Brock Beauchamp

Yeah, this. Also, I didn't realize those stats were from a five year period (was reading on my phone). I'll have to take another look at them when I have more time.

Except that we're not. Ryan Doumit caught about 60 games last season. Jose Molina caught 102. The difference between the two is 155 runs. Expand those numbers to a 162 game season and you're looking at a difference of well over 300 runs. For the record, that is 60% of the runs allowed by the Tampa Bay Rays in 2012. From pitch framing.

Ding ding ding. Doumit played 71 games last season where he wasn't behind the plate. That's the value Ryan Doumit brings the team. In a perfect world, you're not relying on Ryan to sit behind the dish 60 times a year... But put him behind the plate 40 times a year combined with his slightly above average bat at DH and OF and you're looking at a valuable player to almost any team, particularly an AL team. On the other hand, Butera has zero value if he isn't behind the plate. Zero. It's not a "well, he's below average" argument, it's that he literally brings zero value to the team when he's not catching. Actually, you can make the argument that he's a negative value player when he's not catching because his bat is so below replacement level that he even detracts from the bench by simply existing.

Not this again. Hey, I believe there is a difference in run prevention in good catchers versus bad but that list is so comically slanted that no one can look at it and honestly believe it's anything close to accurate. On that list, the difference between Jose Molina and Ryan Doumit is 155 runs. 155 runs. Think about that for a second. On a good team, that's 1/4th of all runs allowed over the course of a season. All done by the catcher framing a few pitches. Nothing to do with the pitcher, the defense's range, pitches called, defensive shifts, preventing the running game, the ballpark... Just the catcher and where he puts his mitt. *head explodes*

Except that Butera is so completely one dimensional that any good he brings to the team is so overshadowed by the rest of his game that he's still a terrible baseball player. Doumit offsets his bad catching by playing a lot of DH and hitting at an .800 OPS (the average catcher hits around .680). Kubel's defense was bad but it was at a corner outfield spot where it had a minimal impact on the team and his hitting offset his deficiencies. On second thought, Drew Butera is closer to a zero-dimensional player because what he does well is so completely overshadowed by what he does at a historically awful level (basically, every part of his game that doesn't involve putting on a mask and crouching behind the plate). He's not just bad at hitting, he's one of the worst hitters in the history of Major League baseball.

Did you really just compare Doumit and Kubel to Drew Butera? Flawed players are just that, flawed. If they weren't, they'd be "superstars". Guys like Doumit and Kubel are vital to the success of an organization. You litter a lineup with those guys and throw in a Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer at the core of the team and you have a playoff contender. Complementary players are important, even if they have flaws. The key is that the player does something significant to help the team win. Kubel and Doumit do that with the bat. Butera... doesn't.

It has nothing to do with backing my opinion or not. Park Factor is nearly useless, period. It's too easily influenced by the home team's pitching staff and offense to be of any real value. I ignore it the same way I ignore wins or RBI. There are too many unbalanced team variables that influence the number and the metric does absolutely nothing to compensate for the fact that Roy Halladay >>>>>>>>> Sam Deduno.

I'm not as high on Hendriks as Seth but I think his ceiling is somewhere around a #3, more likely a #4. His lack of an out pitch is a little distressing. All in all, I think he'll be a serviceable pitcher and I don't worry too much about his struggles last season. He'll probably come around once he learns to trust his stuff instead of nibbling at corners and pitching scared.

Oh, I realize that. Jindal is just as crazy as the rest of the fringe lunatics the GOP has been rolling out in recent years. If the party had any kind of brain at all, they'd push Huntsman as hard as they can. He wraps up the Mormon vote and can deliver a large part of the Christian community based on his background. He can win independents by not denying climate change, evolution, and science in general. As the former ambassador to China, he has the foreign expertise to run the country. As a former governor, he has the executive experience to run the country. But, most importantly, he's whip-smart. And if you're running a GOP candidate against the likes of Clinton and Obama, you need a guy that can stand toe-to-toe with them and not be embarrassed by it. Of course, what did the GOP do with Huntsman during the last conventions? They shipped him as far away from the spotlight as possible. Good job, guys!

It is only two years but the conservative "slaughter" in Congress was largely built on the back of the House. The GOP can still win in the House. The more regionalized the election, the better they can do by customizing their particular brand of crazy to the local constituency. But expand that brand of thinking to the state or national level and they struggle. Urban centers simply aren't interested in listening to that kind of talk and moderate independents swing Democrat instead. And where the urban centers go, so go state (and therefore national) elections. Can the GOP get back the urban constituency? It's possible but they're going to have to do an epic house-cleaning, the likes of which I've never seen in my lifetime.

Smith went hard after Sano when everyone was skeptical that the Twins would be competitive in the international market. Now, the Twins have an elite prospect due to Smith opening the checkbook and allowing the scouting department to go after a guy they really wanted. Would JR have done the same thing? It's possible but there's nothing in his previous tenure or his current tenure to believe that's the case. That's what I liked about Smith. He wasn't afraid to go hard after the international market and make a real splash in an attempt to improve the franchise. He also drafted what many consider to be the Twins' third best prospect, Hicks. He also drafted Gibson, a ballsy but smart move after Kyle had dropped way down the list after breaking his arm (I think it was his arm). People seem to forget that the Twins minor league system improved (by a lot) under Smith's tenure as GM. It was under Ryan that the Twins were left in a spot where Nick Blackburn was a "top prospect" (though it was under Ryan that the Twins picked up Arcia). The Twins farm was really bad in 2007/2008 and its current strength is largely due to the work of Bill Smith, not Terry Ryan. Most of the guys we're excited about right now were acquisitions under Smith's stewardship. On the other hand, outside of the 2009/2010 offseason, Smith's handling of the Major League roster was abominable. Trading the Twins' two best pitchers before the 2008 season, moving Hardy for Hoey, Nishioka, etc... Nearly every move was a disaster. The Capps/Ramos trade was bad but it wasn't even close to Smith's worst move as GM. The Twins got some quality time out of Capps, more than they can say about Hoey, Nishioka, and the pile of garbage they got in return for Santana.

I consider that a mishandling of the major league roster.

Park factor based on runs is nearly useless. You can have the 94 Braves pitching half their games in Minute Maid Park versus the 2003 Tigers pitching in Dodger Stadium with no accounting for the wild variance in pitching quality, only that the 94 Braves gave up 300 less runs in Minute Maid than the Tigers did in Dodger Stadium. Therefore, Minute Maid Park is a pitching haven. The Twins pitching staff was awful last season. The Phillies pitching staff, while not overpowering, was still quite good. Both teams had similarly mediocre offenses. You don't think that huge disparity in pitching had something to do with the park factor and runs scored in each ballpark?

I've always been a fan of how Smith ran the minor league system.

You mean Jon Huntsman. Which has gotten him ostracized from the party. The GOP don't want no smarties makin the rest of the boys look bad.

The Philadelphia pitching staff gave up 210 less runs than the Twins and I don't think much of that was from the "help" provided by Citizen's Bank Park.

Minor league numbers don't really matter when the player has 2500 Major League plate appearances, with the last 1300 of them being of a respectable OPS+ (somewhere in the mid to high 80s). Even if Florimon was following Cedeno's footsteps (and there's no real reason to think that), Cedeno had 1200 plate appearances of pretty awful offense early in his career. Is that what the Twins want from Florimon over the next two seasons?

No, we don't. Florimon hasn't posted an OPS above .700 since A ball and never posted a season anywhere close to .800.

I also believe they're more of a 72-ish win team this season. Most of us also thought the same thing in 2008. The point is that if you get better players going into the season, you're improving your chances of being pleasantly surprised and becoming a contender. The Twins sacrifice nothing except money by pursuing one year contracts to players who improve the roster. What if the Twins went and got Marcum and Saunders instead of Pelfrey and Correia? That's probably 3-4 wins right there (on top of the 3-ish wins Correia and Pelfrey might provide over Deduno & Co). Add in a middle infielder that isn't hopeless with the bat and you're looking at a couple more wins there. Get lucky with Parmelee and Hicks and your offense improves by another win or two. It all adds up. If you have the money to spend and free agents are available on one or two year deals and it doesn't constrain your gameplan with the young kids, what is the downside to trying to eek out a few more wins in case something good happens during the course of the season? What happens if Morneau posts a .950 OPS season? What happens if Gibson pitches 120 innings of 3.00 ERA ball? If you have complementary players that don't suck helping those guys on days they're not performing/playing, you have a chance at this thing instead of hoping that every possible good outcome happens at once, lightning strikes three times, Jesus comes to earth and plays shortstop, and you still only manage to field an 82 win team.

On the other hand, he also gets to face AL East pitching all season long. Here's his spray chart. Would he fail miserably at Target Field? It's possible but given his tendency to pull the ball hard (four of his nine homers at Rogers to extreme right field), he could do okay for himself in the ballpark. Kelly Johnson Hit Chart | Tampa Bay Rays | Player Hit Chart | MLB Baseball | FOX Sports on MSN edit: meh, that spray chart is old. I hate it that Fox Sports always comes up first in Google searches for those things.

There's no such thing as a bad one year contract. I'm not talking about going out and giving Shaun Marcum or Ronny Cedeno a three year deal. I'm talking about exploiting guys who have fallen through the cracks and using them to bolster the weak spots on a roster. Particularly when there's a good chance that those guys and their one year deals will deliver more wins than the guy you did sign to a multi-year contract.

Do that two or three times, get lucky with a couple of the kids, and you're suddenly a fringe contender for the playoffs. But hey, nobody wants to be in that position. That is easily the worst and least thought-out argument I've seen perpetuated on these forums over the past several weeks. Why go and get better players at all? What's the point? All they do is help you win. I mean, come on. Winning is overblown anyway.

It's not minutiae when the team is coming off back-to-back last place finishes, is fielding the same waaaaaaaay below average middle infield, and those combined "minutiae" players add up to over 10% of payroll (over 15% if you toss Nick Blackburn on the list, over 20% if Nishioka hadn't bowed out of his contract). "Minutiae" adds up when you continue to pile up bad decisions.

Last season, these were the OPS+ numbers for Twins middle infielders (non Jamey Carroll edition): Brian Dozier: 67 OPS+ in 340 PAs Eduardo Escobar: 41 OPS+ in 49 PAs Pedro Florimon: 61 OPS+ in 150 PAs Now here are some bargain middle infielders who could have been nabbed for a song ($2m or under, or Jamey Carroll's 2014 option): Kelly Johnson: 2011, 111 OPS+ in 132 PAs / 2012, 84 OPS+ in 581 PAs Ronny Cedeno: 2011, 70 OPS+ in 413 PAs / 2012, 104 OPS+ in 186 PAs You really don't see any room for improvement there? There are two middle infield spots to play, after all. Picking up a second body who has proven the ability to hit Major League pitching is not an unreasonable request. If Dozier (possible) or Florimon (not so much) steps up, you're still allowed some flexibility instead of relying on someone who has a very good chance of being awful at the plate by sliding one of the vets into a utility role. If it allows you to bench Carroll if/when he gets old overnight, even better. Otherwise, you're forced to run Carroll out there nearly every night because he's still better than your second and third options (Escobar and Florimon). As it stands now, Carroll could post a 75 OPS+ and he'd still get his 401 PAs because the chance of Florimon being a viable option at short over the course of a season is virtually zero. Add in a Johnson or Cedeno and you don't have to lean on Jamey so heavily when Florimon and Escobar fail spectacularly. Also, what happens at third base if Plouffe fails?

Hey, any contract to Marcum would have tied up payroll for at least 180 days.