Brock Beauchamp

Jesse Winker may be a good on-field decision but damn, I cannot stand the guy.

Every offseason, we offer our You’re The GM! tool (formerly the Payroll Blueprint) to build your ideal Twins roster. This year, we’ve updated and streamlined the tool a bit to improve the experience. The idea behind this feature is to give fans a chance to play the role of General Manager (or CBO or PoBO… you get the idea) for their favorite team, the Minnesota Twins. It’s meant to give fans the opportunity to discuss (and, let’s be honest, argue) how they would approach the long, dark MLB offseason. This tool is intended to be informal and fun, so we’ve left it as open as possible. There is a payroll “budget” that loosely resembles the Twins' 2024 payroll, but there is no penalty for going over that number. It’s a guideline, nothing more. Second, you can submit as many blueprints as you like throughout the offseason. As the offseason landscape changes, users often return multiple times over the winter and create new blueprints. Before we get into the breakdown of the tool, you can save your blueprint and come back to it at any time. The only restriction is that you must register an account on the site to create a blueprint (so we can save a draft for you and also post the blueprint for others to discuss). Let’s get into the tool itself. It has four quadrants that work best if addressed in a counter-clockwise order (this tool works much better on desktops due to its complexity but will work on mobile devices if need be). Top Left: The 26-man Roster We have created a rough guideline of what the Twins 26-man roster looks like today. The roster is flexible; any player can be added or removed as you see fit. We’ve also included either guaranteed salaries or, in the case of arbitration and contract options, the recommendations of MLB Trade Rumors. This section is where you build your roster and make changes based on the following two sections. As you make changes to players and salaries, the total payroll number (right side of the screen) will change, allowing you to track your budget on the fly. The bottom field in both columns is for any dead money you assume during the course of your offseason. Acquiring dead money should be rather uncommon but we want to present users the opportunity to take on dead salary if it suits their purposes. Bottom Left: Arbitration & Trade Decisions Here, you will find a selection of arbitration options and internal options (usually from the 40-man roster or minor leagues) to assist in building your offseason roster. On the right-hand side of this column, you will see Trade Candidates, a list of the 35 players most likely to be traded this offseason, per MLB Trade Rumors. To help you get up to speed with these candidates, we offer a direct link to the MLBTR write-up on trade candidates. Bottom Right: Free Agents Here, you will find the top 50 free agents, again per MLB Trade Rumors. These are sorted by position to facilitate quickly finding your desired free agent and include the recommended salary for that player. Because this is a blueprint for a single year, we only include their projected salary for the coming season, not the number of years or anything else. To help you get up to speed with these free agents, we offer a direct link to the MLBTR write-up on the best 50 free agents available this winter. Top Right: Dead Money, Your Total Payroll, & Commentary The only unalterable field on the page is Dead Money; it is players to which the team has committed money but has no reasonable way to get out of the contract. Below that, you will see the recommended budget, your current total, and the percentage you are over or under that budget. Again, keep in mind the budget is only a guideline, and you can go above it as much as you like… But defend your choices, coward! The following field is Title, which gives other users an idea of what to expect with your blueprint (e.g. Sign Juan Soto, Damn the Consequences). When your blueprint posts for other users, it will read “Your Username’s 2025 Payroll Blueprint: Sign Juan Soto, Damn the Consequences”. The following field is Your Comments & Explanation, a long-form field meant to type out the rationale behind your decisions. Here is the place to fully explain your trades (including which players are leaving the Twins to bring in new players), why you targeted specific free agents, and, any promotions from the minors you advocate or any options you declined to extend to a specific player. This is often multiple paragraphs, you can write up as much detail as you desire. That’s it, you’re done! At this point, you can either publish your blueprint to the forums or save it for later if you feel it’s incomplete. Thank you for joining us at Twins Daily. I hope you enjoy playing the role of general manager, at least for a moment! Start Your Payroll Blueprint Now

@twinsdaily.bsky.social on Bluesky BSKY.APP The top destination for independent Minnesota Twins content and conversation on the web.

Because people seem to be transitioning away from X/Twitter, at least in some capacity, I was asked to expand the default embed options for other social media sites. The following sites will now embed natively on the site just as Twitter has since forever. 1. Instagram 2. Facebook 3. TikTok 4. BlueSky 5. Threads 6. Twitter/X

I won't put anything past the Pohlads at this point. I'm soooooooo ready to move on from them.

What app download? I've never seen anything asking me to download and neither should anyone else.

Um, no. They won't. Sigh.

MLB Trade Rumors released their top 35 trade candidates for the 2024-2025 offseason. To the surprise of absolutely no one in the room, the two Twins that made the list are the biggest salary concerns on a Twins team already over their projected payroll for 2025: catcher Christian Vazquez and pitcher (starter? reliever? mascot?) Chris Paddack. Vazquez can be considered a luxury on a Twins team battling baseball economics: he's a good defensive backstop with limited offensive capabilities and is slated to make $10 million in his walk season. Paddack is a different story but a similar payroll concern: he's due to make $7.5 million in 2025 but only made 17 starts last season. It's also uncertain whether the Twins want him in the rotation on Opening Day or would prefer to move him to the bullpen where his velocity and speed has played up in the past. View full rumor

MLB Trade Rumors recently wrote about the Twins' financial situation, their current payroll, and options for the coming offseason. Aaron Gleeman of The Athletic recently wrote about the Pohlads committing to keeping the 2025 payroll at roughly the level of the 2024 payroll. The primary problem facing the Twins front office this offseason is that without doing anything through the winter, they're still roughly $10 million over last year's payroll number. Obviously, the Twins need to shake up the roster (at least a little) after the worst collapse in team history. This means the one tool remaining in Derek Falvey's (admittedly empty) tool chest is to deal from the team's relative depth, primarily on the position player side. Some of the names that are due raises via arbitration (MLBTR estimates shown) are Willi Castro ($6.2 million), Ryan Jeffers ($4.7 million), Bailey Ober ($4.3 million), Joe Ryan ($3.8 million), Jhoan Duran ($3.7 million), Griffin Jax ($2.6 million), and Royce Lewis ($2.3 million). This isn't an ideal situation for the Twins, as they will likely be forced to deal additional value and hope to recoup more value in return. They were able to achieve this goal with the Luis Arraez for Pablo Lopez trade but it's a fine line to walk and fraught with risk. View full rumor

Taylor Swift has the money, maybe she also has enough of a grudge against Patrick Mahomes to do it. If not, how do we create said grudge?

Their actions over the past 13 months make a lot more sense now.

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.