July 17, 2008, at 3:34 pm 
This was brought up by Neil in the Cup of Coffee.
My 2 cents:
It's okay for Liriano to be frustrated. He's a competitor, he's had success at the top level, and he wants to get back there. I get that. I certainly have had more irrational reactions when I was 24.
I don't like that Liriano's agent is talking about filing a grievance. I mean, come on. It has been suggested in the past that Garza and Bartlett were left in the minors to save dollars, but look at where they are now. The farther we get from that situation, the more it looks like the Twins simply didn't like what they brought to the table that much. I certainly disagreed, but it was a baseball disagreement and not a beancounting disagreement.
The Twins know that if they miss the playoffs, they are going to lose money. They're in a pennant race right now, and they want to win it. If they think that promoting Liriano is the best baseball move, they are going to do it.
If I'm representing the Twins in a hypothetical grievance hearing, just this season, I have Exhibit A and Exhibit B of players who they could have sent to Rochester for the whole year, gaining a lot of team control over them, and it could have been completely justifiable from a baseball standpoint. Going farther back, I have Exhibit C, Exhibit D, Exhibit E, and Exhibit F.
The Twins have their organizational beliefs. Some might even call them fetishes. If they think you play defense well, you're going to get promoted a lot faster. (This is probably why Gomez came up ahead of Span, why Bartlett was held back for so long, why Morneau was held back behind Mientkiewicz, why Mauer skipped AAA altogether, why Hunter was promoted with a suspect hitting record, etc., etc., etc.) And if you're a pitcher, you get promoted a lot faster if you throw strikes than if you have some questions with control. (See Garza v. Slowey, skipping Radke past AAA, keeping Santana in the bullpen, Bonser not promoted until he was out of options, etc.) Liriano's walks have been down lately, but minor league hitters are much less disciplined than major league hitters, so it's not necessarily a rock solid indication that his control is all the way back.
That Liriano isn't back yet indicates to me that the Twins aren't fully convinced that he can throw strikes consistently. Whether or not that's true, I don't know, but that's a baseball issue, not a matter of trying to take money out of Liriano's pocket. Liriano's going to be with the Twins soon enough and this whole thing will blow over then.
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