Brock Beauchamp

I'm sure Harold Reynolds often believes the things that come out of his mouth. Reality, on the other hand, has quite a different take on it most of the time.

That would require one of them to get on base first. *drops mic*

I LOLed.

And there we go. Aiken.

That's not what was said. Lots of guys get back to their pre-injury velocity.

Chris Carpenter, Josh Johnson, and Tim Hudson - amongst others - disagree with this statement.

No, Jay isn't a great player... But he's an acceptable starter at an up-the-middle position with 2 2/3 more years of team control. It's going to cost something of value to get a guy like that. A lot more than Casey Fien and a marginal prospect. Right-handed relievers who don't throw terribly hard are extremely volatile and nearly a dime a dozen. I like Fien but he's not going to net you much in return without the vaunted "closer" tag next to his name.

It'd be all sorts of hilarious if the Twins somehow ended up with Span again.

Sounds like a hell of an idea for a sitcom.

Oh, the contract was still a good one, if only for what Francisco did last year. He's still earning his meager paycheck this season as well.

With every passing day, I'm more convinced the only guy on the list in front of Thorpe should be Meyer. Stewart is great. I'm not knocking him... But an 18 year old lefty with command that throws in the mid-90s? Yes, please. After the graduation of Arcia last season, Thorpe almost immediately took the title of "dark horse with massive upside" in my eyes.

He's really not far off his 2011-2012 numbers. He's allowing 8.6 hits per 9 (roughly the same as 11-12) and he's walking 4.7 per 9 (just a tick below 11-12). He has basically reverted back to his pre-2013 numbers again. FIP thought he was an acceptable pitcher in 2011-2012 as well (4.54/4.34 FIP, 5.09/5.34 ERA). FIP loves pitchers like Liriano, even when they're not very good.

Eh, Liriano is up to his old antics again. 2013 looks more like an aberration than a real improvement.

For the record, I'm not against pursuing a CF. I think it's a prudent decision. I simply do not believe the Twins currently have the open pieces to make such a trade without hampering their real goal, and that's sustained success from 2015-2020. If the Twins can get a CF whose contract expires this season and doesn't cost more than Levi Michael or someone of his ilk, I'd be all for it. Then they can either extend that CF or pick up a stop-gap this offseason. Jon Jay is going to cost more than Levi Michael. A lot more than Levi Michael.

Sure, that'd make sense if the Twins weren't in the middle of a rebuild and didn't have three young centerfielders, any of which may take the CF reins in Minnesota in 2015. Giving up a guy like Vargas for a guy like Jay who will almost certainly be supplanted by one or more of Hicks, Rosario, and Buxton as early as Opening Day 2015 doesn't make a lot of sense. The Twins need guys like Vargas as either trade bait or to fill a position as early as next season, they shouldn't consider trading him in a season where they almost certainly won't make the playoffs.

No, he's not. Meyer was a consensus top-50 prospect in all of baseball and is a beast of a human being at 6'9", 220 lbs. Berrios might not crack the top 50 this season even if he continues pitching like he has this season. Despite his nasty stuff, he's still a little guy and little guys often struggle at higher levels of MiLB, much less MLB. And even if Berrios is as projectable as Meyer (and he's not), that's still where I'd start the bidding if I was the Cardinals.

Hah! It's really easy to vet a trade. Let's pretend the Twins have Jon Jay on their roster. A team offers them Casey Fien and Levi Michael in trade. Do you make that trade? No? Then neither will the Cardinals, who might be the most well-run organization in Major League Baseball.

Jon Jay is roughly a 10 WAR player in five years of service time. The Cards are rightly going to ask a significant price for him. He's Denard Span-lite and the Twins got Alex Meyer for Span. If I was the Cards, I'd start at Berrios and work down from there, but not very far down from there. It's going to take real talent to get Jay, just as it took considerable talent to get Span. Maybe not a top 100 prospect but it's going to take more than Fien and a C prospect.

Sure, if the asking price is reasonable and you feel you can flip Jay next season for similar talent, you do that... But the Cards are a very well-run organization and they're smart as hell over there. They're not going to give up Jay for a price you can trade him away at next season. They'll probably start the bidding at Jose Berrios and fall back to Kennys Vargas-level talent (plus Fien) and not budge below that point. The offer of Casey Fien and a C prospect is laughable. It's going to take a lot more than that to get Jay.

This is how I feel. On a team that is in flux, giving up pieces to shore up a temporary need seems foolish to me. Centerfield will not be a problem next season unless Hicks, Rosario, and Buxton collapse. The likelihood of that happening is pretty low.

Ah, good catch.

Hey everybody, I'm shutting down this thread for the time being to keep all draft-related talk in the same thread on draft day. Feel free to continue the conversations over here: http://www.twinsdaily.com/showthread.php/11813-Official-2014-Draft-Day-Thread

The problem is that the "free market" label is being misused to defend this atrocity, much like it's mis-used to talk about health care, which is anything but a free market. Internet providers are even more monopolistic/duopolistic than their health care counterparts, though. Most Americans have no more than two choices for internet providers. In my case, I literally have one choice for true broadband service (not the FCC's badly outdated definition of the term). Comcast. That's it. That's my choice. And I live in the Minneapolis city limits. I live in the largest city in Minnesota and I have one choice. This is basically extortion on the part of the ISPs. Consumers have no choice to move carriers if their service is bad. The ISPs leverage that lack of choice into forcing companies like Netflix to pay more money to receive not "faster" but merely acceptable bandwidth speeds. The ISPs use the asinine "fast and faster" argument to defend this regulation but in reality, we all know that won't be the case. As a country, we invented the damn internet yet we receive some of the slowest average speeds of all industrialized nations. We pay more than anyone for that slow service. How do you think this is going to play out once ISPs are allowed to create a "fast" and "faster" lane? It's absurd. On top of all of that, ISPs like Comcast and Verizon also compete with the likes of Netflix, Hulu, etc. They offer their own streaming services. Do you think all of their native streaming services will be automatically granted "faster" lane access? I think that's a given. So, not only are they extorting companies like Netflix, they're also leveraging their own competing services and granting them fast lane access without additional cost, undermining competition in yet another way. A handful of companies "win" if this regulation passes. Those companies are AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner. Who loses? Everybody else. This is as cut-and-dry as arguments get.

Wait a minute. I just realized that while Kurt Suzuki was standing on first base, a man striking a startling resemblance to Josmil Pinto stepped up to the plate. Is that legal? Can that happen?

I was as against the pathetic 2012 offseason as anybody. But I can't complain much about this past offseason. The Twins did a lot to shore up their issues. Obviously not perfect but pretty good if only for the Hughes signing.