Brock Beauchamp

@ashbury By the way, you just reminded me that I had created a badge last month but never saw it in my feed. I looked in the admin panel and it wasn’t set to live so I activated it.

I agree with a lot here but I'm not sure why so many people minimize Berríos' skill level right now. No, he's not an ace, at least not by my personal definition, but it's almost impossible to classify him lower than a good #2 right now. His ERA rank out of American League qualifying pitchers the past three seasons: 8, 13, 11. HIs ERA+ over the past three seasons: 119. That's pretty clearly a guy who, if he's maybe just a click below a traditional ace, is clearly in that second tier of starting pitchers.

This is hilarious because the first draft of this article had this image in GIF form.

Welcome to the inauguraualal Twins Daily Community Awards presentation! For some time now, we’ve wanted to start giving out prizes to the community for doing fun things like posting on our forums, writing blogs on the “not quite worst in the American League… yet” Minnesota Twins, yelling at clouds, and other things that no rational adult human being would spend their free time doing. We expect to give these awards out a few times a year, provided we don’t become distracted by something else that seems more fun, or maybe we just get bored and wander off. We’ll cross that bridge when it comes. To be semi-serious for a moment, we at Twins Daily appreciate the conversation and great content you all provide the Twins community every single day. It’s awesome to see this site bigger and better than ever as we approach our tenth (wait, what?) birthday next February. Without all of your great content, this site would be nothing more than John Bonnes and Nick Nelson sitting in a bar arguing how to spell “Chris Parmelee” and both of them getting it wrong. While we have a great stable of writers to give the community a platform and topics on which to speak, it’s the community that fills the second half of Twins Daily and, unlike most of the second half of the internet, reading the great output of this community isn’t an embarrassment to all mankind. Okay, enough of that. Without further ado… Top Post of the First Half of the 2021 Season goes to… @Old Twins Cap In the middle of June, when all of us were reaching a low point of our Twins fandom, Old Twins Cap stood up and pronounced that not only is this season rather pathetic, any chance of winning a World Series ever is basically gone. We’re doomed, our Twins fandestiny only to bring us more sorrow and heartbreak for all eternity. Sadly, he’s probably not wrong. https://twinsdaily.com/forums/topic/51892-game-recap-twins-7-mariners-2/?tab=comments#comment-1046436 For this post, Old Twins Cap received the most likes of the first half of the 2021 season, rendering his bite-sized entry the top post of the first half! As a prize, he is awarded an autographed Rocco Baldelli rookie card. Look at cute wittle Wocco. He’s adorable. Keep this card close to your heart always, Old Twins Cap. Blog Post of the First Half of the 2021 Season goes to… @Greglw3 Taking a very straightforward, nuts-and-bolts approach to blogging, Greglw3 is light on the words, heavy on the imagery, and wholly capturing our hearts with this blog entry. Not settling to convince us who is the best Twins leftfielder of all time, Greg instead asked us to convince him of the best leftfielder of all time. Some might call this approach lazy, I call it efficient. https://twinsdaily.com/blogs/entry/23049-who-is-twins-best-lf-of-all-time-reopened-with-3-new-choices/ And convince we did, apparently. His blog entry gained the most views and comments of the first half, winning him the blog post of the first half award! To celebrate this achievement, he will receive a rookie card for the Best Twins Leftfielder of All Time (a commanding victory), Bob Allison! We’d also like to congratulate Bob for being very good at the baseball and the extraordinary baseballing he performed in his baseball career of baseballing. Collectin’ Those Likes @USAFChief With a whopping 2,541 reputation points in the first half of the season, our dear ol’ moderator Chiefie received the most likes and attention of anyone on Twins Daily! That’s a good thing, I hear! Sorry, Chief, you get no prize other than our hammering away at that like button whenever we see one of your posts. I hope that helps put food on your table. We’re on a shoestring budget here, we can only do so much. Better luck next time. Collectin’ (About Half as Many of) Those Likes @ashbury At 1,375 reputation points, ashbury was next in line behind chief and also gets no prize! And those are our awards for the first half of the 2021 season. No matter how painful this season seems, remember that there's a cottage industry of Minnesota Sports Therapists, just use the coupon code "wide left" to activate your personal pain point. Thank you one and all for everything you do here at Twins Daily. It’s truly an honor (and a lot of fun) to build and maintain the website that so many of you visit every single day to talk Minnesota Twins and how painful it is to be a sports fan in this god-forsaken state of ours. And remember, we have a fantastic community hidden behind the front page here at Twins Daily. I highly recommend you check out our forums and our community blog and interact with some of these great folks. Jump into the conversation with us anytime, everyone is welcome. Until next time! View full article

They’ve made some mistakes but most I can think of were this past off-season and none were on this list. I’m definitely not going them a pass for their mistakes but the above list isn’t a good example of them. The closest is Pressly but it appears they received a decent return for him.

Yeah, I started noticing that. If it keeps up, I'm going to address the problem, I haven't had the time yet with all the deadline stuff bouncing around and planning/updating on the fly.

This isn't entirely true, though. Pressly was good in Minnesota but became better in Houston. I'll give you that one but the Twins also received what appears to be a decent return on him (which could vault to a very good return if Alcala ever figures it out). Everybody knew Pressly was good and the return indicated that. Escobar's best season (128 OPS+) was his partial season in Minnesota before being traded to Arizona. The Twins also received Jhoan Duran for an Escobar rental, which looks like a hell of a return in time. Lance Lynn was bad for the Twins over a half dozen starts, then rebounded nicely. He was a 31 year old veteran who was bad because he held out until February and missed Spring Training. It requires some gymnastics to blame the Twins for that brief underperformance. Jordan Hicks? I assume you mean Aaron Hicks. Yeah, the *previous* front office bungled his development in a big way and mishandled that dude about as badly as possible (I still shake my head at him dropping switch-hitting and nobody even knew about it). There are certainly instances of the Twins mis-managing players but that's true of every organization. I don't think the recent Twins have an outsized number of those types of players and certainly not based on the players on your list.

Agreed. I've had many problems with various moves Baldelli has made this season but sticking with Berríos last night was not one of them. The guy sailed through six low effort innings, it's on him to finish the seventh, particularly during a stretch where the Twins play multiple doubleheaders and will need bullpen relief.

Welcome to the latest entry into my Tips & Tricks series! In this brief post, I’ll quickly run through another new-to-us feature, “Following”. This will allow you to track and follow the content of people and content you like throughout the Twins Daily website. Essentially, there are three aspects to following on Twins Daily: following categories, following content, and following individuals. I’ll run through each aspect and how each can be useful to you and improve how you find your favorite content on Twins Daily. Following Individuals There are probably some contributors and forum users you like better than the rest, individuals whose content you know is going to be quality so you don’t want to miss it. Following a person on Twins Daily is easy, just click on their username or avatar and visit their profile page. Near the top of the page, you will see a “Follow Member” button. Click that, specify the parameters of your follow and whether you’d like to follow anonymously, and that’s it! You will now be notified whenever this user creates new content anywhere on the site! NOTE: You should set your notification settings to specify how you’d like to receive information about new and updated content. You can change your notification settings from your user options screen or by clicking the link earlier in this paragraph. Scroll down to the “Followed Content” option and selecting your settings. Following Categories You can follow groups of content in Twins Daily, as well. Are you a minor league specialist? Then consider following the minor league news category. Maybe you want to catch all Twins news content, you can do the same. Just visit the category or forum page and somewhere near the top of the page, you will see a “Follow” button. Click that, specify your preferred options, and you will be notified of all content that is added to that category or forum. This also works for blogs if you want to follow the blog entries of your favorite Twins Daily writers, just pop over to their main blog page and search for the “Follow” button. Following Content This is the most granular of the following options on Twins Daily. You can follow specific content you see on the site. If you like an article and its resulting comments, follow that article and you will be updated as new comments are added. The same applies to forum threads or individual blog entries, just look for the “Follow” button near the top of the page. In the settings link I provided above, you can set to automatically follow content you create and content you participate in. If you’re a regular forum user or news story commenter, these are really useful functions to stay abreast of an interesting conversation and any replies you received to your own content. That’s about it! I highly recommend everyone consider using the follow function on Twins Daily, as it’s just one more tool at your disposal to curate the site to fit your personal preferences. And if you’re enjoying the new achievements system, there may be special badges to unlock by following content and other Twins Daily users…

I'm not sure why anyone feels Baldelli needs to be up in everybody's business about this. While I haven't examined this kind of thing numerically and my experience is anecdotal, I feel coaches, not managers, are typically more involved in dugout confrontations/discussions of this kind. If the manager needs to intervene, it will probably be done behind closed doors. There were a few dust-ups in the dugout of those 2000's Twins teams and I never remember Gardy throwing himself into the middle of the situation. I'm sure discussions were had afterward but not right there in the dugout.

It looked like Happ might be moved for salary relief only but after this, hard to seen even that happening.

"His wRC+ has shot up from 53 to 105." Holy crap. I knew he was bad but hadn't noticed he fell that low before rebounding this season.

“They’ve never won a National League pennant and haven’t appeared in a World Series since losing to the Cardinals in 1982.” I have to admit it took me an embarrassing amount of time to work out how this is possible, even though the answer itself is contained in the sentence.

I agree six is really unlikely but I think a lot depends on Byron. I could easily see him taking one year if no one offers more than four.

I don’t know if anyone “wants” to trade Arraez but with Miranda screaming to get a call up while the team pitching is terrible, it could improve the team.

For the first and probably only time in my life, I’m going to say this: I find the Pohlads rather blameless for this situation. They spent quite fairly coming out of a pandemic season. Everyone else? Oh yeah, I got blame all day.

The team was competitive from 2001 to 2007. They moved Santana in 2007 but then also traded for Delmon Young. Then they were good from 2008 to 2010. And 2011 hit like a load of bricks and all their previously good players were injured. By the time 2016 rolled around, they had no one good to trade.

The Twins haven’t had a legit fire sale since the 90s. 2011 came so fast and hit so hard they didn’t have any good pieces to move by the time 2012 rolled around (other than Mauer and I’m pretty sure he had a no-trade clause).

How on earth is the Phillies’ bullpen that bad AGAIN?!?!?!?!

This season has been a real tug of war in my mind. First, I agree that it's *so exciting* to see baseball in person again and every night for 162 games. That was badly missed last year and a big reason why I struggled in the early days of the pandemic. I discovered I set much of my internal clock to the ebbs and flows of baseball. But... the Twins suck this season. That's a bitter pill to swallow and has taken a lot of shine off the first point. But wait... Usually, I watch *a lot* of baseball beyond the Twins so the Twins being a crap baseball team doesn't affect my love of the sport that much. That isn't the case in 2021. I've watched less baseball this season than I have in a couple of decades, excluding the weirdness of last year. But baseball *itself* kinda sucks now. It was easy to gloss over the game's flaws in 2019 because the Twins mashing was so much fun to watch. 2020 was... 2020. But in 2021, as we return to normalcy, it's no longer possible to ignore how much the game has changed in the past five years, and those changes are rarely for the better. MLB needs an overhaul and needed it five minutes ago.

I wonder if this is a shift in organizational philosophy or simply luck of the draw.

Now I really want a catcher in round ten just to complete this series of posts.

If that's true, we should be excited to see whats-his-face join the Twins sometime around the 2037-38 seasons.