Friday, February 15, 2019

Here Lies the Mauer Critic


The Minnesota Twins have kicked off Spring Training with pitchers and catchers reporting. Position players have begun to trickle into camp and soon games will commence. One noticeable name will not be in the clubhouse this season however, and that’s Joe Mauer. Fortunately for his critics, this ends the seemingly endless nightmare of a contract that was seen as an albatross for the organization. Although moves could still be made, this is an opportunity to put the Mauer critics to rest.

As outlined by the tweet pinned at the top of my Twitter feed, Joe Mauer went underpaid in terms of valuation over the course of his career. While winning batting titles and an MVP award, the hometown hero was making peanuts. Even after the megadeal, Minnesota came out nearly $100 million ahead when it comes to dollars dispersed. Even with Joe taking a below market deal to stay in Minnesota, those who chastise him will never wrap their head around the career altering injuries that drastically changed his trajectory over the final half-decade.

There’s little reason to continue arguing against those stubborn enough to believe that Mauer was anything but an asset to the Twins organization. If that was the intent here, we could’ve stopped long ago. Instead, there’s always been the premise that it was Joe’s deal hampering Minnesota from making any moves of consequence. Despite an organization-record salary bill in 2018, maybe more could’ve been done in Mauer wasn’t around. Right now, I’m here to tell you that’s wrong, and so are the Twins.

With few free agents of consequence remaining available on the open market, Derek Falvey and Thad Levine erasing the near $25 million deficit between spend in 2018 and 2019 seems like a longshot at best. Instead of this false reality that Mauer’s $23 million was preventing the Twins from spending more, we’re dealing with a scenario in which Minnesota is spending $25 million less and pocketing the surplus from Joe’s departure.

I’d assume anyone thinking through a logical train of thought would not conclude that Mauer not being on the Twins would open doors to more dollars for better players. A more logical reality has always been that those things are mutually exclusive. Mauer was never hampering the Twins possible expenditures, but we’re also now seeing the reality that this organization simply isn’t willing to utilize resources when the avenue is available to them either.

For the first time maybe ever, the “Cheap Pohlad’s” narrative has run, but Mauer critics end up looking just as silly in all of this.

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