Putting together a coaching staff

Tom Brunansky
will be the hitting
coach again in
2015. It is apparently
a one-year deal.

The Twins on Thursday announced that Tom Brunansky will be kept on as hitting coach. One coach hired, six to go.

Bruno was probably the one incumbent most likely to be retained, but there are a couple others I can imagine returning. And couple I can't imagine being back, those being Rick Anderson and Scott Ullger.

Let's sort things out a bit:

Pitching coach: Probably the most crucial of the seven, especially considering that new manager Paul Molitor has never handled a pitching staff.
Bench coach: On some teams a sounding board on in-game moves, often the liaison between the analytic department and the manager.
Bullpen coach: On many teams, an assistant pitching coach. That was likely the role played the past two years by Bobby Cuellar; his predecessor, Rick Stelmaszek, was probably more of a coach to the catchers.
Hitting coach: Brunansky, of course.
Third base: Traditionally the first assistant manager, many of those roles have moved to the bench coach. The Twins the the past couple of years designated Joe Vavra as "infield coordinator,"
First base: Frequently involved in working on base stealing. Ullger was designated "outfield coordinator."
???: The seventh coach in many organizations has been turned into an assistant hitting coach. The Twins have not applied that designation to a coach. Molitor last year was entrusted with defensive positioning and baserunning; roles during the games were juggled because of Vavra's midsummer hip replacment surgery. What role the seventh coach would have under Molitor is unknown.

A few names, hardly comprehensive, to watch in all this:

Rick Renteria, ousted last week by the Chicago Cubs as manager to make room for Joe Maddon, might be a logical choice for bench coach. He's managed in the majors and minors, he's bilingual, he's available and he's already getting paid manager money by the Cubs.

Chris Bosio's 1987 Topps
card. He made his major
league debut in 1986/

Chris Bosio, currently the pitching coach of the Cubs, was a longtime teammate of Molitor in Milwaukee. While he still has two years on his contract in Chicago, Maddon may want his own guy in the role.

Frank Viola, 1987 World Series MVP and 1988 Cy Young winner with the Twins, has been working as a pitching coach in the Mets system for years.

Cuellar is an experienced pitching coach, is bilingual and might be a fit in either his current job or as Rick Anderson's replacment.

Doug Mientkiewicz was reportedly unhappy at being passed over for the big-league job. I suspect the organization will be better served if Dougie Alphabet is the manager at Double-A to guide the likes of Byron Buxton, Miguel Sano and Eddie Rosario, but it's possible they might put him on Molitor's staff.

Gene Glynn, another internal applicant, could be a fit at any of three spots -- bench, third base, first base. He has particular expertise in infield coaching, and if Danny Santana is to be the shortstop, there's a lot of work to be done there.

Eddie Guardado strikes me as a possible bullpen coach.

I don't see Jack Morris as the pitching coach. He lacks Viola's experience at working with a staff full-time. And given Molitor's complete inexperience in that aspect of the game, I would expect experience to be considered a necessity.

Take the money and run

Michael Cuddyer
was limited to 205
plate appearances
in 2014, but he got
a qualifying offer.

Monday was the deadline for teams to extend qualifying offers to their free agents. This was only a theoretical issue for the Twins, as their only free agent at this point is Jared Burton, and he's a free agent because the Twins declined to pick up his option, which was a fraction of the $15.3 million price tag for a QO.

In all, 12 players were extended qualifying offers, which is a tick above average (a total of 22 offers in the first two years of this system). No player accepted the qualifying offer the past two winters, but I expect at least one will this year.

Old friend Michael Cuddyer should. Emphatically so. That the Rockies made the offer astounded many outside observers. Cuddyer will turn 36 before Opening Day, he's started to have some injury issues, his defensive abilities have declined ... and the qualifying offer means a team will have to surrender a high draft pick to sign him.

I don't think that's happening. Cuddy should learn from the experience of Kendrys Morales, Nelson Cruz and Stephen Drew last year and take the QO. The down side: He's guaranteed $15.3 million. I wish I had a bad choice that would be that rewarding.

Who else would be well advised to take the money and run? In my view:

• Cruz got burned last year; he turned down Texas' QO and wound up with a one year deal in Baltimore for a bit more than half the Texas offer. He led the majors in homers, true, but he's still the same player who couldn't find a market last winter. 
• David Robertson is a closer. Yeah, he had a good season for the Yankees. Few teams are eager to commit that much money to a ninth-inning guy, much less surrender a draft pick for the privilege. 
• Francisco Liriano is an interesting case. He's had two good years for Pittsburgh. But has that erased his reputation for inconsistency? Are teams willing to commit dollars and years to him -- and give up that draft pick to boot? And even if there is a market, Liriano might be better off sticking in a place he's been successful. This is a more difficult call, frankly, than Cuddyer, Cruz and Robertson. 

The other eight ... well, I don't think any of them are likely to accept, although I suspect that some will find the market less welcoming than they expect. 

The Molitor presser

Paul Molitor at Tuesday's press conference.

Parsing the statements made in a baseball-hiring press conference is a fool's game. So I'm a fool.

Some thoughts after watching the Paul Molitor press conference Tuesday morning:

* In recounting Molitor's bio -- which probably wasn't necessary -- Terry Ryan said something about the impressive or great managers Molitor had played for. This amused me, because in my view, Molitor's managerial list was among the weakest in the field of candidates.

Ryan cited four names in particular: George Bamberger, Harvey Kuenn, Cito Gaston and Tom Kelly. 

Kuenn and Gaston are an interesting pair to bring up, because they are oddly similar -- they each were put in charge of a talented but underachieving club that was at odds with the previous skipper, and each won, initially, by maximizing the playing time for the regulars, marginalizing the bench and basically making as few moves as possible. Kuenn got the Brewers to their one World Series tht way, and Gaston won it all in 1992 and 1993, the latter with Molitor.

That is, emphatically, not the situation Molitor is inheriting.

Bamberger is a more interesting figure. He inherited a chronic loser and immediately won 90-plus games the first two years, in part by putting Molitor in the lineup right out of A ball. Bamberger also stuck Gorman Thomas, who had been kicking around for years, in center field and lived with the strikeouts, something previous managers had been unwilling to do.

There are potential parallels to the Twins there. Molitor said he's not waiting on the prospect train, that he wants to win now; but the winning might be easier if they hurry the prospect train to the station.

* Pat Reusse, who has been railing for some time about the Twins taking too many pitches, gave Molitor a leading question about how he, Molitor, liked to swing at first pitches. Molitor gave a much more nuanced answer about the evils of predictability. I have no argument with Mollie's response, but I found myself wishing he'd say: I'd a fool to expect every hitter to hit the way I did. 

This, after all, is the crux of the argument against hiring great players as managers: That they expect lesser players to perform the way they did. Eduardo Escobar isn't Paul Molitor, and Kurt Suzuki isn't either. It's not a reasonable standard.

Anyway, the Twins were seventh in the majors in runs scored. The hitters, in short, weren't the problem. The defense and the pitching were. And, to be sure, it's possible that moves to improve the defense will hurt the offense.

* Terry Ryan was quite explicit: He did talk to Joe Maddon, and the Cubs were simply a more attractive offer. 

* Less explicit, but strongly implied: Ryan has had more payroll space to work with than he has used. He hasn't used it all because he hasn't seen anything worth using it on.

Which is fine with me. Spending money just because you have it is silly.

Beginning the Molitor Era

Paul Molitor will be introduced as Twins
manager Tuesday morning.

The Twins made it official Monday: Paul Molitor will be the new manager.

I was pulling for Doug Mientkiewicz, but the Molitor selection neither surprises nor dismays me. Terry Ryan knows more about the candidates than I do, and he has skin in this game. I don't.

There is one sizable drawback to Molitor: He has never managed on any level. That does not seem to be as significant a deterrent to getting the job as it once was. Indeed, as I observed about a month ago here, half the teams in the division series were skippered by men on their first managerial job.

Molitor does have some obvious advantages. First, he is quite familiar with several of the key players coming up the ladder from his years as a roving instructor. Second, he is open to analytics, probably more so than was Ron Gardenhire. Third, Molitor is a known figure to the major league players after spending 2014 on the coaching staff, several of whom have gushed about Molitor's knowledge.

Which ties into the one attribute any manager absolutely must have: He has the respect of the players. He's a Hall of Famer, to start with, and while the managerial track record of truly great players isn't all that striking, it is a credential that figures to command at least the initial respect of everybody.

The general rap on great players as managers is that they can't identify with the struggles of lesser athletes, and by definition most players are lesser athletes than Paul Molitor was. Given the high marks he's gotten in the past for his work with minor leaguers, I don't think that's going to be an issue for him.

Molitor was widely viewed during his playing days as a manager-in-waiting. For whatever reasons -- and I don't think it was just one reason -- it hasn't happened until now. Molitor is 58, and that's fairly old for a first-time manager. That is a minor checkmark against him, and part of why I was interested in Mientkiewicz. The odds are that Molly won't have a decade-plus run in the job as Gardenhire and Tom Kelly did. That doesn't mean he can't be a success.

Tony-O, Kitty and El Tiante

Three players with Twins connections (albeit very loosely for one) are among the 10 Hall of Fame nominees announced last week for the Veterans Committee: Tony Oliva, Jim Kaat and Luis Tiant.

Oliva, if elected, would certainly go in wearing a Twins cap; he didn't play for anybody else.

Kaat probably would; he got 190 of his 283 lifetime wins as a Twin/Senator, and his stats for his other teams (White Sox, Phillies, Cardinals) don't suggest that he should be identified with any of them.

Tiant certainly wouldn't; he spent just one season with Minnesota (1970); he suffered an injury in May, which opened a rotation spot for a 19-year-old named Bert Blyleven.

The other nominees, alphabetically: Dick Allen, Ken Boyer, Gil Hodges, Bob Howsam, Minnie Minoso, Billy Pierce and Maury Wills. Howsam is the executive who built the 1970s Big Red Machine in Cincinnati. The rest were all players.

None of them are terrible nominees. Worse players at their respective positions than each have enshrined.

To be specific:

• Kaat and Pierce, left-handed pitchers, have better records than Rube Marquard and Lefty Gomez.
• Tiant, right-handed pitcher, was better than contemporary Catfish Hunter, and far better than Jesse Haines and Vic Willis.
• Oliva and Minoso, corner outfielders, were both superior to the likes of Ross Youngs, Harry Hooper and Sam Rice.
• Boyer, third baseman, was better than George Kell and Freddie Lindstrom.
• Allen and Hodges, first basemen, were superior to George "Highpockets" Kelly and Jake Beckley.
• Wills, shortstop, was better than Joe Sewell or Travis Jackson.

But that's basically taking some of the weakest Hall of Fame honorees and using them as a standard, and that's not a real good argument, The truth is, there are better players than any of these nine -- Craig Biggo, Tim Raines, Alan Trammell, Jeff Bagwell, Mike Mussina, Mike Piazza -- on the outside looking in because the BBWAA is doing a lousy job at the front end of the selection system.

Still, I expect at least one of these 10 finalists to be elected.

The committee meets Dec 8 at the Winter Meetings. The early speculation has Oliva and Hodges as the most likely choices. Rod Carew, Oliva's road roommate for years with the Twins, is on the committee, which is one reason to think Tony-O has a good shot.

Is he the best of this bunch? For my money, Minoso is. But none of them will demean the standards of the Hall as much as the selections of Andre Dawson, Jim Rice or Bruce Sutter did.

Pic of the Week

From the Giants clubhouse as Madison Bumgarner gets
the World Series MVP trophy and the vehicle that
comes with the honor.

OK, this may be unfair to Bud Selig, but this image encapuslates his public persona. The departing commish appears baffled by the fact that this bumbler has taken over the World Series postgame. Technology and stuff.

Hey, Bud: You and your cronies decided long ago to whore the sport out to corporate interests. This doesn't make MLB any different than the NFL or NBA, but it was still your choice.

---

Thus concludes another "exciting season" of Pic of the Week. The Sunday Funnies will return for its offseason run next Sunday.

Notes, quotes and comment

Byron Buxton had surgery Thursday on his fractured finger, He's expected to be ready for spring training, and we can only hope that a new calendar year will be kinder to the young man and his career than 2014 has been.

I no longer expect Buxton to head the offseason Top 100 (or 50, or whatever) prospect lists. The injuries that wrecked this year for him ought not be long-term (although the concussion may have ramifications we can't know today), but the year of development is gone forever. He's never going to be 20 again.

Point is, he -- and Miguel Sano -- remain prime prospects, and that doesn't change if Kris Bryant is ranked above them on Baseball America's list. What matters is sharpening their skills and getting them into the major league lineup.

---

Rick Renteria guided the Cubs to a 73-89 record.

The Chicago Cubs on Friday fired manager Rick Renteria for the sin of not being Joe Maddon, who they officially hired within hours.

There has been some consternation in the Twins blogosphere over whether the Twins made an effort to entice Maddon and if so how seriously they pursued him. I never really thought Maddon would see the Twins as a good fit.

Renteria might be another matter. He's 52, bilingual, and in his one season as Cubs manager he got the season's most important task done: He got Starlin Castro and Anthony Rizzo, the first two pieces of the team's rebuilding process, back on track. Their fades in 2013 got Dave Sveum axed.

The Cubs graduated several more pieces of the project to the big club late. Not all of them thrived immediately, but that can scarcely condemn Renteria as a manager for a club in transition -- which is what the Twins are, or should be, next year.

There was a national report linking Renteria to the Twins. Hiring him seems more plausible than hiring Maddon.