Brock Beauchamp

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

I'm disappointed as well but prioritization was needed. I hope this is temporary, and suspect it will be. We just need to get a few other things sorted and then I'd like to re-open the subject once we feel like we're on more stable ground.

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.

Yikes, that's quite a prospect haul to leave at once. With that said, I don't say no immediately.

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.

I think it's likely at least one of them is on the roster for good this season. By the time the postseason rolls around, that number could easily be two.

Still, 28 is pretty hard on some teams, particularly bad teams who want to give prospects a taste of MLB in preparation for future years. It seems like a more reasonable number in the low 30s could have been agreed upon.

There's roster expansion, though only to 28 players. I get the idea behind a reduction from 40, but 28 is pretty brutal, especially for developing teams.

Considering those players’ contributions and how they’re all likely welcomed by the veterans because of said performance, I think they probably feel like a pretty important part of the team (never mind that Baldelli is definitely a player’s manager and has likely had conversations with each of them about why they’re being managed in this way). And all of them can expect to be back in September, I suspect.

Depends if you're scouting a line or the player. If you're scouting a line, he's a backend 100 player. If you're scouting the actual player (ie. watching him play), he's much higher than that.

I heard sliders don't break at all over 30,000 feet, though.

Trout went 25th, if that's what you're implying.

Possibly, but if the Twins had handled Gomez better and not tried to rush his development (or just had a better handle on how he needed to develop), maybe he becomes a good player in 2010 instead of 2012 and the Twins get several years of above-average production out of him. That changes the trade dynamic considerably. Either way, it's ancient history at this point. It was a bad trade, for sure.

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.

In retrospect, definitely. But that's the problem with a front office that is losing ground on the rest of baseball in development and scouting: you can't trust them to trade, you can't trust them to draft. The only thing you can really trust them to do is keep good players they already have and get performance out of them before they leave. It wasn't as pronounced in 2008 as it was in, say, 2014 but the needle was definitely moving in that direction.

If it was the offseason, I'd consider Rosario, but not in the middle of a pennant race. He's too valuable to the Twins over the next couple of months to trade away.

For the past few years, the Twins Daily moderator staff has put as much effort and thought into political threads and how to manage them as they've put into any other section of the site, yet political threads are low single digit percentage points of our posts. We've also had difficulty with some other, higher profile sections of the site. We have decided to focus on those higher profile sections of the site, as they involve the core mission of Twins Daily. Unfortunately, that means we will be shutting down all political threads for the time being. It is unlikely that this is a permanent solution - though it may be - but we need more time to develop a strategy how to moderate the innate argumentative and vitriolic nature of political threads in 21st century America. This was the recommendation from the moderator staff but they're not the people who made the ultimate decision to do this: it was me. If you have any questions, suggestions, or anything constructive to say, please feel free to private message me at any time. Hopefully, in the future we will develop a better system to prevent the bickering, insults, and downright nastiness that has consumed these threads for the past few years and, again, if you have suggestions how to do that, you know where to find me.

That may be my favorite bit yet.

Mehhhh. The Royals stink. Extra innings.

Whew. I thought the Mets had normalized a bit because I hadn’t heard any bat**** crazy stories in a couple of weeks. Good to know that things are still going strong over there.

Heading to the bottom of the ninth in KC, still tied.

And he still only went 3.1. Also, the Royals just got out of a jam in the eighth. Still a tie game.