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One of these comes out each Friday, almost as though on a set schedule. You might consider just skipping them all. Perhaps your capsule review of Jonathan Swift's work would have been, "the title is misleading and should have been A Ridiculous Proposal. In any case Irish babies ought not be cooked and eaten," back in the day.

It's not like Lewis is being converted from linebacker or power forward to third base. He'll pick up the nuances just fine. Left field if they do that, ditto. A few weeks at AAA again, to clean up whatever list of things I bet they gave him to work on, and he'll be back up to stay. Miranda is the one who should be worried, having muffed his chance when either 3B or 1B was there for the taking - it may not be so easy later in the season to find playing time in the majors if he belatedly proves he's "ready".

This article summarizes why winning the Central isn't quite the prize it is for other divisions. We have a first place team, but with a winning percentage lower than any other division leader's. And either second place team in the AL East or West would be ahead of the Twins if they were in the same division. All in all, good start for the Twins, especially compared to 2021, but I'm keeping my enthusiasm for what comes next in check.

It comes down to MLB roster rules, specifically that the 40-man roster is where your major league squad can come from. If you want to promote someone else, you first need to drop someone from the 40, and that means every other team has the choice to grab who you drop. Prospects, after being in the organization for a certain (arcane and varying) number of years, must either be protected by being placed on the 40-man, or else be exposed to a draft for other teams to choose from. Thus, you will have some guys on the 40 who aren't quite ready, but at times you have to press them into major league service anyway, or else have to make a tough decision on whom to lose. Celestino and especially Lewis are prized prospects and in need of roster protection, so they become higher on the pecking order when a replacement player is needed, and are prime examples of what you asked about. Jorge Polanco was in a similar situation a few seasons ago, on the 40-man well before he was considered ready, but up he came a few times for emergency duty anyway. Almost all the "why him when this other guy was doing better at AAA" questions get answered by looking at the situation this way. I should try to find a good history of the 40-man roster, because my sense is that the current rules that define it have become outdated relative to the way major league teams manage their rosters. / edit - not that you asked, but I did locate the following article, apparently vetted by a SABR member so I give it some credence, which states that the 40-man limit in slightly different form was in place by 1910. The motivations for exactly what the limit should be surely have changed over the years, so I'll stick with my contention that the concept is outdated and ought to be rethought. https://www.baseball-almanac.com/articles/baseball_rosters.shtml

Thad Levine turned 50 last year. I wish anyone had thought of me as a boy genius when I was that age. I wish anyone had thought of me as a boy genius when I was a boy.

I don't see significant advantage of Vogelbach over what the team already has stashed at AAA, Curtis Terry. I.e., meh. Josh Bell, mentioned above, maybe could be interesting, but not at very high cost or else I would stick with the in-house options.

My first experience using the Dark Web has been less life-changing than I expected.

Any roster crunch worthy of the term will be easily resolved, because the excess talent will have actual, you know, trade value, instead of just being waiver wire fodder.

How I think my measured and thoughtful response on this topic will look: What it will really look like to others:

The economics of baseball make "worth" hard to quantify when a player gains control over his own contract negotiation, since the instant comparison with all players includes young productive guys being forced to play for under a million. So, John's analysis is quite proper in light of the choice to pay Buxton market rate or not have him at all. He's "worth" the money. Still, a couple of things bother me. One is that having a player you are forced to expect to be "part-time" puts pressure on your roster (both 40-man and the active major-league one), and while I don't know how to quantify what that costs you, it's got to be something. Also, that $100M over seven years could be deployed some other way, such as on non-draft prospect acquisition or simply on pitching (which our FO seems averse to). Using $8M per WAR is a neat and easy analysis, but I don't think a general manager can afford to look at it quite that simplistically. Still, the bottom line almost surely is for that GM to say yes to Buxton.

Ray Miller passed away last year, and in any case has had no impact on this team for some time.

You never played against us in beer league.

Took my first look at Fedko's bb-ref page. He's an interesting sleeper pick that might pay off!

Concur on Cave, but Garlick doesn't even belong in this sentence. The only CF he ever played in the pros was 22 innings at the major league level last year, for some unearthly reason I choose to forget but surely was dire. True, he played CF in college (baseball at Cal Poly Pomona must be a laid-back affair), but the Dodgers in their wisdom did not invest one inning of his five-year development with them in center.

Projecting young players from their minor league stats isn't an exact science, but it isn't that hard either. Someone looking only at MLB small-sample stats in an age-22 season and saying "that's all he'll ever be" is likely to be surprised time and time again.

We missed you.

Watching Pagan is a guilty pleasure. In a season where I have low expectations, I can tolerate the eventual blown save. He isn't a world-beater but seems to have the necessary makeup to just plow ahead, bulldog like, not getting flustered and not giving in to groove a game-losing pitch, and when he gets the job done (possibly with the aid of a favorable strike call) I just have to smile, expecting that it won't last. To this point I find him entirely admirable. It's like not being able to look away from the crash you know is coming.

Donaldson has displayed a reverse-platoon split this year. We know that won't last.

Funny because it's true.

Twins today amassed 7 hits in 34 AB. Not going to win many games hitting like that - a .206 batting average. It's yet another demonstration of why BA is an incredibly important offensive stat. I can do one of these by hand for OBP too, or even OPS, if you like. I'm not versed enough to eyeball WOBA or WPA, but they probably are poor looking numbers as well. This was a bad, bad game. Any reasonable form of analysis is going to confirm that.

I think we can safely chalk it up as a jinx, the question mark format of this article's headline.

Is that not a trait to be desired in our players?

No question, they've banked some wins they have to have. I don't know how certainly that pattern of winning can carry forward. This roster is constructed to give hope and then dash it via a bunch of "aw shucky durn, the injury bug has hit" outcomes.

Taking care of business against the weak opponents the schedule has gifted us, should not be confused with being for real. It won't surprise me if they are below .500 at the trade deadline, and yet that might still be enough to be in contention for the Central title. Or they may continue to whale against the bad teams and breeze to first place. It still won't mean success against a quality opponent in the postseason. That's my benchmark for being for real, and right now I don't see it.

Always fun. Thanks Tom!