Brock Beauchamp

Dude, you really need to stop cherry-picking stats. 1. Nunez only played 141 games last season. 2. Only 55 of those games came at short.

Whoa. A few things: Vielma had a .626 OPS in Ft Myers (which you know is a pitcher's league) at age 21. Gordon had a .721 OPS in Ft Myers at age 20. Vielma has a career MiLB .636 OPS. Gordon has a career MiLB .706 OPS while tracking through the system one year younger than Engelb. I'm not writing off Vielma because "that glove" but suggesting that he's an equal hitter to Gordon simply is not true.

I think you underestimate the value of an across the board solid shortstop. If Gordon is a .750 hitter with 25 steals and a slightly plus glove, he's a 4 WAR player. Gordon has no standout skills and that's okay because he looks pretty good at everything he does. And when you add up "pretty good at everything", that has the potential to be a very good shortstop through his controlled seasons. Will he win accolades? No, probably not and that's okay, too. Good teams need complementary players who are league average regulars with an occasional plus season.

While I understand why you didn't like Goliath, I don't get why you thought it started slowly. The end of the first episode was a doozy and blindsided me. The pacing only became a problem as they continued to do the same thing over again with the William Hurt character... Every scene takes five minutes when one minute would have done the job with the same impact.

That was The Killing in a nutshell. Every episode was "tonight we point the finger at this suspect and tune in next week to watch us point the finger at someone else". I absolutely hated The Killing. I don't understand why people liked that garbage fire of lazy TV writing.

Yeah, for a good portion of the first season, I don't think anything actually happened. The weird thing is that I was okay with it. They nailed the environment and characters well enough that just watching the actors chew scenery kept me engaged when the plot lulled a bit.

And has anyone kept up with The Expanse? I'm saving up the second season to binge watch but the first season was stellar, possibly the best sci-fi I've seen on TV since Battlestar.

The agonizingly slow scenes continue through the series and are my biggest issue with the show. I think the show remains pretty consistently solid throughout and the relationships are what keep me tuned in. Billy Bob and Brittany's relationship is particularly well done. What I most appreciate about the show is how they do a good job of keeping the audience on its toes. Other than the monolithic evil terrible baddies, most of the twists and turns come out of left field and catch you completely unprepared. Even the actions of the baddies are often unexpected because you're rarely fully aware of exactly who's playing for what team. It's not a show I'm particularly interested in seeing after this season is complete but for eight episodes of law intrigue, it does a pretty good job.

What a fantastic way to cap off this series of articles. Nick, it's hilarious you began writing after that fateful Nathan night against the Yankees. It's one of my most memorable Twins nights, though not because I was watching the team. I had a crew of friends in Long Beach from Boston; so much so that we actually called one of them "Boston" because his accent was so thick we couldn't understand half the **** he was saying. I can't even remember the guy's real name even though I worked with him for two years, though his brother Mike was a true baseball aficionado (as only one from Boston can be). Well, that night we secured tickets for the Angels/BoSox series because of course we did. We were in the right field bleachers at Edison, heckling the living crap out of Vlad because, well, because he was there and so were we (we all loved Vlad but hey, he played for the Angels that night). The night was getting on swimmingly; the Red Sox were beating the living piss out of the Angels and the Twins tied it up against the Yankees. Then the time difference kicked in. The Twins took the lead and we went nuts. We actually got the entire right field bleachers (full of Bo Sox fans, naturally) going nuts, screaming "**** the Yankees". We were in pure bliss. Then Nathan came out again and it all fell apart. To be honest, I barely remember anything that happened after that point in the night. Unsurprisingly, I did not make it to work the next day. It was a mix of celebration (Mike and Boston) and consoling of defeat clutched from the jaws of victory (me).

Have we talked about Goliath yet? Because we should. Its pacing is problematic at times - so agonizingly slow, especially every scene with William Hurt - but Billy Bob delivers in a big way. He's the new Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson; he plays himself every time and it's fantastic. I'm not done with the first season yet, still have two episodes left to go.

Suck up.

Well summarized. That's exactly why I pulled the trigger on the integration. We had a great community and I didn't want to see it die a slow death, which it had been doing for 2+ years at that point. Had I simply let things be, BYTO would be gone today either way. Without the front page content, social media presence, and events organized by the writers, keeping a forum self-sufficient in the 2010s is a difficult task. There's too much competitive in the online discussion space from social media. Social media is pretty bad at in-depth discussion but it does a good enough job for enough people that they won't even consider signing up for a dedicated forum anymore. People don't realize it but through 2006-2008, BYTO had similar traffic numbers to the first year of Twins Daily. It was a bustling forum. By 2012, that number was cut in half.

Shores!

The Scott Baker word filter was a thing of beauty. To prevent a recursive loop that printed something like "Timothy Scott Moonshot Moonshot Baker Moonshot Baker" endlessly, we had to put 3-4 filters in place that ran one after the other. It was ridiculous.

Hahahahah, yes. The pine tar debate that raged for months.

I barely registered it happening, to my recollection. John had to fill me in on the details a few days ago and I vaguely recall something happening but it wasn't earth-shattering to me at the time. We had a bit of back-and-forth during the integration talks but I just considered that part of the process. There was a lot of emotional stock invested in our respective sites. BYTO was dear to me, just as the four writers' blogs were dear to them. It was expected that we'd get a little salty over giving up those sites unless certain terms were met (and, as it turned out, all of our terms were very reasonable, we simply weren't communicating them very clearly).

So goodbye, BYTO. Where the dogs of society howled. Five years ago, four bloggers – whose writings were widely shared on the BattleYourTailOff.com forums – gathered their considerable baseball knowledge and passion to form Twins Daily, eschewing their individual sites in favor of a single site for All Things Twins.Initially, I was on the outside, looking in at this curious experiment and was intrigued, to say the least. The writers were some of the best in Twins country but the site was rough around the edges and the forums were in their infancy. It just so happened that I ran a forum… Courtesy of Nick Nelson, a long-time BYTO contributor, a meeting was arranged with the rest of the Twins Daily founders. We talked ideas, vision, and I was on board almost immediately. After a bit of back-and-forth, we agreed on a plan and began work to fold the Battle Your Tail Off forums into Twins Daily in the next few days. We haven’t looked back since that time. I’m immensely proud of what the Twins Daily forums have become, largely due to the diligent (and, at times, exhausting) efforts of our moderation crew – ashburyjohn, ChiTownTwinsFan, diehardtwinsfan, glunn, nicksaviking, Riverbrian, snepp, stringer bell, twinsnorth49, and USAFChief – and how the forums have complemented the four founding writers. While the front page writers are front and center so often (as they should be), I view the forums as the backbone of Twins Daily and the work those ten perform on a daily basis keeps that backbone from curling in on itself and ultimately snapping in two is vital to the site's continued success. As I’ve said many times when discussing forum policy for Twins Daily, “this isn’t RubeChat”. We expect civil discourse and the moderators are the people who make this site such an enjoyable place to hang out and talk Twins. It wasn’t always sunshine and roses. As some of you surely remember, the BYTO forums were a bit… volatile, to put it kindly. During the transition, we lost many great posters that I still miss to this day, posters who either couldn’t or refused to tone down their style to fit the curated and tempered approach to forums we strive toward on Twins Daily. I’ll never forget the BYTO wiki, the expansive word filters (at one point, we had filters in place for the entire 25 man roster), the meltdown threads, and a certain fella from Alaska who reported me to the FBI for… well, I still haven’t quite figured out why I was to blame for any of that in the first place or what he was going on about in general, actually. There’s a lot I miss about BYTO and I’d be lying if I said I don’t look back fondly at that site whenever I’m faced with the overwhelming desire to really go for the jugular when posting on the forums. But what emerged from that integration was the best Twins forum I’ve ever seen on the internet, and I’ve been participating in Twins forums since 1999, when I found the dedicated ESPN team forum and later, the Dickie Thon Fan Club. We encourage (and, unfortunately, sometimes demand) reasoned, intelligent takes on the Twins and baseball in general. It works. Twins Daily continues to grow year-over-year despite the Twins fielding something that more resembles a clown car than a functioning baseball team for four of the past five years. It’d be easy to congratulate myself and call it a day but I’m not the one who made that happen. All you great posters from BYTO who stuck around (many of whom later became moderators on Twins Daily), all you posters who followed John, Seth, Parker, and Nick over from their blogs, and all you new posters who were first introduced to us through Twins Daily itself, you made that happen. So congratulations to all of you for making Twins Daily what it is today. I also blame you for every headache I’ve had over the past half decade but I’ll save that missive for the ten year anniversary post. On that note, I have a fun surprise for those of you who have stuck with us since the BYTO days. While putting together my notes, I dug into my old BYTO design archives and pulled out the best shirt designs we had over the years. Enjoy. I couldn’t stop laughing when I opened the folder and saw its contents. Download attachment: Back-Shirt-Logo.jpg Download attachment: Moneyball.jpg Download attachment: Black-Dominated-Shirt.jpg Download attachment: 7-31-07.jpg Download attachment: Black-Shirt-Lohse.jpg Download attachment: Rally_Monkey.jpg Click here to view the article

Awesome, thanks. Okay, so the only "mismanagement" of Polanco is possibly the 2010 season, when he split the season between two leagues. Given how much Polanco signed for initially, that seems like an odd move. You'd expect a team to hedge their bet a bit with a 16 year old and make sure he gets that additional year, especially one who cost $775,000 to sign. But in the grand scheme of things, it's not terrible mismanagement, just a bit puzzling. It's somewhat unreasonable to expect a team to put too much emphasis on what will happen in seven years when discussing a 16 year old player.

Yeah, getting that extra option is not hard, particularly in the case of a guy like Polanco. I believe the cutoff is 20 days. Given how little he played, that seemed like a no-brainer.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I *think* Polanco must have been an early add to the 40 man. He was signed at 16 years old. Doesn't that give an additional year of pre-40 man roster time?

Ah, good point. I can't recall if he was an early add to the 40 man.

Sure, which is why I'm not entirely against him starting the season at short. I'm wary of it but given the other options, it's not the worst idea in the world to see if he can hack it at short.

Last season? Yeah, that should have been his final option. But had the Twins not inexplicably called him up in either 2014 or 2015, he'd still have an option remaining.

Small sample sizes for fielding are half of a season. Polanco played less than a week's worth of innings between 2014 and 2015 combined. As many of us were hollering at the time, 2014/2015 were complete wastes of Polanco. The front office burned two options for a total of 40 innings played in the field. Had that not happened, we should be asking if Polanco will start the season in Rochester.