When Plan B comes before Plan A

The Minnesota Twins have lined up their Plan B options for the starting rotation.

Plan A? That's another matter.

The Twins ended the 2012 season with a starting rotation of Scott Diamond, Sam Deduno, P.J. Walters, Liam Hendriks and Esmerling Vasquez. Cole De Vries would have been part of that group but for a broken rib.

Sam Deduno chose
to stay with the Twins.

Diamond is a certainty for the 2013 rotation. He's part of Plan A; none of the other five are.

Deduno, Walters and Vasquez were all cut loose in the weeks since the season ended -- and all three have agreed to return on minor-league deals. (De Vries and Hendriks remain on the 40-man roster.)

The return of the outrighted trio is noteworthy. Usually a pitcher who can't keep his spot on the 40-man roster goes off in search of another employer.

That these three opted to remain, and that the Twins are letting them remain in the system, tells us a few things:

• They believe they got, and will get, a fair shake from the Twins;
• They believe there's better opportunity with Minnesota than elsewhere;
• The Twins don't see better alternatives pushing their way up to the higher levels of the the farm system.

I do not believe the Twins are re-signing them with intent to have been in the major league rotation. They are Plan B guys, fall-back options, rotation filler for Triple A who can step in for the big club if and when.

But for them to be Plan B, somebody else has to be Plan A. And that is the key to the Twins offseason, finding the pitchers who make De Vries, Hendriks, Walters, Vasquez and Deduno the Rochester rotation next spring.

Baseball and Election Day notes

Ann Romney, wife of GOP presidential nominee Mitt
Romney, at Game 4 of the World Series. 

On this "I Voted" sticker day, a few threads connecting the election and the National Pastime:

Terry Ryan, the Twins general manager, and Paul Ryan, the Republican nominee for vice-president, are related -- cousins of one degree or another. They're both from Janesville, Wis, and there are apparently a lot of Ryans there.

President Obama irked a few
people by wearing his White Sox
apparel rather than generic
All-Star Game gear when
throwing a first pitch at the
2009 All-Star Game.

President Obama is well-known to be a White Sox fan. Mitt Romney's baseball loyalities are a bit less well defined; as a former governor of Massachusetts, he probably had to at least pretend to be a Red Sox fan, but he grew up in Michigan, and his wife, Ann, wore a Tigers cap to Game 4 of the World Series last month. That was probably a sincere rooting interest, but it was politically astute as well. There aren't a lot of GOP votes in San Francisco anyway, and Michigan is closer than California to being a swing state.

Major League Baseball has a political action committee, the MLB Commissioner's Office PAC, created in 2001. A story in a recent Baseball America said the PAC had raised $465,700 for the 2012 election cycle; the teams leading in contributions are the Giants ($46,750) and the Twins ($30,000). Historically, the PAC has given more to Democrats (58.9 percent) than to Republicans (44.1 percent).

The Pohlads have long been contributors to DFL coffers; this listing of 2012 donations by team CEO Jim Pohlad totals $60,000, all to either the MLB PAC or to Democrats. The trio of brothers (Jim, Bob and Bill) had given more than $300,000 as of last summer to the group fighting the marriage amendment in Minnesota.

Mitt Romney's eldest son, Tagg, was director of marketing for the Los Angeles Dodgers for less than a year around 2005, when Frank and Jamie McCourt owned both the Dodgers and valuable real estate in downtown Boston (parking lots) and Daddy Romney was governor of Massachusetts. Tagg didn't last long, and this story from the Los Angeles Times paints an unflattering picture of his tenure and qualifications. Of course, pretty much everything from the McCourt era draws scorn in L.A. these days.

(Mitt? Tagg? There's some cheap, corny baseball pun to be made there ... and normally I'm the man to make cheap, corny baseball puns, but today I'll resist.)

Parsing the Dan Haren non-trade

Dan Haren has been a
workhorse starter since cracking
the A's rotation in 2005.

There are 30 teams in the major leagues.

None of them wanted Dan Haren. Or, more precisely, none of them wanted Haren and his contract.

Start here: Haren is, when healthy, a very good pitcher. Durability is a big part of that. The 32-year-old right-hander has been in major league rotations for eight seasons, and he's never failed to make at least 30 starts. 2012 was the first time he's failed to work more than 215 innings.

He missed by quite a bit this year, however -- 176 innings, less than six innings a start. He hit the disabled list for the first time in his career and his velocity dropped. He's only 32, but there the mileage on his right arm is pretty high.

The Angels of Anaheim held an option on him for 2013 -- $15.5 million to pitch, $3.5 million to buy him out. The Angels front office decided they wanted out. They spent much of last week trying to find takers for Haren and for Ervin Santana, who had a similar but slightly lower-priced arrangement. (Santana has always been a lesser pitcher than Haren.)

The Angels traded Santana to Kansas City for a 27-year-old Triple A lefty reliever —which is to say, a nonprospect. They never came up with a deal for Haren.

So the Angels decided at Friday night's deadline to pay Haren $3.5 million to go away. He's now a free agent, and the Angels are $12 million ahead financially.

Now, imagine that the Twins had offered them a minor league nonprospect for him — let us say Daniel Turpen, a Double-A reliever who isn't on the 40-man roster. The Angels would have saved the full $15.5 million, and they'd have a minor league arm. They'd have taken that deal over nothing.

But the Twins didn't go that route. Even the 2012 version of Haren, the one with declining stuff and physical ailments, was better than anybody the Twins started except Scott Diamond, but the Twins didn't want him.

Maybe they're wary of Haren's medicals. Maybe $15.5 million is more than they want to put into any one pitcher this offseason. Probably both considerations were factors.

Not just for the Twins, but for 29 other teams. The Angels, who know Haren better than anybody, didn't want him. Nobody else traded for him. It will be interesting to see what Haren's market looks like this winter.

Pic of the Week

The thrill of victory: San Francisco's Marco Scutaro and
Sergio Romo celebrate their World Series title.

Marco Scutaro — or, if you're TBS' Craig Sager, Scooter-roo — had a 2012 that is a testimony to the randomness of baseball.

He opened the season with Colorado, where he played 95 games and had 415 plate appearances, in which he hit .271/.324/.361— which, in the context of Coors Field, is underwhelming at best. His OPS+, which computes his production in the context of the league average and home field, had him a 27 percent below average as a hitter as a Rockie.

On July 27 he was traded to San Francisco. And there — in a much more difficult environment for a hitter — Scutaro hit .362/.385/.473 the rest of the way (61 games, 268 plate appearances).

His has been an odd career, period; he didn't get his first real shot at playing time until age 28, which is old for a rookie, and he's hit better as he's aged. In four years with Oakland (2004-07) he hit .262; in the five years since, bouncing between Toronto, Boston, Colorado and San Francisco, he's hit .286.

He's a free agent, and he just turned 37 last week. It will be interesting to see what kind of offers he gets.

---

This concludes the Pic of the Week Sunday feature for this year; to see them all, click here. Next week I'll resume the Sunday Funnies.

A waiver wire Friday

Alexi Casilla never took command of a regular job
with the Twins despite plenty of opportunities.

The Minnesota Twins had a busy Friday on the waiver wire.

Going: INF Alexi Casilla
Coming: RHP Josh Roenicke, INF Thomas Field
Uncertain: RHP Sam Deduno

Waiver transactions are almost always fringe-of-the-roster moves, but there are a couple of familiar names involved in these moves.

Most prominent, of course, is Casilla, who was claimed by the Baltimore Orioles. It was widely assumed last summer that the Twins would nontender Casilla, who never took control of a regular job despite a multitude of opportunities. It wouldn't surprise me if the O's wind up nontendering him themselves; he figures to get more through arbitration than a reserve infielder ought to get.

The Twins also outrighted Deduno, who spent most of the second half in the starting rotation. He can opt for free agency, but the early word was that he and his agent were leaning toward accepting a minor-league contract with Minnesota, as P.J. Walters did a few days after he was outrighted. I can't see that he can expect a major-league contract from anybody else.

Sam Deduno has a
decision to make: Stay
with the Twins on a
minor-league deal,
or try to land a job
elsewhere?

The additions both come from Colorado, one of the few teams with a worse 2012 record than the Twins.

Roenicke is a 30-year-old middle reliever who had a 3.25 ERA in 88.2 innings for the Rockies. That's good in any environment, but particularly in Coors Field. He also had 54 strikeouts and 43 walks, which is not good. The Rox apparently waived him for much the same reason the Twins waived Casilla: They didn't want to pay him at the arbitration rate.

Roenicke is said to have a good fastball. Off his numbers, I'm inclined to lump him into the same category as Jeff Gray and Alex Burnett — not enough missed bats to make up for his lack of command.

Roenicke does have interesting bloodlines: He is the son of former major league outfielder Gary Roenicke, the nephew of current Brewers manager Ron Roenicke, and the brother-in-law of Ian Desmond, the shortstop of the Washington Nationals.

Thomas Field — he'd better field, because there's little reason to believe that he can hit.  Oh, some of his minor league numbers at lower levels look pretty good, but the Rockies' farm system is pretty much all in hitters parks. He's a shortstop who'll turn 26 before the season starts.

I expect the Twins to try to get him through waivers to get him off the 40-man roster so they can assign him to Rochester and have him for the Triple A lineup — much as they did last winter with Pedro Florimon.

The Twins, as of Friday evening, had 35 players on their 40-man roster; that will shrink some more after midnight, when Carl Pavano and, I believe, Scott Baker and Matt Capps officially become free agents. (Saturday morning addendum: As of this morning, the Twins website had removed Pavano and Capps from the roster but Baker was still listed.)

Changing from within

The Twins filled a couple of significant, if behind the scenes, jobs on Thursday —filled them, in typical Twins fashion, by promoting from within.

The elevation of Brad Steil to farm director is easy enough to interpret. Jim Rantz, who held the job since 1985, is retiring, and the decision appears to have been his. Steil had been his No. 2 and was named interim farm director when Rantz announced his retirement about a month ago.

The Twins have been rather conservative in placing and promoting prospects, and I don't expect that to change. Such decisions are probably collegial anyway, but the appointment of Steil suggests that general manager Terry Ryan continues to favor promoting a player a year too late to a month too early.

There is a good deal more opacity to the training staff promotions. Ryan fired Rick McWane at the end of the season; on Thursday the Twins elevated his underlings one rung each: Dave Pruemer was named the head athletic trainer, Tony Leo the assistant athletic trainer and Lanning Tucker the assistant athletic trainer and rehabilitation coordinator.

Firing McWane indicates discontent with the training staff; promoting the other three suggests satisfaction with their work. I don't know how to square this circle.

Around the division: Detroit Tigers

Delmon Young, erstwhile Minnesota Twin, was probably still circling the bases with his game-tying homer in the final game of the World Series when one of my tweeps opined that he'd just won a multi-year deal that the signing team would regret by the middle of April.

Maybe so. But if so, it won't be with Detroit. David Dombrowski said Tuesday the Tigers would not re-sign Young or closer Jose Valverde.

Delmon Young was 15-for-54 in the postseason, with
three home runs and a .481 slugging percentage.

These are decisions based not on October heroics (Young) or failures (Valverde), but on clear-headed evaluation of the players' abilities — and the ability of the organization to replace them.

Young for the season hit .267/.296/.411, which isn't acceptable production from a designated hitter, and that outweighs the impressive numbers he's put up in the past two postseasons. Besides, the Tigers have Victor Martinez returning next year from his knee reconstruction, and V-Mart's catching days are almost certainly over. There's no room at the DH inn for Young, and his outfielding "skills" aren't helping him either.

(Martinez is a better hitter than Young, but man, that figures to be a painfully slow relay team in the middle of the Detroit batting order — Miguel Cabrera, Prince Fielder, and Martinez.)

Valverde had a rocky 2012 in general — his ERA rose from 2.24 in 2011 to 3.78 — and he absolutely fell apart in the playoffs (2.2 innings, nine runs, all earned).

The Tigers probably feel that they got away with one here, that Papa Grande was on the brink of collapse all season and finally did so at the end.

Dombrowski spoke of prospect Bruce Rondon as a possible successor in the glory job. The Tigers have certainly been more aggressive about promoting prospects than the Twins are, so it's a genuine possibility.

But I wouldn't be surprised if the Tigers threw more of owner Mike Ilitch's money at a veteran. It just won't be Valverde.