Minnesota Twins Daily Clips Monday, November 2, 2015

 Twins in AFL: Walker working on 'plate discipline'. MLB.com (Bollinger) p. 1  Saying farewell to 3 Twin Cities sports figures. Star Tribune p. 2  Turner, Garver are 2 minor league vying for Twins' attention. ESPN 1500 (Wetmore) p. 3  Making sense of the strangest four days in Minnesota sports. Minnesota Post (Borzi) p. 4  organization prospect discussion. SB Nation (Sickels) p. 6

Twins in AFL: Walker working on 'plate discipline'

Jonathan Mayo| MLB.com | October 30, 2015

Certain numbers stand out when looking at Adam Brett Walker II's offensive production.

On the positive side, of course, is the power and run production: Walker finished fourth in the Minor Leagues in 2015 with 31 home runs and third in RBIs with 106. The flip side of that coin is his total. Walker led the Minors with 195 K's in 502 Double-A Southern League at- bats. "I usually don't really look at my numbers, positive or negative," Walker said while playing for the Scottsdale Scorpions in the . "At the end of the year, I'll take a look at them and see where I was at. I just try to take it one day at a time. I'll have positive at-bats and whatever happens, happens."

What has happened is that Walker has led his league in home runs every season of his pro career, starting with his pro debut after being taken in the third round of the 2012 Draft. He's 83 home runs in his three full seasons of pro ball, showing at each level that his power will play. The real question has always been about whether the corner outfielder would make enough contact to be a consistent run producer at the highest level. His strikeout totals have gone up in each of those three full seasons as well, something Walker is trying to address in the Fall League.

"Always working in the box on plate discipline, that's a big key," Walker said. "I'm just working on getting pitches I can handle, laying off the bad ones."

He's managed to do that over the first few weeks of the AFL. He's still struck out 12 times in 31 at-bats, but he's also drawn five walks, leading to a .355/.459/.677 slash line heading into Thursday's games. He stood sixth in OPS and slugging percentage and eighth in on-base percentage. Walker sees it as building off lessons learned in Chattanooga during the 2015 regular season.

"I definitely feel like I'm moving in the right direction," said Walker, who added he's also working on his reads and routes in the outfield. "This past year went pretty well, but there's always work I need to put in. I'm going to keep trying to get that work in, getting more at-bats always helps. I'm just going to keep working so I can get to the big leagues."

Watching his organization-mates get there certainly adds fuel to that fire. At various stages of his Minor League career, Walker has played alongside , Eddie Rosario, , Danny Santana and , all of whom made varying degrees of contribution to the Twins' postseason push this season.

"It definitely motivates me," Walker said. "I was able to play with a couple of those guys, and to see them in the big leagues, helping the ballclub out, they're in the playoff hunt, it looked exciting. I was able to talk to some guys, and they just talked about how much fun it is. It's definitely motivating. I just have to keep working so I can join them.

"It's a great opportunity to be here. I'm honored they selected me to come out here and play. There's a lot of great competition. Hopefully, I end up moving up the ladder and can reach my goals."

Twins hitters in the Fall League

• Mitch Garver, C: When the Twins took Garver in the ninth round of the 2013 Draft, it was unclear whether he could stay behind the plate. One of the better college seniors from that class, he's shown he can, and the time in the AFL will help get him used to handling more advanced pitching while continuing to refine his advanced approach at the plate.

• Stuart Turner, C: Turner is another backstop from that 2013 Draft, one of four the Twins took that June. He can flat-out defend, but will need to find a little more bat -- something he's undoubtedly working on in Arizona -- if he wants to be more than just a glove-first backup.

Twins in the Fall League

• Nick Burdi, RHP: Burdi was supposed to come to the AFL a year ago, but didn't. Now he's there working on becoming more than thrower. Burdi finished the year in Double-A well, after scuffling upon his promotion, and he's using his time in Scottsdale to continue to get used to his move to the third base side of the rubber, a big reason for his improvement.

• Trevor Hildenberger, RHP: A 22nd round pick out of Cal in 2014, the 24-year-old reliever led the Twins in saves in 2015 with 17. But he's yet to pitch above A ball. Getting some AFL innings should help him prepare for the jump to the upper levels.

• Jake Reed, RHP: The 2014 fifth-rounder took Burdi's spot in the AFL last year and threw well, but he struggled in Double-A in 2015. He righted the ship with a move down to Fort Myers, and he's hoping this return engagement gets him back on the right track.

• , LHP: Rogers has been one of the most durable starters in the Twins' system, and he set a career high with 174 innings pitched during the 2015 regular season. He's fresh off five scoreless innings on Tuesday, with the AFL stint perhaps a springboard to a shot at the big league rotation.

Saying farewell to 3 Twin Cities sports figures

Star Tribune | November 1, 2015

Tom Izzo: Saunders was competitive but compassionate

What I enjoyed most about him was the guy never changed. From his playing days, to days when he won 60-some games, and then getting released — I never saw him change.

He was competitive but compassionate. And very innovative — innovative in his thinking. He wasn’t afraid to try things. The analytical things — which have become new and modern — Flip was talking about it six, seven years ago. Every new play he could come up with, he sold it. Every new gadget that came out, he bought it.

I used to like the 2-in-the-morning calls when he was watching the QVC channel and ordering some new gadget. He’d call me and I’d be telling him how dumb he is and why is he spending his money on that. If I lost a big game, it seemed like he was always calling me then. I swear he’d order more things than anyone I knew. I’m going to miss those times.

When there were rumors that he was looking at the Minnesota collegiate job and I said to myself, ‘Well, there goes Tyus Jones.’ We were recruiting him hard and I said, ‘If Flip gets the job, he’s going to clean up,’ just because of his personality and the passion he had for that city. He was very proud of Minneapolis — even though he was from Cleveland, Minneapolis was his home.

— Izzo coaches Michigan State and was a longtime friend of Saunders.

Krystal Kill and Tasha Hynes: Saturdays in fall will never be the same

It was so hard to see our dad, the toughest man we know, make the hardest decision of his life. So hard to see him walk away from what he loves — not just the love of the game, but the love for all the people who surround him every day. 2

It was hard to watch him tell people he loves that he can no longer give them 110 percent. Hard because football has been our life. Hard because we don’t know what Saturdays are going to be like. Hard because we won’t hear “Jer-ry, Jer-ry, Jer-ry” as we leave the field.

But football has blessed our family. It taught us to face challenges together and gave us strength. Most important, football gave us love. We watched Dad inspire millions of people. He became a father to players, helping them become undeniably great men. Along the way, he raised us and was a great husband.

Mom and Dad have given us an incredible journey, and we cannot thank them enough. But now we get to begin a new one, and add another brick to an awesome foundation. Thank you to everyone for being there through these tough times. We will always have our Gopher family in our hearts.

-- Krystal and Tasha are Jerry and Rebecca Kill’s daughters

Eddie Guardado: Hunter a great player, great friend - and better man

I don’t think I have enough words to describe what type of person Torii is. He never forgot where he came from — that’s an important thing — and anyone will tell you that.

He treats everyone like human beings. He treats his family so well. That’s what I like about him, that he’s such a family man.

When I came up, I had Kirby Puckett and Dave Winfield as guys I could look up to. Torii is like those guys. When I was playing, he was a little younger but we became real good friends. He’s come out to my celebrity bowling tournament, and he’s done a lot of good things for my foundation. You could not ask for a better friend.

All good things come to an end. He has nothing to be ashamed of. I told him that. But it’s tough to let go. Your body is telling you one thing, and your mind is telling you another. It’s tough.

I know he’s got to be around the team somehow, wherever it might be, the front office or the field. You can’t let someone like that go. He’s meant a lot to the organization. I’m honored to have been his teammate.

-- Guardado is a longtime friend and teammate of Hunter

Turner, Garver are 2 minor league catchers vying for Twins' attention

Derek Wetmore| ESPN 1500 | October 30, 2015

The Twins have struggled to draft, develop and keep catchers in the past decade, ever since emerged in the big leagues as a fresh- faced kid poised to win multiple batting titles. Of course, is a notoriously difficult position to fill, and the Twins wouldn't be the only organization guilty of being awfully thin behind the plate.

If you turn your attention south, to the Scottsdale Scorpions of the Arizona Fall League, there's a chance you might see their next catcher.

Among the seven prospects the Twins sent to the fall league are catchers Stuart Turner and Mitch Garver, who are working their way up the minor league ladder and are currently locked in what they've characterized as a respectful competition.

"It's a good competition. I think that spot going to be opening up in the next few years here and it's a good situation to be in when you have a chance to battle for a spot," Garver said after a game at Scottsdale Stadium. "Stuart's a heck of a catcher. It's not a competition between us, it's a competition to the game. We always want to play against the game, we don't want to play against each other. We're on the same team, we're in the same organization."

Kurt Suzuki is currently penciled in as the Twins starting catcher for 2016. He has a contract that will pay him $6 million next year and if he gets 485 plate appearances, it'll pay another $6 million the following year thanks to a vesting option. After a career year in his first season in Minnesota, Suzuki hit just .240/.296/.314 this year, a well-below-average offensive line for an everyday catcher.

Chris Herrmann, who is out of minor league options, was seldom used as a backup and batted just .146/.214/.272 when he did get a chance this 3 season.

Josmil Pinto, who has shown the profile of a great-hitting, so-so-with-the-glove catcher in the past, had a concussion in and had a down season when he was on the field in 2015.

So between Turner and Garver, the Twins might be looking for someone to step up behind the plate.

The Scorpions rotate through three catchers, so none of them get a ton of playing time. Garver currently has the highest batting average on the team, although he doesn't have that many plate appearances. He's begun the year 7-for-17 with a and six RBIs. Turner is 5-for-21 with a pair of doubles so far on the young season.

Turner has a reputation as a strong defensive catcher. He was part of the Southern League championship team in Chattanooga for the Twins' Double-A affiliate this year, where he hit .223/.322/.306 as a 23-year old.

Garver, meanwhile, is almost a full year older than Turner and was behind Turner on the minor league ladder this season. He hit .245/.356/.333 in High-A ball a year after tearing up the Midwest League in Low-A Cedar Rapids.

Neither player is viewed as a can't-miss prospect, but they represent the organization's next wave of talent. A few improvements and some good fortune might lead to either one of the catchers finding his way to the big leagues in Minnesota.

Whether or not the Twins address the position through free agency or trades this winter, the two young catchers are at the point in their careers where they'll need to start showing the organization the deserve to keep climbing the ladder.

"Even if it wasn't two catchers in the [Twins organization], we're always just playing to impress and try to play hard, help the other guys out, help the pitcher out," Turner said. "The least you can do is just play hard and show those guys you're here to play hard and have fun. And if you're rewarded with a good at-bat or anything like that, yeah it's always fine and dandy, but just giving it your all and see what happens."

Turner said that he feels as though he has the necessary physical skillset on defense, blocking pitches and controlling the opponent's running game. Now, he said, he's working on more intricate things like game calling and pitch sequencing, as he learns finer points of the game from those around him.

Garver said the Twins want him to work on his defense, which is one of the reasons in the AFL, a league brimming with young talent.

"This was a good defensive year for me but there are a few things I can still fine-tune and get better," Garver said. "As far as hitting goes, I want to be able to hit to all fields... I've been working with [hitting coach] Chad Allen, just putting good swings on balls in counts I can get ahead in."

Allen was the hitting coach for those league champion this season, and he's also working with the Scottsdale Scorpions, helping to keep an eye on the Twins prospects that are in the fall league.

In an organization that currently appears thin on catching, a step forward from Turner or Garver (or both) could help deepen the talent pool.

Making sense of the strangest four days in Minnesota sports

Pat Borzi | Minnesota Post | October 30, 2015

A few hours after University of Minnesota football coach Jerry Kill announced his resignation Wednesday, at a tearful press conference that left even the most cold-hearted observers aching for him, Gopher senior associate athletics director Dan O’Brien stopped by Kill’s office to find him in the midst of an hour-long snooze. On the saddest day of his professional life, a tortured Kill found a rare stretch of uninterrupted peace.

“I don’t remember the last time he took a long nap,” O’Brien said.

Kill’s resignation was the final stunner in a tumultuous four days that left many of us in the Minnesota sporting world in need of a little peace ourselves. The death of respected Timberwolves coach and executive Flip Saunders, the retirement of Twins star Torii Hunter, and the unexpected resignation of Kill meant saying goodbye to three adopted Minnesotans indelibly associated with their teams — and with us.

Sunday’s announcement from the Timberwolves that Saunders – equal parts basketball savant, impresario and raconteur – died of 4 complications from treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma left the entire organization shaken in a way I’ve only seen once, when budding Boston Celtics superstar Reggie Lewis collapsed and died on July 27, 1993, at age 27.

On Monday, the Timberwolves brought out interim coach Sam Mitchell, general manager Milt Newton and six players to speak with reporters, a proceeding that felt like a wake, and not an Irish one.

Almost four months to the day after Saunders introduced overall No. 1 draft pick Karl-Anthony Towns and hometown product Tyus Jones in the Mayo Clinic Square atrium, at a press conference filled with excitement and promise, the 60-year-old Saunders was gone, succumbing to a cancer that he and the team believed treatable. Saunders was such a force that even when he took a turn for the worse, many of his players and Timberwolves employees still believed he might walk through the door any day, bouncy and energetic, ready to tackle the next big task.

When point guard Ricky Rubio said, “What we have over here is a family, and we lost our dad yesterday,” he wasn’t being trite. It articulated Saunders’s importance to a historically flawed organization desperate to remake its public image. Owner Glen Taylor, who fired Saunders as coach in 2005, brought him back in 2013 to oversee the project, and Saunders — the only coach to take the Timberwolves to the playoffs — was still putting everything in place when he lost his life.

Saunders grew up in Ohio, but his seasons as a point guard for the Gophers in the 1970s bought him a ton of local goodwill that never expired. Saunders had a small-town way and touch that endeared him to people. Yet he wasn’t beneath calling into a radio talk show to take on a caller or host whose opinion he didn’t like.

Before a game last February, when Saunders ranted about a cheeky in-house video lampooning Kevin Love’s return to the Target Center, it sounded so contrived that I asked him, “What do you care? Love thought it was hilarious.”

His response: “It doesn’t matter if he thinks it’s funny. You have to decide what you want to do as an organization.”

Then he looked me right in the eye. “Would San Antonio do that? No. They wouldn’t do that.”

Saunders continued from there, and he was right: If you aspire to be a first-class organization, act like one. And a first-class organization would have celebrated one of its former All-Stars, not made him the butt of a gag.

Later, trying to make light of things, I got Saunders aside and whispered, “You know, San Antonio wouldn’t have screwed up his contract in the first place,” meaning the early opt-out clause that forced Saunders to trade Love to Cleveland.

“You’re right,” he said.

That was Saunders at his essence – passionate and relentless, yet willing to listen and respect another opinion.

Hunter’s retirement news came earlier than expected. He told several of us in September he was only “20 percent” sure he would be back. I didn’t believe him. Hunter talked the same way last October when Baltimore swept his Detroit Tigers in the Division Series before signing with the Twins two months later. I guessed he might look elsewhere, pursuing an elusive world championship, since the Twins couldn’t guarantee the 400 at-bats he wanted. Instead, he chose family over . Give the 40-year-old Hunter credit for knowing when it was time.

Players cited Hunter’s positive vibe as a key to overcoming the 1-6 start that left most Twins fans fearing another 90-loss fiasco. His post-game victory dance parties, augmented with disco lighting and a smoke machine, weren’t an original idea; Manager Joe Maddon conceived the concept in Tampa Bay at least three years earlier. Players loved it regardless. Hunter debuted Club Torii on April 17, the night Trevor Plouffe beat Cleveland with an 11th-inning walk-off homer, and it continued after home victories through the end of the season.

Some fans took issue with Hunter’s political views, particularly his view of same-sex marriage, which he opposes on religious grounds. That’s the one topic he wouldn’t discuss all season, on or off the record. Otherwise, Hunter turned his locker area into an open door for teammates and reporters. In a clubhouse with so many young players of different ethnicities, Hunter was the cool uncle everybody gravitated to. That’s tough to replace. Better for him to go now than risk a Brett Favre, staying a little too long, tarnishing a memorable farewell.

Minnesotans accepted and celebrated Saunders, Hunter and Kill because they embraced and celebrated Minnesota. They espoused our best qualities — hard work, grit, passion and determination — without acting like they were better than anyone else. That’s tough to pull off.

Hunter left the first time for money — who could blame him? — then returned to be a mentor to Aaron Hicks and Byron Buxton in the same 5 way Kirby Puckett was for him. He paid it back, and forward.

Kill introduced accountability to a program known more for entitlement than performance. The task of returning the Gophers to Big Ten prominence proved so monumental that Kill, an epileptic and a cancer survivor, jeopardized his health to see it through. Here’s hoping Tracy Claeys gets the chance to finish Kill’s work.

We’ll miss them all. God works in his own way, and I can imagine Saunders at the pearly gates, arguing with St. Peter for more time. I never accepted the Timberwolves-are-cursed storyline, dismissing it as an excuse for the franchise’s serial incompetence. Now, with cancer claiming Saunders and visionary Lynx chief operating officer Conrad Smith less than three years apart, I’m not so sure.

We will see Hunter and Kill again, Hunter likely as a special assistant to Twins general manager Terry Ryan, Kill perhaps as the master fund-raiser Minnesota lacked since Bob McNamara died last year. Kill walked away two days before the groundbreaking for the Athletics Village he pushed for, but at least he walked away with his life ahead of him. In a week filled with melancholy, that’s a victory to cherish.

Minnesota Twins organization prospect discussion

John Sickels | SB Nation | October 31, 2015

Today we begin our major project for the off-season: the Top 20 Prospect Lists for 2016 for each major league organization. This is part of working on the 2016 Baseball Prospect Book; we will start taking pre-orders for the book in a few days and I will have an introductory post for the book at that time.

The first step is the yearly community organizational discussion, beginning with the Minnesota Twins. By tradition, the first three teams to be analyzed are the Twins, the Atlanta Braves, and the . After that, teams are selected basically on my whims, although we'll alternate between leagues. We will select the New York Mets for the fourth team this year.

Basically, with this process you get to see how the sausage is made, both for the book and for the generation of the prospect lists per each organization. The process begins in October, then accelerates in November, December, and January, completing the lists here at Minor League Ball, then followed by the book release scheduled this year for March 1st.

So let's get started today and talk about the Minnesota Twins farm system and the general state of the organization. Some possible points for discussion include, but are not limited to:

***The Twins finished a surprising 83-79 under first year manager Paul Molitor. Do you take the higher or lower on that record for 2016?

*** is a power beast. Do you think he was over his head in any way? Can he improve further, or is what you see what you get going forward?

***Will Eddie Rosario improve his patience at the plate? Would it harm him to do so?

***Can Danny Santana and Kennys Vargas get back on track?

***Who is the next ? And what do you expect from Trevor May if he's used as a starter?

***As always, feel free to discuss sleepers or overlooked prospects in the system.

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