Minnesota Twins GM Terry Ryan addressed lots of news today, starting first and foremost with the demotion of top prospect Byron Buxton.
Buxton demoted
“Defense: okay. Range: great. Everything defensively, I’d say, is what we were hoping to get out of him,” he said. “But unfortunately we’ve gotta have more productivity out of the bat.
“The simple response to that is that there just wasn’t enough contact.”
Buxton hit .156/.208/.289 in 49 plate appearances this season. He is in his age 22 season.
Like Molitor, Ryan is happy that Buxton was not taking his bad plate appearances on the field with him.
“It’s rare,” he said. “But I think it’s a little different in the outfield. Maybe if you’re looking at a shortstop or an infielder it might be more of a problem, but he did a good job of separation.”
“The right thing for him is to go down there,” he added.
“There is no question that the makeup and the work ethic and being the type of teammate you’re looking for, he’s got a lot of those things. A lot of people are rooting for him, it’s not like he’s taking an approach here where he’s not trying — he certainly was.”
Asked if Buxton, who already has 24 strikeouts in 17 games, is going to be strikeout prone throughout his career, Ryan dismissed the notion.
“I don’t think he’ll be a strikeout guy throughout his career,” he said. “I think he’ll be okay.”
“And I know it would be tough for me to justify that right now,” he said with a slight laugh. “I don’t know what percentage, but he’s certainly a 50 percentile (49 percent K rate). That’s a lot. Way too much.
“But I believe that he will correct it. I don’t think that is his history.” Buxton’s minor league stats can be found here.
Injuries
“Plouffe’s doing well; Perkins is getting better,” said Ryan of two players on the disabled list.
“Both of them are getting better. Plouffe’s certainly getting to the point now where he’s gonna … he’ll probably start taking soft toss and tee work here pretty soon.”
Ervin Santana is battling back spasms, but he says they are not lingering.
“I’ve never known back spasms to be lingering myself, but I guess you could always worry about that in any scenario,” he said. “”I don’t know if it’s another day or two days or four days. But we’re gonna try to get through it. One thing’s for sure, I’m going to try out these new sleepify sleep solutions that I’ve been hearing of, I’ll try anything once if it will help.”
He suggested that it could be related to his mattress. “That happens.”
The team is at 14 pitchers, and he says that he would like to get back to 12. Duffey hangs in limbo because they can’t option him because he’s hurt, and the team doesn’t know Ervin Santana’s status.
“He pitched well yesterday, for the time being. But there’s a lot of moving parts in this whole ordeal here. You get a lot of things going,” said Ryan.
“I think it takes some shape here in the next two days, I would think. And that would get us to the off day.”
As far as the perceived short bench, which only includes John Ryan Murphy and Eddie Rosario tonight, Ryan didn’t seem concerned and said the roster was in flux.
“Ehh… I don’t see that,” he said. “I know. It’s just like yesterday, if we had won that game in nine innings, you wouldn’t have said a word about the bench or anything. But we didn’t.
“But we’ve got enough flexibility. The only reason we’d have some problems is if somebody got hurt. But as far as moving guys around, we can do that.”
Alex Meyer’s role
I just saw him out there (in Triple-A), and he pitched well,” he said. “He’s pitched well three different times as a starter. We’ve talked about this back and forth, and how it’s gonna play itself out. But the guy has pitched five, six, seven innings, and he was pretty good.”
“He’s got a fastball, he’s got a curveball and he’s got a change-up. All of them are pretty good pitches,” he added. “So he succeeded out there, and we brought him up, and we got some issues with our starters: Duffey just got hit, Santana’s got back spasms. So we’re trying to protect ourselves.”
David Murphy released
The Twins granted David Murphy his release. The 34-year-old can sign with another team if he so chooses, but he doubts that he will. “He took decent at-bats the last couple of games, played decent in the outfield. Was healthy.”
Ryan said that John Hicks was dropped from the 40-man to add Murphy. “Yeah, I would say that’s fair,” he said.
Asked if he should have talked to him first, he said: “Yeah, that would have been helpful. But I didn’t.”
As far as the roster spot, Ryan said, “You can always use a roster spot. It’s not like we won’t have this happen again.”
