Baker goes Cubbie

Scott Baker during spring training 2012:
His elbow didn't like this very much.

Well, so much for this pitching possibility for the Twins.

Scott Baker, who early this offseason appeared likely to remain with Minnesota, wound up signing a one-year deal with the Cubs on Tuesday. He gets $5.5 million guaranteed and $1.5 million in incentives (incentive clauses are limited to "useage" stats, such as starts and innings pitched, not "results" stats such as wins or ERA).

Baker did good work for the Twins, but not a whole lot of it. He reached 200 innings just once in eight seasons (including 2012, in which he did not pitch). Durability has never been his strong suit.

Much as I would have liked to see Baker remain, $5.5 million is a lot for a guy who had Tommy John surgery around opening day. 2013 is going to be a rehab season. He's talking about being ready to start major league games by the time the season begins, but it's at least equally possible that he won't be ready until May or even June. I don't think he's likely to top 140 innings, no matter when he's ready to pitch.

The speculation is that Terry Ryan and Co. were unwilling to go just one year for that kind of money. The Twins wanted an option for 2014 if they were to go that high for next year; Baker and his agent wanted both the money and to be assured of free agency after 2013.

The Cubs went there. I am not upset that the Twins declined.

And at least we won't have to listen to Bert Blyleven whine that Baker doesn't "pitch down in the zone."

Notes, quotes and comment

Hammond Stadium in Fort Myers, Fla.

The Twins late last week signed a pair of minor-league free agents, RHP Tim Wood and C Eric Fryer, both of whom spent the 2012 season the Pittsburgh organization.

Wood's signing carries some potential significance. He had a very strong 2012 for Indianapolis, the Pirates' Triple A affiliate, and the emergence of Jared Burton and Casey Fien last season has many Twins bloggers anticipating another such success with a minor-league free agent.

Which is certainly possible. It's worth remembering, however, that Wood turns 30 later this week, that he's been unimpressive in previous major league trials and that his excellent 2012 in Triple A didn't get him a call-up with the Pirates.

He'll compete for a job. He may even win one. But if he were really a prime prospect, he wouldn't have been available.

Fryer figures to be Triple A fodder; Rene Rivera's Twitter outburst in September when the Twins bypassed him for Chris Herrmann made it quite likely that he wouldn't remain in the organization in 2013. Fryer figures to rank below Joe Mauer, Ryan Doumit, Drew Butera, Herrmann and maybe Danny Lehmann on the catching depth chart.

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Last Tuesday, Lee County (Fla.) approved a $42 million expansion of the Twins complex in Fort Myers, which involves not only the Twins spring training home but two minor league affiliates, the low-Rookie level GCL Twins and the high-A Fort Myers Miracle.

Among the highlights:

• Hammond Stadium's outfield dimensions are to mimic those of Target Field;
• The stadium will get improved concourses and concession areas;
• A 55-bed dormitory will be constructed (the Twins will pay the tab), which will include classrooms and commissary.

The first two will be more obvious to spring training visitors, but it's the latter that I would expect to have the bigger impact on the operation. It figures to give the Twins greater control over the nutrition and education of the young players on the complex-level GCL (Gulf Coast League) Twins, many of whom are Latin Americans getting their first taste of the United States.

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Josh Willingham won a Silver Slugger award. It's a more elegant trophy than comes with the Gold Glove Award.

It's a nice honor for the Willinghammer, who did have a fine season, but I'm not sure that he was really one of the three best-hitting outfielders in the American League. On the other hand, I'm not sure offhand who to say deserved it more than he did.

Not a Pic of the Week, but it could have been

Did you ever have the feeling you were being watched?

I pulled this one during spring training as a potential Pic of the Week, but I wound up using something else. Then I stashed it figuring that I'd find an opportunity to use it with some Derek Jeter post during the season. That didn't happen either.

But I like the image too much to just forget it either.

And if you can forgive a literary reference, it evokes the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg in "The Great Gatsby."

The Sunday Funnies

Casey Stengel, as manager of the talentless New York Mets in the early '60s, once summed up a particular young player thusly:

"We got a kid, Goossen, 20 years old. In 10 years, he's got a chance to be 30."

(Greg Goossen made to it 65, actually. But as a player, he never got even 200 at-bats in a season in the majors. Casey wasn't the only manager who doubted Goossen could play.)

Tracing some managerial trees

Walt Weiss played for four managers, two of them
Tony LaRussa and Bobby Cox. The other two were
connected to LaRussa.

Three sure-fire Hall of Fame managers, and one with a pretty good case, abandoned the dugout the past couple of years, and some of the managerial hirings this offseasons led me to ponder how the careers of Bobby Cox, Tony LaRussa, Lou Piniella and Joe Torre have affected the current crop of managers.

Cox: His managerial progeny includes Ned Yost of the Kansas City Royals and Fredi Gonzalez, who succeeded him with the Atlanta Braves. Walt Weiss, just named to the Rockies job, also played a couple of seasons for Cox, but I'm putting him in LaRussa's group, for reasons I'll detail later.

Torre: Joe Girardi (Yankees) played for and coached under Torre. Don Mattingly (Dodgers) coached for Torre in New York amid speculation that he was being groomed to succeed Torre; when the Steinbrenners replaced Torre with Girardi and Torre went to the Dodgers, Mattingly followed and eventually inherited the job.

Lou Piniella managed for 23 years,
but spawned few managers.

Piniella: This is odd for a guy who managed for 23 years with five different franchises, won a World Series, had a 116-win season: I can't identify any manager, current or past, whose career trajectory was clearly affected by Sweet Lou. Mattingly and Willie Randolph played for him in the early years of his managerial career, but Donnie Baseball belongs in the Torre family and Randolph had so many skippers it's hard to identify a mentor.

In an odd way, Piniella may have been indirectly influential on Ozzie Guillen, who never played for or worked with Piniella; Joey Cora spent the bulk of his career with Piniella, and Guillen leaned as heavily on Cora as any manager has relied on a coach in recent memory.

LaRussa: He's got literally generations of managerial progeny — too many, probably, to accurately recount. Consider this this: Jim Leyland was LaRussa's right-hand man during LaRussa's first job, with the White Sox in the early 1980s; Leyland's been managing pretty much forever himself. Heck, Gene Lamont spent eight seasons with managerial jobs in between coaching stints with Leyland.

Mike Matheny led the Cardinals
back to the NLCS in his first
year as manager.

Besides Leyland, current managers in the LaRussa tree would include:

• Mike Redmond, new Miami manager; he clearly regards Leyland as a crucial figure in his career;
• Weiss broke in under LaRussa in Oakland, then played one season for Rene Lachemann in Florida (Lachemann is to LaRussa what Lamont is to Leyland — a coach who left periodically for managing jobs only to return after losing those jobs). Then Weiss moved on to Colorado, where he played for Don Baylor, who had played for LaRussa himself, although it would be difficult to claim LaRussa as a primary influence on Baylor. (More likely influences on Baylor would be Earl Weaver and Gene Mauch.)
• Mike Matheny, who succeeded LaRussa in St. Louis.
• Robin Ventura of the White Sox played three-plus seasons for Lamont, the longest period for which he had a specific manager. Ventura also played for shorter periods for Torre, Bobby Valentine and others. I'm not sure which of them was most influential on him.

There are 30 big-league managerial jobs; at least eight of them are now held by the managerial descendants of LaRussa, Cox and Torre.

New trends in the dugout, Part II

Wally Joyner, who hit .289 in a
16-year career, will be an
assistant hitting coach for the
Philadelphia Phillies next year.

Major league teams are permitted up to six full-time uniformed coaches. The limit appears to be motivated by the fact that the uniformed coaches are eligible for and piling up pension eligibility.

Less obvious to many of us on the outside is what exactly these coaches do. Since the sixth coach became the norm back in late 1990s, most teams have identified a coach as the "bench coach." Pitching coach, hitting coach, third base coach, first base coach, bullpen coach, bench coach.

The duties of two are obvious in the title; the bullpen coach, I suspect, is largely there in order to have an authority figure hanging out with the relief corps; the base coaches generally have other duties than waving at baserunners, but they can differ from team to team. (I assume that's why the Twins last month identified the new duties of Scott Ullger and Joe Vavra as outfield/baserunning instruction and infield instruction, respectively.)

And the bench coach? His duties are even more vague.

This fall, a number of teams have turned to identifying a coach not as bench coach but as "assistant hitting coach."

• The Kansas City Royals, having fired hitting coach Kevin Seitzer, hired Jack Maloof as hitting coach and Andre David (who played for the Twins in 1984 and '86) as assistant hitting coach.
• The Los Angeles Dodgers hired Mark McGuire as hitting coach and John Valentin as his assistant.
• The Boston Red Sox haven't hired any hitting coach for 2013, but they intend to have two.
• The Philadelphia Phillies have Steve Henderson and Wally Joyner as his assistant.
• The Tampa Bay Rays were at least considering such a move. (This link is particularly useful for detailing a rationale for two hitting coaches.)

The Twins aren't following this trend -- officially. Terry Steinbach is listed as catching instructor/bench coach.  But they do have two former hitting coaches on their staff in Ullger and Vavra, and new hitting coach Tom Brunansky has suggested that Vavra, who held the job last season, will be helpful to him.

New trends in the dugout

Mike Redmond served a
minor-league apprenticeship
before landing a big-league
managerial job.

When Mike Redmond landed the managerial job in Miami last month, he talked about the career advice he'd gotten from Jim Leyland, his first big-league skipper and now manager of the Tigers: Take a minor league job and learn the nuances of managing in the bushes. Redmond did so: Two seasons in the Toronto system managing in Class A.

Even Ryne Sandberg and Mike Schmidt, Hall of Fame players who harbor(ed) managerial ambitions, had to go to the minors first. Schmidt quit after a few weeks (he could make more money on the autograph circuit and didn't want to manage enough to put up with the minor league life); Sandberg is in the bigs as a coach now and reputedly the manager-in-waiting in Philadelphia.

There are a lot more minor league managers than major league managers, of course, and only a few get to ride the buses to one of the big-time jobs, as Redmond did. The odds are agin 'em.

And the odds are getting worse. Major league teams are increasingly hiring managers who haven't managed, or even coached, on any professional level.

Walt Weiss will be
the sixth manager
in Rockies history.

The most recent such move came late Wednesday, when the Colorado Rockies selected Walt Weiss, a former major league shortstop who had been coaching in high school.

Others of this ilk: Mike Matheny, who led the Cardinals to the seventh game of the NLCS in his first season managing anywhere; and Robin Ventura, who kept the White Sox in the playoff hunt.

Inexperienced and successful: Not a promising development for the dues-paying minor leaguers.

What's more, the Rockies had as one of their leading alternatives to Weiss the still-active Jason Giambi, and the White Sox were seriously considering making Paul Konerko player-manager before tabbing Ventura.

These selection were unusual. Most managers take the Redmond route of a minor league apprenticeship; others are at least coaches in the majors for a while, learning the job from a more experienced manager (Ozzie Guillen from Jack McKeon, for example).

What Weiss, Matheny and Ventura have had in lieu of experience coping with the issues of running a minor league team: Impressive major league playing resumes. Weiss was AL Rookie of the Year in 1988; Matheny caught in the majors for 13 years; Ventura was probably the greatest third baseman in White Sox history.

The single most important thing a manager has is the respect of his players. The pedigree of World Series rings and All-Star games is a good start. (The respect can dissolve quickly, however.)

All this has a certain amount of at least theoretical interest to Twins fans. Paul Molitor has never managed in the minor leagues and was last a full-time coach in 2001 under Tom Kelly. But he may be the manager-in-waiting. Matheny,Ventura and Weiss indicate that Molitor wouldn't be a unique selection.