I Dislike Your Favorite Team

I'll dig in a bit later on today [update: I have dug in more], but calling Delmon Young an absolute disaster who needs to be traded before people realize how awful he is seems a little strong stupid to me. The guy just turned 23 two weeks ago. How many 23 year old leftfielders are playing at the major league level at all (much less hitting .290 in it?)

Updated With More Digging Into It Commences...NOW:

Souhan's column is just a mess of fuzzy-thinking, half-assed hindsight, and the kind of sniping that I thought might happen after the play-in game loss to the White Sox. He makes a couple of sweeping generalizations, with the assumption that everyone would agree (despite the fact that they are, at the very least, debatable, if not obviously wrong).

Let's start with this graf: "The Delmon Young trade -- essentially, Young and Brendan Harris for Matt Garza and Jason Bartlett -- was a disaster. Bartlett is better than Harris. More important, Garza is better than Young. If the Twins had kept Garza and found themselves with a surplus of young pitching, they might have been able to make a trade-deadline deal that would have sent them to the playoffs."

Let's break these into points. First, the Harris vs. Bartlett statement. Yes, there are some stats in which Bartlett outperformed Harris. Bartlett hit 30 points higher for average; Bartlett struck out 30 times less in two fewer games. But there are also important ways in which Harris obviously outplayed Bartlett. Harris had 12 more RBI; 10 more doubles; 6 more homeruns. Harris isn't going to be mistaken for Hank Aaron anytime soon, but it is clear that he delivers more power in a lineup that was desperate for it. Also, how about the fact that Harris had 3 less errors in the field than Bartlett, despite logging significant time at three different positions? I'm not arguing the Harris was clearly better than Bartlett. I'm just arguing that the position Souhan took is pretty much without merit, once one actually looks at the numbers--something that Souhan was presumably too busy to do, seeing as he's a Professional Sportswriter and all.

The Garza and Young argument is silly. Comparing a hitter who was 22 years old for about 98% of the season to a pitcher who turns 25 in a month should be, and is, borderline impossible. Garza stats for the Tampa Bay Devils are pretty good, but the only thing that really changed in his numbers from last year are his W-L records. His ERA actually went up a fraction of a percentage. So it isn't like the Twins traded away a guy who became great; they traded away a damn good pitcher in the hopes of getting a deal on a young guy they think will become great. To suggest that we know the value on that part of the trade is just arrogantly stupid. Or stupidly arrogant. Stupagant?

I wish Souhan were done, but he isn't: "Keeping Santana might have been the way to go. He would have pitched the Twins into the playoffs this season, and the two draft picks might have yielded as many quality players as the Mets trade did."

Keeping Santana is an easy suggestion to make, once the Twins fail to make the playoffs by one game. But no one was expecting them to be one game out of the playoffs when the season started, including Jim Souhan. It's so fucking easy to say that now. But at the time of the trade, Jim Souhan was one of the few people at the various local papers who seemed rather level-headed about the whole thing. I know, because I praised him at the time.

And the point I made at the time still stands--we don't know the value of the folks we got from the Mets, because they are all insanely young and are called Prospects for a reason. Gomez played his way into the starting lineup, but he's super super young. He's still a prospect. The idea that the picks we would have gotten in the MLB's tanglethorn free agent system is without merit. Souhan, at the time, pointed out that propects may not look like much, but in the long run, they can pay big dividends.

And yes, almost certainly, if Santana had been on this team, they would have made the playoffs. But they would have not won even a Divisional League Series, so who cares? What's the difference between making the playoffs and getting swept in 3 in the playoffs? One game at home. That's it. Who cares? The team was built for 2009, or maybe even 2010 in mind. The fact they competed as well as they did in 2008 should be seen as a great sign of things to come, not something to belittle and criticize. If those Mets prospects don't flower by then, and if Delmon Young is a light-hitting, below-average fielder in 2010, then we can start complaining about these moves.

I agree with this week's version of Souhan on two things--this winter the Twins should pursue another right-hander in the bullpen, and should aggressively go for Adrian Beltre. This team is one good hitter away from being pretty bad-ass.