gleaming and the geek gleaming and the geek and welcome to the gleeman of the geek podcast this week we are coming to you again from the big ten in hopkins

uh and i'm having a surly furious god i lovely. He's back to drinking. All the mockery from myself and all the listeners have gotten him back. I don't know. Are you back on the wagon or off the wagon? I don't know how that works. That's what was turned the tide. I couldn't disappoint you. I could tell it. It was really getting to you. But I want you to know now he's doing both.

Now he's got water and beer at the same time. That's because I'm thirsty. I went through a 32-ounce water on the way here, just driving here. Like 15 minutes in my house, I went through a 32-on-on-off. So that tells you, if we break in the middle, that's a bathroom break, folks. That's what you'll hear.

Which, by the way, we are probably going to do.

We're going to try breaking this podcast into, well,

since if they go, you know, truly like another hour and a half, we're going to try break into like three podcasts. We're going to try and actually have some structure to that. We're going to see if that works. Let us know what you think about that. you know, either in the comments section or via Twitter that's at Gleeman and Geek or, you know, shoot us an email, however you want to do it. But make sure that you let us know what you think about us dividing into three different podcasts. We've gotten some mixed feedback on that. We've got some mixed feelings on that. So let us know what you think. So this week... There's a little bit of news. I mean, the past few weeks, we haven't had much, you know, in the way of actual concrete news to discuss. Right. But they're, you know, today, the big news was that they officially announced they're going to decline Nathan's option, which is something we've been talking about for a while now, assuming that. Joe Kirsten actually, I think, brought up the other day that, you know, there were some baseball people who thought maybe that would, you know, the possibility they might pick that up. We've actually toyed with that idea about two, three weeks ago. Then I took a look at the other closers, and I said, well, you're right. I almost had you in a bet there.

I almost locked in some more money.

You almost did. But you snuck out of that. You wriggled free of that bet. But yeah, so instead of $12.5 million, they give him a $2 million buyout, which means he's an outright free agent. They have no rights to him compensation-wise or anything. Right on. And they're free to, it sounds like they're going to try to negotiate a lesser salary. My thought is that if they came to him and said, we'd like to resign you, he's immediately going to say to them he'd like a two-year deal. Now, I mean, why not? Well, yeah. Because what's the worst that happens as they say, no, he hits the free agent market, and then they try to figure something out. And I wouldn't be shocked if he could get a two-year deal on the free agent market, to be honest with you. I mean. Right. Well, it all depends, obviously, what the annual salary is going to be. I'm obviously more impressed with his statistics over the second half of the season than you were. But let me just preface this.

It's a deep reliever market.

It's especially a deep reliever market for closers.

So let me just walk through some of the names.

These are right-handed, right-handed closers out there.

Jonathan Papelbone, Heath Bell, Ryan Madsen, Francisco Cordero, Joe Nathan, Frank Francisco, Bradledge, and maybe Jonathan Broxton, if you want to include him. Oh, and Matt Capps. I'm sure you want to include him. Proven Closer Matt Caves. Proven Closer Matt Caps. Well, and the point I would make that I always make is that closer is not a position.

So really, it's even deeper than that because there are a lot of quality set-up man. Jason Fraser might be out there depending on whether they do that. Octavio Dotel is going to be out there, I think. I mean, after that, you get a little bit of a fallout. At the very least, there are 10 to 12 guys who you could conceivably sign to a deal and make your closer and not feel horrible about it. Now the other sign of that is that there's also a lot of those closures are coming from teams that might be looking for closers. So it might be that we are playing musical chairs and that I haven't taken a long look at the supply versus the demand aspect of it. But that's a pretty big demand. That's a pretty big supply. I think that's true to some extent, but there definitely are fewer teams with an obvious hole at closer than there are potential closers. So listen, one of the things that we're going to do in the podcast today is we're going to each walk through our blueprint. So we'll talk a little bit more about that a little bit. But we're also going to talk a little bit about what we think the twins are going to do for during the offseason, I think. So I don't know if I want to hit this now or hit this later. But what do we think? What does the percentage chance, Joe Nathan, just comes back? That's a tough one. Give it a one-to-one vendor chance here. I was, I think this was on Twitter. Phil Mackey tweeted that there's some talk that Nathan wants to play for a winner. Now, this will piss off Twins fans if you suggest that they're potentially not a winner next year. But, I mean, this whole time, whether it's Kadai or Koubel or Nathan and all these guys,

we've been talking about should they re-sign them, we haven't really talked about the fact that, you know, maybe these guys aren't that gung-ho about resigning with the twins. I'm sure they're not against it. I haven't gotten that sense at all. but I don't know that Kadai and Kubu and Nathan are dying to resign with the twins necessarily. Yeah, but although, I also think you've got to be careful about anything that's said in the middle of a contract negotiation period. Like, for instance, you know, Nathan is sitting there saying, you know, I wouldn't mind leaving. I wouldn't mind looking for, well, of course, that's what he wants to be able to say because he's trying to, he's trying to get them to pick up that option. You know, he wants them to not think, oh, well, I'm absolutely.

Listen, you guys can treat me any way you want and I'll come back, you know, like the pathetic ex-girlfriend that, you know, or the manic ex-boyfriend.

If his agent is any kind of agent, he had to have known they weren't going to pick up the options.

Absolutely.

They weren't going to pick up the options. Absolutely. They weren't going to talk to Twins.

Although, you know, in interviews with him, even like this last week, he was sort of like, well, I don't know if they're going to pick it up or not. You're sort of like, come on. You're not letting any cats on the bag here, Joe, when you say that they're probably not going to pick it on. Which makes me wonder how much communication there is between an agent and a client.

I mean, technically, I guess he doesn't need to know about that. But he has to sort of sense it, you would think, unless, you know. It might be the agent just sort of letting him down easy or something like that. Or maybe he's, maybe Nathan's, they believe that they should consider picking it up.

Maybe he would feel slighted. I don't know. It's a lot of speculation. So back to the question, though. Don't dodge the question. I would say it's not, it's definitely not higher than 50-50 that he'll return. So you think it's less than 50-50? Yeah, 50-50 or less. I mean, I don't see why it would be higher than 50-50.

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