ashbury

Wonder if the skills with the pitching wedge translate.

Awright, another run in and the bases loaded, this Hrbek avatar isn't getting the job done. I'm bringing in the lefty in long-relief. Tried her as a starter and as a closer, maybe this is the role she's suited for. / lefty, as in left shoulder tan-line

Five runs against in the first inning. When's the last time that happened? / oh wait, last Tuesday

Ten balls swung at and not put in play, or taken for strikes, in the first 6 batters. Something to build on. / I'm really trying to be positive here. In other news, so far my latest in-game avatar sucks.

This. It practically begs for hockey-style goons whose only role is to eliminate the other team's best player through tit-for-tat penalties.

Leadoff single. C'mon, Vanimalsie.

You said it better than I did. 4/$48 is just the evidence at the end. Almost certainly there were very informal conversations, say 3/$30, that were politely put on hold pending a more serious offer. Maybe, just maybe, 1/$20 would have been listened to; but the Twins would not be the team making that offer. If they liked someone with Bourn's skills that much for that price, then they would have liked Revere's skills at his lower price enough to not have traded him away.

To which Mr. Bourn replies, "um, really? Because there's a 4 year $48M offer plus an option year on the table from one of your division rivals...". Hard to imagine any team, much less the Twins, offering dollars-enough early-enough to make a one-year deal appealing even in a slow market.

I enjoyed disliking Miller Park, it fit in with my general opinion of the city itself.

My only quibble with this dweeb is he somehow failed to include either of the strings "Hrbek" or "Booger" in his article about Pedro.

This thread is itself a guilty pleasure so I'm back for second helpings. I completely forgot Darin Mastroianni. I enjoyed learning about him when I picked him in TD's Adopt-A-Prospect, and even though I think I know his ceiling (and I think *he* thinks he knows his ceiling), I'm still hoping for a few fluke homers and an .800 OPS to go along with his main skillset. I thought about Brian Harper, as others have mentioned here, but arbitrarily drew the "too good to be guilty" line below his name but above Al Newman's. As long as I'm enjoying catchers, I'll lump Buck Ninety Laudner in with him, as they both made utterly ballsy postseason plays that put them in some wing of a Twins HOF. Mike Smithson for some reason was a guy I rooted an extra amount for on the mound, and Scott Erickson may or may not be above that arbitrary "too good" line but likewise was someone I hoped could put it all together in a really big way.

Yeah, I think we're close to saying the same thing, if I clarify that the *factors* that went into the past decision may still be there and still apply to the next decision, but the nature of the past decision itself ("too early") is no longer relevant. If they were sure he was ready then, and see nothing fundamentally different now, it's the "now" that matters; if they were just rolling the dice then, and he looks to them now as completely overmatched, again it's the "now" that will decide it. And if they were rolling dice then, and can't think of better than to roll dice now, then they should just save their money and fire the decision makers and hire me for a dollar, and I'll probably give them change in return.

That's an excellent observation, and it's incumbent on his coaches to work around that or modify it or whatever. "Joe, for this series we're going to have Aaron try to shake things up on first-pitch, give him the green light, so it'll be up to you to take some extra pitches in the 2-slot to kind of work the pitcher over." Which of course is right in Joe's comfort zone anyway. Actually, as many first-pitches as Josh and Justin take, the top of the order will hardly notice if Hicks hacks a bit more. Right now it's more important to get Hicks going than it is to run up 100 pitches on the opposing starter by the 6th versus the 7th.

What's worse, he was on the horns of a dilemma. I don't like the unwritten rule, or whatever it is, that someone backing off in a situation is labelled a pussy, but it's there, and while Quentin had about 3 seconds to consider his action after getting hit, and could have backed off at the last moment even then, Greinke had about half a second to decide what to do once the guy was coming at him, and once committed to defending himself there was no backing away. I'm not the biggest Greinke fan, but I'd want some further information to warrant believing this was even 50/50 his own fault after the batter leaned into an inside pitch. / edit: heh, Mr. B and I chose different phrasings to say the same thing at the same posting time.

So much for the conventional wisdom, "nobody gets hurt in a baseball fight".

I can't disagree with any of the points in the article (and wouldn't be qualified to comment on the fundamentals of hitting), but if I were writing I would take a different tack on "The first key to improvement is avoiding falling behind in the count so frequently." If pitchers are throwing strikes on the first pitch more often than not, then taking the first pitch means falling behind often. So I'd make the first key "Punish pitchers who throw first-pitch strikes". I don't mean swing at anything - sometimes it will be a ball, and sometimes it will be a "pitcher's pitch" that would get you out even if it's a strike. No, just a more aggressive approach that means if you see a pitch you like, whack at it. And if *that* doesn't work, if you're swinging at strikes and still not raising that batting average, well, maybe it's indeed time for AAA after all.

Neshek went to my alma mater, Butler, so I had to like him. Tom Klawitter (the Klaw!) was fun, but mostly because of his teammates having a rasslin' fixation. I was really rooting for Mark Funderburk to emerge. He didn't. Steve Carlton likewise I had hopes for, but he kind of disappeared after trying out with the Twins; whatever happened to him, did he finally make it somewhere? Juan Berenguer was a little too good to be a guilty pleasure, but El Gasolino wasn't a big enough star to leave out either, and he had some style. Ditto for Al Newman. Rusty Kuntz has a place on the all-time all-dirty name team, so he's on my list too. Guilty guilty guilty. When I am around an Atlanta Braves fan, Kent Hrbek is the guiltiest of pleasures, too. When I'm around a Twins fan, it's a guilty pleasure to claim to like Tom Herr and David West.

Yes, but then question 3) ought to be, what do you do about it? Which is actually a two part question, what is the best thing for him, and (if you do yank him as CF starter) what is the best thing for the parent club? Past decisions, even those from about 2 weeks ago, are by now irrelevant to making an important decision now.

The opposing pitchers aren't cooperating, throwing him first-pitch strikes at a humiliating rate. He should charge the mound or something.

Looks like another thread was simultaneously started at http://twinsdaily.com/minnesota-twins-talk/5960-wolfson-dfa-d-borbon-possibility.html Dunno if the mods have steps they take to combine the two?

I can't believe that the Twins have as detailed a plan for '17 as you provide options for. They can play a little what-if, but more than that would be like deciding now to put on the snowshoes in 4 weeks because the 4-week forecast calls for a late-spring snow. Which option is more likely? Who knows, and does it matter? Either could happen.

Blake: he hit a double in the ninth. Why do you think he wasn't exerting full effort?

[ATTACH=CONFIG]3728[/ATTACH] There is already a lengthy thread in the forum, about the Twins' abortive offer to let fans watch home-team batting practice for $15; I did not get too worked up about the topic at first but I contributed and the obsessive reader may see a theme or two repeated here. Well written essays, pro and con, are also found at http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/44474154/ and http://www.brandonwarne.com/2013/04/11/charging-to-watch-bp-my-take/ among others. To me, the problem is shocking tone-deafness on the part of the team, to the romance of their sport. Sports are often equated to entertainments like movies, and no one expects to come in early to a movie and see filmed rehearsals of the actors struggling through their lines. (Instead you are subjected to ads and bogus quizzes on screen.) They got rid of the cartoon before or after the feature film, long ago. And no one likes the prices of concessions any better there than at the ballpark, but like at the ballpark, some people pay and some people gripe and some people do both. But sports, and baseball in particular, aren't necessarily like other entertainments in all ways. BP (in double particular) is a mixture of tradition and romance. What do you actually learn from watching BP? Not much, and in fact the prime age for watching might be pre-teen on up through college or so - exactly when you would like to make sure you've hooked your future customers. And even at those ages, probably the second time they go early for BP they'll end up engaging in horseplay in between dives for home run balls, or wander around looking for something to eat. It's not the activity itself, it's the atmosphere. You're watching what goes on before the curtain really goes up. It's reported that the teams in Washington and Cleveland open their gates 2.5 hours before first pitch. I would be curious to see how the Twins might respond to this. "Oh, well, Washington and Cleveland, sure, they can do this, because..." what? Ushers and security staff cost less there? Fans there are much better behaved and won't spray graffiti on the walls like unsupervised Twins fans would? No one in Washington or Cleveland actually takes them up on their bluff of an offer and the ballpark is essentially empty until 15 minutes before game time? Charging $15, or even more (Braves and Astros are among those offering VIP packages down on the field), positively kills that "behind the scenes" atmosphere. A VIP package may substitute a *different* atmosphere, an entitled feeling from having it made, well enough that you (or Dad) can plunk down the money (for you), but the romantic one is lost. The $15 makes you *part* of the scene, you're no longer behind it. And for what? 60 tickets times $15 means the Twins likely are being honest about only recouping the extra cost of having some fans come through the gate early, or as some people irrelevantly point out, what Joe Mauer is paid to tie his shoelaces before a game, unless he pays someone to do that for him. But is that the smartest way to manage this $1000 per game? No one's asking to be let in free; they already have a ticket (perhaps at a cut rate from StubHub, and maybe that's sticking in the team's craw?). Could the Twins not gain that much in goodwill by having a policy that the first 60 fans in line with tickets can just come in at X o'clock? Or make it a lottery, or something; never mind, I need a real PR expert to figure out how to not disappoint the family driving from Ft. Dodge or Fargo with that plan. Or, open just one gate that allows access to the outfield seats, come-one-come-all, open up a concession stand selling burgers and overpriced soda, and recoup the lost $1000 from the 500 hardy fans who like to be there early. It's not like there's a risk of the high-priced ticket holders using this as a ruse to stay in the cheap seats when the game starts. And we're not talking about letting hobos in without a ticket. Behavior problems can be dealt with as strictly, or maybe even more so, as/than at the game itself; getting kicked out during BP and not seeing the game at all would be something a rowdy teen would remember and avoid happening again, but this seems really overthinking it except that you do have to have security on hand. With regard to the argument that it's just offering something (for a price) currently unavailable (at any price), thus increasing freedom or something or other, the problem is that BP means more to people than just a commodity like a toaster. That's the "romantic" part I was getting at. BP's something that has been taken away over a long period of time, quietly and somewhat ad-hoc. I remember being very shocked the first time I went to a game at the Dome and had to wait and wait for the gates to open and by then BP was just ending, maybe just a few of the road team's scrubinis. So apparently I had been accustomed to seeing BP at Fenway, Baltimore, and wherever else I had seen major league ballgames by that time (as a kid I lived in barren Indianapolis so I didn't have MLB to go by). Later, I remember driving through Waterloo Iowa, pulling up to the ballpark on a whim and learning that the game would start 2.5 hours later but "come on in, go back and by a ticket when the office opens later". I know that low-A is not the majors, but what I would *like* to feel is "come on in, you're welcome to wander around," and currently the attitude is "gates don't open for a while," and now this new wrinkle is "oh, well, sure, you'd be welcome if you fork over an additional $15". I'm more on the rational/analytic end of the spectrum than most. If this stream of memories of Waterloo Iowa is what comes to mind from news of this $15 idea, it speaks to how BP is more of a deeply emotional issue than a matter of monetizing a commodity. Our society tried to reject "monetization equals freedom" in the sixties (remember the backlash against "status symbols"?) but in the long run the monetizers have won out; there's a stock market segment in the hard news on even a nominally leftist media outlet like NPR nowadays, for goodness sake. The aim to bring a business mentality to every aspect of life would be shocking even to the Mad Men of the 50s-60s. And this trial balloon by the Twins touches some of us in this way. There is a borrowed word, lagniappe, that roughly means a Freebie, as from a merchant. If MLB teams want to stress how much they run their businesses *as* businesses, they should remember that this word exists, and that not every business decision has to be made by the people wearing the green eyeshades. They have plenty of extra-cost options already to which their solution is "well, then don't buy it". Maybe it's *smart* business, here, to give away something that is widely perceived to be of value but which they can apparently envision making only $1000 a game from anyway. Their tone-deafness on the romance of the game risks making people think of Monty Burns shuddering at the thought of ever giving anything away.

Thanks.