Brock Beauchamp

I think that's what you meant to say. True. Short and to the point.

Don't forget the part where he is owed $48m for those three seasons.

The Twins are overflowing with DHs and OFs. Why on earth would anyone want Delmon back?

This information is what it was expected, and what the Star tribune reported today, that the option was declined. Now, what Thrylos is saying is that they are working in a totally different contract. In order to do so, the Twins have to decline the option. Not to nitpick...but what Thrylos said was not that they "are working in a totally different contract." I'm sure that's probably true. Thrylos' claim is that the "Twins re-signed Baker." Done deal. Totally different claim. We shall see. Declining the option was implied, I think. Did anyone seriously believe the Twins were going to guarantee Baker $9m in 2013?

Someone else mentioned Brandon Inge and I think that might be a decent idea. He's certainly not flashy (and in a perfect world, you'd find someone who can hit righties to complement Plouffe) but he also slots in as third catcher, allowing the team to free up a bench spot for someone else (who can hopefully hit).

If the Twins give up anything of significance, the Marlins better pay a significant portion of Buerhle's contract. He's due to make a combined $37m in his age 35 and 36 seasons. Ugh.

If true, this is very interesting. Depending on the money, I like the move. Baker has been vastly underrated for years. When he's on his game, he's a very good #2 pitcher.

Ugh. Buerhle's contract is awful. He's slated to make almost $20m as a 36 year old.

You know, Inge isn't the worst idea in the world. It kicks Butera off the roster and provides a backup option to Plouffe. I forgot about the guy.

This is an argument that I have not made. I use xFIP a lot and I think it's one of the best stats out there. But it's not perfect either. Over large sample sizes (like careers) ERA tends to be a pretty good stat. Over small sample sizes (like single seasons) ERA fluctuates like crazy. Career ERA also needs to be adjusted for great defensive teams (neither MIL or TOR), significant park effects (neither Miller or Rogers) or league effects (equal split between AL and NL). And that's why we have ERA+. It's a solid indicator of a pitcher's value at a glance. FWIW, Greinke has a career ERA+ of 114 to Marcum's 112. Considering how Marcum will probably command about half the money of Greinke, I think he's a fine solution for the Twins' pitching woes. Maybe not my first choice but not that far down the list, either. xFIP is a useful stat but when a guy spends his entire career over-performing an advanced metric (and Marcum has done just that with FIP/xFIP), you have to re-apply logic to that metric and consider the possibility that it may not be an accurate representation of every player in baseball.

Since when is an 89 OPS+ "not that much different" from a 113 OPS+?

In a perfect scenario, Burton almost never sees action before the seventh inning. Anyway, we're tangenting here... No need to split more hairs. I don't mean to imply that the bullpen is perfect by any means... Just that this team has larger holes that need plugging.

5.1 and 5.4 innings are virtually the same if you're using traditional baseball innings counts (.0, .1, .2). I typed "innings" in one portion of the post but all the math is based on outs so we're good there. Not only the "bad" relievers are going to lose innings... That's not the point. The point is that the "good" relievers will also have more of their workload shifted to where it should be... The seventh, eighth, and ninth innings. No more Burton in the fifth helps the team quite a bit, maybe even more than Jeff Gray not pitching the fourth. As I said, I'm not against the Twins looking for more bullpen help. That's not the point of my statements... My point is that I question whether the bullpen should be the second highest priority this offseason.

It's not that terribly difficult to understand. Here, I'll lay it out differently. Most of this past season, the Twins had Burton, Perkins, Fien, and junk in their pen (to keep it simple). The rotation went around 5.1 innings per start. If the Twins sort out some of their pitching woes next season and pick up some starters, let's say they average 6.0 innings per start (not gonna happen but I'm only illustrating a point here). That is a whopping 320 less outs the bullpen needs to get over the course of a season. It also pushes out most of that "junk" from the previous bullpen because they don't need to pitch as often. The vast majority of those 320 innings went to the worst members of the bullpen. That's roughly two seasons' worth of work you no longer need to dish off to your "junk" relievers. Two full seasons of replacement level or worse baseball, poof, gone. That's huge. As an added bonus, the Twins could then shift Duensing to a full-time bullpen role, adding another quality arm to Burton, Fien, and Perkins. That's four quality relievers you now have... Four relievers who need to cover 320 less outs (two full reliever years) in a season. You now have more quality arms in the pen who need to throw less innings per season. That's how a good rotation can help a bullpen. As I said, I'm not against the Twins picking up another reliever in case one of those four guys falter or get injured (uh, Slama, anyone?), but I am surprised that JR considers it the second biggest priority on the team. I don't see it that way. I think more could be gained by pursuing a middle infielder (but admittedly, this FA crop has very little to offer in that department) because the Twins are going to be flat-out awful in the MI unless they get really, really lucky with one of the guys they have in the minors.

As you said, it doesn't make a lot of sense. The Twins would want Lincecum for a song, the Giants would want to hold onto him and hope he rebounds. He doesn't have much time left on his contract so under the best of circumstances, he's not a long-term solution for the Twins, who badly need long-term pitching solutions. It makes more sense for the Twins to pursue a Span trade that brings back a minor league pitcher and then hit the FA market.

We have absolutely no idea why they were fired. Speculating that it was based on declining attendance is suspect at best. It could have been for any reason.

How so? Wouldn't the better your rotation is, mean the more important the bullpen is? What's more important...holding onto a lead or tie, or coming into a game the starter has already lost? Nobody really cares all that much when Jeff Gray comes into a game the starter has already lost. If the Twins don't improve their starting pitching, then the bullpen isn't going to matter much. It'll lose games, but you can't finish lower than last. In any case, no matter if your team is good or bad, or your starters are good or bad, your bullpen is going to be the deciding factor in a lot of games. Most major league baseball games end up close, it's the nature of the beast. Continually getting outpitched in the last 3 innings of a game matters too, just as does getting outpitched in the first 6. You might argue that better starting pitching will throw more innings, and that's true, but the difference isn't as much as you'd think. Twins starters averaged 5.4 IP in 2012, worst in the AL. But the best only averaged 6.2, and half the teams were somewhere in the 5's, so most nights the Twins were asking their bullpen to get 1 or 2 more outs than their opponants. A good starting staff might eliminate those 1 or 2 outs, but every team in the league is asking their bullpen to pitch mulitiple innings almost evey night. You can't do that effectively with a 2 or 3 man bullpen. I do agree that I don't know if the infield or the bullpen is a higher priority, but I'd argue both need to be addressed, although neither will likely matter much if they don't get better starting pitching. The Twins have a decent pen already. Duensing, Burton, Duensing, and *maybe* Fien make up for a pretty solid 7-9 innings. Sure, the Twins could probably use another seventh inning guy but if you have four (maybe three) pitchers who can pitch, you're going to hold on to a lot of leads. The main problem was the rotation. If you didn't have guys like Blackburn folding after four innings, followed by Deduno pitching five good innings, followed by De Vries throwing another 4.2 innings, your good relievers wouldn't be so taxed and we wouldn't be forced to watch Jeff Gray pitch the seventh or eighth inning over and over and over again. Sure, a half inning doesn't seem like much but over the course of a season, that's an extra 80 innings your bullpen has to throw and most of those innings aren't going to the Duensings, Burtons, and Perkins of the team. They're going to the scrubs, the replacement guys. And as we saw with many Deduno/Liriano starts, going five innings or less doesn't automatically mean the game is a blowout. Many of those games were close but Gardy had to come up with four innings from the pen. Not an easy task in a close game, doubly so if the opposing starter goes seven innings and you only have to face the best of their bullpen because of it. Also, a better rotation means that Duensing actually get to pitch from the bullpen instead of being thrown into a starting role where he flounders. As I said, the Twins could use another guy in the pen but considering that their MI options are Escobar, Florimon, Carroll, and Dozier, I'm surprised that's not the #2 priority for the team. It seems to me that the most gains could be found by finding a shortstop or second baseman who isn't really bad at baseball.

We've tossed around ideas on how to expand blueprints. We're definitely looking into ways to create an immersive environment for the community to create and write their own. Don't be surprised if you see some additions to how that section is done next year.

Heh, I vacillated a bit on that font. In the end, I decided it was fine to leave one "fun" font in the book. The book sticks to the Avenir font almost exclusively outside of the page headers. Each year, I want to design the book with a theme. This year, it was old-timey baseball. Lots of textures reminiscent of the history of baseball and tech we no longer use as much (wood, leather, polaroids, etc). Next year, it will probably be very modern. I doubt you'll see two books that resemble each other at all.

Thankfully, modern PDF tools use image caching. Extra pages don't add nearly as much in size as you'd expect, especially if images are re-used. We were really concerned about the book size (I was thinking it would come in around 50MB) but it stayed just under 20MB in its final version. I was even able to bump the image quality to a place where I was comfortable (something I was almost positive I wasn't going to be able to do). For example, our eight page sample was 9MB. The full 72 page version was 19MB. PDF image caching FTW.

Thanks. Yeah, I'm not entirely pleased with reading a few of the pages... I would have liked more time to go back and refine some of the layout to make it easier to read. Unfortunately, I was putting in considerable hours at work and just getting this thing designed was a mad-scramble to make it look good. I'm happy with the book overall but I definitely learned some things to avoid next year. Initially, the text was waaaaaayy too small and what you're looking at in the published version is considerably larger than where I started. Next year, it's going to be even larger. There is simply no reason not to go with large text in an eBook. It's not as if page count is a concern (the current font is 14pt... Next year, it will probably jump to 15pt).

You make an excellent point. It seems to me that the biggest welfare queens in the U.S. are Wall Street (hundreds of billions of dollars of bailouts) and the big corporations ((hundreds of billions of dollars of tax breaks). And without government funding, private enterprise never would have been able to develop computers or the internet. I actually wasn't talking about any corporate handouts. Both Romney and Ryan's families received welfare assistance when they were boys. Without that assistance, who knows if they're in this spot today. Yet they want to remove that assistance for others to reach their "lofty" seats at the table. I used to be more down on the Welfare system until I met my now-fiancee. She grew up on Welfare. Her mother had issues and couldn't hold down a job. Now my fiancee is a lawyer at a mid-sized law firm in Minneapolis. I think it's safe to say that Welfare money was well-spent. Now, those situations are certainly not the case all the time (or even the majority of the time) but without that assistance, my fiancee would have had zero chance of ever becoming the successful lawyer she is today, paying considerable taxes into the system. I'm against "Welfare Queens". I mean, who isn't? But we shouldn't be concerned about them. They're a blight on the system but the real concern is their children. Those kids deserve a legitimate shot at success, just like the one my fiancee ultimately received as she went through the system. And there is simply no good way to lock out the "Welfare Queens" without doing considerable damage to their children as well. I'm all for Welfare-to-Work programs and other associated programs that try to get people out of the system but calling for drastic cuts to funding without consideration for the damage it could do to everyone in it is foolish and short-sighted.

For those of you who have read the book (or skimmed it), what do you think of the layout? Are you comfortable with a horizontal layout versus a traditional vertical book layout? We went back and forth on this topic a bit and I would appreciate some feedback. Personally, I prefer to read vertical books but I also own a tablet and do very little reading on a computer screen (outside of software documentation for work). On the other hand, vertical books kinda suck on a typical widescreen computer monitor. I made the assumption that most of you would be reading this on a computer (and the horizontal layout is not much of a burden on a tablet, either) so I designed the book to take advantage of as much screen real estate as possible by designing it to better fit a widescreen monitor. Was I wrong in that assumption? Do you like/dislike the layout? Do you care? Why?

I think you're on the right track but I don't think we'll see Pavano back on the team. Maybe someone like him but not Carl himself. As a second or third FA option, I'm not against that kind of pick-up as long as the org picks up a legitimate free agent alongside him. I doubt we'll see Blackburn back on the 40 man unless he absolutely shuts down Spring Training hitters (I mean, really shuts them down). Teams don't take guys off the 40 man without the expectation that they will stay off of it. Moving guys on and off the list is too complicated, especially mid-season. Besides, I think the team is probably more keen on De Vries at this point than Blackburn anyway (as they should be).

Let me gently correct one glaring error: control of one chamber (the house) does not equal control of congress. In other news, the Democrats did in fact control congress the first two years of the Obama presidency, with a super majority for several months. I'm sure you don't remember how Obama dismissed and demeaned Republicans during those two years either. He didn't want their participation or support -- because he didn't need it....... THEN. And it is pretty rich to cry out in indignation over bipartisanship after the landslide 2010 elections. Actually, I do remember how Obama treated the Republicans, which I why I said some of the blame is laid at his feet. But Obama and the Democrats did not show the outright vitriol that the Republicans have shown in the past two years. To deny that is to deny reality. The Democrats didn't like the Republicans but after the Republicans took the House, they showed outright hatred for the Democrats, Obama in particular. I thought the vitriol aimed at Bush was a new low for this country but the GOP has managed to one-up that with Obama in office. It's disgusting to anyone who doesn't buy into either party's bull****. As for not controlling Congress, meh. The House is where most bills start and that's the branch that matters in this type of discussion.