Jump to content
Twins Daily
  • Create Account

LaBombo

Old-Timey Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    9,171

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    49

 Content Type 

Profiles

Minnesota Twins News, Rumors & Analysis

Minnesota Twins Videos

2026 Minnesota Twins Top Prospect Rankings

2022 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks & Signing Bonuses

Minnesota Twins Trade & Free Agent Rumors

Minnesota Twins Fan Guides & Resources

2023 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks & Signing Bonuses

The Minnesota Twins Players Project

2024 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks & Signing Bonuses

2025 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks & Signing Bonuses

2026 Minnesota Twins Draft Picks & Signing Bonuses

Forums

Blogs

Events

Store

Downloads

Gallery

Everything posted by LaBombo

  1. LaBombo
    Hendricks making good contact tonight. Bert says that keeps the fielders happy. Liam may spread much joy tonight.
  2. LaBombo
    Depends a lot more for me on what kind of team they put around him in 2014 and beyond than what they get from Pinto or Herrmann. If next season is anything like this one, I'd like to see Mauer catch just enough to stay sharp. Not sure how much that would be, but your 80 game mark sounds about right. If the team is going to contend in 2015, then it would be nice to see Mauer catch at least 100 if his body is still up to it. A reduced workload and no injuries in 2014 would go a long way toward that. Not sure if it was posted before, but there's a nice Gleeman article that shows how much more valuable Mauer's bat is at catcher than it is at first.
  3. LaBombo
    Top of the rotation free agent pitchers almost always signs a multi-year deal. If the Twins make strong offers, it's hard to believe that pitchers would say no just because they don't want to start a three or four year deal with one potentially down season before the team returns to competitiveness.
  4. LaBombo
    In order to get their three best starters, the Indians traded away Victor Martinez and Jake Westbrook in their primes, as well as Drew Pomeranz, a former top 50 prospect who may well turn out to be better than Gibson. Doesn't look like the Twins will be making any trades like that. And although the Indians are playing well, they're 27th in quality starts and 23rd in whip, so it's not like they've assembled a lights-out staff, either.
  5. LaBombo
    Very good stuff, OP, even though I was a little let down when I found that this wasn't a ChiTownTwinsFan baking thread. Don't be discouraged if people claim your hopes aren't realistic. They are. Whether it actually happens... well, the suspense is what makes the off season interesting.
  6. LaBombo
    If the risk of catcher concussions has been proven so high that it should force one of the best players in the history of the position, and still in his prime, to play elsewhere, then the commissioner should have the courage to suspend baseball until the risk is reduced at the very least to the point where teams don't factor it into personnel decisions like moving Mauer to first. Put another way, if you're Josmil Pinto, how's this going to sound: 'Good news, bad news, Pinto. Good news is you're our number one catcher in 2014. Bad news is that the main reason it's not Mauer is that his head costs us like 20 mill a year, so we can't afford to have it getting whacked by foul balls all the time. Your head, on other hand, costs the league minimum, so we're fine with you getting conked in the melon all day long. Anyway, have a nice offseason!'
  7. LaBombo
    Interesting examples. Here's their final steps toward the majors. Morneau: Full season of AA bookended by shorter stints there. 300 PA's in AAA. Hunter: Most of 2 seasons in AA, 17 premature MLB at bats, followed by time in AAA and AA. Cuddyer: Two seasons and >1000 PA's in AA, 18 Sept. callup AB's in the majors. Half a season in AAA before he sniffed the bigs again. So none of them really skipped AAA. And none of them regularly exceeded a K rate of 20% throughout the minors like Hicks. It's usually a pretty bad idea to ask a ballplayer to keep doing something he can't do. And that's what the Twins were doing by letting Hicks continue to flail against major league pitching, for three months after it was clear he wasn't ready.
  8. LaBombo
    Way before way before Hicks flopped or Mastro got hurt, the mistake of not having a realistic MLB-capable CF alternative in the organization was discussed in spring training threads. And it didn't have to do with service time for Hicks, it had to do with the fact that Hicks was likely to struggle and very possibly be overmatched. The front office blew it, and it didn't take a crystal ball to see it coming.
  9. LaBombo
    And infinity times infinity more than Son of Sal.... Good hitters provide more offense than bad ones. It's not that complicated.
  10. LaBombo
    Also, hitting home runs has a positive effect on the Twins' offense.
  11. LaBombo
    Siri says his name means 'mischievous badger' in Spanish.
  12. LaBombo
    !http://encarsglobe.com/data_images/models/ford-pinto/ford-pinto-05.jpg
  13. LaBombo
    Danny G. says that Gardy wasn't roused from his nap and told to make the switch because the cybermetric machine has a busted hydraulic line. Equipment manager working on it, but probably too late now.
  14. LaBombo
    Too soon...
  15. LaBombo
    Woohoo! B!tching about offensive ineptitude causes runs to score. I want a raise!
  16. LaBombo
    It's safe to say that if the weather were nicer, there would easily be twice as many 9th inning faithful as there are game thread posts. '68 Cubs went 84-78. Twins are achieving their streak the hard way, by actually being so inept that being shut out three or four times in a row isn't an anomaly, it's justice.
  17. LaBombo
    Oh well. I tried.
  18. LaBombo
    Twins already have two more hits than I expected. Yay! We there yet?
  19. LaBombo
    Twins probably should have forfeited when Price failed to injury himself during warmup.
  20. LaBombo
    Watching Vikings and keeping an eye on the Twins gamecast. So technology has granted me the ability to have each eye bleed from a different cause.
  21. LaBombo
    Yeah. Watched the Twins trot out Marty Cordova as the cleanup hitter in Tiger Stadium in 1997, when he batted .246/.305/.434. Ranks right up there with .240/.309/.417 in the three spot. The 1997 Twins. Sigh. Not sure which was more depressing, seeing the Twins field a roster like that, or the walk to the stadium through a neighborhood that would have given the bad end of Beirut a run for its money.
  22. LaBombo
    Can you think of another franchise in baseball that would even consider bringing back Ron Gardenhire after three consecutive 90-loss seasons? And think carefully. It hasn't happened with a non-expansion franchise in over 30 years.
  23. LaBombo
    Thanks for both modding and contributing.
  24. LaBombo
    You're probably right. But is that a good thing or a bad thing? This franchise has one playoff series win in the past 22 years. If they bring back the current manager after his third straight 90 loss season, they will have done it twice in that 22 year span. Two more times than any other team in the league. And the other guy they brought back from that had won two World Series rings. Nobody is saying Gardenhire is a bad manager. He's generally regarded as a good clubhouse peacekeeper and, until the three-year tailspin, had a good win percentage with what was a low/mid-payroll franchise. But he's also had two almost entirely different rosters basically forfeit multiple playoff series, has championed a pitch-to-contact coach who may have been a pyromaniac fire chief in a former life, and has through both words and actions disregarded and mocked "cybermetrics", which have arguably had a greater (positive) effect on the game going back to the DH rule than PED's (negative) effects have had.
  25. LaBombo
    Briefly mentioned that in another post. Seems odd that in a season where there's really not much to draw casual fan interest, there's been little in the media coverage or even straight from the Twins. Maybe they're just embarrassed at the prospect of having a guy who only needed 5 wins in 20 games not getting there. Good find on the sale of his house. Read a short business journal story that speculated that the sale had nothing to do with his status as manager but rather that he sold because he had bought a home in Fort Meyers. Of course, that was in April, before another 90 loss campaign.
×
×
  • Create New...