Brock Beauchamp

Listening to MPR this morning and they said May 14th.

And it has been postponed. Kinda surprising that it has taken this long to see a postponement.

Yeah... and add in Mauer's propensity for walks - which easily take away ~20 or so hits a season - and it'd be almost impossible to hit 3,000. He could probably vie for 2,500 but I think 3,000 is an unreasonable goal. But it really doesn't matter. Mauer's hit count isn't what made him great. What made him great was the entire package at the most demanding defensive position on the diamond.

I think basing the future free agent market based on a single offseason where the big players stepped out for obvious financial concerns is a mistake. Maybe baseball regulates itself next offseason and we don't see the absurd contracts we saw in the past but I think it's naive to expect to get a Lance Lynn for $12m or a Logan Morrison for $6.5m every offseason just because they're in the meat of the bell curve. If that happened, that'd be the greatest market inefficiency I've seen in the past couple of decades, even more than Moneyball. You can buy a win for $4-6m at your weakest positions on the roster basically at will, rounding out a bad team into a decent team or a good team into a great team. That's a ridiculous value and surely all 30 teams would realize it and drive up the price of those middling free agents.

This is complete speculation but I wonder if Dozier's "clubhouse leadership" influenced players rejecting the offers. After all, Brian is known for betting on himself. He did it very successfully back in the day. Of course, it's also possible that the front office simply lowballed everybody. It seems a bit weird that no one took the bait and started negotiations, though... If someone says "I'll give you $30m" and you want $60m, why don't you say "well, up that to $45m and we'll talk"? When it comes to guaranteed money, it seems odd to walk away from the table before even making a counter offer, which is the gist I got from this conversation.

Sure, that's a possibility, but this team ain't slow. It's not as if Buxton, Rosario, Kepler, or Dozier get on base that pitchers don't think about throwing a few more fastballs to keep them honest. All in all, I think it balances out.

Castro turns 31 in a few weeks. He's not going to get better offensively. But that doesn't diminish the value he brings to the team. The Twins badly needed a solution at catcher and he delivers. Castro isn't great with the bat but he's good enough... and his glove brings enough to the table that overall, he's a player you want starting for your team unless you have one of 2-3 elite catchers that exist in baseball at any given moment.

Eh, China has a ton of leverage here. Their US exports are only a small percentage of their total GDP. Never mind that China is a large reason why the US debt isn't *really* an issue, and Trump (and frankly, his idiotic tax plan) doubled down on that this year. China, unlike the US, is monolithic. Their government can literally dictate anything that happens within their borders: whether workers are paid, how much they're paid, where their banks lend money and to whom, how pretty much anything is handled. That's a massive leverage point for them when it comes to negotiations. Trump is likely playing a losing hand here, one that may net mild rewards with China (simply out of irritation) but will lose considerable traction with the rest of the world.

I get what you're saying, I really do, but what defines "unreasonable accusations"? Because I've sat down and listened to people of color try to have this conversation... and they're beyond frustrated. If they hold protests in the streets, they're thugs. If they silently kneel during the anthem, they're dishonoring our veterans (just two loose examples of various groups trying different tactics). There's blowback no matter how politely or rudely the conversation is brought to the table. One side is trying really hard to get their message out any way they can and they've been pushing the same message as a group for literally 70 years. The other side talks a lot about tone and semantics. I mean, they talk about it a lot. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to reach out and find ways to communicate but we have well over half a century of evidence to support that one side is trying its ****ing damnest to get people to listen while the other obfuscates and distracts because it's a hell of a lot easier to do that than actually talk about the subject at hand. So we can talk about being polite, we can talk about semantics, or we can actually face the hard truth that one side doesn't want to talk about this subject at all. We can keep circling the issue or we can start calling out those around us who do everything in their power to avoid actually having a discussion. Because the other side has literally tried everything in their power to get people to listen.

Just wait until you get to the second season. It’s amazing. So smart and creative.

I do the same so it’s something I notice because it’s an oddity. The only player of note who throws left and hits right that I know of was Rickey Henderson.

Jamie, you continue to impress with these pieces. Really nice work.

Wait, what? Why!?!!? Let the players have their “thing”, particularly when it has personal significance.

It makes it a lot harder when one side is, intentionally or not, obfuscating the argument.

Absolutely and well said. We need to reach out to those that have issues with the vocabulary used around this issue, as diehard pointed out. And we can have that conversation, for sure... but I know you agree that it’s hard to get white people at large to the table because we fight over such simple issues as this orginal thread topic. I won’t just come to the table, I’ll be ecstatic to be there, if we can actually talk about race without sidebars and tone policing before we even walk into the room. But to do that, white people need to shut up and listen for a minute. And how do we convince a people that are so obviously in power, yet refuse to acknowledge said power, to shut the **** up?

So what you're saying is that the ball approached the plate and things happened.

How did Gibson *really* look today? I listened on the radio but won’t watch the game until tomorrow. It sounded like he was struggling a bit but mostly ran into a string of bad BABIP luck.

Oh, I don’t think you do... just tying the conversation with you into conversations with others.

So this team might be alright.

Yep, which is why I think the phrase is counter-productive in a few different ways. But to bring this statement back around, I don't get upset when people use the term "white privilege" just because I dislike the phrase; that would be discarding an easily-understood message because of semantics.

Well, you're right about power and influence... but white Americans make up about 2/3rds of America (not 3/4) but control something like 90% of the positions of influence and power. It's wildly disproportionate and that's after the huge gains made in the past half century. White people certainly have poverty issues (I highly recommend the book "White Trash: 400 Years..." if you really want to deep dive on that), the issues are different and have often been leveraged that because they're white, they're still better than the richest black man. This country was getting closer to a class-based movement in the early 20th century but, as had happened several times previous in the country, politicians and power brokers leveraged whiteness to keep the poor apart and powerless. But a poor white man is still better off than a poor black man. They won't be arrested as readily, they won't be put in jail for as long if caught, and if they manage to pick themselves off the ground (which is easier if you're white and not under the yoke of a system that seems to enjoy stepping on your neck), they can slide right into "American society" like nothing ever happened at all. No matter where you stack a black man versus a white man economically, the black man is at a bigger disadvantage to not only gain economic advantage, but simply to hold on to his current status. "White privilege" (again, don't care for this term) isn't about white people actually having privilege; it's about society at large not getting in their way when they try to make progress.

"but you don't seem to be too interested in figuring out your role in why it cannot be had" This is not a defensive reaction but I feel the exact same thing about your opinion on this. And that makes the conversation really difficult to have for different reasons than I've outlined in previous posts. White people hold the vast majority of influence and power in this nation. We simply do not see what it's like to walk around with privilege on a daily basis because it's invisible to us (I actually dislike the phrase "white privilege", as it's too easy to shrug off... I prefer something more along the lines of "white default", which focuses on how we walk through life as "Basic Human" and everyone else is "Other"). I don't get harassed by the cops, no one has ever asked to touch my hair, people don't mock my name, people don't avoid me on the street, people don't assume negative stereotypes about me unless they're completely benign and silly like "he can't dance". And because we simply don't know what we're talking about here, I feel we need to curb our outrage when things get uncomfortable; when the conversation goes to a place that makes us squirm in our seats a little bit. I don't pretend that everything that comes out of the left is intelligent or well-worded; hell, I disagree with loads of stuff said by people both to the left and right of me on the political spectrum. But what I try to do is ignore the most idiotic things that come from those sources and focus on the message. Because it's obvious that there are very real, systemic issues surrounding race in this country. I can either get upset about how the message is phrased or I can get upset that the message needs to be conveyed at all. I choose the latter. And if someone asks indirectly if my dislike of a player is racially-motivated, I'm not going to lose my **** over it because it's a legitimate question given the deep-seeded biases institutionalized in this nation. Again, I choose to pause and consider whether their statement has merit. That doesn't mean I need to agree with their statement. Agreement is not required with anything but we should always be listening and we should not seek out accusatory tone to deflect the conversation to semantics at the expense of the message. TLDR: white Americans have held the microphone for 242 years. It won't kill us to sit down and listen for a couple of minutes, even if the things said make us uncomfortable.

I’ll just say that out of the ones I’ve met... very few. Maybe 20% if I’m feeling generous.

Except that I pointed out how the OP went through effort not to be objectionable with their argument, yet objection was still taken. Just go back and read what the OP posted. There are no inflammatory statements in there. Were ideas challenged? Sure, but that's necessary to have this kind of conversation. But no one was labeled with the dreaded "R" word in any form. No one was singled out and told that their personal objections were racially-motivated. The poster tried pretty hard to make sure they didn't target anyone specifically and spoke of the problem at large. It seems to me your standard is unreasonable. The poster did what you talked about, yet is still catching flak for it. And I agree that it works both ways but I can't control the other side of the debate; all I can do is make sure I listen and try not to get upset (or... triggered... heh) over a single word if it means I miss the message. And it feels like that happens a lot in much of our society but few areas does it seem to happen as frequently or violently as it does race-related issues.

To which I'll reply "we need to stop being so damned sensitive about one word when the intent of the message is pretty clear". Which loops me back to White Fragility. We've come to the point that the mere mention of race sparks such defensiveness and rage in some people that a conversation becomes impossible. We focus on semantics because we don't want to deal with the discomfort we find within the message itself. If you look at the poster's OP both in this thread and the original game recap, they *very carefully* dodged directly calling people racially-motivated or even using the word "racist" at all (except in a post that was hidden and included a massive disclaimer how they feel the word "racist" is constraining and lacking the nuance necessary to have this conversation). Yet, the blowback has been wind tunnel-esque. Whose fault is that? You say the word "racist/racism" is the problem, yet the OP never used it. So, under those rules, how on earth can we even have this conversation?