One note on my votes. Yes obviously means I’m voting for the player this year. If I say no, that means I don’t think the player should ever be in the team Hall of Fame. Maybe means that I might vote for him in the future, but not right now. I think if we choose more than one or two players per year, the HOF will fill up with some marginal players pretty quickly, so some of these guys will just have to wait.

Dave Boswell, P. 8 seasons with Twins, 67-54, 3.49 ERA. My vote: No.

Boswell was a very competent pitcher, and he had one very good year in 1969. But he was never the staff ace, and his stock fell fast, to the point that he was cut by the team at age 26. Also, it’s hard to vote for a guy who got in a fight with Bob Allison and his manager.

Tom Brunansky, OF. 7 seasons, .250/.330/.432, 163 HR, 432 RBI. My vote: Maybe.

Bruno’s 9th place standing on the Twins home run list is safe now that Michael Cuddyer, who was 22 behind him, has left the team. He was a key piece of the 1987 Championship team, and his trade to the Cardinals in 1988 ushered in a 19 year curse that prevented any Twin from topping 30 homers in a season. He’s on the cusp of the Twins HOF. If he can get Rochester to hit well, that’ll put him over the top. (more…)

I had so much fun doing research for the AL Cy Young post that I decided to do a similar post for the AL MVP. I’m not going to break down the 2010 ballot though because, for the most part, the voters actually got it right. I think Shin-Soo Choo (5.6 fWAR, 8th in the league) should have finished much higher than 14th, and I certainly don’t think Delmon Young should have finished in the top ten (2.1 fWAR, mostly due to his horrible defense: -9.7 UZR). Every other pick is pretty defensible; actually, the MVP ballot matches up pretty nicely with the season’s WAR leaders. Yeah, Thanksgiving was a couple of days ago, but this kind of progress is something to be thankful for indeed. In fact, it’s interesting to see how much things have changed in terms of awards voting in just the past few years. Though I occasionally make some snarky comments, I didn’t write these posts to dump on the voters in the past; that would be like savaging our ancestors for failing to use antibiotics to treat deadly illnesses like typhoid. They didn’t have access to technology that would allow them to watch any game at any time anywhere in the country, nor did they have the vast amounts of statistical information that we have available today. They made the best decisions they could with the information they had available, and with some exceptions, they did a pretty good job.

What’s more interesting to me is that our view of what makes a ballplayer great hasn’t changed all that much over the years; we still value things like speed, and power, and defense, that fans and front offices have always placed a premium on. It’s that our methods of evaluating these things have drastically changed. (more…)

A few months ago, I started diving into the Twins’ draft history in an effort to find out just how good the organization has really been at developing talent. Since it’s an off day, and it is the deadline for signing this year’s draft picks, I thought this might be a good time to finish it. (more…)