Our Christmas wishlist for the Minnesota Twins. Checked Twice
In the spirit of Christmas, we at Puckett’s Pond have come up with our list of things that we’d like Santa to bring the Minnesota Twins in 2016. Hopefully we haven’t written it too late as Christmas is only 4 days away. We’ll begin with the outrageous and narrow down to the plausible (roughly).
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- A World Championship of course. It’d be a rather large miracle but that’s what Christmas is all about right? It’s been 24 years and we’ve been good!
- A Twin winning the Cy Young. Not sure that even Santa could pull this one off. Kyle Gibson probably has the best shot
- A Twin winning the MVP award. (Sano, Dozier?)
- Just one postseason win. The Twins have not won a playoff game since 2004. Even just another post-season appearance would be appreciated.
- Force a team to trade a great catcher to the Twins since there’s no improvements available on the free agent market
- Yovani Gallardo or Wei Yin Chen to slot in at the front of the rotation. I suppose this is basically the same thing as asking Santa for 20 million dollars for the next 5 years.
- A “Joe Mauer of old” type season from Mauer. It would be an astonishing turnaround for sure but Mauer is only 32 years old. A-Rod had a rejuvenation at age 39. We’re not asking for 2009 MVP Mauer, just 2013 Mauer or even a Mauer who could still get on-base 35% of the time.
- A home run crown for Miguel Sano. His home run rate was 5.4% in 2015 which translates into ~38 over a full season of 700 PAs.
- A Rookie of the Year award for Byron Buxton
- Antonio Bastardo. The Twins need a high leverage left handed reliever. How would a 2.98 ERA and 10 K/9 look on the back end of the bullpen?
- A Twin winning a silver slugger (Dozier, Sano)
- Something resembling respectability from Ricky Nolasco
- Sign lefty relievers Cesar Ramos or Franklin Morales
- Health for Glen Perkins
- Health for Phil Hughes
- Bullpen strikeouts
- Team patience at the plate
- A Byung-Ho Park who lives up to the ZiPS projections mentioned at the bottom of this article
- Resurgence from new lefty reliever Fernando Abad
- Jose Berrios in the bigs by June
- A .700 OPS for Kurt Suzuki
- Some positive regression for Danny Santana
- As little negative regression for Eddie Rosario as possible
- No more PEDs for Ervin Santana
Next: Twins Sign David Martinez and Others
Share your Christmas wishlist with us in the comments. (Or Kwanzaa list, Hanukkah, Winter Solstice, Festivus lists, etc…)