Brian Duensing
Deolis Guerra
B.J. Hermsen
Bruce Pugh
Tyler Robertson
Adrian Salcedo
Anthony Slama
Tom Stuifbergen
Anthony Swarzak
So if your minor league system does not feed the major league team with impact starters for 4 years and you do not sign impact starters via free agency or acquire them via trades, how do you expect to compete?
The writing for the mess that was 2011 and 2012 was on the wall for the Twins in 2009. They either just could not see it (by believing that their prospects were better than what they were) or they ignore it. Either way, it is equally bad.
'
2 comments:
Excellent point.
There are a lot of pitchers who have made no difference for the big league team.
I wonder, do they still lean toward drafting pitchers who are tall? I read in a couple different articles that they thought this was a good practice; that tall pitchers would be more likely to dominate.
Apparently they thought Santana was a fluke.
Marv,
they are still drafting tall kids early in the rounds. I think it is their philosophy since 2007 when Deron Johnson was promoted to director of scouting. He is the one who runs the draft. They do draft some shorter kids but in the later rounds unless there is a no-miss person like Jose Berrios (6' even.) I think that the competitive Twins' teams of the 00's did have a lot of starting pitchers coming through the minor league pipeline. Hopefully these last 2 trades of Span and Revere helped restock this pipeline
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