Brock Beauchamp

Thanks for the reminder to watch tonight's game!

I've thought of this as well and it makes a lot of sense. You have a couple of additional cameras for team-focused use (sidelines, etc) and the broadcast crews travel with the team but camera crews are local. It makes a lot of sense.

One thing that isn't being talked about here is cost and volume. It's bloody expensive to have a film and broadcast crew follow a team around for 162 games. And you have to pay sales people to sell those ads. And you have to buy very expensive servers to stream the content. The list goes on and on. Those factors are easy to disperse if you're making $60m a year from the enterprise. It's a lot harder to figure out how to actually make money when that number is, say, $15m.

I think the RSN model works pretty well IF a long-term view is taken and not the constant, money-money-NOW approach we've seen for decades. Having baseball, hockey, and basketball on a single channel is a good thing for all involved parties, including fans. But drastic changes are needed. RSNs will need to move to higher-tier cable packages. Blackouts must end. EVERY TEAM must be available to stream, free of long-term obligations and bundling. The cash cow is gone. It's not coming back. It's time to meet fans where they are instead of trying to push them somewhere they haven't wanted to be for two decades.

Thanks for writing this up, @C-Gangster!

My vote goes to this guy

Good businesses follow where the customers want to go, not force customers to chase them.

Fantastic post.

I don’t care that much other than it creeps into too many conversations and drags down commentary in general. Being apathetic is NOT the same as support. Come on now. I might have fired Baldelli after this season but I’m also unsure whether it will impact much, if anything, given the front office is unlikely to significantly change.

There isn't a single person here defending Rocco Baldelli. We're two pages into this thread and zero people have chimed in that they believe Rocco Baldelli should remain the Twins manager. The closest we've come is a couple of people suggesting it might not matter whether he stays or goes. Yet there are loads of people outright bashing the guy, literally saying things like "clown show" and the like. I swear to god it feels like I'm being gaslit every time this guy is even mentioned on this website. Holy christ.

I can't publicly say the rumors I'm hearing but this doesn't appear to be the case. Hopefully we'll have more substantial things to say in the coming days.

Honestly, out of the trio, I'm most unhappy with Dave St Peter for that ****ing travesty of a television contract after all those empty promises. Second would be Baldelli. I'm pretty okay with Falvey, really.

This is going to be controversial, and for good reason. In Aaron Gleeman's latest roundup for The Athletic, he mentions that while change is likely coming, three of the most controversial figures of the Twins' late-season collapse are likely to remain in place for the 2025 season. Team manager Rocco Baldelli, President of Baseball Operations Derek Falvey, and team president Dave St. Peter will probably run it back again at 1 Twins Way in 2025. Gleeman mentions that while changes could be coming, the core of the organization is likely safe. This isn't going to sit well with the fanbase after so many of them couldn't watch games on television while the Twins were red-hot and then after a dead-deadline, the team was no longer worth watching. View full rumor

I was talking more about the sheer idiocy of suggesting Sands could be a starter but you go ahead and play victim, I know you wear it well.

You're looking for an easy answer and somehow landed on the manager. The reason the Guardians are good again is because they're hitting again, just as they did in 2022, when they also won 90+ games. Teams have down years all the time.

This thread is such a perfect encapsulation of why it's impossible to have a reasonable discussion about Rocco Baldelli.

I consider them a pair because, as you said, it’s almost impossible to separate the actions and decisions of each.

There's a lot to unpack here and based on some of the writers' slack conversations, it's an interesting topic. This is not a Rocco Baldelli thread, please leave him out of it. Let's focus on the front office. 1. Pinch-hitting. While Baldelli pulls the levers on the field, he's getting his data and guidance from the front office. In the past, I've mostly been okay with their tendency to aggressively approach matchups mid-game and try to win the game in the sixth instead of the eighth. There's a lot to be said for putting a guy like Wallner in the moment the lefty starter is gone or aggressively subbing a good fifth-inning matchup by inserting Kyle Farmer, who at the very least will bring good defensive play to the infield for a few innings after the plate appearance. But now that Kyle Farmer is in his mid-30s and guys like Manny Margot are the pinch-hitters du jour, this strategy played out to literally comical effect in the second half of the season as records of incompetence were set. The roster didn't have the horses to deploy this strategy, yet they deployed it anyway. 2. Does Falvey want to come back? From 2021-2023, Falvey was given license to pursue big-dollar players like Donaldson and Correa. He did a pretty good job of it, too. But the thing about using that strategy is that if your boss suddenly tells you to cut costs by 20%, your carefully laid plans for the future have little chance of working. Where you expected to have $40m to spend on players to round out your star cast, you suddenly have less than $10m. Which then forces shenanigans of trading players for salary relief, trading for players who might not have been even your third choice but possibly your eighth or ninth choice in Margot. Do we believe Falvey would have actively pursued Margot if he costs more than "literally nothing" in dollars? How much faith does this instill in Falvey that Minnesota is a place he wants to continue working? It looked like he had a pretty good thing going, the team had momentum with fans, and all of that vaporized almost exactly 11 months ago. 3. The farm system is the strongest it has been since the Mauer/Morneau days. If nothing else, this might keep the front office intact and at least somewhat able to mitigate the budget constraints suddenly placed upon them. I'm just curious what people are thinking about this front office, the strategies they've used in recent years, and how it all came tumbling down over the past two months.

So now we're blaming Terry Francona? That's a choice.

I don’t think Rocco was wrong in that instance. It happened quickly and to one of the Twins only decent relievers at the time. It went as badly as it could have. And if you think others are at fault, go ahead and create a thread about it. Except AGAIN, this thread is about Baldelli and nothing else. Except we’re not talking about those guys, only Rocco. Not even the hitting coaches. JUST ROCCO. ALWAYS. I spent quite a bit of time this morning organizing a series of articles breaking down how every aspect of this organization failed this season. Yes, including Rocco. I don’t have a “crew” because most of the people I speak to don’t defend Rocco, they just attempt to contextualize his actual influence in comparison to ownership, the front office, and the players themselves.