Brock Beauchamp

Agreed across the board.

I saw it an hour ago but I'm the type of petty bastard that just wanted to sit back and see how long it'd take for someone to figure it out. I'm mildly disappointed, to be honest. I hoped it would go for at least the rest of the game.

I think either the front office really dislikes Stroman or something was lost in the translation of that tweet (ie. the Jays are rightly hesitant, not the Twins).

Nope, 1.5 years of control.

Yeah... me too, and I wouldn't think too hard about it. The Twins must either really like Larnach or really dislike Stroman or both. Or maybe they feel like they'd be selling low on Graterol. That's possible, too.

How is Lewis not living up to anything? He struggled early this year as he made mechanical adjustments but has an OPS well over .900 in July. Also, Lewis and Arraez have little overlap. Lewis is a SS that will fall back to CF if he can’t hack the position. Arraez is a second baseman who has acquitted himself well at third over the past month.

I saw that earlier and got a good laugh out it.

I agree with the exception of Syndergaard. I think they're legitimately interested there, but that's far from a guarantee a deal gets done. I suspect they're in on Syndergaard with the idea they'll shift Perez to the pen and then pick up another relief arm. If Syndergaard isn't going to happen, then they ignore starters and move to pick up two relief arms instead.

I didn't really expect it this year, much less past years.

Both, I suspect. Given how the team apparently views Adrianza, it's possible they viewed him as Gonzalez-Lite and assumed Gonzalez would be snatched up at a much higher rate than they got him. When Marwin lingered in free agency through February, they probably pivoted and grabbed him. Which makes me wonder how analytics-first teams are viewing “roving” players. For example, maybe Gonzalez is a 2 WAR player. That's fine but hardly jaw-dropping. A basic analytical analysis would pencil in two wins and move on. But is that actually the case? I don't think it is because: 1. Gonzalez provides rest for starters. I'm sure some advanced teams have affixed a number to what you get from a player starting 155 games versus starting 145 games. Maybe it's such a small number that most ignore it... say, 0.1 WAR performance over those 145 games. But if you duplicate that nine times, you're quickly at 1.0 WAR or thereabouts. Suddenly, Gonzalez is a full win more valuable than he was before. On top of that, Gonzalez will allow many starters to sit during games they face a platoon disadvantage, further extending that improvement in overall play. Or maybe that starting player has a 2% higher chance of avoiding injury at 145 games. That in itself has an enormous impact if it prevents a 5 WAR player from going down for a month of the season. 2. Gonzalez provides insurance against starter injuries and replacement (or worse) players. We always affix the "replacement player" value but we also know that replacement players aren't manufactured on an assembly line, ready to take over as needed. Plugging in Gonzalez at third while Sano was injured could easily have brought the Twins another 0.5 WAR, as their options behind Sano weren't great (I'm excluding Adrianza from this hypothetical because it's just that, a hypothetical). Multiply that over multiple positions over the course of a season and you start to get that much more value from Gonzalez. 3. The futility fielder. Again, we assume that historically, this player is replacement level. That may not be the case. Just plugging in any random player, as we saw for a decade straight with those 2000s Twins teams, can lead to some ugly black holes on the roster. All of these numbers are just guesses but I don't think it's a coincidence that a team like the Astros valued Gonzalez and now teams like the Twins also value him (or that the Cubs held a similar concept by aggressively pursuing Zobrist). I think there's a lot more to the story than "Gonzalez is worth two wins and that's that". And I suspect this is a trend we'll see gain in importance going forward.

Their "clutch" hitting didn't really show up last night, as they went 14 innings against the freakin' Kansas City Royals. Also, Cleveland's OPS is 28th in MLB with RISP. The Twins are 9th. http://www.espn.com/mlb/stats/team/_/stat/batting/split/39/sort/OPS/order/true

I mostly agree, though I tend to skew on the side of "it was a bad call because Schoop was obviously trying to get out of the way and Engel ran four feet laterally to "hit" him... but they *barely* touched". In that situation, I think it should have been a non-call because it didn't actually impact the play and Engel went right at Schoop. But you're right that Schoop should have tagged him out at second. There was no reason to lollygag and wait for the runner to come to him when 4-5 steps at him and the play is over.

Yeah, the Mets series is what really irked me. They're a mediocre team that is in disarray right now, you need a split at minimum. But the Twins turned around and played Oakland tough, good enough for a split. Then the circus of the Yankees series happened and honestly, any of those games could have gone any way for either team. Both teams saw epic pitching collapses with offensive showings that were equally epic. What matters most to me right now is that it appears the Twins bullpen somehow escaped that apocalyptic series with the bullpen mostly intact. Thanks, Devin.

This is the kind of thing that happens over 162 games, though. As long as the ugliness is temporary, you can hold your nose and get through it because Sano is crushing the ball. Unless something bad happens in the next two months, Miguel will not be manning first base in the postseason. It's far more likely that Schoop is the odd man out and Miguel resumes duties at third, Cron stays at first, and Arraez slides to second.

I don't want Lynn - not even a little bit - but I have enough faith in this front office and their approach that if they target Lynn as someone they want to get, there's a good reason for it. With that said, I hope they see absolutely nothing in Lynn.

Acquire someone, then demote a reliever. There's no one left in Rochester anyway.

Ramos played seven games for Minnesota in May. He was traded at the end of July.

I’ll be immensely disappointed if anyone is sent down. Most of the bullpen can go tomorrow and I want to see what Thorpe has in him. And eff off if you send down Smeltzer. At the VERY least, the guy deserves a week of MLB pay even if you don’t use him.

Wilson Ramos is the obvious example, though it doesn’t invalidate the rest of your point, as that trade was idiotic at the time and only became more idiotic as time passed.

I've been slightly against robo umps for a long time now but last night, more than anything I've felt since the Cuzzi postseason call, has infuriated me to the point where I believe baseball needs to make more changes to how they review and umpire games. We'll see if it wears off but I'm now neutral, if not slightly positive, on robo umps.

I saw the Yankees get the shaft on a few calls as well but the nature of Duffey's non-call was what made it so egregious: man (men?) on, two outs, 3-2 count, late in the game, one run game. If the pitcher makes what is essentially the perfect pitch in that situation - which is what Duffey did - he should get the call almost every time. The ball was in the zone and nigh unhittable. I think enough people around here should know me well enough that I try really hard not to crucify an ump, even if they make a bad call because those things tend to even out in time. But that call just about sent me through the roof last night.

Sure, if you count Arraez as 1.25 of them. I kid, I kid. Or do I?

Sorry, you lost me after this part.

Exactly. Looking at reliever numbers over short periods of time tells very little about their stuff. Parker’s stuff is unimpressive. Sure, he can get three outs from the Royals, as can almost every other pitcher in baseball. Getting three outs from postseason teams is a different story and being forced to put him into the eighth inning of a game like this looks bad. It looks really bad.