ashbury

Our new old hitting coach turns 34 in a couple of weeks. David Popkins is just under a year older than that. I find it very interesting that such relatively young people are given the reins at the major league level, in preference to someone with decades of experience. If it works out, great, but Popkins didn't last that long here. It could be some variant of the Peter Principle at play here - someone with any abilities in one area may get promoted to some bigger job (bench coach, manager) until they reach a certain degree of failure, after which they either have lost their credibility or else (Rowson might be an example) latch on with someone else in a similar role to what they did succeed at. Nothing new under the sun, maybe.

The billionaire who won't spend has no advantage over the millionaire who can't spend. 😀

When the concession stands all run out of those little packets of mustard for your burger or hot dog at the same time, DSP is the guy who fires the person responsible for the oversight and promotes an eager young intern as the replacement, all the while scolding Twins fans for expecting mustard to be available for each and every food item anytime they want. I will take your word for the other stuff.

Me. Back in the bankruptcy days, and the atmosphere in the ballpark wasn't good then. I trust that it is better now.

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Noble on the mound (about to give up a single).

Nah, this is from today. No real difference from yesterday of course, as far as opening festivities are concerned No Twins batters in the lineup today. Jack Noble just pitched a so-so fifth.

National Anthem

Come to games and you can take quick snaps like this. (Or better. 😊)

All billionaires are hypothetical. Eat the Rich. 😀

True. But. I Am Not A Lawyer, as they say, but with business at this level I view all signed contracts as mere starting points for discussion when someone becomes dissatisfied. At a smaller scale Correa has a non-trade clause and yet we're discussing trading him, for example.

"Be careful what you wish for." People have been saying we'll be better off under different ownership. What if new ownership resides in Nashville, Tennessee, for instance? Or consists of a consortium of investors who find themselves with cash-flow problems next time there is an economic downturn?

It's a very different experience from Spring Training at Ft Myers. Definitely a bucket list item, but keep your expectations in check and look for the little things to entertain you. You saw the size of the crowd in my photo - there is a pretense that this is a fan experience, with a 7th inning stretch and so forth, but people are here to watch prospects, not a "game" per se. Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure of meeting Josh Tobias, a recent Red Sox farmhand who now scouts for them, and he was willing to share a thought or two as we watched (no scouting nuggets from him, of course - I wouldn't ask). I commented that there are a lot fewer big-name prospects in the AFL anymore, but he responded that it makes the scouting here this month even more important because pretty much every player here has a "for sale" sign if the offer is good enough. (My interpretation, not his specific words.)

And yet, he did come back. And the collapse continued, to the tune of 2-9, until they gave him the final game or two off again.

While I can't root against my Twins, I still would find it darkly hilarious if the Pohlad family, whose fortune got its start through Depression era farm foreclosures, winds up "right-sizing" their Twins payroll by selling valuable assets like Correa's contract for pennies on the dollar, in a "distressed assets auction" type of scenario, receiving next to nothing in return just to get it off their books. They'd be basically foreclosing on themselves, or more specifically one of their wholly-owned subsidiaries. Even then the irony will be bitter-tinged because, unlike those farmers, they do have sufficient resources such that they can choose to ride it out, but just won't because they are incapable of running a loss - it's simply not how things are done by civilized folks, dontchaknowit.

Where's the game thread for our AFL team today? Guess I have to start my own. J/K. Here's a photo though. That's Kala'i Rosario in RF in case you can't tell. 😊 Had a good time watching a bad, sloppy game last night, with USAF Chief. / edit - and that's Rosario with a HR swing in the 5th in the cover photo

I'm grouchy about naming a team MVP this year, but for Most Improved you've got a great choice in Cole Sands. I was slow to get on the Griffin Jax train, and I'll be more open this time around.

I appreciate the flurry of activity, and want to say that I'm on the road starting today (Arizona Fall League, baby!!!!) so I might not get around to giving your thoughts the time they deserve for a little while. Also, I might not have made clear in my lengthy previous response that, while I did respond to some or all of your comments, the second half (with the bullet items) was about the article I linked and was not directed toward anyone in particular at all. I don't know who Richard Y. Chappell is either, except he seems to be a philosopher who somehow dabbled in this. 😀

Explain Ben Revere then. 😊

I don't disagree that different scenarios could play out and the FO needs to be ready to handle each and every one of them. I just prefer to plan on success except when in a rebuild phase. Trade value at the deadline means little to me during off-season planning. If the team tanks but certain pieces like Paddack were productive, by all means, pivot and sell him (and other expiring contracts, etc). A good FO can do that on nearly a moment's notice, based on whatever standard talent evaluation methods they have. It's a tactic, not a guiding strategy. What I wrote in response to DJL44 was basically that if Paddack is going well then the team has a higher chance of going well too, and if the team is in sell mode at the deadline then the odds are higher that Paddack has flamed out again. Not that he is key to the rotation, but I still see only a thin sliver of scenarios where he's trade bait. However, for off-season planning purposes it's fair to at least acknowledge that in such a scenario, his contract is modest enough that he's not certain to be untradable - he's not Kyle Farmer, where even the player himself expressed surprise he was kept at the price he cost. I don't like trading away pitching. But if there's a reasonable chance that other in-house options will perform as well as the unpredictable Paddack, I might trade him simply because his is an expiring contract going into 2025. If he fails, he fails. If he does well, it's only for a season and that's not part of building a sustainable winner. Only if 2025 is a go-for-it year and Paddack is a key to that effort would I feel differently IOW he's not Sonny Gray, either.

Twins owner taking time with a fan:

Expect to see a lot of opponents going first-to-third on singles. / ninja'd again. "Life moves pretty fast." ― Ferris Bueller

Concur. I read someone saying that poor hitting with RISP was evidence of the players quitting. If so, how do you explain the players who got on base in the first place? (No, there weren't many of those either, but the evidence of quitting was seemingly super selective, from at bat to at bat.)

Falvey's LinkedIn page shows a mystery year after graduating from college, which (while I was digging into Chief's point, looking for hard evidence) may have coincided with a small business venture with a classmate that may or may not have panned out. Falvey would surely mention an MBA in the education segment of a LinkedIn resume. Chief is correct. Still, Falvey gives off much of the vibes of an MBA holder. Such a degree only matters when you're about 23-27 looking for a first or second job to put on your resume. After that, experience and On the Job Training will matter more than school credentials anyway. And that OJT may or may not be explicitly MBA-like. I can attest that back in the heyday of Cray Research in the Twin Cities, they put their technical marketing specialists (i.e. people with tech backgrounds who were going into a marketing role) through many hours of training each year on aspects that would be covered in a good MBA program. It is possible that the Cleveland front office does similar with their own rising in-house talent. When my daughter was getting her MBA at Sloan we had conversations where I felt on very familiar ground to what she was telling us about her studies, and while I don't hold an MBA, I enjoyed the conversations, even if she was maybe humoring her old man a little. Bottom line, Falvey might not be an MBA but he's very much the same "type" that every major league front office seems to gravitate toward. Someone with an undergrad degree in Econ is a very different animal than Terry Ryan who preceded him.

That's threading quite a needle, hanging on to a guy you consider an injury risk and expecting him to remain healthy enough for someone else to want to trade for him at exactly the right moment four months into a six month season before he suddenly goes kablooey. He's just about as likely to go full DeSclafani on us.