Brock Beauchamp

If this front office was smart, they'd take advantage of Perkins and make him the Bullpen Ace and do away with the horrible closer model of bullpen management. Lefties have a rough time as closer; they face too many righties (who often hit lefties, even good ones, well) to throw them out there at random. It would be much smarter to use Perkins to his strengths and put him in there when the matchups are favorable to his skill set. Right now, the Twins have a great complementary right-hander in Burton. If the team is leading in the seventh inning with one out and two guys are on base, wouldn't you rather seen Burton or Perkins come in at that time to shut down the rally? Let one pitch the rest of the seventh, the other can take the eighth or ninth based on who's coming to bat. Last night is a perfect example of why "closers" in their current form are completely useless. Addison Reed, "White Sox Save Specialist", came in with nobody out in the ninth and a three run lead. He promptly gave up two earned runs and almost lost the "save". Why was he even used in that situation? Isn't that a complete waste of his talents? Jeff-freakin-Manship could have pitched in that situation and 95% of the time, he'd get the "save" for it. It's time to start using the best arms in the bullpen when they're needed most. Perkins being a lefty (along with a complementary Burton) would be the perfect time to start using a new brand of baseball thinking that will lead to more wins and better bullpen management. With that said, it's never going to happen on the Twins. They're too stuck in tradition (even if it's only a 25 year old bad tradition) to try something so forward-thinking.

I've always thought this was a prime area to "Moneyball". I've never understood why no one has made the jump to acquiring injured guys at discount prices. It's a win for both teams. The rebuilding team gets a piece that has the potential to help a bunch down the road, the contending team has a chance to win more by dealing a guy who won't be of help for considerable time.

If you're the Twins, do you take a guy in the higher minors with lower upside or do you take a raw guy with big upside in the low minors for some of your trade pieces? I think everything depends on when JR thinks the team can compete again.

I fixed that post for you, Brian.

BTW, I'm particularly interested in what time of day it's happening. I've only seen it happen at night when the forum is busy with game traffic. That narrows down potential problem areas but still doesn't really give me enough information to start figuring out the problem. It could be the ads but I don't think it's the ads themselves; I think the problem might stem from the ad delivery service. It could also be the server itself. I need more information before I can figure it out.

Hell, not even BYTO had those for the past six months. I did away with the dictator ranks before the season started.

If you've had problems with pages loading, post here. Be sure to list when it happened and what model and version of browser you're using (for example, Firefox 3.6). I'll get this sorted in time but right now, it's a really bizarre problem that only happens occasionally. I need to see it happen a few more times before I can troubleshoot the problem.

Okay, that's enough. BYTOers, some of you are acting like little prats. We're working hard to integrate the communities and that requires a little cooperation on your parts. That does not include making thinly-veiled threats about taking over the forum, side-stepping the rules by making obfuscated racist comments, or swearing just because you know how to spell the "f" word. You all know the rules here and they're not hard to follow. I know that in real life, you don't go over to your neighbor's house for a 4th of July cookout and then piss on their lawn and maybe some of their friends. I'm locking this thread because the end result of this thread (which I didn't like in the first place but let slide so some of you could talk about BYTO on the day of its closure) is going to lead nowhere good. The rules here aren't strict. Hell, in time, they may even loosen and be more to your liking. But right now, this is the first day that most of you are on the forum. It's not unreasonable to ask you all to act like adults while everyone gets used to one another. Because you're sure not making a very good impression as it stands right now.

Every time you think for a moment that this team has an outside shot of getting back into the race, they remind you just how awful they can be.

Well, so much for 2-0.

I need to keep reminding myself it's a 2-0 game, not 6-0.

Does Hendriks come back out?

I'm watching on GameCast so I can't be sure... But I'm going to guess "huge". If we had word filters here, there'd be about a 105% chance Revere would end the night with the filter "Bill Robinson".

Do you really want it? I can change it if you like.

Deep breaths, everyone. Don't make me send you to your rooms without dinner.

Another called strikeout. Sigh.

Oh, that part is great. The offense is what's letting the team down tonight, without a doubt. It'd be a shame for Hendriks to finally sort it out and pitch a good game but still get the loss.

Okay, enough about the pseudo-sabr semantics, guys. Let's get back to staring at zeros on the scoreboard.

Has anyone been tracking Hendricks' first pitch strikes? He still seems to be throwing too few of them, though overall his ball/strike ratio is decent.

I'd like to take this moment to point out that the Twins are completely wasting a "quality start" from Liam Hendriks. A shame. Those don't seem to come around often.

Well, I'm glad we could all have this talk because this game is boooooooring.

It's not pretentious elitism, it's wondering why someone is trying to explain evolution by reading quotes from The Bible.

True, not really trying to argue, just mentioning that I've heard a fair amount of SABR people casually reference WHIP over the years. To me, it's a lot like OPS. Good for a quick and dirty analysis but lacking in fine details needed to understand a player.

WHIP is borderline. Quality Start isn't used by anyone in the SABR community.

It might have something to do with SABR people laughing at the Quality Start stat in all its uselessness.