Brock Beauchamp

MLB hired someone whose goal is to end blackouts. I suspect there's a near-zero chance teams are going to happily jump into a new contract with the same old blackout rules. As contracts expire, I expect to see the anti-blackout movement snowball. As for the article itself, baseball has the luxury of being able to straddle both worlds. They can easily sign a subscriber deal that earns them additional money while also keeping free Sunday games on broadcast television. If you have 162 games to play with, losing one out of six to increase your footprint with local free broadcasts might be a decent path forward.

Hey, I wanted all of you to get a look at this first and see if it covers events and has details you'd like to see in an offseason guide. Please give it a read and if you see something that could be improved or altered, please comment here!

Agreed. One of the biggest, and maybe the biggest, mistakes the RSNs made was to tether themselves to cable subscribers for a short-term buck over long-term viability. I think RSNs have a place and I want to see them succeed but they have to be open to offering their product to every consumer channel, not just cable subscribers.

That's certainly true but really, it only accelerated the issue. The bulk of RSN money was propped up through contracts signed amidst declining cable subscriber rates, which are only going to continue to decline. Sinclair taking out massive loans at the peak of the bubble and then going bankrupt certainly accelerated (and worsened) the problem but the core of the problem still exists: a lot of money being paid to an industry that has fewer customers every year.

Yeah, that’s my thinking as well. And I’m absolutely open to other ideas along this vein of thought.

I think the opposite is true. By attracting a much larger base through all Minnesota sports fans, I suspect the price per user would probably be lower. Advertisers are more likely to buy in, it's easier to get carriers on board, and the channel becomes viable full-time instead of just seasonally. I believe the problem right now is that television revenues have been artificially propped up by carriers desperately trying to hold onto declining subscriber rates, not the model itself. The Twins aren't worth $55m a year. I don't know if the real value of those rights is $15m or $45m but carriers have been throwing bad money at live sports in hopes of retaining subscribers (who obviously didn't stay anyway). An all-in-one local sports channel should be viable if the market course corrects to the actual value of said channel, not a loss-leading item to keep subscribers who aren't going to stay anyway.

Indeed that is city hall of Canada City.

This is kind of what I was thinking of with the "personal experiences" segment. I think this could be a really fun aspect of this.

I'd try here first: https://www.baseball-reference.com/about/contact.shtml I've had very little interaction with B-Ref itself, I just set up their linker tool with our sites.

Canada City will live in infamy forever.

What Austin Martin link? Is this a joke I'm missing? Oh, thinking about it, I bet you're talking about the B-Ref linker tool we use. If so, that's buggy af and provided by B-Ref itself. I implore that you petition them to give us better tools than they currently offer, I'm driven crazy by that thing on a regular basis.

I think we'd need a team of people who have the final say on edits. It's the only thing I can think of that makes sense.

And this is really my focus in this project. Puckett and Hrbek have loads of coverage but what about the players we grew up watching like Denny Hocking, Allan Anderson, or Butch Wynegar? That's really the gap I see a project like this filling.

This would also include prospects. The long-term goal would be mainly from the prospect side of things; creating a player page when they're in the low minors and watching that page grow and evolve through a MLB career. But also having a player page for someone like Greg Gagne would be kinda fun, too. I don't think it needs to be limited in this capacity.

We've been floating this idea around for years now but it always seemed so cumbersome and difficult that we never went anywhere with it. Well, my slate is mostly open this winter and I'm interested in taking a longer look at the mechanics of such a thing. What I'm envisioning is a community-generated player page for Twins players. We'd start with zero and any of you hankering to start a page for a player could do so. These pages would include a short bio, user-uploaded images, and would automate links to all Twins Daily content that has that player tagged in it (news, videos, user blogs, forum topics, etc). We could throw in user excerpts of interactions they've had with the player, the sky is really the limit on what we can put on the page. In essence, we'd build a "player hub" for each player. If you want to find all of Twins Daily's content on Byron Buxton (plus his bio information), you'd just hit Byron Buxton's player page. But NO STATS. Stats are their own separate issue and we don't want to replicate/compete with B-Ref; they do a better job of that than we ever could. We'd probably include a B-Ref link to the player's page should anyone wish to check their stats. Is this something some of you would be interested in participating in? Is it a fun project? I just want to hear what you think of the idea and open a conversation about it. Maybe include some kind of system where if one of you users edits a page, you get points for it and can use those points for... stuff. I don't know, sponsoring your favorite player's page or a t-shirt or something. I don't know. I have a pretty good grasp on the technical aspect of this but haven't quite figured out what interests all of you in participating in the project.

We've been using this over at Brewer Fanatic for awhile now and I like the way it works. Basically, use this forum for any rumors you've heard (more on this below) or any trade proposals or whatever you've cooked up. Rumors: do not actually use this forum, use the rumors section of the site! Once you post to the rumors section of the site, the system will automatically re-post back into this forum where it will operate like any other forum thread. This helps us a ton with SEO and capturing new users so please hit the link if you want to post a rumor! https://twinsdaily.com/minnesota-twins-free-agents-trade-rumors/ This forum may operate like the draft forum and rotate in and out of the archives seasonally. I'm not sure how we want to use it long-term so we'll just feel out the situation for awhile.

Wow, really nice work on this!

What's going to be higher, Joe Ryan's innings count or Yordan Alvarez's home run count?

I say 3.2 innings, who is taking the over?

We can take you higher tho

Look at the Astros rotation. They’re not exactly trotting out vintage Pedro every day, either. The difference is that the Twins have taken bad approaches against good pitchers while the Astros have taken very good approaches against good pitchers.

The Twins clubhouse should be cranking some Nickelback today.

Fixed. I went full-bore Memento on yesterday.