Brock Beauchamp

Eh, I'm tired of this argument... Not necessarily by you but the general consensus "the Twins haven't rebuilt". There is more than one way to execute an organizational rebuild. The end goal of a rebuild is to have a bunch of young players with upside as the core of your team. The Twins have done that. Roughly half of their position players are under 25 years old and project to be every day regulars. The other half of the position players are under 30 years old and have multiple years of control remaining. Did the Twins screw up along the way? Sure, that's pretty obvious. Lots of bad contracts, several bad roster decisions. But that doesn't mean they haven't executed a rebuild, albeit in a less-than-optimal manner (in my opinion).

I fugged up the launch date of Pokemon Go and missed my opportunity. I planned to jump into Nintendo in a (rare for me) short-term move and then... Completely forgot about it. Arghblargh. Nice work, Joe.

I *hate* the notion of tanking for tanking's sake, especially at this point in the rebuild cycle. The Twins should move any player who can be traded and likely won't contribute to 2017 or even 2018. Abad, Nolasco, Suzuki, Kintzler, Plouffe, Milone, etc. The Twins should consider moving Santana, Nunez, and Dozier but only if the offer is right. You put your best young players on the field and let them play. If those players rally and assemble a competent baseball team, great. You're in a good position going into the offseason. If those young players collapse and tank the season, well okay. Now you have more information how to proceed in the offseason. This should be about your best and brightest young players in Major League Baseball, not draft picks. The draft is correlated to the performance of your young players and wishing those players to do poorly is shooting yourself in the foot.

I think we know A LOT more about the baseball side than we do the business side. We see the draft. We see how other teams build rosters and use their prospects. We see the free agents signed by the Twins and other teams for comparable money. We have hundreds of thousands of data points to quantify players. We have hundreds of writers who examine the Twins either casually or daily, each approaching the situation from a different perspective. There's nothing close to that on the business side of things. To put it in different terms, I work in the tech industry. I can tell you where Apple is going right with the iPhone and wrong with the iPad. I use their products and the competitions' products. I have a solid understanding of they devices and how they work. But I have no idea if Apple's expenditures on R&D is adequate. I have no idea if their recent buy-in to the Chinese Uber competitor was a good idea. I don't know which divisions are well run and which are poorly run, sucking up resources. All that stuff is under the hood. Their products aren't under the hood.

You misread my post. I said: "Let DSP go be good at the things DSP seems to be good at." Target Field is nice. It improves every year. Beyond that, I can't really evaluate the business side of the Twins because there isn't a lot of information to evaluate from an outside perspective. The TV deal is questionable but the Twins have a lot going against them on the television side of things: the MSP market has a crap cable subscription rate. Without numbers in hand, I can't criticize their management of the Fox Sports contract because it's pure speculation. The Twins seem to think DSP is good at the business side of his job. Absent any evidence the Twins are a badly-run operation from a non-baseball perspective, I'll defer to them on the subject.

Yes, exactly. DSP has a role in this organization and he seems capable of performing that role. Someone has to run Target Field, television rights, licensing, etc. That's an important job that, when done capably, greatly impacts revenue beyond ticket sales. Hiring a president of baseball operations does not invalidate the role DSP provides the organization. This argument feels a lot like previous Bill Smith / Gardenhire arguments. The desire to see someone's role focus on skills better suited to that individual is not synonymous with the desire to see that person leave the organization entirely. Let DSP go be good at the things DSP seems to be good at. Leave the baseball stuff to someone else.

I'm a bit bearish on Netflix for the next few years even though I own, dunno... $3-4k of their stock? I'd have to check. This is the way I see it playing out: 1. Netflix struggles in the short- and mid-term as everybody and their mother decides "Herp derp, we can offer our own streaming service! It'll be tops! There's no way we'll lose money supporting a team of developers and server costs (probably starting at half a million a year) because people will love the idea of paying $8/mo to stream only AMC television shows! PROFIT!" 2. These individual stations will lose their ass as they realize that unless the content is spectacular, a la carte television will not work. A few content providers will shine: Netflix, HBO, Amazon. The rest will see either diminished subscription rates (who wants to pay $8/mo for AMC?) or 2-3 month subscriptions that binge-watch everything over the past year and then cancel. Either way, it won't be enough to support the infrastructure, which is super-duper-expensive. Developers aren't cheap. The amount of bandwidth required to stream seamless video isn't cheap. 3. After all this plays out, Netflix and Amazon will continue plugging away as content providers realize they can make more money by leasing their content to an aggregate provider instead of going all Wild West and creating/maintaining their own streaming service. I could be wrong but I foresee stuff like CBS All Access being giant failures when all is said and done. If a network can't provide 4-5 stellar shows a year - which Amazon, HBO, and Netflix have shown they can do - they won't survive. And Amazon and Netflix aren't only providing great original content, they're also aggregating content from other providers. They may stumble a bit for a few years but ultimately, I see them coming out on top.

I'm not ready to bench Mauer but I'm all for sitting him at least once a week, probably twice, to get younger guys more reps. It's not like Joe's stat line matters this season anyway.

If the Twins forked the presidency into baseball / business roles, I may applaud until my hands fall off. I don't necessarily want to see DSP go, I merely want to see more baseball people in the front office. That's a great way to split the difference.

Cool story. Find a post where I've lambasted ownership for making a profit.

A better question is "why should he?" Would you leave money on the table if you were guaranteed a contract to do the thing you love to do?

Interesting. I've read articles stating the exact opposite. I'll try to dig one up if I have the time.

No, we're not muddying up anything. We're simply suggesting other stats exist beyond slugging percentage (and I won't even dignify your continued usage of RBI with a rebuttal). In fact, OBP has a higher correlation to runs scored than slugging percentage. If anything, I'm using a better stat than you are. We all want Mauer to play better and slug higher. That isn't in dispute... But some of us aren't restricting stat usage to fit our viewpoint.

Good catch. I didn't bother to flip over to the MLB tab because I assumed the NL looked similar to the AL.

I'd prefer to keep Sano at third for as long as possible. In a lost season, we may as well find out if he can hack it at a more premium position. Getting Polanco playing time would be nice but with Park in Rochester and Sano in Minnesota, I think the long-term play is Miguel at third (if possible). Either way, it's not something I'm going to get too riled up about. As long as Sano stays in the infield, I'm moderately happy.

Agreed but he's also not killing the team right now. He's providing a useful skill at a position where we thought the Twins had a roster crunch but, as it turns out...

We'd all like Mauer's slugging to be higher but slugging isn't the only stat that matters. Joe Mauer has the 7th best OBP in the American League. On a team chock full of players who swing from their heels at pitches over their heads, that has enormous value, whether you want to acknowledge it or not.

Sure. Better players means better team. I think that, with a few smart moves, the Twins could enter pretender status next season. If the lineup steps up and performs even adequately in the second half, that's a big step forward. Add in a 2017 rotation of Berrios, May, Gibson, Santana, Duffey/FA and that's another small step. A few bullpen pieces... And that's maybe a .500 team. The rest is where the general manager makes a difference. Ryan did a bad job of picking which free agents to pursue and an even worse job of picking which to extend. 2-3 smart moves and the Twins suddenly aren't terrible.

I think someone would have to be kinda stupid to pass on a pretty good GM job when they've been rotting away in the comissioner's office for five years and has publicly stated their dream job is general manager. And I think you're too fixated on ace pitcher = contender. The Twins don't need an ace to be a contender, they need a competent pitching staff that is above average in the aggregate. Loads of baseball teams have won big in both the regular and postseason without having an elusive "ace".

I whole-heartedly agree that DSP and Pohlad shouldn't be making this decision without both internal and external help from baseball people. It's insanity to expect non-baseball people to pick the head of baseball operations without help. For the record, I don't love the Twins farm talent, either... But it's solid. Many, if not most, GMs inherit a lot worse (never mind the handful of potentially elite talent already on the roster with There's a lot to like about the Twins GM job, particularly if the person has never held a GM position and wants to make a mark on the league. A few savvy moves and you don't have to squint too hard to see a contender in 2018.

Read my last paragraph again. The Twins job is promising because it HAS prospects, not because they're elite prospects. GMs aren't usually fired and replaced with an outside candidate because they've been doing a bang-up job with the organization. If the organization is in salvageable condition, the GM either sticks around or passes the torch to an heir apparent. As far as job openings go, the Twins job is pretty attractive in the short-term.

I'm not overrating anything. Read what I wrote. I said there's a core of young players with a well-stocked system to feed more over the next 3-4 years. If you don't believe that to be true, you're underrating the organization. In no way, shape, or form did I imply the farm system was elite or that there weren't holes in the system. My point is that most new GMs inherit a franchise in shambles and have to start from scratch. That's not the case with the Twins.

If Ng was offered the job and turned it down, she doesn't deserve a GM position in the league. Minnesota may be "flyover country" but there are only 30 of these positions available and few will ever be as promising as this one (core of young players with a well stocked farm system to feed more over the next 3-4 years). Sure, ownership isn't perfect but they're not that bad, either. They don't stick their noses into the day-to-day very often and that puts them head and shoulders over plenty of other franchises. The Twins GM role isn't perfect but it's a pretty good gig if you want to make your imprint on the league in a hurry.

Yes, Beane was a good GM. He also only inherited one rebuild while Ryan inherited two. Ryan also left under dubious circumstances (not of fan of how he dropped Smith into such an awkward situation) but he left a team with a solid core of players. I'm not making excuses for Ryan but the situations were rather different. If Ryan was GM from 2008-2011, would things have turned out differently over the past five years? Hard to say for sure but it's impossible to deny he inherited a crap situation (again).

And your new Minnesota Twins general manager is... *drumroll*