Brock Beauchamp

Probably six of one, half dozen of the other. He's been good for the Mets for what, 2 1/2 seasons now? Knuckleballers are fickle beasts. Most don't ever figure it out. Dickey did. It's hard to give the Mets much credit for that or blame any previous teams for not pulling it off.

Philip Humber pitched 20 innings over two seasons with Minnesota. Yeah, damn Anderson for not doing more with the kid. Wait, what? Garza was a good pitcher with the Twins. He had a 117 ERA+ the year he was traded. His career ERA+? 109. Dickey was an aberration. Anyone with an objective viewpoint can see that. He struggled with how many teams before figuring it out with the Mets? Lohse has had a marginal career as a decent middle-to-back of the rotation NL starter. He's not any better away from the Twins than he was with them. With the Twins, he had almost exactly a 100 ERA+. His career ERA+ is 96. Jason Marquis has pitched 26 innings for the Padres. You're not very good at this.

And who might these people be? Oh, right. Eric Milton, Kevin Slowey, Joe Mays, Carlos Silva, Pat Neshek, Matt Guerrier, Mark Redman... They all lit up the world after leaving the Twins. Jesse Crain was good with the Twins once he started throwing harder again. That continued after his signing with the Sox. Lohse was an up-and-down pitcher with the Twins. He's a marginally better up-and-down pitcher since that point... In the National League. You've got RA Dickey and... RA Dickey. A journeyman who bounced between so many teams that it's obvious something just clicked with him one day and he suddenly figured out the knuckleball, an almost unteachable pitch.

Derek Jeter, starting shortstop for the American League. Good thing the All-Star game doesn't impact home field advantage in the World Series or anything.

Yeah, that's great... When the book is wrong. Joe Maddon is great at knowing when the book is wrong. If Gardy was to go against the grain and eliminate the ninth inning "closer", most of us would be cheering. He would have "gone against the book" and found a potential exploit in current baseball thinking that improves the team. But we're not talking about that. We're talking about running guys on the field who OPS at .500 because they "hustle" or they "really get in there and play". Except they don't play. The stats show that. They're awful MLB players. But Gardy runs them out there anyway. He's trying to play a 21st century game with a 19th century mindset. It's not a winning formula. The Twins could get away with it earlier in his career because the scouting was excellent, development was top-notch, and Anderson did a fantastic job with the pitching staff. That's no longer the case. The Twins need to modernize in a big, bad way and Gardenhire continually proves he is incapable of doing that by running Drew-^%$ing-Butera out there two or three times a week, despite having Ryan Doumit on the bench. One of the hallmarks of early-Gardenhire Twins teams was their "little things" play. They played sound defense. They hit the cutoff men. They didn't kick the ball around. Those Twins teams are gone, which leads me to believe that those attributes were the result of the hard-ass Tom Kelly, not Ron Gardenhire. If Gardy can't even do traditional baseball right (which he seems to pride himself on), how can we expect him to do anything right at this point? I'm not a huge Gardy-basher and I think he does a fine job in the clubhouse but it's becoming more apparent that this franchise needs to go in a different direction. Part of that should involve the coaching staff. I'm willing to give Ryan a little more time to see if he can rekindle more magic but outside of the GM position, it's probably time to start thinking about moving the franchise in a new direction.

That is probably due to the default text editor here on the site. I've had problems with it using my Android phone as well, though my iPad seems work fine with it. Mobile browsers are still really buggy when it comes to text input areas.

Yep. It would be a gift to the team if someone picked up his salary by claiming him.

I'm a Dozier supporter and I think he'll pull through it. With that said, I didn't like the promotion in the first place. If a kid is struggling at AAA, it doesn't make much sense to put him in the majors and hope that he sorts it out against major league pitching. But now that he's here and the Twins are awful, I don't see much point in sending him down. It's not as if his awful play is affecting the outcome of the season.

I think it had more to do with Matt LeCroy. Both were lumbering sluggers who couldn't play a lick of defense. Ortiz had injury troubles, LeCroy less service time. A bad decision but that ship has long sailed.

Yeah, I have to believe that the front office sees starter material in at least one or two of those guys, with the hopes that the rest will be ready for major league duty in the pen within two years.

*in best Captain Edward Smith voice* Screw that iceberg! Get those deck chairs in order, seaman!

I mostly agree except for the "trade from excess" part. When you're in a situation where you basically have to trade Johan Santana, you do not also trade your best young pitcher in Matt Garza. That was my problem with the Garza trade. It didn't make any sense to trade him away when you know that Santana is on his way out as well. The Twins had holes all over but Smith should have known that the hardest hole to patch is starting pitching. Finding outfielders is one of the easier tasks for a baseball GM.

The latter.

Jamey Carroll OBP: 337 Jamey Carroll SLG: 299 That is no small feat. His SLG is only 45 points higher than his BA and nearly 40 below his OBP.

Well, it is and it isn't. It's partially his fault for the Twins having to turn to guys like Blackburn because they have no other options. It's also partially Smith's fault for not stocking the farm with quality pitchers during his three years as GM (though IMO the Gibson pick was still a great one). On the other hand, Ryan drafted Matt Garza, who Bill Smith traded away (a move that flabbergasted me at the time due to the imminent departure of Johan). He also drafted Scott Baker, who is injured. It's beating a dead horse but if the Twins had Garza, Baker, and Liriano heading the rotation (or swap out Gibson for Baker), they'd probably be contending right now. In short, it's a little bit of everyone's fault mixed with a healthy dose of bad luck. People love to rail on the Twins' drafting but it hasn't been that bad. It hasn't been that good, either...

Huh. Well, I missed the errors so they must not have been too egregious. edit: Hah, I searched via find and typed "val". I didn't expect anyone to get the second letter wrong.

For the hell of it, I just checked this thread. Valencia was spelled correctly every time except once, when snepp intentionally mis-spelled it to poke fun of Bert's inability to pronounce his name correctly.

My favorite stat of the day: Groundouts-flyouts: Blackburn 3-8 That's quite a sinkerballer the Twins got themselves right there, yes sirree.

Bert told me today that getting the right sink is all about the arm angle. Hopefully Waldrop has lots of arm angle.

Nope, I only deleted the rectangle ads. Looking through the code for those, there doesn't appear to be anything related to the drop-down. I also checked the other ads and they look good as well. The only thing I could think of that may have done it is that I went a little "revert" crazy with the ad code in place. I reverted 5-6 code snippets back to their default settings but I had given them all a pretty good once-over. I'd be surprised if the code was in there and I missed it.

Well, that's certainly intriguing.

Good. At some point today, I contemplated just pounding my head on the keyboard in hopes that I'd trigger the "enough monkeys at enough keyboards and you'll get Shakespeare" theory into reality.

Cool, thanks. It was on my list of things to do but it hasn't shown up in the past three days for me so I put it on the backburner while I dealt with these other issues.

Okay, I changed the ad code entirely. Please, let me know if this one buggers anything up. It's pretty simple so I don't think it will be able to but with my streak lately, I won't bet against any code finding a way to make my day difficult.

Actually, we currently display no more than three ads per page. I'm still searching for the drop-down ad. I haven't found the code for it and I've only seen it twice. I want to see where it is and what it's doing but the bloody thing doesn't pop up often enough for me to find a code snippet so I can track it down.