Brock Beauchamp

The guy lines up pretty well with Edwin Jackson, though I think Hughes actually has potential to improve where Jackson is pretty much a league-average guy. It will be interesting to see how much money Hughes commands in comparison to the enigmatic Jackson.

There's a lot more to it than the pressure cooker of NY, though that may play a small part. Over 46% of Hughes' balls in play are flyballs. In Yankee Stadium. Boom goes the dynamite, so to speak. On top of that, he gets to pitch to AL East hitters ~80 times a season. How fun for him.

I'd easily offer Hughes 2/$16m or 3/$24m. In a heartbeat. I'd go 3/$30m on the guy, honestly. Wouldn't even blink twice at that price. Get him out of that stadium and he turns into a much more effective pitcher. Get him out of the AL East and he turns into an even more effective pitcher. Here's hoping Ryan sees that as well.

It's unlikely that they'll be consistent, just as the negative posters aren't consistent with their demands, either... If the Twins do something right, then the negative nellies just move the bar further along to continue complaining. The homers and negative people are little different, though at least the homers are slightly more palatable over the long run (excessive positivity is less grating than excessive negativity). Given the way Buxton and Sano are progressing, it's time to start dabbling in the free agency market. As mentioned in another thread, Phil Hughes might be a good place to start. Or Josh Johnson. I'm still wary on offering five year deals to pitchers but the idea must be explored at some point. At the very least, they need to find shorter term, older vets who aren't flat-out awful. This pitching staff cannot be competitive using only internal resources and that isn't going to change in the next 18 months.

It'd be a good pick-up. The guy is a bit like Scott Baker. Decent K rate, decent BB rate, extreme flyball pitcher. He might do okay in Target Field.

I'd give up Drew Butera for half a bag of balls and a Big Gulp.

Ah, for some reason, I thought he had one more year of arb. In that case, the price would have to be really low.

Eh, the price would have to be pretty low. Guys like Hughes are readily available on the FA market every year and you don't have to give up a prospect to get them.

You can do similar comparisons with other starters. I picked Gray simply because I hate him and he's awful. I just randomly pulled a starter off the top of my head: Gil Meche: career .291 BABIP.

Well, yeah. If you put a pitching machine on the mound (or a 14 year old kid), that BABIP will go up a bit (but probably not as much as you'd expect). But that's not the discussion... The topic was originated by someone making the correlation that the same BABIP differences seen in hitters are found in pitchers as well. And that's simply not the case. I even pointed out earlier that outliers like Sean Bergman and Nick Blackburn, two "batting practice" pitchers, can have a higher BABIP (but not even that much... around .315 IIRC). They're also quickly escorted out of the league if it stays that way for too long. On the other hand, Adam Dunn and his 2012 .246 BABIP was considered a moderately good player. That same season, Joe Mauer posted a BABIP of .364 but wasn't that much better than Dunn overall (around .065 OPS points). Fun fact: 2000 Barry Bonds posted a .271 BABIP and a 7.6 WAR. Lots of contact, lots of balls not in play.

No, a bad BABIP won't doom you as a pitcher... in the short term. As we saw with Nick Blackburn, that rarely holds up over time. Johan Santana and pitchers of his calibre tend to do well because they put fewer balls in play and they don't issue free passes, two things that aren't shown in BABIP. And, as you said, there's a difference in batted ball profiles. Johan isn't allowing good contact and he's not walking people so it's hard to score runs. If you're batting .280 and hitting singles with no one on base, it's pretty hard to score runs. If you're batting .280, getting a walk an inning, and hitting line drive gappers, you're gonna score runs. But generally, every pitcher is going to give up hits on 27-30% of balls in play.

Nathan, maybe... But the Twins signed Willingham the day before Cuddyer went to the Rockies. They couldn't have been too interested in retaining ol' Dimples.

Hunter is the only guy on that list that the Twins made even a cursory attempt to keep.

Perkins is way more valuable than Garza. Perkins is locked up for several years at a ridiculously cheap rate and Garza hits free agency in four months. Perkins is attractive to the mid-market teams of MLB while none of them can afford to give up a prospect haul for a guy who will demand a 5-6 year deal worth $80m+ after the season.

On the other hand, Ducatis have a soul whereas Hondas do not. I like my motorcycles to be sassy and a little bit unpredictable. I bought the Honda for a long trip next year (planning to do eastern Canada on a bike) and then I'll be buying another Ducati. I may keep the Honda, don't know yet. We'll see how I like it in a year.

Twins: Clete Thomas RF Jamey Carroll 2B Joe Mauer DH Justin Morneau 1B Ryan Doumit C Oswaldo Arcia LF Aaron Hicks CF Eduardo Escobar 3B Pedro Florimon SS (Kevin Correia P) Rays: Desmond Jennings CF Luke Scott DH Ben Zobrist 2B Evan Longoria 3B James Loney 1B Wil Myers RF Kelly Johnson LF Jose Molina C Yunel Escobar SS (Jeremy Hellickson P)

Except for pitchers, it kinda does. One of the strange anomalies of baseball that nobody really understands. Johan Santana career BABIP: .276 Jeff Gray career BABIP: .296 Not equal but considering the talent of the pitchers, not terribly far apart, either. Numbers suggest that the batter has far more control over BABIP than the pitcher, barring weird exceptions like Nick Blackburn and Sean Bergman, two pitchers who spent a large portion of their careers throwing BP and getting shelled.

Easy. Nobody wants to pitch for the Mets.

If someone finds an annoying rollover ad, please post a screenshot of it in this forum. I never see rollovers and there's no way for us to tell the network "stop running that one Toyota ad". We need some frame of reference based in its appearance and where it's appearing on the page.

Wild speculation. Stop. And Ryan should have quit because his boss is a jerk? And because he didn't quit, that automatically equals collusion with Pohlad's grand plan for contraction? Do you realize how absolutely insane this sounds? Listen, everybody. Criticizing the front office is fine but come on. We draw the line at wild speculation, trashing the character of said people in the front office, and other such nonsense.

So now Terry Ryan actively tried to contract himself out of a friggin job? Un (expletive deleted) believable.

There's a good chance that's the way it plays out. If anything, people complain that Ryan is too bullish on his assets... I don't think anyone would have been terribly surprised to see him sit on Santana if he didn't get an offer he liked. After all, people complain that's what he has done with multiple free agents over the past 18 months.

Marcum hasn't been nearly as bad as the initial glance at his stats suggest. I still believe that he was worth the relatively small risk required to sign him.

An upgrade, sure... But the Twins shouldn't be looking for marginal upgrades in 2013. They should be looking at guys who will help the team in 2014. And Swarzak probably isn't that guy. It makes way more sense to give Hendriks or maybe even Albers a shot (though I understand their hesitancy to shuffle the 40 man again).

That only makes sense if you ignore the obvious fact that trading for outfielders (one of the easier things to find in baseball) opened a giant hole in the starting rotation (much harder to find in baseball). Ryan was the GM of this team for a long time. I posted multiple situations showing how he handled the starting staff before he left. His history involved basically zero instances of him trading a young starting pitcher, much less a very good starting pitcher with an ERA under 4.00 in his first real season with the team. Ryan spent a decade hoarding his pitchers and pitching prospects yet the moment he left, the two best starters on the team were traded. Yet people still think Ryan was the man pulling the strings on those deals. How on earth does that make sense? If anything, I think it pretty clearly shows the exact opposite. He may have been a consultant but there's also a good chance that Smith flat-out didn't listen to him. Now that Ryan is GM again, he's gobbling up pitching at every opportunity. Whenever he's in the GM chair, the Twins accumulate pitching and don't let go of it. The moment he leaves, they trade it away... But logic around these parts believe Ryan is still the one who told Billy Boy to make those trades. Damn, Terry Ryan must have really hated Bill Smith because he basically consulted him out of a job. edit: I think Ryan would have traded Santana. His history with Lohse and Milton show that to be the case... But I think he would have demanded pitching in return had he been GM. Also, Ryan deserves a lot of fault for leaving Smith in a really crappy situation with Hunter and Santana. But given Ryan's history, I can't see a situation where he trades Johan and Garza in the same offseason. That was utter madness.