Further thoughts on the Denard Span trade

Denard Span's on-base percentages
the past three seasons:
.331, .328, .342.

I see in various Twins-oriented places on the Internet -- even from people who like Thursday's trade -- a misconception, or at least a miswording, about Denard Span.

Span is a good player. He is not a franchise cornerstone. He's not a guy you "build around."

The Washington Nationals aren't building their team around Span. The Nats are built around Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg and, to a lesser extent, Ryan Zimmerman. (They're paying Jayson Werth as if he's a cornerstone, but he's a complementary piece -- like Span, a quality complementary piece.) The Nats had the best regular season record in the National League in 2012, and Span should help them stay there in 2013. He allows them to get Harper out of center field and Werth out of the leadoff spot, both of which were ill fits.

Span turns 29 during spring training. He has not made an All-Star team, has not drawn even a 10th-place vote in the MVP balloting, has not won a Gold Glove. He did once lead the AL in triples; that's the only "black ink" on his stat sheet.

For a leadoff man/center fielder to be a true cornerstone, he needs to have an OBP of .400, not .350; he needs to hit .300+, not .270; he needs to win Gold Gloves and lead the league in runs scored occasionally. None of this is Span.

Again, Span is a good, useful player. It is not a condemnation to say he is not a star. The point is, we ought not value him as if he is.

He's a better player than Ben Revere, who figures to take the center field job in 2013. Span's flaws -- throwing arm and power -- are Revere's flaws as well, only more so. I fully expect that by the time Alex Meyer takes his intended place in the Twins rotation, Revere won't be the Twins center fielder either. He'll be supplanted by Aaron Hicks or maybe even Bryon Buxton.

Joe Mauer, Buxton, Meyer, Miguel Sano -- these are guys you can build a team around. Span and Revere, not so much.

The Denard Span trade

Alex Meyer pitched the seventh inning of the
Futures Game last July for Team USA. Note the grip;
he is said to use a knuckle-curve grip on his slider.

Start with the trade itself: Denard Span to Washington for Alex Meyer, a 6-foot-9 RHP who split 2012 -- his first season in pro ball -- between low A and High A.

Let's start interpreting.

* I've said this several times in different formats: It is common for a championship-caliber team to have one regular outfielder like Span or Ben Revere; it is almost unheard of for such a team to have two of them. Trading one of them was inevitable.

* Presumably Terry Ryan decided to trade one of his center fielders for the highest-upside arm he could obtain, regardless of how nearly major-league ready he is. Meyer is NOT major-league ready; even if he opens next year in Double A, he's probably not going to appear in Target Field until 2014 at the earliest. This trade does not make the Twins better in 2013. It's a rebuilding trade -- established major league talent for the possibility of a future ace.

*Meyer IS a high-quality arm. He throws very hard, occasionally touching 100 mph in college (Kentucky); as is typical of very tall pitchers, repeating his delivery was an issue in college. When his arm dropped, so did the velocity. Good slider, working on his change-up. Possible that he might end up in the bullpen, but that would probably be if he never gets his delivery solved. Up and down collegiate record. Scott Boras is his agent.

Meyer had good numbers in A ball last year -- good but not eye-popping. I don't know how well he did at maintaining his delivery, and anybody who's spent the past few years watching Francisco Liriano spin out of control a couple times an inning knows how important that is. I don't see any red flags in his 2012 numbers.

Here's John Sickels' take on Meyer, posted a few hours after the trade was announced.

* Presumably the 2013 outfield for the Twins now is Josh Willingham in left, Revere in center and Chris Parmelee in right. But I still wouldn't rule out another trade for a pitcher, this one involving one of the first basemen (Parmelee or Justin Morneau).

Summation: There's risk in trading for a Class A power arm; Meyer comes without guarantee. But he's exactly the kind of arm the Twins lack and need. If he stays healthy, masters his delivery, develops a change up, he's a front-of-the-rotation arm.

Span is a good center fielder and leadoff hitter. He's not great. And, at age 28, he's not likely to be better than he is. He wasn't going to fetch a polished front-line starter one-for-one.

It's a good gamble for the Twins.

The 2013 Hall of Fame ballot

Barry Bonds: In or out? I say in. The voters will
probably say otherwise.

If I actually had a vote for the Hall of Fame -- I don't -- I would probably be one who identifies a handful of legitimate candidates and perhaps casts a waste vote for a personal favorite with no real HOF case. (Or maybe, if I were a working member of the BBWAA, I would have discovered that I don't really LIKE any of them.) A voter can vote for as many as 10 candidates; most don't go nearly that deep.

This winter's ballot is probably too loaded for waste votes.

Loaded with talent, loaded with controversy. Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa are mightily overqualified by the stat lines, and with the steroid connections, it's quite likely none will get in.

I can argue PEDs in both directions, and at times have. My take in terms of the Hall: 1) I want some evidence, not just rumors; 2) I wouldn't set up PED use as a litmus test; 3) if there's legitimate reason to doubt that a player would have reached Hall of Fame levels without steroids, that's a heavy mark against him.

If I had a vote, I'd probably spend more time agonizing over it than I have. But off the top of my head, here's how I'd go this year:


Jeff Bagwell. How many first basemen in history were better than Bagwell? Gehrig, Foxx ... I'd take Eddie Murray over Bagwell too. The list isn't long. Bagwell's been hurt in the voting by PED rumors, but real evidence is lacking. Give me something more substantial than "he was buds with Ken Caminiti."
Craig Biggio. Maybe he and Bagwell can go in together, which would be fitting.
Bonds. Three MVPs before allegations of steroid use.
Clemens. What he did in Boston alone is sufficient.
Mike Piazza. The numbers say he was the best hitting catcher ever. Even while active, though, there was chatter that he was a chemical construct. Again, I want more than chatter.
Tim Raines. That Rock's out and Jim Rice is in is a data point for the idea that the writers are addicted to the idea that RBI is the be-all, end-all stat. Sorta like Miguel Cabrera winning the MVP over Mike Trout. Or George Bell over Alan Trammell in '87. Raines was better than Rice; Trout was better than Cabrera; Trammell was better than Bell.
Curt Schilling. An odd, up-and-down career, but utterly dominating at his best and a major figure in two of the most compelling postseasons of the past 20 years.
Alan Trammell. Best shortstop not now in the Hall, and better than more than half the shortstops in.

That's eight. That list excludes Kenny Lofton, Jack Morris, Fred McGriff, Mark McGwire, Sosa, Don Mattingly, Bernie Williams, Rafael Palmeiro and Edgar Martinez, all of whom have some sort of plausible argument in their favor -- and equally plausible arguments against.

But I'm not counting to 10 just because I can. Those eight are enough. Those eight are a very loaded ballot.

Marvin Miller, 1917-2012

Marvin Miller and Joe Torre at the end of
the brief 1972 players strike. Torre, then a leader
of the players association, is now a significant
figure in the commissioner's office.

Marvin Miller took the helm of the fledgling players union in 1966 and retired as executive director in 1982. In those 16 years, he changed professional sports forever.

Step by step, confrontation by confrontation, Miller -- who died Tuesday at age 95 -- laid the foundation for free agency. For generations, the owners had insisted that allowing players a voice in their employment would ruin the game. They were wrong.

They weren't the only ones who couldn't see what Miller saw. Jim Bouton, pitcher-turned-writer, tells of asking Miller about the free agency dream before it happened: Wouldn't it let the big market teams buy up all the good players and win all the time? To which Miller replied: You mean like the Yankees have done all these years?

The changes Miller brought to baseball spread to the other major sports. Miller's legacy is the strength and cohesiveness of the union he built. Because of that, baseball's players have the most freedom, baseball has the greatest competitive balance of our major sports and baseball hasn't had a labor stoppage in 18 years. The NFL, the NBA, the NHL -- all had lengthy lockouts in the past few years, in no small part because the owners in those sports are sure they can break the union (as they always have). Baseball's management knows it can't.

Adding to a stockpile

The Twins on Monday announced yet another minor-league free agent signing, this time of Jeff Clement, a left-handed hitting, defensively limited first baseman-catcher. Clement was the No. 3 overall draft pick in 2005, but his career has stalled in Triple A at age 29.

In bits and pieces -- four partial seasons scattered over the past six years -- Clement has hit .218/.277/.371 in 385 major-league at-bats. His defensive chops behind the plate aren't good enough to sustain that, and nobody's glove at first base is good enough to sustain that. Clements' minor league numbers (.282/.361/.493 in more than 2,200 Triple A plate appearances), while good, aren't sufficiently eye-popping to force a sustained opportunity.

The Twins are his third organization; the first two, Seattle and Pittsburgh, have been starved for hitters. Clement couldn't, or at least didn't, carve out a career in either place.

The Twins certainly, at the moment, don't look like the place where Clement is going to change that. What is he? A left-handed hitter who kinda plays first base and catcher. The Twins have two major-league first basemen in Justin Morneau and Chris Parmelee; they both hit left-handed. The Twins have at catcher Joe Mauer (left-handed hitter) and Ryan Doumit (switch-hitter who is stronger from the left side). Clement probably isn't a defensive upgrade over any of the four, and there's no reason to believe he's a better hitter.

So why would a minor-league free agent with his profile turn to the Twins for an opportunity? Because there's a possible future opportunity.

Say the Twins trade one of the first basemen next month for pitching. Clement still may not make the major league roster out of spring training, but he'd be available if the other guy gets hurt. Two "ifs" there, but the odds of them coming through for him aren't terrible. The Twins are going to trade somebody for pitching, we can be sure of that.

At 29, with his track record, Clement isn't going to be anybody's Plan A, and he's not likely to be anybody's Plan B. A strong Plan C might be his best remaining chance, and the Twins offer that kind of chance.

Contemplating Josh Roenicke

The Twins come out of the Thanksgiving weekend having accomplished little of their offseason shopping -- which is hardly unusual or worrisome. (It is quite unlikely that the status will remain quo coming out of the Christmas/New Years period; if it is, that will be worrisome.)

One move they have made, which flew rather under the radar, was the waiver-wire pickup earlier this month of Josh Roenicke, a move which seems increasingly curious to me.

Roenicke comes to the Twins off a 2012 season with two significant positives, at least on the surface:

• He led the major leagues in relief innings (88.2);
• He had an ERA of 3.25, which is even more impressive given that he was pitching his home games in Coors Field.

I speculated at the time that the Rockies waived Roenicke rather than pay him at the arbitration rate after this breakout season, but he's not arbitration eligible. He's 30, he's out of options, but he's still cheap.

So why did the Rox dump him? For that matter, why did everybody in the National League pass on him when he was waived? And how does he fit into the Twins scheme?

It's probably fair to say that the Rockies (and the rest of the National League) doubt that the ERA is an accurate assessment of Roenicke's talent and skill. He had a poor strikeout to walk rate and a below-average strikeout rate; those are better predictors of future ERAs than ERA itself.

Then there's the Coors Field problem. There's only one thing more difficult than having a good year pitching for the Rockies, and that's having a second. Pick through the two decades or so of the Colorado franchise's records, and you'll find that their few effective pitchers had very short runs of effectiveness, frequently due to injury.

I think the issue of recovery time in the lower-oxygen environment of Denver is part of the problem. To pitch in the major leagues is to damage the arm; to pitch at altitude is to damage the arm with less ability to recover. Eighty-eight innings of relief, as pitchers are used nowadays, is a lot; only five pitchers in the majors threw 80 relief innings last season.

The Rockies may well have figured of Roenicke: He's not as good as his ERA, and he's a good candidate to break down; let's not count on him for 2013. So they waived him to create space on their 40-man roster, and when the Twins claimed him, they figured they weren't losing much.

As for all those innings: Two of the five 80-inning relievers were Rockies, and a third Colorado bullpenner had 79. This stems from an experiment the Rox tried last summer: A four-man starting rotation with a low pitch count limit (75). Roenicke was one of three "piggyback" relievers used to get through the middle innings. This makes Roenicke's workload appear a bit less impressive -- he wasn't pitching so many innings because he was so effective, he was pitching them because it was his turn.

Which brings us to the question of how he fits in the Twins bullpen, which is run more conventionally than Colorado's was last year. Assuming everybody's healthy and at 2012 effectiveness -- never a particularly likely assumption with relief arms, but we have to start somewhere -- Roenicke has to rank under Jared Burton and Casey Fien in the pecking order of right-handed relievers. He's competing for a a role with the likes of Alex Burnett (who also had an ERA that was better than his walk and strikeout rates should support); fellow newcomer Tim Wood; and long man Anthony Swarzak. Odds are that of those six, at least one will have some sort of injury issue this spring.

Roenicke might also be seen as an alternative to LOOGY candidates Tyler Robertson and Caleb Thielbar. Roenicke was notably more effective against lefties than righties in 2012; one should be wary of assigning significance to one season of platoon splits for a reliever, but if he actually does have a pitch that gives lefties fits, all the better.

The Sunday Funnies

Frankie Frisch, the player-manager of the St. Louis Cardinals for much of the 1930s, is approaching the main entrance of the team's hotel when a paper bag filled with water zooms past his head and splats on the sidewalk.

Frisch is no fool. He knows who's responsible. And the Fordham Flash hotfoots it to the room of one Pepper Martin, leadoff hitter, third baseman and general pain in the kiester.

Frisch finds Martin in his eighth-floor room sitting next to an open window overlooking the scene of the crime and starts chewing him out.

Martin interrupts: "Gee, Frankie, you wouldn't have wanted me to hold that bag out the window all day and tire out my arm, would ya?"