5 months of.... this?

[Badsmerf]

Are we really going to go through 5 months of pulling random names and trade ideas out of our asses? I don't even want to read on topic like that. Baseball is so difficult to guess on. Once FA opens and things start to happen I can understand it. But man, this is going to be a long winter if this continues.

[Nick Nelson]

If there are particular things you'd like to discuss, you're welcome to get the conversation started. Can't help but notice that this is the only thread you've started all month...

[70charger]

It's better than 5 months of bitching about 5 months of this type of thread...

[kab21]

Are we really going to go through 5 months of pulling random names and trade ideas out of our asses? I don't even want to read on topic like that. Baseball is so difficult to guess on. Once FA opens and things start to happen I can understand it. But man, this is going to be a long winter if this continues.

 

It's what we do every year...

[old nurse]

It is entertaining to have the impossible trades and signings brought up.

[PseudoSABR]

Smerf, I'm right there with you, but it's important to recognize this is TD's first full-fledged offseason. Inexperienced posters are going to be trigger happy; let's face it, many of us have been spoiled by the intellectual etiquette of some Twins fans over the last decade. If intelligent people keep posting (and even taking initiative), the rest will catch on.

[Badsmerf]

Nick, I will try to come up with some topics that elicit interesting discussion in the next few weeks, sorry I blew up. Its just frustrating to beat horses down all week. On a lighter note, sluts rule.

[Brock Beauchamp]

Yeah, it's frustrating. Those of us who have spent the past ten years on Twins forums know the procedure... As Pseudo mentioned, some of the new posters may be a bit trigger-happy. But that's okay, they'll soon figure it out. TD is a new place and we're just getting our feet under us.

 

On the other hand, this "dead zone" only lasts for two months, not five. Once we get near the winter meetings, we'll start seeing real action from front offices and that will generate a lot of quality conversation. Right now, there just isn't much going on.

 

And remember, the Offseason Handbook releases in less than a week (if you pre-order). If that doesn't generate quality conversation, nothing will. There's A LOT of content in that thing.

[Jeremy Nygaard]

And remember, the Offseason Handbook releases in less than a week (if you pre-order). If that doesn't generate quality conversation, nothing will. There's A LOT of content in that thing.

 

I'm excited to see mine show up. Though many ideas I've had to write about, I've decided to wait until the Handbook comes out because I'm sure it's covered in there and covered better than I could do.

 

Knowing it comes out the first day of the World Series has me looking forward to the World Series.

[Brock Beauchamp]

Knowing it comes out the first day of the World Series has me looking forward to the World Series.

 

The Handbook is the only reason I'm looking forward to the Series.

 

In the Division Series, I was cheering for Cincinnati, Oakland, Baltimore, and Washington. It was a pretty awful baseball week for me.

[LimestoneBaggy]

Sorry to hijack your thread, but I can't help but wonder if this is thought process is causing the forums to be exclusionary. I have to admit, far-fetched trade possibilities don't interest me to a huge degree, but posts like this make newbies to this site just choose to sit out. In other words, by pushing the concept that the initiates do not have intelligent thought, you are likley holding back the learning process and potentially excluding people who have thoughts that interest you.

[Mike Sixel]

If you are not interested in a thread do not read it. Discouraging discussions in general seems like an odd request for a message board. I do not understand why you would make this request.

[Winston Smith]

If you are not interested in a thread do not read it. Discouraging discussions in general seems like an odd request for a message board. I do not understand why you would make this request.

 

Amen!!

[Brock Beauchamp]

Sorry to hijack your thread, but I can't help but wonder if this is thought process is causing the forums to be exclusionary. I have to admit, far-fetched trade possibilities don't interest me to a huge degree, but posts like this make newbies to this site just choose to sit out. In other words, by pushing the concept that the initiates do not have intelligent thought, you are likley holding back the learning process and potentially excluding people who have thoughts that interest you.

 

Honestly, that was the biggest issue with BYTO and why we're taking a very different approach with TD.

 

In any forum community (and god knows, I've been a mod/admin in plenty of them), there are differing levels of knowledge and experienced posters are going to get frustrated with the less experienced ones. Here at TD, we've worked pretty hard (and I'd like to think we've been successful) to bridge that gap and not allow long-time users to trample the inexperienced posters. But that frustration is going to be there in any community and once in awhile, posters are going to vent. It's just part of the cycle and outside of imposing Draconian rules on the forum, there's no getting around that. To counter it, we've imposed somewhat strict rules on calling posters names, implying they are stupid, and bitching that certain threads are a waste of everyone's time. I think we've provided a pretty friendly arena for new posters to learn about baseball. It doesn't mean they won't take their lumps while getting up to speed but they won't be insulted repeatedly in the process of doing so and possibly be chased off before they become part of the community.

 

Looking around the baseball world, I think we've done just that with TD. Some of the old BYTOers don't like the more "friendly" nature of TD but that's just how it goes when you jump into a new community with new rules. On the other hand, BYTO was dying because of its no-holds-barred approach to posting. No one could penetrate that community because of how vicious it could be to new users. I think we've reached a fine middle ground with TD. It's not cork-on-the-fork stupid like RubeChat (I mean, honestly... just reading that site for more than a few minutes feels like I'm exposing myself to brain cancer) but it's not "grab the pitchforks and skewer this guy for even mentioning RBI" like BYTO.

 

It's a fine line to walk and we're still learning as we go. But given how the community has started to coalesce in under a year, I think we're off to a fine start.

[Jim Crikket]

Yeah all these silly random trade ideas are terrible. Let's just wait until Terry Ryan actuall DOES something. Then we can all come here and read the comments where 75% of them will be trashing anything/everything he and the Twins do! Now that's what I call interesting.

 

I admit that most of the new thread topics right now hold little interest to me, either. You know what I do about that? I don't read them. Simple, yet for me, effective. At the same time, it would never occur to me to try to tell those who do find that kind of thing to be a worthwhile use of their time that they should not do so.

[DaveW]

Are we really going to go through 5 months of pulling random names and trade ideas out of our asses? I don't even want to read on topic like that. Baseball is so difficult to guess on. Once FA opens and things start to happen I can understand it. But man, this is going to be a long winter if this continues.

 

Yeah, I get it, you don't like Mark DeRosa, now grow up and move on.

 

In all seriousness though, there have only been 1 real trade thread thus far (Josh Johnson) and I started a thread on Chavez and Liriano as well, so I guess I am to blame? But to be honest there was no other new topic on this board other then "Should the Twins trade Mauer?" (This has been beaten to death and its obvious it won't happen)

 

 

The one thing that bugs me is that people feel the need to start there own threads/articles to simply give us there ten point plan to fix the Twins this off-season, to be frank I really don't care to sort through 10 different "articles" by guys who aren't part of the core edit group, I think someone should start a "post your perfect off-season plan here" and keep them all in one thread.

 

In general I think there are to many "article" threads that pop up anyways, since many of the non core edit group (nick, bonnes, seth, parker) actually rarely promote discussion. But this seems to be more of an issue in the general baseball chat, I think a simple "awards" thread would be fine instead of multiple people blogging about who they think deserves the MVP award or what not.

[snepp]

In the Division Series, I was cheering for Cincinnati, Oakland, Baltimore, and Washington. It was a pretty awful baseball week for me.

 

You weren't the only one, I drew a big 0-fer as well.

[Jim Crikket]

In all seriousness though, there have only been 1 real trade thread thus far (Josh Johnson) and I started a thread on Chavez and Liriano as well, so I guess I am to blame? But to be honest there was no other new topic on this board other then "Should the Twins trade Mauer?" (This has been beaten to death and its obvious it won't happen)

 

See and I thought it was my blog post (that got promoted to "article" status) about Mauer that was "to blame." But it turns out, it was your fault!

 

Based on the rest of your comment, however, it appears that you would prefer I and other "non-core" writers keep all of our thoughts to ourselves so we don't keep beating those dead horses you're concerned about. You really might want to consider skipping TD altogether in November because, if they follow the pattern of the past couple of years, once their Offseason Handbook comes out with their own "blueprints" for addressing the Twins' needs, the "core" are going to specifically invite/ask the rest of us to publish our own "blueprints." It sounds like that's exactly what you don't want to see here.

 

And unless I really misread things from the onset, one of the primary goals of "the core group" in setting up TD was to provide an avenue for other bloggers and wannabe bloggers to get their stuff read and discussed by more people.

[Jim Crikket]

In the Division Series, I was cheering for Cincinnati, Oakland, Baltimore, and Washington. It was a pretty awful baseball week for me.

 

You weren't the only one, I drew a big 0-fer as well.

 

Add me to the shutout list, as well. It's so bad that last night I found myself halfway rooting for the rain.

[DaveW]

In all seriousness though, there have only been 1 real trade thread thus far (Josh Johnson) and I started a thread on Chavez and Liriano as well, so I guess I am to blame? But to be honest there was no other new topic on this board other then "Should the Twins trade Mauer?" (This has been beaten to death and its obvious it won't happen)

 

See and I thought it was my blog post (that got promoted to "article" status) about Mauer that was "to blame." But it turns out, it was your fault!

 

Based on the rest of your comment, however, it appears that you would prefer I and other "non-core" writers keep all of our thoughts to ourselves so we don't keep beating those dead horses you're concerned about. You really might want to consider skipping TD altogether in November because, if they follow the pattern of the past couple of years, once their Offseason Handbook comes out with their own "blueprints" for addressing the Twins' needs, the "core" are going to specifically invite/ask the rest of us to publish our own "blueprints." It sounds like that's exactly what you don't want to see here.

 

And unless I really misread things from the onset, one of the primary goals of "the core group" in setting up TD was to provide an avenue for other bloggers and wannabe bloggers to get their stuff read and discussed by more people.

 

I didn't mean to pick on your "mauer trade" article, and honestly your blogs have the most substance of any of the non core ones, and often times I prefer yours.

 

It just seems that sometimes when we come to the forum 70% of the threads are "articles", it's especially cumbersome in the general baseball thread as it really doesn't create any discussion and just clutters things up. (Again do we really need multiple "awards" winners threads/articles?). I'm not saying articles have no place, I just think people should begin to focus more on QUALITY then quantity before they hit the "submit" button on the blog page. Other wise it potentially becomes bleacher report 2.0 (sans 180 mil valuation and slide shows) which is not a good thing

 

Also, I never ripped TD or what they are doing here I just was suggesting they should try to make the forums more discussion based and less cluttered with articles in the forums, especially articles which have no real substance, so your snarky suggestion of "skipping TD altogether" is a little ridiculous.

[TheLeviathan]

Also, I never ripped TD or what they are doing here I just was suggesting they should try to make the forums more discussion based and less cluttered with articles in the forums, especially articles which have no real substance, so your snarky suggestion of "skipping TD altogether" is a little ridiculous.

 

Yeah, this is an actual problem. Some of the articles are 4-6 paragraphs that could have better been said in one or two sentences to generate discussion. It has gotten to the point that I don't even click on articles because they have, by and large, been pretty bare bones of content. To me, articles for the sake of articles aren't going to promote the forum - good articles will. And sometimes, when the content is a bit more dry, it's ok just to wait until there is more fodder for thought. The problem got more and more evident as the season bled out and it's a friggin epidemic of worthless articles these days.

[DaveW]

Also, I never ripped TD or what they are doing here I just was suggesting they should try to make the forums more discussion based and less cluttered with articles in the forums, especially articles which have no real substance, so your snarky suggestion of "skipping TD altogether" is a little ridiculous.

 

Yeah, this is an actual problem. Some of the articles are 4-6 paragraphs that could have better been said in one or two sentences to generate discussion. It has gotten to the point that I don't even click on articles because they have, by and large, been pretty bare bones of content. To me, articles for the sake of articles aren't going to promote the forum - good articles will. And sometimes, when the content is a bit more dry, it's ok just to wait until there is more fodder for thought. The problem got more and more evident as the season bled out and it's a friggin epidemic of worthless articles these days.

Exactly, I appreciate people want to break into blogging or whatever, just keep in mind that you often only get one shot at many readers, and if your first or majority of articles are lacking substance/boring you basically have lost that reader forever.

 

I employ 7 writers for my "day" job, 3 of which are full time. Myself and my partner have told them this multiple times, we'd much rather have our writers pumping out 5 great articles a day then 10 mediocre articles.

[ThePuck]

Smerf, I'm right there with you, but it's important to recognize this is TD's first full-fledged offseason. Inexperienced posters are going to be trigger happy; let's face it, many of us have been spoiled by the intellectual etiquette of some Twins fans over the last decade. If intelligent people keep posting (and even taking initiative), the rest will catch on.

 

Is the assumption that new people here don't know baseball when they get here and therefore aren't intellectual enough at the beginning? If I'm misunderstanding your post, and some other's posts saying things along those same lines, please let me know. Cause some of us were just posting elsewhere for many years and heard about this great place and came over.

[James]

In the Division Series, I was cheering for Cincinnati, Oakland, Baltimore, and Washington. It was a pretty awful baseball week for me.

 

You weren't the only one, I drew a big 0-fer as well.

Me too. Many of my friends that don't post on TD were cheering for the same teams as well.

[Jim Crikket]

Also, I never ripped TD or what they are doing here I just was suggesting they should try to make the forums more discussion based and less cluttered with articles in the forums, especially articles which have no real substance, so your snarky suggestion of "skipping TD altogether" is a little ridiculous.

 

I honestly didn't mean my suggestion that you skip TD in November to be snarky, though looking back and reading it I can understand that it reads that way. I apologize.

 

I was just pointing out that in the pre-TD days, the TwinsCentric guys have followed up the release of their GM Handbook with "blueprints" for fixing the Twins in the offseason and have encouraged other writers to come up with our own blueprints, as well. In other words, everyone putting out their own "ten point plan," which is what you indicated you didn't want to see. Those things, and the discussions they lead to, have historically dominated much of the discussion in our respective separate blogs during November. So my comment was intended to be more "tongue in cheek" than "snark," but regardless, I apologize for the tone.

[powrwrap]

Are we really going to go through 5 months of pulling random names and trade ideas out of our asses? I don't even want to read on topic like that. Baseball is so difficult to guess on. Once FA opens and things start to happen I can understand it. But man, this is going to be a long winter if this continues.

 

On a scale of 1 to 10 reading about potential trade ideas at this time of the year is about a 2 for me, so I feel your pain. The only thing less interesting to me is reading threads about who's going to be in the Twins starting lineup in 2015. Talk about a difficult guess and a waste of electrons.

[Badsmerf]

Smerf, I'm right there with you, but it's important to recognize this is TD's first full-fledged offseason. Inexperienced posters are going to be trigger happy; let's face it, many of us have been spoiled by the intellectual etiquette of some Twins fans over the last decade. If intelligent people keep posting (and even taking initiative), the rest will catch on.

 

Is the assumption that new people here don't know baseball when they get here and therefore aren't intellectual enough at the beginning? If I'm misunderstanding your post, and some other's posts saying things along those same lines, please let me know. Cause some of us were just posting elsewhere for many years and heard about this great place and came over.

 

That is not it at all. A draw-back of less than casual fans is they assume players can be swapped like RBI Baseball trades. I'm certainly not calling anyone out in particular in this thread (dave, i gave you **** about DeRosa because I've given you **** every offseason for the last 4 years). Why it is said that "new" posters are guilty of this is because they haven't spent enough time on forums to know that it takes more than one team needs a pitcher and one needs a hitter so lets swap! Most on here know that.

 

I don't mean to be elitist about this, and am not calling individual posters or threads out. I'm just saying lets collectively bring good ideas and non-redundant topics to discussion. People can post what they want and talk about what they want so it shouldn't make much difference what I want anyway, just sayin.

[ThePuck]

That is not it at all. A draw-back of less than casual fans is they assume players can be swapped like RBI Baseball trades. I'm certainly not calling anyone out in particular in this thread (dave, i gave you **** about DeRosa because I've given you **** every offseason for the last 4 years). Why it is said that "new" posters are guilty of this is because they haven't spent enough time on forums to know that it takes more than one team needs a pitcher and one needs a hitter so lets swap! Most on here know that.

 

I don't mean to be elitist about this, and am not calling individual posters or threads out. I'm just saying lets collectively bring good ideas and non-redundant topics to discussion. People can post what they want and talk about what they want so it shouldn't make much difference what I want anyway, just sayin.

 

I appreciate the way you feel in regards to what I said, but you didn't post anything that would suggest you felt that way...at least I didn't see it. I quoted PseudoSABR's post to you, because his seemed to suggest that new people here don't know baseball when they get here and therefore aren't intellectual to understand the nuances of the game on and off the field. Some others seemed to agree.

 

While I can certainly appreciate the fact that most of you seasoned posters on this site have gotten comfortable with each other's level of knowledge of the game, I'm not sure new people coming in can't be right there as well.

 

I may have misunderstood his post, but it doesn't seem that way...and that kind of thinking can turn new people off.

[ALessKosherScott]

Sign Conseco!

[DaveW]

Sign Conseco!

 

plz start new thread jewscott