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LaBombo

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Everything posted by LaBombo

  1. LaBombo
    You can see it on the faces of the Target Field crowd: Nothing beats an extra helping of free 2016 Twins baseball !!! http://www.gigapixel.com/press/socialmood01.jpg
  2. LaBombo
    You're still keeping track of the game, so that probably answers the second question...
  3. LaBombo
    http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/RfPF_QZN_aLPBGg3DgCCmw--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3NfbGVnbztxPTg1O3c9NjMw/http://l.yimg.com/os/publish-images/news/2014-06-23/79f5f840-fb08-11e3-8f96-0f49f5b5804c_smoldering-boot-WSB.png
  4. LaBombo
    Alternate image for Jep save opportunity during April, May, and September day games... http://www.wnyc.org/i/620/372/c/80/photologue/photos/4465649733_dcddc80777_b.jpg
  5. LaBombo
    If you're going to work a Twins game this year that seems like the one thing you'd never forget. http://charmcitywire.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/doyle.jpg
  6. LaBombo
    If you start giving away loss spoilers, what's next? Lost spoilers? http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03042/the_ending_3042749c.jpg
  7. LaBombo
    Mine's going to be the other half of a nice double play combo with the Nishi shirsey in one of my basement storage bins that won't get opened again until an estate sale some day.
  8. LaBombo
    If you land a GM job before the deadline, would you like to trade for a practically like new third baseman who was only driven home on Sundays?
  9. LaBombo
    The secret of your taste in music is safe with us... http://photosaws.sparkpeople.com/guid/79565afc-3eb8-4176-b470-e5e1eb8141ad.png
  10. LaBombo
    Yup. And it tastes a lot like raspberry juice, if raspberry juice were made from freshly squeezed awful. http://cdn2.stylecraze.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Benefits-Of-Beetroot-Juice.jpg
  11. LaBombo
    Probably just Machado About Nothing. What offense have these men done?
  12. LaBombo
    .275/.303/.456 That's Nunez's slash line if you knock it down 60 points to put it in line with where it would probably be if his batting average on balls in play were at his career average. His lower walk rate and higher K rate are compensated for by his slightly higher LD% and medium/hard contact numbers, so maybe call that a wash. The big changes are his much higher fly ball rate, way up from a 2015 GB/FB of 2.10 to a 2016 rate of 1.34, and a home run rate on fly balls of 13.2%, up from 9.5%. Most projections had Nunez putting up a .280/.320/.420 or so line this year. With his stellar start, a .295/.315/.450 season seems like a good possibility. That would put him at the high end of 'average' offensively at third, and sneak him into the top 10 at shortstop. At age 29 it may be that he's blooming late into a diamond in the rough, or it could be that he's just the result of the mathematical dictate that even a team like the Twins, having a thousand things go wrong with its season, will have a few things go right, like an average player having a good year at the plate. My guess is that Nunez is having his outlier career year, and it will probably end up going to waste other than being one of the few individual bright spots in a bad season. And if that's the case then an extension would have no value other than generating deceptively positive PR for marketing.
  13. LaBombo
    The easy tell is that the ficus is much less likely to bunt without a sign.
  14. LaBombo
    The Blue Jays waived him during a 93 win division championship season, having resigned themselves to AL MVP Josh Donaldson as their 3B. No other team has waived Valencia or let him walk. With the exception of his four week August stay at Boston's Tudor Wharf Residence Inn, all of Valencia's production after the Twins has been for winners. The Twins were the only other loser to move him, and did so in the middle of 4 consecutive 90+ loss stinkbombs. Once again, and I can't emphasize this enough, Danny Valencia isn't the problem. He's a minor symptom of the problem, which is that over the past 5 years the Twins have often come perilously close to not being able to differentiate between a ballplayer and a ficus plant.
  15. LaBombo
    That's primarily my standard as well. The Twins' farm system was really the only cause for optimism in 2012-14, and so far this year it's produced mostly just cringes and mutterings about 'just wait 'til 2017'.
  16. LaBombo
    There are two potential problems with that sort of sentiment. The first is that it appears to set the bar for Twins front office management at the somewhat disappointingly low level of 'No dumber than the average fan'. The second is that in a case of the fan base being generally right when the FO is wrong, the flip side of that sentiment often turns into some version of 'We don't have access to all the information the front office does, so we're not qualified to second-guess'. In a way, though, guess it balances out. The first issue more or less dooms the Twins to futility, and the second part sort of disqualifies us from having an opinion about that doom in the first place.
  17. LaBombo
    Valencia has slugged over .500 every year since leaving the Twins, with the exception of his age 29 season split between franchises. He's nothing like a David Ortiz - level gaffe, but he's also not a free pass for the Twins' Way either. They let him go for essentially nothing while they were among the worst teams in baseball. And just to be clear, I'm infinitely more concerned about the Twins not having a system in place to extract value from a Danny Valencia during a 90 loss season than I am about the Twins not having Danny Valencia.
  18. LaBombo
    18 months on the job seems maybe just a wee bit premature to judge a GM, even if he doesn't inherit tens of millions in aging, expensive players like Friedman did. As for his time in Tampa Bay, well, it's widely viewed as one of the most successful GM tenures in recent history. In two years' time he took a contraction-worthy perennial 95 loss disaster and turned it into a 90+ win powerhouse that made the postseason four times in seven years despite a low payroll and playing in arguably the toughest division in baseball. In doing so, he nearly doubled attendance. So if Friedman 2006-14 wasn't a success, then Ryan 1994-2007 was an unqualified disaster, and Ryan 2011-present is a jailable offense against the national pastime. Who did you have in mind for the job?
  19. LaBombo
    Let's back up. You injected the idea of 'no World Series wins' accrued in Epstein's and Friedman's VERY brief time on the job as a way of gauging what you view as very limited success on their part. When I noted the questionable usefulness of such an all-or-nothing approach, you offered this - and only this - as a counter: "See:Ryan, Terry:Circa:2002-2010" I'm not quite sure how you're not quite sure how anybody can "read into" that footnote just about anything they want to, up to but maybe not quite including Ryan's favorite color. So I'm still wondering why you brought him up in the first place. He wasn't a success as a GM during that run by your standard of World Series wins, or even playoff wins for that matter. And if he was a success, how are Epstein and Friedman not massively more successful, having achieved dramatic turnarounds in a fraction of the near-decade it took Ryan? And no, you absolutely, positively CANNOT use payroll as a means to downplay their success compared to Ryan, because Ryan HIMSELF has insisted multiple times (as have his employers) during this Twins' half-decade of futility that money is not an issue.
  20. LaBombo
    "Then let them make runs without bunts!" http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HD7kolGFY5o/Ua-IkEtYhSI/AAAAAAAAWxs/KOrECYa7w_4/s1600/the-ten-commandments-yul-brynner-ramses.jpg
  21. LaBombo
    2016 Twins: 22 kinds of 'Arghhhh' on tap, and the bar is open. Kidding aside, it was a nice win. 15 hits with even a less-than-stellar Matt Moore starting was a pleasant surprise. http://flyingpigtaphouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/beer-taps-bg.jpg
  22. LaBombo
    Me too. It can get out of hand in a hurry now that it's summer... http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/5d9a8794b53646d99e89b9352e309790/tasbapauni-nicaragua-man-wearing-rastafarian-hat-bbh5h0.jpg
  23. LaBombo
    Twins hang on to lead, six more weeks of Jepsen as closer... http://d1x6zkqyb2gtqn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/groundhog.jpg
  24. LaBombo
    Hats, butts, whatever's handy... http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zJURSr7-EJ8/T9nsg6MdLPI/AAAAAAAACHk/jBZA2FnCLes/s1600/IMAG1179-1-1.jpg
  25. LaBombo
    His fans would rightfully insist that he had several other good songs, but I've wondered if we might ever wake to the UK Guardian headline 'American Die: Angry McLean fans rip singer limb from limb when he fails to perform hit'.
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