Brock Beauchamp

Berrios wasn't handled as badly as the other two but I still feel he was mismanaged. The guy had all of four starts. The first start was bad but whatever, it's his first start. The second start was acceptable. The third start was questionable. The fourth start was disastrous. He pitched all of 15.0 innings in Minnesota this season. The day he was demoted, the Twins were 10-27 and, for all intents and purposes, out of the postseason. The rest of the Twins pitching staff was either injured or various shades of awful so it's not like Berrios was forced out of the rotation. I mean, come on... Pat Dean. If you're going to call up a borderline elite prospect, he gets more than two weeks and 15.0 IP to prove himself. You give that guy at least a month, preferrably six weeks, to settle down and make adjustments. No less than 8-10 starts to let the coaching staff settle him down and help him mature into an MLB player. While Berrios wasn't as badly mismanaged as Meyer or Chargois, the way he was handled is indicative of the problems with the front office and management this season.

I believe my comment was "too little, too late". The day Jespen was acquired, the Twins were in second place and eight games behind the Royals. Two months prior, they were in first place and half a game up on the Royals. During those two months, the Twins bullpen posted these numbers: June: 4.38 ERA, 78.0 IP, 6.1 K/9 July: 4.15 ERA, 69.1 IP, 7.0 K/9

Outside of timing, I think Ryan handled last deadline somewhat appropriately. The Twins were not a great team, as I said multiple times last June and July. But they were in the hunt. The way I saw it, any postseason appearance is something you pursue but given the weaknesses of the 2015 Twins, they weren't in a position to go all-out and trade significant pieces for a 2015 run (like, say, Kepler). Jepsen and Cotts were fine additions. My problem is that they each happened a month later than they needed to happen. The idea was fine; pick up enough pieces to stay in the race but don't overdo it. The execution was flawed because the bullpen needed help over a month before it received any (excluding the controversial move of shifting one of the team's better young starters to the bullpen).

I don't fault the Twins for opening the season with Chargois in Rochester but I fault them (a lot) for calling the guy up three weeks ago, putting him out there for one appearance (that wasn't even a full inning), and then demoting him again. Doubly so when the MLB bullpen is, to be blunt, ****ing horrible. The way Berrios, Meyer, and Chargois were handled is beyond the pale. It's not only absurd, it's unbelievable a professional front office would handle young prospects so haphazardly.

You are correct. The two players make similar money, give or take $1m per year. Nolasco has 1.5 seasons left on his contract plus a buyout year. Santana has 2.5 seasons left on his contract plus a buyout year.

Yep, another guy who wasn't given a legitimate shot in a role the Twins badly needed to fill.

Sure, I think a lot of us agreed the Twins were +7-8 wins over their talent level in 2015... But it wasn't unreasonable to expect enough young players to step up that the Twins would match their 83 win total, which is where I had them pegged for this season. Now, obviously not everyone was going to step forward but it was pretty unreasonable to expect no one to step forward, either... But that's what happened. Of course, some of that is on the coaching staff and front office. For example, neither Meyer nor Berrios were even given a chance to step forward. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

I don't like Clinton much - I don't despise her but to me, she represents a lot of things wrong with the system - but the right's pure hatred of the woman borders on unbelievable. She's portrayed as evil and corrupt but when viewed objectively, it appears she's simply a cog in a system that increasingly fails to serve its people. And it's damned unfortunate she somehow managed to worm her way into being our "best" option because the other side is offering up a guy who is literally a caricature of a presidential candidate.

So, it happened. The FBI has deemed Clinton careless, possibly inept, but not criminal. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/05/484785586/fbi-recommends-no-charges-for-hillary-clinton-in-email-server-case

Let it go. I'm done having this conversation, have said as much multiple times, yet you continue to bring it up at every opportunity. Next time I hear even a peep about that ****ing Scalia thread, the person who brought it up gets banned for good.

Agreed on both counts.

To be clear, I fully expected Sano to regress. I had his OPS over/under around .830, I think. But it was very disappointing to see him bounce around in the low .700s for the first six weeks of the season. It's also quite damning that his OPS has been on the upswing since they stopped telling him to put on an outfielder's glove.

Agreed, which is one of the reasons why I think it's time to move on from Ryan and Molitor.

You're at least partially right, maybe even mostly right... But you're polarizing the issue far more than it should be polarized. Yes, the front office banked on some pretty bad ideas. They didn't assemble a competent bullpen. They added Park. They put Sano in RF. Those were bad ideas. But they had to rely on the young players to step forward. To a man, that did not happen until a few weeks ago when Kepler was the first (only) to step forward. Half a dozen young players crapped the bed simultaneously. Nearly half a season of (virtually) team-wide regression. No team will ever win under those circumstances. So, yeah, mistakes were made. The front office needs to own those mistakes (and their reluctance to do so has been extremely frustrating)... But sometimes, you need to roll the dice on young players. Had the Twins gone out and signed 3-4 mediocre vets, we would have screamed bloody murder because we've seen the team try that already and it failed.

He's a professional paid a crapton of money. Yeah, he's supposed to do better than he did early this season when he spent six weeks with an OPS under or near .750. I've seen many posters deflect blame away from the players and to the front office for any/every perceived failure. I've also seen the opposite, which was the point of my original post. Everybody gets their fair share of blame for this season. But you can't fire players, so...

Sure, and that has probably weighed on Miguel a bit in the first half of the season... But Sano is also expected to have the emotional maturity to compartmentalize his frustration and still do his primary job, the one he was very good at last season (hitting). So, while putting the guy in the OF was certainly a mistake, some of the blame still goes to Miguel. Again, degrees of blame go to all involved parties. The front office never should have put him in that position but Sano should have done a better job of weathering the storm and posted better numbers than he did early in the season (when his OPS was a full 200 points lower than last season). And if you don't like the Sano comp, go with Dozier or Plouffe. Neither player has any excuse to post the numbers they did early in 2016.

That will help but given how white rural America is doing badly, I think there's a good chance we see religious fervor replaced with authoritarian fervor. This election cycle has been so depressing. I understand why people of color are frustrated. I understand why white rural America is frustrated. They both have legitimate reasons to feel screwed over by the system. What I don't understand is why both segments of society have gone about finding their answers so differently. In the 30s, America came somewhat close to aligning based on class/stature and not race. That's how democracy should work. If you slight enough people to reach a majority they align and, damn it all, they do something about it. Instead, white America has reinvested in some pretty scary tenets of authoritarianism. It's just so damned depressing. I can't understand why those people don't look around, see people who only look like them with no coalition from other demographics, and realize that maybe their ideas are wrong. If no one outside your group wants to align with you, then there's almost certainly something wrong with your motivations.

Those irritated me but I figured there'd be space for them later in the season so it didn't ripe me up too much. And Kepler is basically guaranteed a spot for the rest of the season, now the team just needs to find a space for Polanco.

And even despite all of that shuffling, it was expected that one of Plouffe, Park, or Mauer would get injured and Sano would slide back into a natural role. The moment I threw up my hands in disgust is when Plouffe got dinged up and Nunez shifted to third base while Miguel continued to play (word used loosely) the outfield. That wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back for me but it was damned close. The Alex Meyer and Jose Berrios situations were what finally broke me on the season and the point where I said "Oh, screw it. Fire everybody."

Um, not really. Whose fault is it that Miguel Sano has an OPS 115 points lower than last season? It's pretty hard to blame that on anyone other than Miguel Sano. He had the same coaching staff last season. But I agree that when your entire bank of young players fail at once, at least some of the blame needs to be placed on the coaching staff. But players are also responsible for their performance. It's not one or the other. And that's one of my biggest pet peeves with these types of discussions. People pick a side and come hell or high water, they'll defend it to the end. Like most things in life, the Twins 2016 season is the result of many shades of grey and many failures from all levels of the organization. We should be discussing degrees of blame, not the total load/offload of blame to one side or the other. That's ridiculous.

Well, yeah, I simply didn't understand why you pointed out the best case scenario.

I was okay with keeping Plouffe as the market for third basemen was atrocious. Which is fine, because Plouffe is a better third baseman than Sano and even with Trevor on the team, Miguel can slide into the DH role. If Plouffe or Mauer get injured, you move Sano into the field and slide Vargas/Arcia into DH. Park threw a giant wrench into the entire situation.

Well, sure... But that was the best case scenario. The middle of the road scenario is a loss. The worst case scenario is a huge loss. And any GM that makes decisions based on best case scenarios should be fired (which is one of the reasons I'm ready to see Ryan step down, willingly or forcibly).

I have no idea. The Park decision was my second biggest issue of the offseason behind the bullpen, as it forced everyone to move around the diamond and put a ham-fisted 500 lb gorilla in right field.

The thing is that even the reward part wouldn't be that impressive. As we now know, every young player - the backbone of this team that was going to decide whether it won or lost - has regressed. The Twins are a terrible team. Put Desmond on this terrible team and maybe they crack 70 wins (assuming the young players post a better second half than they did the first). So that leaves you two options: 1. Offer Desmond a QO and take the pick. You've now traded down from a 15th pick to a 25-30 pick. That's a loss. 2. Trade Desmond at the deadline. Unsurprisingly, Desmond is much better in Texas than he is outside Texas. Teams will makes offers based on his .800 OPS outside Texas. What is that worth? Well, last year the Astros gave up two guys for Scott Kazmir, neither of which were top 100 prospects (though Nottingham was BP's #66 to begin this season). Gerardo Parra was having a very good season for Milwaukee last year and was flipped for Zach Davies, another guy outside all top 100 lists. David Price netted Daniel Norris but I think we can all agree Price was one of the darlings of the deadline with a value much higher than Desmond. There were other trades, some netting more than others, but I think it's pretty obvious that Desmond is maybe worth a 50-ish prospect in return, tops (provided the other team even has a 50-ish prospect in the system and if they don't, then you probably take two lesser players outside the top 100). So, the best case scenario is that you trade Desmond for a guy with the same kind of upside you get from a #15 pick but he's two years closer to MLB. That seems a lot like shuffling deck chairs to me. You're putting a lot on the line (a first round pick at 15) for a guy whose ceiling is returning a different version of that 15 pick that's a bit closer to the bigs. Terrible idea.